While Gilles Deleuze's control theories have been gaining attention within fields such as philosophy and political theory, their possible effects on and in relation to the field of literature is if not an undeveloped then certainly an underdeveloped mode of enquiry. Deleuze writes in his ‘Postscript’ that there is no need to worry about the increasingly all-encompassing control mechanisms that he outlines, but that we must nonetheless search for ‘new weapons’. Here, I would like to point to how Deleuze himself, especially in his collaborations with Guattari, can help us develop such ‘weapons’ in a specifically literary context and thus help us read and understand literature in control society. Because I see this as the beginning of what I hope to be a broader engagement by literary scholars with Deleuze's conception of control, I will address what seems to be an obvious question to ask literature within such theoretical parameters: the relation between the history of the novel and discipline. The emergence of the novel in the Western world is intimately associated with the emergence of industrial capitalism and, in turn, with the focus on the individual but well-trained bourgeois subject, and it could be interesting, therefore, to think about ways in which the novel as a form and our novel reading as interpreting subjects might be affected by the continued development of disciplinary society towards the somewhat different structures and mechanisms of control society.

Theories of the development of the novel have in common an emphasis on the connection between its form and its focus on the individual. The hero of earlier literary forms, such as the epic, was never strictly speaking an individual, as György Lukács points out, but rather a representation of the relation between the parts and the whole (Lukács 1971: 66). Indeed, the focus on the general and the universal was, Mikhail Bakhtin observes, so central to the epic that it disintegrates as a form as the individual perspective increases (Bakhtin 1981: 34).

‘The world’, Gilles Deleuze says in a conversation with Antonio Negri in the spring of 1990, has ‘been taken from us’. It has been taken from us because we have lost our belief in it and without belief, we have closed down the potential to spawn ‘new space–times’, to make space for even the most modest events that evade control (Deleuze 1995: 176). Strikingly, but not unusually within the framework of Deleuze's oeuvre and in particular within his more political writings, this statement is at once bleak and constructive. In the same breath as it states that we have lost belief and thus the world, it offers at least the beginning of a suggestion of how to regain it. Deleuze notes the loss of belief but also reminds us that if we could only summon up the tiniest bit of it, this would enable us to ‘precipitate events’ and engender ‘new space–times, however small their surface or volume’ (Deleuze 1995: 176). Art plays a crucial part in such claims to hope. As he writes in his second cinema book; exactly because the world has turned into ‘a bad cinema, in which we no longer believe’, true cinema may be able to help us restore ‘our belief in the world’ (Deleuze 2013: 187). It is now three decades since Deleuze started flagging questions of control – in presentations such as ‘Having an Idea in Cinema/What is a Creative Act?’ in 1987 and ‘What is a Dispositif?’ in 1988, the conversation between Deleuze and Antonio Negri entitled ‘Control and Becoming’, published in Futur Antérieur in 1990, which is also the same year in which Deleuze's short but seminal article ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ was first published in L’Autre Journal. During the decades that have passed since then, the shifts away from disciplinary society that Michel Foucault had already predicted and that Deleuze articulated in these brief engagements have escalated in ways and on a scale that neither of them could have possibly imagined. So what is the status of our belief today? And what is the role of artistic and cultural expression in relation to it?

Introduction

Between 1961 and 2009, J. G. Ballard published nearly twenty novels as well as numerous short stories. Many of them are populated with strange creatures that in different ways strain conceptions of the borders of the human and the animal. Reading through Ballard's oeuvre may leave you with an unsettling feeling of confusion or with an inspiring sense of dislocation. These works continuously challenge habitual conceptions of reality and try out different modes of approaching and understanding it as they play with the formalist borders of the mimetic, the representational, and the allegorical. Frequently, this experimentation, situated as it is in post-apocalyptic sceneries and bleak technological futures, has positioned him as a dystopian writer and as a narrator of “exhausted futures.” While many of the futures Ballard constructs are indeed rather bleak – his worlds are flooded, crystallized, dried out, covered in concrete, or populated by characters paralyzed by lives of leisure – I would like to reopen the question of what exactly is exhausted in the worlds he depicts. I wish to draw attention to two interrelated things in particular that seem exhausted in Ballard's writing – the human, and the modes of representation that it has constructed to retain its ontological and epistemic priority as such. The human no longer quite recognizes itself as such in his books. While this repeatedly makes for unsettling character portrayals, it also opens for an interrogation of the means by which literary tropes have policed the borders of the human and the nonhuman.

Ballard is well known for his explorations of human boundaries – the boundaries of sexuality, the boundaries of the psyche, the boundaries of technology. In what follows, I will argue that he not only explores such boundaries but that he also challenges the conceptualizations and epistemological systems of such boundaries in the first place. Such challenges have been and continue to be made in various ways in both animality studies and posthumanist research as we can see, for example in Michael Lundblad's questioning of the way the representation of interspecies animal sexuality tends to be read as a substitution or displacement of forbidden human sexualities relationships or in Cary Wolfe's and many others’ interrogation of the humanist frameworks that have constructed the exceptionalism of the human subject.

Introduction

As we have seen in previous chapters, part of Deleuze's quarrel with sexual pleasure and the orgasm is the way in which he perceives them to tie subject and organism into one constitutive entity. Pleasure and orgasm are linked to a sexuality associated with stratified systems of interpretation and organisation, such as psychoanalysis and State power, that in different ways delimit and determine the boundaries of the body and what it can do. In this way, pleasure and the orgasm also come to stand in the way of desire as a force of connectivity and creation. As such, sexuality understood in relation to psychoanalysis and State power remains but a human construct caught up in negativity. Desire, contrastively, opens towards the imperceptible, the machinic and the nonhuman. This chapter understands the animal in part as the threshold between sexuality and desire, between the human and the nonhuman. If sexuality is rejected because its actualisations seem intrinsically bound up with humanist discourse, then equally, at least in some respects, the animal can be seen as being employed in the service of familial and State politics. Where concrete sexuality tends to be replaced by abstract desire in Deleuze's philosophy, actual animals are replaced by becoming-animal.

Introduction

Deleuze's understanding of pleasure as a mode of capture and his claiming of desire as a mode of production build on a rather disparate tradition of theories of sexuality. Therefore, it is necessary to approach his oeuvre with an eye to his ideas about pleasure and desire by identifying key moments of influence. Our point of arrival is an explication of how the relationship between desire and pleasure in Deleuze is illuminated, enhanced or problematised by the rich tradition of writing on which it is built. Deleuze's philosophy of desire in general demands attention to how both cultural artefacts and philosophical theories produce problematic relations between desire and pleasure. His two most central interlocutors are Foucault and psychoanalysis. These two are central enough, not just to Deleuze's philosophy but to conceptions of sexuality more generally, to warrant some space of their own at the beginning of this study, and while this chapter will be devoted to the study of the former, the latter will be analysed in the following chapter.

When this book was still in its infancy, an American friend and Deleuze scholar insisted that being a Swedish woman writing about sex without addressing the associations between Swedish women and sex would simply be inappropriate. In the light of what this book has ended up as – a kind of defence of the cultural, conceptual and political importance of sexual pleasure – I find this comment rather intriguing. Just as I had no idea that the associations of Sweden with sex were so powerful until I started travelling beyond the Swedish borders, it had not crossed my mind that my interest in delving into the political, cultural and social implications of sexual pleasure might also emerge from a more specific national historical context than that of my own contemporary, academic framework. It seems apt, as an epilogue, to reflect on the book as a whole in relation to this particular context of its writing. I am not Monika or Lena, from Ingmar Bergman's and Vilgot Sjöman's famous films, and I am not really curious yellow or blue either, as Sjöman's film titles go. But how can I tell if my interest in what sex is and what it can do – an interest that certainly is not that uncommon in itself – is somehow shaped by a Swedish historical configuration of sexuality as a relatively naturalised aspect of life?

Introduction

Deleuze's philosophy is intently preoccupied with the production that emerges through the collapse of the traditionally functional. The straight routes of the sea merchant, the unified subject and the organisation of the body called the organism all, in different ways, symbolise the stratification of desire and thereby the delimitation of becoming. Deleuze regards functionality through the lens of the social and political theft of the force of the body – the enforced organisation of matter according to transcendent principles of utility. The striated, as he notes with Guattari, produces distinct order and form and thereby fixes the variable into points between which the trajectory is set. The smooth, on the other hand, is about a connective desire that couples forces and enables unnatural participations. Unlike the fixed organisation of the striated, the smooth is about the explosion and reinvention of forms by the force of becoming inherent in all matter. The smooth is ‘continuous variation, continuous development of form’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 528). Thus literature, for example, should not be about imposing a predetermined form on matter, but should move ‘in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete’ (Deleuze 1997: 1).

Introduction

Positioned as secondary to male ejaculation, discouraged if clitoral, and seen as ‘signifying nothing’, the female orgasm has had a very different status in history than its male counterpart. On the one hand, a deeper understanding of the female orgasm has been overshadowed by its being subsumed as a subcategory of male sexuality, and on the other, the differences between how male and female sexual pleasure have been perceived and theorised are enormous. In both cases, it seems indefensible to disregard the deeply gendered politics of the orgasm, whether your aim is to defend its philosophical and political potential or reject it. Yet, neither Foucault nor Deleuze seem to take these differences seriously enough. Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Lesley Dean-Jones argues, is a history of male sexuality (Dean-Jones 1992: 77). Not least in the way in which he understands the historical use of pleasure and the orgasm as defined through a model of the ‘viral “ejaculatory schema”’ and the female act as a duplicate to this schema, Foucault fails to recognise the different politics as well as expressions of orgasm and ejaculation (Dean-Jones 1992: 54). At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari's demotion of pleasure and genitality, while intended to expand sexuality beyond the two sexes, makes them blind to the fact that their understanding of desire and sexuality fails to take into account the actual politics of sexual difference.

There is a tendency today to neglect the issue of sexual pleasure or even to surrender it in favour of a politics of asceticism. Sexual pleasure, it is argued, keeps us caught up in unproductive codes of sexuality in terms of liberation and repression, fuels the nihilism of enjoyment of capitalism and prevents us from recognising other more enabling modes of engagement between self and other. While this ‘anti-sex’ position, or impasse, opens new and possibly rewarding venues of exploration, it is the contention of this book that giving up sexual pleasure is, and perhaps always will be, premature. It is like giving up the fight. Like letting the big boy take your toys and letting him keep them because you know he will always try to steal them again or, to pursue a more mature metaphor, to surrender the flows of desire because they are repeatedly channelled in the service of social and political control.

This book, therefore, is about the importance of sexual pleasure. It works to underline and explore, not so much the relevance of pleasure on an individual and personal level, but rather the political, cultural and conceptual significance of such pleasure. In the past decades, sexuality has been an important political question relating to issues such as the rights to and for various sexual identities and practices, sexual equality, sexual violence and abuse, reproductive rights and sexual health.