Deleuze and Beckett

S.E. Wilmer, Audroné Žukauskaitė, S.E. Wilmer, Audroné Žukauskait?, Audroné Žukauskait?

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137481146
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

Deleuze and Beckett is a collection of essays on specific aspects of the Deleuze and Beckett interface. Some of the world's leading Beckett and Deleuze specialists apply different concepts of Deleuzian philosophy to a wide range of Beckett's oeuvre, including his novels, short stories, and stage, film and television work.

Part I
Difference, Becoming, Multiplicity

1

Ideas in Beckett and Deleuze

Anthony Uhlmann

In the 1994 Preface to the English translation of Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze, returning to a theme that had long haunted his works, sets out how philosophy and art might be drawn together to allow us to continue to think differently: to allow us to escape formal and conventional constraints on what we are allowed to think. He states:

The time is coming when it will hardly be possible to write a book of philosophy as it has been done for so long: ‘Ah! the old style…’. The search for new means of philosophical expression was begun by Nietzsche and must be pursued today in relation to the renewal of certain other arts, such as the theatre or the cinema. (Deleuze, 1994, p. xxi)

The statement involves a sense of pessimism with regard to the discipline of philosophy and a sense of optimism with regard to the potentials of art. Writing in 2012 one might glance askew at his optimism with regard to form in art. The ‘time image’ in Cinema, for example, which Deleuze saw emerging in the works of the French New Wave and elsewhere in the postwar European film tradition, has now receded in prominence, with ‘movement image’ cinema, which it seemed to supersede as a means of expression in Deleuze’s cinema books, becoming ever more forcefully the dominant mode of expression in cinema (see Deleuze, 1986; 1989). Experimental theatre also struggles to survive, with the more popular forms dominating to the extent that the momentum of avant-garde theatre is difficult to discern and exists (like time image cinema), very much at the margins. So too, the kind of serial form contemporary fiction that he lauds (in the Logic of Sense for example) is marginal.

For Deleuze, of course, the margins are the site from which the elements of most interest emerge, and will emerge in future. My point is simply that at present these kinds of artists (of whom there are a good number), and their forebears, are more marginal, less recognized, than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, and that this relates to a problem similar to the problem that Deleuze identified with regard to philosophy. That is, on the one hand, a particular form or ‘image’ of thought has come to dominate in philosophy, and the task of philosophy is to make a new one that can better respond to the challenges of our times, and on the other hand a second threat, ‘opinion’, which seeks to close down thought altogether, has become more and more powerful in the public sphere. So too, in the arts, two similar challenges have emerged: on the one hand, particular received ‘forms’ have come to dominate and harden, and drive out more active or creative forms, and on the other hand, an opinion has taken hold that now fails to recognize how art might have value as a way of expressing, and as a means of engagement with, what confronts us.¹

These points are meant simply as a historically contingent background to what follows, where again, I will try to show how Beckett’s works shed light on ideas developed in Deleuze and test and extend those ideas. In particular, here, I will focus on two points of impasse and possibility that Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, identify: first, the limitations placed on philosophy by the image of thought that connects representation to Platonic Ideas which he discusses in ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’ (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 253–266); second, the limitations placed on thought by collective assemblages of enunciation that, with Félix Guattari, he discusses in ‘November 20, 1923, Postulates of Linguistics’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1993, pp. 75–111). Structures emerge from these forms that are based on an invariance that fixes and limits our capacity to respond to experience and does no justice to the experience of life. I will argue that, in his 1983 play What Where (adapted for TV in 1986 and recently reproduced) Beckett engages with and ‘exhausts’ forms of thinking that closely relate to the Idea, and collective assemblages of enunciation, and in doing so challenges and renders these received modes of stability unstable.

Beckett is one of the writers Deleuze admired (indeed, in the quotation cited above he makes an allusion to Beckett’s play Happy Days — ‘Ah! the old style…’).² In two pieces he dedicated to Beckett’s works for TV and film, he underlines his understanding of the importance of a) exhaustion and b) negative demonstration to his understanding of Beckett’s works (see Deleuze, 1997a; 1997b). Here I will argue that what is at stake in What Where is not just exhaustion as diminution or petering out, but exhaustion as a cancelling out of grounds of foundation; the cancelling out of the grounding forms of the Ideal or Idea (as it relates to, founds and limits the self) and the collective assemblage of enunciation that relates to, founds and limits interpersonal relations.

1 The Idea

In ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’ Deleuze begins with the question of what it means to ‘reverse Platonism’ (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 253–266).³ The question itself is linked with Nietzsche and is seen as the ‘task of philosophy’ or rather the philosophy of the future. What is it then to reverse Platonism Deleuze asks? Not to do away with ‘essence and appearance’: this had already been tried by Hegel and Kant. Deleuze looks at Nietzsche’s formula, ‘to reverse Platonism’, and realizes that all he has been given by way of an indication as to how to proceed is a metaphor, which does not indicate what it is that Platonism seeks to do. Yet to reverse Platonism one must understand its motivations, why it works as it does.

Deleuze indicates that the motivation of Platonism, the theory of Ideas (or Forms) is the will to select or choose. This becomes clear, he suggests, when we look at the method of division which is not ‘just one dialectical procedure among others [...] [but] represents […] the entire system’ (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 253–254). Such a procedure needs a foundation, a justification or legitimation. Deleuze shows how division is able to bring together the dialectic and the myth as it is central to both. Myths are a means of foundation: they explain the state of things (which Plato would have us believe includes the lineages he wishes to prove legitimate). That is, myths explain not only the natural state of things but can serve to found the social state of things while pretending to explain them.

Deleuze schematizes the Neoplatonic triad of the a) unparticipated, b) the participated and c) the participant as involving: a) the foundation, b) the object aspired to and c) the pretender, which establishes the foundation as the primary term (always out of reach to those who would wish to participate in it). This is metaphorically represented as a marriage to the truth with the figures of a) the father, b) the daughter and c) the fiancé. A further example he gives of this model is as follows: a) Justice (the foundation term or ideal), b) the quality of being just (which derives from but is not itself Justice) and c) the just men (the pretenders who claim to be just).

The myth provides the foundation test against which the pretenders should be judged, and so, Deleuze concludes:

Only on this condition does division pursue and attain its end, which is not the specification of the concept but the authentication of the Idea, not the determination of species but the selection of lineage. (Deleuze, 1990, p. 256)

There are three important texts by Plato that deal with division: Phaedrus, The Sophist and The Statesman. Yet while Phaedrus and The Statesman both include myths The Sophist does not. This can be explained, according to Deleuze, if we take into account that while Phaedrus and The Statesman were looking for the true pretender (and thus needed to establish his credentials through the authority of the founding myth), The Sophist involves a hunt for the false pretender. Such a pretender has no credentials, no relation to the truth of the Idea, and so there is no need to elaborate the foundation of this truth.

Yet The Sophist leads us into paradox because, as readers of Plato, we recognize not only the sophist when he is at last hunted down, but see in the description of him the characteristics of the Socrates we have already met in previous dialogues. If we go back to The Sophist we can see this moment of recognition (which Deleuze suggests is a double recognition):

STRANGER: I can clearly make out a pair of them. I see one who can keep up his dissimulation publicly in long speeches to a large assembly [the demagogue who might be confused with the statesman]. The other uses short arguments in private and forces others to contradict themselves in conversation [the sophist who might be confused with the philosopher]. (Plato, 2005, 1016)

The second definition, that of the sophist, bears a striking resemblance to the picture we have of Socrates: this is both how others see him and how, in part, he sees himself. Without recourse to the myth of foundation, then, we can pin down the sophist, yet he is indistinguishable from Socrates. This identification has profound consequences. To quote Deleuze:

it may be that the end of The Sophist contains the most extraordinary adventure of Platonism: as a consequence of searching in the direction of the simulacrum and leaning over its abyss, Plato discovers, in the flash of an instant, that the simulacrum is not simply a false copy, but that it places into question the very notions of copy and model. (Deleuze, 1990, p. 256)

So the reversal of Plato might be found in Plato himself, and rhetoric (neither good nor bad in itself) is at the heart of all philosophy.

Deleuze examines the dualities – essence versus appearance, intelligible versus sensible, Idea versus image, original versus copy, model versus simulacrum – and suggests that the final duality involves non-equivalence. Whereas the others line up (that is, essence links to the intelligible, to the Idea, to the original, while appearance links to the sensible, the image and the copy) the last two branch off, with the model being identified with the copy (rather than the original) and the simulacrum being identified with neither.

The copy (like the model) is a well-founded pretender, while the simulacrum is a false pretender. With this move we are able to return to the question of motivation, and Deleuze suggests that here the Platonic motivation clearly involves the promotion of the copy and the exclusion or repression of the simulacrum. The simulacrum is dangerous, as it brings with it the void, the infinite regress which is in practice repetition without ground or foundation. Without foundation the regress goes on forever: simulacra are built upon simulacra without any original against which we might judge all the others. We plunge into a mise en abîme that can only be avoided by repressing the simulacra in favour of the copy.

Yet what is really involved in this inequivalence between the copy and simulacrum? The first is founded upon resemblance, but it is a good copy not in that it copies anything, but in that it provides an image of an Idea. The good copy resembles the Idea, not some other material thing: it is a copy made after the Idea. The simulacrum, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the Idea: it does not pass through the Idea but copies images which do not resemble Ideas (or Forms). The simulacrum then, is not best understood as a bad copy of the good copy (which would be an image of an image of an Idea), but as something that evades the Idea altogether; something which, therefore, while still an image, does not have any resemblance (to an Idea). The ground then, the foundation (provided by the Idea) disappears. Deleuze gives us an example from the Catholic catechism:

God made man in his image and resemblance. Through sin, however, man lost the resemblance while maintaining the image. We have become simulacra. We have forsaken moral existence in order to enter into aesthetic existence. (Deleuze, 1990, p. 257)

That is, we have moved from the realm of truth into the realm of pure appearance (divorced from knowledge of essence).

While the simulacrum still produces the effect of resemblance, this is achieved in an altogether different manner from that of the copy. While the copy produces resemblance through similarity, the simulacrum produces resemblance through difference.

The Idea indicates certain proportions and certain relations and the copy precisely follows these instructions. In Plato’s The Sophist we see how the copy in art maintains the same relations as that which is copied while the simulacrum diverges from them. The copy, then, is objectively like the Idea and so resembles the truth that that Idea carries with it; in this way the copy is related to the absolute truth of the Idea. The simulacrum, however, represents through difference; that is, it includes the differential point of view of the object within its representation. A painting of the human form, for example, shows us a specific point of view of that given object: we are drawn into this point of view and further distort it by adding our own point of view to it so that it becomes ours. The painting in no way follows the proportions or relations of the original; indeed, it produces its effect of resemblance by not following them. In reflecting a point of view, however, it also might be compared to the relative truths encountered in Plato’s Protagoras. For what is a relative truth other than the notion of an object when perceived from a certain point of view?

For Plato, one who produces a true copy possesses knowledge, and this knowledge is not so much the knowledge of techniques and methods, but the knowledge of the Idea which is being represented. The bad copy, however, the simulacrum, neither professes nor displays true knowledge of the Idea; rather it works through ruse, sleight of hand. While the copy involves production in line with the blueprint of the Idea, the simulacrum is non-productive; it is pure image without Idea, pure effect without production. This is a kind of vertigo that cuts us free from the realm of Ideas and their certainty and throws us into an unfounded realm in which absolute truths are unknowable, which is akin to madness, but also to a breaking free of limits:

The simulacrum includes the differential point of view; and the observer becomes a part of the simulacrum itself, which is transformed and deformed by his point of view. In short, there is in the simulacrum a becoming-mad, or a becoming unlimited […] To impose a limit on this becoming, to order it according to the same, to render it similar – and, for that part which remains rebellious, to repress it as deeply as possible, to shut it up in a cavern at the bottom of the Ocean – such is the aim of Platonism in its will to bring about the triumph of icons over simulacra. (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 258–259)

This, for Deleuze, is how Plato founds the domain of philosophy. It is filled with representations, copies and icons. With regard to the Neoplatonic triad, we have as foundation the Idea (the original which is the object aspired to), the model (which is the Same as the original: Justice is nothing more than being just) and the copy (the pretender which is similar to the Same). Deleuze goes on to show how the work of great philosophers such as Leibniz and Hegel served still to enforce similarities and reject difference.

His alternative is altogether different: it involves not looking to an order of things behind Being (reality) but at the ultimate disorder which characterizes real experience. That is, to the order of Plato’s Ideas, he opposes Chaos. In the or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Difference, Becoming, Multiplicity
• Part II Psychoanalysis and Sociality
• Part III Space, Time and Memory
• Part IV Theatre and Performance
• Index