The following is a paper written for my Politics and Aesthetics course. Following after a post here by Levi Bryant, I wanted to explore the idea of texts as factories. Levi correctly pointed out in response to the paper that it doesn’t look closely enough at the ability of texts to create communities/collectives. This is where I would want to investigate further and hopefully publishing this here gives others interested in the subject a jumping off point for exploring texts/books as objects/agents/etc.
In “Percept, Affect, and Concept,” Deleuze and Guattari describe the task of the writer as congruous with that of the painter or musician: to “invent different procedures in the search for the sensation as being” with the “material” of “words and syntax” (What is Philosophy? 167). This conception of words and syntax, and even books, as “material” is important. For the philosophy of immanence they begin in Anti-Oedipus, the relationships between author/book, book/reader, and book/society must be determined materially precisely because there can be no exterior play of forces to the situation. Even so, it is common to presume apropos texts that the task of analysis is to denounce “fictions, illusions,” and “false apprehensions” (Bryant). Yet if the affect of a text upon the reader is a material relation, could it simultaneously be true that the fictions inside a text are immaterial and unreal? Or, more radically, does it imply that fictions themselves are, in some sense, real? To treat fictions as real objects would mean to reconceive the task of literary analysis away from one focused on denouncing these “false illusions,” but also necessitate new understandings of the political importance of works of literature. It would also invite us to investigate anew what type of object books really are. Deleuze points toward this when he writes that “a book is a little machine” that cannot be reduced to its status as an inanimate object of human use, nor purely to its interpretations (A Thousand Plateaus 4). Books themselves must “fabulate” (What is Philosophy? 167). These two tasks are the targets this paper seeks to explore. By advancing an understanding of books as agents that gather together diverse affects and sensations in an assemblage, this essay advocates an understanding of texts as productive entities – or, to borrow Levi Bryant’s terminology, “factories.” It will be argued that this understanding offers the potential of a powerful new investigation into the political agency of texts outside of a relation to their authors themselves. In this world, books can become properly political.
To call a book an agent proper requires a few essential assumptions. In “A Treatise of Nomadology,” Deleuze and Guattari articulate a simple but important premise: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are” (A Thousand Plateaus 257). From this it could be said that a body, properly speaking, does not exist unless it affects other persons and things. Works of art obviously do affect individuals and create connections in their circulation throughout the world. Yet the artworks are also independent of human relationality, irreducible to a status as “constructions” of the human mind. This refusal to place non-human entities inside the being of the subject is called ontological realism. Simply state, it is “the thesis that the world is composed of objects, that these objects are varied and include entities as diverse as mind, language, cultural and social entities, and objects independent of humans such as galaxies, stones, quarks, tardigrades and so on” (Bryant “Introduction: Towards a Finally Subjectless Object”). Works of art are objects that manifest as “compound[s] of percepts and affects” (What is Philosophy? 164). For Deleuze and Guattari, the work of art would persist even without the creator or viewer: its destruction can only be realized through the disappearance of its material. The percepts and affects of a work of art exist as “beings” separately from human thought (164). But if an object has to affect other bodies to properly exist, how could it pass this test independently of human relations? Precisely because objects relate to each other in similar ways to their relations to humans – an inhuman affect. From this arises an important idea: works of art are agents with real affects beyond human interactions. This understanding of object “power” counters a long history of post-Kantian philosophy that largely situates thought and agency solely within the human domain. Jane Bennett calls this power of things to cause change “thing-power” (Bennett xii). We might say, then, that works of art – for the sake of this discussion, books – think and act too. They are agents and cause change through their thing-power. Yet Deleuze and Guattari draw a distinction between the thinking of art and philosophy: “Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts” (What is Philosophy? 66). Art and philosophy work on separate planes, yet ones that “pass into each other in a becoming that sweeps them both up in an intensity that co-determines them” (66). This co-determinacy is important: the affect of art can implicate conceptual personae, re-forming thought itself. This is equally true in the circumstance of an individual greatly affected by reading The Notebook as it is in the way the Harry Potter series has materially structured commerce and entertainment for large populations throughout the world.
Having established the agency of things, the question becomes: “How is it, exactly, that texts have thing-power?” Eileen Joy explains the etymology of the word “things”: in medieval Iceland, a “thing” meant a gathering in order to solve collective wrongdoings (Joy). Books are, of course, things, and from this Joy makes a novel point: books are both gatherings and actively gather other things. Kafka can be used to explain this idea of a “gathering,” because for Deleuze he is the paradigmatic example of what he and Guattari term “minor literature.” As they argue, Kafka effectively deterritorializes the dominant German language through his use of minor ones: Czech, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Prague German. Kafka becomes “a sort of stranger within his own language” (Kafka 26). He makes the writing-machine work in non-standard ways: the “minor” languages become a form of literary revolution. Yet Kafka’s universality lies also in a complexity of metaphor and language that often become, literally, lost in translation(s). To combine this with the concept of things as gatherings, the brilliance of Kafka lies in the beautiful and horrifying grouping of these various, not just languages, but modalities of life. Kafka’s writings are, precisely, gatherings of individuals, places, times, and even fantasies, but ones that seem distinct from the movement of time itself. There are two common arguments about great literature: the first of which is that a great work is “timeless.” This is exceedingly true in the case of Kafka. Besides the appearance of a few now-anachronistic things, The Metamorphosis or The Trial could have been written today. This, however, far from being some impossible kind of fault, exemplifies one crucial aspect of the way texts function as gatherings: they gather together modes of life at different times. It is not just in the obvious way that antiquated books remind us of older times – a campfire, a model-T, how ancient! – but that the text itself establishes new connections among different chronologies. Derrida’s notion of time as torn between the present and the future-to-come is important here: texts gather together not just literal presences, but also the specters of the past and anticipations of the future. Is this not precisely the case of books that we later call “prescient”? Of course, rarely do works of literature actively predict a future catastrophe, invention, etc., but the temporal importance of the gathering is made clear precisely through a retroactive hindsight. This leads to the second trait of a great text: it can be said to have no proper predecessor. In a recent lecture, Slavoj Žižek argued this is absolutely true in the case of Kafka: while now we could point to a series of literary predecessors, it’s also undeniably the case that without Kafka there would be no straight line to his inevitable appearance. The point is that, to use Borges’ formulation, Kafka created his own predecessors. He was a “contingent possibility” that retroactively established his own “possibility” (Žižek). Part of the thing-power of a text, then, is the establishment of linkages between both its antecedents and its followers. In this sense, as well, a text does not just gather together particular things and ideas inside the confines of its pages, but moves diverse characters, items, and settings across the pages of disparate works. A text gathers together many disparate possibilities to create new affects.
Texts are thus productive gatherings: “little machines” that produce new relations to the world and new affects. Texts become not just combinations of pre-existing percepts and affects, but also factories of the new. This is the site of their political importance: a text that produces new modalities, that reassembles different assemblages, or transmutes affects is political as such. Returning to Kafka, is this not clear in The Metamorphosis? The story is political precisely in the ways it disturbs a seemingly normal relation between humanity and animality. But we do not read The Metamorphosis because we are frightened by the possibility of one day awakening to find ourselves insects – this would be an insane paranoia. Instead, I argue, it is because The Metamorphosis implies that the real risk is to wake up and find us fully human. The ambiguity in Gregor’s human/animal status makes apparent the invisible constancy of becomings-inhuman. Yet there is no purely universal relation to a text, a point that sometimes appears to get lost in Deleuze’s notion of “affect.” Which is to say that to treat books as “theaters of representation” in need of interpreting, by far the predominant trend in literary criticism, is to create a “beneficent God to explain geological movements” (Bryant; A Thousand Plateaus 4). In other words, because books are material objects made up of material pieces, there cannot be a singular meaning imposed upon the text. This is why Deleuze and Guattari are so insistent that “literature is an assemblage” that “has nothing to do with ideology”: the ascription of ideology to a text denies its productive agency and its multiplicity (4). Each little book machine affects each reader differently, but what seems important is that the text-factory creates multitudes of new affects, some of which hit the reader, even though others miss their target. The universality of a text lies precisely in what is gathered in and by it. With The Metamorphosis this is clear both in the multitude of Gregor Samsa’s in literature itself, but also in the way books, movies, and music have played upon and used the story in new ways. And these affects cannot be reduced to Kafka qua writer, but rely upon, instead the circulation and connection Tof text-factories. This is where the peculiar notion of a literary machine plugging into other machines begins to make sense: the work in the factories of book-things is the creation of new connections, through their circulations, that establish fundamentally new ways of relating to the world.
The most political literature, then, are the stories that can continually produce new affects regardless of, and perhaps even because of, their original setting. Yet how is it that a text-factory does this? To take an ancient example, “The Epic of Gilgamesh … after 3000 or more years … still signifies as a text. It is still able to function a factory, despite the fact that we know little of its context” (Bryant). The text-factories that can continue producing new affects, which challenge old concepts and inaugurate new ones, are precisely texts that most effectively circulate and form connections. The Epic of Gilgamesh, divorced from its historical reality, continues to create these affects. This is, I think, what Deleuze refers to when he calls works of art “monuments.” The point is not that a book contains images of the past, but that the book creates new affects that cause a becoming-past of the present, a becoming-animal of the human, etc. Books “fabulate” these new becomings and even new “percepts” (What is Philosophy? 167), depictions of the world outside its relation to the human. Hamlet is a phenomenal play, but it is also important precisely because after centuries it continues to produces fresh connections, affects, and percepts – it stays connected and forms new connections. To interpret a text in this understanding, however, cannot be reduced merely to a blasé historicism that tries to link a work to its latter, symptomal manifestations. Instead, interpretation’s goal should be to explore the ways in which the gatherings in/of a work manifest new affects both in future texts and, like Kafka, in their own antecedents. This helps, also, to underline why the political importance of a text is not always immediately clear: in the most political writing, this importance grows precisely through new connections forged by time, reading, and interpretation itself.
This essay sought to understand texts as independent of human interaction in order to theorize them as factories of new forms of affect, percept, and relation. Books are things and, because of this, they are also gatherings. To treat books as gatherings in a diverse understanding of the term provides new avenues with which to approach the interpretation of literature. Yet this is only the beginning of an attempt to treat texts themselves as agents. The steps outlined here are thus necessarily vague. They probe the very clear importance, both politically and as aesthetic objects, of giving texts their fair worth and hopefully add on to an effort to begin to understand texts in “their productive power” (Bryant).
Works Cited
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Print.
Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects. Open Humanities Press. Online.
Bryant, Levi R. “Texts Are a Factory: Eileen Joy.” Web log post. Larval Subjects. 5 Oct. 2011. Web. <http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/texts-are-a-factory-eileen-joy/>.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. University of Minnesota, 1986. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. London: Verso, 2003. Print.
Joy, Eileen. “Toward a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism.” The Public School New York, New York. 15 Sept. 2011. Lecture.
Žižek, Slavoj. “The Ontology of Sexual Difference.” Psychoanalytic Practices. Yenching Auditorium, Cambridge, MA. 11 Oct. 2011. Lecture.
