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Chapter 8 Bridging Bateson, Deleuze and Guattari Through Metamodelisation: What Brian Massumi Can Teach Us About Animal Politics

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Deleuze and the Animal
This chapter is in the book Deleuze and the Animal
Chapter 8Bridging Bateson, Deleuze and Guattari Through Metamodelisation: What Brian Massumi Can Teach Us About Animal PoliticsColin GardnerIntroduction: ‘The Included Middle’The idea of ‘the included middle’ as a transversal movement of becom-ing, a zone where intensities ‘pick up speed’, is a key characteristic in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of both the rhizome and the plateau as unlocalisable relations, a matter of coming and going rather than starting and finishing. Thus, ‘A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 25). Similarly, ‘A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus’ (21). Significantly, Deleuze and Guattari appropriate the term ‘plateau’ from the English anthropologist/cyberneticist, Gregory Bateson (1904–80), specifically his seminal 1972 collection of lectures and essays, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. As they point out:Gregory Bateson uses the word ‘plateau’ to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose develop-ment avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example: mother-child sexual games, and even quarrels among men, undergo this bizarre intensive stabilization. (1987: 21–2)In the latter context, Bateson’s analysis indicates how potentially damag-ing and long-lasting Oedipal scenarios – including ‘the curious confu-sions between fighting and lovemaking, the symbolic identifications of orgasm with death’ (Bateson 2000: 112) – are circumvented through deliberately contrived uses of sexual play and the breaking of cumulative tension, methods that could also be applied to quarrels and, in extreme cases, combat and warfare. Thus a boy’s mother might titillate the child
© 2022, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh

Chapter 8Bridging Bateson, Deleuze and Guattari Through Metamodelisation: What Brian Massumi Can Teach Us About Animal PoliticsColin GardnerIntroduction: ‘The Included Middle’The idea of ‘the included middle’ as a transversal movement of becom-ing, a zone where intensities ‘pick up speed’, is a key characteristic in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of both the rhizome and the plateau as unlocalisable relations, a matter of coming and going rather than starting and finishing. Thus, ‘A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 25). Similarly, ‘A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus’ (21). Significantly, Deleuze and Guattari appropriate the term ‘plateau’ from the English anthropologist/cyberneticist, Gregory Bateson (1904–80), specifically his seminal 1972 collection of lectures and essays, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. As they point out:Gregory Bateson uses the word ‘plateau’ to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose develop-ment avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example: mother-child sexual games, and even quarrels among men, undergo this bizarre intensive stabilization. (1987: 21–2)In the latter context, Bateson’s analysis indicates how potentially damag-ing and long-lasting Oedipal scenarios – including ‘the curious confu-sions between fighting and lovemaking, the symbolic identifications of orgasm with death’ (Bateson 2000: 112) – are circumvented through deliberately contrived uses of sexual play and the breaking of cumulative tension, methods that could also be applied to quarrels and, in extreme cases, combat and warfare. Thus a boy’s mother might titillate the child
© 2022, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Introduction 1
  5. PART I UNDOING ANTHROPOCENTRISM: BECOMING-ANIMAL AND THE NONHUMAN
  6. Chapter 1 Ahuman Abolition 25
  7. Chapter 2 Brutal Thoughts: Laruelle and Deleuze on Human Animal Stupidity 37
  8. Chapter 3 The Oedipal Animal? Companion Species and Becoming 52
  9. PART II VECTORS OF BECOMING IMPERCEPTIBLE: THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE PACK
  10. Chapter 4 Louis Malle’s Kleistian War Machine: Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Woman, Becoming-Imperceptible in Black Moon (1975) 77
  11. Chapter 5 Ant and Empire: Myrmetic Writing, Simulation and the Problem of Reciprocal Becomings 99
  12. Chapter 6 Music-Becoming-Animal in Works by Grisey, Aperghis and Levinas 122
  13. Chapter 7 Un/Becoming Claude Cahun: Zigzagging in a Pack 140
  14. PART III ANIMAL POLITICS, ANIMAL DEATHS: TRANSVERSAL CONNECTIVITIES AND THE CREATION OF AN ETHICOAESTHETIC PARADIGM
  15. Chapter 8 Bridging Bateson, Deleuze and Guattari Through Metamodelisation: What Brian Massumi Can Teach Us About Animal Politics 157
  16. Chapter 9 Becoming-shewolf and the Ethics of Solidarity in Once Upon a Time: Feminist and Posthumanist Re-assembling of Little Red Riding Hood 176
  17. Chapter 10 Hannibal aux aguets: On the Lookout for New Rencontres 197
  18. Chapter 11 Mister V and the Unmournable Animal Death 228
  19. PART IV ANIMAL RE-TERRITORIALISATIONS IN ART AND CINEMA
  20. Chapter 12 Meditation on the Animal and the Work of Art 255
  21. Chapter 13 Becoming-Animal Cinema Narrative 266
  22. Chapter 14 Deleuze and Roxy: The Time of the Intolerable and Godard’s Adieu au langage 275
  23. PART V TRANSVERSE ANIMALITIES: ECOSOPHICAL BECOMINGS
  24. Chapter 15 Drinking Animals: Sobriety, Intoxication and Interspecies Assemblages 295
  25. Chapter 16 Becoming-Wolf: From Wolf-Man to the Tree Huggers of Turkey 310
  26. Notes on Contributors 325
  27. Index 329
Readers are also interested in:
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474422758-010

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Introduction 1
  5. PART I UNDOING ANTHROPOCENTRISM: BECOMING-ANIMAL AND THE NONHUMAN
  6. Chapter 1 Ahuman Abolition 25
  7. Chapter 2 Brutal Thoughts: Laruelle and Deleuze on Human Animal Stupidity 37
  8. Chapter 3 The Oedipal Animal? Companion Species and Becoming 52
  9. PART II VECTORS OF BECOMING IMPERCEPTIBLE: THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE PACK
  10. Chapter 4 Louis Malle’s Kleistian War Machine: Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Woman, Becoming-Imperceptible in Black Moon (1975) 77
  11. Chapter 5 Ant and Empire: Myrmetic Writing, Simulation and the Problem of Reciprocal Becomings 99
  12. Chapter 6 Music-Becoming-Animal in Works by Grisey, Aperghis and Levinas 122
  13. Chapter 7 Un/Becoming Claude Cahun: Zigzagging in a Pack 140
  14. PART III ANIMAL POLITICS, ANIMAL DEATHS: TRANSVERSAL CONNECTIVITIES AND THE CREATION OF AN ETHICOAESTHETIC PARADIGM
  15. Chapter 8 Bridging Bateson, Deleuze and Guattari Through Metamodelisation: What Brian Massumi Can Teach Us About Animal Politics 157
  16. Chapter 9 Becoming-shewolf and the Ethics of Solidarity in Once Upon a Time: Feminist and Posthumanist Re-assembling of Little Red Riding Hood 176
  17. Chapter 10 Hannibal aux aguets: On the Lookout for New Rencontres 197
  18. Chapter 11 Mister V and the Unmournable Animal Death 228
  19. PART IV ANIMAL RE-TERRITORIALISATIONS IN ART AND CINEMA
  20. Chapter 12 Meditation on the Animal and the Work of Art 255
  21. Chapter 13 Becoming-Animal Cinema Narrative 266
  22. Chapter 14 Deleuze and Roxy: The Time of the Intolerable and Godard’s Adieu au langage 275
  23. PART V TRANSVERSE ANIMALITIES: ECOSOPHICAL BECOMINGS
  24. Chapter 15 Drinking Animals: Sobriety, Intoxication and Interspecies Assemblages 295
  25. Chapter 16 Becoming-Wolf: From Wolf-Man to the Tree Huggers of Turkey 310
  26. Notes on Contributors 325
  27. Index 329
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