A preliminary indication of the direction in which this replaying of the theory of instinct might move, along lines suggested by the opening quotation from Bergson, can be provided by glossing the concept of desire in relation to Gabriel Tarde’s notions of “belief”
and “appetition.”
Belief for Tarde has no content in the sense of fundamentally referring to an external object. It is a force of liaison binding a multiplicity of lived qualities into a primary perception that is self- effecting (Ruyer’s “hallucinatory” activity). It does not belong to a subject. It is a belonging conditioning the subject’s emergence. The subject does not have or possess belief. Rather, belief is a “posses-sion.” It is the possession of a multiplicity of life- qualities by each
11 The Supernormal Animal
other. It is this immediate qualitative linkage that constitutes the real conditions of emergence of a subject of experience.
In Bergsonian terms, this immediate possession of life quali-ties by each other can be considered a primary sympathy. Once again, sympathy is not something that is had by a subject. It is not a subjective content of animal life. It is a self- effecting qualitative movement constitutive of the life of the animal. The animal does not have sympathy; it is sympathy.
“Appetition” for Tarde is the movement from one such sympa-thetic perception to another, following a tendency toward expan-sion. The tendency toward expansion is an “avidity,” corresponding in the present account to the “passion” of the supernormal ten-dency to excess. The passion of animal life is its creatively outdoing itself. It is the vital movement of animality’s self- improvising, en-ergized by the sympathy that it is. Because this moves animality to surpass what it normally is, it would be more precise to say not that the animal “is” sympathy, but that its becoming is sympathetic.
Together, belief and appetition constitute a pulse of “pure feel-ing.” This feeling is pure in the sense of not yet belonging to a sub-ject, but rather entering actively into its constitution. This is the
“block of sensation” for Deleuze and Guattari, or William James’s
“pure experience.”
The concepts of belief, desire, and pure feeling ground Tarde’s thinking in always- already ongoing minimal activity, rather than any a priori foundation, objective anchoring in external relation, or substance. The possession of belief and the movement of desire that orient sympathetic becoming are immanent to this minimal germinal activity. This is what I call elsewhere “bare activity.”25 The subject issues from this immanence: it is, in Whitehead’s terms, a
“superject.”
Tarde uses desire as a synonym for appetition. In this essay, de-sire refers to the co- operation of belief and appetition in Tarde.
As employed here, the concept of desire also includes an essen-tial reference to Ruyer’s definition of consciousness as an experi-ential solidarity between perceptual qualities indissociably bound in “primary liaison.” Primary liaisons are nonmechanistic and, as Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, “non- localizable.” There are not
therefore “connections” in any usual sense of the term. At the level of life’s minimal (germinal) activity, consciousness is one with the desiring movement of pure feeling.26
It is only when this primary consciousness comes to fold back onto itself— “reflect” on itself as Bergson had it in the opening quotation— that it secondarily “extends its object.” More precisely, life’s folding back on itself recursively constitutes an object. The ob-ject emerges as an effect of this recursivity. The obob-ject, Whitehead says, is that which returns.27 This should not be taken to imply that there is a preconstituted object that returns for a subject. It is not so much that the object returns, but rather that life recurs. It cycles back to an already improvised block of sensation, periodically reit-erated with a negligible degree of variation— a variation within the bounds of what, for practical purposes, can be treated as the “same.”
Thus the object, as it happens, is not one. It is a recursively emergent, reiterative event. What distinguishes an object- event from other species of event is that its reiterability enables it to stand as what William James calls a “terminus”: an attractor for life- composing movements of appetition.28 When the object is not actually present, it has not “withdrawn,” as object- oriented ontol-ogy would have it. It is attractively present as a virtual terminus. It is quietly exerting a force of potential.
The objective movement of return of events to negligible varia-tion settles in as a countertendency to the supernormal tendency.
The already- improvised gels into a nodal point. In tendential orbit around points of return, life’s movement can take on regularity.
The “sameness” of the object is the harbinger of this regularization.
Through it, the object- event becomes a pivot for life reexpressing itself, with a higher quotient of repetition than variation. Thus it is less that “consciousness extends its object.” It is more that life ex-tends its own activity into objective- event mode. A plane of regu-larization bifurcates from life’s self- expressive coursing. Life activ-ity settles into a reiterative ordering of itself, a level organization holding variation to an orbit of negligible variation. Regularization, normalization: it is on this object- oriented level that life’s activity comes to function.
This object- oriented normalization of life constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari call the “plane of organization.” The plane of
13 The Supernormal Animal
organization of function is in reciprocal presupposition with the
“plane of consistency” of desire.29 This gives life a double- ordering.
Pure feeling is doubled by object- oriented perception, in a play of supernormal tendency and normalizing countertendency: of quali-tative excess in vectored becoming, and objective leveling in recur-sive return; of passion- oriented “minimal” activity, and regular-ized object- oriented action; of creative spontaneity, and organregular-ized function. Always both, in a complexity of mutual imbrication.
Evolution cannot be thought apart from this mutual imbrica-tion of contrasting planes of life, and the dynamic tension of their always coming together, never dissolving into each other, never resolving their difference. Evolution is differential. Functional ad-aptation is only half the story. The other half is spontaneous and creative. On this side lies the primary origination of forms of life (which are nothing if not intensely qualitative, tending to excess in an immediacy of germinal activity).
This double- ordering implies that what we normally call “con-sciousness” is a derivative of a primary, nonreflexive, non- object- oriented consciousness corresponding to a radically different mode of life activity, as yet in no subject’s possession. This primary consciousness is not of something. It is something: sympathy. It
“is” the immediacy of sympathetic becoming— also called intui-tion.30 From primary consciousness’s recurrent becoming comes, paradoxically, its countertendency. The mode of this derivative, or secondary consciousness, is recognition. Recognition takes re-cursive return for identity. It constrains recurrence to the same.
Organization and normalization are predicated on object- oriented countertendency running circles around desire.
Project:
• Index the animal to its unrecognizability.
• Find in the human the passion of the animal.
• Induce human being to recur to its animal becoming.
• Take it to heart that “at the heart of the human there is nothing human.”31 For it is in the eminently objectless, immediately relational, spontaneously variation- creating activity flush with instinctive animality— this tendency
the human shares with the gull— that the human “gains singularly in distinction,” attaining its own “maximum determination” in a passionate flash of supernormal becoming.
• Take it to heart: animal becoming is most human. It is in becoming animal that the human recurs to what is nonhuman at the heart of what moves it. This makes its surpassingly human. Creative- relationally more- than human.32
• Put that in writing.
• Remembering that supernormal becoming is a “minimal activity” of life’s exceeding itself. It is modest, to the point of imperceptibility. In the nest or in writing, it is a modest gesture, vanishing even, no more than a flash. Yet vital.
Potentially of vital importance. Because it may resonate and amplify and shake life’s regularities to their object- oriented foundations.
• Consider that in the primary consciousness of the imme-diate intuition of animal sympathy “the act of knowledge coincides with the act that generates the real.”33 Not: cor-relates to. Coincides with. Thought- matter.34 The reality of animality as abstraction. Abstraction as the movement of the real.
• Improvise on that.
Notes
1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911), 238.
2. Raymond Ruyer, La genèse des formes vivantes (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), 260, 238. Translations mine.
3. For a more extended consideration of these questions, see Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).
4. Niko Tinbergen and A. C. Perdeck, “On the Stimulus Situation Re-leasing the Begging Response in the Newly Hatched Herring Gull Chick,”
Behavior 3, no. 1 (1950): 1– 39. The same effect had been observed by O. Köhler in 1937.
15 The Supernormal Animal
5. Niko Tinbergen, Animal Behavior (New York: Time- Life Books, 1965), 67.
6. Ibid., 68.
7. Ibid. “There is no absolute distinction between effective sign- stimuli and the non- effective properties of the object. . . . The full sig-nificance of supernormal stimuli is not yet clear.” Niko Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 42, 46. Tin-bergen, however, does not integrate these observations into his theory of instinct overall. They remain isolated musings. Deleuze and Guattari critique the predominance of the stimulus- trigger- automatism model in Tinbergen’s thinking; see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 327– 28.
8. “This is a question of consistency: the ‘holding- together’ of het-erogeneous elements. At first, they constitute no more than a fuzzy set.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 323. They character-ize life itself in terms of a “gain in consistency,” for which they use “self- consistency” (auto- consistance) as a synonym (335). They go on to define consistency as a “surplus- value of destratification” (emphasis in original, 336). For Ruyer on auto- conduction, see Genèse des formes vivantes, 65.
9. Ruyer, Genèse des formes vivantes, 146– 47.
10. Ibid., 149. Ruyer says the same of internal “signals” such as hor-mones, which according to his account induce a relational effect of co-variation that is in every respect analogous to what occurs in the case of fields of external perception.
11. On expressive qualities and internal relations, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 317– 18, 329.
12. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 145, 180. Joué is translated as “acted.”
13. Ruyer, Genèse des formes vivantes, 142.
14. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 239.
15. Tinbergen, Animal Behavior, 67.
16. On cause and effect as belonging to different orders, see Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 6– 7.
Deleuze ties the independence of effects to language. The present account does not follow him in this regard.
17. On blocks of becoming, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ch.
10, “Becoming- Intense, Becoming- Animal, Becoming- Imperceptible . . . ,”
in A Thousand Plateaus, 232– 309; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ch. 8, “Blocks, Series, Intensities,” in Kafka: For a Minor Literature, trans.
Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 53– 62.
On the associated concept of blocks of sensation, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ch. 7, “Percept, Affect, Concept” in What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 1994), 163– 99.
18. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 104. In the English translation, the French phrase une liaison animée par une vie pro-pre is rendered as “a love affair kindled by a decent life.” I take the phrase much more literally. The word liaison is used throughout Deleuze and Deleuze/Guattari’s work in reference to and in resonance with Ruyer’s thought to mean an unassignable (nonlocal) “linkage,” and the idea of an immanent life of form (“animated by a life of its own”) fits the context of this passage, which is working from the thought of Wilhelm Worringer.
19. Ruyer, Genèse des formes vivantes, 142.
20. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 104.
21. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 174.
22. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 273, 279, 293– 94, 305.
23. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 174 (translation modified).
24. Ibid., 174 (translation modified).
25. Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 1– 3, 5, 10– 11, 22, 23, 27; and Brian Massumi, “Perception Attack: Brief on War Time,” Theory
& Event 13, no. 3 (2010), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/
v013/13.3.massumi.html.
26. For an analysis of belief, appetition, avidity, and pure feeling in Tarde, see Didier Debaise, “La métaphysique des possessions: puissances et société chez G. Tarde,” Revue de métaphysique et de la morale 4, no.
60 (2008): 447– 60. On consciousness as transspatial liaison, see Raymond Ruyer, Le néo- finalisme (Paris: PUF, 1952), 113. On non- localizable liaison and becoming, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 413.
27. “Objects are the elements in nature that can ‘be again.’ ” Alfred North Whitehead, Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 143.
28. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 39– 91.
29. On the plane of organization and the plane of consistency, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9, 21, 70– 73, 251– 52, 265– 72.
30. For an excellent analysis of intuition and sympathy in Bergson (which in Bergson’s texts are not actually as synonymous as they are pre-sented to be here), see David Lapoujade, Puissances du temps. Versions de Bergson (Paris: Editions Minuit, 2010).
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31. Lapoujade, Puissances du temps, 62.
32. Erin Manning develops the concept of the more- than- human as a relational “ecology of practices” in Always More Than One: Individua-tion’s Dance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013).
33. Henri Bergson, Mélanges (Paris: PUF, 1972), quoted in Lapoujade, Puissances du temps, 35.
34. On the plane of consistency as matter, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 43.
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