Deleuzian Belch

The reason why books on Deleuze are so often disappointing is that they offer only paraphrasable ideas, whereas the pleasure of reading Deleuze himself lies in a style of thinking and writing that indeed comes to rest in paraphrasable ideas but also moves through and beyond them.

Having said that, I was recently looking at an essay on Deleuze and the logic of sensation by Jennifer Slack. It offers (I think) an account of Deleuze's critique of ‘Meaning’ – Meaning in the sense of a ‘hidden’ signified, a ‘deep’ content that replaces the thing itself. Meaning is here equated with representation. We hear a scream, a hiccup. ‘What does it mean?’ = ‘what does it represent?’: (Slack:)“Are you a scream of lost love representing recognition in a narrative of pain and abandonment? Are you a cry of happiness representing release in a narrative of joy?” Slack continues: “Deleuze writes that this practised application of representation ‘implies the relationship of an image to an object that it is supposed to illustrate’… Even though a scream ‘no more resembles what it signals than a word resembles what it designates’, we demand to know what narrative, what organisation of intelligible relationships renders this response – a scream, a tear, a frisson – a knowable object.”

This seems to me baffling and confused (yes, these things may be all mine). Now obviously a scream does not ‘resemble’ what it 'signals' in the sense that an iconic sign does. A scream is, presumably, something like an index or manifestation of X (as 'signal' indeed implies) as opposed to a ‘representation’ of X. The fact that it does not ‘resemble’ what it signals in no way rules out questions about what it ‘signals’ (more on this shortly). What also seems slightly remiss, above, is that the phrase she quotes from Deleuze about ‘the relationship of an image to an object..’ specifically concerns figurative painting (it’s from the Bacon book) rather than a more general ‘application of representation’. The concepts patiently extracted from Bacon are transposed elsewhere and made into generalities (wheras Deleuze talks about empiricism as extracting concpets from multiplicities).

Anyway, what seems strange to me is an apparent conflation of meaning and representation. Again, the ‘logic of representation’ as summarised by Slack seems to be that a thing only has value as a bearer (or representative) of its Meaning; instead of this, we must grasp the thing in terms of its immediate affects on the bodies around it, in terms of what it produces and the relations it sets up . The obvious response to this is that ‘Meaning’ is not eccentric to affects, production and enacted relations.

For example, the ‘meaning’ of sticking two fingers up at someone does not lie in its ‘representing’ the expression ‘fuck off’ but also in what it does – intimidates, disrespects, threatens or whatever. More generally, anything from a burp (Slack’s own eg, I think) is not meaningful because it ‘represents’ something but because it intervenes in an already meaning-full world. The belch does not ‘represent’ some content. It breaks up the stilted formalism of the job interview, derails the awkward silence of a dinner party, or confirms some laddish solidarity. The effects of this belch will fully depend on what field of meaning it interrupts (or corroborates). The disturbance that something makes within an extant field of meaning, the relations it produces, are its meanings. Within a different meaning-full world it would not have the same repercussions nor incite the same disturbances.

Sometimes, in Deleuzian commentary, there is this elusive and favoured notion of the a-signifying mark or pure sensation, spots or lines of unclothed intensity anarchically murdering (common) sense. This, somehow, is the naked thing-in-itself divested of Meaning. But what has escaped the net of signification is fully mediated by what it has escaped just as nudity is mediated by clothing. Only within and in relation to this world is it 'a-signifying' and, as such, belongs to it by way of negation. And I think GD would give me an approving belch on this one.