Dark Deleuze Book Review

Book Reviews Andrew Culp (2016) Dark Deleuze, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. We must correct Deleuze’s error: failing to cultivate a hatred for this world. (Culp 2016: 44) Andrew Culp’s recently published text, Dark Deleuze, is quite literally a heresy in terms of contemporary interpretations of Deleuze. It proposes an image of Deleuze as a thinker of the negative, as someone who came to the realisation that what is needed in the age of control societies is a politically charged concept of difference in terms of exclusion, asymmetry and incommensurability. However, one would be mistaken in thinking this as a Hegelian critique dressed up in Deleuzian wool. Despite the fact that this ‘darkened’ Deleuze appears to closely resemble Hegel’s privileged terms of contradiction, opposition and negation, Dark Deleuze is not a text that tries to buck academic trends for the mere fun of it. So much so that Culp even finds himself in the strange position of promoting arguments that could be considered outdated: ‘we need to return to structuralism, if for no other reason than American anthropology was never (post)structuralist. Such a provocation . . . is a rejection of the postmodern “reflexive turn” as thirty years lost to navel gazing’ (52). Against offering the latest in academic fashion, Dark Deleuze attempts a principled reconstruction of a thoroughly political Deleuze from the vantage point of an effectively foreclosed future under the present configuration of capitalism. This text’s heretical reconstruction begins by drawing a hard line between some of the dominant and marginal interpretations in contemporary Deleuze scholarship. For Culp, the relation between these two trends is as clear as it is incommensurable: on the one hand are those who promote an image of Deleuze as the Deleuze and Guattari Studies 12.3 (2018): 428–453 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/dlgs Reviews 429 thinker par excellence of liberalism and pluralism (William Connolly), ontological realism (DeLanda), of fully automated luxury communism (Left-accelerationism), or of a blind acceptance of Capital as the true agent of human history (Nick Land). On the other hand, there are those who take Deleuze at his word when he assigns himself the task of overthrowing ontology (François Zourabichvili) and the development of the powers of the false (Daniel W. Smith). This latter position would also include those who read Deleuze as a thinker who unabashedly privileges the deterritorialising powers of the war machine against the capitalist State, as a thinker who is both politically principled and who assumes an uncompromising asymmetry to the world in his valorisation of a becoming-revolutionary that takes as one of its principal political projects the task of destroying those aspects of the world that seek to destroy us (Marx, Tiqqun, the Invisible Committee). It is in the name of this latter image of Deleuze that Dark Deleuze stakes its claim. While this is by no means a text that introduces Deleuze to first-time readers, it is to Culp’s merit to have written a succinct polemic against what he takes to be the prevailing orthodoxy within Deleuze scholarship (which he labels as the ‘canon of joy’); a polemic which offers readers who may be coming from diverse and variegated backgrounds a set of practical and theoretical tools for understanding and utilising the thought of Deleuze as a whole. Culp’s principal assessment of this Deleuzian orthodoxy is the following: it is to our detriment (and the detriment of actually understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s revolutionary aspirations) that we continue to rely on the affirmationist, connectionist and joyous concepts of rhizomes, assemblages and networks. Here it is worth quoting at length in order to do justice to the scope of Culp’s analysis: Philosophically, connectivity is about world building. The goal of connectivity is to make everyone and everything part of a single world . . . Yet connectivity today is determined far more by people like Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, who demonstrates the significance of Deleuze’s argument that ‘technology is social before it is technical’ [. . .] Trained as a counterterrorism expert, Google poached Cohen from a position at the Department of State, where he convinced Condoleezza Rice to integrate social media into the Bush administration’s ‘diplomatic tool kit’ [. . .] In a geopolitical manifesto cowritten with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt, The New Digital Age, Cohen reveals Google’s deep aspiration to extend U.S. government interests at home and abroad. Their central tool? Connectivity. When connectivity is taken as a mantra, you can see its effects everywhere [. . .] As perverse as it sounds, many Deleuzians still promote concepts that equally motivate 430 Reviews these slogans: transversal lines, assemblages, connections, compositionist networks, complex assemblages, affective experiences, and enchanted objects. No wonder Deleuze has been derided as the lava lamp saint of ‘California Buddhism’ – so many have reduced his rigorous philosophy to the mutual appreciation of difference, openness to encounters in an entangled world, or increased capacity through synergy. Instead of drawing out the romance, Dark Deleuze demands that we kill our idols. (6–7) It is because the connectivist image of Deleuze has been outstripped by the marriage between Google’s cybernetic technology and the aims of the capitalist State that Culp argues for an altogether different and definitely unfamiliar task for thinking and living today: world destruction. This destructive image of Deleuze substitutes ‘philosophy as concept creation’ with the apocalyptic aspiration that Deleuze himself discovered in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon: ‘What this book should therefore have made apparent is the advance of a coherence which is no more our own, that of mankind, than that of God and the world. In this sense, it should have been an apocalyptic book’ (Deleuze 1992: xxi). According to Culp, what we need to understand from Deleuze’s remarks on Erewhon is that Deleuze privileges the category of ‘apocalypse’, and thus world destruction, over and against any notion of world as a unified, commensurable and compossible whole and its subsequent project of world construction. Instead of presenting Deleuze as a thinker who remains committed to the relationship between the transcendent Ideas of World, Soul and God, Culp argues in favour of a Deleuze who gave thinking the task of comprehending the immanent Idea of the World. On this view, the reality of the world is not to be located in any regulative Idea of pure or practical Reason but in the presently existing relations of power that define any historical moment. Thus, with respect to the debate regarding the nature and status of Deleuze’s own theory of Ideas, Culp’s position falls squarely in line with the interpretation offered by Daniel Smith who, in his essay ‘Dialectics: Theory of Immanent Ideas’, presents this reading in the following manner: Anti-Oedipus remains an incomprehensible book as long as one does not see its overall structure as an attempt, on Deleuze’s part, to rewrite the Critique of Practical Reason. But what would a pure immanent theory of desire look like in the domain of practical reason? It would mean that one could no longer appeal to the moral law . . . but instead have to synthesize desire with a conception of purely immanent Ideas. This is precisely what Deleuze does in the opening two chapters of Anti-Oedipus: the three syntheses by which he and Guattari define ‘desiring-production’ are in fact the same three Ideas that Reviews 431 Kant defines as the postulates of practical reason (soul, world, and God), but now stripped entirely of their transcendent status, to the point where neither God, world, nor self subsists. (Smith 2012: 118) How far we are from the Deleuze most people are familiar with; that world of rhizomes, empowering affects, and joyous connections that build a revolutionary plane of consistency! For Culp, and given our historical present, repeating these Deleuzian affirmations has proven useless as capitalism has already appropriated rhizomes and connective syntheses as the means for its reproduction. While Culp’s interpretation stands on its own regarding the various ways of reading Deleuze, we should note at the outset that Culp’s text finds firm grounding in the suspicions Deleuze left undeveloped in his ‘Postscript on Control Societies’: Can one already glimpse the outlines of these future forms of resistance, capable of standing up to marketing’s blandishments? Many young people have a strange craving to be ‘motivated,’ they’re always asking for special courses and continuing education; it’s their job to discover whose ends these serve, just as older people discovered, with considerable difficulty, who was benefiting from disciplines. (Deleuze 1992: 182) Thus, in order to come to grips with Culp’s interpretation, we will first see how the task of Dark Deleuze is one of ‘world destruction’ as opposed to the popular assumption of ‘concept creation’. Then we will see how Culp envisions the revolutionary agent that will carry out the destruction of the world and the corresponding terms of this transformative process. Finally, we will interrogate Culp’s alternative proposals through his terms of indistinction and escape as they relate to this portrait of a Deleuze whose sole purpose was the construction of a new image of Thought that simultaneously was committed, by right, to the overcoming of capitalist social relations. I. Deleuze: The Destroyer of Worlds? For Culp, the notion of the Death of this World finds its history in both the critical project of Kant as well as the anti-Enlightenment project inaugurated by Nietzsche. However, it is only by understanding how Culp reads Deleuze as synthesising Enlightenment critique with the antiEnlightenment’s ‘mad man’ that we will understand what it means to think and what thinking makes possible for us. As Culp writes: The end of this world is the third in a succession of deaths – the Death of God, the Death of Man, and now the Death of this World. This is not a call to physically destroy the world. The Death of God did not call for the assault 432 Reviews of priests or the burning of churches, and the Death of Man did not propose genocide or the extinction of our species. Each death denounces a concept as insufficient, critiques those who still believe in it, and demands its removal as an object of thought. (65–6) The ‘death of the world’, as presented in the passage above, is envisioned as double in nature. That is, the death of this world is not simply the completion of a finite process. Rather, death in this instance is a process that simultaneously abolishes and creates the old world and the new, where the agent of this process of transformation is the destructive character of Dark Deleuze. Thus it is no accident that we can find in Deleuze’s own work, and as early as Difference and Repetition, an articulation of the dual character of death. As Deleuze writes, ‘Every death is double, and represents the cancellation of large differences in extension as well as liberation and swarming of little differences in intensity’ (Deleuze 1992: 259). At this point the death of the world follows from Nietzsche’s death of God and the injunction this death issues: the mere destruction of old values does not suffice to save humanity from a decadent world. The death of the world, just as it was with the death of God, signals the exhaustion of old values and denounces particular concepts as insufficient while leaving open the possibility for new values and concepts to be created. And yet, we cannot simply view Dark Deleuze as the latest participant in the antiEnlightenment tradition that is at times said to span from Nietzsche to Foucault. We are forced to acknowledge that this darker Deleuze also adheres to, while deviating from, the critical tradition inaugurated by Kant. In the successive deaths outlined by Culp, we can begin to see its analogous relation to the Kantian Ideas of Self, World and God. As is known, and according to Kant, the antinomy posed to pure reason with respect to the equally possible and logically governed assessment of both a finite and infinite world is intended to show how inferences made by pure reason alone are based upon poorly posed problems (‘is the world finite or infinite?’) and give rise to metaphysical illusion. However, while we are barred from making a determinate judgement of the World as the synthetic totality of all its appearances, Kant argues that this demonstrates that the true role of Ideas is not informative but regulative. The Ideas of Soul, World and God regulate our activity of rational inquiry by serving as the signposts that guide natural science and the organising horizon of this knowledge. Culp’s wager is that if the Idea of the World was initially regulative and served to guide rational inquiry and the natural sciences towards an ever more unified system of knowledge, this idea has now Reviews 433 been exhausted in our contemporary moment. Not because we have synthesised, once and for all, the totality of all appearances in science. Rather, it is because a unitary synthesis of all that appears is definitive of, and being constantly perfected by, the logical progression of the (re)production of capitalist social relations. To put this in the most plain of terms, it is capitalism that has proved adequate to the task assigned by this regulative Idea of World. It is against the backdrop of this present marriage of the (Idea of the) World to the machinations of capital that the need for a darker Deleuze can be felt. As Culp writes: Contemporary Deleuze scholarship tends to be connectivist and productivist. Connectivism is the world-building integration into an expanding web of things . . . Academics are not alone in endorsing connectivism – I argue that connectivism drives Google’s geopolitical strategy of global influence, which proceeds through a techno-affirmationist desire to annex everything. Commentators use different names for their webs of connection, such as rhizomes, assemblages, networks, material systems, or dispositifs. I simply call them ‘this world’ and plot for its destruction. (66–7) Thus, from the writings of Kant and up to Google’s dream for a fully networked reality, it was always (the Idea of) the World that was at issue. It was always a question of the World as both the guidepost and goal for a unified system of everything that appears. However, we should not mistake the privilege given to world destruction as some implicit eschatology in Culp’s reading of Deleuze. Rather, what is certain is that the World as Idea appears to have exhausted itself on the factory floors, Google’s boardrooms, gentrified neighbourhoods and call centre booths of capital. Given this fact that the World (in both its virtual/ideal and actual/real existence) is approaching the end of its usefulness for thought itself, we need to understand the ‘Death of the World’ as a choice made on how we want this world to end: This is not the banal disaster movie, whose ambitions are usually limited to teaching us what are the bare essentials to survive. Writing the disaster is how we break free from the stifling perpetual present, for the present carries with itself a suffocating urgency. (24) In this manner, the destructive character of Dark Deleuze is not simply another indeterminate negation of a social totality or a blanket rejection of everything and anything that presently exists; Culp’s darkened image of Deleuze is not a thinker who is anti-anything/everything for its own sake. On the contrary, this is an image of Deleuze that privileges the destructive aspects of lines of flight and seeks to devise a 434 Reviews political/practical strategy based on the assumption that the (Idea of the) World and ‘world building’ as it currently stands can no longer serve its original, regulative and ideal purpose. The task of world destruction elaborated here is significant, however, only to the extent that it is tied to another key pillar of Culp’s interpretation: the notion of Deleuze as a Marxist who is ‘so anti-State that it refuses the project of democracy’ (42). Despite some readers’ knee-jerk reactions to this image of Deleuze, Culp develops this reading from the passages wherein Deleuze and Guattari themselves denounce the various forms democracy has taken. From A Thousand Plateaus alone we see the appearance of military democracies (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 394), social democracies (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 462) and even totalitarian-social democracies (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 462). From What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari analyse various instances of Democracy that span from the colonial democracy of Antiquity up to a Nazi democracy (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 97, 108). Thus Dark Deleuze belongs to the tradition of those who position themselves as leftists who take an extra-parliamentary to the parliamentary Left. It is a tradition that views the State as inherently reproductive of the social relations of domination and subordination because it is the function of the State to simultaneously align/organise the interests of the capitalist class and separate/disorganise the interests and power of the working class. In the last instance, what Culp calls world destruction is simply Marx’s own understanding of the term communism as stated in the well-known passage from The German Ideology: Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement, which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. (Marx and Engels 1998: 57) If world destruction is significant only in its connection to Deleuze’s particular brand of Marxism, the necessary follow-up question to arise for Culp’s reading regards the status of the revolutionary subject, the one who is to destroy the world by abolishing the present state of things. II. Un-becoming and Relations of Asymmetry Thus the question for Culp’s interpretation: who is it that is carrying out this apocalyptic programme? Who is it that gets to determine the ‘future earth’ and ‘people to come’? In other words, we are asking: what kind of Reviews 435 agency can truly be said to be revolutionary if we can no longer rely on those received images from the history of revolutionary struggles? Culp identifies two main possibilities in response to these questions. Either revolutionary subjectivity is understood as the process of becoming or undergoing transformation in a way that affects the world in order to dispel ready-made ideas, or subjectivity is located in assemblages and the dynamism of material nature. The answer for Culp is clearly in line with the former. The agent who carries out this world destruction is a collective agent of un-becoming as opposed to that of assemblages. Becoming, says Culp, is really a process of un-becoming; it is a process of delinking or divesting ourselves from this world. Thus the ‘subject’ of world destruction is the one who, by undoing what the world has done to it, gains in revolutionary potential to the degree that it avoids ‘founding a new order on a new image of world’ (30). Thus, this un-becoming subjectivity finds its roots closer to the German anarchocommunist punk scene than that of any supposed pluralist, liberal-democratic, state socialist or connectivist tradition: Think of an old German rock song, ‘Macht Kaputt, Was Euch Kaputt Macht’ by Ton Steine Scherben, an anarchocommunist band connected to the squatter scene and the Red Army Faction (before it went underground). As cheap as it sounds, perhaps the cure for depressive disinterest is the thrill of ‘destroying what destroys you.’ (50) By contrast, and with respect to the subject of un-becoming, Culp views readers such as DeLanda and Latour as the individuals who promote a concept of the subject in terms of assemblages. Culp’s claim here is that, when studied under the light of a capitalism that is always-already rhizomatic and networked, ‘assemblage-modeling is a perfect fit in a world where capitalism produces subjectivity “the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars”’ (27). Conferring subjective agency to assemblages amounts to translating Deleuze and Guattari’s diagrams of the present configuration of social forces into a true modelling of the real. Henceforth the agents of qualitative transformations are solely defined by what individuals and assemblages can effectuate within the confines of capital. By conferring agency to matter-as-assemblages the difference that ‘makes a difference’ only exists in the realm of the actual that terminates in a brute form of materialism. These readers of Deleuze, according to Culp, merely embarrass themselves at the altar of scientism. So if revolutionary subjectivity should be conceived as un-becoming as opposed to assemblages, what specifically pertains to this ‘un-becoming’ 436 Reviews that gives Culp reason to posit its transformative potential? That is to ask, how does the subject of un-becoming organise the task of world destruction? Culp’s reply: by means of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘diagrammatics’; the process whereby thought does not simply map out the structure of reality from what is given to us but the process of extracting and relating singular and ordinary points of an assemblage in order to know which thresholds can be pushed in a revolutionary direction. And if it is a question of diagrammatics, Dark Deleuze aligns itself with a kind of diagrammatics Culp terms ‘asymmetrical’ as opposed to ‘complex’. Opting for diagrams of complexity, which involves a notion of difference understood as an inclusive disjunct says Culp, is nothing but the simple reflection of the world as it is in thought. In a sense, on Culp’s reading, the terms ‘complexity’, ‘inclusive disjunction’ and ‘realism’ cannot even be positions that one would either critique or defend since they are already the determining features of capitalist reality. In other words, we gain nothing from defending a position that asserts the ‘complexity of reality’ since, for Culp, this is nothing more than a banal repetition of logical identity masquerading as novel theoretical insight. It is for these reasons that Dark Deleuze proposes a diagram of asymmetry alloyed to its correlate notion of difference understood as an exclusive disjunct. The diagram of asymmetry aids the subject of un-becoming to persevere in its task of undoing what the world has done to it, and of washing its hands of this world. Here difference is recast in terms of exclusion since to undergo these ‘un-becomings’ is to undergo a process that establishes one’s position as hostile to the present state of things. Additionally, this exclusive notion of difference, says Culp, was the kind of difference privileged by the late Deleuze, the Deleuze who saw control societies as the latest form of capitalist development. Difference as inclusive disjunction, whether considered in Hardt and Negri’s concept of Empire or through the progressive substitution of class war with class collaboration, is a notion of difference that has proved time and again to be commensurable with the logic of capitalist development and reproduction. Hence Dark Deleuze finds exclusive difference and its subjective correlate of ‘become contrary!’ as a weapon against the inclusive logic of Empire. At this point, one might claim that exclusive difference and asymmetrical diagrams simply reveal the voluntaristic lie of the supposedly collective, anonymous and revolutionary ‘darkened’ Deleuze. That is, exclusion and asymmetry are simply moments of Reviews 437 subjective decision and are by no means statements of something objectively real/feasible. It would be as if one could simply pick and choose which diagram and what kind of difference one prefers. The logical terminus of this view is quick to reveal itself: Dark Deleuze would, then, appear as one more bottle of Prell shampoo, one more object that is easily commodified and capitalised. It is this kind of critique, however, that decidedly misses the point (and to the reader’s detriment). Diagrammatics is not a question of true as opposed to false representations of reality despite the fact that Deleuze appears to affirm the basic structure of reality as asymmetrical and hence apocalyptic. Why? Because diagrammatics is a question of devising a map of the world that allows one to have a substantial effect within it. As Culp writes, ‘Asymmetry is ultimately a question of combat, even if it is formally established diagrammatically. Its best realization was the twentieth-century guerrilla’ (35). For Culp, the world has always been incommensurate with itself and especially with human interests. Additionally, it is clear that the world will do something with us so it is worth asking: what will we do with it? This is diagrammatics, not as ontological argument, but as practical engagement with what is asymmetrical and dynamic in the world itself. Since diagrammatics is ultimately related to combat, to our unbecomings, the classic problem of how best to organise the struggle naturally arises. For Culp, it is not rhizomes but unfolding that best captures what is necessary to the task of world destruction. To readers familiar with Deleuze’s work, the choice of unfolding as the privileged form of political organisation can appear strange, if not simply as a blatant category error that confuses the logic of substance’s expression with that of political representation. However, Culp’s usage of the term here could not be more apt. Why? Precisely because it is the process of unfolding, or explication, that proceeds by means of an exclusive disjunct. As Deleuze writes regarding the explication of the possible world expressed by the Other: The I and the Self, by contrast, are immediately characterized by functions of development or explication: not only do they experience qualities in general . . . but they tend to explicate or develop the world expressed by the other, either in order to participate in it or to deny it. (Deleuze 1992: 260) It is precisely this notion of unfolding or explication that characterises a development of a possible world that logically develops according to an exclusive disjunction: either my explication of the Other affords my participation in its world or it denies my participation therein. Thus, 438 Reviews the exclusivity of difference as exclusive disjunction is the properly destructive tenor of Dark Deleuze’s ‘philosophy of difference’, while difference taken as proceeding according to an inclusive disjunct has been thoroughly appropriated and subsumed by the logic of capital. III. Simulacra and Powers of the False To grasp the complete picture of the kind of revolutionary subjectivity offered by Dark Deleuze it is important to see how this agent is qualified via the concept of simulacrum and the powers of the false (pseudos). For Culp, what is effective in the un-becoming of subjectivity is how it brings together its asymmetrical approach to the world and its capacity to render suspect what is obvious and ready-made in the world. Against the idea that Deleuze eventually gave up on the notion of the simulacrum since the term appears with less and less frequency after Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, Culp views the essential traits of this term as a unifying theme throughout Deleuze’s life; and one that makes possible this ‘darker’ interpretation. For example, Deleuze’s writings on cinema and its development of this idea of its powers of falsity can be seen as a continuation of the theme of simulacrum under a different name. Both simulacrum and pseudos share the positive capacity to affect the world through a questioning of any presumed formal model of truth (i.e. Dogmatic Image of Thought). Deleuze’s affinity to powers of falsity is, perhaps, best seen when he speaks of Godard’s cinema since it is always in relation to Godard’s ability to render suspect any supposed model of truth and the readymade ideas we have of the world, a characteristic of all of Godard’s work that gives Deleuze reason to sing his praises: the key thing is the questions Godard asks the images he presents and a chance of the spectator feeling that the notion of labor isn’t innocent, isn’t at all obvious – even, and particularly, from the viewpoint of social criticism. (Deleuze 1990: 40) Or again, as Deleuze says during the same interview: Godard brings into question two everyday notions, those of labor and information. He doesn’t say we should give true information, nor that labor should be well paid (those would be the just ideas). He says these notions are very suspect. He writes FALSE beside them. (Deleuze 1990: 41) Thus, Deleuze identifies the virtue of Godard and the virtues of the powers of the false as their shared ability to render ineffectual/useless Reviews 439 our habituated forms of judgement, evaluation and ultimately, Thought itself. However, while it may appear that valorising simulacra and the powers of the false resembles the fabled ‘night in which all cows are black’, Culp’s interpretation finds, once more, an important counterpoint and ally in Daniel Smith’s work, and particularly with respect to Smith’s reading of Deleuze’s relationship to Plato. As Smith writes: If simulacra later became the object of demonology in Christian thought, it is because the simulacrum is not the ‘opposite’ of the icon, the demonic is not the opposite of the divine, Satan is not the Other, the pole farthest from God, the absolute antithesis, but something much more bewildering and vertiginous: the Same, the perfect double, the exact semblance, the doppelganger, the angel of light whose deception is so complete that it is impossible to tell the imposter (Satan, Lucifer) apart from the ‘reality’ (God, Christ), just as Plato reaches the point where Socrates and the Sophist are rendered indiscernible. This is the point where we can no longer speak of ‘deception’ or even ‘simulation,’ but rather the positive and affirmative ‘power of the false’ (pseudos). The Temptation and the Inquisition are not episodes in the great antagonism of Good versus Evil, but variants on the complex insinuation of the Same. How does one distinguish a revelation of God from a deception of the devil, or a deception sent by God to tempt men of little faith from a revelation sent by the devil to simulate God’s test (God so closely resembling Satan who imitates God so well . . . )? [. . .] If Plato maligns the simulacrum, it is not because it elevates the false over the true, the evil over the good; more precisely, the simulacrum is ‘beyond good and evil’ because it renders them indiscernible and internalizes the difference between them, thereby scrambling the selection and perverting the judgment. (Smith 2012: 13) It is for these reasons that Culp associates the powers of falsity with the notion of simulacrum, since what is at stake in both Godard’s cinema and Plato’s Sophist is how to proceed in situations where the question is no longer that of distinguishing true from false information, or the philosopher from the sophist, but of calling into question information as such, or the idea that the philosopher is in fact the friend of wisdom (e.g. Nietzsche’s view of the philosopher as being closer to a bad lover of truth-as-woman than a supposed friend of wisdom). The ‘negativity’ proposed in Dark Deleuze is precisely the hostility expressed by falsity and simulacra towards Thought as we have assumed it to be (the Dogmatic Image of Thought) and the world received through various clichés (e.g. Bacon’s paintings) and understood through ready-made ideas (‘Just’ ideas). Important for Culp is that the hostility 440 Reviews of pseudos/simulacra has a significant import regarding the realm of political action: This is the power generated only between the true and the false: what Deleuze calls ‘the real.’ The importance of the real is central, as trying to use truth to dispute the false does not work: those who denounce the illegal violence used to found legal orders are quickly dismissed or jailed, and the many climate scientists who harangue the public about the truth of global warming fail to spur policy change. (62) From the vantage point of our present it is no longer sufficient to ‘speak truth to power’ just as it is no longer sufficient to promote connectivity and world construction. It is due to the insufficiency of speaking truth to power and a political project oriented towards world construction that the powers of pseudos and simulacrum need to become the framework for envisioning a new type of revolutionary subjectivity: the powers of the false are the theoretical/philosophical means by which we may disabuse ourselves of long-held habits and assumptions that ground our thoughts and actions in the world. It is these powers of falsity, of pseudos and simulacra, that allow us to prise open the possibility of questioning, in the present, the very concepts and ideas that serve as the conditions, which seemingly guarantee a capitalist future world. Thus, and with regard to Dark Deleuze’s revolutionary agent, what is now required are the corresponding tactics and methods of combat that necessarily arise from this determination of subjectivity-as-un-becoming and whose theoretical framing proceeds by asymmetrical diagrams. And it is precisely in the concluding pages of Culp’s text where he proposes the concept of escape as a means of understanding the political importance of the categories of pseudos/simulacrum. IV. Escape, Indiscernibility, Opacity From what we have seen this much is clear: Dark Deleuze places a wager on the end of the world as it presently exists and calls for putting an end to the Idea of the World as a guide for thought and praxis. It is a text that demands the removal of the World as object of thought and the elimination of any residual investment in the World as project and goal. It seeks to restore Deleuze to his rightful place in the tradition of revolutionary anti-state communism and to show how specific readings of Deleuze that privilege joy over sadness, affirmation over negation, will always be pre-empted by the logic of contemporary capital thereby neutralising any supposed critical import. Reviews 441 So where to go from here? Dark Deleuze ends on a promissory note. Instead of deepening immanent transparency, connectivity and productivism, Culp encourages his readers to look towards notions of escape, indiscernibility and opacity, as the set of concepts by which Dark Deleuze’s project of world destruction can be carried out. Despite the brevity of Culp’s conclusion, however, one still gets a sense of what Culp intends regarding this set of concepts, and as it relates to the overall argument of his text, in the following passage: Escape is never more exciting than when it spills out into the streets, where trust in appearances, trust in words, trust in each other, and trust in this world all disintegrate in a mobile zone of indiscernibility [. . .] It is in these moments of opacity . . . and breakdown that darkness most threatens the ties that bind us to this world. (70) From this passage, one question in particular becomes unavoidable and whose answer Culp leaves implicit1 and thus undeveloped. Namely, what is it that grounds these notions of escape, indiscernibility and opacity, such that they exist with enough autonomy from the forces and relations of capitalist production and therefore appear as useful for the task of world destruction? In other words, on what basis can we be justified in aligning our political commitments with Culp’s preferred and ‘darkened’ concepts over and against a more recognisably Deleuzian political lexicon (with its rhizomes, assemblages, planes of immanence and joyous affects)? Despite the fact that readers may find little in terms of a completely worked-out answer regarding the issue of what grounds, or renders politically desirable, notions of escape, indiscernibility and opacity, one cannot, therefore, simply conclude that Culp’s Deleuze retreats in the face of such problems. Thus, it is against this temptation of foreclosing any future possibility for the project laid out by Culp that we are obliged to underscore the following: Culp’s argument in these concluding pages proceeds by way of an implicit distinction between the ontological and political articulations of escape, indiscernibility and opacity. As we will see in the remainder of this essay, Culp’s implicit distinction between the ontological and the political is particularly relevant in connection with the reference to Fontaine and her work on the nature and status of ‘black bloc’ tactics and we can see the importance of this distinction in two ways. First, regarding the question of philosophical/theoretical commitments, Culp asserts that indiscernibility cannot simply be affirmed as an ontological category without lapsing back into all the errors of the affirmationist readings he previously attacked; without reviving all those 442 Reviews positions which imagine Deleuze as the thinker whose sole aim was to busy himself trying to uncover the intrinsic value of the fabled ‘night in which all cows are black’; or the thinker par excellence whose thought fails to move beyond platitudes such as ‘we’re all the same because we all share the same fate’ or ‘everything, in this day and age, is connected to everything else’. As Deleuze himself remarks: Clearly, at this point the philosophy of difference must be wary of turning into the discourse of beautiful souls: differences, nothing but differences, in a peaceful coexistence in the Idea of social places and functions . . . but the name of Marx is sufficient to save it from this danger. (Deleuze 1992: 207) For Culp, however, indiscernibility and escape are never guaranteed or simply given to us by Nature, God or World, but are the concepts we must create out of that which is given in the present historical conjuncture. That is to say, zones of indiscernibility and opacity are not mere features of reality that can simply be comprehended within any give situation. It is for this reason that this conceptual pair cannot be taken in their ontological inflection. Rather, indiscernibility and opacity are tools devised to combat and ultimately abolish this world. It is for this reason that Culp’s reference to Claire Fontaine is significant since it is in her essay, ‘This is Not the Black Bloc’, where Fontaine develops the distinction between ontological indiscernibility (the night in which all cows are black) and political indiscernibility (the night in which all demonstrators look alike), which operates in the background of Culp’s conclusion. And against this contested background, it is instructive to cite Fontaine’s argument at length: A distinctive feature of one who finds themselves in what we call a black bloc is to demand nothing for themselves or for others, to cut across public space without being subjected to it for once, to disappear in a mass that has at last come together in places that are not office or factory exits and public transportation at rush hour . . . In this night where all demonstrators look alike there is no point in posing Manichean questions. Especially since we know that the distinction between guilty and innocent no longer matters, all that counts is the one between winners and losers. (Fontaine 2013: 21) A world of difference keeps apart the Hegelian ‘night in which all cows are black’ and the night of insurrection ‘where all demonstrators look alike’. Regarding the former, we find ourselves disabled in the face of pure immediacy. In this situation, there is nothing about the world that allows us to distinguish something from anything else, or a cause from its effect, or a principle from its consequences, and so on. With the latter situa- Reviews 443 tion, however, we find ourselves enabled in confrontation with capital’s imposed daily rhythm and its state apparatuses of capture. For example, while one may ordinarily be subjected to ‘random’ stops by the police or even the violence that always arrives at political demonstrations, the indiscernibility of the so-called ‘black bloc’ affords this mass of individuals more opportunities for attack and resisting arrest than if they were to assume the transparency model of peaceful protest and orderly conduct: I could tell you that dressing in black meant: we are all comrades, we are all in solidarity, we are all alike, and this equality liberates us from the responsibility of accepting a fault we do not deserve: the fault of being poor in a capitalist country, the fault of being anti-fascist in the fatherland of Nazism, the fault of being libertarian in a repressive country. That it meant: nobody deserves to be punished for these reasons, and since you are attacking us we are forced to protect ourselves from violence when we march in the streets. (Fontaine 2013: 21) From the two passages above, Fontaine’s key insight bears repeating: indiscernibility and opacity are the political means to decide on how we want this world to end. As if to come full circle, and by means of the distinction between an ontological and political articulation of indiscernibility and opacity, we are brought back to the wellknown lexicon of Deleuzian scholarship (for example, an emphasis on increasing our powers of acting, or finding a solution to the problemquestion ‘what can a body do?’ and so on), which Culp has taken to task: it is precisely the political tools of indiscernibility and opacity that increase a collective’s power of acting against the forces that seek to repress and exploit it. Dark Deleuze finds safety in the anonymity provided by a crowd of black masks and continuously ‘asks if our society can handle that, and what it is worth if it can’t’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 381). Thus, the cardinal virtue of Andrew Culp’s reading of Deleuze is to be located in his demonstration that despite the dominant trend within Deleuzian scholarship to grant a certain privilege to questions of a collective’s power of acting and being acted upon, these methodological/practical questions do not necessarily give rise to a political position, which can be easily summarised by, or reduced to, an unwavering division between the affective passages brought about by ‘affirmation/joy’ and those brought about by a ‘diminution of power/sadness’. Jose Rosales Stony Brook University (SUNY) DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2018.0319 444 Reviews Note 1. The assertion that Culp’s conclusion remains, to a greater or lesser extent, implicit and underdeveloped, is not to suggest that any possible future elaboration on these notions of escape, indiscernibility and opacity will be proven to be useless with respect to Dark Deleuze’s project of world destruction. Additionally, it is worth noting that it is precisely the aim of clarifying and deepening our understanding of these concepts (escape, indiscernibility, opacity) that Culp takes as one the main tasks set out in his book. References Deleuze, Gilles (1990) Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1992) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Fontaine, Claire (2013) The Human Strike Has Already Begun & Other Writings, Lüneberg: Post-Media Lab. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1998) The German Ideology, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Smith, Daniel W. (2012) Essays on Deleuze, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Joe Panzner (2015) The Process That Is the World: Cage/Deleuze/ Events/Performances, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Since the earliest days of scholarly engagement with the work of Deleuze, the relation between Deleuze and art has been central. Any understanding of the Anglo-American reception of Deleuze’s thought would be incomplete without due consideration being given to the key role played in this reception by a broad range of writers and practitioners concerned with the creative arts, from literary critics to art theorists and artists themselves. Despite this, and despite the regular references to music we find in Deleuze’s writings, the topic of music was surprisingly underrepresented in the initial wave of publications concerning themselves with Deleuze and art. In recent years, however, there has been an increasing volume of important work between musical practices and Deleuzian thought,1 and with the publication of Joe Panzner’s The Process That Is the World we can welcome what should be a catalyst for much work on Deleuze and music to come.