An (Un)Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment(s) with Deleuze Guattari

An [Un] Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with De1euze\Guatta

Edited by

Bernd Herzogenrath

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with DelenzelGuattari, Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath This book first published 2008 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2008 by Bernd Herzogenrath and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1 4438 0036 8, ISBN (13): 978 1 4438 0036 5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction Bernd Herzogenrath

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Gilles Deleuze and N�turalism: A Convergence with Ecological Theory . . . . 23 and Politics Patrick Hayden ................

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Eight Deleuzian Theses on Art Elizabeth Grosz

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'The Instructed Third'; Processing Ecology with Deleuze Leyla Haferkamp

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The Rhizomatics of Domination: From Darwin to Biotechnology Michael Mikulak

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How to Become a Reader: The Concept of American Literature . . . and Deleuze Antony Larson ......

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46 52

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A Silent Dance: Eco-Political Compositions after Uexkull's Umwelt Biology , ............................................................................................. 98 Tom Greaves ........

Deleuze and Deep Ecology Alistair Welchman

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Hercules of the Surface: Deleuzian Humanism and Ecosophy Edward Butler Rhythm Ecology; The Topological Stretching of Nature Eleni Ikoniadou

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1 16 139 1 59

Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology ................................................ 176 Erick Heroux

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Table of Contents

'Strange Ecology' in DeleuzelGuattari's A Thousand Plateaus Irving Goh

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Political Ecology and Bio Art: "In the Age of Cynicism, Accompanied by a Strange Piety" James Wiltgen

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Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question Katherine Young

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1 96

216 245

Becoming Animal: The Animal as a Discursive Figure in and Beyond A Thousand Plateaus 266 Vincent J. Guihan ..................................... ..........................................

The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century Paul Lewis

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The Ecology of Love: Reading Annie Dillard with Felix Guattari Georgina Banita

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c. 1 3 1 5 - 1 640: Why Europe? Why not China? Contingency, Ecology and World-History 314 Jorge Camacho ................ ..................................................................

Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies Jussi Parikka Contributors

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339 363

INTRODUCTION BERND HERZOGENRATH

In her seminal study Bodies that Matter Judith Butler stated that "some have argued that a rethinking of 'nature' as a set of dynamic interrelations suits both feminist and ecological aims (and has for some produced an otherwise unlikely alliance with the work of Gilles Deleuze" (4) While the Deleuze-Feminism Connection has already been focused on, I a likewise response to the second one-the alliance Deleuze and ecology-is as yet still underdeveloped? As the essays in this collection will show, the alliance is not unlikely at all- provided that one term in the equation-the term ecology-will be re-interpreted and taken away from the hold of both more 'traditional' [essentialist] perspectives, as well as from the grip of the kind of social\linguistic constructivism that Butler herself is aligned with. A Deleuzian\Guattarian version of ecology does not see nature as distinct from, but coexistent with nature, and agency here is. not restricted to one side-the human\cultural side-of the equation. 'Nature' rather is an open and dynamic whole that does not follow-as the term ecology might suggest-one logic (or even: logos); it might thus be more fitting, as Hanjo Berressem has recently suggested, to speak of eco\logics instead (57). Although motivated differently, Butler's statement links with Luc Ferry's critique in The New Ecological Order (1993), in which he accuses French philosophers such as Deleuze, Guattari, and Serres of an 'anti­ humanist' stance which, according to Ferry, amounts to nothing less than a thinly-disguised 'new fascism.' For a neo-liberal humanist like himself, "it is insane to treat animals, beings of nature and not of freedom, as legal subjects. We consider it self-evident that only the latter are, so to speak, 'worthy of trial" (xvi). Privileging the question of 'legal status,' Ferry bypasses the more pressing problematics of what it means to be 'human' and 'free' if these categories cannot anymore be grounded in an essentialist and clear-cut separation of nature and culture, nature and 'man,' human and non-human, as Deleuze and Guattari-in both their individual and collective works-suggest:

2

Introduction we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry ... man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other-not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product. (Anti-Oedipus 4-5)

'Thinking Environment[s]' with DeleuzelGuattari is thus far removed from what might be termed '(intellectual) tree-hugging'-it is basically a call to think complexity, and to complex thinking, a way to think the environment as a negotiation of dynamic arrangements of cultural and natural forces, both of which are informed and 'intelligent.' It refers to a ' pragmatic unlfolding of these infinitely complex arrangements, and as such cannot rest solely on either a theory of cultural constructivism, nor on, naturallbiological determinism. DeleuzelGuattari provide a useful toolbox for such a project-Guattari has even called for, in his book Chaosmosis, an eeosophy, "a science of ecosystems" (91) and a "generalized ecology-or ecosophy" (91). The fact that Guattari points out the relevance of ecosystems, of a generalized ecology, leads to the notion of ecologies, not just 'one world one ecology.' It may thus be important to tum an ecologies-a 'generalized' Environmental Studies (by definition both local and global)-into a 'general project' that traverses philosophy, sociology, politics, art, history, the hard sciences and urban studies, drawing not on linear dynamics, but Chaos- and Complexity Theory, propagating logics of open systems-with a minimum of structmal stability-and morphogenesis that links various fields of research within a chaotic and ecosophielecologies reference. The perspective point of such an ecologies has nothing of a technophobic luddism and it comes without the regressive ecological rhetorics found in some of the more 'conservative' strands of Environmental Studies. Neither does it follow the one-way logic of socialilinguistic constructivism encountered II much of today's Ecocriticism: The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and representations wherever they appear, to see more clearly a debate which seems to be taking place, often part-concealed, in a great many cultural spaces. Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis. (KerridgelSammels 5)

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A DeleuzianlGuattarian version of ecology does not see 'nature,' as the majority of 'traditional' ecological or ecocritical approaches does, as a single and unified totality, it does not at all rhyme with Al Gore's fantasy of The World Formerly Known as The Harmonious Universe, thrown out of its proper balance by mankind, the dominator and exploiter, and to be restored by man, its steward. Nature, seen as that dynamic, open whole is posed not in balance, but more in what Ludwig von Bertalanffy has termed "FlieJ3g 1eichgewicht" (flowing, turbulent balance).3 Guattari, then, at the end of Chaosmosis, comes to criticize the ecological movement in France precisely for its narrow pragmatics: rather than to close off ecology from the general ecosophic project, the ecological movement should first of all "concern itself, as a matter of priority, with its own social and mental ecology" (129). He also scolds the movement's tendency to compartmentalize ecology into a purely natural one, when one also needs a cultural ecology, whose development has been increasingly at the center of Cultural Studies. 'Nature,' 'landscape,' 'environment'-in postmodern times, all of these terms and their connotations can no longer be restricted to what one once called 'the natura1.' Seemingly clear-cut categories such as 'nature' and 'man,' 'human' and 'non-human' are no longer tenable and cannot anymore be grounded in an essentialist separation, as Deleuze states, "now that any distinction between nature and artifice is becoming blurred" (Negotiations 155). The DeleuzianlGuattarian model of ecology, a rather likely alliance, I would say, affords a single mode of articulating developmental, environmental, and evolutionary relations within ecological systems and makes room for a conceptualization of a general, non-anthropomorphic affectivity within dynamic systems While still focusing mainly on 'natural environments,' the essays in this volume situate these natural environments in the larger context of the proposed 'generalized ecology,' taking 'nature' as the complex interplay of nonhuman and human stressors into account: it is not 'the human race' that either 'stewards' or disturb an otherwise harmonious, well-balanced and stable nature-the natural environment is in itself turbulent, far from equilibrium. Discussions concerned with current ecological crises have attempted to address and to utilize poststructuralist thought, but only few studies have delineated the ecological orientation of a specific poststtucturalist. In his by now classic essay (which I am really grateful to reprint here) "Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism: A Convergence with Ecological Theory and Politics," Patrick Hayden provides a discussion of the naturalistic ontology

4

Introduction

embraced by the contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, one of the most significant voices in poststructuralism. Hayden interprets Deleuze as holding an ecologically informed perspective that emphasizes the human place within nature while encouraging awareness of and respect for the differences of interconnected life on the planet. Deleuze proves to be a signifcant exception to poststmcturalism's generally hostile attitude towards naturalism, an attitude grounded on the view that naturalism is equivalent to essentialism and thus to a dualistic metaphysics. According to Hayden, Deleuze develops a "geophilosophy" that serves as an antidote to such hostility, suggesting that naturalism is in fact compatible with the critiques of essentialism and dualism that define poststmcturalism. Hayden argues that this view may be joined with Deleuze's innovative ethical­ political approach, which he refers to as micropolitics, to create new ways of thinking and feeling that support social and political transformation with respect to the flourishing of ecological diversity. For Deleuze we must not consider either nature or politics, as if they were mutually exclusive, but at nature and politics. Finally, Hayden I briefly shows how Deleuze's ecological orientation compares to several versions of contemporary ecopolitical theory. He argues here that Deleuze's work can help us to think how the concern with ecological destruction is a legitimate post-metaphysical political issue. In her rereading of Dalwin, Elizabeth Grosz addresses the relations between sexual selection and the origins of art practices by exploring the implications of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain. If the various arts are somehow linked to sexuality, sexual intensification and sexual selection, this is because art is a mode of intensification of living bodies, bodies both human and animal, a mode of resonance in which the forces of the earth, cosmological, climatological, regional directly impact on and transformed the lived forces of bodies. Our understanding of art is opened by linking art to natural rather than only culhlral relations. During the post-Katrina era, ecological issues have gradually become an integral part of the 'mainstream spectacle.' Although the political implications of such a development could not be underestimated, the specific mode of popularization, revolving around a 'green and clean' lifestyle and ecological buzzwords, has also brought about a trivializing trend, rendering insignificant the intricacy of the dynamic multipolar relations in the ecological realm. To counter this trivializing tendency, it seems crucial to reconsider the ecological in philosophical terms and create concepts that match its overall complexity. In fact, from a .

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conceptual perspective, political ecology "has not yet begun to exist:" it needs "made-to-order garb" (Latour). Situated at the interface of nature and culture, ecology figures less as a detached science than a 'permeable discipline' open to exchanges of the inter- and transdisciplinary kind; a science in need of the regular revision of its propositions and the readjustment of its tools according to changing parameters. Deleuzean philosophy, regarded as a form of process philosophy, is endowed with the capacity to develop dynamic concepts for tackling such contrasting polarities as unity and plurality, constancy and change, specificity and generality. As a conceptualizing machine, it can provide ecology with concepts that complement its scientific prospects or 'reprocess' its inherited philosophical notions. Deleuzean concepts are 'ecological' in the sense that they do not address the essences of things, but the dynamics of events and the becomings that go through them. From Whitehead to Bateson and further to Deleuze, process philosophy can provide ecology with a conceptual ground that allows for the 'complexification' of the current ecological debate. Although such a complexification would already be an important 'further step' towards a truly ecological culture, beyond these political dynamics, 'processing ecology with Deleuze' allows for something that might ultimately be more important: the ecologization of the subject. In her essay "'The Instructed Third:' Processing Ecology with Deleuze," Leyla Haferkamp approaches the Deleuzian 'conception of concepts' as a useful philosophical aid for approaching ecological problems. For this purpose, she focuses on the cluster of Deleuzean concepts which, by virtue of their dynamic interrelatedness, provide appropriate tools for dealing with ecological complexity: the concept, the plane of immanence and the event. Throughout, Haferkamp regards the philosophical concept as 'the third party' in the continuous process of intermediation between philosophical categories themselves as well as between different disciplines. In his essay on "The Rhizomatics of Domination: From Darwin to Biotechnology," Michael Mikulak explores the complicated ways in which kinship imaginaries are (trans)formed by competing discourses. He begins by interrogating the often ludic tone surrounding the rhizome as an alternative model for kinship and politics. While many theorists have taken Deleuze and Guattari's call to strangle "the roots of the infamous tree," Mikulak examines the bioscientific origin stories and the vectors of biopower that align themselves along these convoluted narrative transversals. More specifically, his paper is about trees, roots and

6

Introduction

rhizomes, and how origins, subjectivity, kinship, unity and diversity, and the relationship between humans and nature are configured, refigured, shaped, and shattered by the competing, although not antithetical discourses of rhizomatics and arborescence. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Darwin, Haraway, Heimlreich, and a range of ecocriticism, Mikulak interrogate how the radically open concept of subjectivity in flux characteristic of ecological models of rhizomatic kinship, transforms the political vectors of the various kinship imaginaries that tie us together. Mikulak rereads Darwin's The Origin of Species in order to show how an arborescent logic was forced upon Darwin by colonialist and racist state science. This vulnerability is present in the kinship imaginaries surrounding rhizomatic theory, and in the same ways that evolution was used to justify competition, colonialism, and capitalistic accumulation, despite clear examples refuting these positions within the text, the rhizome as a model of kinship is being usurped by the age of biotechnology. Mikulak is thus cautious in celebrating the libratory potential of the rhizome and ecological thinking, and instead, uses Darwin to produce a careful and historic contextualization that can reveal the ways in which regulatory science and corporate interests are usurping the liberated mental ecologies of rhizomatic theory. He carefully looks at examples where discourses of nature, culture, ownership and species transform each other in the discovery of Archaea, a group of marine microbes that live in thennal vents at the bottom of the ocean, and who transfer genes laterally, between individuals, as well as vertically, between generations. These microbes have shattered many conceptions of evolution and origins because they disrupt Darwin's "natural classifications" and the link between genealogy and taxonomy. They are truly rhizomatic creatures, both materially, and discursively, and are providing biotechnology companies with a justification for genetic engineering and a new means, through new vectors of gene transfer, to improve the techniques of genetic modification. By examining the way Archaea are being utilized by corporate science, Mikulak warns that rhizomatic theory is just as capable of leading to biopolitical regimentation and imperalist rhizomatics as it is to healthy, ecological assemblages. From his first published essay on the constitution of the subject in empirical philosophy through his polemical critique of psychoanalysis with Felix Guattari to his final work on immanence and clife, Gilles De1euze's philosophy aimed at disrupting the traditional Western philosophical category of the subject. At every hIm of this project, from the subject-as-habitus via Hume to the biopsychic of the Anti-Oedipus to A

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LIFE of immanence, the goal was to move thought away. from the centered, human ground of subjectivity to "fields" that extend beyond the singularly hmnan. What distinguishes Deleuze's work in this exploration of the trans-human is his method, particularly in what it borrows from a Spinozist practice of ethology or study of capacities. For Deleuze, the crucial question in exploring a subject's constitution is not "what is a subject?" but "what can a subject do?" since the shift away from a subject's being to its capacities or powers moves one away from questions of essences and towards those of relations or compositions with other powers. While this particular shift in method is not particularly new it is important to grasp the implications such a method has for the practice of thought and of life itself, for such are the stakes of Deleuze's re-thinking of subjectivity. How can one experience the radical shift in thought that such thinking requires? This collection of essays is devoted to the environment and ecology, but Antony Larson's essay "How to Become a Reader: The Concept of American Literature and Deleuze" seeks to show that one of the consequences of this radical shift in thought is an extension or re-working of terms such as "environment" or "individual" to fields that escape simple binary definitions of culture/nature. Literature as a concept (in Deleuze's terms) is an experiment in this shift in thought. One of the places one might begin to look for answers to these questions is literature and one of the literatures in which this process is most visible and most livable is the literature of the Anglo-American tradition. It is important to understand Deleuze's designation of literature as Anglo-American in conceptual terms (which, in his philosophy is defined as a response to a particular set of problems) and see this concept of literature as responding to these particular questions concerning the practice of life in terms of capacities and Spinozist ethology. Larson addresses this crucial question of how to become a reader through an encounter with perhaps one of the greatest classics of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, so that one might experience the very literal shift in thought at stake. For it is in this masterpiece that two paths of reading and two paths of living open before the reader. On the one hand, one is dared into an interpretation in which the sign is mastered, like the text of nature in which it so often appears, so that a pre-existing judgment may be confirmed, mirroring the critical reading of the Puritan protagonists. On the other hand, signs are often not what they seem in this text, transmitting a curious and vital energy that upon closer examination escapes the pre-determined judgmerit of the

8

Introduction

reader and pushes her into a zone of indiscemibility that escapes definitive interpretation (a sensation that is often transmitted by Hawthome's famous "bifurcating" style). The encounter with such a textual process has several consequences. First, moving through the two levels of reading, one discovers how the text is structured by different zones of intensity which then feed into a secondary and more important encounter between the reader and the text, opening one up to a larger textual process that goes beyond both reader and text. Finally, this larger process, in its nature un­ foreseeable and incalculable in advance, tends toward what Deleuze would call a "becoming-imperceptible" where the intensities of the reader and the text become something that is neither textual nor "human." That this should occur in a text that so fundamentally confronts the desire to master and read in nature the signs of man brings this study back full circle to the overt and radical attack on the human subject that is Deleuzian thought. Jakob von Uexkiill's biology strongly influenced Deleuze and Guattari's account of animal milieus in A Thousand Plateaus. In his essay "A Silent Dance: Eco-Political Compositions after Uexkiill's Umwelt Biology," Tom Greaves explores the way in which the theory of "Nature as Music" is taken up and developed there, showing that although Uexkiill lays the groundwork for important insights in compositional ecology, he remains wedded to an account of harmony which needs to called into question. This is partially achieved by Deleuze and Guattari's account of the composition of territories and the movement of deterritorialisation. Greaves argues that this account can be helpfully supplemented by attending to ecological phenomenology'S concem with the "ontological value of species" and rethinking the concept of niche in terms of the marking of differences which are themselves subject to processes of "despeciation." The appreciation of these processes leads to a thinking of the "milieu of all milieus" or chaotic world, a necessity which marks an important point of conjunction between the very different philosophical projects of Martin Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari. Finally, Greaves suggests that the distinction which Deleuze and Guattari draw between the intensive line of flight of fascism and the totalitarian State can be applied to ecological compositions, allowing us to gain more precise insight into the threat of "eco-fascism." Deep Ecology is distinguished by three central commitments. The first is to the intrinsic value of nature, a kind of axiological antihumanism. This has always been bound up with a second central commitment, the metaphysical claim that human beings are nothing other than natural

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entities, i.e. a kind of metaphysical antihumanism. But both of these have traditionally also been connected to some kind of practice that transforms our consciousness of nature. In his probing of the alliance "Deleuze and Deep Ecology," Alistair Welchman ivestigates the relation between the first two of these commitments, and tries to show how the third is subordinate to the first two. The upshot is that metaphysically and axiologically antihumanist claims can certainly be sustained (and have been in several historically important philosophical systems) but that they do not necessarily generate the kind of valuations that deep ecologists want. Deleuze, as Welchman shos, is a case in point. The transpersonal' or transformative aspect of Deep Ecology is best interpreted as a species of Ideologiekritik: ideological processes have distorted our understanding of and relation to nature, and we must work to undo or reverse those processes. Welchman argues that the most theoretically sophisticated resources for this kind of critique come from philosophical phenomenology. But phenomenology is officially neutral about metaphysical issues and in fact conceptually hostile to any kind of metaphysical naturalism. Such theoretically sophisticated views offer a way of reconceptualising nature that is important and significant, but often in the context of a sustained and even deepened understanding of the metaphysical distinctness of human beings. Metaphysical naturalism on the other hand, can make use of ideological critique of the concept of nature, but does so in the service of a changed understanding not only of nature, but also of human beings as natural products. In other words, it is the first two commitments that are really conceptually distinctive of Deep Ecology; transformation is subordinated to them. What can be learned from the encOlmter is the importance of conceptual revision, and this applies not only to the concepts of the human person and nature, but also to the concept of valuation. According to Welchman, there are three possible ways of thinking the relation between the axiological and metaphysically antihumanist commitments of Deep Ecology. They may be separate; axiological commitments may be 'projected' onto nature; or nature may in some sense be the source of valuations. Welchman rejects the first two as ultimately incompatible with naturalism and shows that Deleuze champions the third. But Deleuze's conception of the values posited in and by nature (quite distinct from the phenomenologically projective account of a weave of fact and value based on human interests) differs significantly from the valuation deep ecologists need. Welchman proposes a diagnosis of this difference: Deep Ecology is still rooted in an understanding the axiological contribution of metaphysical naturalism based and made explicit in

10

Introduction

Schopenhauer's morality of sympathy or co-feeling. But Deleuze sees this as having undergone a successful Nietzschean critique resulting in a valuative preference not for the interests of natural entities (as in Deep Ecology) but for the interesting as such (which he-along with Guattari­ gives a quite technical definition for). Edward Butler's essay "Hercules of the Surface: Deleuzean Humanism and Ecosophy" applies Deleuzean thought to the project of subverting the opposition between humanism and ecocentrism. The essay takes its title from the Hercules presented by Deleuze as the conceptual persona of Stoicism in The Logic ofSense, who "ascends or descends to the surface in every conceivable manner," who "brings back the hell-hound and the celestial hound, the serpent of hell and the serpent of the heavens . . . in his dual battle against both depth and height" ( l 32). Butler takes Luc Ferry's humanistic critique of Deep Ecology as his starting point. Even if critics such as Ferry are correct that the liberating aspects of the Enlightenment project were only thinkable historically as involving a negation of the natural order as it was then conceived, nevertheless, it is not necessaty to reaffirm the conditions of the historical emergence of these ideas in order for the ideas themselves to continue to operate, unless no other origin can be thought for them even in principle. It is easy, however, to imagine the liberatory potential of the Enlightenment having been released without being accompanied by a conception of the human as essentially "antinatural"-namely under a different conception of Nature; A humanism worthy of the name must speak to the genuine conditions under which humans may develop their potential; and this does not come about through opposing humanity to a Nature conceived as a static realm of reified essences, because it cuts off humans from what is liberatory in human nature and in nature itself relative to reified cultural essences and imprisoning traditions. Ferry underestimates the liberatory potential of naturalistic discourses past and present. To be cosmopolitan, to be nourished by difference, is not "antinatural" at all; it is vitality and maturity. At the same time, however, Butler argues, an ecosophy which fails to locate humanity's best and worst potentials within the natural order fails as well, because it mystifies the relationship between humans and Nature and obscures human agency in the constihltion of value. What is needed is not a lapsarian narrative about humanity's fall from natural· grace, but a thoroughly naturalistic genealogy of morals. Furthermore, the fundamental ecosophic thesis of the intrinsic value of living beings and ecosystems loses its significance if individuals are dissolved in a totalizing conception

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of Nature such as is sometimes met with in the rhetoric of Deep Ecology.

A Deleuzean ecosophy can contribute both to the defense of Deep Ecology

from its critics, and to the internal critique and reform of Deep Ecology itself. Butler proceeds to identify some key elements of a Deleuzean ecosophy. Deleuze's basic ethical principle, derived from his reading of Spitioza, is that "the good or strong individual is the one who exists so fully or so intensely that he has gained eternity in his lifetime" (Practical Philosophy 41). This fullness or intensity can, in turn, be measured by the criterion of the diversity of wills compossible with an essence, because death expresses the litnitations of an essence. The more perfect essence is that in which the greater diversity of wills is compossible, individuation according to such an essence generating a plane of immanence with a greater internal complexity. Developing this calculus involves a distinction between a mere disintegration into atoms and a genuine monadological pluralism incorporating respect for the diversity of the orders of reality. Human nature is neither reified nor negated in this ecosophy, but represents a zone of contestation, just like the nature or essence of every living thing or natural system. The ecosophical concept of intrinsic value acquires its ethical force, not by positing a transcendent source for value, but by recognizing an individuative striving in natural beings that is at once and as such the striving to constitute a plane of immanence whose intensive complexity, by expressing the maximal multiplicity of values, approximates the absolute velocity of thought. According to Deleuze, and with Spinoza: "No one knows ahead of time the affects one is capable of' (125). Existence is a test, as of chemical composition. If humanity, or a particular human, turns out not to be what it might have been, nevertheless something or someone else has that nature, that essence; hence the degree of imperfection of the world in which we live is expressed by the presence of ideals. This theory is explicated in relation to a thought-experiment about humanity and an imaginary alien race posed by Arne Naess in Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (1989). Butler's essay concludes with a brief exposition of the sense of this particular image of the deathless essenc.e. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Le Corbusier poses the question 'Can cities be improved by design?' prompting an era of architecture that divided the environment between natural and artificial. Consistent with traditional Western philosophy and science, modern architecture tended to equate the improvement of human condition with the harmonisation of the world's flow. Space, in this spirit of social design, was based on the idea of

12

Introduction

free movement and a desire to ease the body through it. The inherent Cartesianism within these disciplines presupposed an ocularcentric relationship between human body and environment as two different elements in communication: the perceiver and the perceived. The human body - as perceiver - assumes a central perspective in relation to the environment, while the latter - as perceived - is 'simply there before us'. However, contemporary examples of spatial regeneration in architecture and relational art are characterized by a shift from stable form to abstract force. No longer able to distinguish between the fuzzy and continuous generation of complexity between body, technology and environment, we need new theories and practices with which to conceive them together. Eleni Ikoniadou's essay "Rhythm Ecology: The Topological Stretching of Nature," poses the question: If communication (between perceiver and perceived) is conceived at the level of sensory perception, then how do we account for body and environment beyond the limits of our own experience? Can we rethink them together from the standpoint of 'rhythmic topology' within one system of potentiality? Topology, according to Massumi and DeLanda, is the branch of mathematics concerned with spatial properties preserved under bicontinuous defOlmation (stretching without tearing or gluing). Considered topologically, a body surpasses the restriction of essences (what it is) and enters the realm of assemblages (what it can do in its entanglements with other bodies). Away from the replacement of a visual perspective of space by a sonic one, this paper explores rhythm as a relational tension between body and milieu, a mode 'felt' rather than perceived. Rhythmic topology addresses the virtuality of unfinished and unnatural bodies to conceptualise an ecological becoming that stretches beyond our knowledge of it. It thus argues that more than a new philosophy for ecology, Deleuzian ontology is crucial for the re-conceptualisation of an altogether new nature. Although Felix Guattari was personally active in Green politics and published several works about "ecosophy" and the complex transversal connections between "the three ecologies" of psyche, society, and natural environment, nevertheless he is neither recognized nor discussed among ecologists and also literary ecocritics, with very few exceptions to be noted. Erick Heroux counters the silence that has failed to respond to Guattari's challenging contributions-his essay on "Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology" shows how his work bonows from an alternative tradition of theoretical biology: cybernetic systems and cognitive biology. Guattari often refened to scientists such as Gregory Bateson, Humberto

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Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Ilya Prigogine-all major figures i n the early development of the contemporary science of complexity. By briefly introducing the key scientific concepts that Guattari borrows, we will more readily grasp how he also transformed and extended these concepts. For example, to comprehend what he means by "machinic assemblages" it is very helpful to know how Maturana and Varela described the biological cell as an "autopoetic machine" and how Bateson described "mind" or a cognition that was always already coextensive with simple living systems. Guattari further theorized this alternative tradition with and for his transdisciplinary and social concerns. The bulk of this essay describes the differences between the mainstream science of ecology, the alternative tradition coming out of theoretical biology, and finally Guattari's unique and extensive retheorization of these. His ecosophy of "chaosmosis" would greatly clarify and benefit contemporary political ecology, and also will most likely be of keen interest for the emerging subfield of "biosemiotics." Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy in A Thousand Plateaus is first eco­ logy before it is ethology or nomadology. The concepts of becoming­ animal, the refrain, and the nomadic war-machine, are always already born from a certain engagement with Nature's telluric space, its air, its wind, its landscape of flora and fauna, and its movement of waters. Any understanding of these concepts without taking account of the ecological grounding is an incomplete one. But one should not however expect an amicable relation between Nature and thought in A Thousand Plateaus. As Irving Goh, in his essay on "'Strange Ecology' in DeleuzelGuattari's A Thousand Plateaus" argues, there is a violent economy between Nature and philosophy there. Philosophy strikes out at Nature. But Nature never remains as a passive victim. In A Thousand Plateaus, it strikes back. Nature bears a violent force here. It is a movement of pure deterritorialization that sweeps up any grounded habitation [this understanding of Nature is certainly traceable to Bataille's ecology, where the life of the planet is endowed by the passage of a cosmic or solar line of luxurious energy expenditure]. And yet this "strange ecology" in A Thousand Plateaus, to use Deleuze's term in a dialogue with Claire Parnet, does not end in a nihilistic nothingness for either or both of these entities. In fact, through the combat between Nature and philosophy, each will realize that each equally needs the violence of the other not only to sustain itself but also to carry it to another level, to engender a creative line within itself.

14

Introduction

James Wiltgen's "Abstract Composition: The Problem of Thought-Art in the 4th Machinic Age," begins with a brief look at the Large Hadron Collidor as it seeks to crash subatomic particles into each other at near the speed of light, and the current (anti-) cosmological argument that the universe has increased its rate of expansion dramatically, or the latest return of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. What do these forces tell us about the current relations between science, culture, and the world? Turning to Deleuze and Guattari, the ques ion becomes how to actualize various possible assemblages, and ways in which strata can be thought in light of the conceptualization of what exists as the 'infinitely folded up infinite.' After a brief glance at Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, Wiltgen focuses on issues of abstract composition: how can composition be engaged, how to pursue abstract vital lines, and the typology of the shift from the mode of production to the mode of connection. What lies beyond the human and how can nonhumans, things, animals, monsters, phantasms, actants, and other forms of random strata be integrated in different manners. Will it be possible to, as Nietzsche posed, "let the earth become lightness"? In a second part, Wiltgen's essay examines the work of Bruno Latour, first with We Have Never Been Modern but more importantly The Politics of Nature. The provocative argument in the latter seeks to jettison the concept Nature and replace it with a praxis of the 'politics of ecology.' On what does Latour base his argument, how does this translate into a set of practices, and what connections does it have with D & G, in particular the material cited above? In other words, how to understand the call for the 'progressive composition of a common world.' Isuues of materiality, flows and the regime of computation are examined via the work of N. Katherine Hayles; and the importance of sexual bifurcation and the relation between matter and life in the work of Elizabeth Grosz. The pressing issue here concerns the ways in which the world, the earth and the cosmos can be analyzed as most productive for affinnative forms of change. In the last section, Wiltgen develops a view of current artists' interventions into these areas: two points of entry-the MOMA exhibit entitled Design and the Elastic Mind, with its 'bioengineered crossbreeds, temperamental robots, and spermatozoa imprinted with secret texts' (Ourousoft); and the work of a series of bioartists, including Eduardo Kac, and the 'semi-living art' created by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. How have boundaries between the biological and the technical become fuzzy, blurred and eroded? What ways will oocyte fusion, haploidization, and human cloning alter our thinking, our politics and the means of addressing the

y

Bernd Herzogenrath

15

staggering issues of sustainable modes of living? In what ways can the planet move toward what Bataille called a 'general economy'? Animals centrally appear in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1980), as the impossible limit and the figurative possibility of the Body without Organs (BwO), the anti-organism that resists particular assemblage, significance and subjectif cation. Accordingly, animals become living metaphors for the multiplicity of human desire, or the becoming-animal of humans. In her essay "Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question," Katherine Young explores the central concern of how we can negotiate the virtual (animal bodies) and the actual (becoming-animal) in Deleuze and Guattari with a project of animal advocacy. However, instead of laying the framework for Deleuzean animal politics, Young's essay critically analyzes Deleuze and Guattari's underlying anthropocentric implications. In other words, before we can strike an uneasy alliance between Deleuze and Guattari and contemporary political projects like animal rights, we must take them to their (Deleuzean) limits with regard to the animal question. Vincent 1. Guihan also focuses on 'the Animal Question,' though from a perspective different from Young's. His essay "Becoming Animal: The Animal as a Discursive Figure in and Beyond A Thousand Plateaus" addresses the question of "becoming animal" as a relatively small but very important part of A Thousand Plateaus. Becoming animal functions in a number of key ways, but to summarize these, it encourages the adoption and practice of a more dialogic relationship with both animals and nature with as an Other rather than merely instruments to be used. First, it draws Qut, like any kind of anthropomorphism (intentionally or not), the prospect that species difference is often a culturally mediated and/or socially constructed phenomena like race, gender or other elements of human subjectivity. In that sense, becoming animal provides ecocritical thinkers with a tool to trouble one of the longest standing and least-interrogated bases for domination in Western thought and one of the major justifications for environmentally unsustainable living: speciesism�the view that human beings, as human beings, have greater inherent moral worth than other species and that they in particular and the environment as a whole exist for human use. Second, it provides us with a basis to at least trouble if not actually think or work outside of the humanlanimaVnature dichotomies that a number of ethicists have insisted that we must begin to trouble. Becol'ning animal provides us with a way of comprehending ourselves as human beings within a broader framework if environmental

16

/

Introduction

interdependency - not just in tenns of our political will and rational reflection or in tenns of how to we might manage and police nature better as a superspecies - but as a ways of reimagining ourselves as beings dependent on the ecosystem (a condition that, although obviously tme, has been denied to the point of becoming debatable, as the debate around global wanning currently evinces). Finally, becoming animal in particular and the rhizomatic in general provides us with a way to think outside of biopower, to use Foucault's tenn, as the primary way of ordering the relationship between human and non-human animals and the environment. Plants, animals, and the milieu of life have all been special themes in art for many thousands of years, extending even into the Paleolithic. Recently, however, artists have begun to assume a more assertive and radical position in this entangled history of life, nature and art. For the past ten years, a few artists have been presenting sophisticated genetic and biological experiments as works of art. Some works are commissioned, while others are the product of research and production undertaken by the artists themselves. In any case, as Paul Lewis argues in his essay "The Edge Effect: Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century," the living organism, plant and animal tissue, the cell, the genome-all these have entered as raw materials into the practice of art. Laura Cinti has exhibited genetically altered cactus plants that allegedly express human hair. Gron Catts and the Tissue Culture & Art Project have created sculptures of semi-living tissue, including several pairs of pig wings and a Y4 scale human ear. Eduardo Kac failed to produce GFP K-9, the green fluorescent dog he envisioned in 1 998, but he went on to exhibit a similarly engineered transgenic rabbit two years later, borrowing from a marine jellyfish genetic material that had itself been altered in the laboratory. These gratuitous creatures occupy an uncanny place in the zoological world. Their extravagance as artworks derives from the fact that they are not representations of monstrous animals-as one sees in the works of Bosch, for example-but are in fact living constituents of the biotic community. They are alive. Whatever impact these experiments may have within art criticism, their full cultural significance is much greater still. For the "anomalous" construction of artificial life forms in art is but a cultural appropriation of "normal" practices in biomedicine, molecular biology, and agriculture. Life as an artifact first began to proliferate in the landless ecosystem of the scientific laboratory. Reflecting the artifice of its life fonns, the modem biological laboratory is itself a heterogeneous ecology shaped by venture capitalists, public health initiatives, patent lawyers, government

Bernd Herzogenrath

17

budgets, postcolonial political antagonisms, academic bureaucracies, and personal obsessions. Now artists have directly asserted some cultural rights over the play of forces that constitute life, and their works have therefore extended the already complex political ecology of the laboratory in an unexpected direction. The future of these experiments in art will undoubtedly deepen our ongoing historical confrontation with the most fundamental concepts of ecology. The important questions, according to Lewis-such as What is an organism? What is a niche or a habitat? What is natural? What is a nonhuman environment-appear now, more than ever, to be embedded in a deterritorialized struggle among social forces over a biological domain that has itself become deterritorialized. This is a schizoid collision of sociopolitical and ontological dimensions, a collision in which the natural and the artificial exist not as a duality but as a multiplicity. In many important respects, the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari address this "flow of disjunctive forces" between the natural and the artificial. Their profound and sometimes outrageous attempt to sharpen the edge of process philosophy into specific biological speculations and metaphors has left a rich, but by no means perfect, language for new conceptual problems in the science and art of ecology. The recent emergence of genetic and biological experimentation in art, itself an uneasy alliance, provides an irresistible opportunity to test the uneasy alliance between Deleuze, Guattari, and the future of ecology. One of the current development of traditional environmentalist thought tends toward the inclusion of an "ecology of desire" (Heller) and "mental ecology" (Guattari) under the concerted influence of the 'ethical tum' and the 'turn to affect' in the humanities and social sciences. Since it has not been shown whether such new paradigms have found an echo in parallel literary trends or can be used as a heuristic for literary criticism, it is the purpose of this essay to take a first step in that direction. Annie Dillard's novel The Maytrees marks a perspective shift from the life of nature described in Dillard's earlier eco-theological writings-such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974--to the life of the mind best showcased in this untypical narrative about a marriage and family union that does not follow the prescribed norms of moral convention. Dillard's engagement with the crisis of romantic life and its 'ecological' resolution, Georgiana Banita argues, is in keeping with Felix Guattari's transition from a natural to a personal ecosophy, as reflected in the gradual evolution of this concept in his work. While it shares with traditional ecology a concern for biological species and the biosphere,

18

/

Introduction

ecosophy also acknowledges that 'incorporeal species' and 'mental ecology' are equally endangered and in crisis. Banita's reading of The Maytrees in her essay "The Ecology of Love: Reading Annie Dillard with Felix Guattari" seizes opportunities offered by ecocriticism and ecosophy to make good on literature's ethical investment and reaffirm its social responsibility. Banita reveals how the novel builds on its explicit environmental premises to develop an ecology of love relations and their impact on the characters' awareness of themselves, their natural and mental environment, as well as their complex rapport with time, both interior and exterior, subjective and concrete, psychological and narratological. In doing so, she aligns herself with Felix Guattari's tripartite ecological approach as it is espoused in his essay The Three Ecologies, where he proposes a shift from a purely technocratic perspective in ecological action toward an ethico-political articulation comprising three ecological registers: the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity (28). Dillard's novel, as Banita shows, is a hybrid illustration of Guattari's social ecosophy----which consists in "developing specifc practices that will modify and reinvent the ways in which we live as couples or in the family" (34)-and his mental ecosophy, leading us "to reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the 'mysteries' of life and death" (35). In his essay "c. 1315 - 1640: Why Europe? Why not China? Contingency, Ecology and World-History," Jorge Camacho follows up on Deleuze and Guattari's marginal but reCUlTent concern with the problem of finding a historical explanation for the development of capitalism in Europe vis-a-vis its non-development in China. Its relevance is two-fold. On the one hand, this problem-and the way it was treated in historical research between Marx or Dobb and Braudel or Chaunu-serves Deleuze and Guattari as a concrete example of a first principle that allows them to revisit and reframe the old topic of Universal History. Such principle, which they enigmatically relate to Marx's thought, entails that history ought to be conceived as the work of pure contingency. Implicit here is, of course, a particular reading and critique of a German tradition (perhaps Kant or Herder, but certainly Hegel) that stressed the role of necessity, rationality and teleology. For Deleuze and Guattari, the historical course in general and, in particular, the sequence leading to the emergence of capitalism, is a concatenation of contingent events: it could have happened differently, elsewhere, in another moment in history or not happened at all. Moreover, their universal history is retrospective from the point of view of capitalism. For them, capitalism is a potential that has haunted all forms of

Bernd Herzogenrath

19

society and i t is from this virtual position that it has shaped-negatively, as a nightmare to be warded-off-all the social machines that have emerged in this planet. This being so, what is perplexing for them is nothing but precisely its singularity, the fact that it fully developed only once and in 'one place,' thus Camacho asks with them: why in Europe? Why not in China? On the other hand, the problem is relevant in the context of this collection because it prompts Deleuze and Guattari to invoke ecological determinations for the course of world history. In the rather sweeping and marginal explanation proposed in the Treatise on Nomadology, they follow Annales-school historians like Braudel in locating the first 'deep cause' in the rather different ecological geographies of Europe and China, and the concomitant agro-technological infrastructures associated with wheat and rice cultivation. Arguably, beyond any form of determinism, Deleuze and Guattari's interest for such geohistorical explanation is precisely the role it grants to concrete contingency in detriment of abstract rationality. In this way, the objective of Camacho's essay is to revisit and disentangle this problem drawing from historical research that has put an emphasis on its ecological dimension. Most importantly, traveling along these lines it will be possible to extricate the fundamentally ecological character of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy; in particular, their conception of social formations as heterogeneous assemblages composed and shaped by much more than just people. The body of animals, more specifically insects, are media in their own kind. For Jussi Parikka, this means expanding the familiar notions of "media" towards a Deleuzian framework where the term resonates with an ecological understanding of bodies. Bodies are vibrations and foldings with their environments, a theme that was developed in ethological research and then adopted to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Parikka's essay "Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies" shows how this theme is useful in a reconceptualization of media as an enviromnent of interactions, translations and foldings between heterogeneous bodies. In this context, animal bodies mediate and contract not only the rhythms of nature, but are mediated as part of the construction of modern media as well, as conceptual figures but also through the measures of biopower inherent for instance in physiological research. By excavating a certain archaeology of Deleuze's ideas, especially Bergson's notions regarding "insects technics" as elaborated recently by Elizabeth Grosz, Parikka attempts to think through some of the

20

Introduction

consequences of what a more enviromnental, ecological and biophilosophical understanding of "media" could entail. In this context, media is considered somewhat parallel to a Deleuzian understanding of a body: it is a force field, a potentiality, an intersection point where forces of the cosmos contract to form certain potentials for affects and percepts. Thus, as Rosi Braidotti explains, the "Deleuzian body is in fact an ecological unit." Bodies/media work only through relatedness where "this environmentally-bound intensive subject is a collective entity; it is an embodied, affective and intelligent entity that captures, processes and transforms energies and forces." In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari explain how the world contracts different vibrations and how different natural entities act as condensations of the cosmos. The way a plant forms and senses itself is through contracting light, salts, carbon. Through this contracting or folding "it fills itself with colors and odors that in each case qualify its variety, its composition: it is sensation itself " Brains are not found only in the heads of humans and animals, but microbrains inhabit the inorganic world as well. The world is media, in a manner of sensation and contracting, even though Deleuze and Guattari constantly avoided using that specific term as for them it applies only to mass media of communications. Still, it is possible to continue from their philosophy of cosmic vibrations towards directions of a natural philosophy of media where the term starts to encompass the recording of time in rocks, the capacities of transmission in plants and animals, the weird sensations for example in insects that perceive not only through eyes and ears, but through chemicals as well. In fact, recent years of technological innovation have embraced exactly insects and like as perfect models for media design. In the 1 980s, the cyborg became a pre-eminent symbol of the late-modem conflation of biology and technology. This all too familiar figure was, however, always weighed down by a degree of anthropomorphic baggage, largely due to the widely distributed idea of Man and his prosthesis being the characteristic mode of conjoining biology and technology. Yet, since early cybemetics, a panorama of other biological examples was also discussed in a technological context, from viruses to flies and rats to insects. Indeed, at the same time as the man-machine boom was approaching its peak years, other ideas of non-human models of organization and perception were emerging both in media design and consequently in media theory as well. In this context, the epigraph above from A Thousand Plateaus [and Parikka's reading of it] becomes clear: insects, germs, bacteria and particles do not just denote biological categories of knowledge, but simultaneously can be seen as carriers of intensities and potentials. What

21

Bernd Herzogenrath

defmes an insect? Its structure, its evolutionary path, its position in the ecology of nature? Deleuze rejects in Bergson's vein any spatializing modes of understanding entities of nature and culture and opts for a more ethological brand of analysis: natural, cultural and technological bodies are defmed by their potentials for interaction and enaction, the potentials of what they can do instead of what they are. As Dianne Chishohn has rightly to point out, the geo in DeleuzelGuattari's geopilosophy "evokes no singular (geological, biological, hydrological, thermodynamical, etc.) activity but, instead, emits a multiplicity of interconnecting 'geos'-geology, geography, geophysics, and geopolitics, and emerging composites such as geophysiology, geomicrobiology, ad infinitum" . . . similar to the eco in the "generalized ecology," which, according to Guattari, consists of the interplay of at least "three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human SUbjectivity" (Three Ecologies 28). Likewise, one should rather not talk about one ecology, but rather of ecologies both naturelmatter and culturelrepresentation are dynamic, open and ultimately machinic aggregates that operate according to different but interrelated ecollogics To show-and do- precisely this is what the present anthology is aiming at. -

.

Notes 1 Deleuze and Feminist Theory, eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh UP 2000, can be read as a fit answer to the first 'unlikely alliance' in Butler's claim. 2 See however Chisholm, and Herzogenrath. 3 and what in the English translation curiously goes as "steady state" (41 ). • • •

Works Cited

Berressem, Banjo. "Structural Couplings: Radical Constructivism and a Deleuzian Ecologies." Deleuzel Guattari & Ecology. Ed. Bernd Berzogenrath (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008): 57- 1 0 1 . Buchanan, Ian, and Claire Colebrook (Eds.) Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2000). Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).

Introduction

22

�

Chisho , Dianne. (Ed.) "Deleuze and Guattari's Ecophilosophy." rhizomes 15 (winter 2007), see www.rhizomes.net/issue15/index.html (last accessed August 31, 2008). Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Ferry, Luc. The New Ecological Order. Trans. Carol Volk (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). -. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Gary Genosko (London: Athlone Press, 2000). Herzogemath, Bernd. (Ed.) Deleuzel Guattari & Ecology (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Sammels (Eds.) Writing the Environment. Ecocriticism and Literature (London and New York: Zed Books, 1998). von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. General Systems Theory. Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1969).

GILLES DELEUZE AND NATURALISM:

A CONVERGENCE WITH ECOLOGICAL THEORY AND POLITICS PATRICK HAYDEN

Introduction

In this paper, I examine the naturalistic and ecological orientation of Gilles Deleuze, the contemporary French philosopher who is best known as on of the leading voices of poststructuralism. The term naturalism is rarely, if ever, encountered in the writings of poststructuralist, and even then usually appears only as an object of hostile interest. The primary reason for this distain is that naturalism is taken as a straightforward equivalent to essentialism, understood as referring to predetermined orders of 'natures' or invariant essences. ! However, Deleuze proves to be a significant exception to this general attitude toward naturalism. He not only incorporates discussions of naturalism within the contexts of his many analyses of historical figures, but he also develops a philosophical perspective that, at least implicitly, forwards a version of naturalism compatible with the critiques of essentialism and dualism addressed in his numerous publications. While Deleuze has no offered a systematic account of naturalism, one purpose of this paper is to draw together some of the threads of naturalism woven into Deleuze's texts in order to demonstrate how he goes about rethinking this topic. Another purpose of this paper is practical. From his earliest works to his most recent collaborations with Felix Guattari, Deleuze insists that philosophy be conceived as a practice whose usefulness derives from the active creation of new and different ways of thinking and feeling.2 Deleuze is ultimately concerned with the kinds of effects that philosophy is able to produce, insofar as these effects encourage the creation of new life­ affirmative values and sensibilities. It is my contention that Deleuze promotes a type of naturalism that highlights the diverse interconnections between human and nonhuman modes of life, in such a way as to provide

24

Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism

some overlooked philosophical resources for integrating ethical and political considerations with ecological concerns, while resisting the reductive temptation to tum nature into a static metaphysical foundation. In the end, Deleuze's view of philosophy as practical implies a commitment to, among other things, a strong environmentalist stance. With that in mind, I want to provisionally explore some of the ways Deleuze's naturalism relates to ecopolitical theOlY. Undoubtedly, Deleuze has yet to be recognized as a potential contributor to ecological discourse. One of my aims here, however, is to introduce this possibility for further discussion. One of the difficulties with discussing naturalism in the context of Deleuze's work is that naturalism has been so variously defined and employed throughout the history of philosophy that it is impossible to offer a single definition of the term. Some have understood naturalism to be a view that excludes any reference to supernatural or transcendent principles, beings, or entities, with possible consequences ranging from the belief that the world is explicable only in scientifically verifiable terms, to the assertion of some form of humanism or secularism. Others contend that naturalism is meant to indicate the continuity or affinity of the human and nonhuman, and stress that human behaviour and human institutions have their basis in natural phenomena such that here is no exclusive opposition between nature and society. Although there are many possible versions of naturalism with differing points of emphasis ranting from the ontological to the epistemological and the methodological, I believe that Deleuze's take on naturalism can be seen as having the most affinity with contemporary strains of American naturalism, born from the dual influences of pragmatism and empiricism. 3 While it is impossible to offer here a discussion of naturalism in twentieth-century American thought, what is relevant for my purpose is to note that American naturalism, influenced by such thinkers as Aristotle, Spinoza, and Darwin, argues that naturalism can be characterized as a perspective that seeks to eliminate the dualism and transcendentalism of traditional metaphysics, in favour of the view that humans and the cultures belong within a larger natural reality that cannot be overridden by any extra-natural essence.4 In other words, this position denies that there is an independent supernatural realm having ontological priority over whatever comes into being. What I now examine is how this point of view is expressed in Deleuze's own writings. I do so in several steps. In section two, I explore a history of philosophical naturalism found in Deleuze's works of Lucretius and Spinoza. Deleuze lays constant stress on human interaction with the larger natural world, which allows him to conceive of naturalism as an

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environmental philosophy. In section three I outline Deleuze's notion of 'geophilosophy,' which he argues is intended to relate philosophical thinking to the Earth, and demonstrate how this notion leads to an ecological perspective grounded in symbiotic relationships. Finally, in the concluding section of the paper I discuss some of the ways that Deleuze's political concepts and naturalistic ontology compare with contemporary ecological theory and politics. Deleuze on Naturalism

Deleuze's support for a natuntlistic ontology can be seen as a strategy to counteract the anti-naturalistic tendencies of the Platonic tradition informing much of Western thought. As described in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze proposes a "reversal" of Platonism, by which he means "the abolition of the world of essences and the world of appearances" (253).In other words, Deleuze desires to eliminate the dualism that postulates a realm of metaphysical essences separate form and more real than the natural world itself, which is consigned to the status of mere appearance. Deleuze's work is replete with analyses of the negative consequences that he sees as resulting from the legacy of Platonic representationalism. One of the most troublesome results has been the designation of an unconditioned Absolute, a pure transcendent Being, which circumscribes and rules the natural world of becoming and diversity. Yet as Deleuze sees it, one of the basic advantages of naturalism is to conjoin the diversity of the natural world with its real conditions of material difference and processes of becoming (see Logic of Sense 261-3).'Reversing' Platonism can thus be regarded as a naturalistic strategy aimed at eliminating the dualism of essence and appearance while affirming the continuous becoming of a fully natural reality that is in no way indebted to or derived from any form of hidden, metaphysical transcendence. One of the resources that Deleuze draws upon in constituting his vision of the naturalist tradition is the Epicureanism of Lucretius. Deleuze writes that Lucretius formulated the following basic principles of naturalism as an anti-Platonic philosophy: "the positivity of Nature; Naturalism as the . philosophy of affirmation; pluralism linked with multiple affirmation; sensualism connected with the joy of the diverse; and the practical critique of all mystifications" (279). In the essay 'Lucretius and the Simulacrum', Deleuze proposes that a naturalism based on the changing conditions of real experience, and not a representationalism which withdraws from the empirical into a realm of formal structures, is the goal of philosophy. In this case, naturalism is

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Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism

based on the presence of three intertwined aspects of natural diversity: "the diversity of species; the diversity of individuals which are members of the same species; and the diversity of the parts which together compose an individual" (266). All the elements of the natural world, the individuals, species, rivers, plants, and places which constitute, inhabit and traverse it, are inseparable from such conditions of diversity. For Lucretius, nature is understood as a distributive rather than collective power. It is that which produces the diverse; yet it does not totalize the diverse into the transcendent One, Whole, or Being to which Platonism aspires: The Epicurean thesis is entirely different: Nature as the production of the diverse can only be an infinite sum, that is, a sum which does not totalize its own elements. There is no combination capable of encompassing all the elements of Nature at once. ... Nature is not collective, but rather distributive, to the extent that the laws of Nature ... distribute parts which cannot be totalized. Nature is not attributive, but rather conjunctive: it expresses itself through 'and' and not through 'is' . ... Being an addition of indivisibles, sometimes similar and sometimes different, Nahlre is indeed a sum, but not a whole. With Epicums and Lucretius the real noble acts of philosophical pluralism begin. (266-7)

Because nature is differentially interrelated rather than unifying in any absolute sense, it produces itself through new combinations of its heterogeneous elements. Yet no single combination can encompass all the elements of nature at once. Rather, there are particular finite compositions of elements and relations produces in the continuous movements of becoming. In this respect naturalism can be equated with pluralism since Lucretius thinks of nature in terms of Multiplicity, as a non-totalizable sum of diverse individuals, species, and environments. Lucretius's naturalism is further expressed by two complementary points of view, what Deleuze refers to as the "speculative point of view" expressed in the atomic-physical theory of the clinamen and the "practical" or "ethical" point of view expressive of pleasure and a joyful existence (272). While it is true that the former signifies the emergence of a position strongly opposed to the dualism and transcendentalism of Platonic metaphysics, it is nonetheless the latter which becomes the primary object of naturalism, for the responsibility incumbent upon humans is respect for the diversity produced by the immanent nature within which all things reside and live. It is the primary object in recognition of the fact that if natural diversity is harmed or diminished, the potential for a joyful existence is lessened. Lucretius's naturalism also indicates that our actions are to be guided not by adherence to supernatural myths and illusions, but rather by affirmation of the positive power of an immanent and multiple nature and

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by joy resulting from the diversity of its elementS. Myths and illusions rest upon the belief in gods and eternal souls, on divine entities and transcendent forms which mysteriously escape natural existence. Such myths are thelliselves scornful of the material, sensuous, and temporal existence accepted by naturalism, and serve to transpose divine will into a human will (or spirit) set over and against nature. In contrast, Deleuze asserts, the naturalist "speaks about nature, rather than speaking about the gods" (278). The speculative and practical objects of naturalism coincide on this point: the enterprise of demystification through philosophical, scientific, and ethical activity intended to free humans from the illusions of onto­ theological transcendence.5 It is important to notice that this position does not oppose nature to social convention, custom, and invention tout court. Instead, it is opposed to those social forces which depend upon myth and illusion in order to consolidate their poser by negating the multiplicity and diversity of nature and society, sowing sadness rather than reaping joy. The negative spirit of transcendence is that which brands the sensible as nothing more than mere secondary appearance and links the intelligible to the absolute realm of timeless essence. What appears with Lucretius's naturalism, according to Deleuze, is a critique of Platonism's anti­ naturalistic repression of the multiplicity of life and the diversity of nature, along with an affirmation of the flux of natural reality: One of the most profound constants of Naturalism is to denounce everything that is sadness, everything that is the cause of sadness, and everything that needs sadness to exercise its power. From Lucretius to Nietzsche, the same end is pursued and attained. Naturalism makes of thought and sensibility an affinnation. It directs its attack against the prestige of the negative; it deprives the negative of all its power; it refuses to the spirit of the negative the right to speak in the name of philosophy. . . . The multiple as multiple is the object of affirmation, just as the diverse as diverse is the object of joy. (279) A similar naturalistic emphasis in Spinoza's philosophy is embraced by Deleuze. As with Lucretius, nature is characterized by Spinoza as a positive and productive power. Whereas Cartesian metaphysics devalued nature by depriving it of its immanent power, making it the creation of a transcendent God, and placed the thinking subject outside of nature Spinoza's positive naturalism insists that it is within inf nite nature that al f nite things exist as a plurality of modes: "This naturalism provides the true thrust of the Anticartesian reaction. ... [it] is a matter of re-establishing the claims of a Nature endowed with forces or power" (Deleuze Expressionism 227-8). For Spinoza, nature is its own dynamic source of

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creation which expresses itself through immanent and actual powers that, in acting, are parts of nature (see 228). The notion of an expressive nature thereby "forms the basis of a new naturalism" (232). One of the most important factors making Spinoza's naturalism 'new' is that while he finds nature to be dynamic (expressive), he denies that it is teleological. Nature is a complex process without any predetermined end, and naturalism need not account for its movement by postulating the existence of some more fundamental realm which explains this process. There is no ultimate foundation outside of nature, but powers, relations, and bodily compositions constitutive of nahlre itself. This position follows from Spinoza's theory of immanent causality. Immanent causality "refuses the intervention of a transcendent God" (109) no less than it does the hierarchy of emanative causality. Instead, the existence of nature as a productive causality is inseparable from its immanent essence, which is constituted by the very effects belonging to it, namely, the attributes and modes. In this way natura naturans (nahlring nature) and natura naturata (natured nature) are interconnected by a mutual immanence. What is essential here is the univocity of nature: the uniquely differentiated modifications of infinite substance are expressions of formally (qualitatively) distinct but ontologically equal attributes. All things are in some way different; yet they are generated equally from a creative nature, thereby, making it possible to speak of the equality of differences without resorting to an ordering hierarchy or a reduction to sameness. Instead what are important are the relations between different modes, insofar as finite modes are dynamic compositions within immanent nature. Spinoza's naturalism fully emerges from the connection of immanent causality with univocity; "Naturalism in this case is what satisfies the three forms of univocity; the univocity of attributes ... the univocity of the cause ... and the univocity of modality" (Deleuze, Spinoza 92-3). These fonns present us with a conception, akin to that found in Lucretius, of a nahlre that is the infinite sum of multiple relational compositions. Nature is multiple, but the multiple forms an open-ended unity because it is constituted by ever changing combinations. In Spinoza's nahlralism the 'encounters' between complex bodies are also evaluated in ethical terms. As Deleuze suggests, those encounters that agree with the natures of each body are 'good' and help to form other relations between them, which allow for muhml flourishing and preservation. Other encounters that disagree with the nahlres of the bodies concerned are 'bad' and contribute to the destruction and decomposition of the relations that support their ability to persevere in existence. Spinoza's notion of ethical goodness lies in striving to maximize mutually

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compatible relations and in preventing the decomposition, poisoning, and toxification of what is necessary to maintain these relationships with diverse natural bodies. We are faced, then, with the question of how to carry forward Deleuze's picture of the history of philosophical naturalism into the realm of ecological theory which addresses environmental destruction as a contemporary social and political issue. I want to suggest that Deleuze's philosophical writings contain an important and innovative extension of the naturalist sympathies exhibited in his historical analyses, and in this respect can prove useful for contemporary environmental ethics and political ecology. In 'the next section, I examine some of the ways that Deleuze carries out this extension. Deleuze and Geophilosophy

In works written in collaboration with Felix Guattari, Deleuze continues to articulate a strongly naturalistic basis for philosophical practice. In their final work together What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari claim that "thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth" (85). They indicate that what is unique about the Earth is the it "is not one element among others but rather brings together all the elements within a single embrace while using one or another of them to deterritorialize territory" (85). Even though the Earth embraces all territories, it is also the force of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, since its continuous movements of development and variation unfold new relations of materials and forces. Thus, the Earth both generates difference and exhibits continuity; yet it is neither inert nor passive. In this sense, the Earth is again considered distributively, that is, as the open-ended sum of a plurality of elements in constant interaction, rather than as an absolute order of Being transcending what is constituted in nature. What Deleuze and Guattari call "geophilosophy" is the attempt to formulate a mode of thinking in association with, and as the affirmation of, the diversity and multiplicity of the continuous becomings of a fluctuating natural reality. In effect, this attempt amounts to the effort to construct a new way of thinking that is naturalistic and ecologically oriented because it seeks to eliminate the traditional dichotomy separating humanity (as subject) and nature (as object) by "stretching out a plane of immanence," which, they write, "absorbs" the Earth, that is, bonds together with it without eliminating the singularity, uniqueness, or difference of each thing that is a part of this relationship (88).

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One way that this project is pursued is by emphasizing the interaction of the human and nonhuman in terms of immanence and relationality. The notion of 'milieu,' one of the meanings of the Greek oikos from which the common eco derives, plays an important role here.6 Throughout their work Deleuze and Guattari formulate a non-teleological, non-deterministic evolutionism, according to which the immanent world is characterized by constant change that grows from within a diversity of milieux connected in various complex ways. There is, however, no progressive, preordained developmental tendency exhibited in these changes. Milieu is the word that Deleuze uses to refer to all that is involved in the interactions between elements, compounds, energy sources, and organisms from the molecular to the molar levels. Milieux grow 'from the middle' (au milieu) when molecular materials and substantial elements are exchanged and organized around a reversible boundary or membrane, forming a 'unity of composition' that is qualitatively unique: "Thus the living thing," Deleuze and Guattari inform us, "has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions" (Thousand Plateaus 3 1 3). Taking ecology to refer to the intelTelationships of living things and their environments, a milieu is the site, habitat, or medium of ecological interaction and encounter. A complete milieu is made up of the relational interactions of several submilieux (climate, geography, populations, soils, microbes, and so forth). Yet it possesses a relative rather than absolute equilibrium, since the milieu is itself open to transfOlmation on the basis of its supple boundaries and alterable relationships, with the consequence that its submilieux can be affected as well. Organisms and milieux therefore develop, grow, and change together within continuous and intersecting processes of becoming, a view with significant ecological importance. As argued by Deleuze and Guattari, the full diversity of life is exhibited through natural processes of change and becoming. The effects of these processes cannot be identified on the basis of their descent from a common origin, since the creative and transformational "aparallel" evolutionism proposed by Deleuze and Guattari regards them as the products of distinct milieux, environmental variations, and transversal interactions (see 10-1).7 They stress that we cannot account for the CUlTent forms of organisms and habitat by assuming that their features developed according to a progressive hierarchy from the primitive to the more advanced, from the weaker to the stronger, from the less intelligent to the more intelligent, or that survival is simply a matter of developing more

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advantageous adaptive mechanisms. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari call for a rhizomatic conception of evolution based not on a centralized directionality of species development, but on the active, unfinalized flux of constantly circulation relations, interactive encounters, and shared transformations. "More generally," they write, evolutionary schemas may be forced to abandon the old model of the tree and descent. '" Evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating itmnediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to another. ( 10) If so, what is sighificant with respect to the movements of natural reality is not whether organisms can be represented according to their progression or regression along a fixed line of descent, but whether the continuous change and diversification of life and the interrelationships of the various organisms that inhabit certain ecological milieux are to be affirmed and recognized as both necessary and desirable. This recognition involves what Deleuze and Guattari call symbiotic 'alliances' between and among the diversity of milieux and organisms: "If evolution includes any veritable becomings,. it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms" (238). Symbiosis is the co-functioning of two or more different organisms, often in a mutually beneficial, cooperative relationship of reciprocity. 8 Deleuze's treatment of relations shows that relationships cannot be reduced to the supposedly fixed essences from which they are the derived (see Hayden). Rather, the characteristics and qualities of a specific locus of interaction are attributable to the types of relations taking hold of the organisms involved, while the relations are themselves susceptible to change, transformation, or even elimination. In other words, the relationship becomes a kind of existential alliance between diverse living things in symbiosis. This alliance accompanies the becoming that happens in between whatever is related; it is initiated in the middle of their interactions within different ecological milieux. Deleuze offers as an example of symbiosis the interaction of a wasp and an orchid: The orchid seems to form a wasp-image, but in fact there is a wasp­ becoming of the orchid and an orchid-becoming of the wasp, a double capture. ... The wasp becomes part of the orchid's reproductive apparatus at the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp. (Dialogues 2)

Another way that Deleuze develops his naturalism is by arguing for the inclusion of ethology in his description of philosophical practice. Ethology

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Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism

refers both to the study of animal behaviour and to the study of the formation and evolution of human ethos. While ethology has taken may divergent forms, from vitalism to behavioralism and sociobiology, Deleuze uses the term in several of his works in order to emphasize the nondualistic continuity of human and nonhuman life forms and their complex symbiotic interrelationships, as well as to propose an overlap between the physical, biological and chemical, and the social, ethical and political. For instance, Deleuze draws from Spinoza the conception of a "common plane of immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all individuals are sihlated" (Spinoza 122).9 This 'one Nature' is common to all things because it is here that different ways of living are simultaneously constituted. Life is understood according to its relations of movement and rest, and each body, whether human or nonhuman, by its capacity for affecting and being affected by others (see 124). The dynamic capacities of each living thing to act and be acted upon intersect at various points with those of others: some affects are shared, some are not. Each thing is different or singular; yet all are sihmted in the affective realm of nature, a common environment "which applies equally," Deleuze writes, "to the inanimate and the animate, the artificial and the natural" (DeleuzeIGuattari, Thousand Plateaus 254). In other words, nature is that which is common to all different human and nonhuman entities, implying as extensive spectrum of encounters between all bodies (taken broadly) together with the consequences or effects of such encounters: Ethology is frst of all the study of the relations of speed and slowness, of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterize each thing. For each thing these relations and capacities have amplitude, thresholds (maximum and minimum). And variations or transformations that are peculiar to them. And they select, in the world or in Nature, that which corresponds to the thing; that is, they select what affects or is affected by the thing, what moves or is moved by it. For example, given an animal, what is this animal unaffected by the infinite world? What does it react to positively or negatively? What are its nutrients and its poisons? What does it 'take' in its world? Every point has its counterpoints: the plant and the rain, the spider and the fly. So an animal, a thing, is never separable from its relations with the world. The interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior. The speed or slowness of metabolisms, perceptions, actions, and reactions link together to constitute a particular individual in the world . ... Further, there is also the way in which these relations of speed and slowness re realized according to circumstances, and the way in which these capacities for being affected are flled. For they always are, but in different ways, depending on whether the present affect

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threatens the thing ... or strengthen, accelerate, and increase it. (Deleuze, Spinoza 1 25-6)

Nature is thus seen by Deleuze as the immanent plane of life within which all things enter into both their own unique compositions and a variety of "more or less interconnected relations" with other compositions (DeleuzeIGuattari, Thousand Plateaus 254). In fact, the Earth can be considered the fundamental yet never fixed plane of immanence on which the constitution of mUltiplicities takes place. Yet, it is important to note that in Deleuze's work the compositions and relations of all living things are not fixed by an invariable order and that each thing is not directly connected to every other thing. The idea that nature is that which distributes affects provides a basis of continuity between each thing in the world, but also a basis for recognizing the multiplicity of nature since it makes possible a rich differentiation of all things in terms of the kind of variations, interactions, requirements, circumstances, and capacities applicable to each thing and its habitat. This position stresses not an undivided wholeness or totality transcending particular things and milieux, but rather the complex of continuities and differences characterizing all symbiotic interconnections traversing the Earth, without falling back onto a dualism of the human and the nonhuman. However, just what relationships obtain cannot be accounted for on the basis of an indifferent and closed system, but should instead be explained in terms of the interactions and transformations of unique bodies and habitats within a dynamic nature. If different types of relationships, combinations, or symbioses were rendered indistinguishable, it would be impossible to detennine whether certain beliefs and actions had either detrimental or beneficial ecological consequences. Deleuze considers this insight to be one of the most important supplied by the ethological point of view. Here the concerns of the ethologist or naturalist make an explicit shift from the assessment of existing ecological conditions to the proposal that new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting be created, informed by the knowledge of what is beneficial to the flourishing of all life on Earth. Consequently, what must be considered now are the political aspects of Deleuze's naturalism. Deleuze, Naturalism, and Ecopolitics

The strength of Deleuze's affirmation of naturalism is that it focuses on the ethical and political issues associated with the destruction of the Earth's multiple environments, ranging from the degradation of urban

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Gilles Deleuze and Nahlralism

centres to the shrinking of arable lands, the clear cutting of old-growth forests, the mass pollution of air, water, and soil, and the forced extinction of living beings. In other words, Deleuze provides sound philosophical underpinnings for articulating ethical and political responses to the destruction of many of the Earth's combined natural-social habitats. The fundamental considerations here is that of which concepts, practices, and values best promote the collective life and interests of the diverse modes of existence inhabiting the planet. It follows that this basic consideration entails the practical evaluation of the social institutions through which humans define, assess, and intersect with nonhuman nature. Deleuze provides a political perspective to his naturalistic conceptual framework, articulated in ecological terms. The conjunction of nahlralism and politics at this point is based on the view that awareness of ecologically dangerous relationships can be used to formulate active political interventions aimed at transforming or overcoming those relationships in order to create new values and interactions that are beneficial to the diversity of life on Earth. Thus, Deleuze's thought presents an important contribution to ecological politics. This is not to say that ecopolitics supplants or assimilates all other political struggles and forms of intervention, for as Deleuze insists there are "many politics" addressing a number of problems at specific points on a complex social network (see Deleuze, Dialogues 135-47). It does say, however, that certain institutionalized beliefs and practices based on disregard for the Earth and contempt for the life needs and health of its inhabitants, while appearing in different forms and shapes, constitute a serious political issue shared by many across the planet. Yet, for ecopolitical activism to engage itself effectively, it must steer clear of universalized abstractions and carefully study the specific needs and alternative possibilities within localized situations. It is for this reason that Deleuze's notion of 'micropolitics' can be especially useful for a political activism engaged with qualitatively different ecological milieux. The singularity of diverse ecological milieux calls for modes of intervention that are fluidly defined in terms of the problems and conflicts involved, and the means that are available, with respect to each local bioregion and its unique needs. This singularity does not prevent the combining or the fonnation of alliances between different ecopolitical movements and regions, or between ecopolitical struggles and those engaged in other fonns of social and political resistance, but in fact presents the condition for doing so without the need to assimilate them into a more centralized organizational structure. Neither does the micropolitical approach rule out 'macropolitical' considerations. As

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Deleuze acknowledged, "every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics" (DeleuzeIGuattari, Thousand Plateaus 2 1 3). In other words, larger systems and fonns of organization are typically generated by the intersections of multiple smaller, local practices and conditions, which are in turn themselves affected by the influences and activities of macropolitical institutions. Yet it is inaccurate to consider the micropolitical and macropolitical as corresponding symmetrically, and the one to be reducible to the other. Deleuze's point is that a more nuanced lmderstanding of the specificity and reciprocity of the micropolitical and macropolitical, and greater attention to the diversity of the actual practices and current conditions of local situations, are required for a useful political philosophy. Thus, while existing ecological problems undoubtedly present a danger to the entire planet, a micropolitical focus on the particular needs and interests of diverse local habitats and inhabitants in light of the available knowledge of ecological conditions will perhaps better contribute to the creation of effective ecopolitical interventions than will a focus solely from a unitary, large-scale framework. Nevertheless, from the Deleuzian perspective, ecological problems are always considered to be simultaneously local and global, since local habitats overlap and combine with others at various points and have a global impact with respect to the planetary ecosystem. It should be noted that none of these considerations amounts to what Deleuze calls the "grotesque" gesture of calling for a return to "a state of nature" (Dialogues 145). Deleuze rejects the view that there is or ever was an original, non-problematic natural condition that can be reclaimed. Deleuze clearly holds that all of nature, including its human elements, is in constant flux and that there is no essential, foundational, or sacred state of nature to be found. Thus, Deleuze follows Nietzsche in demanding a "de­ deification" of nature that would eliminate interpretations of nature as the site of divine purposiveness, static essences, and transcendent moral ideals. 1O Deleuze's naturalism is not an essentialist theory nostalgically seeking a return to some pristine nature that is an object apart from human existence, conceptualization, and intervention. Rather, it is a critical perspective that attempts to show that humans Can their cultures are, for better or worse, an integral part of the existing natural, biophysical reality which cannot be transcended, but which can be destroyed by certain exploitative, ecologically insensitive beliefs, practices, and ways of being. Human history and natural history are therefore caught up together in the same movements of change. Political intervention aimed at ecologically destructive values and practices cannot be based on any reactive appeal to transcendence, but rather must be grounded in current situations,

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knowledge, and experiences, implying the active creation of, not simple return to, modes of existence that exemplify appropriate, sustainable, and beneficial relationships between human and nonhuman beings and their environments. A micropolitical approach to such issues has both similarities with and differences from some contemporary ecological or Green movements. Social ecology and deep ecology are perhaps the most visible examples today. Social ecology, pioneered by Murray Bookchin, is oriented primarily toward the examination of the relationship he sees between environmental degradation and social structure. More specifically, Bookchin argues that the human domination of nature follows from the domination of human by human as found in certain kinds of hierarchical and oppressive social arrangements. He writes that "ecological degradation is, in great part, a product of the degradation of human beings by hunger, material insecurity, class rule, hierarchical domination, patriarchy, ethnic discrimination, and competition" ( Which Way for the Ecology Movement? 17). Social ecology is thus premised of the view that "the basic problems which pit society against nature emerge from within social development itself' (Remaking Society 32) and that "human domination of human gave rise to the very idea of domination nature" (44). According to Bookchin, this assumption is particularly evident in the technical-economic system of constant and aggressive expansion characteristic of modern capitalism. Referring to himself as an avowed naturalist with an aversion to "spiritualism" and "mystical" approaches to ecological problems, Bookchin argues that radical culhlral, political, and economic changes in the current social order, as well as the development of a new "ecological sensibility," constitute the appropriate responses to a precarious ecological situation. Consequently, Bookchin contends that a society oriented by the "grow­ or-die" attitude toward humans and nonhumans alike is destined to confront insurmountable natural limits. Only fundamental changes in capitalistic modes of production and consumption can avert ecological catastrophe. These changes are centred around such notions as the decentralization of communities, a complex evolutionism rooted in mutualism or symbiosis, the necessity of cultural and biophysical diversity, bioregional federalism, and the development of ecologically appropriate alternative technologies. I I The general outlook of social ecology presented so far seems to find some strong points of agreement with the naturalistic and micropolitical aspects of Deleuze's thought. Deleuze has consistently criticized the destructive effects of a 'universal capitalism,' the totalizing functions of State apparatuses, the oppression of

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nationalist, racist, and sexist 'majoritarianisms,' and the dangers presented by the basic tendency to divorce the creative becomings of life from social existence. There are, however, important differences that would lead Deleuze to reject some of the specifics of Bookchin's position. One of these is Bookchin's excessive reliance on a rationalistic paradigm for social development. He contends that because humans are "nature rendered self-conscious" (The Ecology of Freedom 36), the perfection of human subjectivity will lead to a "rational" (The Philosophy ofSocial Ecology 1 82) society that is able to serve as a benign steward for the rest of nature: On this basis, Bookchin has taken a hostile stand against recent critiques of the category of reason as evidence of mere "irrationalism" and "antihumanism.,, 1 2 He argues that any retreat from the province of reason amounts to "misanthropic" mysticism. Bookchin's unwillingness to question the generic notion of an inherent, universal reason, and his basic assessment of oppression as simply the result of "irrationality," as if rationality and domination were mutually exclusive, indicates that he retains some problematic, foundationalist assumptions that have been challenged in various ways by critical theorists, post­ structuralists, and feminists, among others. 1 3 In addition, Bookchin's rationalism has also led him to embrace a Hegelian model of progress, according to which the appearance of a truly rational society is the dialectical manifestation of a latent "potentiality" contained in nature (see Bookchin, "Ecologizing the Dialectic"). He frequently offers a picture of "nature rendered more and more aware of itself' as human societies have "organically" unfolded "from their own inner logic," proceeding from the "primitive" to the modem and ultimately to the "rational" (Remaking Society 4 1 and 75). For Bookchin, the realization of a rational society reveals "nature's potentiality to achieve mind and truth" (The Philosophy ofSocial Ecology 35). Bookchin's transcendentialist leanings are clearly in evidence with the preceding remarks, in which he indicates that a fragmented nature will gradually (re)unite with itself as it increasingly attains self-reflexivity and eliminates social contradiction. These examples are intended to dismiss Bookchin's work altogether, for these is much of value within it, but rather to point to specific positions that Deleuze would obviously reject as burdened b deterministic presuppositions of traditional essentialism, foundationalism, and humanism. The problem with such presuppositions, Deleuze might point out, is that they fail seriously to acknowledge the influence of external miliuex on the formation of individuals, species, and ecosystems in their perpetual interaction. Ironically, by relying on the notion of an inevitable 'inner logic' to explain the development of natural and social processes, thus making it difficult to

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explain why we need to invent new ways of existing as well as resistance to the current social order, Bookchin weakens his critique of ecologically destructive beliefs and practices. What of deep ecology, another significant contemporary ecological theory? Perhaps the most prominent deep ecologist in the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, who coined the tern deep ecology, but others who have contributed to its development are Bill Devall, George Sessions, and Warwick Fox. As Naess conceives it, "deep" ecology is so called because of three basic points: (1) it rejects "shallow" environmentalism seeking minor reform of a few basic socio-economic practices; (2) it asks "deeper" questions about how and why these practices are in place; (3) it embraces a "total world view" based on the intrinsic, spiritual identification of self and nature (Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle 27-8, 1 63, and l 7 l �6). Devall and Sessions claim that deep ecology "attempts to articulate a comprehensive religious and philosophical worldview" according to which the "spiritual and material aspects of reality fuse together" into an "organic whole" (Deep Ecology 65). What is referred to as deep ecological consciousness is the view that the world exists as an "unbroken wholeness" (Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep" 96) with no discontinuities or boundaries between human and nonhuman nature. Deep ecology insists that everything is a part of and connected to everything else in an overarching unity founded on internal relations (see Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, passim). In terms of ethical and political responses to ecological problems, deep ecology argues that 'reformist' actions such as recycling and the cleaning up of highly polluted sites are only short-teilli measures which leave intact the dominate paradigms legitimizing human exploitation of nature. Naess contends that self-realization and biocentric equality are two 'norms' that can aid in a radical transformation of these paradigms. As presented by Naess, self-realization is a process in which the self is identified with as much of the world as possible, since difference is taken to be a hindrance to the awareness of the "sameness" uniting all things into a "greater Self" A full realization of the individual self can only be accomplished with its integration into the larger Self of the entirety of nature: By identifying with greater wholes, we partake in the creation and maintenance of this whole . ... The ecophilosophical outlook is developed through an identification so deep that one's own self is not longer adequately delimited by the personal ego or the organism. One experiences oneself to be a genuine part of all life. (Ecology, Community and Lifestyle 1 73-4)

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Naess goes on to argue that the wider identification characteristic of the "deep, comprehensive and ecological self' contributes to an understanding of biocentric equality, that all things in nature are equal with respect to their ability to achieve self-realization, implying that harming other entities is equal to hanning one's own self through the elimination of potentials for self/Self-realization. It appears that there are more differences than similarities between Deleuze's naturalism and deep ecology. While Naess uses language similar to Deleuze when he claims that "diversity, complexity, and symbiosis" are fundamental "potentials," and that realizations of these potentials should be plural and qualitatively different, he assigns them this importance only insofar as they are integrated into the totality of comprehensive Self­ identification (200-2). This difference may be a consequence of Naess' assumption that difference can only inhibit the awareness of biocentric equality and is to be equated with "indifference" (174) in the sense that if a strong identification of sameness is absent only negative indifference will remain. Naess grounds this belief in the idea of "microcosm mirroring macrocosm," of each natural entity mirroring "the supreme whole" (202). This approach, again, seems to indicate a denial of difference, for the individual self and the supreme Self simply reflect one another in a mirror of sameness. I believe, however, that a position grounding concern for others in resemblance or identification presents a greater opportunity for ethical-political indifference that does an account based on respect for the coexistence of interrelated differences. Furthennore, such an attitude may fail to pay sufficient attention to the unique needs, interests, and capacities of different modes of existence; seeing them as identical (or seeing them only if the are identical) could lead to greater ecological harm than if their differences are acknowledged and understood as such. In addition, Naess openly adheres to a "back to nature" attitude and a "Nature mysticism" (1 83) that Deleuze also clearly rejects as dangerously reactionary, with the possibility for limiting the creation of alternative discourses and practices and for falling back into a kind of moralistic longing for the "Golden Age" (176). Finally, it is doubtful whether Deleuze would have any sympathy for the constant appeal to an essentialistic and psycho logistic 'depth' in deep ecological theory. For Deleuze, it is not some vague essence that is the key to ecological understanding, but rather the various kinds of relations or interactions that each living thing is capable of entering into with others. Hence, the micropolitical appeal to analyses that are specific to particular modes and regions of existence, that is, to differences as they exist and function.

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Not surprisingly, the position most compatible with Deleuze's thinking on these matters is Guattari's 'three ecologies' argument. As outlined in his book, Les trois ecologies, Guattari makes the case for a series of critical and creative "ecological praxes" situated with the context of three distinct, yet interconnected ecologies: social ecology, environmental ecology, and mental ecology (all translations are my own). These three ecologies correspond to the "ecological registers" of social relations, the nahlral enviromnent, and human subjectivity. When taken together, the three registers require an "ethical-political articulation" capable of addressing the dangers presented to life on Earth by the combined effects of environmental disequilibrium, progressive deterioration of social existence, and the ossification and standardization of thought and behaviour ( 1 1 -2). Critical of the belief that the dominant economic­ political systems of what Guattari calls 'integrated world capitalism' will be either willing or able to cultivate significant transformation in the planetary situation, Guattari calls for a simultaneously micropolitical­ macropolitical ecological revolution: There will not be a tme response to the ecological crisis except on a planetary scale and on the condition that it brings about an authentic political, social, and cultural revolution, reorienting the objectives of the production of material and immaterial goods. This revolution must not be concerned solely with the visible relations of forces on a grand scale but equally with the molecular domains of sensibility, of intelligence, and desire. ( 13-5)

Guattari regards the three ecological registers to be 'existential territories' characterized by unique problems and conditions requiring the construction of new fields of possibility for both human and nonhuman nahlre. This construction is to be undertakes in terms of the individual and collective "resingularization" (2 1 ) of the world, inspired by aesthetic as well as ethical creation. Working from the perspective that culture and nature are inseparable, Guattari argues that there are three complementary points of transversal interaction relevant to ecopolitical praxis: the socius, the psyche, and the environment. Responding ethically and politically to the "simultaneous degradation of these three areas" must be done in terms of the "contemporary conditions of the objectives and methods of each and every form of movement of the social" (32-3). Hence, the need for three ecologies. Of these ecologies, social ecology is the theory and practice concerned with the degradation of social conditions, and with the reconstruction of human relations and liberty at all levels of the socius, or social field. Such

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phenomena as urban decay; capitalistic expansion, and exploitation of territory and labour; subjugation of women, the unemployed, immigrants, the homeless, and children; the rise of religious fundamentalisms and cultural intolerance are to be considered as effects of the decline and pollution of the social environment. These phenomena are indicators of the disappearance of "the words, expressions, and gestures of the human solidarity" (35). In comparison, environmental ecology is the theory and practice concerned with the degradation of the diverse natural conditions upon which all life inhabiting the planet depends, as will as the protection and enrichment of these conditions. The widespread ravages of the Earth's complex ecosystems and in the increasingly rapid loss of natural species and habitat enacted by the various exploitative technologies of an international market economy, or integrated world capitalism, have led to a steady deterioration of world-wide living conditions. Finally, mental ecology is the theory and practice concerned with the degradation of the conditions for creative subjectification and singularization. In Guattari's analysis, the spread of integrated world capitalism has been accompanied by the infiltration of homogenizing nOlIDS into the production of subjectivity at all levels of daily life, whether "individual, domestic, conjugal, neighbourly, creative, or personal-ethical" (44). Such norms de-singularize different modes of subjectivity and experience, and propagate images of thought as somehow 'outside nature,' centred on concepts, discourses, and regimes of control, instrumentalization, and representationalist identity. Each ecology, then, confronts a specific problem area; yet the�e areas are separate form one another because they are interconnected and degrading simultaneously. This position allows Guattari to propose a generalized ecology viewed through the lenses of each of the three ecologies, united by their common principle: The principle common to the three ecologies consists of the following; each of the existential territories with which they confront us, not in and of itself, closed upon itself, but as ... opening up, as a process, into praxes that enable it to be rendered 'habitable' by human projects. It is this praxic­ openness that constitutes the essence of the art of the 'eco,' subsuming all the ways of domestication existential territories, concerning intimate modes of being, the body, the environment, the great contextual ensembles relative to ethnic groups, the nation, or even the general rights of humanity. (49)

While the struggles and aims of each ecology are different, their COlnmon aim is to "organize new micropolitical and micro-social practices. New solidarities, a new gentleness or kindness, conjoined with

42

Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism

new aesthetic practices and new analytic practices of formations of the unconscious" (45-6). In this way, Guattari articulates an ecological vision aimed at developing different forms of social action "which cannot be achieved by top-down reforms" (57) on the part of professional politicians, but by the creative proliferation of new value- systems, alternative modes of subjectivity, innovative human and nonhuman relationships and forms of alliance, across the social network of local practices intersecting with the natural movements of global becomings. What has been elucidates here makes it clear that Deleuze would agree with most, but perhaps not all, of the elements of Guattari's account. What is most important is their agreement that in order to resist ecologically destructive beliefs and practices, it is necessary to engage in the creation of specific alternatives at the level of local, yet overlapping habitats, which allows for the formation of mutually beneficial alliances and relationships of ecological solidarity. On this basis, it may be possible to formulate a more extensive dialogue between Deleuze, Guattari, and other current theorists and activists concerning ecology, and to begin to develop micropolitical analyses of various ecological conditions, problems, and modes of intervention. One of the most important suggestions that I make in this paper, I hope, is that we must actively work to create a habitable world, while recognizing our place in a natural, living reality that is complex, interrelational, symbiotic, and ultimately, whose changing limits or dimensions are inseparable from our own continued existence. If that is the case, Deleuze's ecological naturalism amounts to the practical affirmation of the common destiny shared by all modes of life on Earth, not in spite of, but because of their multiple yet always intersecting and fragile lines of difference. Notes 1 Published discussions of the poststmcturalist critique of essentialism and determinism are too numerous to list here. However, an accessible survey of these topics may be found in (Best and Kellner). 2 For a concise presentation of Deleuze's views here, see (Deleuze and Pamet). For Deleuze, philosophy should not ask after the 'essence' of a thing, but rather ought to look into how something functions or lives, how it relates to other things, and into what kinds of effects it has or inspires. This theme is discussed by Deleuze in his (Nietzsche and Philosophy). 3 Deleuze has characterized his philosophy as a type of pluralistic empiricism inspired by Anglo-American thought. See (Deleuze and Pamet, Dialogues vii-viii). 4 General accounts of philosophical naturalism can be found in (Danto), (Kirkorian), and especially (Ryder).

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5 For more on the 'illusions of transcendence,' see (DeleuzelGuattari What is Philosophy? 49 and 73). 6 Oikos can mean house, household, family, milieu, vicinity, habitat, or environment. 7 For more on the notion of nonparallel or aparallel evolution, see (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues 2-1 0). 8 Michel Serres has made symbioses a central aspect of his call for a "natural contract" that is dedicated to the renewal of our relationship to the Earth. He argues that humans have maintained a "parasitical" rather than "symbiotic" relationship with the natural world, and that a global ecological revolution requires an awareness of the Earth as our "symbiont" (see Serres 35-44). 9 I refer here to the final chapter which is also published separately as "Ethology, Spinoza and Us," in Incoiporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Publications, 1 992). There are quite a few references to ethology scattered throughout De1euze's writings and it is unnecessary to refer to them all in this context. However, the reader is urged to consult especially plateaus 1 0 and 1 1 of A Thousand Plateaus, entitled respectively " 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ... " and " 1 837: Of the Refrain." 1 0 Nietzsche asks: "When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to 'naturalize' humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?" (The Gay Science 1 68-9). Significant discussions of Nietzsche's naturalism can be found in (Schatzki) and (Lampert). 1 1 These ideas can be found throughout the works cited above, and especially in (Toward an Ecological Society). 12 See, for example, the introductory chapter to (Remaking Society). 13 Michel Foucault clarifies that critically examining the notion of an inviolate, inherently non-oppressive rationality is not by itself evidence of irrationalism: "1 think that the blackmail that has very often been at work in every critique of reason or every critical inquiry into the histOlY of rationality (either you accept rationality or you fall prey to the irrational) operates as though a rational critique of rationality were impossible" (Politics, Philosophy, Culture 27). The point made by Foucault is that there are different possible forms of rationality that may or may not be useful or beneficial.

Works Cited

Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner Postmodern Theory: Criticai Interrogations (New York: The Guilford Press, 1 99 1). Bookchin, Murray. Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal and Buffalo: Black Rose Books, 1 980). -. The Ecology ofFreedom (palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1 982). -. Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston: South End Press, 1 990).

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Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism

-. The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal and Buffalo: Black Rose Books, 1 990). -. "Ecologizing the Dialectic." Renewing the Earth: The Promise of Social Ecology. Ed. John Clark (London: Green Print, 1 990). -. Which Way for the Ecology Movement? (Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, 1 994). Danto, Arthur C. "Naturalism." Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy. Vol. 5 (New York, Macmillan, 1 967). Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). -. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1 988). -. The Logic of Sense. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 990). -. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1 990). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 987). -. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 994). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Pamet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New Yark: Columbia University Press, 1 987). Devall, Bill, and George Sessions. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1 985). Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York and London: Routledge, 1 988). Guattari, Felix. Les trois ecologies (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1 990). Hayden, Patrick. "From Relations to Practice in the Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze." Man and World 28:3 (July 1995): 283-302. Kirkorian, Yervant H. (Ed.) Naturalism and the Human Spirit (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 944). LampeIi, Lawrence. Nietzsche and Modern Times (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1 993). Naess, Arne. "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement." Inquiry 1 6 (1973): 95-100. -. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Trans. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 989). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. WaIter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). Ryder, John. (Ed.) American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (Amherst, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 1994).

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Schatzki, Theodore R. "Ancient and Naturalistic Themes in Nietzsche's Ethics." Nietzsche-Studien 23 (1 994): 146-67. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1 995).

EIGHT DELEUZIAN THESES ON ART ELIZABETH GROSZ

Deleuze and Guattari have enabled us to profoundly reconsider how the human is understood and how the prevailing conceptions of subjectivity, agency, reason and language, since at least the seventeenth century if not long before, have served to divide the human from the animal in ways that must now be interrogated. From ahnost the beginning of Deleuze's writings, and at the heart of his various collaborations with Guattari, the place of the animal-in the human, before the human and beyond the human-has figured as central theme, as a way of perhaps displacing consciousness (and the unconscious) as the defining feature of the human. From Deleuze's, and Deleuze and Guattari's, work on Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, the animal cannot be considered that over which the human has dominion, for the animal is the internal condition, context and destination of life itself. Man, that all-too-human creature, is what the animal has created and continues to inform; and the animal is the source and force that enables the most human of all productions�art, science, philosophy-to be seen, not as the culmination of logos, but as the animal gift, the animal impetus, that the human has inherited and must makes, however provisionally, his own. Deleuze and Guattari enable us to ask: How are our conceptions of human accomplishments-whether in art, architecture, science, philosophy or in governance and in social and political relations­ transfOlmed when we place the human within the animal? What kind of crisis exists in the concept of man or the human that impels us now to seek that which man had cast aside and rendered as his to possess and govern? How and why does the animal imperil human uniqueness and dignity? What do we gain in restoring the human to the animal from which it has come and the natural in which it is, however ambiguously and complicatedly, structured. How is art to be understood when its preconditions are not cultural but natural? 1 I want to proceed in a purely speculative way discussing the animal and sexual preconditions of art with some broad hypotheses which I cannot prove or even argue but which I hope will generate some new

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thinking regarding Deleuze and Guattari's relevance for thinking the place of the animal in art. It is Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion, above all in 'Of the Refrain' in A Thousand Plateaus that art is entirely involved in and dependent on the anima1.2 Eight Theses about Art and the Animal

1. All of the arts, from architecture to music, poetry, painting, sculpture,

dance are the indirect products or effects of what Darwin calls 'sexual selection' the attraction to potential sexual partners, sometimes but not always or tmiversally for the purposes of procreation, for the purposes of some kind of sexual encounter. Sexual selection, Darwin makes clear (in ways that many of the Neo-Darwinists have forgotten), is not reducible to natural selection, the capacity to survive in given and changing enviromnents, but is a fundamentally separate and potentially antagonistic principle which may at times imperil life for the sake of pleasure or desire. The separation of natural from sexual selection-so crucial to Darwin that he devotes two separate books to these principles (natural selection is elaborated in The Origin of Species ([1859] 1996) and sexual selection is explained in The Descent ofMan, and Selection in Relation to Sex ([1 872] 1 98 l )-is regularly reduced in contemporary Darwinism, when, for example, sociobiologists suggest that sexual attraction and procreation are 'really' underneath it all, forms of maximizing the survival potential of one's genes. In such accounts, which are, nearly tmiversal at present, sexual selection is in fact an unconscious attraction to those beings who can maximize one's genes' capacity to surVive. Instead, I will claim that sexual and natural selection are two quite irreducibly and potentially antagonistic principles. If natural selection can help explain the remarkable variety and adaptations of life to its specific enviromnents then only sexual selection can explain the extravagant, often useless, sometimes imperiling qualities that have no survival value (Darwin, for example, mentions in the case of the human, hairiness or other visible differences in secondary sexual characteristics); 2. Sexual selection can be more explicitly linked to the arts than is natural selection, to the extent that it functions to highlight, to focus on, to intensify, the bodies of both the living beings exciting and the living beings excited by various forms of bodily display-such as in the courtship songs and dancing of competing birds, the dazzling displays of colors in sticklebacks and other erotically attuned fish, the loud and colorful encounters of various mammals in competition with members

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Eight Deleuzian Theses on Art

of the same sex over sexual partners. Sexual selection unhinges, deranges and imperils survival for the sake of intensification, for the sake of pleasure, providing a principle separate from that of mere survival, which for Nietzsche is the most contemptible and ignoble of aims (This notion of the separation of sexual from natural selection is the condition under which art can fully understand and appreciate its own animal genealogy); 3. Art is a form of intensification of the body (both the body of the subject of sexual display and the bodies of the observers of such display) that links the energies and intensities of the lived body to the rhythms and forces of the earth itself. Art is the result of the living creature's ability to extract something-a property, a quality, a sound­ tone, a color-source, a rhythm or force-from the earth, from the usually uncontained territory in which it lives and enacts its activities. Art is the extraction of territorially linked qualities and their use in intensifying the energies and forces of living bodies. So art, like technology or like science, links living bodies to the earth, not wholesale but through the connections it makes between specific qualities-those leaves that attract the attention of various showy birds, the shiny objects that appeal to bower birds-and specific bodies. But unlike technology or science which aim to extract useful principles, principles which can be used to attain specific aims or goals­ regularity, predictability, order and organization-the arts redirect these forces of practical regularity through intensification to produce something no longer regular, ordered or manipulable but something, an intensity, which actively alters the very forces of the body itself, something appealing, irregular, unpredictable; 4. This emphasis on sexual selection rather than on Dmwin's more privileged concept of natural selection, which is so beloved by the sociobiological tradition, not only provides us with the possibility of a non-reductive understanding of the arts that refuses to understand them in terms of their capacity to prepare us, by way of playful rehearsal, for the tasks of survival; this emphasis also makes clear that wherever art is in play, that is, wherever qualities, properties, features, forms have the capacity to brace and intensify the body, we must recognize, along with all feminisms of difference (especially that developed by Luce Irigaray), that sexual selection is the underside of sexual difference. Sexual selection, the sexual appeal and attraction of members of the same species, is always at least two-fold, resulting both in the development of at least two different kinds of morphology or bodily type, male and female, and at least two different kinds of criteria for

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attractiveness. Ironically, Darwin is more a feminist of difference than the anti-feminist he has been commonly accused of being; 5. Art and especially the first and primordial of all of the arts, architecture, is thus a particular linkage between living bodies and the forces of the earth. Art is the direct connection between the forces of the living body and the forces of the earth, formed above all through rhythm. Architecture is the first art, the art that is the condition for the emergence of all the other arts, for without some cordoning off of territory from a more generically conceived earth, no qualities or properties can be extracted, no properties can resonate, intensify, effect and transform bodies. Without territory, they simple are, they are without effect. It is only to the extent that both the body and the earth are partially tamed through the creation of a provisional territory that protects the living creature, and creates a temporary 'home' that art as such can emerge. It is through the staking out of a territory in the bird's eloquent song that a space is marked between trees in which amorous encounters can take place between the songbird and those it entices, between the songbird and the rivals it repels, between a songbird and the fuhlre generations it anticipates through a nest to be built. Art is, for Deleuze, the extension of the architectural imperative to organize the space of the earth. This roots art, not in the creativity or sensibility of mankind but rather in excessiveness or abundance of nature, in nature's production of extractable qualities that have intensifying effects on living beings; 6. Art is the sexualjzation of survival; or equally sexuality is the rendering artistic of nature, the making of nature into more than it is, the making of a leaf into a sexual adornment rather than just a residual shedding, photosynthesizing property of a tree. Art is that ability to take a property or quality and make it resonate bodies to the extent that this quality takes bodies away from their real immersion in a particular habitat and orients them to a virhlal world of attraction and seduction, a world promised or possible but never given in the real. This is why the first art is architecture-for qualities to be extractable, a territory, that is a framed and delimited space, must first exist, a space of safety, competition, courtship and flight; only within such a provisional space, a space always threatened with deterritorialization, can there be the pure joy of qualities, the immersion of the living in intensities. Architecture is the bridge between life and art, the condition under which life complicates itself and fmds transportable, transformable qualities for this complication.

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Eight Deleuzian Theses on Art

7. If art is rooted in the ways in which sexual selection deviates from nahlfal selection, making properties, qualities, organs and muscles function, not usefully but intensively, mt is the capacity of materiality to function otherwise that what is given: art is the exploration of qualities and properties not for their own sake, not for their use value or exchange value, but only insofar as these qualities and properties do something, have some effect, on living beings. Art is the means by which nature deviates itself from givenness, comes to function in other terms than the useful or the manageable: art is thus the space in which the natural and the material is the most attenuated, rendered the most visible and tangible for living beings; and 8. These qualities and properties, attractive to various forms of life, become art only to the extent that they can be moved, transferred outside of where they are found, sent on a deterritorializing trajectory, able to function elsewhere than where they originate or are found: while the conditions and raw materials for art are located within territory, as part of the earth, they become art, architecture, dance only to the extent they become transportable elsewhere, only to the extent that they intensify bodies that circulate, move, change, only to the extent that they too become subject to evolutionary transformation and spatial movement. These eight theses outline, in as brief a way as possible, how Deleuze and Guattari, inflected through Darwin's own texts on sexual selection and its productive extravagances, may provide us wit h a way of linking nature to art, not through imitation or mimesis but directly; Art is nature attenuated to attract and allure; or equally, nature is art undeveloped and requiring intensification and framing. Art is the elaboration and foregrounding of properties, the qualities-sonorous, visual, tactile, and so on-that nature provides through their deterritorialization, their framing and movement elsewhere. The animal is that world in which everything human about the human is born, accommodates and intensifies itself, and dies. Animal origin and animal destination. A human trajectory enabled and limited through the animal. Darwin opens up this trajectory, Nietzsche ironizes it, and Deleuze and Guattari celebrate it.

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Notes I Since this anthology is focused on Deleuze and Guattari's relations to ecological thinking, I am reluctant to place my own work within a 'traditional' ecological or eco-feminist position. I have already specified my differences from eco-feminism in chapter one of Time Travels. To briefly recap here: I have carefully avoided any understanding of nature, the world, or the cosmos as a single unified entity in all of my work. Generally ecological perspectives are holistic, and they imply a concept of the world as a unified totality, a cohesive and potentially unified entity that has been primarily subjected to division through human intervention. In my understanding of the D!!rwinian tradition, on which I rely so strongly in this text, Darwin's understanding of nature is bifurcated, linked to divergence and the elaboration of difference, rather than being directed to the attainment of unity or cohesiveness. My concem, if it is to be in any way defined by the eco-Iogical, is to separate the logos from bios, to understand them as two extemally linked relations: the eco has no logos, or its logos is that of the proliferation of destruction. My concem here, as elsewhere, is to complicate and elaborate differences, to insist on the impossibility of a larger term that could encompass differences, to affirm incommensurability. And equally, it is to problematize the place of human agency in either the destruction or the reconstitution of a unified and cohesive world. Ecological accounts have positioned the human as the agent of the destruction of this unity; and as the agent who, armed with a new politics, or new insights, may be the one who can repair or overcome mankind's previous acts of destruction. This is to accord man, once more, the privilege of dominion, or its more modest companion, stewardship, over all living things and over the earth as a whole. 2 This more or less recaps some of the work I have undertaken on art and the animal in Chaos, Territory, Art.

Works Cited

Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 198 1). -. The Origin ofSpecies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 987). Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). -. Time Travels. Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics ofSexual Diference. Trans G. Gill and C. Burke (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994).

'THE INSTRUCTED THIRD' : PROCESSING ECOLOGY WITH DELEUZE LEYLA HAFERKAMP

In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze reads Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's theory of monadology in terms of the model of the fold, according to which the world is considered an infinite continuum of folds and foldings, an origami world of utmost pliability; a "plastic habitat" in perpehlal process, constantly "folding, unfolding, refolding" (137). "[W]hat has changed now," Deleuze writes, "is the organization of the home and its nature" (137). The two-floored edifice of the Baroque house is transformed into the 'new habitat,' situated as the new oikos beyond the dualistic distinctions of inside/outside, subject/object, public/private. Within this context, Deleuze ends his reading of The Monadology with a plea for nomadology, calling for a mode of subjectivity that is always 'in process.' Deleuze's reading of Leibniz provides, as Tom Conley has noted, powerful insights for rethinking the positio humana within the 'ecological fold:' That humans stand as triumphant subjects among inert objects no longer holds. They no longer own things as they had in the world of possessive individualism. Now it must be asked how humans select and designate what they caU 'living' or 'inert.' If organic life cannot be easily demarcated from inorganic matter, it behooves subjects to look at matter from a different angle. Leibniz points towards an ethics that appends the science of ecology. In his turn, Deleuze suggests that an at once abstract and tactile sense of matter must figure at the ClUX of any social practice. (xiv, emphasis added)

The Fold and What Is Philosophy?, published shortly afterwards and co­

authored with Felix Guattari,

would be hypothetical approaches to problems - population, habitat, displacement, genocide - that require urgent and practical commitment

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[ . . . ] And since they beg reaction of this kind, these works can also be said to orient philosophy into the future of the planet in ways that pragmatic means have yet to conceptualize.(xiv) I

The ecological insights implicit in the 'hypothetical approaches' formulated in Deleuze's later work attain more relevance if we take into consideration a crucial metaphilosophical aspect: the Deleuzian method of 'processing' concepts; as in 'process philosophy.' In the following, I will deal with the Deleuzian 'conception of concepts' as a useful philosophical aid for tackling ecological problems.2 For this purpose, my focus will be on the cluster of Ueleuzian concepts which, by virtue of their dynamic interrelatedness, provide the appropriate tools for dealing with ecological complexity: the concept, theplane of immanence and the event. If, in socio-historical terms, "the transition from ecosystem ecology to evolutionary ecology seem[ed] to reflect the generational transition from the politically conscious generation of the 1 960s to the 'yuppie' generation of the 1980s" (Soderqvist in Worster 414), ecology today seems to be shifting grounds once again as the 'ecological threat' tends to become an integral part of the MTV generation's 'mainstream spectacle.' While environmental consciousness rapidly gains high-street visibility and eco­ lifestyle finally finds its niche in the heart of consumer culture, the popular understanding of ecology runs the risk of being confined to relations of linear causality between neatly defined phenomena, thus reducing the fundamental. complexity intrinsic to the ecological to a set of analyzable complicatioris. In scientific terms, the tenn Oecologie, coined by Darwinian biologist Errist Haeckel . in 1 866, originally addressed the "relations of living organisms to the external world, their habitat, customs, energies, parasites, etc." (qtd. in Worster 192). Although Haeckel's definition underlines the significance of the relationship between the biological organism and its physical environment, it fails, :fi.-om a contemporary point of view, to capture the complexity of the network of parameters operative in the ecological process. It was only during the 1970s, when the science of ecology took a 'systemic turn,' that one recognized the importance of the multidirectional interconnectedness between the heterogeneous constituents that make up the ecological.3 This connectivity is not only a crucial factor operative on the intrarelational level of the ecosystem, but also an important aspect on the metalevel of ecology's interrelations to other disciplines. Situated at the interface of nature and culture, ecology figures less as a detached science than a 'permeable discipline' open to exchanges of the inter- and transdisciplinary kind; a science in need of a

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Processing Ecology with Deleuze

regular reVISIOn of its propositions and the readjustment of its tools according to changing parameters. Recent definitions of ecology point to a revival of the systemic approach and highlight the dynamic aspects of connectivity and diversity within a systemic framework that includes both organic and inorganic elements. The systems perspective - that the ecological constitutes a complex system with emergent properties - has become, with some modifications, increasingly more important for the ecological debate. As a new defmition of ecology provided by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Shldies demonstrates, ecology is [t]he scientific study of the processes influencing the distribution and abundance of organisms, the interactions among organisms, and the interactions between organisms and the transformation and flux of energy and matter.4

Importantly, the new definition replaces the 'relations' in Haeckel's seminal definition with bidirectional 'processes,' 'interactions' and 'transformation and flux:' It blends biological with physical aspects, thus blurring the boundary between the organic and the inorganic due to the existence of the continuous loops between the domains of interiority and exteriority so neatly separated by Haeckel. Despite this systemic complexity, within the current discourse of popular 'lifestyle ecology,' the whole range of environmental problems seems to have been downsized to the 'inconvenient truth' of global warming. While climate change does indeed pose an immense challenge to the biosphere as 'we' know it, S the frequent use and haphazard contextualization of the phrase in the mass media contributes less to a fruitful debate in political ecology than to the psychodramatic process of soothing our 'bourgeois conscience.' To counter this extremely anthropocentric and immensely trivializing tendency that prevails in the post-Katrina era, it seems crucial to reconsider the ecological in philosophical telms that match its overall complexity and expand the ecological discourse beyond the bounds of an oscillation between technocratic faith in effective planning and outright pathetic fallacy. As Gregory Bateson has noted, the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans themselves, and it would be foolish to sacrifice these ideas on the altar of pragmatism. It wiII not in the long nm pat to 'seII' the plans by superficial ad hominem arguments which wiII conceal or contradict the deeper insight. (5 1 3)

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In The Natural Contract, Michel Serres stresses, in a similar vein, the urgency to abandon the 'parasitic' position of anthropocentricism and rethink our relationship to nature in terms of a new contract: " [W]e must add to the exclusively social contract a natural contract of symbiosis and . reciprocity in which our relationship to things would set aside mastery and possession [ . . . ]" (38). This new pact, he argues, should extend beyond the scope of mere discursivity and take into account the fact that "the earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds and interactions [ . . . ]" (39). Serres' contract implies an ichnographic set of horizontal relations, i.e., a flattened hierarchy that is held together by the systemic 'intercordedness' of its constituents, within which the venerable distinction between humans and nonhumans is dissolved. However, this heterarchic web of relations is defined not only by the diversity of its interconnected elements, but it also implies a systemic totality within which the seemingly opposite poles of the global and the local communicate: "The bond runs from place to place but also, at every point, expresses the totality of sites. It goes, to be sure, from the local to the local, but above all from the local to the global and from the global to the local" (107). The natural contract that follows "the recent passage from the local to the global" and sets the parameters for "our renewed relationship to the world" (38) calls for a new mode of thought that Serres sees embodied in what he calls the "the Instructed Third," who dwells in the interzone as the "traveler in [both] nature and society," while ceaselessly navigating the waters of "the Northwest Passage, those waters where scientific knowledge communicates, in rare and delicate ways, with the humanities [ . . . ]" (94). In a more recent inquiry, Bruno Latour argues in a similar vein when he draws attention to the necessity of inserting "a learned community that acts as a third party" between nature and society, which "the ecological movements have sought to short-circuit [ . . . ], precisely in order to accelerate their militant progress" (4). According to Latour, the shortcomings of political ecology result from the conceptual deficiency residing at its core, from its having skipped the crucial step of redefming/reorganizing conceptual parameters. This conceptual inconsistency can be traced back to the fact that political ecology has merely juxtaposed such inherited notions as oi/cos, physis, anthropos, etc., without further investigating their interrelatedness and interdependency within their mutual, ecophilosophical context. For the sake of a weak version of pragmatism, it has too readily 'gotten beyond' the old distinction between humans and things, subjects of law and objects of science - without observing that these entities had been

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Processing Ecology with Deleuze shaped, profled, and sculpted in such a way that they had gradually become incompatible. (3, emphasis added)

Roughly speaking, the contemporary ecological debate can be said to be taking place in a realm marked out by two idealized extremes: a fully 'organized' technocratic culture with its valid solutions and a pristine and 'organless' nature characterized by perennial flow. The latter is an Arcadian myth in that it implies the purely intrinsic, ecocentric value of the natural, whereas the former sways into the homocentric Utopia of perfect planning. These two extremes, though fully incompatible and in themselves useless for the development of viable ecological policies and strategies,6 serve nonetheless as necessary parameters that demarcate the outermost periphery of the theoretical framework that allows for the description of ecological processes. It is within this framework that Deleuzian philosophy, regarded as a form of process philosophy with the "capacity to fuse into one unifying conception such contrasting polarities as unity and plurality, stability and change, specificity and generality [ . . . ]" (Rescher 4), is well-equipped to play the role of 'the instructed third.' The planomenon of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is the plane of immanence, which provides the space on which the links between the seemingly incompatible realms of discursive abstraction and fluent materiality are established. "The plane of immanence," as they note programmatically, "has two facets as Thought and as Nature, as Nous and as Physis" (What Is Philosophy? 38). This topology of the plane implies a thoroughly monistic process philosophy, in which the notion of process, although it is not restricted to the Heraclitean notion of perennial flow, encompasses the whole range of transmutations related to the dynamics at work in the very interzone marked out by the idealized extremes of pennanent fonn [being] and amorphous fux [becoming]. Accordingly, Deleuzian philosophy puts the emphasis on the simultaneity and interdependency of opposing forces as well as on the translational processes taking place in between them; a move that reflects the principle of dynamic reciprocity Alfred North Whitehead had developed in Process and Reality: In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Pennanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by submission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can find no interpretation of patent facts. (338)

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In the Deleuzian version of process philosophy, the ontological oneness of epistemologically incompatible categories, e.g., the horizontal [planar] interconnectedness of nous and physis, constitutes the basic paradox philosophy has to deal with.7 Although Deleuze abandons the primacy of the mental in favor of a psychophysical monism, his perspective is by no means that of an eliminative materialism that fully rejects the mental component. What Deleuze does reject is any idea of transcendence that surpasses materiality, an orientation that also prevails in Bateson's writings. "In addition to the physical determinism which characterizes our universe," Bateson writes, "there is a mental determinism." This mental detenninism is, however "in no sense supernatural [ . . . ] [It] is not transcendent but immanent and especially complex and evident in those sections of the universe which are alive or which include living things" (472). Deleuze goes even one step further when he asserts that "[a]lthough it is always possible to invoke a transcendent that falls outside the plane of immanence, or that attributes immanence to itself, all transcendence is constituted solely in the flow of immanent consciousness [ . . . ] Transcendence is always a product of immanence" ("ltmnanence" 3 1 , emphasis added). As the "[i]mmanent mind has," as Bateson argues, "no separate or unearthly channels" (473), what we take to be transcendent can only emerge from within the realm of immanence, which, according to Deleuze, "is not related to Some Thing as a unity superior to all things or to a subject as an act that brings about a synthesis of things" ("Immanence" 27, emphasis added). Along these lines, the Deleuzian perspective comes close to that of an emergentist materialism, which regards the mental as an emergent property of the bio-physical. 8 This specific mode of materialism suggests the reversal of Platonism, in which the ideas as immaculate concepts enjoy absolute primacy over all other categories of being. Such a reversal applies even more readily to Plotinus' Neo-Platonic theory of hypostases and emanation. The top-down movement of emanation, the eidetic illumination of the lower strata of being, is substituted in Deleuze by the productive force of immanation ensuing from "the new postconscious and postsubjective, impersonal and non-individual transcendental field" (Agamben 225). It is within the context of such an emergentist materialism that Deleuze understands philosophy as the discipline engaging in the continuous 'conception of concepts:' "Concepts do not exist ready-made in a kind of heaven waiting for some philosopher to come grab them. Concepts have to be produced" (Two Regimes ofMadness 3 13).

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Why, then, processing ecology through Deleuze? Though lacking an explicitly ecological orientation, Deleuzian philosophy offers extremely useful conceptual tools for dealing with the translational processes that take place between the diametrically opposed 'ecological' terms such as constancy vs. change, form vs. flux, order vs. chaos. In his early work, Deleuze himself stressed the significance of the conceptual as follows: "The genius of a philosophy must first be measured by the new distribution which it imposes on beings and concepts" (Logic of Sense 89). Later, for Deleuze (and Guattari), the special vocation of the philosopher consisted primarily in the conception of concepts: "[P]hilosophy is a discipline that is just as inventive, just as creative as any other discipline, and it consists in creating or inventing concepts" (Two Regimes of Madness 3 13). As Deleuze and Guattari write, just as the scientist is the inventor of prospects and the artist the creator of affects and percepts, the philosopher is the inventor of concepts (What Is Philosophy? 24).

What makes Deleuzian philosophy especially relevant for the ecological debate today is also its deliberately transdisciplinary positioning as a system of thought open to both the sciences and the arts. Though they produce different tools, the philosopher, the artist and the scientist interact in their effort to depict and analyze 'reality.' However, whenever there is need for conceptual clarity, it becomes the philosopher's task and the philosopher's task only to explore the domain in between the disciplines and come up with the adequate concepts. "A scientist as a scientist," Deleuze writes, "has nothing to do with concepts. That is even why thankfully - there is philosophy" (Two Regimes ofMadness 3 14). As a conceptualizing machine, philosophy provides ecology with concepts that complement 'its' scientific prospects, although they differ drastically from these prospects. For instance, science and philosophy differ drastically in their attitudes towards chaos, which is "defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes" (What Is Philosophy? 1 1 8). While science decelerates the infinite speed to the point of an analyzable standstill, "in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual," philosophy retains the infinite, "giv[ing] consistency to the virtual through concepts." It can do so because the plane of immanence serves as the "philosophical sieve" filled with concepts whereas science attempts at laying out its own "plane of reference" ( 1 1 8). Unlike scientific propositions that are based on fixed points of reference and aim at quantitative measurements, concepts are complex products of metaphysical thinking: "[T]he concept is not a simple logical being, but a metaphysical being; it is not a generality or a

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universality, but an individual; it is not defined by an attribute, but by

predicates-as-events" (Fold 42, emphasis added).

Deleuze's 'concept of concept' can best be elaborated by virtue of its connectivity to the plane of immanence on the one hand and to the concept of the event on the other. The concept is correlative of the plane of immanence, without which it could not exist. The plane displays the constitution of the assemblages forming and filling space; it is characterized by "only speeds and slownesses between unformed elements, and affects between nonsubjectified powers.,,9 The components constituting its surface abide by the geometrics of "pure longitude and latitude" (Thousand Plateaus 26 1) and know of no dimensionality, i.e., they are located within the cartography of heterarchic directionality. Though in itself not directly a philosophical concept or "an act of thought" (What Is Philosophy? 2 1), the plane constitutes "the image of thought" (37) indispensable for philosophical activity; it serves as the prephilosophical basis and "the absolute ground of philosophy, [ . . . ], the foundation on which it creates its concepts" (4 1). The notion of concept is also closely related to that of the event, probably the most important concept relating thought to process. One of the things that make Deleuzian concepts so 'ecological' is that they do not address the essences of things, but the dynamics of events and the becomings that go through them. In most general terms, "[t]he concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come" (3233). Although concepts as metaphysical entities belong to the realm of relational abstractions and have "the reality of a virtual, of an incorporeal, of an impassible, in contrast with [scientific] functions of an actual state, body functions, and lived functions" (159), the events they signal constitute the hinge between the virtual and the actual; in fact, [the event] is itself inseparable from the state of affairs, bodies, and lived reality in which it is actualized or brought about. But we can also say the converse: the state of affairs is no more separable from the event that nonetheless goes beyond its actualization in every respect. ( 1 59)

Thus, the event connotes the simultaneity of incompatibles: it involves both the virtual and the actual, both the virtual concept of philosophy and the actualized function of science as its independent yet synchronous categories: "The event is actualized or effectuated whenever it is inserted, willy-nilly, into a state of affairs; but it is counter-effectuated whenever it is abstracted from state of affairs so as to isolate its concept" ( 159). The event is the intennediary, the 'meanwhile,' the interzone of thought:

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Processing Ecology with Deleuze In every event there are heterogeneous, always simultaneous components, since each of them is a meanwhile, all within the meanwhile that makes them communicate through zones of indiscernibility, of undecidability: they are mediations, modulations, intermezzi, singularities of a new infinite order. ( 1 58)

The meanwhile designates neither the eternity of immanence nor the temporality of scientific actualization: In laying out the contours of events to come, the concepts address the level of pure becoming. As the elements "moving about on a plane of immanence" (143), as mere intensifications upon its fractal surface, Deleuzian concepts display indefinite contours; unlike scientific propositions with their detenninate coordinates of the actualized 'freeze-frame,' concepts, in their vagueness and fuzziness, retain something of the nebulous virtuality of immanence. In fact, they cannot be thought apart from the planomenon, which constitutes the conditions of their creation. Nonetheless, Deleuze argues that " [p]hilosophical concepts are also modes of life and modes of activity for the one who invents them, or knows · how to tease them out, giving them consistency" (Two Regimes of Madness 263). This claim does not only establish a quasi-phenomenological link between concepts and 'lived reality,' but also points towards a specific understanding of subjectivity prevailing in Deleuzian thinking. It does not come as a surprise, then, that Deleuze abandons the traditional image of the subject as fixity in favor of a process of subjectivation designated by "difference, variation and metamorphosis" (Foucault 1 06). Deleuze focuses, like Michel Foucault, the "processes of subjectivation, governed by the foldings operating in the ontological as much as the social field" (1 1 6). These processes of subjectivation are set against the two hitherto dominant modes of subjectivity, "the one consisting of individualizing ourselves on the basis of constraints of power, the other of attracting each individual to a known and recognized identity, fixed one and for all" ( 105-06). The new subjectivity is always one 'under construction' and 'in progress.' It is in Deleuze's reading of Leibniz that the ecological mode of protean subjectivity is integrated into a web of relations that · include the concept and the event. A new theory that was based on the principle of variation and involved the concept, the event and the individual within one and the same framework was introduced during the Baroque as "[t]he concept [became] the 'concetto,' or an apex, because it [was] folded in the individual subject" (Fold 1 26). Deleuze traces the Leibnizian folding of the object into the subject by way of the latter's adopting a multi­ perspectival, hence variable 'point of view:'

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The principal examples of [Leibnizian] philosophy are shown in the transformation of the object into a series of figures or aspects submitted to a law of continuity; the assignation of events that correspond to these fignred aspects, and that are inscribed in propositions; the predication of these propositions to an individual subject that contains their concept, and is defined as an apex or point of view, a principle of indiscernibles assuring the interiority of the concept and the individual. (126)

This reconciliation of the external world with the individual via the concept, often corresponding to the triad "scenographies-definitions-points of view," makes possible what Serres has called Leibniz's "ichnographic chart of the Universe" �(161nl l), made up of the network of bidirectional relations between multiplicity and tIDity. For Deleuze, this new and, as I have tried to show, ecological relation is the most important consequence of the fold-in: "Always a unity of the multiple, in the objective sense, the one must also have a multiplicity 'of one and a unity 'of ' the multiple, but now in a sUbjective sense" (126). Apart from refening to the complex intenelations between organisms and the multiplicity of environmental components sunounding them (and even those living within them as integral 'parts'), the tenn 'ecology' has also come to denote any 'intricate system or complex.' All ecological crises require prompt action and a decisive attitude, but they also necessitate the insight, know-how and flexibility to deal with them as complex systems. "Organism plus environment" is, as Bateson remarked, no longer ecology's sole unit of survival; · it now has a double: "the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind' (49 1). Ecology, then, is not only the science concerned with the overall bio-physical system and its constitutive parts, but also "the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs [ . . . ] in circuits" (49 1). On the level of the mental, the "many catastrophic dangers which have grown out of the Occidental enors of epistemology" (495), which Bateson had warned against nearly four decades ago, not only still present a major challenge today, they do so ori an amplified scale. The epistemological fallacies that posit the primacy of transcendence over immanence and/or regard immanence as immanent to 'Some Thing' other than itself, the belief in "an overall mind separate from the body, separate from the society, and separate from nature" (493) and the more banal modes of superstition and 'psychocentrism' that prevail in contemporary culture contribute itmnensely to the 'ecological threat.' The propagation of transcendence refutes the fact that the human agent is fully included in the decentered network of the dispersed and the interconnected, without the privilege of the hierarchical superposition of an impartial observer [n+ 1]; that "[ w]e are not outside the ecology for

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which we plan" (5 1 2). In the flattened network, the human position is always that of the partial observer while some of our concepts/ideas can become "nuclear or nodal with constellations of other ideas" (5 10). "We are," as Foucault has observed in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, [ . . . ] when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. ("Of Other Spaces" 22)

Concepts, as metaphysical tools, belong to the order of understanding and they play a crucial role in facilitating our comprehension of the world. Deleuzian philosophy holds the potential to provide efficient and fexible concepts for the ecological debate precisely because it operates from within the interstices of thought and nature. The Deleuzian concept is always 'in process;' first as a product of the flow of immanence, an intensification upon its surface of chaotic directionality and, secondly, as the act of thought that signals the event, which is, in its turn, the 'meanwhile' of the interstices between the virtual and the actual. But most importantly, the philosophical concept always serves as 'the third party' in the continuous process of intermediation between philosophical categories as well as between different disciplines. It is precisely this precarious position that allows for the specific functionality of philosophy within the ecological realm. As Whitehead noted, [t]he useful function of philosophy is to promote the most general systematization of civilized thought. There is a constant reaction between specialism and common sense. It is the part of the special sciences to modify common sense. Philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint upon specialists, and also an enlargement of their imaginations. By providing the generic notions philosophy should make it easier to conceive the infinite variety of specific instances which rest unrealized in the womb of nature. (17)

From Whitehead's Process and Reality to Bateson and further to Deleuze, process philosophy can provide ecology with a conceptual ground that allows for the 'complexification' [or, in Deleuzian tenlls, the complication] of the current ecological debate beyond the bounds of the strict distinction between homocentrism and ecocentrism. Although such a complexification would already be an important 'further step' towards a truly ecological cuihIre, beyond these political dynamics, 'processing

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ecology with Deleuze' allows for something that might ultimately be more important: the ecologization of the subject. The true point-of-perspective of 'processing ecology with Deleuze' lies in the processualizing and singularization of the subject, in its immersion within the horizontal planomenon of flattened hierarchies and within the overall 'mentality' and mental ecology - of the haecceities that make up the plane of immanence. Ultimately, 'processing ecology with Deleuze' means never to forget that, in our origami world, "the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system - and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system ofyour thought and experience" (Bateson 492). Notes I The explicitly environmental perspective is presented in Felix Guattari's programmatically ecological writings that directly combine ecological categories with political activism. See esp. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: The Athlone Press, 2000). Guattari draws on Bateson's ecological views for developing a politically relevant ecosophy. See Verena Andermatt Conley, Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (London: Routledge, 1 997), 9 1 - 107. 2 Deleuze sees Leibniz's genius in his metaconceptual innovation: "It is also widely held that Leibniz brings a new conception of the concept that transforms philosophy" (Fold 42). 3 See, for example, Eugene P. Odum, "The Strategy of Ecosystem Development," Science 1 64 (April 1969): 262-70. 4 http://www.ecostudies.org/definition-ecology.html 5 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (lPCC) was rewarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for the final proof of global warming and the assessment of its drastic consequences for the biosphere. This achievement emerged from a new form of science organization and related policies. To observe the climate system, the cooperation of hundreds of scientists all over the world is necessary. http://www.ipcc.ch (Apr 29. 2008). 6 "What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses [ . . . J. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream" (Whitehead, The Concept o.fNature 30). 7 At frst sight, 'immanence and transcendence,' 'the virtual and the actual,' 'the smooth and the striated,' 'deterritorialization and reterritorilization,' etc. are all conceptual pairs of seeming binary polatity. An Anti-Hegelian, Deleuze never posits them within a dialectic of sublation that blends conflicting poles into a unifying fusion. Instead, Deleuzian philosophy treats such pairs as the limits demarcating a zone of indiscernibility, i.e., the very zone of their continuous intermediation.

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8 "[A]ccording to emergentist materialism the appearance and refnement of cognitive abilities, be it in the individual or in the species, far from being mysterious, is an aspect of the development or the evolution of the brain interacting with the rest of the body as well as with its natural and social environment" (Bunge 1 05). 9 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between two planes concephJalized as "the plane of immanence" and "the plane of transcendence." The function of the latter is restricted to the 'organized' development of forms and the formation of subjects (267-68); it accommodates the dimensionality of hierarchic developments and organizations. The plane of transcendence/organization corresponds to the planomenon's noetic facet (see What Is Philosophy? 38). Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. "Absolute Immanence." Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1 999), 220-39. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000). Bunge, Mario. Scientific Materialism (London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 198 1). Caty Institute of Ecosystem Shldies http://www.ecostudies.org/definition ecology.html (Apr. 27 2008) Conley, Tom. "Translator's Foreword." Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1 993), ix-xix. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000). -. "Immanence: A Life." Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 25�33. -. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 993). -. The Logic ofSense. Trans. Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004). -. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2006). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). -. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994). Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16: 1 (Spring 1 986): 2227.

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Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2004). Rescher, Nicholas. Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001). Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: The Free Press, 1 985). -. The Concept ofNature (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2004). Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

THE RHIZOMATICS OF DOMINATION: FROM DARWIN TO BIOTECHNOLOGY MICHAEL MIKULAK

In a time where global wanning, pantoxicity, pesticide pollution, resource scarcity, and a whole host of environmental problems regularly appear in news headlines, the perennial question about what the relationship between humans and nature is and should be, is more pressing than ever. While it may seem trite to focus on questions of narrative, representation, agency, and subjectivity in the face of more "pressing" material concerns, the environmental crisis is more than a problem for scientists; it is a problem of narrative, ontology, and epistemology. It is as much a failure of imagination as it is a technological problem, arising from maladapted social and political ecologies that fail to establish healthy and sustainable network of kinship imaginaries2 that are capable of addressing the competing needs and desires of multiple actors within the biocultural networks humanity is always within. Kinship imaginaries are the foundation of how we relate to others, and thus are the ground upon which (bio)politics are based. They are the basis of how we imagine ourselves to be connected to the world around us, and the myriad organisms that populate this increasingly shrinking and sullied world. How we imagine ourselves in relation to nature determines, to a large extent, the power dynamics of that relationship, whether it is colonial, ownership based, or convivial and respectful. Whether the Christian narrative of Genesis that encourages Man to "increase, multiply and subdue the earth" (cf Lynn White Jr, Merchant), or Gary Snyder's blend of Eastern mysticism and Aboriginal myth which sees the world in terms of an etiquette of freedom, kinship imaginaries are the foundation of our relationship with each other and the world around us, and thus must be interrogated carefully if we are to address the source of the enviromnental crisis., They are the discourses, emotional ties, art and beliefs we have about our place in the world and provide the substrata and intellectual justifcation for our actions in the world. Although not an exhaustive sampling, this paper is about two competing kinship systems, the arboreal and the rhizomatic, and the ways

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in which they structure and are structured by political economy, scientific knowledge, and power. The environmental crisis is a complicated interaction of all these things, and my choice to focus on kinship imaginaries derives from the belief that any solutions to the environmental crisis must also occur on the level of narrative if they are to be more than a passing fad. Neil Evernden suggests that "we are not in an environmental crisis, but are the environmental crisis," in the sense that our way of knowing and being in the world is the problem (134). As such, to address kinship imaginaries, is to approach the problem from the understanding that we must first change the way we think about nature and culture if we are to solve the problem. There are many different kinship imaginaries circulating, but I choose to focus on rhizomatics and arboreal systems for the sake of brevity, but also because of the potency of certain discourse emerging out of the biotechnological debate, and their implications for transforming the way we understand nature and culture to be related. And so this is a paper about bioscientific origin stories and the vectors of biopower that align themselves along these convoluted narrative transversals. More specifically, this is a paper about trees, roots and rhizomes, and how origins, subjectivity, kinship, unity and diversity, and the relationship between humans and nature are configured, refigured, shaped, and shattered by the competing, although not antithetical discourses of rhizomatics and arborescence. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Darwin, Haraway, Heimlreich, and a range of ecocriticism, I will interrogate how the radically open concept of subjectivity in flux characteristic of ecological models of rhizomatic kinship, transforms the political vectors of the various kinship imaginaries that tie us together. Because the biopolitical nexus of life and politics always draws on discourses of naturecultures in order to find more efficient modes of domination, we must carefully attend to kinship imaginaries that on the surface may seem to promise connection, but which open the door to perhaps more insidious modes of domination. This is especially the case with environmentalist discourses of ecology, which often valorize an open concept of complete rhizomatic interpenetration and connectivity, without considering how vectors of category transformation may infect the body politic with yet undreamt of viruses of biopowei. What I call the rhizomatics of domination are the shifting configurations of (bio)power that capitalize on ecological understandings of relationality and kinship. This is not to say that Deleuze and Guattari, and other rhizomatic theorists blindly celebrate the rhizome, but rather, that rhizomatics is being shaped by other rather arborescent discourses, namely the bioscientific narratives of biotechnology, capitalism, and solving world hunger and curing disease

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through genetic engineering. It is thus important to understand how the rhizome is being deployed, much in the same way that Darwin's notions of evolution were transformed into racist justifications for eugenics. In terms of ecology, Donald Worster declares Darwin as the "single most important figure in the histOlY of ecology over the past two or three centuries" (1 14), and as such, it is important to interrogate Darwin's contributions to rhizomatics, and the way he has been taken up. Darwin(ism) has profoundly shaped contemporary kinship imaginaries, both positively and negatively, and by examining the profound struggles and tensions Darwin faced in articulating a non-anthropocentric web of life, I hope to cast some light on current problems we face today as biotechnology, and the intensely capitalist discourses around it, rewrite both life itself, and the way we imagine our connections to the world. Roots and Rhizomes

Rhizomatic theorists like Deleuze and Guattari and Stephan Helmreich tend to dichotomize the rhizome in relation to a (Darwinian) genealogical tree. For example, Helmreich argues that "at least since Charles Darwin, the family tree has been an algorithm for thinking about evolutionary genealogy, origins, and identity" (340). Such genealogical classification, he claims, are "derived from Victorian social practices of family record keeping. Reading such kinship customs onto the organic world, Darwin effectively naturalized and universalized them, suggesting through a now commonplace epistemological reversal that such practices were themselves emanations of natural logic organizing all relatedness" (340). In rejecting these practices, Deleuze and Guattari declare that they are sick of trees because in the West, "arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification" (16). They declare that we must "make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots" (24)! The arboreal is associated with linearity, hierarchy, origins, racism, rigidity, and carnophallogocentrism, while the rhizome embodies flexibility, openness, movement, and potentiality. On the one hand we have a kinship system that is vertical, appealing to origins, stages, the scala naturae (in which humans rule over dumb beasts), and on the other hand, a system that seems to be open, thrives on diversity and change, and celebrates plurality. While I agree that the rhizome as a model is potentially very libratory and politically flexible, the ludic tone of valorization that often surrounds the rhizome tends to replicate the very binaries and dualistic thinking it attempts to escape by privileging an equally abstracted notion of

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multiplicity, lines of flight, rupture, and schizoanalysis that are potentially even more amenable to shifting configurations ofbiopower within the age of biotechnology. Rhizomatics seems to be the theoretical soup de jour, and in the same way that arborescence has been rigorously overcoded and dominated by certain bioscientific discourses of purity, miscegenation, and progress, the rhizome is equally vulnerable to such manipulations. As such, my paper argues that the celebration of rhizomes must be amended with careful attention to what I call the rhizomatics of domination. Echoing Haraway's notion of the "informatics of domination" (Manifesto 161)/ the point of this paper will be to reach back into Darwin in order to show how even what we'consider pure models of arborescent descent, are in fact much more rhizomatic and complicated in their configuration of origins. By looking at the ways in which Darwinism was transformed by the arboreal logic of the time (social Darwinism, eugenics, degeneracy, anti-immigration), and tracing the lines of flight from his theories to the bioscientific origin stories assembled by political opportunists, we can extrapolate and begin to see how the rhizomatics of domination is effecting the landscape of late capital. With discourse of climate change, eco-apocalypse, and the recent celebration of global warming as a boon for capitalism, the struggle over kinship imaginaries will shape the terrain of the future by fundamentally setting the tone for how we deal with the environmental crisis. The way we perceive environmental damage dictates how we will react to it, who we blame, and the actions we take. Discourse shapes the way we tmderstand our relationship to global pollution and the actions we can take to address it, and kinship imaginaries are the most basic ideas we have about how we relate to the world. It is thus my contention that the reception and use of Darwinism must stand as an example for us when we are theorizing the political potential of rhizomatic or ecological thinking, especially in the context of powerful new technologies of genetic engineering that are rewriting the social and biological fabric of the tree of life along increasingly privatized lines of rhizomatic flight. In the same way that Darwinism was (mis)construed as a bioscientific discourse of legitimation for political philosophies that fly in the face of its author's intentions, rhizomatics must attend to the fascistic potential of re-coding bios within the current biopolitical terrain. N aturecultures

The purpose of most environmentalist discourse is to account for the material, epistemological, spiritual, political, and economic conditions that have resulted in the current environmental crisis. The discourse is thus

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inherently elegiac, mourning for a lost nature, state of union, innocence, or perhaps simply a connection to a world we are increasingly alienated from. Many ecocritics and environmentalists locate environmental degradation in the separation of nature and culture-in other words, a failure of kinship imaginaries to knit together human goals and desires with those of the biosphere. For example, many critics have pointed the finger at Western rationalism and scientific objectivism for its role in objectifying Nature in a manner that denies it agency and voice and transforms it into a mere resource for human exploitation (cf Manes, Evemden). The ostensible purpose of environmental discourse is thus deconstructive in the first instance, but ultimately constmctive, with hope coming from the desire to reconstitute society within a healthy and sustainable relationship to nature. The environmental crisis is thus a crisis of narrative as much as it is a crisis of technology, economy, and politics. But what is it that we are saving? What do we mourn? If Nature is dead, as Bill McKibben has stated, then what does it mean to be post­ natural? How do we weave a multiplicity or assemblage withOn) Nature without engaging in the same kind of fall and recovery narrative that Carolyn Merchant identifies as essentially colonialist in "Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative"? Is Nature, thus, a useless category for creating an ecological, biocentric ethic, because the tenn already frames humans and nature along a binary of self and other. Is it an arboreal narrative of false origins and hierarchies? What purpose does the categOlY serve? Have we ever been in Nature in the purest sense of the word? If we accept what Donna Haraway says about our biotechnologically sahlrated world of technoscience, that we live "in a world where the artificatual and the nahlral have imploded, Nature itself, both ideologically and materially, has been patently reconstructed" (Vampire 350), then is the source of environmentally destmctive ideology the arboreal separation of nature and culture, or a rhizomatic lack of separation? In other words, do we perhaps need to insist on a more stringent separation that would thus isolate the goals of non-human nature from our own and allow us to account for it in our enumerations? Darwin's Rhizomatic Tree of Life Heisenberg Principle: "What we observe is not Nature itself, but Nature exposed to our method of questioning" -Systems Theory 336.

Like anyone trying to theorize the link between nature and culture, Darwin was faced with the problem of producing "objective knowledge"

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while being embedded within the very system he was observing. Gillian Boer addresses precisely this problem when she analyzes the disjuncture between language and content within Darwin's project, which she identifies as the decentering of humanity in the kinship chain of Nature, an effort that resonates well with ecocriticism's attempt to challenge the logic of anthropocentrism and move towards a sustainable, biocentric worldview. Donald Worster agrees, stating that "the figure of Dmwin must remain the most imposing and persuasive force behind the biocentric movement" (1 87). However, if language is inherently anthropocentric, and we are linguistic creatures, how'can we ever hope to understand a world outside of ourselves and respect the goals of non-human nature? Is biocentrism even a tenable position? Should we perhaps be seeking a stronger distinction between humans and the world, rather than collapsing the two? Or is this perceived separation simply a linguistic artifact? How can we speak of/within Nature if language predisposes us towards all sorts of humanistic biases? Does this even matter? Gillian Beer asks: "If the material world is not anthropocentric but language is so, the mind cannot be held to truly encompass and analyze the properties of the world that lie about it" (Darwin 's Plats 45). Darwin seems very aware of this, frequently bringing attention to the linguistic limitation of his own theories. In The Origin af Species, he states that "I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphoric sense, including dependence of one being on another" (62). Donna Haraway argues that "biology is also not a culture­ free universal discourse, for all that it has considerable cultural, economic, and technical power to establish what will count as nature throughout the planet Earth" (Vampires 323). Darwin seems painfully aware of this, and perhaps for this reason, avoids mentioning humanity in the Origin af Species. However, precisely because Darwin is trying to explain something that exceeds the anthropocentric focus of language, the discourse of evolution can easily be manipulated to serve various political ends. Moreover, because the act of description and observation necessarily results in the transfonnation of the thing being observed, any theory of nature that does not take into account its production as a hmnan discourse is dangerous and hugely problematic. Thus, even if one is seeking a non­ anthropocentric theory, to avoid the human is to obfuscate the ideological, economic, and political conditions of emergence that necessarily shape any theory of nature or culture. It is irresponsible and naive at best, and incredibly dangerous and fascistic at worse. For example, Earth First!ers tend to look at human beings ecologically, or as one more "natural

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population" that has exceeded the carrying capacity of its range; hence, like rabbits, algae, deer, or locusts in similar circumstances, there must be a catastrophic crash or mass die-off to re-equilibrate networks of ecological exchange. The most famous and problematic incarnation of this position was an article in the Earth First! journal that argued that AIDS was a good thing because it would reduce the pressures of human population on the earth, and consequently, governments should do nothing to help African countries with the epidemic. Although this statement was later retracted, the Earth First! tendency to take a virulently anti-humanist stance has problematic ramifications for the ethico-political communities of kinship they imagine. Although they embrace a profoundly ecological view that equates all life, they tend to exclude humans from many of their accounts, and thus cannot address issues of environmental justice and the role of hierarchical and exploitative social and political ecologies that produce the conditions of environmental degradation. Chim Blea, a pseudonym for a member of Earth First!, argues that: "We as Deep Ecologists recognize the transcendence of the community over any individual, we should deal with all individuals-animal, plant, mineral, etc. - with whom we come into contact with compassion and bonhomie" (Ecocritique 23). The (eco)fascistic tendencies emerge in the complete subsumption of the individual to an imagined · community, without a framework being established for adjudicating how, what, and where one organism should live, and another die. If everyone is truly equal, then what does it matter if nahu·e dies in order for humanity to survive? In a strange way, any biocentric theOlY must take a detour through anthropocentrism. And in this sense, Darwin is a key figure. He was instrumental in shattering the Arcadian view of nature based on a Romantic concept of pastoral hannony. His focus on struggle and violence unsettled people's notion of a benevolent creator and creation in place for humankind. Popular kinship imaginaries now had to contend with a natural world that was decidedly inhumane and violent, denuded of a benevolent original mover that provided all life with the means to survive, and the divine right for human domination. What emerged, according to Donald Worster, was a "dismal science" of nature red in tooth and claw, even though Darwin himself placed a high degree of emphasis on mutual aide and cooperation. This had the effect of decentring humanity and thus providing the necessary first steps towards a biocentric environmental ethic of rhizomatic interconnectivity. However, it also tended to provide the ideological naturalization of violence, competition, and hiearchalized human superiority. The same act of decentring had profoundly antithetical consequences in terms of humbling and aggrandizing humanity' within the

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networks of worldly kinship, making humans on the one hand, just one member of the great chain of being, and on the other, the rightful conquerors and creators of an earthly garden of Eden (cf Merchant). Thus, "to dwell on the violence and suffering in Nature was, from the mid­ nineteenth century on, to be 'realistic'" (Nature's Economy 128). While Worster is correct in identifYing Darwin's role in the scientifc disenchantment of the Arcadian view of nature, and the shift from an economic model based on harmony, divine providence, and abundance, to an economy of competition, violence, and suffering, a careful attention to Darwin's language reveals a much more complex interaction between competition and cooperation, one that is more in line with a rhizomatic conception of nature, than an arboreal one. For example, In Descent of Man, Darwin is very biocentric, arguing that "nature appears as a world essentially held together by lines of 'mutual love and sympathy'" ( 182). This was very typical of Darwin's work, and he would often seek to simultaneously affirm and deny the struggle for existence as violent and competitive, attempting the delicate balance of holding mutualism and competition in a dynamic flux. For example, he argues that "a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture" (Origin 62). The notion of arboreal hierarchy often ascribed to Darwin ignores these frequent appeals to rhizomatic solidarity, and his careful attention to the way language frames our understanding of kinship networks. In one form or another, Darwin often stated: "all survival is socially determined," and nature is a "web of complex relations," in which "no individual organism or species can live independently of that web" (Nature's Economy 1 56). Especially if we consider Darwin's debt to Lyell, post­ Darwinian concepts of nature were rooted/routed through a continual flux and migration of all life. Unlike the Linnaean notion of a divine order where every organism was given a place in nature that did not change, Darwin introduced a rhizomatic motion to nature that understood it as an infinitely dynamic economy in a constant state of flux. No organism was divinely appointed to a specific niche, and no environment was immune to change. By shattering the notion of a divine mover and static creation, Darwin's so-called tree of life begins to resemble a rhizome. There is no such thing as balance and harmony: Nature is no longer static, it is a rhizomatic structure of proliferating lines of flight that multiply endlessly in perpetual de and reterritorialization between beings. So how do we read the Origin of Species? Is its appeal to an arborescent origin, or is it a prototype for rhizomatic thought? The notion of origins and order is arborescent, but the principles of evolution are

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rhizomatic. Politically, Darwinism has become associated with an arborescent system, but from the point of view of kinship imaginaries, it is rhizomatic. Arborescence organizes, segments, and orders according to first principles. This is the Darwinism of order and origins, and the consequence of the racist reductionism by the likes of Herbert Spencer that naturalizes the fierce competition of an economic order by appealing to evolution. The rhizomatic is about flow, deterritorialization, space without boundmy, edge or linearity. It is escape, flight, flux, flow, and never ceasing movement. This describes Darwin's notion of evolution quite accurately: the dynamic flux and flow of genetic information in a process of de and reterritorialization that transfonlls species and individuals in relation to the flux of all the forces around them. The totality is but an assemblage, an incomprehensible multiplicity that transforms itself in the act of becoming. There is no beginning or end, just ceaseless change and rhizomatic flux. Arborescent Darwinism Rockefeller: "The Growth of a large business is merely the survival of the fittest" -Dmwin 487.

All biological discourses are necessarily shaped by political economy, a perfect example of the co-constitution of naiure and culture, and thus the necessity of close deconstruction. Although the phrase "survival of the fittest" is synonymous with most popular conceptions of Darwinism, the tetm was Herbert Spencer's and not Darwin's. So while Darwin was trying to situate humanity back in the natural order, careful to use the struggle for existence and natural selection as metaphors, many people rallied around his ideas for their own dubious ideological causes. They transformed the complicated notion of evolution as co-constitutive and dynamic, with no goal or departure point, but rather a series of endless adaptations, into a teleological narrative of perfection and progress that served . various nationalistic and racist agendas. Perhaps the most influential of these interpretive appropriations was Herbert Spencer's, who began what we now know as social Darwinism, and which in effect collapsed survival and struggle into one another in a blatantly ideological tautology that applied the "implications of science to social thought and action" (The Vogue of Spencer 490). Spencer believed that "evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness" (491), and for him, this was embodied by a specific class of European gentry. Even before Darwin, he applied the Malthusian theory of

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population to a theOlY of social selection that was incredibly callus to social conditions. In 1852 he stated that "the pressures of subsistence upon population must have a beneficent effect upon the human race," or in other words, starvation is good for the species as a whole because it weeds out the poor and weak (492). There are frightening similarities to Earth First!'s argument about aids, suggesting once again that we need to attend to the rhizomatics of domination before we whole-heartedly embrace the rhizome as a kinship model. Spencer vehemently attacked Benthamism and social reform on the basis that they interfered with the natural machinations of a laissez faire market place that followed the laws of evolution. He was against helping the poor because this would interfere with the "the ultimate development of the ideal man" (The Vogue of Spencer 492). The state should not interfere with the market because "the whole effort of Nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them [the poor], and make room for better" (493). We can see obvious resonances here with current discourses surrounding neoliberalism, in which the market seeks to replace the environment by mediating all social, political, and environmental interactions within a supposedly fair social Darwinism. The struggle for existence, or competition, is seen as a positive force of inevitable perfection, which, if left to its own, will act like nature and weed out the weak and unworthy, and reward the strong. The market functions as an evolutionaty sieve that separates the strong from the degenerate, and thus collapses society into the choices of isolated bourgeois monads. Structural violence is ameliorated into the amoral rhetoric of survival strategies, and the rich become the legitimate bearers of evolutionary capital. Thus, it is easy for Carnegie to state: "All is well since all grows better" (The Vogue ofSpencer 497), and avoid the difficult questions of privilege and artificial selection within an unjust political economy, which would throw the whole equation into question. I could see Darwin responding by stating that the arena of artificial selection pales to that of Nature, and any economic evolution would therefore be necessarily flawed and imperfect. The focus on antagonism, unsocial sociability (Kant), and competition is not only violent and callus to the inequities faced by those on the bottom of the "evolutionary rung," it also favors those who already have power by creating a reverse-teleology that naturalizes their own ascent to power. The kinship chain that emerges is one of isolated egos violently competing for limited resources. Michel Zimmerman proposes that so long as people conceive of themselves as isolated egos, only externally related to other people and nature, they inevitably tend to see life in terms of scarcity and competition. When people conceive of themselves as

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The Rhizomatics of Domination internally related to others and to nature, however, they tend to see life in terms of bounty, not scarcity, and in terms of cooperation, not aggressive competition. (242)

And thus in order to get to the heart of the environmental crisis, We must address the implications of various kinship imaginaries as they align humanity and nature along a continuum of struggle, competition, and harmony. For example, Elizabeth Belmke argues that we must resist a frontal knowledge of Nature that knows it from above and confronts "Nature as a totality of sheer things . . . in such a way that being known (or being-object) becomes the measure of being" (95). As an altemative to the Cartesian ontology she resists frontal knowing in favor of speaking within nature, and thus being a part of it: "We must leam to speak from within this Nature that surrounds and includes us" (95). She takes this framework and tries to apply it in order to create a practical, "embodied ethics" for interspecies peace (96). She shifts language into the body, leaming to decode and recode somatic semantics, or somantics, in a way that enables and fosters interspecies peace and a kinship of life by leaming to hannonize "kinetic melodies" (109) and becoming a co-participant in fluid situations. This does not mean that all encounters will be peaceful or possible; however, openness is an essential first step. She embraces the notion of an "improvisational" or "wild body" that enables us to push at the boundaries of our semiotic, cultural, and historical contexts and engage in communication with significant others (108). By taking the poshlre of "primordial motility" (107), we can hope to adapt and listen by abandoning the "pervasive style of seperative seeing that makes Being, Nature, Others, etc., into objects over-against a subject" ( 1 08). But how do you resist this frontal knowing and enable modes of interbeing that embrace what Haraway calls the "counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translations necessary to getting on together" (Companion Species 25)? The implication of rhizomatic thought, with its emphasis on becoming and flow is one such way. Behnke echoes Deleuze and Guattari in many ways, speaking of a subjectivity that is unfixed and in constant flux and thus resistant to overcoding. The notion of an improvisational body seems to, on some fundamental level, abandon a desire to be one with nature in favor of a mixing or, like the wasp and the orchid, a kind of semiotic translation through a process of de and reterritorialization. In this context, we can see echoes of Delueze and Guattari rejecting unity: "The notion of unity (unite) appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding" (8). This artificial unity is

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similar to viewing the world from a strictly anthropocentric standpoint: a semiotic overcoding of the human that renders the multiplicity of nature unintelligible by naturalizing the human and humanizing nature. The way in which Darwinism has been deployed politically, emphasizing the arborescent logic of purity, origins, and struggle, is a perfect example of this kind of overcoding. From a critical standpoint, rhizomatics can help us resist this overcoding by providing a language for becoming-nature that does not separate or blindly ameliorate, but rather, celebrates the messiness of becoming. The kinship imaginary that emerges is one that, on a fundamental level, is profoundly multiple and resonates with the ecological precept that- everything is connected to everything else, without seeking a knee-jerk and uncritical union or unity. Narratives of origin are struggles over the future as much as the past, in that they set the initial vectors of biopower. The focus on struggle within the various appropriations of Darwinism is nothing but the use of biology to justify the Hobbesian State of Nature, the war of all against all, and as such, must be countered with more politically just narratives of origins, even if those are equally politically inflected. While many of Darwin's contemporaries transformed his theOlY into a justification for their political and economic climate, and therefore de-moralized questions of poverty and justice, Darwinism was also picked up by thinkers like Peter Kropotkin (1902), who emphasized the "Law of Mutual Aid" as the motive force of nature. Based on observation of animals and plants in Siberia, he concluded that when there is a large scarcity of food, "no progressive evolution of the species can be based upon such periods of keen competition" (Mutual Aid 520). Instead, he draws on a movement out of the University of St. Petersburg that focused on Darwin's observations of morality, sociability, and intellectual development within social animals. Kropotkin believed it was dangerous to "reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy" (522), and instead, proposed a theory of solidarity and sociability that did justice to the evolutionary befits of mutual aid. In essence, he rejected the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, arguing that "the numberless followers of Darwin reduced the notion of struggle for existence to its narrowest limits. They came to conceive the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half­ starved individuals thirsting for one another's blood" (524). Ultimately, Kropotkin argues that it was equally dangerous to view nature as pure struggle, or pure hannony, as "sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle" (525), both of which represent different evolutionary forces at work. He believed that social animals were the fittest, using the example of ants, which are among the most numerous and successful

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insects in the world, as a case where "mutual aid has entirely taken the place of mutual struggle" (526). The emphasis on struggle, even in Darwin, was likely the result of the fact that Darwin relied on Malthus almost religiously, and thus failed to theorize fertility itself as a product of natural selection, and as such, the ratio between sexual productivity and food production remained dismal and thus favored a view of nature based on competition. However, the Malthusian ratio only applies under conditions of ecological disturbance (Nature's Economy 155), and does not adequately account for species differentiation as a force counter to competition. Thus, instead of competing for the same food source, a species can differentiate and find a new source. It can proceed rhizomatically rather than arboreally, proliferating new shoots and lines of flight. Divergence allows organisms to create new places in nature's economy without resorting to competition: "Diversity was nature's way of getting round the fiercely competitive struggle for limited resources" (Nature's Economy 1 6 1). Rhizomes, Microbes, and Trees : Towards a More Critical Rhizomatic Thinking

Although a truly rhizomatic paper would resist conclusions, I am moving towards an assemblage of points, that I hope, ties things together, while also leaving them open. Thus to end is only to begin, and I propose that Darwin is both an end and a beginning to thinking about current debates within biotechnology, and the different kinship imaginaries enabled and disabled by the recent discovery of a Archaea, a group of marine microbes that live in thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, and who transfer genes laterally, between individuals, as well as vertically, between generations (Trees and Seas). These microbes have shattered many conceptions of evolution and origins because they disrupt Darwin's "natural classifications" and the link between genealogy and taxonomy. They are truly rhizomatic creahlres, both materially, and discursively, and are providing biotechnology companies with a justification for genetic engineering and a new means, through new vectors of gene transfer, to improve the techniques of genetic modification. This strange new bacteria is very appealing to biotech firms because it allows them to work as both engineer (man the tinkerer) and as botanist (man the gatherer). The claim to the former allows for the patenting of genes based on novelty (cf Shiva), while the latter, allows these companies to avoid regulatory scrutiny by claiming substantial equivalence between the genetically modified organism and its natural counterpart. It is based on this substantial

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equivalence that GMO foods are not labeled in Canada and the US. By shifting our understanding of the origins of the tree of life towards a rhizomatic model, a new set of kinship imaginaries emerges, with competing vectors ofbiopower emerging from the very same argument. Once again, Darwin's own struggles are illustrative. For example, a biocentric worldview was fostered by Darwin's removal of God from the cosmic equation, since the Genesis invocation towards domination, and the special place of man in the scala naturae was challenged (cf Merchant, Lynn White Jr). However, as God was replaced as Nature's original mover, and creation was seen as "replete with errors, weaknesses, imperfections, and misfits" (Nature 's Economy 1 75), the human place within the order became much more amenable to a Baconian concept of absolute domination. As such, '''Man must proclaim himself Nature's engineer and must then see about creating his own paradise on earth" (Nature's Economy 1 76). This is very much the kind of discourse within biotechnological circles, which refer to lateral gene transfer as nature's genetic engineering, and thus justify their own socially, politically, and economically mediated practice as somehow entirely natural (Trees and Seas 348). Although the idea is not new, the rhizomatic flow of Archaea provides a new mode of justification and framework for Man the (bio)engineer, one that draws on rhizomatic and ostensibly ecological kinship networks to justify unscrupulous economic, political, and biological practices. Thus,. while Deleuze and Guattari maintain that rhizomes never allow themselves to be overcoded (9), we can read biotechnological uses of rhizomatic horizontal gene transfer (as a technique and as a discourse), as precisely this kind of overcoding, whereby the organism is taken over by a practice of signifcation and subjectification, in this case by the expansion of capital into · the interior space of cells and genes through patents. The celebration of rhizomatic lines of flight fails to account for the rhizomatics of domination present in the biopolitical over and re-coding of genetic information through the patenting of life forms (IPRs), biopiracy, and biotechnological research that seeks to colonize the very interior of life itself (cf Shiva, Haraway). In a sense, the rhizome provides new imoads for corporations to claim ownership on life by setting a precedent for bioengineering in the very heart of evolution, and thereby naturalizing a deeply colonial and parasitic relationship in a manner that echoes what happened to Dalwin's theories. Stephen Helmreich explores this further by examining the potential restructuring of kinship imaginaries in new scientific research on Archaea. He argues that "the taxonomic untidiness such microbes have introduced

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through their lateral gene transfer reaches beyond issues in phylogeny and molecular systematics into arenas adjacent to kinship concerns and biopolitics" (341). By potentially shifting the meaning of bios in the biopolitical equation, these microbes may usher in a revolution of biotechnological discourse akin to Darwin's, realigning the vectors of biopower within new constellations of violence in the name of social good. The common argument launched by companies like Monsanto who claim that GMO crops, like Golden Rice, are the only way to feed the worlds hunglY masses, exploit rhizomatic concepts of evolution in order to incorporate genetic codes into the informational economy. Thus, while discourses of kinship, race and origins have moved away from talk of miscegenation, this new rhizomatic openness is being greeted with a conCUlTent closure of the genetic commons as corporations manipulate new kinship imaginaries in order to patent life itself. This is especially the case with the thermophyllic microbe Archaea, whose main commercial use promises to increase the speed and efficiency of genetic engineering by providing new viral vectors capable of h·ansfelTing genetic information at higher temperatures. Moreover, the "natural genetic engineering" (Trees and Seas 348) of these microbes is being used as a justification for human engineering, which is interpreted as natural and safe. However, as Vandana Shiva points out, this reductionist view of nature, with conveniently shifting discourses of artifice and nature used to simultaneously justify the safety of "naturally" engineered organisms, and the appeal to scientific creation and novelty for the purposes of patenting, ends with Nature being declared as "dead, inert, and valueless" (24). Corporations are thus able to recode biodiversity as a genetic investment strategy (Vampires 35 1), and use the flexibility of rhizomatic kinship in the same opportlmistic and selective way that Darwin's contemporaries took up the struggle for existence as a justification for fierce capitalistic competition. Thus, while on the surface the conceptual untidiness of rhizomatic, lateral gene transfer has the potential to strangle "the roots of the infamous tree" (A Thousand Plateaus xiii) and provide new kinship imaginaries capable of dealing with a messy and interdependent world, it is fundamentally important that we ask "how a genetically shuffled bios might be inscribed into new biopolitics" (Trees and Seas 342). In the rhizomatics of domination characteristic of corporate funded genetic engineering and biopiracy, the benefits of rhizomatic kinship are subsumed by the hierarchical accumulation of capital, while the dangers of biological contamination, the development of super-viruses and weeds, and the devaluing of traditional forms of knowledge are felt horizontally by the entire biocultural network of organisms. Taxonomy is shifting from

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kind to Brand, from Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer to Man™ and Woman™ (Vampires 350). So while these marine organisms challenge the genealogical origins of species and open up the possibility for the kinds of kinship connections Haraway valorizes in Cyborgs and Vampires, a radically open concept of kinship also leaves us prone to a rhizomatics of domination. We can take a lesson from the ways in which Darwinism became a justification for fOlIDS of biopower he no doubt would have found egregious. There is much in rhizomatic theory that makes it invaluable for theorizing new forms of kinship necessary for addressing the unhealthy relationships humans have with the planet in the age of ecological crisis. However, in the same way that Darwinism became used to justify fascistic and nationalistic fonns of power, rhizomatic theory is very amenable to reconfigurations of bios within biotechnological discourses of life. By using Darwin as a kind of test case, we can resist the rhizomatics of domination from choking the roots of a very different kind of plant, one which, if we are careful, has the potential to knit a network of kinship capable of addressing the messy and complicated environmental crisis we now face. Notes I This essay was first published in Rhizomes 1 5 (Winter 2007) 2 Kinship imaginaries are discourses about the relationship between nature and culture that focus on the ways in which humans relate to the world and ultimately each other. 3 I am specifically thinking about the way that systems of networks and infonnation, while liberating us from certain older forms of oppression and domination, open up whole new systems of power that may be more difficult to locate and resist.

Works Cited

Appleman, Philip (Ed.) Darwin (New York: Norton & Company, 1 970). Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). Behnke, Elizabeth. "From Merleau-Ponty's Concept of Nature to an Inter­ Species Practice of Peace." Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life. Ed. Peter Steves (New York: SUNY, 1999). Capra, Fritjof. "Systems Theory and the New Paradigm." Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology. Ed Carolyn Merchant (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994).

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Datwin, Charles. Descent ofMan (1871) http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles. darwin/texts/descent/descentjro nt.html, last accessed April 07, 2008. -. The Origin ofSpecies (1 859) http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin2/texts.html, last accessed April 07, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 987). Evemden, Neil. The Natural Alien: Humankind and the Environment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). -. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New (York: Routledge , 1 99 1). -. "Universal Donor's in a Vampire Culture: It's all in the family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century US." Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1 996). Hehmeich, Stefan. "Trees and Seas of Information: Alien Kinship in the Biopolitics of Gene Transfer in Marine Biology and Biotechnology." American Ethnologist 30:3 (2003): 340-58. Hofstadter, Richard. "The Vogue of Spencer (1955)." Darwin. Ed. Philip Appleman (New York: Norton & Company, 1 970). Kant, Immanuel. "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose." Kant: Political Writings. Ed. Hans Reiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1 99 1). Kropotkin, Peter. "Mutual Aid (1902)." Darwin. Ed. Philip Appleman (New York: Norton & Company, 1970). Lovelock, James. "Gaia." Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology. Ed Carolyn Merchant (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1 994). Luke, Timothy. Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics ofNature, Economy, and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Manes, Christopher. "Nature and Silence." The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1996). McKibben, Bill. The End ofNature (New York: Random House, 1 989). Merchant., Carolyn Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003). Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1 994).

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Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1997). Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild: Essays (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1 990). White Jr, Lynn. "Historical roots of our ecologic crisis." The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1996). Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Zimmerman, Michael. Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

How TO BECOME A READER: THE CONCEPT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE AND DELEUZE ANTHONY LARSON

From his first published essay on the constitution of the subject in empirical philosophy through his polemical critique of psychoanalysis with Felix Guattari to his final work on immanence and life, Gilles Deleuze's philosophy aimed at disrupting the traditional Western philosophical category of the subject. At every turn of this project, from the subject-as-habitus via Hume to the biopsychic of the Anti-Oedipus to A LIFE of immanence, the goal was to move thought away from the centered, human ground of subjectivity to "fields" that extend beyond the singularly human, leading to declarations such as the following from Diference and Repetition: "Biopsychical life implies a field of individuation in which differences of intensity are distributed here and there in the form of excitations" (96). While such a statement might remain curiously impenetrable, the position it implies was nothing new for certain strands of French thought at the end of the twentieth century. Jacques Derrida, notably, pushed the trans-human implications of deconstruction to questions of the animal in his later work. What distinguishes Deleuze's work in this exploration of the trans�human is his method, particularly in what it borrows from a Spinozist practice of ethology or study of capacities. For Deleuze, the crucial question in exploring a subject's constitution is not "what is a subject?" but "what can a subject do?" since the shift away from a subject's being to its capacities or powers moves one away from questions of essences and towards those of relations or compositions with other powers, notably powers of the trans-human. While this particular modification in method is not particularly novel to specialists of Deleuze and Guattari, it is important to grasp the implications such a move has for the practice of thought and of life itself, for such are the stakes of Deleuze's re-thinking of subjectivity. How can we experience the radical shift in thought that such thinking requires?

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According to Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, a shift in thought concerning our constitution in the "fields" surrounding us implies a shift in living practices, particularly where one's relationship to the environment (another way of describing "fields" of life) around oneself is concerned. How can this happen? What would such a shift feel like? One of the places one might begin to look for answers to these questions is literature, for, as Deleuze was constantly reminding his readers, "Writing is question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived" (Critical and Clinical l). In other words, it is, paradoxically, through the cultural construction of literary textuality that one is able to beyond the limits of our daily anthropomorphic structures and touch on the larger "text" or "field" of Life itself. For Deleuze, literature offers a privileged point onto this process of life. One of the literatures in which this process is most visible and most livable is the literature of the Anglo-American tradition (which Deleuze treats memorably as being "superior" to other traditions in Dialogues). Why, after affirming literature's potential out of limiting structures such as anthropomorphic culture, would Deleuze go on to make such an outrageous affinnation concerning literature? For there are many splendid literary traditions and limiting them to their socio-historical borders seems above-all counterintuitive. However, this would be to forget Deleuze's designation ofliterature as Anglo-American in conceptual tenns (which, in his philosophy is defined as a response to a particular set of problems) and to forget how this concept of literature responds to these particular questions concerning the practice of life in tenus of capacities and Spinozist ethology. In other words, it is through this original Deleuzian concept of literature that we can begin to understand this highly practical project for changing our manner of perceiving ourselves and our surrounding environment. Before proceeding further, it will be necessary to address a concern that examining literature in a collection devoted to ecology, the environment, and Deleuze might appear frivolous. One of the stakes of Deleuze's fundamental tum away from questions of ontological status (What is a body?) to those of capacity (What can a body do?) is a re­ framing of the way that one separates understanding and action. As Arne Naess has noted, one of the most fundamental advances offered by Spinoza's thought is that understanding is not simply a proposition but an act (quoted in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, translator's introduction ii). Reading literature with Deleuze (and Spinoza) is exactly this: inadequate

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ideas that one initially has concerning the text are corrected and appended in such a manner that new ideas are formed that allow one to read and act in entirely novel ways. Naess says that to approach thought in such a manner "implies acts of understanding perfonned with the maximum perspective possible" (quoted in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, translator's introduction iii). One might once again object that such talk of thought, understanding and action has little to do with ecology or the environment. This would again be a mis-reading for what occurs with this particular Deleuzian approach to thought and to that most everyday of actions which is reading and the interpretation of signs around us is a transfonnation ofrteutral terms such as "enviromnent" or "individual." The text transmits affects but the affects are nothing without the "plane of consistency," "enviromnent," or "individual" in which those affects act. The environment or the individual are not simple categories that require mapping and understanding in a passive manner (asking what the environment is, for example) but fields of forces, the actions of which we strive to experience. What can we experience when we read? What happens to us when we walk in the forest or on the ocean shore? What happens to the shore or the forest when we walk in it? In each of these questions, the framework of the environment changes in perhaps a superficial manner but the more profound question of understanding how such an environment acts does not. To say that "everything is the environment" would be rather reckless, but this extension of the way one thinks the enviromnent to places such as the text and reading is important. It allows one to go beyond sophisticated repetitions of an already ancient cleavage in which the "enviromnent" comes into existence as an epistemological object of the philosophical subject. Indeed, extending the enviromnent outward in this manner is extremely Deleuzian in the same manner that his thought is an attempt to excavate the plane of immanence in all instances of transcendence. Perhaps the most radical "Deleuzian enviromnentalism" would be one in which the term "environment" disappeared and left its place to "thinking." This move is far rom convincing and it is thus necessary to put this theory to the test. Practically speaking it is through an encounter with perhaps one of the greatest classics of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, that one might experience the very literal shift in thought at stake. For it is in this masterpiece that two paths of reading and two paths of living open before the reader. On the one hand, one is dared into an interpretation in which the sign is mastered, like the text of nature in which it so often appears, so that a pre-existing judgment may be confinned, mirroring the critical reading of the Pmitan protagonists. On the other

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hand, signs are often not what they seem in this text, transmitting a curious and vital energy that upon closer examination escapes the pre-determined judgment of the reader and pushes her into a zone of indiscernibility that escapes definitive interpretation (a sensation that is often transmitted by Hawthorne's famous "bifurcating" style). The encounter with such a textual process has several consequences. First, moving through the two levels of reading, one discovers how the text is structured by different zones of intensity which then feed into a second and more important encounter between the reader and the text, opening one up to a larger textual process that goes beyond both reader and text. Finally, this larger process, in its nature un-foreseeable and incalculable in advance, tends toward what Deleuze would call a "becoming-imperceptible" where the intensities of the reader and the text become something that is neither textual nor "human." That this should occur in a text that so fundamentally confronts the desire to master and read in nature the "signs of man" brings this study back full circle to the overt and radical attack on the human subject that is Deleuzian thought. As many critics have noted one of the reasons Hawthorne's novel remains so powerful and attractive today is because it dares the reader to undertake a strategy of reading based on judgment in which one overlays one's own prejudices or worldviews in order to better "see through" the text and decipher its lessons. That is, the plot is propelled forward by the thinly hidden but nonetheless extra-textual affair between the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne for which Hester suffers and pays her debt of the scarlet letter while Dimmesdale apparently escapes his judgment but suffers another more debilitating and fateful punishment in the end. In such a plot, the reader often very willingly goes along with Hester's Puritan judges and ministers and is also only too happy to follow the investigations of Roger Chillingworth, Hester's "lost" husband who has returned to the Puritan colony to exact his revenge on Dimmesdale. Indeed, it is in this judicial equation of a debt of pain for a sin committed that Henry James finds the novel at its most interesting: The story goes on, for the most part, between the lover and the husband­ the tormented young Puritan minister, who carries the secret of his own lapse from pastoral purity locked up beneath an exterior that commends itself to the reverence of his flock, while he sees the softer partner of his guilt standing in the full glare of exposure and humbling herself to the misery of atonement-between this more wretched and pitiable culprit, to whom dishonour would come as a comfort and the pillory as a relief, the older, keener, wiser man, who, to obtain satisfaction for the wrong he has suffered, devises the infernally ingenious plan of conjoining himself with

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How to Become a Reader his wronger, living with him, living upon him; and while he pretends to minister to his hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain, revels in his unsuspected knowledge of these things, and stimulates them by malignant arts. (Scarlet Letter 1 962 ed. 232)

From this critical position, it is only a small step to the next one in which the abundance of tropes in Hawthome's novel invites the investigative and judgmental reader to fill in the textual gap and draw the pastor's secret out in the daylight, in a manner that milTors Chillingworth's own investigation. It is just this danger that James famously finds to be the text's weakness taking as an example the remarkable scene from the twelfth chapter when Dimmesdale is drawn to the pillory in the middle of the night and calls a passing Hester and Pearl to join him: But, before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street, with the distinctness of mid-day, but also the awfulness that is always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the door-steps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them; the garden�plots, black with freshly turned eaIih; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with green on either side; -- all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with this hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another. ( 1 0 1 - 1 02)

For James, all the subtlety and poetry of this passage is lost when Hawthome says, " . . . the minister looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter-the letter A-marked out in lines of dull red light" (102) since the appearance of the central symbol in the novel is "mechanical" and "grazes triviality" (Scarlet Letter 1962 ed. 233). In other words, James is wary of the way the text invites the reader to close the tropic and allegorical gap a little too quickly and to see in the night's "unaccustomed light" a "moral interpretation" that simply draws out the secret at the heati of the novel's plot. There is a certain amount of

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pleasure in this type of approach to the text in that it permits the reader to close in on the extra-textual mystely of the text, to determine who has done what and perhaps even to participate vicariously in Dimmesdale's punishment. "Seeing through" the text in this manner is also another way of mastering signs, and in this particular example, signs of nature. In a manner similar to that of the vicarious judgment that one feels when reading Hawthorne's text, the reader closes the textual gap offered her/him in the dichotomy set up between the Puritan civilization and the sinful wilderness into which Hester is cast. Thus, on a walk through the woods shared by Hester, Dimnfesdale, and Pearl, Hawthorne offers a textual trap similar to the one mentioned above in that he dares the reader to read in nature's signs the mirror-image of sins, secrets and sufferings of his protagonists: Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the refected light from its water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces of it amide the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush, and here and there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens. All these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tale out of the heart of the old forest whence it fowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool. ( 1 20)

Once again, the reader is dared into decoding the reasons that Hester and Pearl find themselves banished to the "wilderness" of the young colony and it is the process of this decoding itself, in that it requires the reader to set up a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and meaning, that sets up the structuring dichotomy between Puritan civilization and "sinful" wilderness. As Hawthorne reminds his reader, "Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of the sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source" (102). Seeing through Hawthorne's symbols is to reveal things based on this supernatural and transcendent position where positions of judgment and dichotomies between Puritan civilization and wilderness are founded. Of course reading in this manner is inappropriate and the objection that James raises to Hawthorne's text is really about how it allows itself to be read by hasty and careless readers and not about the text itself. As any reader looking to get to the literal heart of Dimmesdale's suffering knows,

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Hawthorne's text is not as satisfying as it appears for secrets are never truly exposed and when they are, they only appear so, as with the novel's conclusion where the scarlet letter seems to 100m again visible behind a textual cloud of hallmark Hawthornian style made up of contradictory hypotheses, plays on points of view, tortured revision, and the undecidibility of signs: Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER-the very semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne-imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin, there were various explanations, alI of which must necessarily have been conjectural. Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of penance, -- which afterwards, in so many futile methods, folIowed out, by inflicting a hideous torhlre on himself. Others contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency of magic and poisonous drugs. Others, again-and those best able to appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility, and the wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body, whispered their belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever active tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and at last manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter. (1 62-3) -­

Instead of closing the critical gap, the scarlet letter (both the symbol and the text itself) holds off any final and deciding interpretation, reminding us that "The reader may choose among these theories" (163). The scarlet letter is evelything but the unadulterated symbol that the hasty reader hopes to find in order to fix his/her judgment once and for all. This play of words on the scarlet letter's "A" (which is anything but original and, one suspects, almost desired by Hawthorne) is the linchpin of a poor reading of the text and the desire to see through its tropes, for judgment always depends on a transcendent (or one might say, unadulterated) position outside of the text in order to make a final decision. What James sees as "mechanical" or "trivial" is the transcendent tribunal that Hawthorne's symbols (the scarlet letter itself, Hester's illegitimate daughter, Pearl, the rose that opens the first chapter of the novel, the engraved shield on the tombstone that closes the novel, Hester's exile in the wilderness, the babbling and secretive brook, etc.) tend to set in motion in the careless or poor reader. That is, where James detects what he calls a slipping from moral tragedy to physical comedy, there is the erection of a tribunal of judgment in the reader's mind in which the symbol's fluidity is reduced and nanowed to a logic of one-to-one conespondence. The logic

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of this one-dimensional reading of Hawthorne's symbol does indeed rob the text of its power in favor of a simplistic exchange of a symbol for what is considered to be its just value. To return to what was announced at the beginning of this text, such a reading is an example of a very basic and relatively un-intense "field" of intensity in which the reading subject finds his/her values justified and reinforced. Such a reading subjugates the plurality of Hawthorne's text to the "sameness" or "oneness" of the transcendent and judging subject. It is a reading that attempts to get to what the text "is" and had very little to say concerning what the text can "do." The greatness of Hawthorne's text is to undo this tribunal of judgment in a text that turns around that very theme and it is most certainly this slippery movement of judgment turning upon itself and being undone that is at the heart of so many mis-readings and dangers. If we have worked through the dangers of mis-reading this text, I have yet to respond to the questions I announced above of how literature can help us go beyond our basic and "un-intense" fields of constitution. Perhaps the best way to begin is to realize that if anything, mis-reading texts such as Hawthorne's makes us weaker and separate us from our ability to act. In order to understand how this is possible (and also to more explicitly respond to what I consider to the more important and pressing question of how we can become better readers and thus go beyond our poor and un-intense subjectivity), we need to pass more explicitly through the work of Deleuze. What does it mean to say that judgment separates us from our ability to act? For Deleuze reading Spinoza, there are two ways to consider the world: through the prism of transcendence (in which a certain instance or value is placed outside of all others) or in and through immanence (in which no transcendent point rises above any other). To take an example close to our reading of Hawthorne, the difference between these two ways of considering the world around us can be explained by morality (transcendence) or Spinozist ethics (immanence). In a system based on morality, one is judged according to one's essence and more precisely according to one's ability to achieve one's essence. For man, it is well­ known that his/her essence is reason since man is a reasonable creature. Of course, man often falls short of this essence and morality's role is to constantly remind man of his/her essence, of the need to achieve hislher essence to its fullest degree. This system of reminders or exhortations is what we call values, upon which one is then able to judge whether one has achieved or failed to live up to his/her essence. In other words, morality bases itself on a belief that life is defined by essences which morality then raises to a higher power by defining as the end of life itself. This

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externalization of our essence is the system of values to which we are condemned to eternally answer. In a system based on Spinozist ethics, this hierarchical tribune of judgment disappears. For Spinoza, man is not defined by what he/she is (essence) but by what he/she can do. Bodies no longer have essences but rather possess powers and life is no longer an affair of realizing one's essence (and thus judging whether one has correctly or incorrectly realized this essence) but of discovering one's powers. The question is no longer one of judgment, of whether one has lived up to one's abilities (reasonable or unreasonable) but rather practical, of how can one live in such a way in order to act in such a way (reasonable or unreasonable). In order to understand such a strange way of seeing the world one has to take the further step of seeing the world through Spinozist lenses: each body, each idea, is made up of a certain number of relations that form its substance. When one body or set of relations encounters another the result is either positive and the two bodies or set of relations combine in a harmonious manner to fmm a higher and more complicated relation (the result of which is joy), or it is negative and both bodies are diminished in the encounter (the result of which is sadness). Food for example nourishes our body procuring joy, but poison kills it procuring sadness. For Deleuze and Spinoza, the stakes of life are to come to an adequate idea of this system of relations and encounters structuring our existence. One falls into morality and a system of judgment when one fails to adequately understand the proper structure of these relations and encounters, beginning with the effects of joy and sadness they procure. Deleuze explains this best in summarizing Spinoza's theory of the triple illusion of consciousness: Since it only takes in effects, consciousness will satisfy its ignorance by reversing the order of things, by taking effects for causes (the illusion of final causes): it will construe the effect of a body on our body as the final cause of its own actions. In this way it will take itself for the first cause, and will invoke its power over the body (the illusion offree decrees). And where consciousness can no longer imagine itself to be the first cause, nor the organizer of ends, it invokes a God endowed with understanding and volition, operating by means of final causes or free decrees in order to prepare for man a world commensurate with His glory and His punishments (the theological illusion). Nor does it suffice to say that consciousness deludes itself: consciousness is inseparable from the triple illusion that constitutes it, the illusion of finality, the illusion of freedom, and the theological illusion. Consciousness is only a dream with one's eyes open. (Spinoza 20)

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As mentioned above, the stakes of an ethics it la Spinoza is to escape this triple illusion by seeking out encounters which allow us progressively to have an adequate vision of the relations and encounters which structure our existence. We noted above that a poor reading of Hawthorne's text, based on judgment, separates us from our ability to act and in this it is highly dangerous. If we adopt a Spinozist vision of the world, new and surprising paths for discovering abilities emerge. Bodies can enter into relations with each other and this "disposition" is their power to either affect or be affected. That is, their power or ability is always a combination of the active (actions) and the passive (the passions of joy or sorrow that accompany encounters with other bodies). In order to escape the triple illusion of consciousness and the passions that accompany it, we must try to seek out encounters in which our power to affect is increased. This might sound like a simple idea but just as Deleuze's declaration that consciousness is the seat of all illusion might be shocking or surprising, this vision of our capabilities or powers is also surprising and shocking. A concrete example to understand this more clearly would be helpful: everyone has seen young children learning to swim at a swimming pool. The instructor describes the movements of a certain stroke to the children but their mind has a difficult time grasping the relatively theoretical movements. The encmmter between the mind and the idea of swimming a particular stroke simply does not pass and everyone has seen (or experienced) the confusion of the children as they try to master the stroke outside of the water. What is needed is the encounter of their bodies with the water. Suddenly, when in the water (and sometimes when thrown in the water by the instructor) the children discover a capability in their body that they did not know they had or were not able to adequately understand. The encounter of the body of water with their actual bodies awakens a capability in their bodies that they did not know they possessed. The sensation of the encounter between these two bodies (that is, their swimming) provokes a greater understanding in their mind of their abilities and what they can do with them. In other words, it is through the encounter of two bodies that a greater and more adequate idea of one's abilities emerges. ] As a consequence, bodies are judged "good" or "bad" in such a situation only in relation with the other bodies they might encounter. In this instance, one can declare the water of the swimming pool good for the children who encounter it with a rudimentary but inadequate idea of what they are capable of doing. The water of the swimming pool is bad for those who have no idea of what they are capable of doing in water because of the risk of drowning. In this manner, a Spinozist vision of the world judges ourselves and others by what these

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bodies can and cannot do and not by morality (which is, of course, the way a swimming pool is most often presented: "Forbidden and off limits!"). Once again, Deleuze explains this vision of a world beyond good and evil in exemplary terms: Hence good and bad have thus a primary, objective meaning, but one that is relative and partial: that which agrees with our nature does not agree with it; And consequently, good and bad have a secondary meaning, which is subjective and modal, qualifying two types, two modes of man's existence. That individual will be called good (or free, or rational, or strong) who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power and the composition of powers. That individual will be called bad or servile, or weak, or foolish who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his encounters, but wails and accuses evelY time effect undergone does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence. For, by lending oneself in this way to whatever encounter in whatever circumstance, believing that with a lot of violence or a little guile, one will always extricate oneself, how can one fail to have more bad encounters than good? How can one keep from destroying oneself through guilt, and others through resentment, spreading one's own powerlessness and enslavement evelywhere, one's own sickness, indigestions, and poisons? In the end, one is unable even to encounter oneself. (Spinoza 22-3)

After this long detour through Deleuze's Spinoza, morality and ethics, we are at last capable of returning to our central questions concerning literature. It should be clear by now that correct or empowering readings of literature and the encounter with the text should be seen in Spinozist terms. Literahlre is an empowering experience and the best texts awaken abilities in us that we did not know existed. The unprepared or careless reader is quick to try to fill the critical gap between Hawthorne's symbols (especially that most central one, the scarlet letter itself) and a judging and measuring eye but if he/she is open enough and capable enough, the frustration he/she experiences in attempting to make that velY judgment, to limit the scarlet letter to a simple and unadulterated tmth, opens him/her up to something else. This something else is what Deleuze, unsurprisingly, calls literature's affair of health: Literature then appears as an enterprise of health: not that the writer would necessarily be in good health [ . . . ] but he possesses an inesistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things, whose passage exhausts

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Anthony Larson him, while nonetheless gIVIng him becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible. (Critical and Clinical 3)

Following up on an observation made by Proust, Deleuze notes how literature hlrns language upon itself, creating a sort of foreign tongue in language itself which is the text's style. Taken to this deforming limit, the text allows the reader to see and hear the sights and sounds of an Outside of language which is what Deleuze calls the passage of Life itself (Critical and Clinical 5). Another way of putting it is that the confusion and power that we feel when confronted with a text such as Hawthorne's forces us to let go of our desire to judge, to personalize the stakes of the text. In place of a personal reading based our position as judge there is the impersonal of the text: As a general rule, fantasies simply treat the indefinite as a mask for a personal or a possessive: "a child is being beaten" is quickly transformed into "my father beat me." But literature takes the opposite path, and exists only when it discovers beneath apparent persons the power of an impersonal-which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point: a man, a woman, [ O o .] a child rO o .] [L]iterature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say "I" [ O o ] (Critical and Clinical 4-5) .

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When the minister gazes at the sky from the scaffold during his night vigil, he does not see the scarlet letter but an immense letter and it is this impersonal but highly singular and powerful letter/text that speaks to the empowered reader of Hawthorne's novel. As one moves from the desire to judge, to personalize the stakes of the text to this larger, stuttering (the many options that the reader is left to choose at the end of Hawthorne's text) and impersonal reading, one moves through two different "fields" or deployments in life-one weaker and servile and another stronger and freer in life. Furthermore, moving through these readings, through this passage of Life, is also something from which one never "recovers." One of the authors Deleuze is fond of citing is Francis Scott Fitzgerald, in particular, his autobiographical text, The Crack-Up in which the author chronicles his fall into alcoholism. It is easy to see why such a text attracted Deleuze, especially in Fitzgerald's description of "molecular" changes that break down one's "molar" structure (another way of putting this passage of Life in literahIre): Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside the ones you remember and blame things on and, in

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How to Become a Reader moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick-the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. (69)

To deploy oneself through such an apprenticeship in literature is to never go back to what one was before such an encounter and it is in this that we become more powerful and freer. This encounter or apprenticeship in literature is something that must be sought out, as Deleuze reminded us above when speaking of Spinoza. One must search out empowering encounters in life that allow the passage of Life to appear. This is important, for it implies two things: first, that the field or plane of intensities that are "deployed" in Life are never given in themselves (that is, they are not "out" there to be discovered through the text but must be constructed with the text) and must then, secondly, be assembled in relation to each other. To put it differently, Deleuze's concept of literature teaches us that our constitution within Life is always "at work" and becoming, bifurcating like Hawthorne's text in which we must always choose our endings and encounters. Much is at stake in such a concept of literature. The lesson that Deleuze gives through literature is valid for life: one may blindly judge, master and possess the signs of the text and close oneself up in the black hole of a debilitating (or, as Deleuze might say, clinical) subjectivity; or one may choose to open oneself up, to pass through the intensities of the litermy and critical text and search out ever greater and ever-more liberating encounters. To read in such a manner is to read with and through Deleuze and Life. Notes 1 This is an illustration of the Spinozist theory of parallelism: there is no hierarchy between mind and body and (much like Nietzsche and Freud) Spinoza believes that it is often through the body that the mind can discover unedited powers. Deleuze explains, "There are no fewer things in the mind that exceed our consciousness than there are things in the body that exceed our knowledge. So it is by one and the same movement that we shall manage, if possible, to capture the power of the body beyond the given conditions of our knowledge and seize the power of the mind beyond the given conditions of our consciousness. One seeks to acquire a knowledge of the power of the body in order to discover, in a parallelfashion, the powers of the mind that elude consciousness, and thus to be able to compare these powers. In short, the model of the body according to Spinoza does not imply any devaluation of thought in relation to extension, but, much more important, a

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devaluation of consciousness in relation to thought: a discovery of the unconscious, of an unconscious of thought just as profound as the unknown of the body" (Spinoza : Practical Philosophy 1 8- 1 9). Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles. Diference and Repetition Trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 994). -. Essays Critical and Clinical Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). -. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1 988). Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Crack-Up ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1993). James, Henry. "Critical Essay." The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962). Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Ed. Leland Person (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

A SILENT DANCE: Eco-POLITICAL COMPOSITIONS AFTER UEXKULL'S UMWELT BIOLOGY TOM GREAVES

The German-Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexkiill exerted a quiet but powerful influence on 20th Century philosophy, which has only recently been fully recognised. Like the worlds of meaning that he claims escape both the casual glance of the naturalist and the precise measurements of the physiologist, Uexkull's thought has escaped the notice of much ecological philosophy. This is perhaps not surprising for a thinker who explicitly challenged contemporary Darwinism and advocated a retum to the apparently discredited idea of a "plan" underlying the history of life. Nevertheless, Uexkull's biology made a decisive contribution to two streams of philosophical thought, the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and the assemblage-ontology of De leuze and Guattari, both of which have been influential on those who see the necessity of widening the scope of enviromnental philosophy. In this chapter I will trace some of the remarkable points of conjunction between these two fundamentally distinct philosophical programmes as they each take up Uexklils concept of Umwelt. After outlining some of the significant and contentious features of Uexkall's theory of "Nature as Music," I consider whether Deleuze and Guattari's focus on the telTitorialisation of Umwelten might not be helpfully supplemented by phenomenological concerns about the ontological significance of specific difference and speciation. I then tum to the problematic notion of a chaotic world or "milieu of all milieus" and try to show why this notion remains of central importance to both accounts, although they differ markedly as to its precise significance. Finally, I discuss claims about the totalitarian and fascist tendencies to be found in musical and ecological composition, which have been associated with the notion of a milieu of all milieus. I suggest that we can use the distinction that Deleuze and Guattari make between totalitarianism and fascism to gain a more precise understanding of the threat of what is sometimes

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called "eco-fascism." Compositional ecological philosophy must become attuned to different modulations of silence, both destructive and creative. Umwelt: A Compositional Theory of Environment

An Umwelt is distinguished from an environment or habitat in that it is composed of only those elements which have significance for the living being. Uexkiill often expresses this by referring to the Umwelt as the subjective world of the animal. That is because he wants to point out that what physiologists miss when they analyse a reflex arc, for example, is that the relation between- an animal and an object is not one of linear reception and reaction. Rather, the relation is one of an integrated "functional circle" in which meaning is carried from the object through a perceptual world and the subject in turn utilizes that meaning in an operational world (Uexkiill, Stroll 322-324). Thus, there are no neutral objects in an Umwelt, but all carry significance and a certain "tone" with them. In fact, describing the Umwelt as a subjective world becomes problematic when we consider that meaning is not projected from a subject onto a neutral object. The object is itself caught up in this circle of meaning just as much as the subject. The meaningful "cue" or "tone" of an object is there by virtue of the animal listening out for it, but it nevertheless has that tone, othelwise the animal would not hear it. The idea that the living subject is a "centre of meaning" will become even more problematic when the "object" which it encounters is another living being, as is so often the case. Here two or more worlds of meaning intersect and it is surely impossible to locate the origin of meaning on one side or the other. Neither is the Umwelt subjective in the sense of being unavailable to others. The whole basis of Uexkiill's research is the thought that these worlds can be systematically described, if we are able to overcome certain prejudices as to the proper objects of scientific inquiry. The famous example of a simple Umwelt that Uexkiill sets out at the beginning of his short book "A stroll through the worlds of animals and men" is the Umwelt of a tick. The tick's Umwelt is made up of three receptor cues and three effector cues. The tick smells the butyric acid emanating from a passing mammal, then it drops from its watch post. If it lands on something warm, then it moves about. When it feels a hairless spot it begins to burrow and pump itself full of blood. The question is not whether each of these affective-effective cycles can be understood in terms of physiological impulses or in terms of the organic structures which are infuenced by the smell of the acid or the body heat and then transmit "physical waves of excitation" through the body. They certainly can be

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understood in this way. The question for a biologist, however, is how it is that out of all the possible stimuli that surround the tick these three affects produce a precisely articulated world: "The isolated impulses are coordinated into units, and these self-contained motor impulses or rhythmical impulse melodies act upon the muscles subordinated to them" (Uexki.ill, Stroll 323). The biological question is therefore a question of the coordination, composition or consistency that is produced by blocks of affect. Those blocks are articulated into affective and effective cues so that, "Figuratively speaking, every animal grasps its object with two arms of a forceps, receptor, and effector" (Uexki.ill, Stroll 323). The influence of this theory can be seen at various points in A Thousand Plateaus. In plateau 3 "The Geology of Morals," the figure of a pincer is reworked as a "double articulation" during the discussion of coding consistency. Deleuze and Guattari insist that we can begin to articulate various figures of the milieu, not in a line of development leading up to the fi!lly fledged Umwelt of the tick, but as distinct moments of its articulation. There is the exterior milieu in which an exterior of amorphous material is interiorised as in the process of crystallization (55). There is also the organic interior milieu in which organisation involves membranes and limits in the interior (56). Finally, there is the figure of the annexed or associated milieu, whereby sources of energy that are different to the material that will make up the interior are annexed to the organism. Life begins to "breath," to respire in the most general sense of annexing specific energy sources (57). It is here that Deleuze and Guattari first refer to Uexki.ill's tick, as it displays its associated milieus in its ability to recognise only very specific chemical elements in its surroundings. Once again, this is not an evolutionary account of the Umwelten nor is it suggested that Uexki.ill was wrong to simply start in the midst of already constituted animal worlds. The various figures of milieu are folded into one another; they do not form an explanatory chain. That life forms articulated functional circuits and begins to "breath" is not explained by any of the preceding figures. Thus it is perfectly legitimate to proceed as Uexk(ill does, beginning in the midst of animal (that is, animate or breathing) worlds. The task is not one of tracing a line back to the first intake of breath, but of following the way in which these worlds play themselves out, as they involve other figures of milieu, erupting onto and folding into the animal stratum. As life takes breath, it can begin to sing. If we want to follow the composition of animal or breathing life then we must investigate the temporal articulations that constitute that life. This is where Uexki.ill's musical illustrations of ecological composition come into play. It will not

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only be a question of the where and how of the composition, but of the type of composition and of what transpires in the performance. In "A stroll tln-ough the worlds of animals and men" Uexkiill describes a sequence that rolls forward in such a way that, "The effector cue or meaning extinguishes the receptor cue or meaning" (324). Now if each meaningful cue or "tone" were utterly extinguished as it is followed by the next then the musical composition would never hold together. Is it not the case that a meaningful cue in nature "hangs" like a musical note, whilst being transformed by the following tone? The theory of "Nature as Music" which Deleuze and Guattari refer to when they cite this text in plateau 1 1 of A Thousand Plateaus, is perhaps better exemplified in Uexkiill's somewhat later text "Theory of Meaning." i There each of the "meaning receptors" of the tick is set out in a table over and against the "meaning carriers" of the mammal. The first are said to be points and the latter counterpoints (Uexkiill, Bedeutungslehre 1 46). Just as the wasp and the orchid that Deleuze and Guattari describe form an assemblage, the tick and mammal are also in concert. We are thus presented with a theory of composition in nature, which Uexkiill thinks can be utilised in understanding both what he calls the "mechanics of nature," which includes ontogeny and ethology, and the "technics of nature," or phylogeny. Later in "TheOlY of Meaning" Uexkiill describes two experiences which led him to develop the idea of parallels between biology and music. The first was at a Mahler concert in Amsterdam. During the concert he was sitting next to a young man who was studiously reading the score tln·oughout. Uexkiill, "inusically uneducated" as he puts it, asked what can be gained from reading the score which cannot be immediately gained from hearing the piece played. The young man passionately replied that only those who can follow the score can see how each particular instrument and voice form a point and counterpoint, so that they then melt together into a higher fonn. This led Uexkiill to ask himself whether it is not the task of biology to "write the score of nature" (154). Of course, this does not mean that a score is to be written for nature to follow. Uexkiill is clear that the idea of a "compositional theory of nature" should not lead us to the mistaken belief that there are general rules of composition that nature itself can teach. The score that is to be written is a score composed from nature, like the musical poems of Messiaen, taken from the song of birds. Neither straightforward reproduction nor a set of general principles of composition, such a biology would allow us to fmd coherence in a multitude of voices, without liquidising their multiplicity.

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The second musical event which inspired Uexkiill to think about the idea of biological composition was a performance of the Matthew Passion played in Hamburg. The song moved forwards with a real destiny, but one which was totally unlike the progress that the "fantasies of researchers" see in the processes of nature: Why should the violent drama of nature, that has rolled on since the appearance of life on earth, in its highs and lows, not be, like the Passion, one single composition? Was the highly prized progress, that is supposed to lead living beings from incomplete beginnings to an ever greater completeness, at ground simply a petty bourgeois speculation concerning the increasing profit of business? (1 64)

It is easy to see the power that such a fantasy still exercises. Despite the ever increasing clamor of resistance to any thought which displays the slightest hint of finalism, there is still a strong tendency to view the history of life more or less as a progression. Even if it is no longer thought as a progression from incompleteness to completeness, the complexity of living systems is still imagined to increase in a more or less linear trajectory, interrupted by the occasional catastrophe. What is thereby misunderstood is that the complexity of a composition is not to be measured by the actual diversity of is elements at any one time. It may be that we need to rethink not only the history of life but our attitude towards the conservation or cultivation of biological diversity with an ear for the overall coherence of the composition. It is that coherence, rather than any latent finalism, that Uexkiill is thinking of when he continually refers to the plan of nature. He is careful not only to distinguish the idea of a plan from that of a goal, but to insist that the "will-O'-the-wisp" of a goal must be extinguished from our contemplation of Umwelten. This can only be effectively done by drawing attention towards the over-all plan, into which it is possible that certain teleological actions may be dovetailed (Uexkiill, Stroll 352-3). The plan is therefore not a plan of action, nor even a fixed ground plan, but the plane of consistency where Umwelten are composed. The history of life is seen as a single composition, but this does not imply the presence of a composer other than the biologist who composes from nature and not for it. Uexkiill already goes a long way towards the destratification of this plane by insisting that every Umwelt is as "complete" as another and also that, as Deleuze and Guattari put it: "Above all, there is no lesser, no higher or lower, organization" (Deleuze and Guattari, 77).

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Nevertheless, Uexkilll retains a certain kind of expectation in his mode of listening. There is no higher or lower, in the sense of more or less complete, because every phrase is complete in itself. The "contrapuntal" structure of Umwelten that he insists upon ends in agreement and is bound to harmonic space. Any tension is quickly resolved. Uexkilll even describes the "counterpoint" which is maintained between diverse Umwelten as the two feet of a bridge which is connected in music by harmony and in nature by meaning (Uexkiill, Bedeutungslehre 1 57). Furthermore, the comparison between music and biology should not be confned to the notes played by the various instruments in a symphony, but the instruments are constructed with a view to one another, so that the orchestra forms a technical as well as a musical unity. Uexkilll's compositional theory of environment thus leaves ecological thought with a number of pressing questions which are taken up in not altogether disparate ways by Deleuze and Guattari and thinkers in the phenomenological tradition. Firstly, is it the case that the "musical" and the "technical" can be separated even to the extent that Uexkilll suggests they can? Clearly in nature the construction of the instruments takes place as part of the composition, so that we need to learn to think not in tenns of an orchestra which plays a composition, but of an orchestra which composes itself as it plays. In that case, to learn to listen to that composition without demanding that it fit any musical cliches would be of the greatest importance to ecological thought. It is well known that ecology has been dogged by an image of balance and harmony which has ancient roots. Of course, that does not mean that harmony is to be abolished, although it may be freed. The diversity of contrapuntal voices need not be the answer of one instrument to another, but the piece itself can be heard to create and sustain a multiplicity of voices. Secondly, we must consider what is to be made of the plan(e) when it comes to ecological thought. Should we not confine ourselves to the diversity of environments that are played out for us and avoid apparently vapid and perhaps dangerous speculations about a "milieu of all milieus," a chaotic world or chaosmos? Are we able to think such a world, even one for which contrapuntal integrity remains paramount, without liquidising ecological multiplicity even as we do our best to recognise and respect it? Territory and Niche: Marking a Distance/Difference

When we stumble into an unfamiliar habitat territories are not simply open to view. Even the closest knowledge of the features of an environment will not reveal territories unless we are able to see how

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environmental and behavioural patterns mark out a territory. That is why Uexkiill says that, "Territory is a pure Umwelt problem" (Uexklill, Stroll 365). It is also the ethological problem par excellence. On the other hand, the concept of niche is also an Umwelt problem, but one which belongs above all to ecology. Of course, the two problems cannot be strictly separated, but rather they belong to two different tendencies in the thinking of life. Since it is above all an ethology that Deleuze and Guattari are interested in developing, one might be tempted to think that the ecological problem of niche is set to one side or surpassed in this ethology. After all, in A Thousand Plateaus we move from milieu to territory, tracing the territorialisation of milieu in the "becoming-expressive of rhythms." When the functional milieu is territorialised, have we not left ecology behind? Or can the problem of niche be posed again, in such a way that Uexkiill's distinction between the technical and the musical in nature does not apply? At first sight the problem of territory and the problem of niche seem to be distinguished by the fact that the fonner is intraspecific whilst the latter is interspecific. Both involve marking a critical distance, but territory marks out a distance between those who occupy precisely the same niche. Apparently niche is prior to territory and of a different order. It is crucial for ecological thought to show that this is not the case, that there is a problem of niche as well as a problem of territory. However, they are not problems that can be tackled in isolation. The problem of niche can fruitfully take its lead from Deleuze and Guattari's thinking of territorialisation and deterritorialisation. For Deleuze and Guattari the marking of a territory becomes far more complex than in many previous accounts. In particular, marking is no longer understood as a warning sign which points beyond itself, towards the potential consequences of transgression. They do not allow the expression of territory to become a system of signs that all tend to signifY aggression. That is their challenge to Lorenz's "ambiguous thesis," with its, "dangerous political overtones" (Deleuze and Guattari, 348).2 Intraspecifc aggression is not the transcendental signified of territorial markers. Rather, aggression itself is taken up into the territorial expression which marks critical distance. Aggression expresses territory rather than territory signifying aggression. Aggression is only one of the functions which is reorganised in territorialisation and we can presumably imagine a territorialisation which does not express itself in terms of aggression at all. In fact, Uexkiill himself, from whom Lorenz derived many of the principles of his research, already came quite close to this view of things. He considers the case of dogs marking their territory through urination.

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Rather than necessarily signaling that aggression will be faced if a meeting occurs, UexkiHl recounts the case two dogs that marked the same territory. If taken out together, they engaged in a "urinating competition" (Uexkiill, Stroll 367). It is the becoming expressive of the function that counts in marking a territory, rather than the specific function of aggression. If we tum to the problem of niche, then the situation is somewhat different. Rather than following the tendency to tum the marking of distance in expression into a signification of a privileged function, niche has been understood as the function of all functions. Niche has come to be defned as an "n-dimensional hypervolume," which is to say, the volume created by plotting the species' survival range within the entire range of environmental conditions (such as moisture, temperature, light and so forth) against one another. Certainly, the volume will not have fixed dimensions, since the "realisation" of a living function within any one dimension might affect the range of any number of other dimensions. If there is more food available an animal might need less water. Nevertheless, G.E.Huchinson's formal distinction between "potential" and "realised" niche remains purely Aristotelian (see Hutchinson). The "potential" niche, that is, the full range of potentialities of a species within which the real niche of the species is realised when restrictions such as predation and competition are taken into account, becomes as unthinkable as pure matter. A potential niche has neither form nor volume unless it is already partially realised. So the distinction becomes one of the greater and lesser degrees of formation or realization. In contrast to this functionalist accolmt, we need to begin to think niche too in terms of expression and the marking of a distance. It would be a mistake to entirely identify a niche with a milieu nmction, such as the annexation of an energy source. We need to begin to see and hear expressions which not only mark out territorial distances but also specific differences. Niche is not a volume carved out of unformed matter, but an expression which reorganises a multiplicity of forms. Deleuze and Guattari are already aware of a link between their discussion of the becoming-expressive of a function and something approaching what Merleau-Ponty called the problem of the "ontological value of the notion of species." ( 1 89).3 They draw our attention to the "decoded" sections of genetic material, the "junk DNA" which has no function and does not code for any protein. This material and the 'genetic drift' which it induces remain important but highly problematic phenomena. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is precisely because it is decoded and without function that territorialisation can produce a kind of indirect differentiation or speciation:

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Eco-Political Compositions after UexkiiII's UmweIt Biology But it is very unlikely that this kind of matter could create new species independently of mutations, unless it were accompanied by events of another order capable of multiplying the interactions of the organism with its milieus. Territorialisation is precisely such a factor that lodges on the margins of the code of a single species and gives the separate representatives of that species the possibility of differentiating. It is because there is a disjunction between the territOlY and the code that the territory can indirectly induce new species. Wherever territoriality appears, it establishes an intraspecific critical distance between members of the same species; it is by virtue of its own disjunction in relation to specific differences that it becomes an oblique, indirect means of differentiation. (Deleuze and Guattari, 355)

Precisely how telTitorialisation "lodges on the margins of the code" remains somewhat unclear here. What is clear is that the problems of telTitory and niche are not concerned with the intraspecific and interspecific respectively. Nor are speciation and the "potentialities of a species" which mark out its niche to be confined to the order of the coded. Rather, once the ecological niche has been freed from the strictures of functionalism, then it becomes an expression of distance which accompanies telTitorialisation. The task then becomes one of listening to the different rhythms whereby distances and differences are marked out. An example of this complex interplay between telTitorialisation and speciation is the case of the ruddy duck, a North American species which has "colonised" Britain. There is to be an attempt to exterminate the British population because of the " genetic threat" which it poses to the rare and closely related white-headed duck in Spain. The ruddy duck is known for its aggressive behaviour, marking out a telTitory but also a niche which it both shares with the white-headed duck and excludes it from.4 This sitlJation is neither a pure telTitory nor a pure niche problem. Colonisation and hybidisation involve a complex of expressive rhythms. The real danger is the fetishisation of telTitorial boundary and specific difference which closes our ears to those rhythms. That is not a call for "non­ intervention" or anything of the kind. It is simply a reminder that neither telTitories nor niches are pre-established boundaries but are rhythmically created, so that the creation, conservation or transgression of any such . boundaries is best undertaken by the establishment, support or elaboration of those rhythms. Whilst not strictly separable, the varying rhythms of territorialisation and differentiation introduce dissonance into Uexkull's theory of ecological composition. On the one hand, there is the disjunction that Deleuze and Guattari find played out in romanticism, between the telTitory

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and the earth. The Ur-refrain of the earth beats out a rhythm which strikes against all territorial and milieu refrains: The little tune, the bird refl'ain, has changed: it is no longer the beginning of a world but draws a territorial assemblage upon the earth. It is no longer made of two consonant parts that seek and answer one another; it addresses itself to a deeper singing that founds it, but also strikes against it and sweeps it away, making it ring dissonant. The refrain is indissolubly constituted by the territorial song and the singing of the earth that arises to drown it out. Thus at the end of Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) there are two coexistent motifs, one melodic, evoking the assemblages of the biM, the other rhythmic, evoking the deep, eternal breathing of the emih. (Deleuze and Guattari, 374)

The rhythm of the earth takes in all of the territorial expressions but also harnesses and overwhelms them. The earth carries each territorial refrain before it and they in turn can be deterritorialised by it, although they remain under its sway. The earth founds territories, but it does not leave them behind, it forces them into continuous variation. The dissonance to be heard in the creation of specific difference, on the other hand, is not that of a pulsing earth that carries all along with it, butof the lag of those who cannot keep pace. It was Bergson who identified this rhythm of speciation. He complained that radical finalism conceives evolution on the model of, "a musical concert, wherein the seeming discords are really meant to bring out a fundamental harmony" (128). Nothing of the kind is to be found in the evolution of life. However, the mistake lies not in the musical metaphor but in the failure to hear a basic rhythmic difference: The profound cause of this discordance lies in an irremediable difference of rhythm. Life in general is mobility itself; particular manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always going ahead, they want to mark time. ( 1 28)

Life is always lagging behind itself. That is not because of some failure to keep time, but because the very mobility which creates a path for itself must of necessity lay down a road which it is reluctant to leave behind. Rather than the deep pulse of the earth sounding behind each refrain we hear the plodding lag of living beings whose very way of life has forced them into a niche. None of this is to say that territory and niche are to be absolutely distinguished in terms of this rhythmic difference. Once more, territory and niche are each marked out rhythmically, but there is nothing to say that the marking of a distance might not also create a difference.

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The rhythms of the earth and of life must both be attended to in a behavioural ecology which is able to hear the composition as a whole. Is there anything to be said about the whole complex of these rhythms, the consistency which they are able to achieve and the lines of flight by which territory and niche are deterritorialised and destructured? Can we think the whole without turning it into a totality? In such a project Deleuze and Guattari might find an unlikely ally in ecological phenomenology. The Chaotic World: What becomes of the "Milieu of all Milieus ? "

At frst sight Deleuze and Guattari's thinking of animality and environment might seem to contrast sharply with that of phenomenology. However, both make extensive use of Uexkiill's Umwelt-theory, in such a way that the central ontological concerns introduced by the thinking of animality and environment coincide at certain points. In particular, as we have begun to see already, the concept of Umwelt demands that we consider the consistency of the whole ecological interweaving of animal environments. What is the character of this consistency? How and where is it constituted? These questions led both Deleuze and Guattari and the phenomenologists to reconsider the problem of world in the light of ecological composition. In his 1957-58 lectures on "Animality, the Human Body, and the Passage to Culture" at the College de France, which formed part of a series of lectures on the concept of Nature, Merleau-Ponty devoted some time to an examination of Uexkiill's notion of Umwelt. During his interpretation Merleau-Ponty is led to the question of the world where Umwelten are composed. If animal worlds can be "englobed" in a human Umwelt and it is precisely the task of biology to achieve this, nevertheless an Umwelt is never total, so we are all englobed in an Umgebung-the totality of natural surroundings-which we often mistakenly assume our own scientific Umwelten can grasp in its totality. Uexkiill's theory then steers us towards the question: "What is the Umwelt of Umwelten?" (177). In Uexkiill's works Merleau-Ponty finds two responses to this question, both of them unsatisfactory. In the earlier work, adhering more strictly to the Kantian principles which he professes allegiance to, Uexkiill gives no positive determination of this environing world-in-itself and suggests that none can be given. By the time of the 1934 "A stroll through the worlds of animals and men," following what Merleau-Ponty sees as inhlitions already developed by Schelling, Nature itself is detennined as a unique subject which carries all Umwelten but is itself closed to them. This second view

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is of interest because, somewhat unexpectedly, by insisting on the mutual envelopment of Umwelten it avoids the implicit anthropocentrism of the view that all we can speak of comes from within an exclusively human Umwelt. Nevertheless, both of these solutions move away from the true novelty of the notion of Umwelt. Neither the sum of exterior events, nor an interior relation, the compositional event of an Umwelt, "opens on a temporal and spatial field." The constitution of the world in which these environing events "surge-forth" is not secured before the event. It is neither the suprasensible nor a nature-subject, but the theme of a melody that haunts all its realisations. The plane of ecological consistency consists in this melodic thematism, it is not a set of pre-constituted niches waiting to be filled. The problem that we are left with is how to traverse the ecological world, the Umwelt of Umwelten, without reducing it to a pre­ constituted field which itself could be grasped in the pincer of a particular functional-milieu. It is this problem that deeply informs both the ecological­ phenomenology that Martin Heidegger elaborated in this lecture course The Fundamental Concepts ofMetaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude and the account given by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Despite deep rifts between these thinkers, there are a number of points in their respective traversals of the ecological plane at which they come so close as to almost touch. First of all, there is the question of becoming-animal. What is the kind of event that brings us into the midst of an ecological composition? It is not sympathy or empathy if that means an attempt to feel the affects of another, which belong exclusively and personally to that other. That is why it is also not a question of imitating an animal, since that is also an attempt to get ourselves into the position of the animal, implying that an animal occupies a position which will itself not be affected by this becoming. Heidegger therefore asks not whether we are able to empathise with an animal, or get into the consciousness of an animal, but whether we can be transposed into the life of an animal. This transposition in tum is not the taking up of a position, but a movement of becoming which we follow through along with the animal: "Nothing other than this: whether or not we can succeed in going along with the animal in the way in which it sees and hears, the way in which it seizes its prey or evades its predators, the way in which it builds its nest and so forth" (Heidegger, 203-4). The possibility of going along with the animal is nevertheless subject to afect of a certain kind, hut an impersonal affect to which the Dasein is attuned in its going along with the animal. This tune is not the exclusive property of one who becomes attuned. Such an attunement turns out to be the core

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of Heidegger's infamous thesis, a thesis which he himself stmggles with a great deal, that the animal is "poor-in-world." The "poverty" is a ''poverty in mood [Ar-mut]" in which the Dasein comes to be athllled to animal becomings (195). Dasein can become attuned to the animal's life only because animal becomings are played out to a hllle. Thus it is not in the least bit clear that there is anything more "anthropocentric" about such ecological phenomenology than the concept of becoming-animal offered by Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, Keith Ansell-Pearson has suggested that Heidegger's thinking of "animal­ becomings" might be used to counterbalance a lacuna in Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Uexkiill, namely that the thought of "becoming­ animal" has a tendency to suggest that the animal is already given in its animality and to neglect the way the idea of Umwelten demands the thorough re-thinking of how that animality comes about. Ansell-Pearson even suggests that one might argue that Deleuze and Guattari's, "attempt to disclose nonhuman becomings of the human results in a 'violent' humanization of animal worlds as well as producing an idealized account of nature and the cosmos" (Ansell-Pearson, 1 88). Whether or not Heidegger's account could entirely remedy such a situation is unclear, since he himself admits that his "going-along-with" the animal falters when it comes to giving a full account of what he calls animal motility and its specific kind of "historicality." (Heidegger, 265-267) Ultimately it may not just be a question of thinking animal�becomings alongside becomings­ animal, but becoming attuned to the tension that arises in both of these accounts, between being swept up by an affective becoming-along-with the animal and thinking the kind of world which is inhabited or plane that is traversed in these becomings. For Heidegger, when there is a "going-along-with" an animal, just as Deleuze and Guattari insist is the case with "becoming-animal," it is not a question of imitation or imagination. Dasein does not imagine what it is like to be an animal, nor does it play at being animal. It finds itself in the midst of an ecological dimension, so that there is never a going-along-with one animal, without at the same time going along with all those with which it is in communication and with which its Umwelt intersects: The woodworm, for example, which bores into the bark of the oak tree is encircled by its own specific ring. But the woodworm itself, and that means together with this encircling ring of its own, finds itself in tum within the ring encircling the woodpecker as it looks for the worm. And this woodpecker finds itself in all this within the encircling ring of the squirrel which startles it as it works. Now this whole context of openness within the rings of captivation encircling the animal realm is not merely characterized

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by an enonnous wealth of contents and relations which we can hardly imagine, but in alI this it is stilI fundamentally different from the manifestness of beings as encountered in the world-forming Dasein of man. (277)

The gulf that Heidegger insists upon here is often taken as evidence that he cannot adequately think the proximity of Dasein to animality or anything like becoming-animal. But upon closer inspection it becomes clear that although our imagination can often fail us, ecological thought is not fundamentally an exercise of any special imaginative capacity. The very movement through� the worlds of woodworm and woodpecker and squirrel is that of Dasein that finds itself in the midst of these encircling rings. It is not that Dasein stands somewhere outside of this ecological interplay or tries to imagine itself in the midst of these intersecting circles. The manifestation takes place in the "going-along-with" the worm which at the same time is the traversal of the whole composition of encircling rings. "World-forming" has nothing to do with the moulding of unformed matter. It is the traversal and translation of the chaos of forms that intersect in this ecological dimension. There is an echo of the Chaosmos here. Each encircling ring persisting in what is its own, threatened by the surrounding chaos, but also in itself engulfed by the others, shot through by lines of flight from which its very own milieu is composed. In the final analysis, we may find that the boundaries that Heidegger is constantly marking and remarking are themselves composed from movements and traversals that constitute an ecological dimension without underlying unity. There is a despeciation on the ecological plane which runs alongside and intersects with deterritorialization. It is only in the intersections, the movements of traversal, that the "its own" of each specific ring is composed. That is why Heidegger too, like Deleuze and Guattari, questions the idea of a linear evolution, a straightforward unfolding of differentiation from an undifferentiated primordial slime, which does not take account of the way that differentiation is repeatedly marked out and as such open to despeciation. The contextual ring in which an animal lives out its life is not marked out for it before it begins to live. The genetic code itself, together with the all important margin of decoded code, is one of the materials taken up in the composition of what is specific to that life. Its specific meaning is produced in the movement it composes along with others. As such the specific tones which each living being can produce and become attuned to only gain their specificity as part of the whole composition.

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Eco-Political Compositions after Uexkiill's Umwelt Biology

Modulations of Silence and Ecological Annihilation

The danger that threatens this retum to the whole, to the world in which Umwelten compose themselves and mark out for themselves what is their own, is the dissolution of specific difference. However much Deleuze and Guattari insist that, "there is in all this no hint of a chaotic white night or an undifferentiated black night," (78) the Earth does still threaten to engulf the singing of birds and the colour of flowers in one huge Ur­ refrain (378). Species are threatened with being swept up in the huge traversal of "life in general." This threat is not easily overcome and we have seen that Uexkull himself was constantly in danger of succumbing to it, especially when he introduces a great Nature-subject to describe the compositional plan, rather than allowing the plan itself to be composed between the Umwelten themselves. This danger asserts itself in strictly compositional terms. That can be illustrated by some remarks of Theodor Adomo conceming the use of counterpoint in new music. Even in the most thoroughly contrapuntal composition, in which harmony has been "freed" to the greatest degree possible whilst maintaining the consistency of the piece, there is the danger of dissolving specificity, precisely through its insistence on differentiation: It is true enough that even though the different voices are heard simultaneously, their tones and rhythms never coincide, and hence they are absolutely to be distinguished from one another. But this very absoluteness makes the differences between them problematic. Not only does everything go back to a unified, identical basic material, so that distinctions collapse into sameness; but also the all-inclusive nature of the distinguishing principle hlms everything into one single thing. Differences are eroded into complimentaries; the antithetical nature of counterpoint, the representative of freedom, is submerged in synthesis without retaining its identity. (1 3940)

Adomo is concemed with the potential totalitarianism of counterpoint. That is to say, absolute differentiation may revert to simplicity. An economy with the highest degree of division of labour is not as a consequence an economy which allows for a high degree of specificity or differentiation. This has its ecological equivalent in the thought of a living world which absolutely separates each living voice, locating each in its own "niche" within a total economy of nature. A silencing of the whole may be the effect, even as polyphony is emphasised at every tum.

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Nevertheless, the totalitarian lock-down of despeciation and the resulting dissolution of specificity itself, may not be the only or even greatest danger facing ecological composition. Along with, but thoroughly distinct from its potential totalitarianism there is the potential fascism of music. Fascism is not the blocking of lines of flight, but their turn towards destruction. Since music is composed precisely of such lines it is never immune to this potential: "Music has a thirst for destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not its potential 'fascism'?" (Deleuze and Guattari, 330). We must recall here that Deleuze and Guattari draw a strict distinction between fascism and the totalitarian State. They concur with Virilio's observation that fascism is less totalitarian than it is suicidal. "Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition" (Deleuze and Guattari, 258). The dissolution of species and territories by means of the locking down of all lines of deterrorialisation or despeciation would therefore not be the only danger to face ecological composition. There is also the danger that its own creative movements will be swept up into a suicidal flight of destruction. The silence from out of which and within which the whole composition emerges might become overwhehningly attractive. With this we are able to define far more precisely than has usually been possible the much discussed danger of "eco-fascism." This would now have to be distinguished from the first danger, the danger of a totalitarian locking down of all creative lines in the name of conservation or preservation. As we have seen, such a totalitarian ecology will ultimately dissolve rather than conserve what has been composed from creative lines of deterritorialisation and despeciation. The danger of eco-fascism, however, is not this conservationist lock-down, whatever the conservationist laws introduced by the Nazis might suggest, but an intense line of traversal at a global level. The perception of a global crisis brings with it the declaration of a total war. It is a line of destruction which surges through the entire Mechanosphere, bringing with it the implicit desire for death as the only way to really achieve a "zero carbon footprint." It sweeps across land creating vast tracts of bio-fuel and damming rivers, displacing millions and al1l1ihilating species such as river dolphin. It may even reach the cosmos, in the form mirrors to deflect the sun's rays away from us. This is not to say that anything like the full force of eco-fascism has as yet been unleashed. We see the potential for it in conjunction with a State apparatus that blocks creative lines whilst painting itself green and joining the enviromnental refrain. What we need most of all in this situation is to

�

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Eco-Political Compositions after Uexldill's Umwelt Biology

learn to listen. Not just to the great silence from which every mus­ ecological composition is born, the silence which penetrates the whole but which can also induce a thirst for annihilation. We need to learn to listen to the smaller but equally powerful silences which sustain the composition. "The animal is," Merleau-Ponty writes, "like a quiet force" (177). It emerges from the physiochemical conditions, but not as their effect. The whole interpenetration of strata on the plane of consistency makes up, according to Deleuze and Guattari, "a silent dance" (77). Furthermore, the very creations which can be locked-down or tum bad in annihilation arrive in silence: Is it not the nature of creations to operate in silence, locally, to seek consolidation everywhere, to go from the molecular to an uncertain cosmos, whereas the processes of destmction and conservation work in bulk, take center stage, occupy the entire cosmos in order to enslave the molecular and stick it into a conservatory or a bomb? (382-3)

Within the two movements which threaten dissolution and annihilation, the totalitarian conservatory and the fascist's bomb, we can perhaps still just discern the small silences of creative ecological becoming. Notes 1 Ronald Bogue also points to the signifcance of this later text for gaining a full understanding ofUexldill's theory. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003) 58-62. It has been published both in German and in French translation in a single volume together with "A stroll through worlds of animals and men." 2 Gary Genosko has explored Deleuze and Guattari's confrontation with Lorenz in some detail in his, iliA Bestiary of Territoriality and Expression: Poster fish, bower birds, and spiny lobsters," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24 no.3 (1 997): 529-42. 3 The significance of this "ontological value of species" and the central importance of Uexldill's "melodic" theory of animality for Merleau-Ponty's understanding of it has been carefully explored by Mauro Carbone in his The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern Univeristy Press, 2004), Chapter 2 "Nahlre: Variation on a Theme." For our purposes the question would be whether Merleau-Ponty does not remain too "painterly" in his understanding of the problem. Does he not lock the ontological value of species into the reciprocity of vision? Does he not need to distinguish "two movements of creation" as Deleuze and Guattari do, the painterly moving from the soma to the germen and the musical moving form the germen to the soma? cf. (Deleuze and Guattari ,383-4).

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4 Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, Birds Britannica (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005) 108- 1 1 .

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. "The Function of Counterpoint in the New Music." Sound Figures. Trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1999). Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Germinal Life: The Diference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999). Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998). Bogue, Ronald Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003). Carbone, Mauro The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A­ Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern Univeristy Press, 2004). Cocker, Mark, and Richard Mabey. Birds Britannica (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004). Genosko, Gmy. '''A Bestiary of Territoriality and Expression:' Poster fish, bower birds, and spiny lobsters." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24:3 (1997): 529-42. Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Hutchinson, G.E.. "Concluding Remarks." Cold Spring Harbour Symposia on Quantitative Biology 22:2 (1957): 415-27. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the College de France. Trans. Robert Vallier (Evaston: Northwestern University Press, 2003). von Uexkiill, Jakob. "A stroll through the worlds of animals and man: A picture book of invisible worlds." Semiotica 89:4 ( 1992): 3 19-9 1 . - StreifZiige . durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschenl Bedeutungslehre (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1 970).

DELEUZE AND DEEP ECOLOGY ALISTAIR WELCHMAN

I

Deep ecology is distinguished by three central commitments. The first is to the intr·insic value of nature. l Surface ecology, by contrast, legitimates various broadly ecological concerns with non-human nature on the basis of their value as means for some human end. Deep ecology might for instance argue in favor of restricting or forbidding pollution on the ground that the pollution causes harm in nature; a surface ecologist might be able to support exactly the same conclusion, but only because the same pollution will cause harm to human beings. In this sense deep ecology is an ethics of nature, the denial of the axiological version of humanism, i.e. the denial of the view, exemplified by Kant, that human beings either themselves constitute the only values or else are the only source for values.2 Deep ecology can therefore be conectly described as a kind of (axiological) anti-humanism, provided it is clear that the "anti" does not negate human beings as such, but merely negates the view that human beings are the sole sources of value. From its initial formulations, deep ecology has always been bound up with a second central commitment, the metaphysical claim that human beings are nothing other than natural entities, i.e. a kind of metaphysical naturalism. 3 In this sense, deep ecology is the denial of the metaphysical version of humanism, i.e. a denial of the view, exemplified by Descartes, that human beings are metaphysically distinct from natural beings. Accordingly, deep ecology can also be understood as a kind of (metaphysical) anti-humanism, with a suitably modified version of the above proviso. Deep ecologists manifest an obvious affinity for naturalistic philosophical systems that assert the continuity of human beings with non­ human nature and therefore give naturalistic accounts of human beings themselves. Naess alludes with some frequency to the work of Spinoza (e.g. "Spinoza and Ecology"). And more recently connections have been made with Nietzsche and Deleuze,4 who, not coincidentally, himself

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devoted two monographs each to Spinoza and Nietzsche. In addition, some deep ecologists have made use of a specifically naturalistic account of ethics (CaIlicot). Now there is a clear (though not inferential) connection between metaphysical and axiological humanism: the metaphysical distinctness of hmnan beings is often mobilized in support of their axiological distinctness.5 What is not so clear is the question as to whether there is a relation between the denial of metaphysical humanism and the denial of axiological humanism. It is not obvious, to say the least, how one can move from any kind of metaphysical naturalism to an axiological claim. It seems, on the face of it, quite consistent to believe that humans are natural beings and at the same time to think that the rest of nature has only instrumental and not intrinsic value in relation to human beings. In other words, deep ecology wants to be an ethics of nature, but it only supports this with a kind of naturalistic ethics. The gap between the two is not necessarily simply the result of Moore's naturalistic fallacy (see Moore 9ft). Indeed I will argue that metaphysically naturalistic systems can all be understood as presupposing or expressing values in the sense of evaluation or selection. The question that needs answering however is: what principle of valuation or selection? And the answers to this question vary with the type of metaphysical naturalism, that is, with the conception of nature. Minimally, the relations between the metaphysical and axiological anti-humanisms at play in deep ecology need to be clarified. The third central commitment of deep ecology is to some kind of practice that transforms our consciousness of nature. 6 Although it sometimes takes on a meditative or even a frankly mystical tone, this transformative aspect of deep ecology can, I think, be given a quite rigorous philosophical reconstruction. The motive for this third commitment seems clearly to be an avoidance of axiological issues, at least of a certain type: "moralizing" ones (see Fox 2 1 5ft). As a practical matter, it is probably true that adopting a moralizing tone may be counter­ productive. But a transfonnative identification with nature hardly evades all issues of valuation. Presumably the reason for identifying with nature is that people are in fact identical (in some sense) with nature, i.e. not metaphysically distinct from it: this is certainly Fox's view.? And so the issue would devolve back into a consideration of the relation between valuation and metaphysical naturalism.

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II I think the transpersonal or transfonnative aspect of deep ecology is best interpreted as a species of Ideologiekritik: ideological processes have distorted our understanding of and relation to nature, and we must work to undo or reverse those processes. Thought of in this way, transpersonal ecology has also called upon some philosophical heavyweights, just as the metaphysical naturalism aspect did. Indeed, what have become the standard axes of ideological distortion can be deployed in this new field. Thus, Marxists may argue that our understanding of nature has been distorted by commodification, in which the non-human world comes to be understood primarily as an economic resource; similarly feminists (eco­ feminists) may argue that our understanding of nature has been distorted by a patriarchal system that sustains itself by aligning women with nature as a way of legitimating male domination.8 On a more clearly philosophical plane, thinkers as diverse as Heidegger9 and Adorno, l o whose sophistication makes the term ldeologiekritiker seem rather a bad fit, nevertheless have analyses predicated on the presence of a deep distortion of nature in our experience of the world. These thinkers are doubtless difficult to interpret. But what makes them so difficult is, I think, their analysis of just how deep ideological distortion goes. In the case of Heidegger the distortion ("technology") is the only way in which Being has, historically, ever in fact been revealed to us. I I In the case of Adorno the distortion is bound up with reason itself (in the fonn of instrumental rationality). 1 2 As a result, there is a certain pathos of the negative about both these writers that centers around the sheer intellectual (and even more than intellechtal) difficulty of thinking beyond Western Metaphysics or Western Rationality. But at the same time their projects would make no (or at least less) sense if it were absolutely impossible to free oneself from the "ideological" distortions. However provisional it may ultimately be, there is a clear contrast in for instance Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology" between the understanding of the Rhine made manifest in a hydroelectric plant and that manifest in Holderlin's visionary poetry. 13 Despite the variety of thinkers who can be positioned in place of a psychological sense of · personal transformation, there is nevertheless considerable agreement on the centrality of Descartes in the construction of the false conception of nature. Descartes breaks with the medieval idea of the continuity of beings (and, a fortiori, of the continuity of human beings with nahlre) that had dominated Western thought since Aristotle by introducing a radical separation between human beings and what he now

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calls "nature. " The defming characteristic of human beings is their possession of consciousness, what he calls "thought", although it includes everything of which we are conscious and not just what today would be described as thoughts (as opposed to e.g. feelings or mere sensations). 14 We have bodies, but only contingently. And our bodies, like animals and everything else in the universe, i.e. nature, have only the property of being extended in space. 1 5 This conception of nature excludes not only thought and feeling, but also secondary qualities (like color), which have no real existence, according to Descartes, since they are merely subjective projections. 16 Now Descartes' overall metaphysical position (metaphysical humanism, as above) involves two components: it claims that human beings are specifically distinct from nature in that we are defined by our possession of a non-natural property (thought); it also has a quite distinctive conception of what nature is - a machine. It is going to turn out, I believe, that the denial of metaphysical humanism must entail, along with its reconceptualization of human nature, a reconceptualization of both the rest of nature and of valuation. This is what can, I think, be learned from viewing the transformative aspect of (deep) ecology as a form of Ideologiekritik: at the end of the critique we will have transformed both the nature of human beings and (non-human) nature so as to see their underlying metaphysical unity in nature as such. It is from this point of view that the deep ecological reference to metaphysically naturalist philosophical systems cah be brought critically into play with the question of valuation. The often phenomenological orientation of the Ideologiekritiker lends itself to the epistemic pessimism of Heidegger and Adorno: it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to escape the clutches of the false "ideology" of nature, and so most of the theoretical energy of such positions is spend in a kind of conceptual deprogramming that is the speculative analogue of Fox's appeal to psychology. Where it differs is that in Fox's case, although theoretically unsophisticated, it is clear that the culmination of the process is a consciousness of metaphysical naturalism, i.e. that "we and all other entities are aspects of a single unfolding reality" (Fox 252). Ideologiekritik however is by no means committed to any kind of metaphysical naturalism (although it may contingently accept some form of materialism, e.g. dialectical materialism). Indeed, in its most philosophically sophisticated guise, as phenomenology, it is intrinsically hostile to any form of metaphysical naturalism. Heidegger clearly wants to revolutionize our (Cartesian) conception of nature; and, at the same time, he wants to revolutionize our conception of

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the subject (hence his new vocabulary of Dasein); but he by no means wants to sink Dasein into the world ontologically: Being-in-the-world is the way of Being of Dasein that precisely distinguishes it from the ways of Being of non-Dasein, what he calls, after Kant the "categories", presence­ at-hand and readiness-to-hand. l? Heidegger can be best understood as radicalizing Kant's critique of Descartes, which objected to Descartes' conception of the subject as a thinking thing precisely because the subject is even more diferent from nature than the objectlike designation "thing" can accommodate. 18 This is why Kant figures so prominently in reactionary resistance to (deep) ecology. 1 9 Heidegger transforms our conception of nature from a mere resource; but is radically committed to the ontological distinctiveness of Dasein.20 Thus Ideologiekritik is doubtless important, but it is at best a way of getting to an underlying metaphysics (and here I am only interested in naturalistic metaphysics). So an emphasis on the transformative aspect of (deep) . ecology distracts attention away from its metaphysical commitments; and those metaphysical commitments entertain as yet unexplained relations with its fundamental evaluative ones, i.e. the existence and importance of non-human values. Here I will want to argue that it is not just our conceptions of human beings and nature that must be changed, but also the conception of value itself. As already mentioned, the problem of the relation of valuative commitments to metaphysical naturalism inevitably brings up the question of the application of Moore's naturalistic fallacy. In brief, Moore argued that it is impossible to infer the intrinsic goodness of something from its natural properties; from which of course he concluded that the good is an objective but non-nahlral property. The specter of this fallacy is raised by the very term "deep ecology." The "ecology" part of this designation refers to an apparently neutrally descriptive scientific endeavor; whereas the "deep" part brings in a range of nonnative principles. In Naess' fonnulation, this is supposed to be unproblematic because he distinguishes carefhlly between the scientific claims of ecology and his own system (more properly ecosophy), which, he says, like the great metaphysical systems of Spinoza and Aristotle, freely mixes normative and descriptive components (Naess 1 973: 99). How this is possible still requires some clarification. Nevertheless, while Naess may have been admirably explicit about separating the normative and factual principles of this view (see "The Shallow and the Deep" 331:), there are clear dangers in an appeal to ecology. On the one hand, there is the danger that social values will be projected onto the science in the process of its constitution. Ecology has

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hardly achieved the kind of cognitive maturity that gives it a physics-like autonomy from the nexus of human practices out of which it emerged?! Indeed some of its most fundamental concepts were politicized at their origin and are still among the most contested of any science?2 On the other hand, there is also the inverse danger that exploits the relative authority of the scientifc discipline's epistemic position for prescriptive ends. For instance, for a long time, technical (perhaps among other) limitations made it difficult to model any but homeostatic, i.e. self­ sustaining, systems. But from this it is easy to move to a view that systems should be self-sustained, a view that has conservative implications analogous to those of structuralist-functionalist sociology. Three different positions can be used to mark out the range of possibilities for thinking about the relation of valuation to metaphysical naturalism. There is, first, what appears to be Naess' position: that evaluative commitments are separate from descriptive (metaphysical ones). This position suffers from an obvious drawback: in the absence of further elaboration, our abilities to perform evaluation or identification are not explicable on the basis of the nature that we attribute intrinsic value to or on the basis of that nature with which we identify. But then, we are to that extent precisely not identical with that nature, and the only result must be a kind of humanism. Second, there is the view that valuations are "projected" into nature. This can be given an (increasingly popular) transcendental idealist gloss, so that it no longer seems as if it is just getting things wrong, i.e. the projection can be understood as in some sense constitutive of (our conception of) nature. Conceived in this way, the valuative commitments of (deep) ecology would be analogous to those of virtue theory: human experience of nature is (at least under the right conditions) always and constitutively the experience of a natural world that presents itself as inextricably shot through with valuative significance (affordances for the prosecution of human interests) in the same way that human experience of the social is (at least under the right conditions) always and constitutively the experience of a social world that presents itself as inextricably shot through with valuative significance (opportunities for kindness etc.). Thus, for both Heidegger (in thinking . at least in part about nature), as for Alasdair MacIntyre (thinking about the social), the idea of the separation of fact from value (that underlies Moore's conception of the naturalistic fallacy) represents a kind of cognitive catastrophe: once valuation has been separated from description, then the two can never be put together again?3 In this sense, even to ask the question of the relation between valuation and nature is already to have deprived oneself of the resources to answer

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it. It should be noted however that the upshot of this position is a kind of idealism about nature. The very fact that we are able to break through the seamless interweaving of fact and value already demonstrates the contingency of this conception of nature and suggests that the seamless weave is not the real nature as it is in itself. The last option is that nature itself is, in some sense, valuative, and that this is what supports both the existence and importance of non-human values and the valuation of human beings, understood as a part of nature. This is a delicate matter, for how can it be distinguished from a selective appeal to the authority of nature adopted as legitimation for a social project? One way is to appropriate the Kantian insight offered by the above analysis comparing Heidegger and Macintyre, but to prolong it in precisely the opposite direction. Rather than retreating to nature as phenomenon, the thought of nature can be expanded beyond the phenomenal scope where it is restricted by properly scientific considerations, transforming nature this time not in relation to a synthesis of human interests, but by going beneath the phenomena, retrieving but renewing a classical sense of the metaphysical. This, I take it, is the attraction of thinkers like Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze for (deep) ecology.

III Deleuze's conception of nature goes to unusual lengths to establish continuity between the cultural, biological and even inorganic domains. Deleuze's early assertion of a primary monism is articulated in his later (collaborative) works in terms of an analytical vocabulary that is deployed freely across all domains.24 Thus, in a Plateau on ethology, territorial animal behavior (especially birdsong) is explained in terms derived from human cultural production (of musical styles) and vice versa with such suppleness that the twin objections of naturalizing the cultural and aestheticizing nature are simultaneously undermined. It is humanistic chauvinism not to attribute aesthetic ability to birds just as it is to deny that high art is not also nature (see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 1 1). In collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze defends this view by developing a thought of abstraction that is understood not as conceptual generality but as interconnection across heterogeneous domains. This difference can itself be understood using the crucial distinction between a tree and a rhizome. Tree-like or arborescent structures are organized according to a strict hierarchical principle, the most visible of which today

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is probably the organization chart. These charts (in which the arborescent structure is upside down) start with a single trunk (the boss) who is the superior of everybody. Everyone else in the organization either reports to the boss, or reports to someone else who reports (ultimately) to the boss. The significant feature of such structures for Deleuze is that communication on one level is always mediated by someone on a higher level. Until recently, the biosphere was itself understood as a tree (the tree of life) in which present-day life forms were related by filiation through a common ancestor somewhere higher up the tree. Deleuze and Guattari were among the first philosophers to take note of the general import of the revision to this model that has now become the standard for redrawing the diagram of life, that is, the fact that genetic relatedness can also be established by direct lateral connection between life forms. When Deleuze and Guattari were writing, the only significant examples of this were viruses. But now it is widely recognized that most life forms can be assigned only a statistically approximate filiation because of the dominance of inter-"specific" genetic exchange in bacteria. This idea of lateral connectivity or networking is what Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizome. 25 There are even rhizomatic and arborescent conceptions of abstraction itself. Conceptual classifications have, since Aristotle, followed the tree of life quite directly: higher order concepts contain or encompass lower order ones, traveling up to the most abstract concept (God, Being) and down to ever more minutely distinguished aspects of reality. 26 Abstraction here carries its standard but arborescent connotation of lacking (specific) content. But Deleuze and Guattari treat abstraction rhizomatically as the possession of a greater ability to connect laterally or transversally. The more connections to the more heterogeneous elements, the more abstract?? Abstraction therefore knits together disparate domains at the same time as it radicalizes the notion of multiple realizability by isolating "machinic" fragments that can be effectuated in disparate domains. This is what enables Deleuze and Guattari to avoid reductionism in either direction: it is not that Deleuze and Guattari are projecting or anthropomorphizing when they say that in the development of courtship and other rituals in birds, "expressive matters" or "motifs" become "autonomous" and form a "style" - even when this autonomy of the motif is immediately explicated using the example of the Wagnerian musical motif wandering away, in the score, from its assigned dramatic character on the stage ( 1 980: 3 1 9). Nor are they (the converse) giving a reductive account of human aesthetic capacities, as if the latter were "just the same as" birdsong. Rather, the same "abstract machine" is differentially effectuated in both cases.

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Here Deleuze and Guattari insistently reject the idea that such inter­ domain assemblages result from a comparison or an analogy, a procedure that would result in the privilege of one domain over another (see Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 1 29ft). An affinity group is not rhizomatic because it "compares itself' with couch grass or bacteria, but because all three effectuate the same abstract machine. The relative under-theorization of ecology in comparison with evolutionary biology is exactly the victory of tree over rhizome since ecology is the Shldy of the systemic properties of the lateral connectivity (alliance) between leaf nodes in the evolutionary tree of descent (filiation). Nevertheless, despite Deleuze and Guattari's deep-seated metaphysical naturalism, implacable hostility to the humanist perspective of transcendence and detailed methodological commitment to the use of a conceptual apparahls that resists anthropocentrism, there is still an only uneasy juxtaposition between their work and (deep) ecology. It should be clear that Deleuze and Guattari would fiercely resist Warwick Fox's peon to the tree (Fox 253-4) even while acknowledging the pernicious force of arborescent formations in biohistory. But the problem is surely more general than this. Organicist interpretations of ecosystemic relations have been rife in (deep) ecology, culminating in Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. They are probably on the wane now, but their replacement by more vague terms like "interconnectedness" (e.g. Fox 245t) looks less than half-hearted in comparison with Deleuze and Guattari's onslaught against the (notion of the) organism as such in Anti-Oedipus, one of whose central theoretical terms is the body without organs. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari strenuously resist any concept of holism: the whole, far from having any priority over the parts (either valuative or ontological) is simply a part produced alongside other parts. And, despite some similarities of their work to a kind of general systems theory, they distance themselves from this through a refusal of even the idea of effective functioning?8 Perhaps most basic of all, is the singular importance in Deleuze and Guattari's work from 1 972 onwards of the term "machine." Of course, as Halsey carefully notes, Deleuze and Guattari's machines, especially their desiring-machines, are not "purely mechanical" (40).29 Is this disjunction between Deleuze and (deep) ecology a merely superficial or terminological one, or is there a substantive disagreement? To answer this question will require something of a detour, starting out from the observation that it was already true for Descartes that machines were not purely mechanical.

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Descartes arrived at his historically dominant conception of nature through a peculiar reversal of the intuitively obvious relation between science and technology. This relation would normally be understood analytically, in other words: the theoretical business of science will tell us something about the way nature works, and technology, implemented by engineers not scientists, will apply the theoretical understanding of science to the fabrication of useful instruments, machines. For Descartes, this relation is exactly reversed. His conception of science is parasitic upon his understanding of technology. In particular, he formulated his mechanical philosophy of nature as the object of scientific inquiry on the basis of his observation of technical -machines, most especially the hydraulic statuary in the royal gardens at Saint-Germain, which were themselves the products not of a scientific but of an autonomously artisanal milieu.3o This leaves Descartes with a problem because the notion of a machine is irreducibly · nonnative: its effectuation of a causal chain is to be evaluated in terms of its performance of a function. As he admits in Meditation 6: "A clock made of wheels and counter-weights follows all the laws of nature no less closely when it has been badly constructed" (AT VII: 84). As a machine, a clock is defined not just by the chain of causes it embodies, but also by its functional consistency with something outside of nature, i.e. a form of purposiveness. In the case of human or animal bodies, this purposiveness must lie in God. So, even for Descartes, machines, and hence nature, are not purely mechanical, but contain an essential reference to a purposive or teleological realm.3 l Descartes' conceptual innovations are generally regarded as in part responsible for the break between facts and values that underlies both Moore's naturalistic fallacy and the difficulty of any more supple an understanding of the relation between metaphysical naturalism and general questions of axiology. His failure to effect this break cleanly however has historically opened up the possibility of giving a naturalistic account of the emergence of values in nature through the functioning of biological organisms. The phenomenological account weaves fact and value together on the presupposition that nature is constituted as phenomenon out of fundamentally human interests. In Heidegger, for instance, beings reveal themselves most primordially as ready-to-hand, i.e. as already taken up in a sphere of specifically human significances. By contrast the naturalist critique of Descartes takes the realm of divine purposes that underlie the mechanistic construal of nature, and gives a naturalistic account of just those purposes. In Kant, for instance, machines are precisely distinguished from organisms on the grounds that while the former have (as Descartes

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argued) extrinsic purposiveness, the latter are intrinsically purposive, i.e. they carry their purposes with them. Kant, famously, could give no account of how this possible. 32 But after Darwin it becomes easy to think of organisms as positing value. Canguilhem, for instance, sees the calisal pathways of organisms as incomprehensible in the absence of their homeostatic regulatory functions (see The Normal and the Pathological 126, 1 3 1 , 1 36). Thus it becomes possible to say that e.g. methane is of value for methane-metabolizing bacteria because of the functional role it plays in maintaining the existence of such entities. It is important to note the difference between these two positions, which can at times become subtle. In the phenomenological account we (as phenomenological subjects or Dasein or whatever) construct "nature" in accordance with our interests. It may still be true that this happens in the naturalized account. If there is anything that it's like to be a methane­ metabolizing bacterium, then doubtless methane will appear valuable within its phenomenology. While this example may seem fanciful, the origin of the modern science of ethology was dominated by the work of von Uexkiill who made exactly this move. Uexkiill emphasizes that interest-relative life-worlds are constructed phenomenologically by all organisms and have strikingly different saliencies so that the "same" ensemble of objects will appear very differently to a human, a dog and a tick. 33 Nevertheless, the naturalized account does not appeal to any projective, world-constituting or phenomenological origin - not even to one of Uexkiill's non-human phenomenologies -- for a valuative component in nature. Rather, the crucial element is the sheer fact that there are systems, usually understood as biological ones, whose conditions of existence involve the effectuation of a differential valuation of segments of the environment, in other words: living systems that posit values. It is not, in other words, the values constructed phenomenologically from within such systems that form the basis of a metaphysically naturalized conception of valuation, but the existence of systems that do in fact posit values. Still this does not seem to be enough to generate the valuative results that deep ecology wants to infer from its metaphysical basis. It might be possible to generate a naturalized conception of the interests of naturally occurring systems on this metaphysical basis. But the interests concerned are both inherently conservative (reminiscent of the first wave of cybernetics) and appear to have only an oblique relation to our valuations as human beings. Systems at various scales doubtless do have conditions of existence interpretable as interest-relative valuations. But on what basis ought I to respect these? It is not obvious. Indeed the phenomenology of

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such valuations in e.g. the case of predator-prey relations suggests that the values one system posits may precisely be the abjection of another system. There are possible answers to such questions, in for instance the sometimes now quite intricate - naturalistic ethics of evolutionary biology. Such naturalistic approaches are no longer socially Darwinist: since the 1930s, work on inclusive fitness has shown how it is possible to develop biologically based valuations that extend beyond the individual organism to those that (may) share its genes. Still these fall short of even the inclusion of all human beings, and so also fall short even of axiological humanism (see Callicot). Those deep ecologists like Callicot, who use this approach therefore still need to appeal for a transformation of consciousness that will get us to identify with not only non-kin but also non-human nature. Perhaps this can be done. But the question remains: why should we engage in such a process of identification? It cannot be just on the basis of the values posited by life (the interest of a functional system is continuing to function) since those values opened up the original gap that now needs to be closed by identification. In other words: some extra valuation is also required to motivate identification. My hypothesis is that this further move can indeed be explained on the basis of metaphysical naturalism, but only of a very specifc kind. Naturalizing the extrinsic Cartesian finality of machines through the intrinsic finality of a living system yields a possible calculus of valuative interests, but nothing more. What could motivate a transfonnative identifcation with nahlre is not the mere fact that humans are a part of nature, but the further claim that humans are, in some way, genuinely metaphysically identical with (the rest of) nature. An example of such a metaphysical naturalism is Schopenhauer's view that individuated things (including organisms, and hence human beings) possess, in addition to their material properties, a second, phenomenally inaccessible, aspect: they are also wilL For Schopenhauer individuation itself is inapplicable to the will (this is his famous and highly original interpretation of the familiar doctrine of the freedom of the will: the will is free not because it is capable of free choice, but because it is free of the form of individuation, the principium individuationis). It follows from this that the will in itself is neither singular nor plural. For Schopenhauer therefore it is false to say that each of us has a will. Rather each of us (and evelY separate entity in non-human nature too) is at the same time the same non-singular, non-plural, non-individuated wilL Schopenhauer characterizes the will as endless striving: striving because it is willing; endless because if it had an end or aim or purpose,

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there would be something separate from it. Here Schopenhauer introduces the idea of a transformed nature that acts, but neither in accordance with a chain of causes nor on the basis of a purposiveness alien to it. This is the idea of a nature whose activity is properly immanent to it. From these resources it would be possible to construct a rigorous critique of the naturalization of purposes on the basis that this naturalization uncritically accepts the non-natural purposes posited e.g. by Descartes and merely asserts that just those kinds of purposes can be given a naturalistic account without going further and interrogating the structure of purposiveness itself. Of course endless striving without aim or purpose is a fonn of suffering, and Schopenhauer does not shrink from the implication that existence is, at a basic level, pain. Only at the level of individuated entities (what Schopenhauer calls the level of aspect of representation) does the will will anything in particular: each entity wills to sustain itself in what Schopenhauer calls the will to life. Each thing then posits the continuation of life as a value and perfonns an appropriate selection on its environment as a result.34 But each of us is at the same time will, and hence metaphysically identical with the other. As a result, the direct values of self-maintenance posited by life are metaphysically superficial: when I pursue my interests at your expense, when I assert my (personal) will against yours, I forget that I am really (at the deeper metaphysical level underneath the nature of mere representation) the velY same will that you are and hence I really attack myself - or more accurately: I act as an instrument by means of which the will attacks itself. Je suis la plaie et Ie couteau! Je suis Ie soufflet et la joue! Je suis les members et la roue, Et la victime et Ie bourreau! [I am the wound and the lmife! 1 am the blow and the cheek! 1 am the members and the wheel,

The victim and the executionerl]35

This metaphysical identity provides the missing link between a naturalistic account of non-human interests on the basis of organic functioning and the need for a transfonned consciousness. The affinities with deep ecological thought here are clear, and indeed the metaphysically naturalist and anti-humanist ethics of Mit/eid (sympathy) that Schopenhauer develops from this shades into a mysticism of self-denial

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explicitly influenced by the philosophy of the Vedas and the Upanishads. It seems to me that only something like this can meditate between the location of valuation in the self-sustenance or Self-realization36 of the individual natural system and an analogue of Kant's "universalization" requirement, that we (as humans) recognize and value these valuations. It is because "I is another" that it makes sense to identifY with the interests of self-unfolding natural systems taken as a whole.37 Now Deleuze's relation to deep ecology can be made clear, for Deleuze is the inheritor of the Schopenhauerian intellectual tradition, but only in a significantly modified fmm, that is, modified by Nietzsche's critique of Schopenhauer. Deleuze follows Schopenhauer in having a metaphysically enriched conception of nature, distinct from the interest-relative phenomena of phenomenology as well as from the interest-neutral terms of scientific discourse. But he follows Nietzsche in rejecting the presuppositions of the morality of sympathy that underlie Schopenhauer's rationale for our identification with nature as a whole, and hence also, the ground for recognition of the interests of functioning systems in maintaining their own functioning. This presupposition is that existence is fundamentally pain, and hence of little value. Schopenhauer's thought makes a clear bridge between a fmm of anti-humanist metaphysical naturalism and an anti-humanist axiology. But, for Nietzsche, it is the value of this axiology that must be brought into question on the basis of the value of life. 38 What does this mean? Deleuze's interpretation is in tenns of difference, both as ultimate value and metaphysically basic constituent. The idea is that conservative (i.e. homeostatic or purely self-conserving and merely self-regulatory) systems have a tendency to dissipate. They may for instance be subject to the ratchet effect, where eventual minor dysfunctions accumulate to the point of breakdown because a conservative system has no way to reverse such changes. The culmination of this tendency is the second law of thermodynamics and the eventual achievement of ilTeversible thermal equilibrium. Life, in so far as it resists this tendency, requires and produces differences (e.g. the pool of variation of Darwinian evolution). This is the sense that Deleuze gives to Nietzsche's eternal return, understood as a principle of selection. Conservative systems (based on identity) cannot return because, without difference, they will eventually cOlTode down to nothing; only difference can return because it is what enables even the identical to resist dissipation. But for difference to return is for "it" to return not as the same, but precisely as different.39

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By his later and collaborative work, the rather dIy-sounding philosophical distinction between the different and the identical had morphed into the distinction between rhizomatic and arborescent types of system discussed above. But the Nietzschean principle of evaluation and selection is still operative. It is rhizomatic systems that capture difference so as to act in a maximally exploratory way. Integrity (identity, self­ maintenance etc.) has a completely secondaIY relation: it is affinned to the extent that it is necessary for the promotion of rhizomatic exploration. This is the reason for Deleuze's hostility to functional coherence (organisms, functioning, finality, holism etc.). In the polemical frst volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, he and Guattari prosecute Nietzsche's revaluation of values with a maximum of rigor, attacking all residual derivatives of identity; and, while the second volume is apparently more conciliatory, this is in fact a purely pragmatic response to the contention that some level of integrity may be required for the production of more difference.4o This is where Deleuze's conception of the machine finds its place. An assemblage (a "system" constituted out of intrinsically different or heterogeneous parts) is machinic at its most extremely deterritorialized edge, namely the point at which it is most in contact with a maximum number of other assemblages, at which it is maximally abstract in the sense previously elaborated.41 This is the point at which its exploratory behavior produces a new source of differences, e.g. the metabolic creativity of bacteria or the chemical creativity of protein synthesis or the expressive creativity of language. Machinic selection or valuation for Deleuze is therefore distinct from the implicit valuation of the machine in which Descartes found himself embroiled. Descartes makes all valuative judgments (including those of purpose or function) into essentially secondary qualities, projections of human mental capacities. It is possible to naturalize such capacities into the notion of the organism as intrinsically rather than extrinsically purposive; but in so doing, one retains both the ideas of extended (nature) and thinking things (human mental capacities) in substantially the same forms. The valuative commitments of this strategy are correspondingly conservative, favoring self-interested (i.e. self-maintaining) systems and the values they necessarily posit. Deleuze's conception of machinic valuation is both metaphysically and axiologically anti-humanist, but quite different from the deep ecological view that natural systems have an interest in Self-realization. Machinic valuation does not represent selection based on anything remotely approximating interests; but rather the selection of systems that are

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interesting, in the quite specific sense of optimally productive of exploratory novelty.

Notes I In Arne Naess and George Sessions' canonical "Platform Principles of the Deep Ecology Movement," the first principle reads: "The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes" (Devall and Sessions 70). Naess in particular has tried to distance himself from any theory of intrinsic values in the style of analytic philosophy, and has instead emphasized a kind of "ordinary language" use of the term. See (Naess "Intrinsic Value" and Fox's discussion (22 I t). In some ways the distinction seems misplaced because many analytic philosophers use the terms "value" and "right" precisely to express the distinction between value in general (axiology) and specifically moral rightness. 2 Kant's position is that only rational beings possess intrinsic value, because they have (possibly) good wills. Strictly speaking this includes rational aliens and rational supernatural beings like angels or god. I shall iguore these possibilities in what follows. See Kant's Groundwork ofthe Metaphysics ofMorals). 3 Naess claims that "The ecosophies will, I suppose, be absorbed in the general traditions of philosophy of nature (NatUiphilosophie)" (Ecology, Community and Lifestyle 2 1 0). 4 See the pieces by Acampora, Hallman and Halsey as well as Patrick Hayden's essay in this present volume. Bennett also makes use of Deleuze in her attempt to establish a kind of "active" theory of matter. Her references to ecology though are largely limited to its systems theoretic aspect rather than its "deep" aspect. S In The New Ecological Order, Ferry locates Descartes' metaphysical discontinuity between human beings and nature at the origin of the axiological discontinuity constitutive of humanism that he rightly associates with Kant and Sartre (see e.g. 3ft). 6 Naess' analysis of such a transformation in his conception of "identification" ("Spinoza and Ecology" 36ft). Fox's Towards and Transpersonal Ecology is a book-length attempt to orient deep ecology in terms derived from the then­ fashionable transpersonal psychological analysis of Abraham Maslow. See especially pages 225ff for a wealth of evidence that this transformative approach is widespread among deep ecologists. 7 Fox claims that there are three grounds for identification with wider nature: personal contact, ontological and cosmological (249ft). The last of these involves an acknowledgement of the claim that we are all "aspects of a single unfolding reality" (252). 8 It is of course also standard for Ideologiekritiker to argue that the concept of "nature" is often deployed itself for ideological reasons, i.e. to present social choices as inevitable. Indeed this may be the basic formula for all ideology. I will

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address this issue below, but here the point is that such distorted conceptions of nature presuppose the at least possible accessibility of an undistorted conception of nature. 9 Heidegger has been repeatedly appropriated as an ecological thinker. See, for instance, Zimmerman ("Toward a Heideggerian Ethos"). Zimmerman regards Heidegger as a robust realist ("What Can Continental Philosophy Contribute to Environmentalism?" 2 1 7), citing Glazebrook. While not personally endorsing this interpretation of Heidegger, it does have the merit of making it clear that Heidegger wants to correct a distortion in our understanding of nature. Other, more canonical, interpreters of Heidegger have also given him an environmental gloss, see Wood (200 1 ) who coins the term "ecopheneomenology." 10 Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is already a proto­ ecological tract in that their critique of the Enlightenment and its self-destructive obsession with the "mastery of nature" (xvi) creates a "disenchantment" (3) of nature, i.e. a false (ideological) conception of nature (and our relation to it) that can be, in principle, subject to Ideologiekritik and corrected. II In his "Letter on Humanism" from 1 947, Heidegger writes "As a form of truth technology [Technics] is grounded in the history of metaphysics, . . . which is itself a distinctive and up to now the only perceptible phase of the history of Being" (220). 12 One can see how far this goes for Horkheimer and Adorno in the theme of the second essay of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "Odysseus, or Myth and Enlightenment" (43-80). Although their constant allusions to the Weberian notion of disenchantment suggest that they agree with Weber that it was Descartes who radically instrumentalized modern culture, they nevertheless argue that the deployment of myth in Homer's Odysseus is already instrumental in conception. Thus to find a model for a non-instrumental relation to nature, one would already have to go back beyond the muthos / logos distinction. 13 Heidegger writes: "In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that is spoken by the two titles: 'The Rhine,' as dammed up into the power works, and 'The Rhine,' as uttered by the art work, in HOlder lin's hymn by that name' (297). 14 Descartes' theory of perception involves both a mental component and a physical component: stimulation of nerve sites causes infonnation to be transfen'ed to the brain where (at some point) it is converted into something of which we are conscious, a "sensing," of which he writes "But this [sensing] precisely so taken, is nothing other than thinking" (Meditations 29). In Meditation 6 he describes sensations e.g. of hunger or thirst as "nothing but confhsed modes of thinking" (81). 15 This is the upshot of the famous 2nd Meditation (Meditations 23-34) in which Descartes shows that there are two substances in the universe, and that human beings are (essentially) one substance (thinking substance) and evetything else (including the human body) is extended substance or matter. 16 In Meditation 6 Descartes claims that there are indeed "differences corresponding to the different perceptions" of secondary qualities like colour, but that these differences "do not resemble" our perceptions of them (Meditations 8 1 ).

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17 Heidegger writes that "Dasein's characters of Being are defined in terms of existeniality, we call them 'existentialia'. These are to be sharply distinguished from what we call 'categories'-characteristics of Being for entities whose character is not that of Dasein" (Being and Time §9, 44). 18 Kant's critique of Descartes' conception of the self as a thinking thing takes place in the "Paralogisms" section of the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason (A348ffIB41 3ft). In § I 0 of Being and Time, Heidegger also mentions the "reifcation" (46) of the subject in Descartes and goes on to give an analysis of Max Scheler's (Kantian) attempt to distinguish persons from things (47-8) in which he is clearly approving, while at the same time maintaining that the various positive characterizations of the Being of persons (Dasein, in his terminology), e.g. "soul" or "spirit" or even "subject," have all been flawed. Later he makes it clear why: "Even if one rejects the 'soul substance' · and the thinghood of consciousness, or denies that a person is an object [i.e. one takes Kant's critique on board], onto logically one is still positing something whose Being retains the meaning of present-at-hand, whether it does so explicitly or not" (§25, 1 14). In other words: Kant's critique does not go far enough in undoing the reification of Dasein, even tenns like 'subject' are thought on the basis of the categories, that is, on the basis of the kind of being that entities unlike Dasein have. 19 Ferry is quite clear about this, defining the humanist era in Kantian terms, as involving a conception of human beings able to set aside their whole natural being: as he terms it "Antinatural Man" (3ft). 0 2 The term "metaphysical" is highly freighted in Heideggerian thought: it is the nexus of philosophical concepts characteristic of the West, which Heidegger wants to overturu or reinvigorate, but increasingly finds this task impossible, perhaps necessarily so. My use of the term is simply to distinguish prima facie non­ axiological from axiological claims and I do not want to enter this complex Heideggerian debate on either side. 21 In the interview "Truth and Power," Foucault distinguishes between sciences with a "low" and a "high epistemological profile" and confines his project to the fonner ( 1 09). 22 Sarkar describes, for instance, the classification of stochastic models of population growth as "a striking exemplar of the social determination of science." 23 See MacIntIyre's "disquieting suggestion" at the beginning (It) of his After Virtue that the social conditions required for even the perception of virtues have been eradicated and compare with Heidegger's claim that after Descartes scission of the world into extended and thinking things, we try to bridge the gap using "value-predicates" - but "Adding on value-predicates cannot tell us anything at all new about the Being of goods, but would merely presuppose again that goods have pure presence-at-hand as their kind ofBeing" (Being and Time §20, 99). 24 In Diference and Repetition, Deleuze argues, following Duns Scotus, that Being is "univocal" (35). In A Thousand Plateaus he infers a pluralism from this monism according to the equation "PLURALISM MONISM" (20). 25 For all this see A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 1 . Deleuze and Guattari use the biological model of arborescence ( 1 0, complicated by viruses) and contrast =

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(arborscent) models based on filiation with (rhizomatic) ones based on "alliance, uniquely alliance" (25). 26 Schopenhauer compares such conceptual classifcations to a mosaic, which can approximate reality to any given degree of accuracy, but can never quite match up to it because the mosaic pieces must always have edges, where reality does not (see Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Vol. 1 , § 1 2, 93-4). 27 See their critique of Chomsky's linguistic models, which are "not too abstract but, on the contrary, . . . not abstract enough, . . . they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements" (A Thousand Plateaus 7). 28 A Thollsand Plateaus borrows the term "plateau" from Bateson (21 -2). In Anti­ Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that "in desiring-machines everything functions at the same time, but amid hiatuses and ruptures, breakdowns and failures, stalling and short circuits, distances and fragmentations, within a sum that never succeeds in bringing its various parts together" (42). 29 It must be noted however that Halsey's assimilation of Deleuze and Guattari to "conceptual-scheme"-type linguistics (where reality is a flux essentially ungraspable by any linguistic terms, which therefore do intrinsic violence to reality) does not really do justice to their break with structuralism. 30 Descartes mentions the fountain at the royal gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Leyes in the "Treatise on Man" (AT X: 1 3 1 -2). 31 It is this that prompts Canguilhem to remark that "The mechanistic conception of the body is no less anthropomorphic, despite appearances, than the teleological conception ofthe world" ("Machine and Organism" 64). 32 Kant distinguishes between "relative" and "inner" purposes in §61 of the Critique of Judgement (2 1 2f) and shows his skepticism about the possibility of a properly scientific biology when he declares that "it is absurd . . . to hope that another Newton will arise in the fhture who shall make comprehensible . . . the froduction of a blade of grass" (§75, 248). 3 See von UexkUll's "Stroll through the Worlds of Men and Animals." Von Uexkiill founded the Institut fiir Umweltforschung at the University of Hamburg, one of the first. Interestingly enough, his term for the biologically constructed worlds of animals was Umwelten or environments. 34 Von UexkUll's debt to Kant is well-known (see his Theoretical Biology) but it would be interesting to speculate to what his notion of interest-specifc and action­ relative perception owes to Schopenhauer's conception of knowledge subordinated to the will. 35 Charles Baudelaire "L'Heautontimoroumenos" (poem LXXXIII in Les Fleurs du Mal). 36 This is Naess' preferred term (Ecology, Community and Lifestyle 196f). 37 Rimbaud declared that "I is another" (345). Thus transformative identifcation with nature has practical consequences only on the supposition of a kind of egoism: the more people identifY with wider nature, the less they will be likely to harm it, presumably for the same reasons people don't generally harm themselves: self-interest.

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38

An analysis of Nietzsche's relation to Schopenhauer (independent of Deleuze's appropriation of it) is beyond the scope of this paper. It is worth noting however that even by 1 872 in The Birth of Tragedy's analysis of epic (§§3-4) Nietzsche is, in the notion of a Greek optimism based on a profound sensitivity to pain, contesting Schopenhauer's valuations even while still accepting its metaphysical outlook. 39 This interpretation is laid out in detail in Deleuze's Diference and Repetition, Chapter 5. 40 Deleuze and Guattari's implicit critique of Anti-Oedipus is given primarily in A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 6, where they claim that "you don't reach the BwO [body without organs] . . . by wildly destratifYing . . . the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse" ( 1 60- 1). 4 1 "Whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that deterritorializes it . . . we say that a machine is released. That in fact is the distinction we would like to propose between machine and assemblage: a machine is like tl1e set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization and draw variations and mutations of it" (A Thousand Plateaus 333).

Works Cited Acampora, Ralph. "Using and Abusing Nietzsche for Environmental Ethics." Environmental Ethics 1 6 ( 1 994): 187-84. Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cummings (London: Verso 1 979). Bennett, Jane. "The Force of Things: Steps towards and Ecology of Matter. " Political Theory 32:3 (June 2004): 347-72. Callicot, 1. Baird. "The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic." A Companion to A Sand County Almanac Interpretive and Critical Essays. Ed. 1. Baird Callicot (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press 1 987): 1 86-214. Baudelaire, Charles. Les Flew-s du Mal (Paris: Gallimard 1961). Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological. Trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen (New York: Zone Books 1991). -. "Machine and Organism." Incorporations. Eds. S. Kwinter & J. Crary (New York: Zone Books, 1 992). Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1 965). . Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1 990). -. Diference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press 1994).

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-. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Robert Hurley (San Francisco, City Lights 1 988). -. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Thomlinson (London: Athlone Press 1 983) -. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1 987). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R Lane (London: Athlone Press 1984). Descartes, Rene. "Treatise on Man." Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. l . Trans. John Cottingham et al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1 985): 99-108 [page references to Descartes are to the standard Adam & Tannery edition given in marginally in the editions referred to]. -. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. from the Latin by Donald A Cress. 3rd Edition (Indianapolis, Ind. : Hackett 1 993). Devall, Bill and George Sessions. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1 985). Ferry, Luc. The New Ecological Order. Trans. Carol Volk (Chicago 1 995). Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon 1 9 80). Fox, Warwick. Toward and Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (Albany, N.Y. : State University of New York Press 1 995). Glazebrook, Trish. "Heidegger and Scientific Realism." Continental Philosophy Review 34 (200 1): 3 6 1 -40 l . Hallman, Max. "Nietzsche's Environmental Ethics." Environmental Ethics 1 3 (1991): 99-125. Halsey, Mark. "Ecology and Machinic Thought: Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari." Angelaki 1 0:3 (December 2005): 33-55. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row 1 962) [references are to section and page of the German edition, reproduced in the margins of the English]. -. "Letter on Humanism. " Basic Writings. Trans. and ed. David Farrell Krell (HarperSanFransicso: 1 977), 1 89-242. -. "The Question Concerning Technology" Basic Writings. Trans. and ed. David Farrell Krell (HarperSanFransicso: 1 977), 287-3 17. Kant, Immanuel. Critique ofPure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1 998) [references are in the standard AlB form referring to the original 1 st and 2nd edition pagination reproduced in the margins of the English].

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-. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Lews White Beck (New York: Macmillan 1 959). -. Critique ofJudgement. Trans. J. R. Bernard (New York: Rather Press 1951). MacIntryre, Alasdair. After Virtue (London: Duckworth 198 1). Moore, G.E.. Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1 956). Naess, Arne. "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary." Inquiry 1 6 ( 1 973): 95- 1 00. -. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. Trans. and ed. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1 986). -. "Spinoza and Ecology." Speculum Spinozanum 1 677-1977. Ed. S. Hessing (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1 977): 4 1 8-25. -. "Intrinsic Value: Will the Defenders of Nature Please Rise?" Conservation Biology: The Science of Scarcity and Diversity. Ed. Michael Soule (Stmderland, Mass: Sinauer Associates 1 986). -. "Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World." The Trumpeter 4 (1 987) 3 : 35-42. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Trans. Carol Diethe and ed. Keith Ansell Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1 999). Rimbaud, Arthur. "Lettre a Paul Demeny, 15 mai 1 8 7 1 . " CEuvres (Paris: Editions Gamier 1 960): 344-47. Sarkar, Sahotra. "Ecology." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2007 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fal12007/entries/ecology, last accessed April 7, 2008. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I (ZUrich: Diogenes Verlag 1 977). von Uexkiill, Jakob. "A Stroll through the Worlds of Men and Allimals." Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept. Trans. and ed. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, Inc 1 957): 5-80. -. Theoretical Biology. Translated by D.L. Mackinnon (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace & Company Inc. 1 926) David Wood. "What is Ecophenomenology?" Research in Phenomenology 3 1 : 1 (200 1): 78-95. Michael E. Zimmerman. "Toward a Heideggerian Ethos for Radical Environmentalism. " Environmental Ethics 5 :2 (Su11er 1 983): 99132.

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-. "What Can Continental Philosophy Contribute to Environmentalism?" Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Eds. Bruce Foltz and Robert Frodeman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004): 207-30.

HERCULES OF THE SURFACE : DELEUZIAN HUMANISM AND DEEP ECOLOGY EDWARD P. BUTLER

Alcmaeon says that humans die for this reason, that they cannot join the beginning [arche] to the end [telas]. -pseudo-Aristotle, Prablemata 17. 3. 9 1 6a33

Proponents of deep ecology, in attempting to articulate a metaphysics in support of their core intuitions, have seemingly managed instead to provide openings for critics whose attacks, though often facile, have begun for lack of an effective philosophical response to pass for conventional wisdom. Particularly damaging, although least accurate, has been the claim that deep ecology, because it opposes anthropocentrism, is thereby incompatible with humanism. In its cruder forms, this argument is simply a straw man, confiating non-anthropocentrism with misanthropy, whereas the first principle in the deep ecology platform states, "The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have a value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the non­ human world for human purposes" (Devall and Sessions 70). Ecosophists are far from failing to honor the human qua human; Arne Naess, the founder of deep ecology, affirms that "[t]he richness of reality is becoming even richer through our specific human endowments; we are the first kind of living beings we know of which have the potentialities of living in community with all other living beings" (Sessions 239). The charge that deep ecology seeks to undennine the structures of nonnativity is itself undermined by Naess, when he plainly states that "the significant tenets of the Deep Ecology movement are clearly and forcefully normative" (Sessions 1 54). The charge that the principles of deep ecology are somehow irreconcilable with nonnativity is a different one altogether, and goes rather to the question of mistakes ecosophists have made in attempting to articulate those principles in a metaphysical structure. More salient is the criticism from friendly quarters (see, e.g., the critique of deep ecology in Hayden 126-8) that the metaphysics of deep ecology would dissolve individua1 1iving beings into an unmediated unity

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with Nature conceived as a totalizing super individual. At its worst, this has amounted to a regrettable marriage of bad Spinoza and bad Vedanta, and would undermine the basic deep ecology thesis of the intrinsic value of living beings as species and as individuals. It is instructive in this respect to contrast the view of nature Deleuze traces to Spinoza and ultimately to the ancient atomists. According to Deleuze, what matters in Spinoza's thought "is no longer the affirmation of a single substance, but rather the laying out of a common plane of immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all individuals are situated" (Spinoza 122). For the atomists, nature is not a totalizing super-organism but "an infinite sum, that is, a sum which does not totalize its own elements . . . a sum, but not a whole" (Logic of Sense 267). Nature exists purely as "the principle of the diverse and its production," and "a principle of the production of the diverse makes sense only if it does not assemble its own elements into a whole" (266). Since the thesis of intrinsic value makes no sense without intrinsic diference, it is clear that this concept of miture is better suited to the purposes of deep ecology than one in which difference is denied. Accordingly, this essay offers suggestions toward a Deleuzian metaphysics of deep ecology incorporating basic elements of the deep ecology program, in patticular the thesis of intrinsic value, into a post­ anthropocentric humanism.

I. Ethics and the Plane of Immanence The notion of a preconceptual plane of immanence which is the principle of individuation for concepts, subjects and facts alike could be considered Deleuze's philosophical first principle. 1 A plane of immanence, Deleuze explains, is "the image thought gives itself of what it means to think," which "retains only what thought can claim by right," i.e. "movement that can be carried to infinity" (What is Philosophy? 37). Deleuze characterizes such an "infinite movement" as expressing the "reversibility" of thinking and being: "movement is not the image of thought without also being the substance of being . . . The plane of immanence has two facets as Thought and as Nature, as Nous and as Physis" (38). A plane of immanence is not itself immanent to something, to any subject or object, but rather is a selection of "diagrammatic" or "infinite" movements yielding a field of concepts (pertaining to thinking and to being), on the one hand, and facts (whether subjective "lived contents" or objective "states of affairs"), on the other. The plane of immanence as such, which is proper to philosophy taken in the widest possible sense, has complex relationships with other planes of formation,

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such as the artistic "plane o f composition" and the scientifc "plane of reference," with which the present essay will not be concemed. The plane of immanence is germane to the present discussion because it is the site of normativity and provides the possibility of a Deleuzian ethics. Deleuze's ethics depends upon the idea of a comparability of planes of immanence based upon theirintensive complexity, that is, the diversity of individuals and modes of individuation they are able to encompass, not in empty universality, but in concrete and mutually sustaining relationships. In the moral framework Deleuze develops from his reading of Spinoza,2 all acts are in themselves equally natural, equally perfect, and in that respect morally neutral, but this equality does not apply to the agents of these acts, the modal essences to which they are ascribable. In this model of action, the good act is one which brings the relations constitutive of the agent into "composition,,3 with the relations constitutive of another being, and such an act augments the agent's power of acting, while the evil act, insofar as it decomposes the relations characteristic bf some other being, diminishes the actor's very agency. The equality of acts from the standpoint of nature expresses the fact that there are only really relations of composition, insofar as it is only of these that there are adequate ideas, i.e., ideas that express their causes rather than indicating affections. Nature is thus, metaphysically speaking, intrinsically good, although it is by no means good for all things at all times: thus, there is an "agreement" between a poison and the new disposition it produces in the body, but not between that disposition and the organism's preservation. From this perspective, beings do not decompose one another qua beings, and so insofar as there is an adequate idea of the evil act it must belong to a different being, a more universal one, as Deleuze explains: [C]onsider bodies agreeing less and less, or bodies opposed to one another: their constitutive relations can no longer be directly combined, but present such differences that any resemblance between the bodies appears to be excluded. There is still however a similarity or community of composition, but this from a more and more general viewpoint which, in the limit, brings Nature as a whole into play . . . As all relations are combined in Nature as a whole, Nature presents a similarity of composition that may be seen in all bodies from the most general viewpoint. (ExpreSSionism 275)

The "agreement" between the poison and the consequent disposition of the body is a chemical composition but a biological decomposition, just like the reduction of a living thing to its raw materials, either by a physical or an intellectual process. The latter may in tum enter into relations of cultural composition, just as the fonner may enter into the composition of

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a spider. We can come to grasp the reality underlying the processes of generalization constihltive of the "biological" or the "cultural" as such through the detours of the understanding necessitated by these complex relationships of decomposition and composition: [E]ven in the case of a body that does not agree with our own, and affects us with sadness, we can form an idea of what is common to that body and our own; the common notion will simply be very universal, implying a much more general viewpoint than that of the two bodies confronting each other. It has nonetheless a practical function: it makes us understand why these two bodies in particular do not agree from their own viewpoint. (285f)

The language of "viewpoints" here can make it seem as though there is no more at stake than a matter ofperspective, but in fact it is a matter of individuation itself. In Deleuze's reading of Spinozist ontology, the individuation of modal essences depends wholly upon their realization in existence-this is clearly a primary reason for Deleuze's preference of Spinoza over Leibniz. Deleuze sees the two philosophers as "radically opposed" on this issue: In Leibniz an essence or individual notion is a logical possibility, inseparable from a certain metaphysical reality, that is, from a "claim to existence," a tendency to exist. In Spinoza this is not the case: an essence is not a possibility, but possesses a real existence that belongs to it itself . . . Neither a metaphysical reality nor a logical possibility, the essence of a mode is a pure physical reality. Modal essences therefore, no less than existing modes, have efficient causes. ( 1 93)

Deleuze argues that Spinoza's modal essences are intrinsically distinct while denying that they are possibilities subsisting a priori in a divine intellect. Their intrinsic distinction, their individuation, is instead irreducibly existential-and hence assimilated by Deleuze to the atomic "swerve", or clinamen, which he refers to as "a kind of conatus" (Logic of Sense 269). This intrinsic and yet existential individuation expresses for Deleuze the peculiarly Spinozist sense of eternity: "The eternity of essence," Deleuze explains, "does not come afterwards; it is strictly contemporaneous, coexistent with existence in duration" (Spinoza 40)-­ neither a priori nor a posteriori, but contemporaneous: "You do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination" (Spinoza 125).

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The value of this ontological perspective for Deleuze is that it renders existence "a physical or chemical test, an experimentation" (40) in which the essence of a mode expresses itself through the unique composition of extensive parts belonging to it in duration and the combinations it enters into, which are eternal although they happen in duration. There is a real genesis in time of the essence which is nevertheless truly eternal. Individuation-which is inseparable from essentialization-is thus fundamentally ethical: If during our existence we have been able to compose these parts so as to increase our power of -acting, we have at the same time experienced a proportionally greater number of affections that depend only on ourselves, that is, on the intense part of ourselves. If, on the contrary, we have always been engaged in destroying or decomposing our own parts and those of others, our intense or eternal part, our essential part, has and cannot help but have only 11 small number of affections that come from itself, and no happiness that depends on it. This is the ultimate difference, therefore, between the good man and the bad man: the good or strong individual is the one who exists so fully or so intensely that he has gained eternity in his lifetime. (41 )

"Death i s all the more necessary," Deleuze explains, "because i t always comes from without" (42). But this exterior is defined wholly according to the limits of the plane of immanence constituted by an essence. "That a man, from the necessity of his own nature, should endeavour to become non-existent, is as impossible as that something should be made out of nothing" (Ethics IV, Prop. XX), Spinoza states. The individual in this respect is absolutely atomic, but there are individuals-or "bodies"-of many different orders and thus, as Deleuze memorably remarks, "the interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior a projected interior" (Spinoza 1 25) -cf. the description of the plane of immanence as "the not­ external outside and the not-internal inside" (What is Philosophy? 59f). Death is defined for an essence, not by its interior limitations, but by the interior it projects. In the plane of immanence constituted by Nature itself there is no nonbeing (Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 38f); but for individual essences the situation is very complicated. Since all particular essences are comprised in the production of each (Expressionism 198), the individuation of each involves, by defnition, a normative disposition to all the individuals in every order of being, and produces itselfin and through this nonnative or ethical disposition, indeed as this ethical disposition. The fullness or intensity of such an individual essence can, in tum, be measured by the criterion of the diversity of wills compossible with it,

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with death expressing the essence's limits of compossibility, a limitation which is not passive but in effect an active negation or exclusion by which it defines itself. The more perfect essence, the more living essence, is that in which the greater diversity of wills is compossible, individuation according to such an essence generating a plane of immanence with a greater intensive complexity. Individuation involves the recognition and articulation of the diverse orders of being.

II. Intrinsic Value and Valuation We now possess the tools for an appraisal of deep ecology as a plane of immanence. The most fundamental principle of deep ecology is the thesis of intrinsic value. As Arne Naess remarks in his essay, "Equality, Sameness, and Rights," I have injured thousands of individuals of the tiny arctic plant, Salix herbacea, during a ten-year period of living in the high mountains of Norway, and I shall feel forced to continue stepping on them as long as I live there. But I have never felt the need to justify such behavior by thinking that they have less of a right to live and blossom (or that they have less intrinsic value as living beings) than other living beings, including myself. (Sessions 223)

Notice that Naess's recognition of the intrinsic value of the plant does not force him to stop treading on them. As he states elsewhere, "We might agree upon rules such as will imply different behaviour towards different kinds of living beings without negating that there is a value inherent in living beings which is the same value for all" (Naess 1 68). The recognition that beings having the same value will not be valued the same is thus the threshold of an ethical maturity. The anthropocentric hypothesis that the plant only has value insofar as it serves some human purpose, whether material or aesthetic, obscures the moment of valuation by presenting it, not as an existential choice, but as something given by virtue of a reified human essence. Thus Luc Ferry, in attempting to articulate his own anthropocentric environmental ethic in opposition to deep ecology, calls upon us to create "a phenomenology of human signs in nahlre . . . to obtain a clear awareness of that which can and must be valued in it" (l43).The achml moment of valuing nature has here been reduced to finding signs in nature of a reified human essence. The role of thought itself is thus devalued inasmuch as it is reduced to the anthropomorphic representation of humanity instead of its production, the labor of the spirit which was

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embodied in Pico della Mirandola's description of humanity as the indefinite essence (on which see below, sec. III). The recognition of intrinsic value thus does not mean that one does not make relative value judgments, but rather that the judgment is explicit and the costs of the choices not hidden. Valuing other individuals in and through the concrete relationships I establish with them, I individuate myself. But this valuation has itself no assignable value if it does not begin from the recognition of intrinsic value, for it is only against this background, with these stakes, that thought and action can themselves be ethically measured or valued. Similarly, in questions of culture, to recognize that cultural fOlmations have an intrinsic value is not to cease making value judgments concerning them and their effects; it is, rather, to begin making value judgments about them explicitly rather than obscuring them. The way in which to make these choices coherent is to understand that our own essence and individuation depend upon the harmony or dissonance we establish between the different orders of being at whose nexus we exist and act; and on this point the Deleuzian ethic of individuation and the deep ecology ethic of intrinsic value are functionally indistinguishable. While affirming the intrinsic value of species and individuals, Naess cites the "rich variety of acceptable motives for being more reluctant to injure or kill a living being of kind A rather than a being of kind B," as well as the paucity of general nonns for this sort of decision: "The more narrow and specific the questions posed, the less vagueness there will be" (Sessions 224). General norms individuate whole orders of being, while individuals must be dealt with to the greatest degree of specificity possible if we are to do justice to them, and the orders of being which must be taken into account in such ethical judgments are diverse. Here is where a kind of phenomenological practice makes sense. As Naess remarks in a paper on the philosophy of wolf management, discerning the possibilities for "mixed communities" of humans and other animals is more important than the abstract concept of "a general 'life community' embracing all kinds of life" (Naess and Mysterud 24). Fundamental nonns such as "severe suffering endured by a living being x is of no less negative value than severe suffering endured by a living being y, whatever the species or population of x and y" (26) have an operative value particularly when they can help to shift the terms in which a dispute is conducted. For example, as Naess points out, "wolf enthusiasts" may not always take seriously enough the suffering of sheep attacked by wolves and the effects of such attacks on entire herds. Taking up the issue in these terms does not resolve the dispute, but it individuates the sheep as objects of ethical regard

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irrespective of the outcome, emiching a debate which might otherwise only value them economically and aligning argumentation with ontology. Another general ' norm articulated by Naess in relation to wolf management is that "Humans have an obligation not to place their domestic animals in a situation where there is a significant risk of severe suffering." Here the general norm makes the specific relationship of domesticity an object of ethical regard. The degree to which there can be an adequate idea, in the Spinozist sense, of the relationship of "domesticated animal" must be assessed in such an ethical inquiry; that is, the degree to which there is something in the machine of domestication which transcends mere domination. Insofar as there are species which exist in no other fashion than in the relationship of domestic animal, there is some degree of "composition", in the Spinozist term, in this relation. The powers and limitations of such a machine become apparent when it is put to the ethical test. The responsibility incumbent upon humans in this relationship may require, in the specific situation, hiring shepherds to protect the sheep, in which the machine of domestication meets a threat from its exterior-the wild predator-by intensifYing: the shepherd brings domesticated dogs to guard the domesticated sheep. But the limitations of the domestication machine are explicit in its projected exterior, the wild predator, for whom-just as for the human consumer-the domesticated animal is decomposed into a mere captive food source. The wild predator, at the same time, is a pestilential, chaotic outsider from the viewpoint interior to the relationship of domestication, due to the impossibility of constituting the ethical relationship characteristic of humans and their domesticated animals with respect to the wild animal-and which may suggest the limitations of the attempt to constitute an ecological ethic based on the concept of "stewardship." Rather than an abstract concept, or, worse, a mystical construct, intrinsic value can thus be seen as a kind of regulative ideal. Furthermore, it can be applied beyond the confines of ecology in the narrow sense. Felix Guattari posited three ecologies, pertaining to the environment, social relations and human subjectivity respectively. The constihltion of planes of immanence permitting the richest intensive complexity corresponds to what Guattari calls "singularization" or, in many cases, "re­ singularization." Guattari's notion of singularization has been perversely conflated by certain critics (e.g., Ferry) with nationalistic chauvinism or even with racism and fascism, or simply with a relativism incapable of critique, but these criticisms fail to understand that the ethic of singularization is applied at every level, not just on the level of nationalities. The ethic of singularization in fact represents the apex of

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individual rights, insofar as it demands that we secure to the degree possible all of the · existential tenitories which empower individuals in pursuing their life projects. This necessarily involves both the preservation of tradition as well as the liberation from it. Moreover, the ceaseless effort to strengthen diversity in every cultural field as well as in every order of being guarantees the relentless subversion of hegemonies. Hegemonic ideologies will always continue to exist; but where their natural antagonists flourish, hegemonic ideologies are forced back upon their own existential tenitories, their opportunities for expansion curtailed. The truly effective critique of hegemonic ideologies comes not from countervailing universalizing discourses� but from their own projected exteriors, which undermine them existentially and locally rather than attempting to co-opt them through overcoding. The projected exterior is both exterior and interior; thus, for example, a projected exterior of religious fundamentalism is esoterism or occultism, interior to fundamentalism inasmuch as they share the latter's intensive cultivation of the text, but repressed for their recourse to transfonnation.4 As a broad ethical perspective, recognizing the diversity of the orders of being means recognizing that the way we make value judgments differs in different orders according to the different ways in which we participate in them. In a society that is our own, we speak and are understood and seek change from within. With the power we possess in social institutions comes an ethical demand to act on a scale commensurate with our personal influence. The more central we are in such a social group the more action is demanded of us and the less restraint, insofar as we play a larger share in constituting the group itself. Where we are peripheral, or an outsider, we have nevertheless a role to play, but there is much we cannot do or which it would be unwise to attempt. At the limits one could say we act on the basis of a common humanity; but this universal is really just a place­ holder for whatever degree of understanding has already been established between myself and the other prior to the exchange--if there were a more specific basis for the intervention, one would not appeal to such a universal. The universal thus expresses the sphere of interest in which we engage the other-recall that in Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, recourse to the universal implies the relationship of antagonism or decomposition between individuals. In the relation to the other animal, there is also a universal, a common animality presupposed in the encounter and embodying relations established in many cases prior to our thematic awareness-the perception of, e.g., living motility being phenomenologically very primitive. The type of universal to be deployed here is not that which is formed by subtracting

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differentiae, but that which is integral in each individual, and is transcendent in just this fashion-e.g., the Platonic autozoion, "Animal Itself', which is "one and visible, containing within itself all animals which are by nature cognate with it" (Timaeus 30 D).5 The wider sphere of interest expressed by this animality means that the most basic elements of value must hold proportionally more weight. Issues of physical integrity, habitat preservation, and so forth, thus necessarily dominate our ethical engagement with the non-human animal. When dealing with our fellow humans, by contrast, we feel free to override these matters for the sake of cultural concerns. Humans choose to make war with one another over such matters and it does not surprise us much when they sacrifice their physical integrity to an ideal. We cannot expect someone else to sacrifice herself for our ideal, however; and a fortiori we cannot ask this of another species. For we could ask the other's sacrifice as the price of being a member of our community, and upon acceptance a certain agreement would have been reached. However, no agreement is ever made solely among its immediate participants, and thus no social contract or compact achieves real, but only ideal or hypothetical closure. This failure of closure means that everyone has something to say about everyone · else's culture. But to a member of another species we can only offer very limited participation, the "mixed community" of humans and other animals usually being defined more by the capacity to tolerate diverse uses of a common space than a community of purpose. Culture's role in according value to the non-human cannot therefore be absolute, and is in fact more curtailed than in the case of according value to a custom or tradition. In certain cultures the sacrificial act, inherently an act of decomposition and hence of evil, is made good upon precisely such an according of membership in the society to the non-human victim, in which the same limitations and lack of closure are to be observed as in the case of the compact according to which humans become members of society. No such compact succeeds in determining all of the "bodies" ascribable to an individual, and hence human rights form an irreducible remainder in relation to any cultural organization; and the gap in determination is of course far greater in the case of a non-human participant. It would be a mistake to fail to recognize that non-humans do participate in human culture, even above and beyond phenomena such as domestication or the "mixed community" of coexistence. The mere production of symbols pertaining to non-humans already constitutes their participation in the social, albeit to a minimal degree--but not so minimal as that it does not already compound the ethical responsibilities toward "the animal" as such with responsibilities toward a participant in a social order. The symbolic

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order, like every other order of being, is not composed of static essences but of multiple planes of immanence proving themselves; hence there is an ethics of symbolic production which encompasses not only religious and artistic symbols but also, e.g., mathematics.

III. Deep Ecology as Humanism The emergence of human ecological consciousness is a philosophically important idea: a life form has developed on Earth which is capable of understanding and appreciating its relations with all other life fOnTIS and to the Earth as a whole. (Naess 1 66)

Far from being a challenge to humanism, deep ecology ought to be seen as its fulfillment, for the telos of humanism cannot lie in an anthropocentrism embodying a reified notion of the human essence. This truth is recognized by a "humanistic" critic of ecology such as Ferry (see Chap. 1 , "Antinatural Man"), who however proceeds to use it to exacerbate the ideological opposition of humanity and nature which he regards as indispensible to preserving the democratic values of the Enlightenment. But the true value of indeterminacy in the human essence is that the latter acquires determinacy through the ethical judgments made by human beings, with the regulative ideal of a maximal coexistence and flourishing of species and individuals on the earth expressing the maximal value of the human essence itself and the individuals constituted as humans according to it. The ecosophical concept of intrinsic value derives its ethical force from affirming an individuative striving in natural beings that is at once and as such the striving to recognize others, to constitute a plane of immanence whose intensive complexity expresses the maximal multiplicity of values. The indefinite essence of humanity is the symbol of this striving, and has no inherent bond to the taxonomic designation "human. " In just this fashion Kant distinguishes between the predisposition to humanity and the predisposition to personality (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, AK 6:27-28). Although Kant did not extend personhood to non­ human animals, he did extend it beyond humans to any other rational beings, as well as criticizing anthropomorphism in morality (AK 6:65n). "Rationality" indeed is not an empirical, but an intelligible characteristic, and to that degree a rational being is the same as a being rationally conceived, conceived, that is, in its autonomy, as an autopoietic individual, rather than in its heteronomy, as either an instrument or as a mere moment or aspect of a totalizing whole. Where we recognize autonomy we recognize an end, a telos, but in the case of a living being that telos is not,

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as in the case of abstract beings, expressible as a separate end of which the individual is a means, but as something unique and inseparable, that is, "existential", expressing intrinsic distinction. In autonomy of the "merely" biological kind, therefore, we also inescapably find an intrinsic value which puts us to the test, the test of the compossibility of our telos with that telos, the experiment which determines our exterior, our mortality, our own degree of "autonomy." Moreover, in the absolute positivity of nature there is a plenitude, as well as an anonymity, of "natures. " Any possible nature is actual; and if humanity, or any particular human, turns out not to be what it might have been, it is necessarily the case that something or someone else, of whatever order of being, has that nature, that essence. Arne Naess expresses this intuition in a provocative thought-experiment about humanity and an imaginary alien species: Homo sapiens may be capable, in suitable circumstances, and upon the basis of a wide perspective, of recommending its own withdrawal as the dominant living being on earth. By such an act humans would confirm Gust as we do in many other actions) that mankind is not bound to the values "useful for human beings" or 'suitable to human self-preservation" when "utility" and "self' are taken in a narrow sense ... Would we as human beings subject ourselves freely to the political will of an alien species which had more or less the same characteristics as us, but which lacked our tendency to torhlre, torment and exploit one another? The decision would perhaps take a few centuries, but I believe it would be positive. We would abdicate, if we were sure of them ... Human beings would lose something of their own essential nature if they refrained from abdication. ( 1 69)

It is not a question here of some determinate other species, nor of an elite within ours, but rather of whether "humanity" is to be identified with whatever humans do or have done, however sordid, or must stand for an ideal irreducible to the all-too-human, and one which thereby cannot help but be open to the non-human other from the moment that the latter becomes distinct. What the thought-experiment affirms is that if we are not human, someone or something else nevertheless is; but what the human is, in which order(s) of being it exists, is indeterminate in order that its value might range across these orders. By contrast, Ferry, in his defense of "humanism" against the threat to it he imagines coming from deep ecology, finds it adequate to find our duties toward all other animals in the degree to which they present to us an "analogue" of humanity (54), but fails to appreciate what is radical in the Kantian notion he appropriates inasmuch as for Kant we, too, for our own

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palt possess only analogous humanity, since we are animals as well. Ferry makes humanity in the ethical sense merely a property of our species rather than a problem posed to the individual. To be human is a mere status for Feny. But hmnanity is an indefinite essence, not because we are exempt from nature, but because the essence of the human is inseparable from the project of humanity, which transcends any particular species, including our own, but is nevertheless a project at once natural, metaphysical and historical. Heidegger says, with Ferry's approval, "The stone is without world, the animal is poor in world, man is creator of world" (55), but a "world" is a trivial thing indeed if only humans have one. The stone has created our world, as has the animal, in a different sense. Nothing is without world. 6 The geological world, the biological world, the mathematical world-nothing has given philosophers license to hold themselves aloof from acknowledging them, nor would there be anything "humanistic" in doing so. Again, Ferry quotes with approval Philip Elder's ironic remark that it is anthropocentric to presume that objects such as mountains are opposed to the development from which ecologists would seek to preserve them, and argues that since "[a]ll valorization, including that of nature, is the deed of man . . . consequently, all nonnative ethic is in some sense humanist and anthropocentrist" ( 1 3 1)-but in what sense? Is it merely a question of attempting to find any sense at all in which ecology, in aspiring to transcend anthropocentrism, could be said to be anthropocentric in spite of itself? Beyond this rhetorical tactic, is it Feny's claim that the humans who oppose the development of the mountain-or even simply those who do not stand to benefit fmancially from it and thus passively fail to support it-no longer human? Are their values a perfonnative contradiction? It is reasonable to say that a mountain, taken purely as stone-that is, as the very raw materials on account of which it is being targeted for development-is not "opposed" to development, but it is irrational to suppose that the animals who would lose their habitat would favor it, or that the continued existence of the mountain as a cultural asset is compatible with such development; and so it is unclear where the contradiction is supposed to lie. Rather, it is Ferry who seems caught in a fundamental contradiction when he attempts to determine the "subjective moment" in valuation as an objectively human moment, a moment, that is, in the natural history of the human species, and to deduce from the fact that ethical discourse is a human activity that the outcome of all ethical decisions must benefit, above all, any hmnan asselting even the most trivial claim, lest the deliberation undennine its own conditions of possibility. Just as the deep ecology thesis of intrinsic value sets a

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regulative ideal of the widest possible scope for ethical-ontological individuation, so too the refusal of anthropocentrism in deep ecology ought to be seen, not as anti-humanist, but as the fulfillment of the most profound ethical potential within humanism itself, because it rejects the thanatophoric moment in which a humanism all-too-human would seek to detennine with finality the limits of ethical concern according to abstract taxonomical designations. From a Deleuzian perspective, a post­ anthropocentric humanism is particularly desirable inasmuch as it accomodates both the becoming-animal of the human7 as well as its reciprocal movement, the becoming-human of the animal, which is a matter neither of anthropomorphism nor of domestication, but of the animal's deterritorialization of humanity via, e.g., the abstract machine of Kantian morality.8 Deleuzian humanism, as a frankly metaphysical humanism, can also be seen as expressing the conditions of the possibility of a project such as that of Halliwell and Mousley's Critical Humanisms,9 viz., their remarks concerning the "amorphous" nature of the human, which is to be conceived not as "a given entity" but as "an open-ended and mutable process"; the concept of the human is to retain its "critical edge" while resisting "becoming a reified and prescriptive category." Similarly, Deleuzian humanism as I have sought to articulate it in this essay holds open a critical space for multiple humanisms, critical because it speaks to what is at stake in any conception of the human, open and multiple because the human essence is viewed as a product of ethical individuation, as an appropriation in the Stoic sense (oikeiosis). Although Deleuzian humanism as I have described it does not fit any of the diverse humanisms Halliwell and Mousley describe, they do discuss A Thousand Plateaus briefly under the rubric of the "transhuman"-the "transhuman" being, in effect, nothing other than the metaphysics of the human properly understood.

Coda: Philosophy at the Surface In the Eighteenth "series" of The Logic of Sense, Deleuze offers a sketch of three paradigmatic "images of philosophers" rooted in antiquity. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze typifies the Platonist as a philosopher of the ascent to the intelligible and the Presocratic as a philosopher of the descent into the maelstrom of the forces animating life. Deleuze sublates the Nietzschean opposition, however, by adding a third image, typifying the Hellenistic philosophical schools of Stoicism and Cynicism as philosophies of the surface. Deleuze offers here-as he does in other

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places and in diverse ways-a genealogical account of the emergence of his own philosophical position. This particular account is an appropriate conclusion to the present essay because it offers an image of the activity of philosophy as rooted in a relationship to nature, rather than solely as the working out of the implications of a certain set of concepts. Deleuze here uses Empedocles and the Orphic theologians as exemplars of Presocratic thought. He singles out in Empedocles the complementary images of, on the one hand, the isolated limbs and organs offering themselves up for exotic combinations in a prior and also (due to the cyclical nature of becoming) future phase of cosmogenesis (Empedocles frags. 50-52 Wright); and on the other, the phren hiere (frags. 22, 97), the "body" of divine thought into which the cosmos is formed by the waxing strength of Love, dubbing the phren hiere the "body without organs," in the first use of this familiar Deleuzian concept (Logic of Sense 129). 10 Paralleling these two Empedoclean perspectives on the "body", the one dismembering and recombining, the other an indivisible and ideal totality, Deleuze cites "two faces" of Dionysus: "his open and lacerated body, and his impassible organless head . . . Dionysus dismembered, but also Dionysus the impenetrable" (129). 11 In the reciprocity of these two "bodies", the one disintegrated into its molecular relations while the other expresses nothing other than the mind capable of thinking all these syntheses and decompositions, Delelize sees something requisite to Presocratic thought but which remained unthought in it, namely the torsional surface of thought which connects them, and which he sees as having been made explicit by the Hellenistic schools. 1 2 With this shift to the surface, there comes at first a crisis of relativism as Platonic intellectual ascesis and Presocratic practices are both subsumed in the Stoic science of mixtures: This thesis . . . establishes that in the depth of bodies everything is mixture. There are no rules, however, according to which one mixture rather than another might be considered bad. Contrary to what Plato believed, there is no measure high above for these mixtures and combinations of Ideas which would allow us to defne good and bad mixtures. Or again, contrary to what the Presocratics thought, there is no immanent measure either, capable of fixing the order and the progression of a mixture in the depths of Nature (Physis); every mixture is as good as the bodies which pervade one another and the parts which coexist. How could the world of mixtures not be that of a black depth wherein everything is permitted? (1 30-1)

This "black depth" is a consequence of the interpenetration of everything; since all elements are contained in all things and pervade one

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another, everything is impure, everything is "cannibalism" and "incest." Thus the supposed Platonic essentialism is undermined, as well as the Presocratic cosmological organization of forces. What is left appears to be solely the pure positivity and relativity of Nature. What presents itself to the Stoic as more fundamental than either abstract essentialism or "natural law" is the modes of mixture or synthesis: "imperfect mixtures which alter bodies" and "perfect mixtures which leave bodies intact and make them coexist in all their parts" ( 1 3 1). The ultimate "perfect" mixture is, Deleuze explains, "the unity of corporeal causes . . . wherein everything is exact in the cosmic present" ( 1 3 1). The perfect mixture, Nature, is in effect the hiere phren of Empedocles retenitorialized. Nature is the perfect mixture because it is guided by no transcendent hidden hand but by the strivings interior to individuation, and divine thought is that which attempts to approximate this absolute polycentricity. The intelligibility of causality on the ultimate scale was, in Empedocles, the absolute transparency of the cosmos to itself at the acme of Love's power, but is now individual and contemporaneous, just as Eleatic Being and Nonbeing are retenitorialized as Atom and Void. This is the moment, in effect, when the plane of individuation transcends that of speciation-hence the significance Deleuze accords to the Epicurean doctrine of an infinity of atoms, but not of atomic shapes or sizes (270), for the metaphysical individual must be free from final detetmination either by the universal (shape) or by the phenomenal (size, because if the atom could be of any size, there would be sensible atoms). From a different perspective, the Empedoclean body-without-organs, the unique individual, presents itself as the precondition for the ideality of the universe in Platonic thought through a movement of eros producing the Idea in temporality. But on any level less comprehensive than the totality-a paradoxical totality, moreover, that does not assemble its elements into a whole-there are no perfect mixtures, nor absolute states of bodies which would render transformation intelligible (as, e.g., in Heraclitus frag. 3 6 DK: "For souls it is death to become water, for water it is death to become earth; from earth water comes-to-be, and from water, soul"): Bodies caught in the particularity of their limited presents do not meet directly in line with the order of their causality, which is good only for the whole, taking into consideration all combinations at once. This is why any mixture can be called good or bad: good in the order of the whole, but imperfect, bad, or even execrable, in the order of partial encounters. ( 1 3 1 )

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At first, all of the moves seem to exacerbate this opposition between the universal, an apocalyptic body-without-organs, and the order of particular relations, a realm that would seem to be ungovernable by any science or morality. If everything is coherent and justifiable on the ultimate scale, then our plane lacks justice and coherence altogether. Can the Stoic science of mixtures supply a science, much less an ethics? A little later, Deleuze remarks that We moved too quickly as we presented the Stoics challenging depth and finding there only infernal mixtures corresponding to passions-bodies and to evil intentions. The Stoic system contains an entire physics, along with an ethics of this physics. If it is true that passions and evil intentions are bodies, it is true that good will, virtuous actions, true representations, and just consents are also bodies. If it is true that certain bodies form abominable, cannibalistic, and incestuous mixtures, the aggregate of bodies taken as a whole necessarily forms a perfect mixture, which is nothing other than the unity of causes among themselves or the cosmic present . . . Ifthere are bodies-passions, there are also bodies-actions, unified bodies of the great Cosmos. (143)

With this in mind, Deleuze formulates a fundamental Stoic problem, an index for reason and morality alike. He asks with respect to Chronos, that is, discrete time, the time of particulars, Do the bodies which fill it possess enough unity, do their mixtures possess enough justice and perfection, in order for the present to avail a principle of an immanent measure? Perhaps it does, at the level of the cosmic Zeus. But is this the case for bodies at random and for each partial mixture? (163)

Stoicism, Deleuze explains, reinterprets the Presocratic cosmos "through a physics of mixtures in depth" (132). These "mixtures" are essentially ways of analyzing larger aggregates into smaller ones and composing smaller aggregates into larger ones. The heir to the Stoic science of mixtures, at once ethics and physics, is thus ecosophy and the science of testing the value of the human essence and of one's own essence as a human in the crucible of Nature. For Deleuze, therefore, the essence of the Hellenistic moment in philosophy relative to its historical predecessors is to have brought Presocratic physics and Platonic idealism alike to the "surface" of an ethical and individuating plane of immanence on which hybrid discourses concerning the ontology of ethics and the ethics of ontology come to life.

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De1euze chooses Hercules, an important symbolic figure for the Stoics, to personify this moment in the history of thought. Hercules, he explains, is always situated relative to the three realms of the infernal abyss, the celestial height and the surface of the earth . . . He always ascends or descends to the surface in every conceivable manner . . . It is no longer a question of Dionysus down below, or of Apollo up above, but of Hercules of the surface, in his dual battIe against both depth and height: reorientation of the entire thought and a new geography. ( l 3 1 t)

The "Herculean" individual--the subject of deep ecology-carries on her back at all times her own individuation in eternity, at the nexus of intrinsic value and unfathomable Nature, with nothing whatsoever to predetermine the outcome of her struggle.

Notes 1 On the plane of immanence, see especially Deleuze and Guattari (What is Philosophy? 35-60). 2 Deleuze's ethics are to be discerned chiefly through his readings of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and the Epicureans. In the following account, I accord a certain primacy to Deleuze's Spinozist ethical thought, because there he speaks in a more conventionally nonnative language of good and evil, rather than in hedonic tenns of joy and sadness. Another reason to accord primacy to the Spinozist side of Deleuze's ethics is that it shall be seen from the following that it is possible from within this ethical framework to motivate Deleuze's adoption of an ontology synthesized from the Epicureans and from Hume-i.e., from two different varieties of atomism. 3 Note that the sense of "composition" in Deleuze's readings of Spinoza is completely distinct from the sense of "composition" as it applies to art (the "plane of composition"). 4 Cf. "Prohibitions on Transfonnation," 379-83 in Canetti. 5 Compare the Deleuzian "body without organs" as discussed in the Coda of the present essay. The universal in question expresses the complementarity of the first two kinds of universal in Simplicius's commentary on the Categories, 82. 35-83. 20, in contrast to the third; see the discussion in Lloyd, 67; see also MoyIe'S remarks on the problem of conceiving the commonality between humans and other animals as a generic "first nature" to which the specific difference of "second nature", or reason, is added in humans. 6 It should be noted that theorists of deep ecology have their own readings of Heidegger; see in particular Zimmerman 1 983, though there is more incompatibility to be found between Heidegger and deep ecology in Zimmennan 1 993. 7 See Chap. 1 0, " 1 730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming­ Imperceptible . . . ," in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (232-309).

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8

For the characteristics of abstract machines, see A Thousand Plateaus ( 1 4 1 ff). My thanks to Tim Matts for bringing this issue to my attention. "For two branches do not spring from his back, he has no feet, no swift knees, no organs of reproduction, but is equal to himself in every direction, without any beginning or end, a rounded sphere, rejoicing in encircling stillness," (frag. 22, trans. Wright); "For he is not equipped with a human head on a body, he has no feet, no swift knees, no shaggy genitals, but he is mind alone, holy and inexpressible, darting through the whole cosmos with swift thoughts," (frag. 97). 1 1 In point of fact, Deleuze confuses here the fate of Dionysus, dismembered and consumed by the Titans but for his heart, preserved by Athena, with that of Orpheus, the "prophet" of Dionysus, dismembered by the Maenads while his oracular head was preserved.� 1 2 That is, the Stoics and the Cynics. Deleuze does not discuss the Epicureans here, but would obviously regard them as capable of being assimilated to the other Helienistic schools ill the salient respects upon his own reading of them. 9 0 1

Works Cited Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1 973). Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosopy. Trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1 988). . Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1 990). -. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester w/Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 990). Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 987). Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 994). Devall, Bill and Sessions, George. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1 985). Ferry, Luc. The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 995). Halliwell, Martin and Mousley, Andy. Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). Hayden, Patrick. Multiplicity and Becoming . (New York: Peter Lang, 1 998). Lloyd, A. C. The Anatomy of Neoplatonism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1 990).

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Moyle, Tristan. "Re-Enchanting Nature: Human and Animal Life in Later Merleau-Ponty." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 38 :2 (May 2007): 1 64-80. Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Trans. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 989). Naess, Arne and Mysterud, Ival'. "Philosophy of Wolf Policies I: General Principles and Preliminary Exploration of Selected Nonns. " Conservation Biology 1: 1 (May 1987): 22-34. Sessions, George (Ed.) Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism (London: Shambhala, 1995). Zimmennan, Michael. "Toward a Heideggerean Ethos for Radical Environmentalism." Environmental Ethics 5 (1983): 99-13 1 . " Rethinking the Heidegger-Deep Ecology Relationship." Environmental Ethics 15 (1993): 1 95-224. Wright, M. R. Empedocles: The Extant Fragments (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995).

RHYTHMIC TOPOLOGY: THE AFFECTIVE STRETCHING OF NATURE ELENI IKONIADOU

Introduction Score for a Hole in the Ground is a sonic sculpture by Jem Finer, positioned in a forest at Kent's countryside. Part music score part art installation, it consists of a deep shaft next to a lake in which resonant metallic objects, of different sizes and tunings, are buried. Drips of water from the lake strike the objects ringing them like bells, while a giant brass hom pipes the sounds seven metres above ground. This project was inspired by the Japanese suikinkutsu, a type of music device and garden ornament in the country's tradition, originating from the middle of the Edo period (1603- 1 867). The suikinkutsu is an acoustic water chamber of subtle and minimal music, composed by the sounds of the environment. As such, it is "a literal manifestation" of the fact that "in Japan rhythm was traditionally conceived of as obeying the unpredictable qualities of nature" (Finer 41). Contra Western music's metric fixity and definiteness, Finer's installation wants to evoke an indeterminate environmental soundscape. In other words, to present an "eco dub system" that relies on environmental harmonics as its sources of energy: climatic forces, gravity, water and wind (41). According to Finer, this is a post-digital return to a prehistoric music, in which the reverberation of nature becomes the space of composition. As such this sonic sculpture needs no human intervention (other than set up) and is independent from any energy source or technology. The idea is that it becomes part of the environment that it penetrates, providing an alternative model to the computational paradigm of sound design. Its compositional value rests on the fonnation of potential connections between landscape, metal, and weather, as they continuously contaminate and affect each other. Score for a Hole in the Ground, for this essay, poses a conceptual aesthetic challenge to the common dichotomies between nature and culture, the biological and the artificial. These oppositions are nothing

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new. Fundamental assumptions about the given natural world, at the heart of mainstream Western thought, reflect an inherent Cartesianism that philosophy and science have often been unable to shake. Within this tradition the attempt to understand a body's experience of space has relied primarily on the latter's ocularcentric conception, linking its experience to human subjectivity. Yet the rearrangement of hierarchies in sensory perception, in order to substitute visual predominance by aural experience (as in the work of Walter Ong and McLuhan) presents us with further limitations. First, that it remains confined in the dualism between perceiver and perceived as two distinct elements in communication, and, second, that it relies on the first in order to determine the latter. At the same time, a predetermined world implies that we can only ever represent it, by acquiring insight into fully formed identities and essences. According to Deleuze and Guattari, identity, analogy, resemblance, and opposition become problematic categories in constructing assemblages of the real rather than merely representing it. In the theory of assemblages a body is produced by process: its differences and relations with other bodies, within a system whose potential is never exhausted in actuality (4). A body is not defined by symmetrical parts that form a whole but by tensions, forces and speeds that melt the boundaries between internal and external worlds topologically. Topology, according to Massumi, is "the science of self-varying deformation" (Parables for the Virtual 1 34). Considered topologically bodies surpass the restriction of essences (what they are) and enter the reahn of assemblages (what they can do in their entanglements). Following Deleuze and Guattari this essay asks, how can we account for the relationship between body and environment beyond the limits of subjective experience? Current architectural theory, neurophysiological case studies and bio-technological experimentation, provide promising fields in which to rethink a body away from essentialism. Drawing on particular instances we will argue that real and virtual, living and nonliving, natural and artificial, are vibratory milieus tied together by the concept of 'rhythmic topology.' Away from the replacement of a visual perspective of space by a sonic one, this essay explores rhythm as a relational tension between nature and culture, a mode 'felt' rather than perceived. Rhythmic topology, then, addresses the virtuality of unfinished bodies (human, animal, technological) to conceptualise a becoming of nature that stretches beyond our knowledge of it. It thus argues that more than a new philosophy for ecology, Deleuzian ontology is crucial for the re-conceptualization of an altogether 'new' nature. In particular, this essay analyses the rhythmic topology of a body in three different levels: the aesthetic level of digital architecture as

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the spatiotemporal modification of bodies; the neurophysical level of rhythmic hallucinations as autogenerated bodily activity; and the biotechnological level of cellular vibration as the intensive transformation of turbulent matter.

A note on rhythmic topology The idea of nature as physis, the development of living organisms outside extemal influences, has not only shaped our understanding of ecology as the scientific study of the environment. Rather, it has necessarily interpreted nature contra culture throughout various aspects of Westem thought. This notable split between natural and artificial environmental models is part and parcel of an understanding of rhythm as split between a) physical, that is, a psycho-physiological notion of circadian body rhythms whose speed and slowness depend on extemal cues, expressed in breathing, walking, heart beat and so on; and b) artificial, such as the mechanical motion of the metronome, or any machine that establishes a steady tempo or pulse. In both cases, rhythm implies synchronization, balance and the metric organization of spacetime and body. However, for Deleuze and Guattari the concept of rhythm excludes any linear or metric relation in favor of 'packets of relations' and the 'superposition of disparate rhythms.' Here the relation between body and milieu is not one of identification, categorization or organization but one of rhythmic passing and transduction. Living bodies continually pass from one milieu to another, but also milieus pass into one another, tied together by a rhythmic creativity ("interrhythmicity"). Rhythm, in other words, is the critical moment that allows heterogeneous connections and the manifestation of change: Between night and day, between that which is constructed and that which grows natnrally, between mutations from the inorganic to the organic, from plant to animal, from animal to humankind, yet without this series constitnting a progression. (Deleuze and Guattari 3 1 3)

As such rhythm is not the beat of coordination but the diference that creates linkages in-between different milieus, during which one becomes the basis for the other. Following Deleuze and Guattari's concept of rhythm, we can rethink the relation between nature and culture away from hitherto dualities. This move to collapse the distance between either/or and between subject and object, involves plugging them into the abstract machine of topology. l A topological body is not unitary but collective: a

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dynamic alliance of different bodies, across species, between biology and technology. Topology, also called rubber-sheet or differential geometry; is a branch of mathematics concerned with spatial properties preserved under bicontinuous deformation. In Parables of the Virtual, Brian Massumi defines a topological figure "as the continuous transformation of one geometrical figure into another" ( 1 34). Topological spaces cannot be studied by the metric concepts of Euclidean geometry, such as length, shape and volume, since their distances do not remain fixed on the basis of their exact shape (DeLanda 22). Thus their analysis requires an altogether different understanding of form, under which a thing passes from one formation to another, irrespective of fundamental distinctions in shape. Studied first by Leibniz, subsequently by mathematicians such as Euler and Gauss, and established through Poincare's differential equations, topology points to systems that are utterly different with similar long-term behavior. Deleuze extracts the topological feahlre of multiplicities (defined by singularities) from Poincare, to argue for a rhizomatic model of thought, which knows no subject, object, points or positions. Considered topologically, a thing can no longer be considered as one, a unity, but as a multiplicity, always increasing its lines of connection with other things. Topology follows the continuous transformation between and within 'things' at a scale smaller than we can perceive. Rhythm is the link between things, bridging or allowing them to pass from one another, inciting the speed at which their relations unfold. Echoing Deleuze and Guattari, rhythmic topology conceptualizes an affective space that cuts across the distinction between biological and artificial, unraveling micro­ synthetic bodies beneath their macro-organic appearances. In the specific case of Finer's project, Score for a Hole in the Ground, we see . an attempt to surpass the determinism of Western models of thought, by moving away from a primarily technological and visual organization of music (composition in scores). As such the sculpture suggests an alternative understanding of rhythm as immanent to nature, expressing the latter's artificiality beyond technological interventions. The sculpture exposes the dub forces of an ecological system and in so doing reorganizes the relationship between naturality and artificiality. It is a system that continuously regenerates the micro-rhythms of sonic matter, extracting them from the guts of the earth and amplifying them noncomputationally. Sound molecules travel from water to metal and from soil to air, at different speed variations, in unpredictable and undecided ways. The anti-teleology of the system means that it will keep on playing endlessly, constituting and reconfiguring new rhythmic planes out of the

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different combinations and alterations of the molecular landscape. In Deleuze and Guattari's words, "nature appears as a rhythmic character with infinite transformations" (3 1 9). Although Finer's sonic sculphlre is used here to provide an entryway to the map of rhythmic topology, as are all the different instances used in this essay, rhythm for us is not directly associated with sound nor does it strictly imply time. At the molecular level, before vibration is extracted in sound and sound becomes organized music, we may speak of spatiotemporal rhythms that populate all bodies. If we detach the notion of rhythm from the limits of beat, meter and cadence, referring to the concept as used by Deleuze and Guattari, rhythmic topology invokes a space that is affective rather than specific to the sonic or the visual. Affect, according to Massumi, is "the simultaneous participation of the virrual in the actual and the acrual in the virtual, as one arises from and rerurns to the other" (35). Affect is a body's capacity (power) to enter into relations with other bodies, a potential to affect and be affected (Massumi 15). For Spinoza, affects are modifications of a body (ajJectiones), by which the power of a body to act increases together with the ideas of these modifications. Affect thus surpasses action; it is felt by a body "toward a thing furure, present, past" and draws it in different directions (Spinoza 1 28, 1 95, 1 90). Affect is change superimposed by a body's potential; it does not inform us of the nature or externality of a body but it is an indication - or inclination - of what it might become. Rhythmic topology is thus not a matter of sonic or visual perceptions and cognitions of a body, but of affective, nonsensorial tendencies that extend to all bodies living or not. As we have seen in the case of Score for a Hole, inorganic and organic matter share symbiotic connections that point to naMe as an ongoing process away from teleology. The spatiotemporal eco architecture of this sculprure rums our understanding of nature towards an open-ended becoming of indeterminate mutations.

Blob Bodies The coming together of heterogeneous realities beyond the limits of possibility and the concreteness of acruality is better expressed by the concept of potential relationality. A philosophy of potential relationality crucially argues that an opposition between nature and culture reduces the world to · a function of human understanding. Soil, air, metal object and sound molecule feed into each other in a variety of ways, as their abstract formations reveal a multiple narure that we problematically reduce to the domain of the living. In architechlre, contemporary practices are also

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Rhythmic Topology: The Affective Stretching of Nature

beginning to investigate the relational potential of digital design, using topology as an alternative method to building and understanding spaces. The building of space now shifts from stable form to abstract force, steering new ideas and challenges to the relationship between space, body and technology. Architects of topological surface organizations "invite us to consider a new morphological analog of the body more akin to a single­ cell blob than a symmetrically articulated upright man" (Greg Lynn 176). In so doing they incite the amorphous, unfmished and underlying topological structures that bodies and spaces endure. Architectural theorist Greg Lynn's method of designing, involves programming a set of modifications before he has an object to modify. His work engages with "an alternative mathematics of fOlm" ( 176), to integrate an abstract plan that cannot contain all the details of the final product. In other words, the design has to be abstract enough in order to be compatible with myriad combinations. Lynn's "soft geometry" includes curves, folds and blobs as morphological issues that emerge in the process of converting a surface into a continuous traversing line. Blobs are intensive bodies that traverse the internal/external divide (between body and world, organic and inorganic) expanding by constantly incorporating external forces. Their importance in architectural theory is that they suggest peculiar and alternative methods of structural organization and a strategy of building that connects exterior and interior topologically. In particular, Lynn uses · a topological tactic that he calls 'smoothing,' the blending of heterogeneous mixtures that continuously reorganize form to expose new possibilities that were not there before. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's description of smoothness as the "continuous variation (and development) of form" (478), Lynn puts a philosophy of heterogeneous ecology to practice. He is building process not form, following the potential movement of self-variation before it settles into an exact figure. Although Lynn uses CNC (computer numerical control), digital technology in his work is not used as an architectural tool of construction but as an integral component of the environment. Hence, Lynn does not strive for a simulation of reality in artificiality or towards a perfection already present in nature. Referring to Lynn's description of computer­ assisted design (CAD), differential parameters that combine to govern continuities of self-varying movement and end only when the program stops running, Massumi asks: Doesn't [Lynn's] topological design method digitally repeat what our bodies do noncomputationally as we make our way to and from our workstations? Then, when we watch the program lUn, aren't we doing it again, slumped before the screen? Are we not immobily repeating our

Eleni Ikoniadou

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body's ability to extract form from movement? When we stare, barely seeing, into the screen, haven't we entered a 'lost' body-dimension of abstract orientation not so terribly different from the one we go to when we roll up our eyes and fnd ourselves in the fold? (Massumi 1 83-4)

Lynn's abstract topological geometries of fluidity reveal an architecture of folding that engages with seemingly unrelated elements, as they become intricately connected by the external force of smoothing (or smooth mixtures). Smoothing does not eliminate difference between the elements but rather integrates it, by topologizing their surfaces. Body and milieu enter into a new allian