Becoming and Composition: A Deleuzian Reading of Virginia Woolf's Momentary Vision
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Huang, Hui-yu
Abstract
The idea of the whole is a consistent theme in Virginia Woolf’s works, which is presented through her descriptions of life, order, and pattern. Woolf’s idea of the whole emerges from an atmosphere teeming with stability, coherence, peace, and eternity as resistance against “the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral.” Nonetheless, Woolf’s idea of the whole is also simultaneously characteristic of the “varying,” the “unknown,” and the “uncircumscribed,” which features disruption and fluidity. These two aspects of the whole are closely interlinked with the material aspect in contexts. Involvement of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s exploration of the variability and infinity of chaos, along with Deleuze’s conceptual analyses of trajectory, becoming, and diagram, in observing Woolf’s writings may facilitate an understanding of how Woolf’s idea of the whole achieves its intensity via the material aspect. Woolf’s idea of the whole points to a process of composition, rather than an integration of given constituents or a transcendence of sublimity and completeness. Disruption and fluidity that characterize this sense of the whole are not to be deemed equivalents of overwhelming destruction, opposition, or precariousness. Instead, disruption and fluidity are laid out via laying down the imposed confinement of given identities and values. The material aspect of this sense of the whole points to a process of contraction resonating with disruption and fluidity, in which individuals, feelings and emotions, and things, after laying down their affiliated, recognized values, become elements susceptible to diverse potentialities and compositions. The material aspect in this sense is an orientation toward an impersonal level of “matter of fact.” In Deleuze’s analysis of the concept of the event, actualization, as a level composed of states of affairs, may have two directions of development. On one hand, actualization may refer to actualized, defined states of affairs; on the other hand, actualization may point to reworked compositions put into effect in states of affairs. Counter-actualization involves both aspects of actualization: it disrupts the rigidity of actualized states so as to launch reworked compositions in actualization. In terms of Deleuze’s view of the event, willing the event is not necessarily delimited to passive acceptance of actualized states of affairs, but instead may be regarded as an expression of counter-actualization. On the one hand, resistance against actualized values and initiation of reworked actualization shape “an active mode of ethics,” which reinforces the significance of counter-actualization and its positive effects in reworked actualization. On the other hand, with a further step, counter-actualization does not circumscribe its operation within an actualized framework of activity and passivity. With an attempt to open access to alternative and diverse trajectories of willing the event, counter-actualization focuses on the indispensability of unfolding a potential, virtual plane in processes of slackening the rigidity of actualization. This potential, virtual plane lays out in disjunctions and resonances between divergent series. If the confronted divergences, disjunctions, and resonances in processes of counter-actualization are taken into account, the operation of the will that wills the event is no longer confined to the activity or passivity of personal will. Distinguished from a pursuit of the autonomy of personal will, the intensity of the will that wills the event relies on the extent of exertion of susceptibility, potentiality, and plasticity, which display the susceptibility to the immanence of divergent series, lay out the potentiality of divergent series, and compose the plasticity of divergent series. This sense of willing the event in terms of the extent of susceptibility, potentiality, and plasticity enables the immanence of an individual to impersonally emerge from the “univocity of Being.” The univocity of Being is the quintessence of the Deleuzian “transcendental empiricist ethics,” which is also the immanence of Woolf’s conception of the whole.
Subjects
Virginia Woolf
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
actualization
counter-actualization
the material/matter of fact
passage
becoming
composition
immanence
SDGs
Type
thesis
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