The Banana Peel Project

The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.  It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity.  For that future world and that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue.

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

The question posed by language analysis of some discursive fact or other is always: according to what rules has a particular statement been made, and consequently according to what rules could other similar statements be made?  The description of the events of discourse poses quite a different question: how is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

No sense of possibility or potentiality exists in the realm of statements.  Everything in them is real and all reality is manifestly present.  All that counts is what has been formulated at a given moment, including any blanks and gaps.  It is none the less certain that statements can be opposed to one another, and placed in hierarchical order…Foucault rigorously demonstrates that contradictions between statements can be measured only by calculating the concrete distance between them…Comparisons between statements are therefore linked to a mobile diagonal line that allows us, within this space, to make a direct study of the same set at different levels, as well as to choose some sets on the same level while disregarding others…It is precisely the rarefied nature of this space which creates these unusual movements and bursts of passion that cut space up into new dimensions.

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity.  Memory goes.  Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern.  Everything previously moving with the grain is now against–you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest of caves of the mind.  You never knew those caves were there.  It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

What brings these bits together is a very specific attention to difference.  Derrida points us to the unknown, positioning the future on the other side of an inscrutable break in semantic meaning, a positioning that obscures the unknown in the shadowy netherworld of the subjunctive.  Would, might, and can are the operative moves for Derrida, and the ghost of potentiality renders everything on the other side of the break dark, threatening, and monstrous.

Likewise, Foucault, in his early structuralist daydream The Archaeology of Knowledge, identifies a clear difference between the lonely statement and the relational matrix of discourse.  A world captured in a single statement (or metaphor, or model, or trope) is not a world at all; it is uniform, boring, lifeless.  This pallid universe is not the one in which Foucault exists, nor indeed is it the one that you and I inhabit.  We exist in a discursive system, the space of which is defined not by individual statements but by the spatiotemporal relations between statements.  What Derrida deconstructs as terrifying and unknowable, Foucault identifies as constitutive of the very structure of meaning.

At times, it seems that Deleuze’s distinctively manic formulations achieve their greatest clarity in the presence of even greater fluidity.  In this case, Deleuze is explicit about how to move within the discursive space that Foucault outlines at the beginning of Archaeology, underlining how it is that movement across fields of difference is tantamount to play.  Difference, he reminds us, is what enables some things to be seen and others to disappear.  “Blanks and gaps” are meaningful and, more importantly, very real.  Movement is a product as well as a precondition for the articulation of difference, and Deleuze shows that this kind of linguistic play is both required for and constitutive of the most elemental of human experiences.  Passion.

In her famous autoethnography, Jamison is attentive to these plays of difference.  Mania and depression are not reducible to polarities, but there is a distinct sort of movement going on here.  This is a movement between selves: one passionate, articulate, and productive; one demanding, mute, and consumptive.  Each reveals the other in all its vulnerability and fragile contingency, and each requires the other for its own identity.  Yet both are intimately and always self-involved.  The other always disappears completely until something breaks.  Jamison’s selves are defined by constant movement—on the other side, always already (potentially) there (and not here), something waits, always threatening and monstrous.

The self is a statement, but movement requires difference, and that difference is as terrifying as it is completely, irreducibly necessary.