Sad Mondays #6
Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, May, 2020.
[Dedicated to all you Zorro lovers out there]
I was astounded to see the bear standing upright on his hind legs, his back against the post to which he was chained, his right paw raised ready for battle. He looked me straight in the eye. This was his fighting posture. I wasn't sure if I was dreaming, seeing such an opponent. They urged me to attack. "See if you can hit him!" they shouted. As I had now recovered somewhat from my astonishment I fell on him with my rapier. The bear made a slight movement with his paw and parried my thrust. I feinted, to deceive him. The bear did not move. I attacked again, this time with all the skill I could muster. I know I would certainly have thrust my way through to a human breast, but the bear made a slight movement with his paw and parried my thrust. By now I was almost in the same state as the elder brother had been: the bear's utter seriousness robbed me of my composure. Thrusts and feints followed thick and fast, the sweat poured off me, but in vain. It wasn't merely that he parried my thrusts like the finest fencer in the world; when I feinted to deceive him he made no move at all. No human fencer could equal his perception in this respect. He stood upright, his paw raised ready for battle, his eye fixed on mine as if he could read my soul there, and when my thrusts were not meant seriously he did not move.(Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” https://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm)
In the winter of 1801, two friends meet in a park and start discussing the skill of the puppeteers at the local marionette theatre. The one friend, a dancer himself, finds that the puppets exhibit an unparalleled grace, of a variety that no human is capable of, perhaps only equaled to God’s; the other friend, far more sceptical, sees the performance in entirely mechanical terms, and considers its vulgarity to be somewhat beneath him. To explain a little more about this idea of grace, the first friend, the dancer, tells the other what happened to him on his travels to Russia, thus beginning a story within a story. In Russia, he says, he was staying with a nobleman’s family when he happened to beat the son of his host in fencing. Angry at his defeat, the son retaliated by introducing him to a bear living at his farm, which he claimed was the real master of the sport. So begins the battle, described in the quote above. Every move the dancer makes is thwarted by the bear, every move that the dancer feigns, is ignored. Indeed, no human could equal the bear’s quick perception. This bear, unlike any human, could read the fencer’s soul.
This is a parable about knowledge. The fencer is obviously knowledgeable, having the necessary skill to beat his opponent at fencing. But the bear possesses a different kind of knowledge, one that proves to be superior. The question is, what kind of knowledge does the bear have? What does the animal know that the human does not? First of all, it would seem to be the knowledge of the body, the bear being capable of perceiving those minute movements that man cannot. However, given the context of the discussion, it is also the knowledge of inanimate matter. After all, we only get to hear the story of the fighting bear because the one friend wishes to prove to the other, how “mechanical puppets can be more graceful than the living human body.” Both the bear and the puppet possess this elusive thing called “grace” (ibid.).
In this sword battle, we witness the opposition of the two great planes on which knowledge is drawn. The first, Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of organisation (Thousand Plateaus, 265-6). This is the hidden plane of structure: if we have knowledge of fencing, this means we also have knowledge of certain principles, not just the rules of fencing itself, but more fundamentally, the forms of time and space that allow us to perceive movement, the concepts of causality that allows us understand the nature of cause and effect, and most importantly, the figure of the subject that navigates these rules. The plane provides the necessary structure for understanding to take place. There is a second plane however, without structure, form, or subject, which consists entirely of “the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements … molecules and particles of all kinds” (265). This is the great plane of Nature, drawn along the lines of Spinoza’s infinite motion, the immediate infinite mode in which God as Substance is expressed in the attribute of extension (see Sad Mondays 5, appendix 2). Despite being structureless, this second plane has a consistency, which allows its population of haecceities, affects, and non-subjective individuations to assemble and disassemble compositions of power.
To know this second plane like the bear does, is to know immediately and infinitely, not just what the body does in any particular moment —that would be knowledge of the first plane— but everything the body can do. It is to know the body as unformed elements, affects, and compositions of power. Or if we are talking about puppets, it is not to look at the puppets prancing around on the stage, but to understand how their movement is caused. As our dancer explains, the operator does not move the puppet’s limbs individually, but by understanding the workings of puppetry, the centre of gravity of each limb and the line or arch it may take. Grace lies in mechanical forces. What has no consciousness or infinite consciousness, the puppet or God, is the most graceful.
