writing

  ---- by Rosi Braidotti

  Deleuze's philosophical monism makes no categorical difference between thinking and creating, painting and writing, concept and percept. These are all variations of experimentation, more specifically, an experimentation with intensities that foster patterns of becoming. Experimentation expresses different topological modes; they enact a creative process that is not configured by unfolding a fixed essence or telos. Creativity is understood as a multiple and complex process of transformation, otherwise the flux of becoming. Put simply, creativity affirms the positive structure of difference.

  Writing then, is not the self-assertion of a rationally ordained imaginative subject, rather its eviction. It has to do with emptying out the self, opening it up to possible encounters with a number of affective outsides. The writer's eye captures the outside world by becoming receptive to minute and seemingly irrelevant perceptions. During such moments of floating awareness, when rational control releases its hold, 'reality' vigorously rushes through the sensorial/perceptive apparatus. This onslaught of data, information and affectivity simultaneously propels the self out of the black hole of its atomised isolation, dispersing it into a myriad of dataimprints. Ambushed, the self not only receives affects, it concomitantly recomposes itself around them. A rhizomic bond is thus established that, through the singular geometry of the affects involved and their specific plane of composition, confirms the singularity of the subject produced on a particular plane of immanence.

  One needs to be able to sustain the impact of affectivity: to 'hold' it. But holding or capturing affectivity does not happen dialectically within a dominant mode of consciousness. Instead, it takes the form of an affective, depersonalised, highly receptive subject which quite simply is not unified. The singularity of this rhizomic subjectivity rests on the spatio-temporal coordinates that make it coincide with nothing more than the degrees, levels, expansions and extensions of the 'outside' as it rushes head-on, moving inwards and outwards. What are mobilised are one's capacities to feel, sense, process and sustain the impact in conjunction with the complex materiality of the outside; a sort of fluid but self-sustaining sensibility, or stream-of-consciousness that is porous to the outside. Our culture has tended to code this as 'feminine'. Pure creativity is an aesthetic mode of absolute immersion along with the unfolding and enfolding of one's sensibility in the field of forces one inhabits - music, colour, light, speed, temperature and intensity.

  Because of the historical bond that ties writing to régimes of power, the activity of writing plays a special pragmatic role; it is a tool that can be used to decode the despotic power of the linguistic signifier. In this way, the intensive writing style particular to Deleuze spells the end of the linguistic turn, as he releases the subject from the cage of representational thinking. Writing is therefore, not explained with reference to psychoanalytic theories of symbolic 'lack', or reduced to an economy of guilt, nor is it the linguistic power of the master signifier. Writing is an intensive approach that stresses the productive, more than the regressive. Put differently, Deleuze insists writing is the structure of affectivity that animates the subject. At the heart of Deleuze's rhizomatics is a positive reading of the human as affirmative, a pleasure-prone machine capable of all kinds of empowering forces. It is just a question of establishing the most positive or even joyful connections and resonances.

  For Deleuze what is at stake in writing is not the manipulation of a set of linguistic or narrative conventions; nor is it the cognitive penetration of an object; nor even the appropriation of a theme.Writing is an orientation; it is the skill that consists in developing a compass of the cognitive, affective and ethical kind. It is quite simply an apprenticeship in the art of conceptual and perceptual colouring.

  A new image, or philosophical concept, is an affect that breaks through established frames and representations. It illuminates a territory through the orientation of its coordinates; it makes visible/thinkable/sayable/ hearable forces, passions and affects that were previously unperceived. Thus, the question of creation is ultimately technological: it is one of 'how?'. It is also geological: it is about 'where?' and 'in which territory?'. Ultimately, it is ethical: it is concerned with where limits can be set and how to sustain altered states or processes of change.

  Connectives

   § black hole

   § creative transformation

   § difference

   § immanence

   § power

   § representation