Computers are not theatre: The machine in the ghost in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's thought

Convergence

Volumn 2, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 80-110

  Murphie, Andrew ^a  

^a MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61049210711     PISSN: 13548565     EISSN: 17487382     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/135485659600200208     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies I (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 265.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 104.
3. For example, Guattari wrote that 'Subjectivity today remains under the massive control of apparatuses of power and knowledge, thus consigning technical, scientific and artistic innovation to the service of the most reactionary and retrograde figures of sociality. In spite of that, other modalities of subjective production, processual and singularizing ones, are conceivable. These alternative forms of existential re-appropriation and self-valorisation may in the future become the reason for living for human collectivities and individuals who refuse to give in to the death like entropy characterising the period we are going through'. Félix Guattari, 'Regimes, Pathways, Subjects' in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 35.
4. See, for example, Paul Virilio, 'The Image to Come', Art and Text, 36, pp. 90-94
5. Lost Dimension (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991)
6. The Aesthetics of Disappearance (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991)
7. War and Cinema, The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989)
8. L'art du moteur (Paris: Galilée, 1993)
9. and, with Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
10. For one description of this virtual realm see McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
11. Erkki Huhtamo, in 'Seeking Deeper Contact: Interactive Art as Metacommentary', Convergence, 1, no. 2 (1995), pp. 81-104, suggests that the assumption of Laurel and similar researchers of a 'common ground' for humans and machines, leading to a 'growing "naturalness", immediacy and intimacy to the human-machine relationship' is 'problematic, particularly if viewed from a wider social and cultural perspective' (p. 82). Huhtamo underlines the contradictions that the human-machine relation in fact involves, as we move from an 'oppositional' to a 'cyborg logic' (ibid), that may not be so easily resolved as they seem to be in Laurel's work. He subjects the notions of interactivity, immersion and automation, together with the anthropomorphism so often involved in discussions of interactivity, to a rigorous questioning.
12. Randal Walser, 'Elements of a Cyberspace Playhouse' in Virtual Reality: theory, practice, promise, eds. Sandra Helsel and Judith Roth (London: Meckler, 1991).
13. Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
14. Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1991), pp. 49-67.
15. Howard Rheingold, Virtual Community (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1994), pp. 145-175.
16. For an interesting example of this see Brad Rhodes and Pattie Maes, 'The Stage as Character: Automatic Creation Of Acts of God for Dramatic Effect' at http://rhodes. www. media. mit. edu/people/rhodes/aaai95. html.
17. To be fair here, these are questions that Rheingold addresses far more thoroughly, and more critically in Virtual Community (London: Secker and Warburg, 1994).
18. See also Walter Benjamin's essay, 'The Author as Producer', in Reflections, Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 220-238.
19. See, for example, Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 11. Baudrillard rightly suggests that simulations are effective producers but seems nostalgic for a time when everything was not only simulated - when there was something that reflected the 'real' in an uncomplicated way.
20. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 135.
21. Of course, it is necessary here to mention that, as in the case of Brecht, it is often the effect of Aristotle's Poetics that is being attacked rather than the Poetics themselves. In Brecht's case, it was perhaps a matter of attacking the Greek basis, that is, as has been discussed previously, the cultural guarantee of something else - namely the naive forms of naturalism that Brecht found himself surrounded by. Aristotle's theories are, of course, much more complex than their interpreters often allow. For example, the concept of the 'imitation of an action' seems to oscillate between the imitation of men (Aristotle, 'The Poetic' in European Theories of the Drama, ed. Barret Clark [New York: Crown Publishers, 1965], p. 5) and 'not of men, but of actions, (of life, and of felicity)' (p. 9). It can be seen that Heidegger follows the complexities of Aristotle's notions of mimesis perhaps more closely here than Brecht, in that it would seem that Brecht's theatre work itself could be considered under the notion of an imitation of an action despite his critique of the idea. Heidegger, on the other hand, like Aristotle, situates his work precisely in this gap between 'men' and the more general action of life that surrounds them. The whole notion of mimesis here is, perhaps, another problematic from the orbit of which it may not be so easy to escape. Nevertheless, certain priorities both in Aristotle's work and in its cheaper imitations themselves, as imitations, misrepresentations which in themselves demonstrate the problematic of the mimesis, must be resisted - perhaps used as a departure point rather than a point of arrival.
22. Aristotle, p. 8.
23. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 1983), p. 3.
24. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre; The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).
25. This is discussed at length in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Deleuze and Guattari write that 'the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process (of production) appears to emanate from this recording surface' (p. 10) - my parentheses and italics.
26. Brian Eno and Kevin Kelly, 'Eno: Gossip is Philosophy', Wired, May (1995), p. 151.
27. See Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) for a description of the politics of the line.
28. See, for example, Elizabeth Grosz; 'Desire, Bodies and Representation', Artlink, 8, no. 1, pp. 34-39
29. 'Desire, the Body and Recent French Feminisms', Flesh (Sydney: Intervention, 1988), pp. 28-33
30. 'Space, Time and Bodies', On the Beach, 13, April (1988), pp. 13-26.
31. Witness, to this effect, Irigaray's withering critique of Plato's Cave, the latter's specular deferral of production at the very moment that it instates productive relations of sexual prejudice in The Speculum of the Other Woman (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985).
32. 'A Cyborg Manifesto', in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), pp. 149-181.
33. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1990), pp. 28-29, my translation.
34. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 87.
35. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
36. Deleuze, Logic, pp. 280-301 gives a detailed description of Deleuze's views on Klossowski.
37. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone Press, 1994).
38. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 56-57.
39. Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 108.
40. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989), p. 88.
41. Deleuze and Guattari also differ from another theorist often linked with them in this area: Jean Baudrillard. Unlike Baudrillard (for example, in 'L'Extase de la Communcation', Mediamatic, 3, no. 2, 1988), Deleuze and Guattari can provide differing ethical evaluations of simulacra depending upon their precise points of appearance in social machines. For Baudrillard, simulacra seem to all amount to much the same thing, once 'simulation' takes over the social.
42. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu'est-ce que la Philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1991), p. 21, my translation.
43. A French performance artist who consciously undergoes plastic surgery as performance. See L. Gray, 'The Body in the Text', Sydney Morning Herald, 7 May 1996, p. 18.
44. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 471.
45. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 355.
46. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 255.
47. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 260.
48. Deleuze writes of Spinoza also that, although ideas and things are separate they are parallel expressions of the same substance - 'For every idea there corresponds some thing, and to everything an idea' (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, p. 116). For Deleuze, 'the corporeal mechanism and the spiritual automaton are most expressive when they find their "sense" and their "correspondence" in the necessary reason that was everywhere lacking in Descartes' (p. 335).
49. 'The eye is an implicated light or the expression of a possible light, while the ear is that of a possible sound. ' (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition p. 260)
50. Félix Guattari, 'Machinic Heterogenesis' in Rethinking Technologies, ed. Verena Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 13-27.
51. Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology' in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), pp. 3-35.
52. Guattari, 'Machinic Heterogenesis', p. 22.
53. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu'est-ce que la Philosophie, p. 8.
54. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 307.
55. Even Alex Callinicos (Against Postmodernism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989, p. 68) recognises this, although a staunch opponent of Deleuze and Guattari.
56. Félix Guattari, 'Machinic Heterogenesis', p. 23.
57. This is present also in the earlier work of Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (Middlesex: Penguin, 1984): Signs are involved in things prior to representations. Signs and things engage one another independently of the subjective control that agents of individual utterance claim to have over them. A collective agency of utterance is then in a position to deprive the spoken word of its function as imaginary support to the cosmos. It replaces it with a collective voice that combines machinic elements of all kinds - human, semiotic, technological, scientific, etc. (p. 76). It can be seen that this forms the basis for Guattari's new form of analysis - one that analyses more than chains of signifiers or semiotic elements - and is why he writes that 'I wish to condemn psychoanalysis only on behalf of a different kind of analysis, a micro-political analysis . . . On behalf, in other words, of a genuine analysis' (p. 78). See also pp. 90ff.
58. Philip Hayward, Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century (London: John Libbey Press, 1991), p. 5.
59. One of the clearest examples of which is found, of course, in Foucault's discussion of Jeremy Bentham's 'Panopticon' in Discipline and Punish.
60. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers, pp. 127-128, my translation.
61. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 257-258.
62. I do not mean to invoke the reinstatement of the grand narrative of the artist here, or the maintenance of so-called 'high culture'. Rather it is a question of finding points of creation in everything.
63. See McKenzie Wark, 'Suck on This, Planet of Noise', Media Information Australia, no. 69, August (1993), p. 75, for a brief description of one related project, that of Eric Michaels and Francis Jupurrurla.
64. Regina Cornwell, 'Interactive Art: Touching the "Body in the Mind"', Discourse, 14, no. 2 (1992), pp. 227 and 232.
65. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 50.
66. For a fuller discussion of these issues see my own 'Sound at the End of the World as We Know It: Nick Cave, Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire and a Deleuze-Guattarian Ecology of Popular Music', Perfect Beat, 2, no. 4, pp. 18-42.
67. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, p. 19.
68. Deleuze and Parnet, p. 104.
69. See also my own 'Lost in the Fatherland: Naturalism, Theatre and the Body', Spectator Burns, no. 1, (1987), pp. 10-23, for further discussion of Kleist's marionette.
70. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 131.