[A truncated transcription by ‘undercurrent’ of a symposium held in Paris in December 2004 under the auspices of the CSL, under the title Pop’philosophie, et après…?. Participants in this disussion were Chaim van der Lycée (Centre pour les Sciences Libidinales, Alphaville, Paris) and Grayson Darkling-Furniss (Black Hart University, New Crobuzon)]
Darkling-Furniss: If I could ask my colleague to open the discussion, since he is far more au fait with the lineage of so-called “pop philosophy” than I…?
Van der Lycée: Thank you. In 1972, with L’Anti-Oedipe – manifesto of Pop-Philosophy and seemingly the zenith, or nadir, of post-structuralist excess – scarcely printed, Deleuze had already admitted that it did not achieve “the pop-philosophy that we dreamt of.” Eight years later, in considering the contemporary cultural scene, he was tempted to admit that, in certain senses, “L’Anti-Oedipe was a complete failure.”
Today, amongst the numerous rubrics under which the growing army of Deleuze-scholars have placed the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (marxo-freudian synthesis, post-lacanian psychoanalysis, hypermaterialism, liberal idealism of desire and delirium…) we very rarely hear mention of Pop-Philosophy. Maybe only when a severe critic wishes to reprimand those who have used Capitalism and Schizophrenia according to the “instruction manual” provided by the authors themselves (“read a book as you’d listen to a record”,”concepts are exactly like sounds…they are intensities that either suit you or don’t”, etcetera) for having corrupted the pure philosophical thought of the “real Deleuze”. That Deleuze who arrived in opportune fashion after his own death, to be canonised – after all – as a totally traditional philosopher, the one whose magisterial presence serves systematically to erase the importance of the Deleuze-Guattari becoming, the “misadventure” of Pop-Philosophy. One such critic warns us: “Advice to all pop-philosophers […] The desiring-machine is not a ‘pop’ object whose sole use is to amuse you, it is a complex ontological assemblage. Which is less fun, certainly, but is ‘Signed Spinoza'”. (“Tu me copieras cent fois : ‘…que je degradasse les murs de la classe…’“!). The idea that philosophy could be enjoyable, surely the real Deleuze couldn’t have said it, despite the evidence – or, if so, it’s the fault of that blaggard Félix!
This lack of will to pursue pop-philosophy is compounded by the fact that today (and I trust that my worthy interlocutor will forgive me if I rehearse his arguments in advance) we seem to be surrounded by pretenders to the title: the ‘concepts’ of marketing and advertising; the millenarian theologies of the digital revolution; the therapeutic “philosophies” of self-help, spiritual growth, crystal healing…the massive tomes of management theory. We even have philosophy consultants to give support to the well-heeled in their professional and personal lives: I quote from the marketing literature of one such: “If people face problems that are social or economic, it doesn’t make sense to define their problems in purely psychological terms.” Not bad, albeit at a distance of some thirty years from L’Anti-Oedipe, and no doubt at a more expensive hourly rate too. “Some people who have stabilized their neurochemistry and validated their emotions now wish to examine or re-examine the criteria or their beliefs, the principles of their conduct, or the meaning of their lives” Thus, philosophy reduced to an extra level of the therapeutic service industry for the bourgeois hit by midlife crisis.
Michel Houellebecq has described in horrifying detail the pathology of this repulsive world of neo-hippiedom with its brash and naive symbolisms, its empty theorizing, and its aromatherapy oils which grease the wheels of capitalism for a “revolutionary” generation surprised and disappointed by their political issue. A world that stinks of narcotics actual and metaphorical, consumption, comfortable incomes, patchouli and repressed nihilist despair. If these are the pop-philosophies that ’68 has bequeathed us, the point is well-taken: the philosophy of liberation of desire, pop-philosophy, is a failure because our culture is saturated with desire, with liberalism, and the result is nothing but a new decadence, atomised individuals in desultory search for new “intensities” to amuse themselves with. Quite rightly, our critic reminds us that whereas Deleuze had insisted that the thought of desire was nothing if desire was not thought as a _problem_, today desire is unproblematically omnipresent.
But Deleuze and Guattari never rescinded the ideal of pop philosophy, and neither should we. We should understand pop-philosophy not as a question of accessibility, of political populism, or merely of ‘fun’. Pop-philosophy is the idea of a mobile thought, distributed, transversal, founded on the abstract processes of pop culture. If D&G considered L’Anti-Oedipe a failure, it wasn’t because pop-philosophy had failed, but because they had failed it. It was still too academic, as they said; and we betray them if we take this as pretext to return gravely, responsibly, to the self-denial and to our sober studies in the history of philosophy, to end the supposed ‘deferral’ of the properly philosophical.
Pop is a form of distributed collectivity, outside organised political masses, precisely that form of collectivity affined to our technological age, one which expresses best the rapport between this epoch and those who it at once produces and alienates: those without profession, without letters, without papers [sans-papiers], without philosophy.
It is an expression of the most potent force – spontaneous inventive collectivity, it propogates itself without frontiers. It is incorporeal contagion, rhizomatics. Pop happens on the plane of abstract experience, pop creates experiences which do not yet have names. Far from being the proces by which philosophy must simplify to reach the people, pop is the crucible from which emerge unforeseeable forms of anorganic life and culture.
Pop-philosophy is the arithmetic of desiring prodution, the calculus of the machinic unconscious. Post-structuralism, L’Anti-Oedipe included, with its residual investment in institutional rationality, foundered on this frontier, between the good sense of interpretation and the nonsense of machinic delirium.
But the pop-philosophers, not afraid of being corrupted, with their participative rather than masterful, relation to the world, will show how the semiotic system of philosophy will find its dissolution with the rhythic tics and conceptual infections of pop-philosophy.
Darkling-Furniss: All talk of popular numerics, vernacular cybernetics, and so forth is – philosophically speaking – nothing but a degraded anthropological scrabbling. Politically speaking it is worse than Mitterand, it is complicit with every sort of liberal dilettantism. As Houellebecq himself realises, we must take our criticism of 68 and post-68 back further, to Freud and Nietzsche, the ‘fathers of therapy’. Whereas we can exculpate Nietzsche from blame for Nazi phantasies, since that was an opportunistic usage of his thought, he is no less (and just as deleteriously, in fact) the direct progenitor of a new decadence. The decoupling of truth from value and the principle of genealogy spell the end of all political responsibility.
Do you realize how ridiculous you must sound when you bring into the classroom, the place where should be taught universal truths, this [spluttering]…this rubbish. This is little more than a propoganda campaign for MTV. Pop caters to the lowest common denominator; the energy of pop is too often the testosterone-fuelled energy of male adolescence; the languages of pop are impenetrable, ephemeral jargons; it locks into stereotypical patterns which relate purely to physiological artefacts and thus have no significance whatever to philosophy. Man will always have need of entertainment; this is not, however, philosophy; or even philosophically interesting. There is no philosophy, nor politics, in pop.
Van der Lycée: These are not trivial objections, they relate to real problems: how to engineer a singularity that has universal appeal; how to channel viciously entropising energies into a labyrinth; how to create a new idiom to voice feelings that do not exist in the major language. Some will endure, some not: a process of experimentation. These are questions about how to create artificial cultures, which is precisely the question of pop. For there are not, and in all probability will not again be, “naturally ocurring cultures,” and this is the desolate cry we hear from both the harbingers of postmodernity and the Houellebecqian critics of liberation. For pop philosophy the transcendental question par excellence is what makes abstract cultures tick.
Moreover, it is precisely the core pop audience, the adolescents for whom, as Guattari writes, ony music can create a proper “existential territory”, those who feel concepts and ideas in the most raw way, who are too affected by them. It is the role of institutional education (and in severe cases, university philosophy) to help them “grow out of” this phase where the proximity to life holds the dangers of schizophrenia and suicide; to demonstrate to them how to manipulate thoughts and concepts with indifference, like a formalist game.
The pop multitude is not organised, it is constituted by coincidence by distributed process: unconscious tropisms which form before analysis or well-thinking reformism can declare a programme (here is what was surprising in 68: it was not authorised by intellectuals; so for a joyous period, it did not make sense.)
Of course, the de jure distinction of pop is found everywhere in de facto mixtures. Those who insist on conflating pop becomings with populism or with particular instances of pop will also object that what we are proposing is merely a philosophical appropriation, tainted equally by its outside origins and the intellectualist de-authentication of what it appropriates.
Pop (including all the mercurial media of videogames, communication technologies, argots and slangs, but especially music) is not essentially oppositional, militant or even political, except insofar as it is purposefully opposed, or hijacked by outside forces. But it is an expression of the most potent force of all – it is spontaneous inventive collectivity, it spreads without barriers, it is incorporeal contagion or rhizomatics (“rhizomatics=pop analysis”). Pop operates on the plane of abstract experience, creating intensities that do not yet have a name.
Darkling-Furniss: (laughing) Experimentation! This is not a chemistry laboratory!
Van der Lycée: Experimentation. You will remember that Professor Desnoms, towards the end of his troubled tenure at the Institute of Digital Studies in Arkham, tried to convince his students that the way to study Nietzsche was not to understand, but to map the relationships between each successive letter onto the standard angloamerican QWERTY keyboard. Naturally, students raised issues with the qwertopographical system of interpretation. They pointed out that The manuscript of Genealogy of Morals was handwritten, before Nietzsche obtained his typewriter in 1880, a full eight years before the QWERTY layout was agreed as a standard. Two years even before his typed letter proclaimed the mild form of the hypothesis “Our writing materials contribute their part to our thinking”. And moreover a lexical analysis of the work could hardly hope to come up with authentic insights into Nietzsche’s philosophical genius, especially when the book under consideration was not even in the original German. Sweeping these problems aside, Desnoms had begun work on his magnum opus when (according to the stories passed down to us) one day, and quite suddenly, the departmental staff were startled by a hideous cry of “Ia! shub-niggurath!” Desnom’s amanuensis (employed to carry on the work when the professor’s fingernails grew to outlandish lengths, preventing all access to the keyboard) entered the office to find Desnoms had disappeared leaving nothing more than a strange fetid odor that hung around the corners of his office with its odd angles and ancient slanting ceiling. Some believed the Professor’s passage was merely a trick in poor taste, whilst others had “theories too wild and fantastic for credence.”
Darkling-Furniss: One might have expected you to raise the ‘Desnoms case’; and although I will not accuse you of poor taste in parading this sorry example of incontinence and enthusiasm before us like a hero, I cannot understand the relevance of his ghost’s presence here today. Since everybody knows that Desnoms simply went mad. Is it then any wonder that in the end all his work came down to a battered keyboard? What a wonderful metonymic image for the reduction of our philosophical heritage to a desultory, arbitrary game of signs. Like the numbers within numbers of the stock market, if one looks long enough one is hypnotized; but in reality all one is watching is the unthinking despotism of market forces, one is not thinking, one is merely counting.
Van der Lycée: True, this indifference to signification and this pure space of nomos in which pop operates is related to the nomos of the market (a rare joke amongst economists : a teacher asks, “Name two pronouns”; the Pupil responds “who, me?”. According to the market, the pupil is right.) But what is more philosophically rigorous, what could exhibit less of an attachment to the comfort of immediate certainties, than this absolute submission to arbitrary principles? Who is the more abstract and rigorous here, I ask you?
[there is an undecipherable outburst from Darkling-Furniss]
To continue…along this vector, mapping lines of desire without reason, following delirious connections, a phenomenology, starting from the middle of a field of forces rather than from an epistemological center, meets a materialism that has left rationalism behind. The illogics of matter. For a true materialism must accept that concepts are matters too. Thought should be unafraid of being corrupted: this is the action of the world on things. A participative, not a masterful, relation to the world. The completion of the semiotic system of philosophy would be its dissolution. Laughter, tics, infections. “Transcendental materialism = programmatic occultism.”
Far from being the simple context to which philosophy must be simplified in order to get through to the people, pop is the crucible from which emerge the unforeseen virtual forms of life and culture (Jacques Attali : “Music is prophecy…[I]t explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given coded. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible” (we might add, theorisable))
To attain pop-philosophical status, it is not a case of simplifying, pandering to all-too-human therapeutic method. But we will not accept either the retrenchment in academic hard-labour.
Darkling-Furniss: The action of the world on things indeed! What you’re suggesting is merely a submission to the world, a piety in the face of supposedly inevitable flows, whereas I believe that the glory of the human spirit, if there is any, consists in separating oneself from the world, in thinking beyond what is immediately influential.
Van der Lycée: Nevertheless, I must remark that you and your compatriots are most timely: your reassertion of eternal Being and militant political truth certainly captures the spirit of the times. (This isn’t to accuse you of any personal cynicism, since no doubt even intellectual markets have their invisible hand. If the accusation of being unwitting apologists for “digital capitalism”, mitterandists avant le lettre, can be made against Deleuze and Guattari, then tu quoque! )
If the alternative is to be subjected to a philosophical épuration sauvage, giving no quarter in its drive to dessicate philosophy and return it to its momentous Platonic origins, then we are happy to take up the cause of the rhythmic proliferation of non-organic life, a vitalist terrorism: Pop philosophy – you’re either with us or against us.
Darkling-Furniss: That remark is in dubious taste. Now you’re just being childish.
References
1. “Pop’philosophy….et puis?” in Cahiers pour le schizanalyse vol 16 no.4, Dec 2004, Paris
2. Deleuze’s Letter to Cressole (“Letter to a Severe Critic”)
3. Interview in the Edition of L’Arc dedicated to Deleuze in 1980
4. Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux
5. “I Shrink, therefore I am”, London Observer Magazine, 21.10.04.
6. David Rabouin, “La pensée du désir, un échec?”, in the edition of Magazine Litteraire dedicated to Deleuze in 2003
7. Michel Houellebecq, Atomised (Les Particules Elementaires) and Platform (Plateforme).
9 Dialogues, Parnet and Deleuze
10 Guy Lardreau, “L’Exercice différé de la Philosophie; À l’occasion de Deleuze”