04.03.

2018 Sav ng the Past: Deleuze's Proust and S gns | Electron c Book Rev ew

Saving the Past: Deleuze's Proust and Signs

by Stephen Bernard Hawkins
2007-09-30

Proust and Signs: The Complete Text.

Gilles Deleuze
Richard Howard, Trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Stephen Hawkins engages with the “web of counterintuitive,
paradoxical, contentious and yet important claims” that he
identifies in
Gilles Deleuze’s Proust and Signs.

Proust et les signes is said to be one of Gilles Deleuze’s more accessible

G works.
Richard Howard’s recent (Proust and Signs, 2000) and fine translation, which
includes no introduction or editorial notes, makes the work appear accessible even
for English readers. The central questions of the text have to do with the nature of
love, art, memory, learning, and our experience of time. One need not be a student
of philosophy to reflect on and feel the importance of these themes; one need not,
for that matter, be a student at all. Proust and Signs is thought to be accessible
because it speaks a language we know. It appears to address the great questions in
a way that preserves their significance for us. It sets out not to collapse mysteries
into a host of uncontentious facts about a reality more profound than our own
experience. We can find Proust and Signs accessible because we can tell
immediately what it is about.

Yet Proust and Signs is a difficult book, and it presents difficulties for the
commentator who would present the main points of an argument. For Deleuze’s
own work shares the exploratory nature of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la
recherche du temps perdu): it has the character of a search; it is not the simple
presentation of conclusions elsewhere discovered. Deleuze does not see language
as a neutral medium for the presentation of thoughts formed prior to their
expression in words. The expression of thought in language is not always, and need
not be, a translation or copying of an idea from one medium code into another.
Before their authors write them, In Search of Lost Time or of Proust and
Signs have no determinate existence. They are not the unfolding of a prior, unified
vision of things, of the world. Genius is not a pre-given union with the universe,
not a mind that takes dictation from divine inspiration. Genius develops itself in a
work by pursuing the work’s sinews, by multiplying the relations between
characters, within characters, by generating a world within which the author can
give expression to forces internal to her, of which even she is not conscious.
To claim that Proust had the notion - even vague or confused - of the antecedent
unity of the Search or that he found it subsequently, but as animating the whole
from the start, is to read him badly, applying the ready-made criteria of organic
totality that are precisely the ones he rejects and missing the new conception of
unity he was in the process of creating (Proust and Signs 116).

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The author always begins in the middle - not of the work, but of a complex
situation: “We search for truth only when we are determined to do so in terms of a
concrete situation, when we undergo a kind of violence that impels us to such a
search” (15). In the closing pages, Deleuze compares the narrator to a spider in a
web - a spider that does not see whole objects, and does not need to: “She receives
only the slightest vibration at the edge of her web, which propagates itself in her
body as an intensive wave and sends her leaping to the necessary place” (180). The
novelist’s choices are determined by the features of the episode or problem
encountered, and not by a whole vision of the aim of his work, or by a theory of the
world. The philosopher too operates under the pressure of constraints, responds to
the violence of the sign that surges through his body. He cultivates a sensitivity to
signs and awaits an encounter. “There is no apprentice,” writes Deleuze, “who is
not the Egyptologist of something. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming
sensitive to the signs of wood, a physician by becoming sensitive to the signs of
disease. Vocation is always predestination with regard to signs” (5).
Art may give rise to overwhelming feelings or blinding truths, but it often produces
the greatest effects by means of a subtle manipulation of details that remain
hidden to all but those trained in the techniques of the art form. We recognize
instantly that Deleuze has seen through to the heart of what is meant by ‘vocation.’
But lines such as those quoted above, of which there are too many examples
in Proust and Signs to count, are themselves the surface effects of the most
remarkable, small decisions made by Deleuze at a level of metaphysical
technicality which only now and again become visible in this book. Very often the
presentation of a new philosophical discovery is met with contempt or else taken
as a simple and obvious truth hardly worth articulating. But the effect, or the
communicated proposition (“Vocation is…”), sometimes hides the genuine
discovery, the change that takes place behind the scenes which is powerful and
extraordinary precisely because it is capable of producing an effect that we
instantly recognize as true. Proust and Signs is accessible because it generates
effects of this kind. But how does it generate them? What constraints give rise to
these ‘moves’ in the work?
Deleuze borrowed from Henri Bergson a theory of problems, questions, and
solutions. An organism can be understood as a particular solution to a problem-
structure in a given local environment. Organisms are equipped with a set of tricks
that enable them to meet environmental obstacles. When an obstacle appears, it
appears in the form of a challenge to the organism, posing a question for which the
available tricks are possible solutions. No organism instantly seizes the full
complexity of the signs communicated by the environment; rather, the structures
of a particular organism receive certain signs, are sensitive to them, and cannot
grasp others. (Consider, for example, the human ear’s inability to hear the dog
whistle.) The environment is interpreted as offering a set of signs that cohere to
raise a challenge or question for the organism, but in fact there are always more
signs than the organism is ready to receive. The organism’s perceptual structures
select signs from the environment to which the organism then tries to respond; in

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04.03.2018 Sav ng the Past: Deleuze's Proust and S gns | Electron c Book Rev ew

other words, it forms a ‘question’ from the deeper, more complex problem
structure, and then responds to it with its action. When the solutions or tricks an
organism would use to overcome obstacles no longer work, it becomes necessary to
determine a new question from the problematic. The human brain is a remarkably
powerful question-generating machine: when we are brought to a state of
confusion or aporia - when we have no obvious way out - we can try to
reconceptualize the problematic, make ourselves sensitive to new signs, and
discover in the environment a new set of constraints from which we can derive an
action capable of sustaining us. That is, the human being can convert itself into the
solution to questions, the response to challenges, that could never have been
imagined or anticipated, but which are generated when sensitivity to the
previously unnoticed signs in the environment is increased. A novelist constitutes
piece by piece a world in which problems are generated; the poor novelist will
respond to fewer or simpler ‘questions’ drawn from the problem-structures (Who
killed whom? What was the motive?…)
Bergson’s central problem was responding to the common philosophical habit of
spatializing time, attempting to think time on the model of the familiar
chronological timeline, where time is reduced to a series of static, eternally
present, discrete instants, and the experience of change is considered an illusion.
The paradoxes that flow from attempts to understand time on this model, such as
those discovered by Zeno of Elea [495?-435? BCE] or in the twentieth century by
J.M.E. McTaggart, are well known. Bergson set out to establish that change is real,
and his concept of durée, or duration, is his version of the Heraclitean claim that
what is real is flux, change, or ‘becoming.’ Deleuze follows Bergson in beginning
with change (or difference, or becoming), and abandoning the attempt to
reconstruct change out of static instants on a timeline. In passages like those one
finds in many of Deleuze’s writings, and on which much of his work rests, we find
in Proust and Signsthe claim (58) that the very notion of a passing present, or of
change, implies the ontological category of an unchanging ‘pure past’ or past-in-
itself (elsewhere identified by Deleuze as ‘being’ and as ‘the virtual’) into which
these present moments pass. There is no space here to consider the argument in
favor of this position, but we can see how Deleuze has found that his own
philosophical search has turned up a question to which there is no answer in
Bergson. Deleuze turns instead to Proust for reflections on this matter:
Despite his profound pages on dreams or on paramnesia, Bergson does not ask
essentially how the past, as it is in itself, could also be saved for us. Even the
deepest dream implies, according to Bergson, a corruption of pure memory, a
descent from memory into an image that distorts it. While Proust’s problem is,
indeed: how to save for ourselves the past as it is preserved in itself, as it survives
in itself? (59).
To save the past, to regain lost time: this is Proust’s preoccupation, the problem
that constitutes his great work. The memory of Combray is unlocked by the taste of
the madeleine cake, and the past appears to return. Deleuze spends the first half
of Proust and Signs presenting a theory of signs as they are employed in Proust,
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04.03.2018 Sav ng the Past: Deleuze's Proust and S gns | Electron c Book Rev ew

though Deleuze is here drawing forth the implications of Proust’s rich but not
previously theoretically unifiedsuggestions. Deleuze approvingly cites Proust’s
diagnosis of Victor Hugo’s mistake in his philosophical first poems: rather than
being content to lead to thought, Hugo makes the mistake of thinking (95). And
though Deleuze goes beyond Proust, forces connections that were previously only
suggested in Proust, this too is just Deleuze’s attempt to lead to thought.
According to Deleuze’s theory, there are four kinds of signs. There
are worldly signs and there are the signs of love; these are signs of passing time,
lost time, wasted time. And there are the sensuous signs and the signs of art; these
are signs of time regained. As signs of passing time, the worldly signs and the signs
of love belong to the primal ‘becoming,’ the original flux. The signs of love are the
signs of corruptible, passing bodies. A particular smile is flashed, or a casual touch
of the fingertips on the elbow: these signs, says Deleuze, are by nature deceptive,
since they point beyond themselves to their origin, in another ‘world.’ The kiss that
is the source of joy becomes also the source of jealousy, as the lover
wonders, where did she learn to do this? The origin of the sign that gives joy is
simultaneously the sign of other possible lovers for my beloved. It is the sign that
we are corruptible, that we cannot give ourselves wholly to each other, since we are
not whole. Behind the signs that we emit there is no subject or eternal soul to
which we might be devoted; there are only signs that point to other experiences of
generation, and promise nothing that would endure.
The worldly signs are empty or formal (7). They are said to stand for thought or
action (6). Highly sophisticated social codes are formed from such signs:
expressions or gestures have the power to convince those present of one’s status, or
otherwise to expose oneself as out of place. As we know, they point to no origin;
they appear sterile, pointless. The signs of love are actions between bodies, but
human beings construct, also, massively complex systems of strictly formal signs,
which seem to have nothing to do with love and nothing to do with art. Deleuze
nevertheless insists that they are crucial, that even art would be impossible for us if
we did not pass through this stage of strictest formality. Art is impossible without
the knowledge of how signs come to constitute worlds, determine the limits of
worlds, select the inhabitants from the aliens to the circle produced by signs.
We cannot deny the overwhelming irrelevance of worldly signs when they are
considered as the rules of worlds that have only contingent existence, that merely
replace passing actions or thoughts, but do not provide a solution to transience.
They, like signs of art, are signs of passing time, of lost time. If we do not move
beyond them, we are likely to be consumed by sadness, overcome by the
meaninglessness of it all. Such is the nihilism feared by those who insist we need
ideas of a saving God in order to have meaning in our lives. It is Deleuze’s aim to
present a materialism that makes no call to such transcendent figures, but
nevertheless accepts as real and serious the challenge of accounting for meaning
and making joy possible for human beings. It will not be enough to abandon
oneself to purely carnal desire, simply because we have been compelled by Darwin.

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Deleuze’s account of the signs of love, and Proust’s work on the relationship
between love and jealousy, show that such abandon is no path to joy.
It is the sensuous sign, instead, that first offers a glimmer of hope for regaining the
lost time of becoming: it is when we taste the madeleine and Combray emerges in
our imagination that we first sense that what has been lost has some kind of
persistence, that it cannot be destroyed by time. Combray is enfolded in the taste
of the madeleine - not, Deleuze insists, Combray as it was originally lived, but
Combray in a new splendor, all of its own. We experience at once an extraordinary
joy and yet anguish at the sense that even Combray, wondrous clue to what we are,
is gone: the sensuous sign that points us to another material experience cannot
save the past for us, but only suggests that the past might be saved. These signs are
also too material (39). They mislead us by compelling us to seek the meaning of the
experience of the cake in the experience of Combray; but the truth of being cannot
be seized in either of these actual states, even if the Combray recalled is less
material and suggests a dynamic character more profound than Combray as it is
lived. The experience of involuntary memory, when a seemingly lost world is
immediately made present to us, provides us only an image of eternity - Plato’s
definition of time itself. Is there nothing Eternal - is the past lost to us?
It is the work of art that evokes the Eternal and saves the past-in-itself for us. But
to see how this is so, and why, we must come to some understanding of what is
meant by Eternity or the ‘original time’ for Deleuze (45). Eternity is not
otherworldly; it is not a world transcendent to the physical universe, which would
serve as a ground for this world. And original time is not a ‘first’ time at the
beginning of a timeline running from the Big Bang down to our present; recall that
Deleuze is Bergsonian, and so he is critical of the idea that the timeline is itself
time. Deleuze insists that the present coexists with itself as past (58). What is
meant by this deeply problematic and paradoxical claim cannot be decided here,
but this much can be said: the past is what is, and it always is, or eternally is. This
definition of the past is how Bergson meant us to understand the past-in-itself.
Deleuze now draws on the neo-Platonist notion of ‘complication’ as the original
state prior to any development or ‘explication.’ Deleuze plays here on the root ‘pli’ -
French for ‘fold.’ The universe unfolds itself in every moment - but that from which
it unfolds forever is. From the perspective of the new state into which the universe
has folded, what was before has changed - but it is a change only relative to the
new state or new perspective; in itself, the past has not changed, the universe as
‘being’ itself has not changed. Since the ‘original time’ is a state prior to
development or explication, original time is not something that happened once
and for all, at the origin of the physical universe in a moment we call the ‘Big
Bang.’ Insofar as there are genuinely new creations, original time shows itself to
endure as that out of which our developments flow, the being that supports every
new creation. By producing a work of art, we bring into full view the resource from
which our new connections are made - the virtuality, Bergson would say, that gives
rise to our actual thoughts, actions, and our works of art themselves. Whether we
create works of art has no effect on the endurance of being in-itself. But the more

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we allow ourselves to be gobbled up by the passing of time, the less likely we are to
recognize the enduring, dynamic nature of the universe itself. Through art we
bring into view being itself and give expression to being itself through our unique
perspective on what is, preserving thereby our viewpoint, that immaterial
opportunity for our own endurance, so precious to Proust.
Proust and Signs can be recommended as ‘accessible’ if we are interested in
reflecting on the nature of art, love, time, or learning. There are passages of
considerable beauty and significance in this work. Those drawn in by such beauty
should expect to find themselves caught in a web of counterintuitive, paradoxical,
contentious and yet important claims. What is to be done from there is a matter to
ponder in the short time between now and the end.

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