auAdrian Switzer</>
atTo Risk Immanence/To Read Schizo-Analytically</>
astDeleuze, Guattari, and the Kleistian War-Machine</>
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What a wide array of narrative arcs are inscribed in Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas: the story is a Baroque, textual architecture overlaid with the tight coils of a horse’s braided mane; the cuneiform lettering of illuminated scripture; the swath of destruction Kohlhaas cuts across the German countryside; finally, the last arc inscribed in the story is the broad parabolic sweep of the executioner’s axe: “Kohlhaasaber [...] wandtesichzudemSchafott, woseinHauptunterdemBeil des Scharfrichtersfiel. Hierendigt die Geschichte vomKohlhaas” (Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas 103) [Kohlhaas, however ... turned to the scaffold where his head fell under the axe of the executioner. Here ends the story of Kohlhaas]. Yet, as attested in the language with which Kleist reports Kohlhaas’s execution, each narrative arc is figured in distinctly textual terms; again, the swing of the executioner’s axe “endigt die GeschichtevomKohlhaas” [ends the story of Kohlhaas].
As Clayton Koelb points out the story is overall coherent despite its turn from an initial realism, centering on the provincial horse-dealer who suffers injustice at the hands of the Prussian government, to the fantastic character of its conclusion where an old gypsy woman’s prophecy is deciphered to reveal the end of a royal line. The horses whose abuse seems to trigger Kohlhaas’s vengeful wrath, “come into play mainly as stand-ins (that is, as collateral) for a missing document.” It is not the horses per se that are at issue; rather, Koelb rightly argues, it is “Kohlhaas’s lack of a ‘permit [Paßschein]’ that starts all the trouble” (Koelb 1099).
Consider in this regard the following exchange between Kohlhaas and an officer at the border between Brandenburg and Saxony:
extDerBurgvogt, indemersichnocheineWesteüberseinenweitläufigenLeibzuknüpfte, kam, und fragte, schiefgegen die Witterunggestellt, nachdemPaßschein. - Kohlhaasfragte: derPaßschein? Ersagte, einwenigbetreten, daßer, sovielerwisse, keinenhabe;daß man ihmabernurbeschreibenmöchte, was dies fürein Ding des Herrnsei: so werdeervielleichtzufälligerweisedamitversehensein. (Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas 10)</ext>
ext(The warden, still fastening a waistcoat across his capacious body, came up and, bracing himself against the wind and rain, demanded the horse-dealer’s permit. “My permit?” asked Kohlhaas and added, a little disconcerted, that so far as he knew he did not possess one, but that if the warden would kindly explain what on earth such a thing was he just might possibly have one with him.) </ext>
To Kohlhaas’s dismissive comments concerning his documentation—if only he knew what it was, perhaps he would have it after all—the Junker Wenzel von Tronka replies that without a state permit a dealer bringing horses could not be allowed across the border.
All of Kohlhaas’s subsequent travels—across the border into the Electorate of Saxony, and his return to the Brandenburg Mark—are figured in this missing permit:“In Dresden [...] begabersich, gleichnach seiner Ankunft, auf die Geheimschreiberei, woer von den Räten, derenereinigekannte, erfuhr, was ihmallerdingsseinersterGlaubeschongesagthatte, daß die Geschichte von demPaßscheineinMärchensei” [In Dresden ... [Kohlhaas] went immediately upon arrival to the Chancellery, where from the officials—some of whom he knew—he learned what he all along had been inclined to believe, that the story about the pass was a fiction]. Despite the misgivings of the officials, Kohlhaas acquires from them a written certificate attesting to the lie of the Junker’s story. No pass is, indeed, required to cross the border to traffic in horse-trade (13).
Kohlhaas later files official papers against the Junker in the court at Dresden (21).The court of Saxony, however, returns no official decision on Kohlhaas’s “statement.” Then, in reply to “a private letter” written to his advocate, Kohlhaas learns that the case has been dismissed: the Junker von Tronka has high-placed relatives in the Elector’s officiate who will read nothing more of Kohlhaas’s case (21). The letter arrives by messenger, intercepting Kohlhaas in his travels through Brandenburg; he in turn drafts another document, a petition, with a brief presentation of the occurrence, which is then sent on to the Elector of Brandenburg enclosed with the advocate’s letter (23).
After this second flurry of written exchanges, correspondence again ceases. Finally, and only by chance, Kohlhaas hears from a passing magistrate that the Brandenburg Elector passed all the documents off to a certain Chancellor Count Kallheim who returns to the countryside “for further preliminary information” from the Junker von Tronka rather than going straight to Dresden with the petition (23). Kleist here articulates a feature of the whole documentary history of the Kohlhaas case: narrative trajectories run along textual lines that are “nichtunmittelbar” [not straight (or) immediate] but circuitous (in this case, from outlying areas of Prussia inward to the center of State power in Berlin and then back out again into the provinces).
In light of the “textual” character of each successive narrative arc in Michael Kohlhaas, we might reformulate our initial description of the work as follows: The wide array of narrative arcs inscribed in the story are also inscriptions of the story as an array of circulating texts. Kleist’s work, then, is a proliferation of textual trajectories along narrative lines and the unfolding of the narrative through this proliferation of textual trajectories. Each successive narrative arc—each excursion into a further, foreign province, or scorched-earth campaign against first Dresden then Lützen then Leipzig—figures along a curvilinear path that flattens as it extends out. Though it is possible to read this opening of the textual space and widening of the sweep of Kohlhaas’s reign of terror in direct proportion to the intensity of his moral indignation—and thus to read the storyin its entirety as a moral tale—the proliferation of permits, court documents, letters, and official decrees that Kleist enumerates suggests a rather more “textual” reading of the narrative. Furthermore, the horses whose abuse promptsKohlhaas’s s legal proceedings, and in so doing, roots the story in the juridico-moral categories of right and wrong or justice and injustice, eventually disappear from the story. By contrast, texts, documents, letters, etc. pervade the narrative and circulate through it from beginning to end. A “textual” reading of Michael Kohlhaas—a reading of the story as a text composed of and about texts—is recommended if we wish to address the work as a whole.[1] In the present discussion we will thus set aside a reading of Michael Kohlhaas as a moral tale in which the injustices of secular law confront the absoluteness of divine law in the person of its eponymous protagonist, in favor of a more text-based reading. The present article adopts this approach in an effort, instead, to attend to all the different texts that circulate throughout it.
In so, our analysis shares its point of departure with Anthony Stephens for whom moral readings in the secondary literature are, “too common on Kohlhaas to retain any interest.” There are, Stephens continues, “simply too many variables to be balanced against one another, in too many combinations, to yield a consistent set of answers” (Stephens 258). To the extent that a moral reading of Michael Kohlhaasdepends upon narrative or stylistic consistency or coherence, such a reading inevitably faces difficulties when confronted with the strangeness, incoherence, and undecidability of the text. What remains to the reader and critic of Kleist, Stephens concludes, is simply a description of “a literary form that tests the coherence of its own discourse” (256).
Again, to the extent that a moral reading depends upon a minimum of decidability, such a reading is imposed on Michael Kohlhaas—and on Kleist’s writing in general—to the detriment of the source material. As Seán Allan writes, there is a “complexity of Kleist’s narrative,” that reflects the “labyrinthine system of justice” that Kohlhaas attempts to navigate (Allan 55). Allan cites the following character description of Kohlhaas to exemplify his point: Kohlhaas, Kleist writes, has “einrichtiges, mitdergebrechlichenEinrichtungder Welt schonbekanntesGefühl” (Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas 15–16) [a true (or) appropriate feeling, [with which he was] already familiar, for the fragile order of the world]. This sentence poses a number of interpretive problems; stylistically, it is unusual in separating the adjective richtig from the noun it modifies, namely, Gefühl. Formally, the reader wonders how “real” [richtig] Kohlhaas’s “feeling” is, given that the words are separated by a long parenthetical remark on the state of the world that occasions the feeling and Kohlhaas’s familiarity with the feeling. Further, how “true” [richtig], in the sense of genuine or authentic, can a feeling be that is described in terms of its being, “already known?[2]
Attempts to understand Kleist’s sense of richtig are equally problematic: Is Kohlhaas’s feeling “right” or “real” as he really experiences it? If so, then the sentence reads as if taken from his vantage point. But then we return to the question of how “genuine” a feeling can be that is already known or familiar? Alternately, we might take richtig to mean “appropriate” or “proper” in the sense that Kohlhaas’s feeling matches the circumstances occasioning it. With this reading,the voice in this passage must then be that of the narrator: an estimate is taken of Kohlhaas’s feeling and it is found to match the situation; the feeling is thus richtig from the vantage point of an observer. If we decide on a third-person voice for the sentence, such a decision gives rise to a further question: In what sense can one be said to have an “appropriate” sense of a gebrechlichenEinrichtung [fragile order]? The adjective gebrechlich means “frail” or “fragile” and is formed from the verb, brechen [to break]. Kohlhaas thus thinks of the world as both eingerichten [ordered] and gebreblich [decrepit]. The world, in short, is ordered according to its disrepair or disorder and Kohlhaas “rightly” senses this state of affairs. Does this mean that Kohlhaas’srichtigesGefühl is “right” with or aligned to the brokenness of the world?
Given the stylistic and interpretive peculiarity of the sentence Allan highlights (and there are any number of other phrases that pose similar challenges), Stephens’s description seems apt enough: Kleist writes in a literary form that, “tests the coherence of its own discourse.” Yet, Stephens’s conclusion that all that remains for the reader and critic of such writing is a description of its discourse is not sufficient. To read and theorize Kleist’s works might not be of moral consequence given the incoherence of the text, but such textual incomprehensibility does nothing to diminish the political significance of reading Kleist: quite the contrary.In fact, it is my claim that the (proto-) modernism of Kleist’s language and narrative structure is what lends political force to the texts, to the act of reading them, and to the work of theorizing itself. Kleist presses narrative form to the point where text, its theorization, and the politics of reading and interpretation converge. Using the language of narrative arcs or trajectories, we can formulate this process in the following terms: at the outer limit of a text composed of widening intra-textual arcs we find a zero-grade curve inhabited by narrative content, stylistic form, and textual interpretation. Such flattened curvature can also be designated in language borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari as a plan d’immanence or, more simply, a plateau (Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux 325ff.).
In Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari insist on the smooth, planar space of the modern text: “L’idéal d’un livreseraitd’étalertoute chose sur un tel plan d’extériorité, suruneseule page, surunemêmeplage.”[3] A single-page plan d’extériorité of this kind produces an immanent plane on which multiplicities and various lignes de fuite or lines of flight are not over-codable. The modern text is thus an immanent plane that allows no “supplementary dimension” from which difference and variation can be coordinated or organized (nor does such a text allow for a single point of reference from which a determinate moral lesson can be decided).
Deleuze and Guattari continue their formal description of the modern text by portraying this single-page plane of exteriority as populated by, “lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations” (15).[4] Finally, in conclusion, Deleuze and Guattari identify this textual form with Kleist: “Kleist inventauneécriture de ce type, un enchaînementbriséd’affects, avec des vitesses variables, des précipitations et transformations, toujours en relation avec le dehors. Anneauxouverts [...] Le livre-machine de guerre, contre le livre-appareild’Etat” (16).[5]
At the close of the passage, Deleuze and Guattari then move without pause from discussing Kleist’s writing style to consider, instead, the distinctly political matters of war and the State. Thus, it is with Deleuze and Guattari that we here insist on the political significance of Kleistian modernism; to rephrase my thesis in their language: it is in texts composed and read as plans d’extériorité that the political potential of literary modernism is manifest. Further, it is in just this same textual form that threats to such an immanent, modernist politics are discernable. In the above quote Deleuze and Guattari announce their decidedly political reading of Kleist as “le livre-machine de guerre.” it is with the same designation that Deleuze and Guattari title chapter 12 of Mille Plateaux: “1227—Traité de nomadologie: la machine de guerre.”[6] In order to delineate more precisely the politics of the Kleistian text as well as schizoanalyse imposed upon it by Deleuze and Guattari, let us briefly examine the pertinent chapter of Mille Plateauxwhere Kleist is discussed.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of a “war-machine” names the history of revolutionary insurgency against the State form of government.[7] More generally, their idea of the “war machine” enables them to resolve the history of state politics into a dynamic of interiority and exteriority. Where the monolithic concept of the state no longer guides the theorization of political history or different forms of government.[8] In its place, Deleuze and Guattari offer relations of interiority and exteriority as more pliable and incisively heuristic (Surin 110). Furthermore, the concepts of exteriority and interiority are structures or forms of desiring, which is basic to the socio-political project of Deleuze and Guattari’s early, two volume Capitalismeetschizophrénie.[9]Desire, for Deleuze and Guattari, is fundamental in the sense that it is constitutive of various concepts and conceptual relations—the State or the war-machine—and, in turn, is made up of those same concepts and relations. Within this general framework, “interiority” and “exteriority” name the principles according to which desire works to construct concepts; these two terms, together, also names the principles that structure and govern the constitution of desire as the State or as the war-machine.
Desiring, in machine-like fashion—that is, non-psychologically and non-intentionally—expresses itself under given socio-political and conceptual conditions. Interiority and exteriority name such conditions as governing or structuring principles of desiring. As conditioned by the circumstances of its expression, all desiring coalesces into forms to which subsequent expressions of desire conform. Indeed, there is no expression of desire that is not in conformity, to a greater or lesser extent, with the existing socio-political and conceptual-ideological order; it is the rare instance of desire-expression that contributes to the formation of a new order.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s technical language, interiority characterizes arégime of desiring that is conservative:desire thus expressed tends to preserve the conditions of its expression. In less formal or less abstract terms, an interiorized regime like a State selects social and political forces that preserve state-order or contribute to its entrenchment and continuity. Exteriority, by comparison, does not name the principle of desire in the general absence of all structure; Deleuze and Guattari reserve the language of le corps sans organes [the body without organs], which they borrow from Artaud, to designate such a condition of desire. Rather, if interiority characterizes desire that is structured into the familiar Statist forms of national identity, consumer trends, or economic class, exteriority characterizes desire as its expression exceeds those same familiar forms. In short, it is along the aberrant or divergent tendencies within any particular form of interiorized desire that exteriorized desire is expressed.
The expression of desire is always and everywhere double: on the one hand it is interiorized and conservative, or what Deleuze and Guattari term segmenté [segmented] or territorialisé [territorialized] desire (DeleuzeGuattari, Mille Plateaux 258ff.), while on the other hand, it is exteriorized and indeterminate (or un-determining) what Deleuze and Guattari term déterritorialisé [de-territorialized] desire. In chapter 12 of Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari present this double expression of desire in terms of the coexistence and concurrence of interiority and exteriority (or the interrelatedness of the State and the war machine).
extCen’est pas en termesd’indépendance, mais de coexistence et de concurrence, dans un champ perpétueld’interaction, qu’ilfautpenserl’extériorité et l’intériorité, les machines de guerre à métamorphoses et les appareilsidentitairesd’État, les bandes et les royaumes, les mégamachines et les empires. Un même champ circonscrit son intérioritédans des États, maisdécrit son extérioritédansce qui échappe aux Étatsou se dressecontre les États. (446)</ext>
ext(It is in terms not of independence, but of coexistence and concurrence in a perpetual field of interaction, that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of metamorphosis and State apparatuses or identity, bands and kingdoms, megamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its interiority in States, but describes its exteriority in what escapes States or stands against States.) </ext>
To rephrase the point in terms of desiring:there is no desire that is either or just exterior or interior; further, there is no interiorized desire without desire in a condition of exteriority nor can there be an exteriorized desire that is not also under the condition of interiority. The only and specific difference between desire in interiority and exteriority is that the latter is constituted by what is specifically divergent from or aberrant in the former. In this way, the “lack” structure of desire that Deleuze and Guattari inherit from Lacan, and the negativity they find in Hegelian dialectic are both transformed (à la Nietzsche) into a double, positive expression of desire.
The divergent expressions of desire under conditions of exteriority implicate the convergent tendencies of desiring within (Statist) interiority; this is one-half of the double-expressiveness in which exteriority and interiority are “perpetually” linked. When desire under conditions of exteriority coalesces to form what Deleuze and Guattari term agencements [assemblages] as, for example, when the anti-Statism of an insurgency triggers the formation of terrorist cells, the condensation of desire under the conditions of exteriority is matched by a comparable reification of interiorized desire.In short, the insurgency is paired with the intra-Statist formation of the military.