Performing Immanence by Jan Suk

Author:Jan Suk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2021-03-20T21:17:25.862000+00:00

If thought searches, it is less in the manner of someone who possesses a method than that of a dog that seems to be making uncoordinated leaps. We have no reason to take pride in this image of thought, which involves much suffering without glory and indicates the degree to which thinking has become increasingly difficult: immanence (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy 55).

Thinking, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is an unorganized yet organic process. The leaping dog is an image that is jarring, although very rhizomatic and unexpected. The image of a leaping dog is liberating and joyous. Such a methodology is far from systematic and anchored; rather it is ephemeral and poly-rhythmical. Similarly, in the context of the immanent performativity, Brian Massumi speaks of the ultimate desire to live like a thought: “[t]hought does not reflect the real. It is real. It has a reality on a par with the world’s becoming” (“Thought” 29, original emphasis). The equation of thinking and the world’s becoming is mutually transformative.

This immanent relationship is complementary to lived reality: “the inclusion of conditions for new emergence in the world that determinately emerges, and reciprocally the inclusion of the determinately emerged in the field conditions for new emergence” (“Thought” 33). The relationship between the lived world and that of performance is transversally interconnected, with a similar quality to that of an unfinished literary machine. Immanence manifests its interconnection and the reciprocal relations to something, a relation that is creative. The creation “is a process in perpetual motion, less a completed burrow than a ceaseless burrowing” (188), as Ronald Bogue observes. For Deleuze, Bogue continues, writing is a transformative process, a passage both for the writer and the reader, a mutually deterritorializing movement. To write is to flee (192), Bogue, states, to enter another dimension, more or less illusionary. Yet the illusionary, be it for writing or theatre, is etymologically not far from the Latin in lusio, from entering the game.7 Speaking about games, Laura Cull observes that for Deleuze, the game of dice “is a game with two moments: ‘the dice that is thrown and the dice that falls back.’ However, for Deleuze this distinction does not form the basis of a radical distinction, but an immanent differentiation, since they are ‘two moments of a single world’” (in Cull, Immanence 51). If the logic of Deleuze is to be pursued, the bad player throws the dice again and again in order to achieve a desired combination that has already been determined in advance, Deleuze maintains.

According to Cull, “the good player affirms whatever combination emerges as the right one, in a gesture of amor fati—or love of fate—which for Deleuze constitutes an ethical value” (Immanence 51). Here it must be again that Deleuzian understanding of ethics is very open. Cull stresses Deleuze’s intrinsic belief that “ethics is a matter of experimenting with what we can do; going as far as possible to produce joyful affects rather than sad ones, of creating relational bodies” (226). This positivistic and

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