Romanticism and the New Deleuze

Robert Mitchell, Duke University, and Ron Broglio, Georgia Tech

1. Whether represented as a reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, a movement "against the tide of modernity," or a flight from History into the ideologically-determined consolations of the Imagination, Romanticism generally has been understood in terms of immanence and transformation: that is, as an attempt to locate, within an overarching system or structure, those points from or axes along which the system or structure can be transformed.[1] Even methodological approaches that emphasize the political and social constraints of Romantic authors—and, by extension, the ideological limitations of depictions of Romanticism as a transcendence of the Enlightenment or of modernity—do not, in the end, so much contest this basic understanding of Romanticism, but rather simply seek to evaluate whether Romantic authors in fact succeeded in escaping their political and social contexts. From a variety of methodological perspectives, in short, "Romanticism" has been understood consistently as a problem of immanent transformation: a question, that is, of the extent to which a movement that began within the Enlightenment could produce fundamental changes in literary, social, and political structures.

2. Given this lengthy tradition of understanding Romanticism as a problem of immanent transformation, and given the historic willingness of scholars of Romanticism to engage "high theory," it is peculiar that scholars of Romanticism have, for the most part, ignored Gilles Deleuze, arguably the twentieth-century philosopher most interested in the relationship between immanence and change. Though scholars of Romanticism in the 1970s, '80s and '90s were quick to engage the work of some of Deleuze's French peers—most notably, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault—Deleuze himself seems to have fallen outside the fold of Romantic literary critical references. Though Deleuze is not entirely unknown to scholars of Romanticism—one occasionally comes across references to concepts that emerged from Deleuze's work with Guattari, such as "deterritorialization," "affect," and "bodies without organs"—Deleuze's own extensive philosophical oeuvre appears to have remained largely terra incognita for most scholars of Romanticism (at least so far as one can determine the matter from explicit references and bibliographies).

3. As we hope to exemplify by means of this special issue, such neglect is unfortunate, for Deleuze's philosophy contains significant resources for scholars of Romanticism. Most significantly, Deleuze's work can contribute to our attempts to understand the very nature of our field of study: insofar as Deleuze's texts represent a sustained effort to understand the conditions of possibility for immanent transformation, his philosophy can help us to better articulate what is at stake in the very "problematic" of Romanticism itself. In addition, Deleuze's work—as well as his frequent collaborations with Félix Guattari—also bear directly upon a number of more local concerns and emergent methodologies within Romantic literary criticism. For the many scholars of the eighteenth century and Romanticism who have become interested in the history of the emotions, for example, Deleuze's extended discussions of the logic of "sensation" offers an important resource, allowing us to further develop our sense that the Romantics understood sensations, emotions, and passions as embodied and contextual phenomena, rather than as "psychological events" that happen at some central point within an isolated subject.[2] In addition, Deleuze's theory of "affect" helps us to reconsider from a post-phenomenological perspective what it might mean for a poem to represent the "movement" of consciousness, providing us with a vocabulary for better understanding the intensive movements of poetry—that is, those dynamic movements of "momentum, pause, suspense, turn, culmination, climax, and diminuendo" within poems.[3] On a related front, Deleuze's extensive engagement with Stoic philosophy can help us to better understand what was at stake in the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era interest in Stoicism (an interest evident in the work of authors as diverse as Adam Smith and Percy Bysshe Shelley).[4] For scholars interested in Romantic-era relationships between medicine, biology, and literature, Deleuze's concept of non-organic life and his theorization of embryological development allows us to rethink key Romantic-era terms, such as "organicism" and "development," and to reconsider links between biological knowledge production, medicine, and literature in the Romantic era.[5] And for scholars of Romanticism interested in history—whether the development of modern conceptions of history within the Romantic period, or the specific historical contexts of particular authors—Deleuze's sustained reflections on revolution and historical repetition, and the methodology of history writing developed by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, make possible modes of historical narration that are both "critical" but at the same time enable Romantic-era texts to actualize otherwise hidden potentials in our own moment.[6]

   I. The "New" Deleuze?

4. In order to facilitate these productive points of contact between Deleuze's philosophy and the study of Romanticism, this special edition features essays and audio-casts that explore some of these connections. In entitling our collection "Romanticism and the New Deleuze," we hope to recall earlier collections, such as The New Nietzsche and The New Bergson, which aimed at marking—and encouraging—a fundamental shift in interpretations of a philosopher.[7] In the case of Gilles Deleuze, this change in interpretation is particularly evident in the English-speaking world, and it can be characterized in part as a shift in emphasis from the more popularly-oriented books that Deleuze wrote with Félix Guattari in the 1970s, such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, and toward Deleuze's much more explicitly philosophical studies. (These latter include his monographs on specific philosophers, such as Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Bergson, his extensive reflections on aesthetics, especially cinema and painting, and his difficult but rewarding philosophical treatises, Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense.) To date, this shift in emphasis has been most evident in film studies, new media studies, science studies, and feminist theory.[8] However, it is our hope that scholars of Romanticism will also begin to explore the ways in which the "new Deleuze" helps us both to reframe and rediscover the traditional thematics of Romanticism, while at the same time inventing new methodologies and approaches to our field of study.[9]

5. At the same time, though, our titular emphasis on the "new Deleuze" is also a bit deceptive, for this shift in Anglo-American critical interest from Deleuze's popular to his philosophical works should be understood as neither a rejection, nor a transcendence, of the concerns that motivated his work with Guattari. The problems that motivated Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are also—or, at any rate, are consonant with—the problems and approaches of Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, and Deleuze's readings in the history of philosophy. It is primarily the modalities of these two sets of texts that differs: where a book such as A Thousand Plateaus encouraged readers to treat the text like a phonograph record, "sampling" from its different chapters, a book such as Difference and Repetition is structured by more extended and rigorous philosophical arguments. And in place of the more easily appropriable concepts that populated Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus—concepts such as "schizoanalysis," "desiring machines," "rhizomes," "the nomadic," "de-territorealization" and "lines of flight"—texts such as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense often emphasize more obscure and difficult concepts, such as "asymmetrical syntheses of the sensible," "differentials," the distinction between "ground" and "foundation," "quasi-causes," and the "Aion." Nevertheless, both the "new" and "old" Deleuze should be understood as part of the same problematic—namely, the attempt to understand and theorize the world from the perspective of immanent transformation.

6. We have sought to highlight this compatibility of the "new" and "old" Deleuze by including audiocasts and essays that employ both the terminology that Deleuze developed in his own work and the terminology he developed in his projects with Guattari. Ron Broglio's audiocast and essay on Wordsworth, for example, draw heavily on Deleuze's work with Guattari, emphasizing the ways in which their approach to "meandering" and "walking" help us to understand and theorize anew the Romantic premise of a world of "extended agency" (that is, a world in which "agency [is] extended over a whole scene or environment"). David Baulch's work on Blake, and Robert Mitchell's discussion of Kant and Shelley, on the other hand, draw more on Deleuze's solo work, focusing on Deleuze's theory of "revolution" and his practice of "transcendental philosophy," respectively. By emphasizing both the new and old Deleuze, we hope that this collection encourages Romanticists to participate in the new wave of Anglo-American interest in Deleuze's solo work, and to take this as an opportunity as well to read—or re-read—his work with Guattari.

   II. Deleuze and Romanticism: Philosophy and Aesthetics

7. If, nevertheless, there is a slightly greater emphasis in this collection on the "new" Deleuze, this is in part due to our desire to emphasize to Romanticists Deleuze's numerous texts on philosophy and aesthetics, many of which have been translated only recently. Deleuze's readings of earlier philosophers, in fact, represent one of the most obvious points of contact between his work and that of Romanticist scholars. The list of authors that Deleuze took up in his monographs on philosophers—a list that includes Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Bergson—map out a tradition that is clearly "Romantic" in its points of reference. However, Deleuze's work on these philosophers does not so much replicate what we believe we already know about this tradition, but rather unveils another, more hidden side of Romanticism. In Deleuze's reading, for example, Hume is important less for his role in consolidating a British tradition of epistemological empiricism and serving as the catalyst for Kant's critical philosophy, and more because Hume's texts force us to think through the question of "synthesis" that undergirds the apparently simple concepts of "habits" and "associations"—a question that ought to be of supreme importance to scholars of Romanticism interested in what it might mean to undo what Wordsworth called our "pre-established codes of decision."[10] In similar fashion, the version of Kant that emerges in Deleuze's various readings of the "critical" philosopher differ from traditional readings: rather than positioning Kant solely as the founder of modern aesthetics (or a stepping stone to Hegel's absolute idealism), Deleuze's Kant instead emerges as a philosopher who helps up to think better the very nature of sensation and the importance of "conflicts of the faculties."[11]

8. Yet it is perhaps in his work on aesthetics—and in particular, his writings on literature, painting, and cinema—that Deleuze's romanticism, and his importance for Romantic literary criticism, becomes most evident. Though Deleuze did not write extensively on any Romantic artistic productions, preferring instead to focus on authors (e.g., Proust, Kafka, and Lewis Carroll) and technologies (e.g., cinema) more traditionally associated with modernism, or even postmodernism (e.g., his book on Francis Bacon's painting), his overriding interests in these texts nevertheless seem fundamentally Romantic. The question of time—and more specifically, how artistic productions can make time sensible—dominates his work on Proust and cinema, and as Deleuze makes clear in his monograph and lectures on Kant, this is a question that has its origin in the new "image of time" that Kant made possible.[12] Moreover, Deleuze, like many Romantic authors, remained convinced that sensation is not simply a preface to epistemological representation, but instead has its own structures, structures that can be thought through analyses of both painting and cinema. As a consequence, his analyses of both cinema and painting hold important resources for scholars of literary Romanticism (though of course such resources will require translational work).

9. In addition to providing resources for understanding anew both aesthetic theory and the history of philosophy, Deleuze's work can also help Romanticists to engage again the always-vexed question of the relationship between philosophy and art. No doubt largely as a consequence of the explicitly philosophical interests of many of the authors—e.g., S. T. Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers—included in the early canons of Romantic literature, scholars of Romanticism traditionally have been quite open to, and interested in, linking the philosophical and artistic productions of this period. Yet scholars of Romanticism often have linked philosophy and art by means of schemata drawn from either Hegel or Marx, suggesting either that Romantic-era philosophy provides a theoretical explication of Romantic-era art, or that both Romantic-era philosophy and art are ideological expressions of class contradictions.

10. Deleuze's late work with Guattari suggests a very different approach to the relationship between art and philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari are critical of claims that art and philosophy "inform" one another, or that philosophy "explains" art. Rather, they stress that the relationship of philosophy and art is one of productive disjunction. According to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy creates concepts, while art creates sensations—and while concepts and sensations certainly come into many relationships with one another, neither should be understood as the "expression" of the other.[13] Nor should philosophy and art be understood as simple "expressions" of historical contexts; rather, we should understand both philosophical concepts and artistic sensations as inventions that respond to "problematics." This latter term certainly can include Marx's notion of social "contradictions" that are the motor of history, but it also goes beyond the humanism of Marx's concept to include the non-human problematics within which we are embedded.

    III. The Form and Contents of this Issue

11. This collection consists of two different media: audio-casts (aka "pod-casts") and written texts. Three of the four audiocasts in this collection—those by Baulch, Broglio, and Mitchell—were originally recorded as part of a special panel on "Romanticism and the New Deleuze" at the 2006 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) conference. Subsequent to the conference itself, the editors of this special edition invited David Collings, one of the panel attendees, to provide a commentary in audio-cast format on one of the essays. Finally, all the contributors were asked to provide essay versions of their talks, which supplement the audio-casts with notes and references, and often present more extensive explication of some of the arguments outlined in the audio-casts.

12. There is no "preferred" itinerary through the audio-casts and essays that make up this special collection, and readers/listeners should feel free to engage the various components in any order. The audio-cast format, insofar as it replicates the mode of aural delivery of the conference at which this work was originally presented, provides listeners with a relatively quick overview of each of the arguments. The essay versions of the talks, by contrast, allow readers to explore in greater depth the claims made by each contributor, and provide readers with specific references to Deleuze's work.

13. While Deleuze's work readily lends itself to recent efforts to expand the canon of Romantic literature, the essays and audio-casts that make up this collection focus on the ways in which Deleuze helps us to rediscover canonical authors. In "Wandering in the Landscape with Wordsworth and Deleuze," Ron Broglio (Georgia Tech) exemplifies through the example of Wordsworth the ways in which the critical function of literary criticism can be deepened and extended through the work of Deleuze. Contrasting Wordsworthian "walks" with the Deleuzian/Guattarian "meanderings," Broglio argues that Deleuze and Guattari's work helps us to better understand the concrete ways in which Romantic poets were "hooked up to the world."  He also illuminates the sense of distributed—and often non-human—agency with which Wordsworth grappled in his poetry, though, as Broglio notes, Wordsworth also often sought to subordinate this expanded notion of agency within his larger project of writerly self-fashioning.

14. In  "The Transcendental: Deleuze, P. B. Shelley, and the Freedom of Immobility," Robert Mitchell (Duke University) seeks to exemplify the productive disjunction between philosophy and poetry that Deleuze and Guattari describe, linking Deleuze's reading of Kant to Shelley's use of rhyme in his poem, "Mont Blanc; Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni." In both his short book on Kant and in several subsequent lectures, Deleuze argued that Kant's Critiques point toward—though they do not make explicit—an understanding of "sensation" as a complex rhythmic synthesis (rather than the raw and simple material of representations, as assumed by, say, John Locke). Mitchell employs Deleuze's reading of Kant to analyze the thematic content and irregular rhyme of Shelley's verse on the "frozen floods" of Mont Blanc, arguing that the poet seeks through this poem to help readers isolate sensations enabled by a suspension of animation. Mitchell thus attempts to use Deleuze and Kant's philosophy to heighten a sensory element of Shelley's art that has been underappreciated, while at the same time employing Shelley's poem to reinvent philosophical concepts initiated by Kant and Deleuze.

15. In his response to Mitchell's audio-cast and essay, David A. Collings (Bowdoin College) emphasizes some of the questions that still remain in the wake of such an encounter between Kant, Shelley, and Deleuze. The editors of this special issue asked Collings to respond in part because of his important contribution to the questions section of the NASSR panel at which these papers were first presented, but also because his own work on symbolic exchange and violence engages many of the same themes as Deleuze's work, but from a different theoretical perspective.[14] By providing a friendly critique of several elements in Mitchell's audio-cast, Collings helps us to further invent ways of talking about the role of sound and rhythm in the experience of the sublime, and the role of both the beautiful and the sublime in our understanding of Shelley's poem. Collings's analysis also asks us to consider further the relationship between philosophy and poetics. He asks to think again, for example, about the relationship between read and heard versions of a poem, noting that Shelley's "poem suggests that rhyme somehow operates inherently within articulation itself, even when, or especially when, the ear is unaware," but wondering where that leaves us in our analysis of more "regular" poems. Equally important, Collings asks us to consider more closely the ethics of Shelley's poem, asking whether "Mont Blanc" implies a quasi-Kantian "teleological operation of the faculties" or the "less legislated operation of the faculties akin to the scenarios of Difference and Repetition"?

16. Finally, in "Repetition, Representation and Revolution: Deleuze and Blake's America," David Baulch (University of West Florida) exemplifies the ways in which Deleuze allows us to make sense of one of the more hermetic poets of the Romantic era, William Blake. Beginning with Deleuze's analysis of the necessary role of repetition in any "revolution," Baulch advocates a method of reading Blake's America that does not tie itself solely to historicist representational and referential frameworks, but rather understands the poem in connection with a Deleuzian "Idea" of revolution: that is, "Idea" understood not as a mental representation, but a productive "problematic" that inheres in the structure of reality. Such a reading allows us to acknowledge the basic problem with mapping Blakean images in America to historical referents—namely (to paraphrase Saree Makdisi) that the more specific we are in mapping, the more we seem to make obscure the prophecy of the poem—but at the same time this reading moves us beyond the alternative strategy of reading the poem as simply an example of "the idiosyncratic world of Blake's vision." Instead, Baulch's reading allows us to understand Blake's America as a poem that demonstrates that the necessary conditions of historical action are connections between the "virtual" and the "actual" that go beyond historical referentiality. As a result, Baulch's essay also allows us to see Blake's understanding of revolution as central to our understanding of Romanticism as a movement constantly in tension, and continually beyond itself.

Notes

¹ M. H. Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition provides a classic description of Romanticism as both a development of, and "reaction" against, eighteenth-century/Enlightenment-era aesthetics and philosophy. Romanticism is described as a movement "against the tide of modernity" in Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre's Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. For a representative account of Romanticism as a flight from History to Imagination, see Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation.

² Deleuze discusses the logic of sensation most extensively in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Examples of recent interest in eighteenth-century and Romantic-era histories of emotions, passions, and affect include Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen; Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the "Death of the Subject"; Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History; and Andrew M. Stauffer, Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism.

³ See David Perkins, "Romantic Lyric Voice: What Shall we call the 'I'?" The Southern Review 29:2 (Spring 1993): 233.

⁴ Deleuze discusses Stoic philosophy in The Logic of Sense. For discussions of eighteenth-century neo-Stoicism, see Julie K. Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion and Hugh Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry.

⁵ Deleuze discusses biological conceptions of development and embryology in Difference and Repetition, esp. pp. 244-54, and Deleuze and Guattari make similar arguments in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp. 149-66. For recent literary critical discussions of biology, development, and organicism in the Romantic era, see Helmut Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800; Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism; and Charles I. Armstrong, Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife.

⁶ Deleuze's work may be of particular interest to scholars of Romanticism interested in emphasizing multiple sites and modes of historical agency through concepts such as "assemblages" and "actor-networks." As formulated by sociologist of science Bruno Latour, both of these concepts owe a significant debt to the work of Deleuze and Guattari (as Latour acknowledges—though often obliquely—in many of his publications—see, for example, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, pp. 59n.64, 95). However, Deleuze's emphasis on difference, differentials, and tension suggests that Latour's consistent emphasis on negotiation and consensus between human and non-human agents—exemplified by Latour's call for a "parliament of things"—may constitute a theoretically-unwarranted limitation of these concepts. For recent employments of the concepts of "assemblages" and "actor-networks" within Romantic literary criticism, see Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: 'From an antique land'; and Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge.

⁷ See David B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation; and John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson.

⁸ See, for example, D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine; Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences; Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media; Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body; and Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power.

⁹ The fact that the "old" Deleuze was largely ignored by scholars of Romanticism may have been a function of the fact that Deleuze and Guattari's publications became available in English just as many Romanticist literary critics were turning to historicist and "critical" methodologies that initially appeared either at odds with, or at least at oblique angles to, Deleuze and Guattari's political and historical methodologies. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, for example, appeared in English in 1977, only shortly before Marilyn Butler's Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760-1830 and Jerome J. McGann's The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation, while A Thousand Plateaus was published in English a year after Marjorie Levinson's Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays and two years before Alan Liu's Wordsworth: The Sense of History.

¹⁰ See Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature.

¹¹ For Deleuze's readings of Kant, see especially Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties and Difference and Repetition.

¹² For Deleuze on Proust, see Proust and Signs; on cinema, see Cinema 1: The Movement-image and Cinema 2: The Time-image; on painting, see Francis Bacon.

¹³ See especially Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?

¹⁴ See, for example, David A. Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment; Queer Romanticisms: Past, Present, and Future; "The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason"; and "Bentham's Auto-Icon: Utilitarianism and the Evisceration of the Common Body." The latter two essays are part of a completed book-length project (forthcoming) on symbolic violence, the collective body, and Romanticism.