a method of textual practice, or by other methods: it is a question of saying
what use it has in the extra-textual practice that prolongs the text.
(Deleuze, cited in D.W. Smith 199 7 : xvi)Thought, like the process of life itself, is an accretion, an addition to a ceaseless
production of variation (and the selection and synthesis of variants) whose chief
goal is to create effects through new encounters which beckon and become;^17 ‘one
term does not become another; rather, each term encounters the other, and the
becoming is something between the two, outside the two’ (D.W. Smith 199 7 :
154 ). This is, if you like, the speech act radicalized, made into a tool of maximum
modulation and push through which new modes of existence can be glimpsed,
even actualized. It is knowing ‘how to leave, how to push the process further, to
follow a line of flight, to enter into a becoming that escapes the resentissement
of persons and the dominance of established orders’ (D.W. Smith 199 7 : xi). The
technology that Deleuze uses in order to produce maximum modulation, the stress
on singularities and events, the dissolution of the subject, the intersection of the
body, the minorization of politics, the stuttering of language – are well enough
known now to require no repetition.^18
It is no surprise, then, that for Deleuze performance, like literature, is regarded
as a key means of reading and creating signs. It is a symptomatology, a diagnostics
of signs which isolates a particular possibility of life and which helps to make more
modes of existence possible. It is a process that operates by means of experimental
and unforeseen becomings, just like Deleuze’s own life. Thus, in Deleuze’s world,
the acts of theatre become more broadly performative.
[Theatre] will surge forward as something representing nothing but what
presents and creates a minority consciousness as a universal becoming. It
forges alliances here and there according to the circumstances, following
the lines of transformation that exceed [theatre] and take on another form,
or else that transform themselves back into [theatre] for another leap. It is
truly a matter of consciousness-raising, even though it bears no relation to
a psychoanalytic consciousness, or a Marxist political consciousness, nor
even to a Brechtian one. Consciousness-raising is a tremendous strength but
one made neither for solutions nor for interpretations. When consciousness
abandons solutions and interpretations, it thus acquires its light, its gestures
and its sounds, its decisive transformation. Henry James wrote ‘she ended up
knowing more than she could ever interpret; there were no more obscurities
clouding her clear vision. These remained only a raw light’. The more we
attain this form of minority consciousness, the less isolated we feel. Light.
We are our own mass, by ourselves, mass of my atoms. Under the ambition
of formulas, there is the most modest appreciation of what might be a revo-
lutionary [theatre] a simple loving potentiality, an element for a new becoming
of consciousness.
(Deleuze 1995: 2 4 3)132 Part II