Signs

According to the little tags next to our blog, there have been as many posts about Eric A. Havelock as there have about Proust, though I find that hard to believe. Anyway, I'm sure I've told you before that years ago I picked up Deleuze's "Proust et les signes", already knowing Proust very well and not having read anything at all by Deleuze, and when I read it, it was a revelation... I had read things on Proust by Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Ernst Robert Curtius, Beckett, plenty of people you've never heard of and probably a couple other you have, and the actual experience of reading Proust was the only thing that had left any strong impression on me. Beyond being lucid, Deleuze was the only person I read who actually altered my initial experience and fundamentally changed my way of thinking about the the book. If afterwards when approaching more difficult, more obscure and less instantly enlightening books by Deleuze, I've generally stuck with them and paid attention, confident in the fact that there was a pay-off coming, it was largely because of this first experience (which, I might clarify, didn't have to be stuck with or struggled through and didn't delay the pay-off). Now years later, reading the Proust book again, for me not surprisingly I guess, I'm less convinced by the book as a whole... as a short aside, having spoken to you and written so often about Proust, I'm never sure what goes without saying, what's been covered, and what might be misunderstood if I don't clarify. As always I'll simply guess, probably both repeating the obvious and leaving out the necessary, but there you have it... Anyway, Deleuze's book is actually kind of two separate books written at different times on different subjects with an extra chapter tagged on that was a paper for some conference or collective book. The first half is making the point that Proust's book is not primarily about time or memory (as most people up until the sixties assumed it was) that it was about signs and apprenticeship ('apprentissage' which can also just mean the process of learning). He picks up on Proust's insistence throughout the book on all the things that the hero didn't know or understand, the multiplicity of people and things around him that he approaches as puzzles and mysteries, and his increasing adeptness at interpreting things (words, behavior, looks, feelings, works of art, etc). Deleuze makes the undeniable point that 'la recherche' basically recounts the formation of an accomplished semiotician. Making signs is of course a counterpoint to interpreting them - particularly to ensure a position in society where the ability to respond to signs in the correct way guarantees status. Jokes aren't really made as often as people signaling that they are being amusing and others giving signs that they've understood and appreciated in place of genuine laughter - signaling rank as an initiate, knowledge of the code, etc. Doctors decode symptoms, diplomats learn to interprets signs given off both intentionally and unintentionally by their counterparts (a rule in the recherche is that signs given off unintentionally are always more telling and important than those made on purpose). Of course the jealous lover is the ultimate paranoid sign-reader, trying to unravel every blush, sideways glance or cast-off comment, almost always without a sufficient information to make any sense of what they are interpreting, or even to separate the meaningful signs from the meaningless ones. But Deleuze gets alchemical and strange dividing Proust's world into arcane categories and ordering it according to rules often not spelled out by Proust. The four categories of signs he signals out are hard to take issue with - there are signs of 'mondanite', or of the social world, signs of love and jealousy, sensible (or sensorial signs) - the name he gives and the way he describes them is a bit surprising, but still not shocking, and finally signs belonging to the realm of art. He sets these four categories in a set hierarchy which is justifiable. In Proust it's clear that socializing and even less frivolous friendships are based on empty interactions - Deleuze claims that the signs of the social world cause a sort of nervous excitation and that the signs given off refer to nothing but themselves and places most of the value of socializing in it being a kind of entry level introduction to decoding signs... of course this milieu wouldn't be necessary if that were all it were. In the structure of la recherche, besides being a gathering place for characters, society is the perfect forum for showing the passage of time and the effects of time on society and the individual, which Deleuze isn't ignorant of and deals with later on. For Deleuze, from 'empty' signs in society we move to 'deceptive signs' of love. The meaning of the signs the beloved gives off is always opposed to what it claims to be. Love provides the best training in the reading of signs because of the violence the signs do to the lover, the constraint it puts on him/ her and the intensity it instills. From this we move to sensorial signs, by which Deleuze means the sudden ecstatic feeling conjured up by a stray sensation which often links a present moment to a moment in the past, a memory unlocked by a stray taste, a sound, a smell, etc that we've come across before (though at moments this doesn't seem to be attached to a memory and simply excites something in the imagination). For Deleuze, though these 'signs' do point to an essence, and are thus 'superior' to signs of society and love, they are still tainted by being material signs in that it is a concrete sensation that awakens them and that their 'meaning' (i.e. the memory they awaken) is also material. Finally signs of art use 'spiritualized' matter (whatever that means), the sounds or words or colors used to embody them being chosen and not constraining the essence they reveal... I'm not going to try to unravel or defend the whole explanation of this 'material/ spiritual' divide, which to me seems silly. In the second part of the book he'll try to look into what exactly an essence is, but at this point in his argument he's actually doing okay insofar as art DOES have the role of retrospectively giving meaning and order to the signs of the other levels, and though the 'sensible' signs, as Deleuze calls them, in the book are the most intense links to 'essences', it is true that they are rare, they can't be controlled or held onto and their meaning isn't fully revealed except insofar as they feed into the creation of art. The argument starts getting a bit weirder when he divides up the sorts of time that correspond to each of the sorts of signs. First there's time that is wasted (qu'on perd) which goes with society... this is simply frivolous and empty. Then there's 'lost time' (temps perdu), which goes with love - and this is a sort of tragic dimension of irreconcilable loss, jealous going with an understanding of death and disappearance, that things can't be held onto. Realizing you will one day be indifferent to the current object of your obsession is a sort of experience of dying... not that Deleuze spells it out in quite this way, but I believe this is what he is getting at. The time that is rediscovered (qu'on retrouve) is linked to sensible signs - the past surging up in the involuntary memory with all of its initial force is an experience that things aren't lost quite as irretrievably as you might generally believe. And then finally time rediscovered (temps retrouve) belongs to the signs of art, where pure time is uncovered - eternity in an instant, not immortality after death but a sort of slipping outside of time. Though each time corresponds to a certain milieu and a certain class of signs, Deleuze stresses that they bleed into one another and the walls between experiences aren't as solid as his alchemical formula would lead one to believe. I'm no going to go into the divisions of corresponding machines and forms of production, because I would never finish. Though I feel I haven't yet hit on where it gets particularly weird... I will say that there IS something appropriate about strange schema... I think Proust would kind of love that. Anyway - I keep talking lately about necessity and contingence... in one of my recent entries I mentioned being necessary didn't mean inevitable. Deleuze was making more or less the same point in Proust, except where I said 'necessary', he said 'inevitable', and where I said 'inevitable' he said something else, at which point I realized that I have been kind of sloppy in my wording. Once again, of course, he was talking about the fact that contingent encounters do violence to consciousness and make ideas necessary and vouch for the truth of discoveries while thought driven by logic, precisely because it chooses its own way is not constrained, has no necessity and deals with only propositions that are logically tenable but not necessarily true (at some point in talking about all the ways in which Proust was opposed to Plato, being platonic, but against dialogue, against philos and sophia, etc, Deleuze suggests that Plato/ Socrates was able to provoke the sort of violence of images that Proust requires from encounters from outside, but its a sort of offhand comment).
I'm going to save a discussion of essence being 'pure difference' and expressed through difference and repetition. I hope to hit the book 'difference and repetition' soon. Of course Deleuze is extremely interested in a sort of initial irreducible multiplicity at the root of existence. I thought it wouldn't take me so long to say so little, but of course it's kind of madness to try to tackle a whole book in a single entry. I had actually hoped to talk about Deleuze on Proust yesterday and Deleuze on Nietzsche today, but I'm behind schedule, and tomorrow I go away on vacation for a week. I'll have to rethink how to make entries when I come back.
Hope all is well with you.