DELEUZE

"We don't claim to have written a madman's book, just a book in which one no longer knows-and there is no reason to know- who exactly is speaking, a doctor, a patient, an untreated patient, a present, past of future patient. That's why we used so many writers and poets; who is to say if they are speaking as patients or doctors- patients or doctors of civilization. Now, strangely, if we have tried to go beyond this traditional duality, it's precisely because we were writing together. Neither of us was the madman, neither of us was the psychiatrist; there had to be two of us in order to find a process that was not reduced either to the psychiatrist or his madman, or to a madman and his psychiatrist. The process is what we call a flux. Now, once again, the flux is a notion that we wanted to remain ordinary and undefined. This could be a flux of words, ideas, shit, money, it could be a financial mechanism or a schizophrenic machine: it goes beyond all dualities. We dreamed of this book as a flux-book."
(from "In Flux" in Chaosophy. By Felix Guattari, Semiotext[e], NY, 1995.)

Deleuze and Guattari are a challenge. And I guess that is as it should be. In Guattari's quote above, he is explaining a core challenge of his work to our existing world order. How else could one challenge how we view the world, other than by "becoming" and creating in an unprecedented manner. If things are not as we understand them from our privileged and separated position, then we need to throw out all the rules and write, as in the best of literature, in a way that takes us out of our selves and our supposed relationship to the world.

Both Deleuze and Carroll challenge our rules, and discover entirely new universes down the rabbit hole. There approaches are so distinctive in fact, that I find myself struggling to discover order and explanation. But as I struggle to understand Deleuze, that effort seems in direct conflict with the author's own intent. Perhaps there are intensities and collectivities in our experience and our unconscious that are beyond structure and order, could these things simply be the things themselves? I do not know. I feel as if I can see the door that Deleuze and Guattari open into an alternative universe -- Carroll as well? -- but I am far from entering the flux and becoming.

One thing I must say relative to our readings here is how Deleuze and or Guattari relate that art and literature are forums for the "political" communication of the unconscious. To Deleuze, "literature is productive, not representative. Literature has the power to mobilize desire, to create new pre-personal investments, and enables thought and affects that extend beyond the human." Alice is about becoming and Deleuze's alternative reality is a world of becoming.

I so want order and explanation, but there is so much of art and literature that resists that order. The best of art and literature tap into something deeper of human experience that goes beyond the personal to the universal, yet unclassifiable. Does our bizarre Alice and her becoming somehow relate to Deleuze's concept of becoming-woman? Has our scientific desire for explanation and classification left us with gaps in our understanding of the human experience?

I can see how a deep dive into Deleuze could help us reach a key that opens a door into a secret garden. There is much to explore here, but the dislodging of dogma, order and structure is an uncomfortable process. Does the young girl of our attention have something to tell us here?