Deleuze and Cultural Studies (one paradigm less) more

CHAPTER 6 Culturcal Studies and Gilles Deleuze Gregory J Seigworth SPECIAL AFFECT One paradig'ill less Underneath the large noisy events lie the small events of silence. Gilles Deleuze, Differenceand Repetition [OJne has to seek a term for that which is not fully articulated or not fully comfortable in various silences, although it is usually not very silent. I just don't know what the term should be. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters More than twenty-five years ago cultural studies was new again for the first time. Although Stuart Hall's 1980 essay 'Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms' presented itself as an evenhanded assessment of the state of cultural studies, it was clear that 'structuralism' (the new paradigm in town) would be continuing along its path of ascendance as begun in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Meanwhile, 'culturalism' as the founding paradigm of cultural studies - exemplified, for Hall, in the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson - was plainly receding.! Sharing at best a fairly loose coherence, the so-called culturalists held to the notion that the realm of culture (as found in texts, in history, in lived experience) could not always be determinately fixed to the relations of production (society's economic base). Yes, people made history in conditions that were not of their own making, but history's motor - the capacity for agency, for change, for making history - could not be readily separated out from the 'whole way of life' (or, for Thompson, a 'whole way of struggle') that serves as history's ever-present fabric of relations. The structuralists grew itchy at what felt like a certain naivety in this formulation and began to chafe against such an overly woolly (seemingly woolly-headed) fabric. No longer able to abide the indissolubility of culture as a 'whole' expressive totality with no apparent emphasis granted to any particular thread (in CULTURAL STUDIES AND GILLES DELEUZE 108 NEW CULTURAL STUDIES 109 either the first or last instance), the structuralists wanted to trace out the threads, to weave a more complex - that is, more specifically determinant (focusing mainly on the ideological effects of political economy) - set of determinations; and, thus, to form concepts that, in Hall's words, could 'cut into the complexity of the real, in order precisely to reveal and bring to light relationships and structures which cannot be visible to the na'ive naked eye' (1980: 67). Thc 'cultUralists', one might say, had spun a fahric that structuralists could now see straight through, revealing themselves as not quite emperors anymore. Thus, by the late 1970s, the study of culture was rather br along in the process of aligning its own movements with the latest in continental theory: at that time, a heady amalgamation of structuralism, Marxism and psychoanalysis as forged largely by courtesy of Louis Althusser (although, soon enough, to be rendered slightly more supple through Antonio Gramsci's writings in general and his concept of 'hegemony' in particular). Hall's 1980 essay merely formalised what was already cultural studies' stepping into this new set of adventures, trying on a new set of dothes.2 What, then, of the potential for an even 'newer' set of adventures twenty-five years hence? In a more recent interview with the journal Radical Philosophy, Hall was asked if there might be a 'new notion of culture regulating the field today, in the way that these two paradigms did in the past? Or has the field become piecemeal, lost its theoretical core?' (Hall 1997: 25). Reflecting briefly on the initial paradigm shift from culture as 'a whole way of life' to culture as 'signifying practice', Hall concluded: If! were writing for students, those are still the two definitions I'd pick out, and I wouldn't say there is a third one. I suppose you might say that there was a postmodern one, a Deleuzian one, which says that signification is not meaning, it's a question of affect, but I don't see a break in the regulative idea of culture there as fundamental as the earlier one. (p. 25) will focus on a cultural studies that has, after Deleuze, one paradigm less and not one more. After a morc than quarter-ccntUry-long dctour through the dense and twisting theory-thickets of structural Freudo-Marxism and poststructuralising articulation theory (a detour that has been, by no means.. fruitless), there is a sense - call it a pre-emergent structure of fecling - that many of those oncc presumably old-school, shopworn conccrns of 'culturalism' have becn steadily finding their way back onto the diverse agendas of a widely dispersed cultural studies. Of course, nowhere will one find these concerns presented as a single, united front, and far less should one expect to find any explicitly stated affiliation with the faintest residues of a 'culturalist' tradition. Still, what might be evidcnced by this accidentally ad hoc twenty-first-century re-versioning of culturalism - besides, too, a certain collective exhaustion of structuralist (post- and otherwise) trajectories can perhaps best be glimpsed in a revived emphasis upon such matters as: process, sensation and affect, movement and transition, rhythm, creativity, imagination, the connection of ethics and aesthetics, the virtual, expressive totality (the 'whole'), 'forces' of life (vitalism), the lived or experience, biosand non-human materiality, or what might be understood, quasicollectively, as a renewed attention to 'empiricism'. Born long before cultural studies, this is an empiricism where 'experience' and 'experiment' are uttered (together, once again) in one and the same voice. It is the latter - the concept of experience and a renewed sense of the empirical and empiricism - that will be a primary focus of this chapter. Not surprisingly, the quasi-collective features listed above also help to compose whatever might be seen as the present 'Deleuzian' boom in cultural studies. Deleuze declared himself, first and foremost, an 'empiricist' of the forgotten 'experiment-meets-experience' sort: where one 'is always experiencing, experimenting, not interpreting but experimenting, and what we experience, experiment with, is always actuality; what's coming into being, what's new, what's taking shape' (1995: 106).The goalis, as it had once been, to open up the concept of experience affectively to the (more-than-human) being of a sensate world, not allowing it to lodge only within the interpretative powers of a being's knowing sensibility. Much of what might fall under the name of 'Deleuzian cultural studies' today takes up this experimentally experiential ambition in one way or another and, thus, for all the right and wrong reasons, Deleuze has become very much of a theoretical darling for many graduate students and postgraduates in cultural studies and elsewhere. While no longer holding such 'darling' status, Williams' culturalism (or, as he preferred, 'cultural materialism') adopted a remarkably similar ontological cast (despite never quite allowing itself to shake off fully, as The current chapter will concur with Hall on this much: there is no need to imagine a new paradigm for cultural studies, or, if so, it should certainly not be called 'Deleuzian'. 3Why not a third paradigm? Because if the work of Gilles Deleuze has a particularly productive entry point into the already existing theory-narrative of cultural studies, it would enter on the side of 'culturalism' (that is, as a return to and reinvigoration of many of the dawning premises of cultural studies), and only thereafter might it undertake renegotiation talks with many of the 'structuralisingl signifying' tendencies still actively operating across the field. In sum, the argument here 110 NEW CULTURAL STUDIES CULTURAL STUDIES AND GILLES DELEUZE 111 Deleuze would, certain remnants of humanism). Perhaps this is why imagining a secret, subterranean history of cultural studies where culturalism, circumventing its eclipse, meets up directly with Deleuze's empiricism - arriving sometime, say,in the mid-1970s and later taking structuralism on board as useful addendum, and not as a necessarily separate path or alternative paradigm - remains enticing in the possibilities still to be made. Experience, for Williams, went beyond - perhaps, in a sense, also went below or continually slipped past - 'culture' as the regulative idea that has come to define the space of operations for cultural studies (yes, just imagine: cultural studies withoUt culture?). Simply put, experience does not personally belongto a subject (the purported subject of experience), nor does it only arise in the mediating space of subject and object. How might experience be granted a certain relative autonomy, its own dynamic potential as active and changing, travelling f~lI.therafield than usually allowed in contemporary understanding? Williams dared to entertain such an idea: to unfix experience, to connect it with 'all that is present and moving, all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and explicit and the known, [from all that] is grasped and defined as the personal' (1977: 128). His concept of 'structures of feeling' was one other way to approach this whole matter of experience, and, not surprisingly, it was also consistently misunderstood. Because experience was among the most harshly criticised of all the foundational blocks in the culturalist repertoire, bearing witness to some of Williams' tussles over it can prove tremendously enlightening. A par- the interviews where Williams is reminded that, for Louis Althusser, experience serves as 'simply a synonym for illusion' (Williams 1981: 168). In privileging the concept of experience, the culturalists were accused of conjuring up an unrealistic, theoretically insupportable voluntarism.4 The human subject was - from the structuralist perspective - just too saturated, through and through, by ideological forces and other unavoidable sociocultural/linguistic constructions. Over the course of the interviews, perhaps the most illuminating moment comes as Williams replies to a question that attempts to link his concept of experience back to the pre-dawn of his own (and the culturalist) emergence. Williams is asked whether his reliance upon 'experience' and, by extension, his concept of 'structures of feeling', haven't merely recapitulated a certain 'Leavisian notion of "life"'. Unlike F. R. Leavis, Williams, in his own estimation, had not 'spiritualised' cultural production by longing for the organicism of a romanticised past; rather he had attempted to materialise it (though, certainly, this materialisation would encompass such relatively ephemeral life-processes as affect and emotion) in a way that was forward looking, orientated towards an emerging future. So, had this originary 'culturalist' paradigm, in the end, really travelled very far from its predecessors? Until this moment in the interviews, Williams' immediate responses to even the most pointed questions about the place of experience in his work had been quite gracious, often conceding some amount of ground to his interlocutors (many of his answers begin with: 'Yes' or 'That seems fair' or 'I accept' or 'I concede'), but here his answer is quite emphatic in its disagreement. It is worth quoting at length: No. That should be very clear. For after all the basic argument of the first chapter of The Long Revolution is precisely that there is no natural seeing and therefore there cannot be a direct and unmediated contact with reality. On the other hand, in much linguistic theory and a certain kind of semiotics, we are in danger of reaching the opposite point in which the epistemological wholly absorbs the ontological: it is only in the ways of knowing that we exist at all. To formalist friends, of whom I have many, who affect to doubt the very possibility of an 'external' referent, it is necessary to recall an absolutely founding presumption of materialism: namely that the natural world exists whether anyone signifies it or not. . . . . . By contrast in the whole process of consciousness - here I would put a lot of stress on phenomena for which there is no easy knowing because there is too easy a name, the too easy name is 'the unconscious' - all sorts of occurrences cut across the established or offered relations between a signification and a reference. The formalist position that there is no signified without ticularly illustrative case in point can be found in the NeJV Left Review interviews that make up Raymond Williams' career-retrospective volume Politics and Letters (1981). Over the course of the interviews Williams is taken to task, more than once, by his interlocutors, Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett and Francis Mulhern, for utilising the concept of 'experience' in ways that they consider somewhat less than circumspect, and, indeed, even naive. This thoroughgoing interrogation of the status of 'experience' - as well as 'structures of feeling' - remains instructive for the nuanced parrying of point and counterpoint between Williams and his interviewers. But just as impressive throughout the more than four hundred pages of Politics and Letters is the distinct impression that Williams leaves; here is someone holding fast to the conviction that, like culture, cultural studies is itself 'a single indissoluble real process' and cannot too readily become a house divided. The chief accusation levelled at the concept of experience was that it was never as free from ideological determination as Williams (and other culturalists) might have wished to believe. With cultural studies at its most fully immersed in the structural Marxist moment, there is even a point in 112 NEW CULTURAL STUDIES CULTURAL STUDIES AND GILLES DELEUZE 113 a signifieramountsto sayingthat it is onlyin articulation that weliveat all. . . (1981:167) Having here set out, rather succinctly, the limitations of the structuralist paradigm as he saw them, Williams then turns to directly address his own initiatives at reshaping the 'culturalist' enterprise and, in particular, the sustained attention given to the concept of experience. While readily acknowledging the inherent (and inherited) difficulties with the term and what it encompasses, William refuses to let 'experience' be simply expunged from cultural analysis or to otherwise allow its ready subsumption under the too tidy lines and right angles of signifying articulations. 'Experience' by whatever name, including structure of feeling, is crucial to grasping what is in the process of change, in the very midst of flux and flow, moving along the cusp of semantic availability, present in 'all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and the explicit and the known' and, hence, in what has 'not yet come, often not even coming' (1977: 128 and 130). As Williams continues in his response to the Politics and Letters interviewers' question: . . . I have found that areas which I would call structures of feeling as often as not initially form as a certain kind of disturbance or unease, a particular type of tension, for which when you stand back or recall them you can sometimes find a referent. To put it another way, the peculiar location of a structure of feeling is the endless comparison that must occur in the process of c()nsciousness between the articulated and the lived. The lived is only another word, if you like, for experience: but we have to find a word for that level. For all that is not fully articulated, all that comes through as disturbance, tension, blockage, emotional trouble seems to me precisely a source of major changes in the relation between the signifier and the signified, whether in literary language or conventions. We have to postulate at least the possibility of comparison in this process and if it is a comparison, then with what? If one immediately fills the gap with one of these great blockbuster words like experience, it can have very unfortunate effects over the rest of the argument. For it can suggest that this is always a superior instance, or make a god out of an un examined subjectivity. But since I believe that the process of comparison occurs often in not particularly articulate ways, yet is a source of much of the change that is eventually evident in our articulation, one has to seek a term for that which is not fully articulated or not fully comfortable in various silences, although it is usually not very silent. I just don't know what the term should be. (1981: 167-8) This insightful and far-reaching features in what was Raymond passage usefully highlights many core Williams' evolving project of 'cultural materialism' - with its balance of the ontological with the epistemological, its broader attention to various processes of consciousness (including the unconscious, non-conscious and so on), its elevation of the realm of affect and feeling (with 'tensions' and 'pressures' in lieu of determinations and linguistic significations), and its rein flection of 'experience' towards change/ process, emergence, 'the lived'. Williams' Keywords had first been published in the year prior to the Politics and Letters interviews and, somewhat curiously, contained no separate entry for the concept of 'experience' (an omission that his interviewers do not fail to point out), although it was added in the book's next edition. However, in the initial volume, a discussion of experience does appear, rather interestingly, under the headings for 'science' and 'empirical', where special note is made, in both of these entries, of what had once been the interchangeability of 'experience' and 'experiment' (as both share the common Latin root word experiri) until the latter third of the eighteenth century. In this splitting of experience and experiment, Williams noted that there followed an interrelated set of unfortunate consequences: (1) a distinction arises within 'empirical' between the practical and the theoretical (with experience cast as atheoretical or anti-theoretical); (2) a division in science occurs between an inner (subjective) knowledge and an external (objective) knowledge; and (3) there is a cultural! everyday delineation between 'experience past ("lessons") and experience present (full and active "awareness")' (1985: 127). Williams' work in cultural studies is known first and foremost for its appeal to 'wholeness', and so the mere fact that the contemporary understanding of 'experience' was now based upon a set of exclusions (of theory, of creativity, of the present and future) and upon a subjectively centred model of consciousness presented a serious problem desperately in need of resolution. While the twists and turns and detours in the history of the concept of experience have been widely explored, most recently and comprehensively by Martin Jay's Songs of Experience (2005), key here to the project of a revived culturalism will be the insights of Gilles Deleuze, ~:s well as Frankfurt School critical theorist Walter Benjamin. What do they share with each other and with Williams? Mainly, a desire to include the excluded of experience and to find a way out of the false problem of an interiorised subjectivity and an outside world. Not only do Deleuze and Benjamin coincide in their appeals for a reintegration of all of the exclusions of experience and overlap in their hostility at self-sufficient models of consciousness, they both point a finger at the work of one highly suspicious character in particular: Immanuel Kant. For Benjamin and Deleuze, it was, perhaps more than anything, Kant's rendering (or rending) of the 114 NEW CULTURAL STUDIES CULTURAL STUDIES AND GILLES DELEUZE 115 concept of 'experience' that made him the focus of their enmity. Deleuze called his book on Kant's critical philosophy an affectionate study of 'an enemy' (1995:6), while Benjamin proclaimed Kant one of his great adversaries, a 'despot' that he was determined to 'track down' (1994: 125).5 Looking back, like Williams, to transformations taking place in the latter part of the eighteenth century, Walter Benjamin levels the majority of his critique squarely at what he sees as Kant's (and the subsequent neoKantians') re-routing of experience through a 'hollow' epistemology: where experience is allowed only minimal significance by serving as the 'possibility' of knowledge (Benjamin 1996: 102). Benjamin was determined to produce what he considered a 'superior concept of experience' (Wolin 1989:211): one that does not conflate 'experience' with 'knowledge of experience': Paradoxical though it sounds, experience does not occur as such in the knowledge of experience, simply because this is knowledge of experience and hence a context of knowledge. Experience, however, is the symbol of this context of knowledge and therefore belongs in a completely different order of things from knowledge itself. (Benjamin 1996: 95) experience - categorically unbound and infinitely particulate - does not look like knowledge, nor does it arrive only in the harmoniously symmetrical synthesis of sensation and sensibility.6 As Deleuze would remark, those well-known Kantian 'conditions of possible experience' are always surrounded by and shot through with 'subjacent conditions of real experience' (1994: 232); these 'subjacent conditions' (peripherally beneath consciousness) still act but without rising to the status of knowledge. Because Kant also immediately derived the transcendental from the empirical, his philosophy perpetually turned the experiential into a field of 'possible experience from which nothing, the external as well as the internal, escapes' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:46). After all, as Williams said (in the lengthy quotation above): 'all sorts of occurrences cut across the established or offered relations between a signification and a reference'. As such, the conditions of experience are not subsumable or otherwise capable of ready assimilation with the dictates of conscious apprehension, nor do they fall under the too easy name of 'the unconscious', as Williams also noted. But these 'occurrences' or events do exert a force (or, better, a feeling or sensibility of force) - setting limits, maintaining pressures, presenting potentials - that will always exceed, in all directions, the possible experience of psychological consciousness or any all-enveloping epistemology. The second major problem created by the Kantian concept of experience - before ever becoming transcendental- is that it leaves too much out of the experience equation that Benjamin and Deleuze argue, in their own ways, should be admitted. In fact, Benjamin deliberately sows the seeds of his own philosophy for the future in those very places that Kant ruled decidedly out of bounds. Benjamin complained that: Kant's epistemology does not open up the realm of metaphysics, because it contains within itself primitive elements of an unproductive met,.physics that excludes all others. In epistemology every metaphysical element is the germ of a disease that expresses itself in the separation of knowledge from the realm of experience in its full freedom and depth. . . . There is - and here lies the historical seed of the approaching philosophy - a most intimate connection between that experience, the deeper exploration of which could never lead to metaphysical truths, and that theory of knowledge, which was not yet able to determine sufficiently the logical place of metaphysical research. (1996: 102-3) Benjamin adds that, although his choice of the word 'symbol' here might be 'unfortunate', he is using it 'simply to point to different conceptual realms' (1996: 95). The concept of experience had once possessed its own affectual, viscerally ontological sort of knowing, or what Benjamin called 'speculative knowledge'. After Kant, the concept of experience could no longer, of itself, provide its own kind of intuitive knowledge as the present/future-orientated experiment of experience (not at all unlike Williams' reference to 'experience present' as 'full and active "awareness" '). Experience for Kant was to serve only in the interest of a higher, adjudicating knowledge, as the faculty of intuition is submitted to the legislation of understanding. Deleuze's own critique takes a similar approach, locating two intrinsic problems with Kant's version of experience. The first is that knowledge, contrary to Kant, bears absolutely no resemblance to the 'experience' that purportedly provides its ground. That is, experience and knowledge of experience do not work via some mode of resemblance or recognition. Deleuze draws attention to this implicit tracing operation: 'It is clear that. . . Kant traces the so-called transcendental structures from the empirical acts of a psychological consciousness: the transcendental synthesis of apprehension is directly induced from an empirical apprehension, and so on' (1994: 135). For both Benjamin and Deleuze, The Kantian understanding of experience acts to quarantine or eradicate all 'metaphysical g'erms' in a steady purification process that needs, in Benjamin's view, to be seriously contaminated. This is why fellow 116 NEW CULTURAL STUDIES CULTURAL STUDIES AND GILLES DELEUZE 117 Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno would claim that Benjamin's insights appealed: to a type of experience that distinguished itself from the usual only by its indifference to the limitations and taboos to which a well-adjustcd consciousness normally bows. Benjamin never once acknowledged the boundary taken for granted by all modern thought: the Kantian commandment not to trespass into unintelligible worlds. . . For Benjamin everything habitually excluded by the norms of experience ought to become part of experience to the extent that it adhcrcs to its own COI1Creteness inslead of dissipating this, its immortal aspect, by subordinating it to the schema of the abstract universal. (1988: 4) In Benjamin's work, the most seemingly ephemeral, most materially recalcitrant, other-than-human, non-sensuous and incorporeal aspects of experience were granted equal standing with the more 'knowing' world of human understanding and reason. What Benjamin regards as the unfortunate conflation of 'experience' with the 'knowledge of experience', Deleuze refers to, with equal disdain, as the 'sensibility of Being' and, instead, proposes a concept of experience as the 'being of the sensible' (1994: 140). Here, again, experience is not strictly amenable to a mode of thought or any image of thought based upon resemblance, representation, or (re)cognition, but is more nonrepresentational and affectual, belonging to neither subject nor object (neither inside nor outside). The conditions of experience are then reconceived as an immanent and open field of intensitics, banal affectivitics and sensations that can come to engage with faculties of knowing but without necessarily being replayed, realised, synthesised or somehow completely subsumed in the process.7 Benjamin, Deleuze and Williams, as a result of this winnowing down of experience following Kant, each came to develop his own alternative conceptualisation - respectively, 'non-sensuous similarity', 'virtual', 'structures of feeling' - to designate all that skirts along the edges or otherwise dwells in the far and near reaches of that 'blockbuster word' experience, in order to include all 'that which is not fully articulated or not fully comfortable in various silences, although it is usually not very silent'. Of course, this obstinacy over experience also did much to contribute to many of the criticisms often levelled at Benjamin, Deleuze and Williams, rendering each of them - in his own way - untimely, or, at least, habitually out of sync with his contemporaries. Williams might have felt this untimeliness as much as - perhaps more than? - Benjamin and Deleuze; even his most forthright attempts to refine and clarify his positions did little to dispel continued critique of his views on experience. About a year after the release of Politics and Letters, Stuart Hall published a commentary review of the book that, while often self-effacing and gracious, remained flatly unconvinced by Williams's 'uninspected notion of "experience" which. . . produced the quite unsatisfactory concept of "structures of feeling" and which continues to have disabling theoretical effects' (1990: 62). Further, Hall reiterated that 'the "experiential" paradigm does continue to cause some theoretical fluctuations jn Williams's work around sLichkcy problems asdctcrmination, ocial s totality, and ideology' (p. 63). Such continuing fluctuations, of course, were believed to hasten the demise of the experiential or culturalist paradigm. But what if it is precisely the manner of this paradigm's 'theoretical fluctuations' that render it poised now, more than ever, for a return? Could an always untimely appeal be raised to reassert the conceptual and practical worthiness of a resurgent culturalist/ experiential paradigm? One initially instructive insight in this regard comes from Adorno, who found himself exasperated and perplexed more than once by the writings of his friend Walter Benjamin. Remarking on Benjamin's concept of experience, Adorno noted how it was far outside the mainstream of almost all modern philosophy and, thus, 'so at odds with these criteria [used by Benjamin's critics] that it never even occurred to him to defend himself against them as Bergson did' (1988: 4). Indeed, it was the work of early twentieth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson that served for Deleuze and Benjamin (although this would not be the case for Williams) as a crucial antidote to Kant.8 Bergson was one of the most consistent and nuanced critics of Kant's metaphysics of experience and, as such, his thoroughgoing depictions of its conceptual limitations proved powerfully resonant for anyone looking for a way out of this box. In one especially vivid passage, Bergson wrote of how Kant's philosophy rests upon 'pouring the whole of possible experience into pre-existing molds' as if 'the great discoveries only illuminate point by point the line traced in advance, as, on a festival night, a string of bulbs flick on, one by one, to give the outline of a monument' (2002: 197).Benjamin and Deleuze readily signed on to such a portrait of Kant's experiential shortcomings. However, this was not to be the case for Williams; he made barely any reference to Bergson's work.9 This is not entirely a surprising state of affairs. Bergson's thought, once widely influential and highly regarded at the dawn of the twentieth century, had faded from view almost completely by the time of Williams' first writings.lO In the face of prevailing postWorld War II sensibilities, the philosophy of Henri Bergson had come to be regarded as too irrationalist, too mystical, too vitalist, too affirmatively 118 NEW CULTURAL STUDIES CULTURAL STUDIES AND GILLES DELEUZE 119 optimistic and too unapologetically metaphysical. Such sentiments surely provided Williams with more than enough reason to give Bergson's writings the widest possible berth - even as he (Williams) continually directed his own work towards a remarkably similar set of concerns: to 'the creative mind', to an immersion in 'process' by putting historical data (and concepts) back 'into solution', to feeling/emotion and the affective, to the emergent and pre-emergent, to an open-ended materialism, and to the 'wholeness' of life. Today's revived interest in Bergson can be largely credited to Deleuze; his works, such as Bergsonism and Difference and Repetition, have nearly single-handedly demonstrated how this untimely, process-orientated philosophy may have finally found its moment. Deleuze states that his 'return to Bergson' is meant not only as 'a renewed admiration for a great philosopher but a renewal or extension of his project today, in relation to the transformations of life and society, in parallel with the transformations of science' (1991: 115). In Bergsonism, three distinctive features - intuition, science and metaphysics, and multiplicities - are identified by Deleuze as having come into even sharper contemporary focus, and, hence, each offers insights that might continue 'along new paths which constantly appear in the world' (p. 115). Perhaps too these features might shed additional light on Williams' experiential! culturalist paradigm and reveal ways that culturalism can still speak to our contemporary moment. In short, could a revitalisation of culturalism find shared resonances with the recent revival of Deleuzian Bergsonism? At the outset, though, it is worth emphasising that any extended encounter between Williams' culturalism (or cultural materialism) and Deleuze's Bergsonism (or incorporeal materialism) must cut, even as it connects, both ways. That is, it cannot simply be a matter of mustering a defence of the former by or through the latter, but must also be one of acknowledging that each of these projects must be mutually transformed over the course of these momentary intersections (such as follows). Bergson links experience and experiment throug'h the Intuition. faculty of intuition that exceeds or overflows the intellect; this is his 'reversed Kantianism' as taken up by Benjamin and Deleuze in their own arguments, as outlined above (Mullarkey 1999:115).Empirical before it is conceptual, intuition is experience put back into solution, where it 'follows the real in all its sinuosities' (Bergson 1998:363).Bergson argues that intuition is 'nothing mysterious' but, instead, means starting always within the lived immediacy of mobility and continuity (2002: 199). Intuition takes place beyond the 'turn in experience', continuing as a single, immcrsive process: as memory (experience past, both conscious and embodied), in duration (the endured overfullness of experience present), while simultaneously remaining open to the future (experience as experiment). Or, as Deleuze says, 'beyond experience, toward the conditions of experience' (1991:23). Similarly, Williams - most especially in his Marxism and Literature wanted to elaborate a 'practical consciousness [that) is saturated by and saturates all social activity. . . social and continuous (as distinct from the abstract encounters of "man" and "his world", or "consciousness" and "reality", or "language" and "material existence")' (1977: 37). He described this version of experience as reconstituting the 'lost middle term between the abstract entities, "subject" and "object'" (p. 37). Indeed, sounding a great deal like Bergson countering Kant, Williams states: 'Thus, mediation is a positive process in social reality, rather than a process added to it by way of projection, disguise, or interpretation' (pp. 98-9). With intuition, experience is less a discrete place in the time past belonging to a subject, and more an immanent process of relation (beyond inside and outside, beyond subject and object). Williams' particular (unspoken, unspeakable) consideration of intuition finds its greatest conceptual purchase in his structures of feeling's grasp for the 'pre-emergent', or that which moves 'at the very edge of semantic availability' (p. 134): the 'kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but. . . in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange' (p. 131). The 'practical consciousness' thus re-emphasises the role of the 'creative process' and, thereby, alters the perceived relationship between theory and practice. It means, wrote Williams, not only 'casting off an ideology or learning phrases about it, but confronting a hegemony in the fibres of the self and in the hard practical substance of effective and continuing relationships' (p. 212). It likewise means that one 'special function of theory' is creatively tied to 'exploring and defining the nature and variation of practice' - and looking to how 'excluded and subordinate' models and experiences might need to be readmitted and refitted in order to work towards 'the articulation and formation of latent, momentary, and newly possible consciousness' (p. 212). Putting this method of theoretical intuition and concept-creation into practice places unique demands on writing. It strives to discover 'a new articulation and in effect a new formation, extending beyond it~ own modes' (p. 211) but without idealising or spiritualising the writing process: finding expression and opening a place for the not yet fully arrived. Fred Inglis captures this sense well when he observes that \Villiams 'commended to others to see that whatever is begotten, born and dies is always mobile, changeable, mortal, and that only by trying to grasp this 120 NEW CULTURAL STUDIES CULTURAL STUDIES AND GILLES DELEUZE 121 changeful, ungraspable totality will we understand anything, and then only in passing' (1995: 245). Science and metaphysics. Deleuze remarked that Bergson's intuition, as a method, leads 'to the open creative totality' extending beyond the human (1991: 111). Williams might have hastened to add that 'beyond' the human does not entail leaving 'the human' entirely behind or presenting one's project as 'anti-humanist' (and neither Bergson nor Deleuze nor Benjamin would disagree), yet there is ample reason to believe that the non-human, ahuman, more-than-human and so on also have a place in Williams' cultural materialism.ll On the way towards 'the materialist recovery', Williams took the 'experiment' of experience quite literally: even, for example, telling his Politics and Letters interviewers that if he 'had one single ambition in literary studies it would be to rejoin them with experimental science' rather than 'a blending of concepts of literature with concepts from Lacan' (1981: 340). But perhaps more than any of his other writings, Williams' essay on Marxist philosopher Sebastiano Timparano reveals how he deliberately chose not to impose a priori limits on what should count in 'the materialist project': Too much socialand cultural practice is necessarilydirected beyond human history, to material that at once precedes and persists. To neglect or withdraw from these directions wouldbe a major cultural defeat. For the enemies are various and powerful: from the spiritualisms that are flourishing within a disintegrating social order, through the contemporary mythologizing, often sophisticated,of so many of our least understood conditions and practices, to the now vaunting ambition of epistemology to become the universal science.(1980: 121) In the face of an epistemological clampdown, Williams maintained that the problem was not with 'science' but with how concepts such as 'physical' or 'material' came to be defined. The way forward, said Williams, is to encourage 'the necessary social process through which the materialist enterprise defines and redefines its procedures, its findings and its concepts, and in the course of this moves beyond one after another "materialism'" (p. 122). Bergson's own interplay of metaphysics and science works, according to Deleuze, to produce a radically redrawn materialism that extends simultaneously into matter, bodies, and machines (technology)as well as incorporealities, felt qualities and processes, finding in these, then, 'new lines, openings, traces, leaps, dynamisms' that might offer 'new linkings and re-linkings in thought' (1991: 116). By allowing metaphysical room for creative intuition, science - for cultural studies at least escapes its ingrown tendency to reduce the world to the contents of our consciousness and, instead, points the way towards the more-thanconscious, towards multiplicities. Multiplicities. Andrew Milner describes Williams' cultural materialism as engaging with 'a specifically "materialist" humanism, which acknowledged the differences in our present condition, precisely so as to distinguish eradicable inequity from desirable plurality and thereby to proceed, not to the abstractly universal, but to a concrete commonality' (2002: 166). This inherently political passage from desirable plurality to concrete commonality echoes Adorno's quotation (above) about Benjamin's trespassings through the Kantian prohibitions on experience, and also resonates with Deleuze's claim that he'd always felt he was 'an empiricist, that is, a pluralist' (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: vii). In these instances, this is not a rarefied move towards some higher level of abstraction, but rather the embrace of something quite vividly, even viscerally available: an affectively, experimentally empirical stance towards the world as a multiplicity in order 'to find the conditions under which something new is produced' (p. vii), and not a world where pre-existent concepts are always waiting to be conveniently superimposed. As Deleuze continues: The essential thing, from the point of view of empiricism, is the noun multiplicity, which designates a set of lines or dimensions which are irreducible to one another. . . In a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elem- ents, but what there is 'between', a set of relations which are not separable from each other. (pp. vii-viii) A multiplicity takes into account the concrete variability of a thing's particularity or singularity, without lifting it out of the processes of its emergence or severing it from the context of relations that make it uniquely what it is. Deleuze's resituating of structuralism, in his essay 'How Does One Recognize Structuralism?', is based upon this very notion: 'To discern the structure of a domain is to determine an entire virtuality of coexistence which pre-exists the beings, objects, and works of this domain. Every structure is a multiplicity of virtual coexistence' (2004: 179).In unfolding this virtual co-existence of any single element plus its relations and its conditions of emergence, Deleuze is able to shift structuralism - as a method of analysis prone to stasis - subtly out of phase with itself, putting every structural moment into motion as a processual, mobile configuration. 12 Or, as Raymond Williams might have completed this same thought: all such structural moments come to serve as 'indissoluble elements of a continuous social-material process'. Like Deleuze and Bergson, Williams 122 NEW CULTURAL STUDIES CULTURAL STUDIES AND GILLES DELEUZE 123 favoured the thought-image of solution and precipitation as a means to describe the flows and fluxes between process and structure, between virtual co-existence and articulated determination, between the uninterruptedly continuous and the discontinuously discrete: in short, to describe the way any element or structure is inhabited by multiplicity. Williams often acknowledged, as ever-present (even if not always fully conscious), the process of comparison between thought and feeling, experience and experiment, the indivisible whole and its parts, the disarmingly simple and densely complex and, even more, how each could contain the other while also remaining itself. He hung his hopes (and their resources) for the future on this multiplicity, and in its realisation as our 'concrete commonality'. Williams' final words in Politics and Letters state these hopes and their political impulses poignantly: I have been pulled all my life, for reasons we've discussed, between simplicity and complexity, and I can still feel the pull both ways. But every argument of experience and of history now makes my decision - and what I hope will be a general decision - clear. It is only in very complex ways that we can truly understand where we are. It is also only in very complex ways, and by moving confidently towards very complex societies, that we can defeat imperialism and capitalism and begin that construction of many socialisms which will liberate and draw upon our real and now threatened energies. (1981: 437) supposedly musty past-ness), always alongside, in this current heterogeneous mass of possibilities. Experience and experiment. Williams remains our contemporary. If cultural studies were to find itself one paradigm less (via whatever route or new adventure it travels to get there - Deleuzian or not), it should not, in the end, be named either 'culturalist' or 'structuralist', nor should it be given some other designation. It should only have to be known, simply (and, finally, complexly), as 'cultural studies.' '" Notes 1 It is important to remember that the tag 'culturalism' came from Richard Johnson and is not a name that Thompson, Hoggart and Williams ever chose to designate their own work. Nor was there ever any spoken or unspoken alliance between their projects. Given the various and subtle heterogeneities of the so-called 'culturalists', this chapter will limit itself to dealing almost exclusively with Williams' thought. 2 While it is not the aim of this chapter to enumerate all of the presumed pains and wrong turns that some argue followed in the wake of Stuart Hall's bifurcation of cultural studies into culturalists and structuralists (Hall 1980), interested readers might consult Milner (2002); Mulhern (2000); Pickering (1997). 3 After all, as Michel Foucault proclaimed (somewhat facetiously), the name Deleuzian should some day apply to the whole twentieth century (Foucault 1977: 165). 4 Martin Jay (2005: 199-215) efficiently summarises the fallout around 'the quarrel over experience in British Marxism': especially as regards Williams and Thompson. See also the 'Theory and Experience' chapter of Fred Inglis' Raymond Williams (1995: 240-65). 5 The key text is Benjamin's 'On the Program of the Coming Philosophy' (written in 1918 but unpublished in his lifetime). His critique of Kant's philosophical accounting of 'experience' is unremitting, even while it attempts to preserve certain other elements of the Kantian system (though Benjamin will, later, forego any pretence to perpetuate the system itself). In a 1918 letter to his friend Ernst Schoen, Benjamin is even less charitable to Kant: The greatest adversary of these thoughts is always Kant. I have become engrossed in his ethics - it is unbelievable how necessary it is to track down this despot, to track down his mercilessly philosophizing spirit which has philosophized certain insig'hts that are among the reprehensible ones to be found in ethics in particular. Especially in his later writings, he drives and senselessly whips his hobbyhorse, the logos. (Benjamin 1994: 125) " ,. ;i!, There is still a long way to go (it is going to be, as Williams warned, a 'long revolution'), but maybe multiplicity, intuition and a metaphysically materialist science are among those simple and, finally, complex pathways that allow cultural studies to continue the necessary work of bringing such hopes ever closer to fruition. Twenty-five years after splitting in two and then going 'piecemeal', there is arguably more than sufficient licence to wonder if a reinstated culturalist appeal to a vital and experiential empiricism returns now as an increasingly necessary critical endeavour. Deliberately echoing Williams, Francis Mulhern (one of the original Politics and Letters interviewers) writes, on the last page of his Culture/ Metaculture, that the practice of cultural studies operates, today, in the space of an open-ended excess 'with no fixed composition or tendency. It is a heterogeneous mass of possibilities old and new and never mutually translatable, possibilities no longer or not yet and perhaps never to be chartered as bearing general authority, as proper norms of political judgment' (2000: 174). No longer. Not yet. Perhaps never. Then, too, it is never a matter of reaching back to a past that once was in order to restore some bit of its lustre, but of finding this lustre (minus its i ,-j 6 See Daniel Smith's 'Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality' (1996: 29-56). 124 NEW CULTURAL STUDIES CULTURAL STUDIES AND GILLES DELEUZE 125 New York: 7 See Brian Massumi's introduction to Parablesfor the Virtual for more on the 'field of emergence of experience' (2002: 15). 8 Lawrence Grossberg has also pointed a finger at Kant, arguing that cultural studies has 'gotten itself into something of a dead-end because. . . almost all of the available theories of culture can be traced back to and located within the terrain of a Kantian philosophical discourse' (1997: 19). 9 To the best of my knowledge, there is only a brief parenthetical mention of Bergson - with regard to 'idealist notions of the "life force'" (1989: 72) - in Williams' finalcollectionof essays, ThePolitics of Modernism. 10 So popular was Bergson, at one time, that the first traffic jam in the United States has been attributed to his speaking appearance at Columbia University in 1913. 11 Felix Guattari argued that, while both Foucault and Deleuze 'emphasized the non-human part of subjectivity,' one should not misjudge and, then, 'suspect them of taking anti-humanist positions' (1995: 9). See Mulhern, who writes of Williams: 'His analysis of creativity was radically anti-essentialist, postulating experience as a historical formation of subjectivity, variable between and within societies, not a perceptual constant. And "the human", in his discourse, marked a social principle of inclusion, not a perennial moral nature' (2000: 90-1). 12 For a fascinating account of letters exchanged between Deleuze, Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey (a student of Althusser's at the time) over the course of Deleuze's drafting of his 'Structuralism' essay, see Stolze (1998). See also Etienne Balibar (2003). For a more collective accounting of Althusser and structuralism, via Spinoza, see Fourtounis (2005). Bibliography Deleuze, Gilles [1990] (1995), Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin, Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles [1973] (2004), 'How Does One Recognize Structuralism?', in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext( e), pp. 170-92. Deleuze,Gilles and Felix Guattari [1991](1994), What isPhilosophy?,rans. Hugh t Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University,Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet [1977] (1987), Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel [1970] (1977), 'Theatrum Philosophicum', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 165-96. Fourtounis, Giorgos (2005), 'On Althusser's lmmanentist Structuralism: Reading Montag Reading Althusser Reading Spinoza', Rethinking Marxism, 17: 1, pp. 101-18. Grossberg, Lawrence (1997), Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies,Durham,NC: DukeUniversity Press. Guattari, Felix [1992] (1995), Chaosmosis: n Ethico-AestheticParadigm, trans. A P. Bains and J. Pefanis, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Hall, Stuart (1980), 'Cultural Society, 2:1, pp. 57-72. Studies: Two Paradigms', Media, Culture, and Hall, Stuart [1980] (1990), 'Politics and Letters', in Terry Eagleton (ed.), Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 54-66. Hall, Stuart (1997), 'Culture and Power', Radical Philosophy, 86, NovemberDecember, pp. 24-41. Inglis, Fred (1995), Raymond Williams, London and New York: Routledge. Jay, Martin (2005), Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1'vlassumi, rian (2002), Parablesfor the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, B Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Milner, Andrew (2002), Re-Imagining Cultural Studies: The Promise of Cultural Materialism, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Mulhern, Francis (2000), Culture! Metaculture, London and New York: Routledge. Mullarkey, John (1999), Bergson and Philosophy,Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Pickering, Michael (1997), History, Experience, and Cultural Studies, New York: St Martin's Press. Smith, Daniel (1996), 'Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality', in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 29-56. Stolze, Ted (1998), 'Deleuze and Althusser: Rethinking Marxism, 10:3, pp. 51-63. Flirting with Structuralism', Adorno, Theodore (1988),'Benjamin the Letter Writer', in Gary Smith (ed.), On WalterBenjamin, Cambridge, A:MIT Press,pp. 329-37. M Balibar, Etienne (2003), 'Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?', dijJerences: A Journal of FeministCultural Studies,14:1, pp. 1-21. Benjamin, Walter (1994), The Correspondenceof Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, trans. Manfred Jacobson and Evelyn Jacobson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Walter (1996), Selected Writings: Volume 1,1913-1926, Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Bergson, Henri [1907] (1998), Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, Mineola, NY: Dover. Bergson, Henri [1903] (2002), 'Introduction to Metaphysics', in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle Andison, NY: Kensington pp. 159-200. Deleuze, Gilles [1966] (1991), Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books. Deleuze,Gilles[1968](1994),DifferencendRepetition, trans. Paul Patton, New a York: Columbia University Press. 126 NEW CULTURAL STUDIES Williams, Raymond (1961), The Long Revolution, New York: Columbia University Press. Williams, Raymond (1977), Marxism ali{I Literature, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Raymond (1980), Prob/elllsin Materialislll ali{IClliture, London: Verso. Williams, Raymond (1981), Politics ilnd Letters: Intervicms with the New Lefi Review, New York: Verso. Williams, Raymond (1983), The Year 2000, New York: Pantheon Books. Williams, Raymond (1985), Keywords: A Vowbular)l of Culture and Society, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Raymond (1989), The Politics (~r Modernism: Against the New Con.fOrmists, ondon and New York: Verso. L Wolin, Richard (1989), 'Experience and Materialism in Benjamin's Passagenwerk', in Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Histmy, Chicago: University of Chicag'o Press, pp. 210-27.