Belo Monte vs. Brasil (2015)

A Jamesonian approach to magical realism is certainly valid up to a point; we have already noted that Midnight’s Children can be read from such a perspective.

We can now compare this historicist method Deleuze’s philosophical stance, where Being as creative agency is the absent cause of all of reality. If Jameson’s society and its superstructures is predicated on modes of production, to Deleuze,

it is the orientation of Being which determines both modes of production and such superstructural levels. Jameson reads the text as inevitably ideologically charged since it refl ects the modes of production of a society. Deleuze reads the text as potentially ideologically charged; insofar as a text is oriented in a way analogous to the organization of a certain mode of production or a certain superstructural level, they can be seen as mutually explanatory. Crucially, however, the text for Deleuze does not have to refl ect this dimension. Since Deleuzian ontology takes us back to conditions of Being prior to superstruc-tures or modes of production, it allows us to articulate the world in terms not inevitably bound to society, at the same time as it also provides a philosophical framework in which society can be analyzed.

Recall, how, following the Deleuzian distinction between two modes of Being, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two modes of assemblages. An assemblage is a unit in the analysis of the world that allows them to describe relations between terms (material as well as immaterial) without subjective agency, without hierarchy and without a transcendent organizing principle.

Rather, assemblages are determined by their relative territorialization or deterritorialization, or, in some of the many other terms used by Deleuze and Guattari, whether they are striated or smooth, rigid or supple, sedentary or nomadic and so on. In terms of Deleuze’s ontology, that which is actual tends to be territorialized, while the virtual is that which is absolutely deterritorialized.

As we have seen, society, life in the actual world, is necessarily territorialized as it is inherently organized. That is, the political fi eld is one that is in essence predicated on territory.

The same poles of orientation, towards the actual or the virtual, the territori-alized or deterritoriterritori-alized, that inform societies, also determine works of art.

Literature is not an image of the world to Deleuze and Guattari, but another assemblage in the world:

There is no longer a tripartite division between a fi eld of reality (the world) and a fi eld of representation (the book) and a fi eld of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. (TP 23) The text may well establish a particular resonance with a certain kind of society, because it embodies the same kind of ontological orientation as that society – recall how the organization of the realism in magical realism follows that of the State: rigidly segmented – but this is not the limit of what the text can do. The text can also embody something completely separate and different from any society, something unique to art itself, since the principles of its creation, which we considered in the previous chapter, are to be found prior to any society. It is this uniqueness of art that a Jamesonian analysis cannot grant literature, since to Jameson, ‘all literature, no matter how weakly, must be informed by what we

Deleuze and the Postcolonial Politics of Magical Realism 113

have called a political unconscious [. . .] all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community’ (PU 56). It is precisely by going outside the social realm for the conditions of art that Deleuze enables us to understand what art can do apart from and beyond the territorial, political realm – but, importantly, not in detriment to this realm, but as an equally vital part of Being.

In the last chapter we discovered how the sign of art, to Deleuze, is something that is ‘the ultimate goal of life, which life cannot realize by itself’ (PS 155).

It allows for a ‘superior view-point’ where the ontological principle of Being is revealed in all its chaotic reality as it ‘constitutes and reconstitutes the begin-ning of the world’ (PS 110). However, while these ontological effects are key to Deleuze and his view of art as revelatory of the virtual, they tell us little about the practical effect art can have in the here and now. After all, the work of art is actual and we encounter it in the actual. Yet there were hints at such practical effects at the end of Sexing the Cherry, as well as Beloved, where the virtual as the contemporaneous past of the actual opened up possibilities of action in the present and future. In order to further consider how art can be both separate from the world in essence, and at the same time be effective in this world, we have to go back to Deleuze’s work on art, in particular What is Philosophy? and Cinema 2.

It is obvious that Deleuze’s approach to art radically differs from Jameson’s historicist view, and this is precisely the key to why a Deleuzian approach can articulate what the magical elements in magical realism can do, where a histori-cist reading cannot. In fact, it is because the signs of art, such as the magical elements, are not historical that Deleuze fi nds that they have unique revolu-tionary potential: ‘ “Becoming” does not belong to History’ (WIP 96). Instead, history is ‘only the set of almost negative conditions that make possible the experimentation of something that escapes history’ (WIP 111). This experi-mentation is the creative act of art as revolution, for ‘revolution is absolute deterritorialization even to the point where this calls for a new earth, a new people’ (WIP 101). The political fi eld as predicated on territory belongs to the actual conditions of history. In contrast, the revolutionary, for Deleuze, is that which moves away from such territory. Magic, as we have seen, is precisely a movement of deterritorialization, divergent from the territoriality of realism, and thus divergent from politics and history, and it is precisely as such that it is revolutionary in Deleuze’s sense.

If the revolutionary, to Deleuze, is that which is deterritorialized to ‘the point where this calls for a new earth, a new people’, the sign of art is revolutionary exactly because it is a new creation in the act of being created. In fact, the specifi c ontological characteristics of the signs of art that we discovered in the previous chapter are necessary for their revolutionary potential. The point of the call for a new people can only be reached if a sign of art, through its deterritorialization, enacts the ‘birth of the world’ (PS 110). Any actual people, any people that already exists, and which is merely represented by realism

refl ecting the conditions of that existing society, is, of course, necessarily already territorialized. Only a virtual people without any relation to present or histori-cal society can be absolutely deterritorialized and thus properly revolutionary.

Consider Deleuze’s notion of the minor. A minority is not defi ned by the num-ber of its memnum-bers or elements, but by the connections between these constitu-ents, connections which belong neither to the elements nor to the group as such. While the major is that which is territorialized or coded, a minority

‘has no model, it’s a becoming, a process [. . .]. When a minority creates models for itself it’s because it wants to become a majority’.¹² Only a people that does not yet exist, but which is in the very process of becoming-people, is properly a minority. Equally, minor literature does not designate specifi c ethnic or national literatures, but the ‘revolutionary conditions for every literature’; any author, even one belonging to a majority, can fi nd ‘his own point of underdevelop-ment, his own patois, his own third world’ (KM 18).

Clearly, Deleuze’s use of the term ‘third world’ here is as idiosyncratic as his use of the term ‘revolutionary’. Indeed, we have to consider this a virtual

‘third world’ just as his revolution is virtual – and thus explicitly not an image or representation of the actual Third World, nor of any actual revolution.

However, within a Deleuzian framework this certainly does not mean that the two cannot be usefully considered in relation to each other. In Cinema 2 Deleuze defi nes a Third World cinema in political terms which we can compare to Jameson’s analysis of Third World literature. Deleuze states that a Third World political cinema exists exactly on the basis that ‘the people no longer exist, or not yet . . . the people are missing’ (C2 208). To Deleuze, it is in the Third World, ‘where oppressed and exploited nations remained in a state of perpetual minorities, in a collective identity crisis’, that the need for the articulation of a new people becomes clear, precisely because the people are missing:

This acknowledgement of a people who are missing is not a renunciation of political cinema, but on the contrary the new basis on which it is founded, in the third world and for minorities. Art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is pre-supposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people. The moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There have never been people here’, the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute. (C2 209)

To Deleuze it is thus not a case of fi nding the contradictions caused by the encounter between individuals, classes or modes of production: ‘If the people are missing, if there is no longer consciousness, evolution or revolution, it is the scheme of reversal which itself becomes impossible. There will no longer be conquest of power by a proletariat, or by a united or unifi ed people’

(C2 211). The Deleuzian revolution is not about reversing the master–slave,

Deleuze and the Postcolonial Politics of Magical Realism 115

colonizer–colonized relationship, but about inventing a new people beyond any such opposition.

Deleuze and Jameson may appear to intersect at the point where they both proclaim that Third World art is necessarily collective. However, while to Jameson this collective utterance is a function of individual lives expressing national destinies through allegory, to Deleuze, the minority voice is collective precisely because it does not represent any actual, existing people:

because the people are missing, the author is in a situation of producing utterances which are already collective, which are like the seeds of the people to come, and whose political impact is immediate and inescapable. The author can be marginalized or separate from his more or less illiterate com-munity as much as you like; this condition puts him all the more in a position to express potential forces and, in his very solitude, to be a true collective agent, a collective leaven, a catalyst. (C2 213)

Ronald Bogue, in his essay ‘Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come’, elucidates this role of the artist as catalyst that Deleuze develops in Cinema 2, by considering Deleuze’s analysis of the work of Quebecois fi lm-maker Pierre Perrault and his methods. Perrault makes documentaries, ‘not by producing an

“objective” recording of an external reality, but by entering into a collaborative process of invention with their subjects’.¹³ In Pour la suite du monde (1963) Perrault invites a group of Quebecois islanders, marginalized by both Anglo-Canadian society and offi cial French culture, to revive a traditional hunting practice. As they go about this task, Perrault fi lms the group not only speaking of memories and folk lore of the hunt, but also beginning to form a new community. Perrault’s camera captures them in the process of what Perrault calls ‘legending in fl agrante delicto’, that is, in the very process of inventing a new communal myth. Bogue quotes Perrault on this subject: ‘I do not want to help give birth yet again to myths, but to allow people to give birth to them-selves, to avoid myths, to escape customs, to elude Writings’.¹⁴

While Jameson sees a return to myths and rituals of the past as an expression of the ‘voice of the oppressed’ constituting an allegory of the nation in Third World literature, to Deleuze, ‘Third World’ cinema is instead all about ‘legend-ing’ or inventing myth; ‘an act of story-telling which would not be a return to myth but a production of collective utterances capable of raising misery to a strange positivity, the invention of a people’ (C2 214). The author, acting as an agent for these new myths, ‘must not, then, make himself into the ethnologist for his people, nor himself invent a fi ction which would be one more private story: for every personal fi ction, like every impersonal myth, is on the side of the

“masters” ’ (C2 213). To Deleuze, the collective nature of ‘Third World’ art does certainly not lie in its allegorizing individual stories, or any kind of representa-tion of a state of things, but in its power as the crearepresenta-tion of the new.

As we have seen, realism is not a matter of verisimilitude as such, but of the text belonging to a particular regime of signs or refl ecting a particular

ontological orientation. Realist fi ction keeps up the appearance of referential-ity through the regime of signs of subjectifi cation. Such fi ction is thus, says Deleuze, a ‘model of pre-established truth, which necessarily expresses domi-nant ideas or the point of view of the colonizer [. . .] [it] is inseparable from a

“reverence” which presents it as true, in religion, in society, in cinema, in the systems of images’ (C2 145). The crucial opposition is not between ‘fi ction’, or

‘text’, and ‘reality’, but rather between the realist regime of signs and the regime of signs revealed by the signs of art. That is, between a territorial regime and one which embodies the deterritorialization of Being in the act of new creation. Thus ‘what is opposed to fi ction is not the real; it is not the truth which is always that of the masters or the colonizer; it is the story-telling func-tion of the poor, insofar as it gives the false the power which makes it into a memory, a legend, a monster’ (C2 145). This statement may seem to echo the mantra of the magical realist critic that sees freedom in returning to traditional story-telling and legend. This is not what Deleuze means, however. To Deleuze, story-telling is precisely not the return to ‘anthropological’ myth in search for meaning, or the recollection of personal or collective memories of a people, it is the creation of the ‘monsters’ of simulacra: myths and legends without origins, that is, myths and legends whose people do not yet exist. It is precisely only when art goes beyond the real, starts ‘making up legends’ that it contrib-utes to the invention of a new people (C2 145).

Bogue rightly asks how this ‘story-telling’ or ‘legending’ relates to narrative, and concludes that it does so by opposition. Bogue fi nds that Deleuze privileges elements antithetical to narrative in his works on literature and art. For example, in Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari fi nd the ‘minority’ of Kafka’s novels in their structure consisting of pieces of discontinuous narrative. In Cinema 2 Deleuze describes ‘Third World’ cinema as operating through crises or a ‘put-ting into trance’ of its narrative or ‘speech-acts’. Just as the minority of Kafka’s language means being ‘a sort of stranger within [one’s] own language’ (KM 26), in ‘Third World’ cinema ‘the speech-act must create itself as a foreign language in a dominant language’ (C2 215). Also in Proust and Signs, Bogue points out, the search or apprenticeship progresses not through narrative but through signs, and ‘eventuates in a philosophical understanding of essences that transcends the sequence of events leading to that understanding’.¹⁵ That is, this making up of new myths does not consist in a narrative movement at all, but is rather situated in the elements that rupture narrative, such elements as the crystalline signs, in terms of which we considered magic in the last chapter – the signs characterized by non-human becomings and indiscernibility in opposition to an ‘organic’, human or motor-sensory narration.

It is therefore the very fact that art leaves behind a narrative that represents the individual, the human, the historical, that gives art its greatest revolutionary potential for Deleuze. It is a revolution that cannot be found in any existing society. To Deleuze and Guattari,

Deleuze and the Postcolonial Politics of Magical Realism 117

art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and a people that are lacking as correlate of creation [. . .]. The artist or the phi-losopher is quite incapable of creating a people, each can only summon it with all his strength. A people can only be created in abominable sufferings, and it cannot be concerned any more with art or philosophy. But books of philosophy and works of art also contain their sum of unimaginable sufferings that forewarn of the advent of a people. They have resistance in common – their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame, and to the present. (WIP 108,110)

The effect of art in the here and now is thus a resistance, a forewarning or an imperative. Clearly, this approach sheds a new light on postcolonial magical realism. We cannot see magic in an ‘anthropological’ light any longer, so much we already know. Defi ning magic as a pure simulacrum makes the debate about origins and authenticity redundant. We have to remember that becomings ‘are born in history’ but are not of history.

It is in this sense that we can recuperate, through Deleuze, Bhabha’s concept of the hybrid signifi er. If the hybrid signifi er is a sign of art, meaningless and undecidable, the very ‘extinction of the recognizable object of culture’, then that is precisely why it has a Deleuzian revolutionary potential. We saw that the problem was that Bhabha, like many postcolonial theorists, attempted to bring this enunciatory moment back to the existing state of affairs: while the hybrid signifi er entailed the ‘act of erasing the politics of binary opposition’ (LC 256), such ‘iterative “unpicking” ’ was immediately followed by ‘incommensurable, insurgent relinking’ (LC 265). Deleuze, however, allows us to take the hybrid signifi er to its logical conclusion: rather than insisting on a return of ‘the subject as agent’, Deleuze fi nds the revolutionary potential of the sign of art precisely in the fact that the subject, the people, is missing. Deleuze thus enables us to both go beyond the limits of a Marxist approach, which cannot adequately

It is in this sense that we can recuperate, through Deleuze, Bhabha’s concept of the hybrid signifi er. If the hybrid signifi er is a sign of art, meaningless and undecidable, the very ‘extinction of the recognizable object of culture’, then that is precisely why it has a Deleuzian revolutionary potential. We saw that the problem was that Bhabha, like many postcolonial theorists, attempted to bring this enunciatory moment back to the existing state of affairs: while the hybrid signifi er entailed the ‘act of erasing the politics of binary opposition’ (LC 256), such ‘iterative “unpicking” ’ was immediately followed by ‘incommensurable, insurgent relinking’ (LC 265). Deleuze, however, allows us to take the hybrid signifi er to its logical conclusion: rather than insisting on a return of ‘the subject as agent’, Deleuze fi nds the revolutionary potential of the sign of art precisely in the fact that the subject, the people, is missing. Deleuze thus enables us to both go beyond the limits of a Marxist approach, which cannot adequately