Cancelling Deleuze

[bonus] issue 135 - 23rd April, 2021

CJW: Apologies for the delay with this issue. Turns out I fucked up something when I first set up the Buttondown account, so I’ve been getting that sorted out, and it’s taken a bit longer than I hoped (which is entirely down to me having too much on this month). I put off sending this on Sunday, just so Mr Buttondown (Justin to his friends) could finish fixing my fuck up. (We’re still not done, but I came up with a temporary workaround at least.)

Anyway…

Recently on Buddies without Organs we covered Gilles Deleuze’s essay On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature. It was a great episode I felt, and I put some notes up on the website, but there was something more I wanted to write about from the essay. The below is my attempt. I feel like it’s maybe half an essay, but I’m still trying to figure out what the second half might be, or where it might go. If you’ve got any thoughts, let me know.

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A minority never exists ready-made, it is only formed on lines of flight, which are also its way of advancing and attacking.

There’s another thread in On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature that lends itself to a rather ungenerous reading, where one might be tempted to say that Deleuze is arguing for appropriation in writing. (I only even mention this because my brain has been melted by twitter, so I viewed this portion of the essay through the lens of people on twitter trying to cancel Deleuze. Twitter: not even once.)

I don’t believe Deleuze is arguing for cultural appropriation at all – I just think he’s just writing in the late 80s (using the language of that time) about something that is a push-button topic in the online writing community today: cultural appropriation, writing the other, #ownvoices, and the like. This in particular is a section that did not age well:

No, says Lawrence, you are not the little [Inuit] going by, yellow and greasy, you do not need to mistake yourself for him. But you may perhaps put yourself in his shoes, you have something to assemble with him, an [Inuit]-becoming which does not consist in playing the [Inuit], in imitating or identifying yourself with him or taking the [Inuit] upon your-self, but in assembling something between you and him, for you can only become [Inuit] if the [Inuit] himself becomes something else.

Not only has the language used here aged poorly (to say the least), but he seems to be implying that anyone can take on another person’s identity - that this something-becoming is a simple and trivial act - which is problematic again when you consider the perceived audience of this essay - mostly white, mostly male, writers. Personally, I do think any writer can write any character, but there is a big difference between (for instance) writing a story that includes a trans character, and writing a trans story - as in, I would never write about transitioning because that’s not my story to tell. But also, when I say that any writer can, I mean they can if they do the work to do it well, I think the problem is that a lot of (white/cis/straight) people feel entitled to write any character. and that entitlement gets in the way of them doing a good enough job. They approach it without sufficient research, interest, and empathy because they’re willfully ignorant of their own privilege and hostile to being told they’re doing/writing something problematic.

So while I think Deleuze perhaps stumbles in trying to make some of his points here, I don’t think it’s a fundamental problem with the man or with this essay, and I don’t think it’s a cancelable offense. When you look elsewhere in the essay you’ll pick up the other parts of this thread. Like this:

What other reason is there for writing than to be a traitor to one’s own reign, traitor to one’s sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority?

Deleuze is telling us to be a traitor, be a saboteur, or risk reinforcing hegemony. If you’re a man, being a traitor to your sex doesn’t necessarily mean writing female characters (especially if you aren’t doing the work to do it well), it means undermining the apparent superiority of the male as it is shown in so much other writing. It means interrogating your own preconceived notions and reaching beyond the immediate, the obvious, and the lazy. If all you’re going to do is write to support the status quo, then why are you even bothering?

And then the other pincer of my argument against the (entirely imaginary) cancellation of Deleuze – is this:

[…] we are always sunk in the hole of our subjectivity, the black hole of our Ego which is more dear to us than anything.

Every time I see people on twitter arguing that, for instance, white people shouldn’t write from the POV of a person of colour, it’s almost always off the back of some white writer shitting the bed badly. They’ve let their ego get in the way – they’ve decided that of course they’re not racist, of course they don’t need to interrogate their prejudices or reach beyond the first thing that comes to mind because they’re a good person. I’ll tell you what, buddy, no matter how good you are or how good you think you are, you have spent your entire life in a society that is extremely racist, where white supremacy is foundational – even if you don’t realise it, you’ve internalised a lot of nasty shit.

And this goes back to the line of flight. Are you on a line of flight – are you on an active journey toward becoming?

There’s a related section when Deleuze recognises the way minorities are able to undermine hegemony through the ways they can twist and shatter the English language.

The American language bases its despotic official pretensions, its majoritarian claim to hegemony, only on its extraordinary capacity for being twisted and shattered and for secretly putting itself in the service of minorities who work it from inside, involuntarily, unofficially, nibbling away at that hegemony as it extends itself: the reverse of power. English has always been worked upon by all these minority languages, Gaelic-English, Irish-English, etc., which are all so many war-machines against the English

He also specifically mentions Black English, which I’m glad to see because today it’s extremely apparent how much Black culture – and queer culture, and queer Black culture – is able to affect the mainstream. Just about every popular piece of new slang that’s come about in the past few years online can be traced directly back to spaces that are queer and/or Black.

It is a case of making language shift, with words which are increasingly restrained and a syntax which is increasingly subtle. It is not a question of speaking a language as if one was a foreigner, it is a question of being a foreigner in one’s own language, in the sense that American is indeed the [Black] language.

Now, there’s a counterargument to be made that these twistings and shatterings don’t so much undermine the hegemony as be absorbed and appropriated by capital. And that might be true, but it doesn’t undermine the vibrancy and creativity of minority spaces – which is something Deleuze recognises and celebrates here. Whatever his failures in this essay, I believe he’s coming from a good place, and I think there’s still a lot to be taken from this essay on questions of writing/becoming, and who/how to tell the story you need to tell.