Table Of ContentDeleuze and
Futurism
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Deleuze and
Futurism
A Manifesto for Nonsense
HELEN PALMER
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Bloomsbury Academic
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
1 Poetics of futurism: Zaum, shiftology, nonsense 1
2 Poetics of Deleuze: Structure, stoicism, univocity 41
3 The materialist manifesto 73
4 Shiftology #1: From performativity to
dramatization 105
5 Shiftology #2: From metaphor to
metamorphosis 133
6 The see-sawing frontier: Linguistic
spatiotemporalities 159
7 Conclusion: Suffixing, prefixing 185
Notes 195
Bibliography 231
Index 247
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Andreas Kramer and Alberto Toscano for
helping me to negotiate multiple simultaneous pathways throughout
this project. Thanks to Alberto for consistently challenging and
detailed feedback on Deleuze, and thanks to Andreas for intro-
ducing me to Russian futurism back in 2007, and for providing
motivation, encouragement and friendship ever since. Thanks to
my Goldsmiths friends for Monday Club drinks and Twiglets:
particularly Jessica Rapson for her friendship and her proof-
reading eagle-eyes; Eva Aldea for dog walks, talks and stacks of
Deleuze books on loan; and my sisters-of-sorts, Vikki Chalklin
and Jo Lloyd, for three years of PhD-fuelled hysterical laughter
at Malpas Road. Special thanks go to Mum, Dad and Neil, who
have encouraged, motivated, counselled and supported in a huge
number of ways. I could not have done it without you.
I dedicate this book to Beth, for your inspiration, pragmatism,
energy, alliterative flair and eternal bestowal of homebaked treats:
thank you for keeping hold of me, even when I made no sense.
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INTRODUCTION
A manifesto for nonsense
In the 1960s, Gilles Deleuze presented a case for nonsense as
the ultimate being of language. The groundwork is palpable in
Difference and Repetition (1968), and its fullest expression can be
found in The Logic of Sense (1969). Decades earlier, the Italian
and Russian futurists begin an international and transdisciplinary
movement presenting a case for the elimination of linguistic sense as
we know it. The movement in both cases consists of the liberation
of language from the strictures of preconceived meaning. Deleuze’s
philosophical extraction and affirmation of difference is in a certain
sense analogous to the linguistic experiments of the early European
avant-garde. This is again demonstrated by a linguistic model,
which is why the futurist manifestos chosen as models for analysis
in this book are the principal ‘technical’ manifestos of Russian
and Italian futurism, the ones that outline the metamorphoses to
which language should be subjected: F. T. Marinetti’s ‘Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ (1912) and the Russian futurists’
collectively written and untitled literary manifesto in the book A
Trap for Judges 2 (1913).
What leads Deleuze to affirm nonsense in this way, and how can
one specific movement of the avant-garde help us to understand it?
There are several ways in which we could characterize the answer
to this. It has its base within language and linguistic theory, and
a perception of language as matter. This affirmation of linguistic
materiality consists of a shift in focus from the semantic content
of the word to its material properties: a word’s sound and shape
are the most obvious and common examples. The word ‘shift’ is
important. Deleuze and the futurists (both Italian and Russian)
share a desire to liberate, radicalize and reconfigure language. The
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viii INTRODUCTION
nature of this manipulation is at once both radically destructive and
radically creative; it is based on a critique of reason and an ensuing
celebration of language for its own sake. The metamorphoses to
which Deleuze and the futurists aim to subject language to reach a
point of ‘nonsense’ are by no means identical, but their linguistic
drives tend towards a common dynamic element. This element
is outlined below, but this book will argue that it is a concept in
the form of a neologism: we might call it a conceptual neologism.
The conflation of linguistic and philosophical practices, or the use
of linguistic concepts as models to express philosophical ones, is
a process we can view in Deleuze’s thought. Just as the creation
of neologisms is fundamental to a futurist poetics, the creation of
conceptual neologisms is fundamental to Deleuze’s thought.
The dynamic element
The aim of this book is to identify the dynamic element that consti-
tutes or drives a ‘futurist poetics’ and examine it in its various
guises, both in futurist writing and in the writing of Deleuze. The
first two chapters, ‘Poetics of futurism’ and ‘Poetics of Deleuze’, set
the stage for the aspects of language, space and time under inves-
tigation. These chapters introduce some important concepts for
the book as a whole. The concept of ‘nonsense’ and the analogous
function of the neologism occurs in Deleuze’s discussions as well
as futurist manifestos; the element of creativity and disregard for
linguistic convention is a trope which can be viewed not only at a
lexical but also a conceptual level. This leads us to the idea of the
conceptual neologism, which is the ultimate goal of futurist poetics.
The first two chapters also introduce the type of thinking which this
book argues is present in the poetics of Deleuze and of futurism:
an alternative type of reasoning based on a critique of Saussurian
arbitrariness, which in this book is called Cratylic reasoning. This
involves the motivatedness of links between objects or terms, both
linguistic and conceptual, and is fundamental to the link this book
draws between Deleuze’s linguistic theories and futurist aims. These
chapters also introduce the concept of the ‘shift’, another way of
describing the dynamic element that can be seen in both futurism
and Deleuze. The shift is a reconfiguration, a radicalization but also
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INTRODUCTION ix
a formalization, which is the peculiar movement of these aspects
of avant-garde and Deleuzian thought. Examples of the shift are
presented in the following chapters, which demonstrate its various
effects on linguistic spatiality and temporality.
The next four chapters examine the dynamic element from various
angles, through the dual perspectives of Deleuze and futurism.
Chapter 3, ‘The materialist manifesto’, examines the concept of
linguistic materiality and the ways in which this is celebrated within
futurist writings and Deleuze’s texts. Two ‘technical’ manifestos –
one Russian, one Italian – are examined as models that outline this
‘ideal’ of language-as-matter, and the sections of Deleuze’s writing
that outline analogous linguistic drives are critically analysed
simultaneously. Chapters 4 and 5 examine two ways in which we
can discern the dynamic shift at work, through the development,
abstraction or reconfigura tion of linguistic norms. Chapter 4,
‘Shiftology #1: From performativity to dramatization’, analyses
the way the celebrated linguistic materiality discussed in Chapter
3 is then set in motion – through its performance, enactment or
dramatization – differentiating between the linguistic implications
of performativity and the philosophical implications of drama-
tization. This distinction is not a clear-cut one, as both aspects
constitute the attempt to bypass mediation through acceleration.
This acceleration, I argue, is a vital part of futurist poetics. Chapter
5, ‘Shiftology #2: From metaphor to metamorphosis’, analyses
the way this aforementioned linguistic materiality is intensified
and made more ‘material’ through the critique of metaphor which
again takes the form of an acceleration. Metamorphosis is a
more immediate alternative than metaphor because it eliminates
the temporal gap between items in an analogical equation. The
distinctions between concepts of space and time within language
are significantly problematized under this futurist schema, and this
is the subject of Chapter 6, ‘The see-sawing frontier: Linguistic
spatiotemporalities’. This chapter examines the ‘shifts’ occurring
in linguistic conceptions of space and time, through the philo-
sophical developments of Bergson and the creative explorations of
Khlebnikov and Marinetti, and Deleuze’s own temporal schemas.
The book concludes by arguing that within the futurist poetics
outlined, temporality and language are linked through geometrical
models, the most important being the ambiguous ‘frontier line’ of
futurist advancement articulated by Deleuze.
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