“Sense,” writes the great Gilles Deleuze in his jaw-dropping 1969 whopper The Logic of Sense, a book we might call an innovation in a field named Transcendental Structuralism that it also inaugurates, “is exactly the boundary between propositions and things.” Naturally, Deleuze is compelled to follow logic to the boundary places and see what its skin wears on the outside—perhaps millions of little rhinoceros horns—the part of language worn on the outside of language but not strictly extrinsic to language, a place where it abandons propositions and things and has only free-floating sensors and morphic sense, a nonsense, perhaps, which is the only sense. Antonin Artaud, the schizo-gnostic machinist, Félix Guattari and transversal “infra-sense.” Before the schizo, however, the pervert is king and the logic of sense his lair. The pervert escapes the neurosis and interpersonal paralysis of the everyday on one side of the plank and the depths of psychosis and dissolution on the other, like Chaplin in Modern Times or Tati in Playtime. What is The Logic of Sense, Deleuze's self-admitted attempt to give structural semiotics its transcendental [i.e. Kantian] philosophy, but a perversion of structuralism and a bit of a pugilist’s broadside or bromide? Politics is like trying to fuck a cat in the ass, said one famous creep in a faraway land called Los Angeles County, long, long ago, but Deleuze is the one major 20th century thinker we can imagine giving the proposition some serious thought. Perhaps we might even take a page out of the book of Deleuze-commentator David Lapoujade and declare the bold and ennobling pervert a connoisseur of aberrant movements within structure. The pervert prevails proud only so long as data fails to upload to the cloud. From Structuralism to Silicon, from “what does it mean?” to “how does it work?” and then back again, roundelay and turnstiles, the relationship with depth gradually changes, as in Herman Melville, the nonsense of the depths that are deployed at the surface according to the intensive variations of the body without organs. Somebody in Paris asked me if there is an easy way to explain the body without organs and I told her that when she dreams the body she has and uses in her dreams doesn’t have any organs. The photogenic and always available face of the earth itself has been remodelled in the image of smooth moon-like scarcity and oblivion, “a kind of postmortem ground,” and, by the end of the 60s, with those Paris cops dressed up as actual Martians swinging their bang-bang clubs, the One-Many as Infinite Multiplicity becomes run through with “inclusive disjunctions” and pockets of ungodly bad harmony…the fantasia of black holes. The acute schizophrenic is always a perfectly functional transmitter/receiver, although to mislabel the schizo a pervert would be to add far too aristocratic a gloss, I should imagine, to the ransacked worldly toil of the former.
Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
One time I was talking with a musician I know in town who is also a bookworm and an athletics nut and he asked me about Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., its being about baseball, sort of, and authored by a writer my very high regard for whom was already known to my interlocutor from previous chats and neighbourly seed-chewin’. When I actually thought for a moment about how to tackle the query, it suddenly dawned on me that The Universal Baseball Association, only his second of twenty-one novels, is also the only one in the Coover corpus entire that strongly resembles something Harry Mathews might write. It’s what I thought in the moment and it’s what I said, by God. My musician associate was justifiably surprised to hear me make this curious claim for the perfectly sound reason that Harry Mathews is connected by discursive habit to Paris, France’s Oulipo laboratory and Bob Coover, only two years his junior, to American Postmodernism Inc. So here is the thing: in order to write The Universal Baseball Association, Coover needed to invent a fantasy baseball league that made sense and that you could theoretically operate in real life, put all that stuff in the main character’s head, and then also plot a coherent whirlpool-type narrative around it. Something analogous happens in Mathews’ significantly later masterpiece The Journalist, from 1994: a psychotherapist encourages the narrator to start journaling for the therapeutic value it may provide in the aftermath of a mental health event, only for the journaling to become so obsessive and specified that complex systems of collation gradually enter the picture, leading in kind to cross-referencing, column manipulation, variable fonts, and special paginating. In novels like these the characters seem to be doing all of the novelist’s work for them, but they definitely are not. A big, weird job like this, with a zillion little moving pieces like a model train passing through a tiny elaborate war zone, you take on only because you want a big, weird job to set your teeth into and have at. What is it in the end that I love so much about Bob Coover of Iowa, U.S.A.? I keep waiting for him to pull up in his blue Studebaker truck and take me to go get a root beer float and play Fat Boys on the Wurlitzer. And though the scouts may presuppose them in opposing camps, dumb in all the currently relevant faculties as it is their plight to be right this very night, falling asleep in their hosiery, I know I see the influences of Coover and Mathews both bubbling up with some regularity in the cauldron of my own creative spell-castings. Hey, boys, I greet the two of them, running a cloth quickly over my face. You’ll be happy to hear the robins are still guarding the tree!
L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985)
Coming out of high school, I applied to four or five universities and got into two of them. I applied to the film program at Ryerson but that was not one of the two, alas, as getting accepted there would have pushed me more in a film production than a film theory direction. That’s fate, dawg, so now you have to listen to me talk about Lacan while I pick my misshapen nose in my stained Tallulah Bankhead hoodie. As part of my application to Ryerson, I sent in a treatment for a possible student film, which ended up being about an anonymous backpacker who enters a mountain village only to find it completely abandoned. Naturally, I stipulated that this all-but-silent film was to be shot in high contrast black and white.
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