Call For Papers: Deleuze and Modernism

A colleague and I are putting together a proposed themed panel for the 5th International Deleuze Studies Conference, hosted by Tulane University. Consider submitting something!

We seek papers that examine the ways Deleuze’s reading of modernist literature influenced his philosophy...

How to Become a Monster

He who fights with monsters
should look to it
that he himself
does not become a monster.
And when you gaze long
into an abyss, the abyss
gazes also into you.

--Nietzsche Family Circus

The quote comes from Beyond Good & Evil, Aphorism 146

Paul Jacobs Conjures The Inhuman via Arnold Schoenberg's Piano Music

Paul Jacobs - Arnold Schoenberg: Piano Music

In his 1968 book Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey wrote:

“In the desert I am reminded of something quite different — the bleak, thin-textured work of men like Berg, Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek, Webern and the American, Elliott Carter. Quite by accident, no doubt, although both Schoenberg and Krenek lived part of their lives in the Southwest, their music comes closer than any other I know to representing the apartness, the otherness, the strangeness of the desert. Like certain aspects of this music, the desert is also a-tonal, cruel, clear, inhuman, neither romantic nor classical, motionless and emotionless, at one and the same time — another paradox — both agonized and deeply still.”
(page 285)

In his 1989 book Schoenberg and the new music, Carl Dahlhaus paraphrases the thesis of Hanns Eisler's 1935 manifesto "Some Observations on the Behaviour of Worker Singers and Musicians in Germany" by saying:

"That it expresses an inhuman state of affairs is its merit, because it conceals nothing; and at the same time this is its misfortune, for by being a mirror of inhumanity it becomes inhuman itself."

And then goes on to say:

"Eisler's thesis was challenged by Adorno's counter-thesis which proposed that music is human precisely because it speaks of inhumanity and resists it. And it performs -- contrary to Eisler's verdict -- a critical function in that it does not transfigure or obscure what exists but calls it by name"
(page 28)

Adorno said, in his 1947 book Philosophy of Modern Music :

"The inhumanity of art must triumph over the inhumanity of the world for the sake of the humane. Works of art attempt to solve the riddles designed by the world to devour man. The world is a sphynx, the artist is blinded Oedipus, and it is works of art of the type resembling his wise answer which plunged the sphynx into the abyss. Thus all art stands in opposition to mythology. In the elemental 'material' of art, the 'answer'—the only possible and correct answer is ever present, but not yet defined. To give this answer, to express what is there, and to fulfill the commandment of ambiguity through a singularity which has always been present in the commandment, is at the same time the new which extends beyond the old, precisely by virtue of being sufficient to it. For this reason the total seriousness of artistic technique lies in continually designing schemata of the familiar for that which has already existed. This seriousness is today so much greater, since the alienation present in the consistency of artistic technique forms the very substance of the work of art. The shocks of incomprehension, emitted by artistic technique in the age of its meaninglessness, undergo a sudden change. They illuminate the meaningless world. Modern music sacrifices itself to this effort. It has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world. Its fortune lies in the perception of misfortune; all of its beauty is in denying itself the illusion of beauty. No one wishes to become involved with art—individuals as little as collectives. It dies away unheard, without even an echo. If time crystallizes around that music which has been heard, revealing its radiant quintessence, music which has not been heard falls into empty time like an impotent bullet. Modern music spontaneously aims towards this last experience, evidenced hourly in mechanical music. Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked."
(page 132)

"It is the human that is the alien"

"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
as those are: as light, for all its motion, is,

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.

--Wallace Stevens
Transport to Summer (1947)
in The Collected Poems (pg. 327-28)

Also...

Some thoughts on the intersection of Art, Crime, Beauty and Murder -- beware, NSFW!!!

And some thoughts on the Inhuman and the Avant-Garde

"But we can no longer be human. We have got to have that book."

"A Human is a being halfway between an alligator and a bird who wants to be a bird. The ancient books say there are ways humans can become something else. The most important book on human transformation is hidden with the corpse Catullus in the Saba Pacha Cemetery in Alexandria because all books were written by dead people."

--Kathy Acker
Blood and Guts in High School (pg. 147)

Beastly humanity

“There is nothing appealing in what you say but on the contrary the poems are positively repellent. They are heartless, cruel, they make fun of humanity. What in God’s name do you mean? Are you a pagan? Have you no tolerance for human frailty? Rhyme you may perhaps take away but rhythm! Why there is none in your work whatever. Is this what you call poetry? It is the very antithesis of poetry. It is antipoetry. It is the annihilation of life upon which you are bent. Poetry that used to go hand in hand with life, poetry that interpreted our deepest promptings, poetry that inspired, that led us forward to new discoveries, new depths of tolerance, new heights of exaltation. You moderns! It is the death of poetry that you are accomplishing.”

--William Carlos Williams
(pg. 88 in Imaginations)

Burroughs on Beckett: "quite literally inhuman"

"Some people are undoubtedly more conerned with interpsychic data than others. We can see it in a spectrum with various degrees of attention. And it seems to me that Proust and Beckett are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Proust is principally concerned with time. Beckett is virtually timeless. Proust is concerned with minute descriptions of objects and characters with their sets. What do the characters, if they could be so called in Beckett, even look like, beside being awkward and not young And the sets? What sets? His writing can be taking place anywhere.

...I am very much closer to Proust than to Beckett. I am concerned with the creation of character. In fact I can say that this is my principal preoccupation.

...There is no time in Beckett.

...There is no memory in Beckett.

...Beckett is quite literally inhuman. You will look in vain for human motivations of jealousy, hate, or love. Even fear is absent. Nothing remains of human emotions except weariness and distress, tinged with remote sadness.

(page 183)

-- William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays