#deleuzeguattari

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Sad Mondays #2

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, February, 2020.

Art is the sexualization of survival; or equally sexuality is the rendering artistic of nature, the making of nature into more than it is…(Elizabeth Grosz, An Un-likely Alliance, 49)

The above quote is taken from Elizabeth Grosz’s short entry ‘Eight Deleuzian Theses on Art’ in the anthology focused on Deleuze and Guattari’s relation to ecological thinking, ‘An Un-likely Alliance - Thinking Environments with Deleuze and Guattari,’ in which she rejects the holistic perspective of traditional eco-feminism in favour of a bifurcated Darwinian understanding of nature to produce a definition of art. For me, the above echoes Adorno’s discussion of natural beauty, especially when he writes,

For [natural beauty], nature is exclusively appearance, never the stuff of labor and the reproduction of life, let alone the substratum of science. Like the experience of art, the aesthetic experience of nature is that of images. (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 65)

In both cases, art is defined as an excess to nature: in art there is something “more” than the given nature, nature is made into more than it is - it is appearance as well as the stuff of labour or reproduction of life. But whereas in Adorno, nature is made aesthetic through the concept of the image and thus involves the concept of human consciousness, in Grosz, the kind of nature found in art is an animal force that displaces consciousness (as well as unconsciousness) as the defining quality of the human. As she states, the “animal” is the driving force behind all human productions, art, science, and philosophy.

“Art is the sexualisation of survival,” meaning it belongs to one of the two evolutionary forces identified by Darwin, the sexual rather than natural selection, used to attract sexual partners for the purpose of the sexual encounter. If we can believe it, just as birds have song and colourful feathers for attracting their mate, we have a comparable impulse for the decorative, which lies behind the urge to produce art, even if this urge occasionally goes against our need for survival. Art is our plumage, just as extravagant and just as useless.

Art makes “nature more than it is,” because these forms of bodily display, which excite and produce pleasure, link the living body with the material earth. For Grosz, art is the result of us humans being able to extract something from our habitat, be it a property, quality, or force—colour or sound—not with the aim of this becoming useful, but precisely for the irregularity of its appeal, and the pleasure it can bring. Art is the ability to detect a property which resonates with our bodies, remove it from the habitat in which it is found, and place it within a world of seduction, a world described by Grosz as “virtual.” In this, Grosz’s Deleuzian interpretation of the human animal impulse as sexual selection resonates with Adorno’s description of natural beauty as an “image,” but mirrors it erotically.

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Sad Mondays #12, part one and two

Author: Magda Wisniowska – December, 2020.

Parnet: Well, men cannot become-men, and that's tough!

Deleuze: No, that's a majoritarian standard, heterosexual, adult, male. He has no becoming.

(https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/lectures/en/ABCMsRevised-NotesComplete051120_1.pdf)

For Deleuze, men cannot become-men. Indeed, nothing can become-man because man is not a becoming. Man is, and what man is, is a standard: heterosexual, adult, male. He constitutes the white, male, adult, “‘rational,’” European standard upon which our majority is based (Thousand Plateaus, 292). Man is a “major, molar term,” a dominant man-standard, around which we, in the Western world, construct our identities, in a society, which is patriarchal, where the predetermined subject is heteronormative, and its values, Judeo-Christian (see Patty Soutin, “Becoming-woman” in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, 119). In contrast, becoming is what destabilises a major molar term and is thus always a becoming-minoritarian.

Neither however, can women become-women, at least not in the sense of a simple transformation of changing into a woman. The term, woman, is equally “a molar entity,” her identity defined in opposition to the dominant molar term of man. She has a form, a body endowed with organs and functions. She has a subjectivity which is feminine. Becoming is not the transformation or imitation of this entity, but a disruptive molecular process of “emitting particles that enter the relations of movement and rest” in “the zone of proximity.” It is the production of a “microfemininity,” the creation within us of a “molecular woman” (Thousand Plateaus, 275). While all molar entities, men and women alike, are such configurations of molecules or particles, in becoming these are broken up and recomposed, so that they lose their initial molar configuration. Becoming is that in-between stage of the yet unordered, unorganised particles, at the threshold of forming something else. Therefore, becoming-woman as a becoming-molecular is the first step of breaking away from that most powerful of standards, the molar term “man.”

As such, a first step towards becoming-molecular, becoming-woman —though not wholly incompatible with feminist aims — has attracted a substantial and completely justifiable amount of feminist ire, criticised for its inattentiveness to the specificity of what it means to be a woman in its privileging of the universal process of becoming (see Errin Cunnif Gilson, “Responsive Becoming: Ethics between Deleuze and Feminism” in Deleuze and Ethics). Depending on who you read, becoming-woman, is no real woman at all, or it is the most real of women, the only kind of body and sexuality not organised through its relation to man. My approach is somewhat different — I want to know why Deleuze and Guattari discuss becoming-woman in relation to, not man, but the warrior. Man might not have a becoming, but a warrior does — for it is the warrior, who is becoming-woman. As they write,

…all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings. When the man of war disguises himself as a woman, flees disguised as a girl, hides as a girl, it is not a shameful, transitory incident in his life. To hide, to camouflage oneself, is a warrior function…

As Leonard Lawlor explains, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the soldier’s becoming is central to the understanding of becoming’s zigzag structure. As Lawlor repeatedly reminds the reader, becoming is not a reciprocal relation, but one in which we become an other, so that the other can become something else — in this case, soldier becomes woman, so that woman becomes animal. Lawlor emphasises the importance of “functions” in this process, or what he also calls “traits.” Zigzagging occurs through these functions, precisely because they are plural, one function having more than one use. Disguise has therefore at least two uses: exhibition, in order to attract a partner and disguise, a means of camouflage. Man becomes woman and woman becomes animal through the sharing of these traits. He writes,

What does the woman become? The woman does not become a man. Disguising herself, she becomes an animal who exhibits herself, not so that she may attract a mate, but so that she may be able to attack an enemy. In its undecidability, the animal function of disguise is at the center of becoming woman, but in this becoming, it is not the case that man becomes woman and woman becomes man. Man becomes woman and then woman becomes animal. (“Following the Rats”, Substance #117, vol. 37, no. 3, 2008, 177)

Lawlor’s account is very good in showing how becoming is not an isolated process but rather one in which we are bound to the becoming of the other. But who is this disguised warrior, this woman who attacks? While Lawlor makes no mention of this, the example used by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus is Kleist’s play, Penthesilea (which is especially pertinent, a new operatic version having been recently screened on Arte - https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/101038-000-A/penthesilea-dusapin-beim-festival-d-automne/). In the play, Penthesilea is the woman, who is becoming-animal and Achilles is the warrior, who is becoming-woman.

Penthesilea is the Amazon queen, who attacks the Greeks during the siege of Troy, in order to capture prisoners for the purpose of procreation. She thinks she has captured Achilles, with whom she falls in love. Whereas unknown to her, Achilles had escaped and it is Penthesilea who is his captive, a fact he initially conceals from her. When Penthesilea discovers the truth, she flies into a rage. Achilles on the other hand, now knowing that the Amazons must defeat their lovers in battle, returns to the fight unarmed with the intention of surrender. With no means of defending himself he is set upon by the angry queen. We see the aftermath, Penthesilea pale and drawn, alone on the stage, told of the events by her companions, who repeatedly reassure her, sei ruhig, sei ruhig. She is told that she has shot Achilles, piercing his throat with her arrow, and then, together with her dogs, she has ripped apart the corpse and eaten his flesh.

There is no becoming “man” here, no changing into “woman.” Both molar entities are destroyed, quite literally, in the death of both characters. There is also no sense of transformation — almost no action — as all battles take place off stage. What the play presents is a union between the two fighters, two forces struggling to find common ground among the myriad of contradicting impulses, in which nothing is resolved. In this union, disguise has a significant role to play. Achilles conceals his escape as well as the fact he captured Penthesilea; he pretends to wish to fight despite having no weapons on him. Penthesilea fights like a warrior; she attacks Achilles despite being in love with him; she acts like a dog would. In becoming, both man and woman disguise themselves as an other, but they do so in different ways. In the first case, disguise is a concealment, in the second, an exhibiting. Becoming is this disorientating, disruptive and ultimately violent mutual adoption of a disguise. This is what we learn: in becoming we are molecules in disguise.

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Sad Mondays #7

Author: Magda Wisniowska - June, 2020.

Becoming-animal is only one becoming among others. A kind of order or apparent progression can be established for the segments of becoming in which we find ourselves; becoming-woman, becoming-child; becoming-animal, -vegetable, or -mineral; becomings-molecular of all kinds, becomings-particles…Singing or composing, painting, writing have no other aim: to unleash these becomings. (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 272)

Deleuze originally wrote his essay, “Four Formulas to Summarise Kantian Philosophy,” as a preface to the English edition of his 1967 book, Kantian Critical Philosophy, published in 1984. In this short text, Deleuze gives each of the formulas summarising Kantian philosophy a literary reference. The first is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Time is out of joint,” the second,  Rimbaud, “I is an other,” and the third, Kafka, “The Good is what the Law says.” For his final section, Deleuze once again used Rimbaud, summarising the aim of Kant’s Critique of Judgment as follows, 

To attain the unknown by disorganising all the senses . . . a long, boundless, and systematised disorganisation of all the senses. (Rimbaud, as quoted by Deleuze in “Four Formulas to Summarise Kantian Philosophy,” Essays Critical and Clinical, 33)

For Deleuze, attaining the unknown by disorganising the senses defines Kant’s aesthetic judgement of taste. Here, aesthetic judgement is very different to the cognitive, theoretical judgment found in the first critique, as it does not have this judgment’s determining quality. In a determining judgment, the faculties involved in making it determine an object, in accordance to the faculty posited as legislative. This kind of judgment determines by imposing the rule of one faculty on the others. As in the case of theoretical judgment, judgment determines according to the legislation given and the conditions defined by the faculty of understanding. But in aesthetic judgment there is no such determining faculty and thus no determination. Instead, there is only what Deleuze describes as the  “unregulated exercise of the faculties” (ibid.). Kant would say, aesthetic judgment is our faculties’ “free play” (Critique of Judgment, §9, 217)

What does this mean? It needs pointing out that Deleuze’s understanding of Kantian judgment is a highly idiosyncratic one, with at least one commentator, Daniela Voss, arguing that it has no predecessor (Conditions of Thought, 158). We are so used to thinking of judgment as a faculty, as an innate capacity that we all have, much like the capacity for perception, or for understanding, or for reason. But Deleuze argues that judgment is not the one, single faculty for Kant. Different capacities have to work together to produce a judgment, so in the case of a cognitive judgment, our capacity for understanding determines the perceptions of our faculty of intuition through the intermediary of the faculty of imagination. The power of judgment is nothing more than the accord of the different faculties, an agreement in which one of them has a legislative role. The central problem Kant confronts in the Critique of Judgment lies with the nature of this accord. For if the faculties have such a relationship when it is regulated by one of them, it stands to reason that they first must also be capable of their own relationships between each other, which are unregulated and free. This is precisely the relationship they enter in the aesthetic judgment of taste. When we make an aesthetic judgment, we do not determine, we feel. The pleasure we feel when making aesthetic judgments of taste is of our faculties acting unconstrained.

The cognitive judgment Kant describes in the Critique of Pure Reason occurs on the plane of organisation (see Sad Mondays 6 and 6.5). Indeed, cognitive judgment is this plane, setting out the transcendental conditions of knowledge. It is that “hidden principle” which “causes the given to be given” (Thousand Plateaus, 265), allowing what we perceive to become perceptible (ibid., 281). In regulating, it gives structure to what the self perceives and what the I thinks. To “unleash becomings” however, is to attain the unknown through the disorganisation of the senses. It is to forgo determination and to exercise the faculties without regulation, as we do in the pleasure of judging something to be beautiful. The “pathos” of the Critique of Judgment lets both the self that perceives and the I that thinks to “evolve freely” and to “form strange combinations.” (Essays Critical and Clinical, 34). This belongs to the plane of consistency. 

In the chapter “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal” Deleuze and Guattari reflect on art only rarely, despite the number of literary references. But how they think art in this chapter, is surprisingly Kantian. 

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Sad Mondays #5, part two

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, May, 2020.

Lord Chandos, becomes fascinated with a "people" of dying rats, and it is in him, through him, in the interstices of his disrupted self, that the "soul of the animal bares its teeth at monstrous fate": not pity, but unnatural participation. Then a strange imperative wells up in him: either stop writing, or write like a rat . . . If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc. We will have to explain why. (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 240)

Lord Chandos is the principal character of the fictional letter written to the philosopher Francis Bacon, a short story by Hugo von Hofmannsthal published in 1902. In this letter, Lord Chandos describes to his friend how he has increasingly become disillusioned with writing, unable to perform the simplest of tasks. Instead, he writes of moments when ‘words desert me’ and ‘something entirely unnamed…reveals itself to me.’ This could be as seemingly insignificant as a harrow left in the field or a dog lying in the sun, but is most memorably described through the incident of the poisoned rats. Chandos describes how after ordering rat poison to be spread in the cellars of his dairy farms, he had a vision of the dying rats, convulsing, frantically seeking escape, screaming out their rage. The ‘most exalted Present’ of this vision was of a mother rat surrounded by her dying young, gazing ‘into the void of infinity’ and ‘gnashing her teeth’. (https://depts.washington.edu/vienna/documents/Hofmannsthal/Hofmannsthal_Chandos.htm).

Deleuze and Guattari’s point would be that Chandos here writes of the rats, but he also writes like a rat, because he begins to think like a rat. At the moment when ‘everything festers, throbs and boils’ and he is ‘about to ferment’, a kind of ‘feverish thinking’ takes over in a medium that is more immediate than words, leading ever deeper into the self (ibid.). Chandos describes this language of writing and thinking as a language in which ‘inanimate objects speak to me’(ibid.).

What we are discussing is a relation to the animal, which is not a classificatory one of natural history, as it neither seeks similarities nor analogous structures (see Sad Mondays 5, part one). Indeed, we are not really discussing animals at all, in the sense of individual pet dogs barking or oedipal sounding rats, but ‘the pack’, Deleuze and Guattari’s term for evoking ‘multiplicity’ (Thousand Plateaus, 241, 243-5). Multiplicity is also not simply an aggregate of units—that would be the multiple — but a radical openness, whose logic is ‘unnatural’ because it is without the unity offered by hereditary production. Someone who treats the animal in pack mode and thus engages with multiplicity unnaturally, on its own terms, is the figure of the sorcerer. Chandos would definitely be one such sorcerer, and Deleuze lists many others. I personally like Lovecroft’s outsider (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/o.aspx), but there is also Captain Ahab and his whale, Kafka and Josephine the mouse singer, Lawrence and his tortoise.

To take up the position of the sorcerer, is to change the nature of our own subjectivity. Remember the inner voice speaking out my thoughts in my head? (see Sad Mondays 5, appendix) The I that thinks and the self that listens, and the gap, crack, delay in between? These are ‘the interstices of the disrupted self’ that Deleuze describes, which would allow for the animal’s soul to become bare. I must first age (and it is true that the thinking I that thinks must always be older than the self that listens, having come before it), crack, and then open up to what must remain unnamed. Or rather as soon as I open up to multiplicity, I am no longer an I. According to Deleuze and Guattari, I am a ‘fascinated Self’ (Thousand Plateaus, 245). The world of the animal is a fascinating one. Fascination makes me lose myself in ‘the pact’, the alliance formed with the animal, which happens when I follow the whale, when the vision of dying rats wells up within me (243).

This is why if at any moment someone saw me in my fascinated state, I would be a monster as hideous as the outsider that Lovecroft described, with its rotten flesh and disintegrating body, both ‘nameless and voiceless’. For I would be as unnameable as the animals I am fascinated with. I would have become the animal when the animal had infected me. And my feverish thoughts would not be thought by me anymore — these would be the thoughts of the animal. And there would not be a self which would speak and hear them, because the animal I became has no language. You would only hear the howling from me and the gnashing of the teeth. But the path I have taken, that could be written down for you to read.

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Sad Mondays #4b

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, April, 2020.

Does it not seem that alongside the two models, sacrifice and series, totem institution and structure, there is still room for something else, something more secret, more subterranean: the sorcerer and becomings … (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 237)

In his essay ‘Strange Ecology in Deleuze-Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus,’ Irving Goh, discusses the chapter from which the above quote is taken, presenting Deleuze-Guattari’s idea of nature as inherently and profoundly violent. Nature is violent and we are violent towards it. Violence is what distinguishes their idea of nature from the passive or benign version endorsed by ecocriticism and environmental movements, where nature is something we must be willing to embrace, guard, and protect. But how is this idea of nature a violent one? And what does it have to do with sorcery, sacrifice, and totems?

Deleuze and Guattari begin this chapter, ‘10. 1730: Becoming-Intense,Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . .’, with a discussion of natural history and the two-fold idea of series and structure with which it approaches the myriad of relations found in the animal kingdom. They argue that in its concern with inheritance—genealogy and filiation—evolutionism failed to address the significance of external conditions in the evolutionary process. In contrast, natural history allows for environmental factors by taking into account the sum and value of differences. In order to register these differences, it conceives the relationship between animals in two different ways. The first way, the one Deleuze and Guattari associate with the series, looks at the resemblances between the species, genera, taxa; the second, which they associate with structure, examines the structural similarities constituting different organisms. Either way, whether mimetically or mimologically, these operate through mimesis: in series chains of beings imitate each other—structurally, we organise by making comparisons.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that this two-fold idea of series and structure impacts how we think other relationships, especially those between the animal and the human. They refer to two thinkers as examples of each approach: Jung and his theory of the archetype demonstrates the working of resemblance in myth Levi Strauss and his work on totemism offers the more structural approach. I like to look at graphs. We currently see one everyday, live, online, its figures changing before our very eyes. This is the graph showing the exponential impact of the coronavirus with its ever rising number of infected and dead. We look for resemblances, at how the situation might compare between China, Italy, and the US for instance; and we also analyse the data structurally, how any measures we have taken might have affected the curve’s exponential growth. We all look in hope of seeing the moment when its awful curve might begin to flatten out.

But there is a third way of thinking about the relationship with the animal, a secret and subterranean way, the only way to think our relation to the coronavirus. Deleuze and Guattari describe it first as a “becoming.” It concerns an alliance made between different species that, despite being productive in the sense that it allows for proliferation, does not produce those kinds of characteristics that can be inherited. It is not evolutionary, but involutionary, as in, it requires a particular kind of mutual involvement, of one animal in the process of becoming another, without ever reaching the point of unity of production. Deleuze and Guattari describe it as “creative” and associate it with the figure of the ‘sorcerer’ or ‘witch.’

It is to this that Irving Goh attributes violence. For it would be a mistake here to think that creation involved in this process makes the relationship somehow benign. It is not a relation we can classify, whether through resemblance in a series, or structurally, in some kind of rational order. Forging it disrupts all structures, not just scientific or the institutions of the State, but also conjugal and oedipal. As becoming cannot be characterised, not even in terms of feeling, there is no subject in becoming, no sense of self. The sorcerer draws an alliance with the animal pack, meaning that the human encounters the animal as a multiplicity, a proliferation without the unity of the ancestor, a contagion. It is this infection that Deleuze and Guattari speak of. In our case, the infection is with the coronavirus. The human and the virus, a combination of heterogeneous terms, is neither genetic nor structural, but a ‘dark assemblage’, an ‘unnatural participation’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 242).

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Sad Mondays #2.6

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, March, 2020.

A mistake in speed, rhythm or harmony would be catastrophic because it would bring back the forces of chaos, destroying both creator and creation. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 311)

The above quote is taken from the well-known opening paragraphs to Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter 11 of ‘A Thousand Plateaus,’ “1837: On the Refrain,” already discussed in Sad Mondays #2.5. In these paragraphs, they forgo conventional definition to offer instead what Emma Ingala describes as an affective portrait of the concept of the refrain, one that better deals with the pre-conceptual experience it is meant to evoke: “the moment before concepts are created to pacify the forces of chaos by structuring the world into familiar territories.” (“Of the Refrain (The Ritornello),” 192). From this image of a child singing to himself in the dark, we learn that the ritornello is a combination of three dynamisms: “the determination of a centre, the tracing of a circle around the centre, and the opening of the circle” (Ibid. 191). Or, if the Deleuze-Guattarian image is to be maintained, the child must first sing, then dance in a circle more confidently to his tune, before finally allowing himself the freedom to improvise. But it is also important to note how Deleuze and Guattari’s description ends. They insist that what they describe are not three successive movements, but rather three aspects of the same thing. The ritornello can only be characterised as fulfilling the protective function of the ritornello, if the initial song is such that it allows for future improvisation.

Last week we were at home when we heard what might have been the refrain drifting in through our open windows. Or perhaps, we were even one of those people who were singing on their balconies, reassuring themselves, protecting themselves from the chaos of our strange coronavirus times. But what I would like to argue now, is that we were mistaken. We have not yet sung the refrain, because while we might have drawn a landmark with our voices, we have still to draw a circle around this “uncertain and fragile centre” (A Thousand Plateaus, 311). To draw a circle is to make a home, and again, Emma Ingala is quite right to argue that we would not be able to hum, sing, or make music of any kind unless we had a home—a community, a culture or a symbolic order—in which these skills were learnt. Similarly, we can only speak of trauma after the event, in a safe environment. For a refrain to be a refrain, this is what it has to do, to provide this kind of comparable structure for ourselves, a safe-haven, so that the home then becomes the place where the self can dwell (“Of the Refrain (The Ritornello),” 195). So despite being on the balconies of their houses and flats, those people who called out into the night were not at home, and maybe, neither are we, despite the two weeks of house confinement. The structure of the home is missing.

As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, the home implies a territory, and the territory implies an act of creation. In their way of thinking, the action of establishing a centre is always repetitive and in its repetition, has an element of rhythm to it. Rhythm is precisely what differentiates the action from the surrounding chaos. This they then call ‘the milieu’ after Gilbert Simondon. For a milieu to become a territory however, it further requires the element of expression. Rhythm has to become expressive and we can see this best in the animal world. When a bird sings to court his mate, the courtship function of the song establishes a milieu. But the bird only marks his territory with his courtship song when it becomes a kind of signature through which he lays claim to a territory, signalling to all the other birds that this territory has found an owner. In this respect, we are indistinguishable from animals, in that what we create, all forms of culture, are a home, a territory expressive of ourselves.

Somewhere along the line, we have made a mistake, a mistake in rhythm as it were, and I think this has to do with the third dynamism of the ritornello, the opening up of the circle. All homes need doors, not just to protect from what is outside —that would be “on the side [of the circle] where the old forces of chaos press against it” (A Thousand Plateaus, 311). Chaos is what destroys both creator and creation. We need a door that would allow us to venture out again, to an outside that is as much a part of the home as the home itself.

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Sad Mondays #2.5

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, March, 2020.

Art is the direct connection between the forces of the living body and the forces of the earth, formed above all through rhythm. (Elisabeth Grosz in ‘An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze|Guattari’, 49)

We have been here before, a few weeks back. The quote is from Elisabeth Grosz’s short 'Eight Deleuzian Theses on Art' in which she lists those preconditions of art Deleuze and Guattari identify as both sexual and animal, using Darwin’s writing on sexual selection as a starting point. She presents art as a sexualisation of survival, the urge to produce art a consequence of the need for attracting a sexual partner. Yet her eight theses are primarily a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus,’ the chapter, 'Of the Refrain.'

It begins with a song. No, that is not right. It returns to a song. Or rather, even better: a song returns. In Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on the refrain, it is a child’s song, the tune a child hums as he walks home in the dark. For us perhaps, in our coronavirus times, it is the song we hear sung from balconies in Italy or in Spain, a lone voice in the night, singular then multiple, as other voices join in. I would argue that in both cases, the song’s function is that of protection, though only Deleuze and Guattari identify it as such. But how we understand safety here, must also be reinterpreted, because clearly no amount of singing will prevent the virus from spreading, and humming is no defence against whatever danger might be lurking in the dark.

The kind of safety Deleuze and Guattari find in what they call “the ritornello” should be understood instead as “a modulation of space” (Emma Ingala, 'Of the Refrain (The Ritornello),’ 193)—similarly to Freud’s older example, of a different child, this time playing his game of Fort-Da. This game is not about mastering the Mother’s absence as Freud had argued, nor is it, as Lacan would have it, a matter of substituting the signifier for the thing. The game—like the song—imposes a rhythm on space. The experience of the mother’s absence or of darkness—or indeed of the coronavirus crisis, which continues to escalate hour by hour—is that of chaos. According to Deleuze and Guattari, this is a non-dimensional state with no points of reference, so formless that it could be deemed non-existent, so fast, its speed would be infinite. What makes chaos so terrifying is precisely its being undifferentiated, all of its points equivalent. The ritornello gives this chaos the presence of order by establishing a point of difference. As Emma Ingala writes,

Rhythm protects from chaos through the establishing of an inequality or difference that can become a landmark. (Emma Ingala, 'Of the Refrain (The Ritornello),’ 194)

But what about pleasure? What of Grosz’s sexual selection? Perhaps it is wrong to assume that attracting a sexual partner needs to be pleasurable, in the sense that the process must always be enjoyable for us. Grosz’s concern is not so much sexual pleasure but the productivity associated with it. Let us remember that, especially Deleuze, deals with concepts. The child and his song is a concept. In the ritornello a concept is created, in order to pacify chaos. It is a kind of making that is not opposed to the given, for the given already implies a structure in place. Rather, it is a making of the given as given. The ritornello is that affective action with which interiority, the self and the very structure of the human subject is established. Before the ritornello, we are just one with the surrounding chaotic darkness. We are undetermined and pre-conceptual.

Once again our need for attracting a sexual partner is opposed to our instinct for survival. We sing, not to help us survive in these uncertain times, but to produce, and what we produce is ourselves.