transversality

  ---- by Adam Bryx and Gary Genosko

  A critical concept for literary criticism, 'transversality' is introduced by Deleuze in the second edition of Proust and Signs. The concept concerns the kind of communication proper to the transversal dimension of machinic literary production. Transversality defines a modern way of writing that departs from the transcendent and dialectic presuppositions of the Platonic model of reminiscence, and envisions an immanent and singularising version instead.

  Also termed an 'anti-logos style', transversality assembles heterogeneous components under a unifying viewpoint, which is far from totalising. Unlike the Platonic counterpart that strives to imitate the Idea and thus reproduce what is both stable and transcendent, Proust's reminiscence departs from subjective associations and culminates in an originating viewpoint. The critique of Plato centres on the issue of intelligence always coming before, where the disjunctive use of faculties merely serves as a prelude for the unifying dialectic found in a single logos. The disjunctive use of faculties in Proust is unhinged from this transcendent and dialectic model, and works on an immanent principle where intelligence always comes after.

  The transversal dimension of fiction fundamentally counters the principles of the world of attributes, logos, analytic expression, and rational thought with the characteristics of the world of signs and symptoms, pathos, hieroglyphs, ideograms and phonetic writing. Where order has collapsed in states of the world, the viewpoint provides a formula by which fiction can constitute and reconstitute a beginning to the world. Such a beginning is necessarily singularising; the transversal dimension or the never-viewed viewpoint draws a line of communication through the heterogeneous pieces and fragments that refuse to belong to a whole, that are parts of different wholes, or that have no whole other than style. The ephemeral images, memories and signs of the odours, flavours and drafts of particular settings are swept along at various rhythms and velocities in the creation of the nontotalising transversal dimension of fiction that is not reproductive, imitative or representative, but depends solely on its functioning.

  Deleuze finds third parties that will communicate aberrantly between partitioned partial objects of hermaphroditic bodies and plants. The famous apiarian bestiary of Deleuze shows itself here. But the pollinating transversal insect is not simply natural or organic, for that is a trope of the logos. Rather, it is a line of passage, a zig-zagging flight, or even the narration of involuntary memory, that productively transverses. Transversality is machinic. The literary machine produces partial objects and resonances between them. The fore-mentioned viewpoint, understood as an essential singularity, is superior to the partitioned objects, yet not beyond them, for the self-engendering literary machine works in and upon itself.

  Connectives

   § Guattari, Pierre-Félix

   § psychoanalysis