“Bring something incomprehensible into the world(!)”. The rallying cry of Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari resounded across the field of poststructuralism and theory, and then faded off into the distance. The field of theoretical practice today, while cognisant of the contributions of the generation of thinkers before it, seems to have quietly moved on and away from their stylistic presentations of thought. The practice of literary and non-standard experiments in thought seems to have fallen out …
Read more“Bring something incomprehensible into the world(!)”. The rallying cry of Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari resounded across the field of poststructuralism and theory, and then faded off into the distance. The field of theoretical practice today, while cognisant of the contributions of the generation of thinkers before it, seems to have quietly moved on and away from their stylistic presentations of thought. The practice of literary and non-standard experiments in thought seems to have fallen out of style. The paradox is palpable: while the field of thought today is so massively indebted to the contributions of the poststructuralists, it eschews their manner of practice, and while critiques abound of the modern world’s subjugation to the techno-capital order, and entrapment within the confines of a rigidly materialist-relativist episteme, these fail to explicitly draw the link between the crisis of thought today and its stylelessness. This disdain for style should not be surprising - it is more thought’s norm than its exception. The segregation and disprivileging of style and the aesthetic traces its roots back to Plato, and is then on assumed by many of the consequent major philosophers. The legacy this leaves on the field of thought is a mystification of the status of style in thought. This mystification constitutes a far more fundamental disprivileging manoeuvre than Plato’s denouncement of the aesthetic or Aristotle’s subjugation of the stylistic to amere means of delivery of a more fundamental dialectic; it constitutes the failure of philosophy to provide for style an existence of its own. Style has thus always been condemned to exist only in an epiphenomenal sense - either the byproduct of a thinker’s accidental facticities, or as deviation from or conformity to a general fashion of the times. I argue that in trying to accord for style an existence of its own, we must turn to Deleuze, whose concept of style - unwaveringly materialist and transversal - allows us to develop for style a status that goes beyond the literary and the aesthetic. Further, Deleuze’s multiple and often inconsistent metaphysical systems which situate the ontological in the noological, provide the perfect models within which to explicate the ontological/noological status of style.
