T H E D A R K
P R E C U R S O R
International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research
DARE 2015 | Orpheus Institute | Ghent | Belgium | 9-11 November 2015
O P E N - A C C E S S R I C H - M E D I A P R O C E E D I N G S
Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici
T H E D A R K
P R E C U R S O R
International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research
DARE 2015 | Orpheus Institute | Ghent | Belgium | 9-11 November 2015
O P E N - A C C E S S R I C H - M E D I A P R O C E E D I N G S
Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici
Luis de Miranda
Edinburgh University, UK
On the Concept of Creal: Ethical Promises of a Non-Teleological Creative Universal
Day 1, 9 November, De Bijloke Mezzanine, 14:00–14:30
The French novel Paridaiza (De Miranda 2008a) describes a totalitarian digital duplication of our planet. A small group of rebels subverts the hedonistic-fascist system in which millions of players are imprisoned. The liberators implant a virus within the code of the immersive world in the form of a disruptive signifier. Five combined letters function as the grain of sand in the gears: “Créel,” a portmanteau for créé-réel, “created-real”—therefore “Creal” in English. In a simultaneous essay on Deleuze (De Miranda 2008b), republished in English (De Miranda 2013), the generic term “Creal” qualifies the kind of non-anthropocentric and non-teleological universal proposed by modern process ontologies: “Creal” designates what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) called the “chaosmos” or “plane of immanence,” what Bergson ([1911] 2007) called “duration,” “creative evolution,” or “life,” and what Whitehead ([1929] 1976) called “creativity process,” adding that “creativity is the universal of universals characterizing the ultimate fact.” Castoriadis (1986), faithful to the Pre-Socratic tradition, spoke of the dual unity of “Chaos/Cosmos” (and “Physis/Nomos”) in a two-sided cosmology.
The Creal is not teleological, as it tends to explode in all possible (and virtual) directions. The Creal might be historically post-anthropocentric (coming after Descartes and Hegel), yet it is ontologically pre-anthropocentric and constantly ante-historical (there is an analogy between the Creal and what science today calls dark energy). According to Creal ontologies, humans cannot be said to create fully: they edit, “institutionalise,” coordinate, direct, channel, co-realise, or shape a small portion of Creal. Creal is the dynamic differential core of the flesh of the world, “such stuff as dreams are made on” (Shakespeare, The Tempest 4.1). The less I act or control, the more I am creal—this was the main finding of the surrealists (Alquié 1965). As long as we posit an absolute that is defined as a non-Protagorean and non-teleological constant renewing, we become less inebriated with our overestimated human power to create.
This paper will show how most Creal-cosmologies tend to defend an “agonal” (or agonistic) conception of creation, at the risk of inoculating an essentialised notion of eternal struggle in their ontology. Henri Bergson ([1946] 1992) spoke of cosmic creation as an emotive machine that produces worlds and gods via a constant combat of spirit against matter; for him, the Creal is an “immense efflorescence of unpredictable novelty,” and the Real is the solidified and somewhat zombified side of life. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) spoke of “esprit de corps” as the spirit of seditious plural bodies that constantly decode the binary Real. A world is an agonistic compound of Creal and Real: it is a “creorder” (Nitzan and Bichler 2009).
Yet, precisely because of their intrinsic agonism, Creal-cosmologies contain a clear ethical promise. Here, the rationale shall be Lacanian, following a study (De Miranda 2007) of Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1997): to be sustainable a structure, an order, and a discourse all need a totemic absolute situated at the invisible core of the chain of signifiers. The invisible universal around which realities are constructed maintains their cohesion as an axis mundi. If we accept this to be true, we realise that postmodern attempts to construct durable worlds or communities without an explicit contractual absolute contain a formal fallacy and a political risk. It might be that the only way for polities to avoid the menace of totalitarianisms is to agree by a global social contract on an absolute that shall take the place of less plural and less democratic absolutes. I argue that, logically, creation is the only absolute that can constantly self-destroy and systematically recreate the respect for alterity. The Creal is an ethical absolute, not a scientific one. It can be understood as an open common ground to overcome the general devaluation of postmodernism, the over-evaluation of capital-humanism, and the menace of imperialistic state religions.
In De Miranda’s L’Art d’être libres au temps des automates (the art of freedom in the era of automatons) (2010), an essay on the philosophy of the digital, the term “ordination” defines the form of agency that humans can deploy to order and actualise a zone of Creal. The growing computational protocolisation of societies are not necessarily a threat, and we must continue to facilitate the self-empowerment of “people to come” with active digital literacy. Humans are “ropes over an abyss,” as Nietzsche (1974) said, bridges between Creal and coordinating machines. Our contemporary equivocal position in the middle of a chaotic universal, on one side, and an algorithmic universal, on the other, is our ethical chance: by identifying neither with the Creal nor with any ordered world, we maintain a position as arbitrators in agonal societies. To conclude, I shall propose that “agonistic pluralism,” a political theory inspired by Hannah Arendt ([1958] 1998), might be the most compatible with the Creal hypothesis. As Chantal Mouffe (2000) writes: “While we desire an end to conflict, if we want people to be free we must always allow for the possibility that conflict may appear and to provide an arena where differences can be confronted. The democratic process should supply that arena.” Perhaps, once we remember with Nietzsche, Lacan, Spinoza (Deleuze 1988), or Sade (Lacan 1989) that conflict is but the anthropocentric perceptive on the perpetual and multiple Creal becoming, we might become immature enough to abandon the paradigm of agony and replace it with a Heraclitean idea of childish creative play: “Eternity is a child playing, playing checkers. The kingdom belongs to a child” (Heraclitus quoted in Levenson and Westphal 1994). However, politics are not made by children …
References
Alquié, Ferdinand. 1965. The Philosophy of Surrealism. Translated by Bernard Waldrop. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Arendt, Hannah. (1958) 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bergson, Henri. (1911) 2007. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Macmillan.
———. (1946) 1992. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Citadel Press.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1986. Crossroads in the Labyrinth. Translated by Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco, CA: City Light Books.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.
De Miranda, Luis. 2007. Peut-on jouir du Capitalisme? Lacan avec Heidegger et Marx. Paris: Punctum.
———. 2008a. Paridaiza. Paris: Plon.
———. 2008b. Une vie nouvelle est-elle possible? Deleuze et les lignes. Paris: Nous.
———. 2010. L’Art d’être libres au temps des automates. Paris: Max Milo.
———. 2013. “Is a New Life Possible? Deleuze and the Lines.” Deleuze Studies 7 (1): 106–52.
Lacan, Jacques. 1989. “Kant with Sade.” Translated by James Swenson. October 51, 55–104.
———. 1997. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1950–1960. Translated by Dennis Porter. London: Norton.
Levenson, Carl Avren, and Jonathan Westphal. 1994. Reality. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin.
Nitzan, Jonathan, and Shimshon Bichler. 2009. Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder. New York: Routledge.
Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) 1978. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. Corrected ed. New York: Free Press.
Luis de Miranda, born 1971, is currently writing a PhD on the conceptual history of “esprit de corps” at the University of Edinburgh (School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures), for which he received a three-year research scholarship. He is also tutoring in French literature, philosophy, ethics, creative writing, and directing the Crag—the Creation of Reality Group. Previously, Luis, born in Portugal, lived mostly in France, where he authored thirteen books, novels, and essays, some of which have been translated into Arabic, English, or Spanish. He has also worked as a publisher, an editor, a book critic, and a cultural reporter.
Web: www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk/crag