The Art of Hiding in Plane Sight
Breaking Bad through Marx, Žižek, Deleuze and Guattari.
Maty Candelaria, 10/7/2022
Introduction
By Cody Tatley
"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
[...]
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.
Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own.
The desert of the real itself."
Jean Baudrillard, Ecclesiastes
This wonderful experiment in both thought and writing by Don't Even Dream About It has at its core two themes which underpin the points of departure that this text has taken up; what philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called "[...]the fabrication of the BwO"1where the possibilities and potentials for new activity are being marked and laid out as Grounding for further activity - or "to make something circulate on it or pass across it2" ("it" being the 'Body without Organs').
These two themes would be firstly the notion of the psychoanalytic Symptom, examined throughout history since Hippocrates to Freud and Marx - Lacan remarks that the Symptom was invented by Marx, something Slavoj Žižek elaborated upon in his opening chapter 'Did Marx Invent the Symptom?'
From the Sublime Object of Ideology.
“One has to look for the origins of the notion of symptom not in Hippocrates but in Marx, in the connection he was first to establish between capitalism and what? - the good old times, what we call the feudal times."3
And its schizoanalytic counterpart (or double-articulation) the Secret from the Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible: Memories of a Secret Plateau4.
As linguistic phenomena; secrecy is a language which literally denies access to certain signifiers (what in Anti-Oedipus is referred to as 'antiproduction')5 and since Lacan posits that the "Unconscious is structured like a language6" symptoms are therefore themselves also linguistic in nature.
"Most of you will have some idea of what I mean when I say —the unconscious is structured like a language [...] [t]hus the unconscious is always manifested as that which vacillates in a split in the subject[.]"7
The second notion would be in the exploration of the relationship between the two, since it is the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who take the concept of the secret much further, and they bring with it entire framework in which we understand the symptom and the relationship between content and form (something Post-Structuralism is known for examining in its critical approaches to the Structuralist thought, specifically, German Idealist inspired Psychoanalysts much like Lacan and today the Ljubljana School) in conjunction with the stylistic flavour of Mark Fisher's model of Popular Modernism:
“In popular modernism, the elitist project of modernism [as exemplified by e.g. the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and progressive pop music] was retrospectively vindicated. At the same time, popular culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist. Particular modernists techniques were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of producing forms which were adequate to the present moment was taken up and renewed.8"
Much like Žižek's use of analyzing films to explore philosophical concepts, Mark emphasizes a theory-fiction approach to philosophy that applies both the conceptual apparatus and workings out of typical academic philosophical fashion (though nothing about this particular brand of continental philosophy could truly be called typical) with the affectionate, pathos and prose-driven writing which makes more of a meal for the one dining.
This creates an experience in philosophical-thought which makes use of theory with its practice (praxis), combining contemporary media analysis, commentary, elaboration, but also critical development - concepts are not only explained but also explored - with character and narrative analyses of AMC'S Breaking Bad.
Here, the philosophies of contemporary, left-wing continental thought are not only conjured up but themselves brought into question.
Interpretive frameworks surrounding Transcendence (Kantianism) Absolute/Dialectical logic (Hegelianism) and Materialism/Immanence (Spinozism/Nietzscheanism/Marxism) will constantly be shifted around and used to examine themselves and their relations with each other, and these relations with the popular, cultural art and media which some consider the best writing that a television series has had from author and writer Vince Gilligan.
The Secret and the Symptom cannot be understood purely as isolated phenomena, but only in conjunction with their examination of their lines of flight and their genealogies - or conditions for possibility/existence (genetic conditions).
The closer one looks, the more the dichotomy blurs, and the two appear as one. But, look again, through the lens of Bergsonist Intuiton, and find that this new, homologous concept is rather a composite.
An assemblage. A multiplicity.
Not just as bodies - secret or symptom both have bodies as signifiers or words (word-bodies, word-machines) and as signified content, secrets are material things as are symptoms, even if they seem to be the results of a fundamental lack (negation) they also contain an aspect of positive content in themselves - but also the relations of these bodies, and the relations of these relations (Spinozism: Practical Philosophy).9
In other words, as:
"[A] body [...] defined only by a longitude and a latitude'.
(Memories of a Spinozist).10
Or, as a:
Haecceity.
(Memories of a Haecceity)11.
Both the secret as 'the secret that there is none' (otherwise known as the 'Parrhasian Veil' - a concept from Julian de Medeiros' 'The Hermeneutic Temptation') and as 'the secret of the content of the form itself'.
Both the Freudo-(Hegelo-)Marxist analysis of forms and dreamwork - which Žižek reminds us are of the same kind - and the Lacanian Symptom/Secret as Verfewung (or 'repression as the return of the repressed thing' perhaps best explored in Lacan's Seminar on the Purloined Letter)12.
Secret/Symptom becomes both the thing which points to something else and the thing which hides and obscures both itself and its relation to this something else.
The Secret/Symptom as real, material signs with meaning in-themselves.
And as empty, 'floating signifiers' - concepts with no essential definition but nevertheless engaged in several processes which highlight their functionality and usage, and therefore which too highlight its meaning, as Wittgenstein reminds us "meaning is usage".
"For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language”. 13
What we have come to call the 'Body without Organs of the Secret/Symptom'.
All these core themes could equally fall under one question or line of inquiry, which demarcates the journey of this work and objet d'art:
'What is the Body without Organs of the Secret/Symptom?'
Which can elsewise be asked as:
'What does becoming-secret, becoming-symptomatic look like?' Or 'What is the (cancerous) Body without Organs of Walter White/Heisenberg?'
I say this last iteration of the question because for me it is clear that in the analysis of Walter White through the developed notions of both becoming-secret and the symptom, that Breaking Bad is itself a presentation entirely in the becoming-cancerous, or of the "cancerous body without organs".14
A final point, there are then two notions and one concept:
Symptom, Secret, and Cancer.
Through the question of Walter White's Desire (which is almost entirely tied up with the question of his becoming and of his Body without Organs) we find new perspectives and incredible highlights on the character, as well as on those same theoretical tools and frameworks used in the interpretion itself.
In a double motion, we are led to interpret the independent variable, i.e we use our instruments to measure, we observe phenomena and their correlation to other phenomena in coming to understand their casual ration by experiencing change (difference) amongst these phenomena.
And we interpret the very instruments of measurement, the methodology of approach curated to explore the casualty of the phenomena selected.
Don't Even Dream About It uses Lacanian/Žižekian Psychoanalysis and Deleuzo-Guattarian 'Schizoanalysis' to find out what the body without organs of Walter White is, and they use Walter White to find out the bodies without organs of these two approaches - this is the double motion of critique, the foundation for what we have called creative destruction15 - used by Marx in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843):
"The weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism of
weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force. But
theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses."16
The Art of Hiding in Plane Sight is itself an art of analysis which Marx called 'analysis of (commodity) form' and which Freud called dreamwork - which have become conjunctively and disjunctively synthesised to produce a Žižekian/Deleuzo-Guattarian 'Dreamwork of the Form' .
Some people can talk, hiding nothing, without lying: they
are secretive by their transparency, as impenetrable as water ("I always tell the truth, even when I lie" - Scarface / "I always tell the truth, not the whole truth, for this is impossible" - Lacan, Télévision, 1978).
Whereas others have a secret that is always breached, even though they surround it with a thick wall or elevate it to an infinite form.
The aspect of remaining hidden can be maintained entirely by pure transparency.
By having everything out in the open (an old adage goes, the best place to hide is right under the nose).
That is to say; secrets not only rely on a becoming-hidden, but also on a becoming-exposed.
The Art of Hiding in Plane Sight is the analytic method which calls out the hidden thing which is fully exposed.
By identifying not only the content of the secret (the hidden thing) or its form (its transparency/exposure) but also this content of the form itself (what is being hidden in the act of exposure).
The Art of Hiding in Plane Sight
Breaking Bad through Žižek , Deleuze, and Guattari.
What is a secret?
Is it the art of concealment? Of hiding ‘something’ behind the curtain? And once this content is ‘revealed’, has the secret transformed into something that is other than a secret?
In Breaking Bad, Walter White’s begins his secret as a secret to himself. Walter’s original secret wasn’t that he had cancer and began to manufacture methamphetamine as a way to provide for his family.
No, the original secret was festering within Walter’s body from years of resentment which had already poisoned his passions. In fact, you could say that the resentment was his original secret to himself. An intensional and virtual secret, not yet actualized. Walter, who had already fallen fantasy to Patriarchy and Oedipus, by the first episode of the show, had already grown tired of what he believed to be his mundane and insipid existence.
He wanted to be great at something. He wanted to be ‘the best’. Such a will-to-power -- since it was inspired by his own ressentiment towards life -- could only populate Walter as a cancer, a contagion that spreads and gains its own consistency.
A force that is pure anti-production, total death-drive.
But before becoming-actual, this cancer remained virtual. Although not yet actualized, it was nonetheless real.
Deleuze and Guattari say that there are three types of bodies-without-organs (BwOs): full, empty, and cancerous17. Although the difference between these types are subtle, it may be put simply that full BwOs are full of positive potentials and connections which affirm life, cancerous ones are self-destructive and which decompose relations and lead to the empty. We call the empty BwO: the dead.
Far from affirming life, Walter resents it. He believes that in order to affirm life that he must destroy it, or at least subsume everything in his path. As such he mistakes domination for will-to-power. He wishes to become a body-without-organs, to transcend the body which places him on a trajectory towards death. Like Artuad, he places himself on the limit and falls victim to an all too sudden destratification.
But Walter cannot transcend his body, only lose himself on the body-without-organs of the secret. He can only put himself on various paths towards self destruction, and the the annihilation of everything in his path until the BwO has lost all of its speed and consistency. He can form alliances, but only on the condition that he sets those alliances into a path of destruction. He can ride on intensities, but only on the condition that its speed is set to overdrive, until all power is burnt out.
Zero Intensity.
Walter’s first step towards becoming a BwO is to enter into the plane of the secret. For this he must find an already existing secret to attach himself to: the criminal drug trade. Walter himself must become a secret, and that secret must find its own form. As a chemical sorcerer, he must fabricate a double, Heisenburg, who stands in place for the secret. Under this form, this construction, he is able to trick himself and others into believing that there is something beneath the mask.
The truth is that the mask hides nothing behind it.
Walter's transformation into Heisenburg isn’t a way of Walter breaking into two. A common way of analyzing Walter White/Heisenberg would be to say that Walter White is the Good, whereas Heisenburg is the expression of his the Bad which was broken. Walter White is the Father, Husband, Teacher, and respected member of the family, Heisenberg is the Abusive Husband, neglectful Father, and the Mastermind behind a small Albuquerque pocket of the criminal drug trade.
Walter is said to be in the family business, Heisenburg is in the empire business.
However, it would be a mistake in judgment, and a failure to recognize immanence if we were to sever the body of the secret into constitutive parts of good and true, and bad and false. Or in other words, to place Walter in the realm of the order of the Real holding a secret, and Heisenburg as the secret being held.
Rather, Walter White himself becomes a secret. Like Batman, who dons the mask of Bruce Wayne, it is never clear which face is the true mask18. Perhaps here we might instead say that the secret is not what is behind the mask, because we would only find a double of another mask, or just an empty container: a hollow man.
How, then, does Walter White become a secret? He enters into it.
In the subsection of “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal…” titled “Memories of a Secret '' in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari provide their theory of the secret. For Deleuze and Guattari, secrets contain a content which is too big for its form -- a content which oozes out of the box. However, once the content of the secret outgrows its container, it acquires its own form. Deleuze and Guattari say that the content of the secret is either ‘covered, doubled or replaced by a simple container'. Therefore, it would be a meaningless task to try to uncover the truth behind the secret, because we may be looking at the double, or just the container itself:
“In short, the secret, defined as a content that has hidden its form in favor of a simple container, is inseparable from two movements that can accidentally interrupt its course or betray it, but are nonetheless an essential part of it: something must ooze from the box, something will be perceived through the box or in the half-opened box” (Deleuze and Guattari).
Deleuze and Guattari give us three important insights about the secret:
“The secret was invented by society; it is a sociological or social notion. Every secret is a collective assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari, “Memories of a Secret”). This gives all secrets a genealogy.
The Secret will eventually acquire its own form and consistency. Unlike the finite content of the secret, the form of the secret is itself infinite and ever expanding (inwards and outwards)19.
Once this operation has happened, the secret becomes ‘non localizable something that has happened’. The secret then has itself become a secret, by making its tracing a phantom.
From this perspective, Walter White may be seen as ‘the double’ which conceals his criminal persona. As such, this ‘double’ is truly just an empty container, a concept which exists on the plane of the secret. But this secret of Walter White is only a symptom of the greater secret of the Criminal Drug trade.
The secret of the criminal drug trade clearly existed prior to Walter White, and even prior to Gus Fring and the Cartel. With a fine tuned genealogical pen, we could trace the origins of this trade to the repressed roots of capital, creating yet another layer of the fantasy. Walter is a symptom of the drug trade, which is itself a symptom of capital. The insight I borrow here from Deleuze and Guattari is that the secret of the secret society is merely a double or mirror to the fantasy of Capitalist Production.
As Žižek and Marx show us, one of the original secrets of Capitalism is the form of the relations which produce commodities.
It isn't the subject that possesses a secret, but rather the becoming-secret of the social order which subjects are molded by. Walter White's seems to possess a secret life as Heisenburg, but in reality he becomes implicated within the secret. Walter himself is just a concept, or at most a concept-creator. A fabricator of doubles.
In his magnum opus The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek articulates an amazing analysis of the concept of the secret. For Žižek, what constitutes a secret is not the latent content behind the secret -- such as with the secret behind the commodity or the secret behind the dream-- but rather, “the secret is the form itself” (Žižek).
What this means is that in order to truly understand the concept of the secret, it isn’t enough to try to go beyond it. We must go through it, come back, and realize the shape it has and set of relations which upholds the secret as such.
Žižek locates a theory of secrets primarily in Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. The reason for this, from a somewhat unconventional reading of both of these thinkers through Hegel, is that Žižek sees both Marx and Freud as inventing the concept of the symptom under different symbolic and discursive registers.
Žižek explains that for Freud, the purpose of dream analysis is not to understand the latent content behind the dream to uncover its ‘true meaning’ but to understand how to analyze the form that the dream takes. More importantly, Žižek sees Freud as well as Lacan as theorists who place dreams within the realm of The Real, as opposed to being a matter of symbolic imagination (a realm which is experienced when we are supposedly awake).
This Hegelian reversal of everyday experience as being a matter of symbolic imagination which is itself constructed by a given regime of signs is a way of understanding fantasy as a form as opposed to a content behind the form.
Since dreams are understood as existing within the realm of the real, the function of analysis “center[s] our attention on this form itself, on the dream-work to which the 'latent dream thoughts' were submitted” (Žižek). Particular dreams are therefore only symptomatic of the realm of dream-work which generated them. Or as Deleuze and Guattari say in Anti-Oedipus, dreams are generated as a byproduct by the factory of the unconscious.
As for how Marx is related to the concept of the symptom, it isn’t a question of ‘did Marx invent the symptom’ but rather, ‘how did Marx invent the Symptom’?
The answer: Marx overturns the transcendental categories of Immaneul Kant on its head. No longer is thought structured by transcendental categories as an a priori factor latent in the Human mind. Marx flips this order and says, transcendental categories are first material abstractions which happen in the real world, that in turn structure the thought patterns of a thinking subject. It isn’t the world becoming rational via transcendental subjects operating in accordance with categorical judgements, but the becoming-capital of subjectivity, and the quantification of social relations.
As Žižek says:
“In other words, in the structure of the commodity form it is possible to find the transcendental subject: the commodity-form articulates in advance the anatomy, the skeleton of the Kantian transcendental subject that is, the network of transcendental categories which constitute the a priori frame of 'objective' scientific knowledge"
For example, let’s take Marx’s analysis of the commodity in Capital Vol. 1., specifically how qualitative value is transformed into quantitative value, and how the object of the commodity is made into a fetish (given a transcendental value outside of its use value). By transcendental, I don’t necessarily mean transcendent but rather that the commodities value is naturalized, as opposed to being necessarily contingent and mediated by social relations.
Under capitalism, when raw products are combined with abstract labor in a given means of production, and are mediated by the exchange of other commodities, they produce a value which is something other than its use value.
If the process is successful, the exchange-value of the commodity will be more than the cost of products, labor and means of production combined, thus generating a surplus-value. Once more, the symbolic value of the products and labor power will have a qualitative shift to being a commodity, thus gaining a new symbolic value -- a symbol which represents its capacity to be exchanged ($).
Once a commodity, the new symbolic value differs in kind from the raw products and labor power which constituted it before. However, this difference in kind can only be articulated under capitalism as a difference in degree, a homogenous unit of currency which allows for the possibility for an equivalent exchange. Under capitalism, commodities still retain a qualitative difference, however this difference in kind is misrecognized as being within the object itself, as opposed to being given value within a particular social situation or use.
To recognize that the commodity has now become an object of fetishism is to recognize that the commodity through a process of material abstraction has gained a transcendental status which is different from its previous value of utility and at the same time, has become a homogenous unit of exchange. The social conditions which generate the commodity as such are obfuscated, and instead attributed to the object itself.
Marx criticizes the economists of his time -- such as Ricardo and Smith -- for mistaking the object's exchange value with its inherent value. In the subsection of Capital titled “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”, Marx says, “Political Economy has indeed analyzed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labor is represented by the value of its product and labor time by the magnitude of that value”.
Prior to the exchange of commodities mediated by social reality, we could say that the qualitative value of labor and things could not be quantified, only retained value from their usage. Once commodities and labor are placed into relations of exchange and general equivalence, we say that they have been made abstract. Furthermore, since capital structures the totality of social relations (exchange of commodities, and relations between people), this material abstraction is the becoming-quantitative of social relations.
Labor-power becomes associated with labor-time, and use-value is replaced by monetary or exchange value.
“The value of every commodity is now, by being equated to linen, not only differentiated from its own use value, but from all other use values generally, and is, by that very fact, expressed as that which is common to all commodities. By this form, commodities are, for the first time, effectively brought into relation with one another as values, or made to appear as exchange values”
…
A commodity can acquire a general expression of its value only by all other commodities, simultaneously with it, expressing their values in the same equivalent; and every new commodity must follow suit. It thus becomes evident that since the existence of commodities as values is purely social, this social existence can be expressed by the totality of their social relations alone, and consequently that the form of their value must be a socially recognised form” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1).
One of Žižek’s crucial insights in the Sublime object of Ideology is that Marx didn’t see the commodity itself as holding a secret. Rather, what is made secret is the totality of social relations which go into composing the commodity (the form itself). Since commodities are already assumed to have a natural value retained in the object itself, people will always behave as if this value is real.
This point is made obvious in Capital when Marx says that:
“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”.
What this shows, for Žižek is that commodities are first assumed a transcendental (natural) status, and only later revealed to be imbued with a transcendent status. Importantly, it's not the object which is transcendent, but social relations between people inscribe the object as having more value than is actually contained within it (the truth is that there is none).
As Marx says again, “We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it”. Although we do not actually believe that commodities retain a spiritual status, our actions say otherwise. Value converts products into a ‘social hieroglyphic’ which we can only understand by investigating the form itself20.
Walter White’s blue meth is imbued with such a symbolic status. Walter himself is obsessed with the ‘purity’ of his product. However it is notable that while ‘blue sky’ only retains 99.1% purity, it never quite achieves an absolute purity. This quantification of value is itself viewed fetishisitcally (as being more than is actually contained within the object), as the number contained within the commodity is mistaken for the quality of it.
What is obfuscated by the product ‘blue sky’ is its productive aspects: a war for power between rival gangs, international distribution networks, mass manufacturing of methamphetamine, and the socio-chemical engineering of users.
All of these productive aspects operate within a shroud of secrecy.
“The fetishism of the commodity-- the domination of society by "imperceptible as well as perceptible things" -- attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the perceptible world is replaced by a selection of images which is projected above it, yet which at the same time succeeds in making itself regarded as the perceptible par excellence” (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle).
As Žižek and Marx rightly points out, it wouldn’t be enough to pull the curtain aside, and expose the ‘blue sky’ for what it truly is, because the function of ideology is to act and behave ‘as if’ the commodity already holds a transcendental value. It isn’t enough to say “I understand in my heart that this or that commodity will not make me happy” because “I must act as if this were true”. It isn’t enough to know that blue sky’s chemical purity does not equal value as such because the business cannot be stopped.
Belief isn’t something held in the hearts and minds of its subjects, but something which is done and performed. Belief is exterior, not interior, "embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people" (Žižek).
Therefore, the commodity is itself only symptomatic of wider social and economic relations which themselves are historically and politically contingent. The commodity is only a particular expression of the greater plane of the secret itself.
We discover that the commodity is a secret not by lifting behind the curtain of the commodity -- because this will only lead us to Fetishistic Disavowal, a cynical belief that we are beyond the illusions and fantasies which constitute social reality-- but beginning at the commodity as a transcendental object, moving towards an analysis of its form in relation to its plane (capital), and then narrowing our gaze back onto the particular ways in which the fetish object is contingent to the historical economic conditions which generated its appearance of transcendence21. In this way, we recognize the commodity not as transcendent, but transcendentally as immanent.
Only once we begin to analyze the commodity form as a secret itself, and not as hiding the secret, can we understand the commodities function in ideology.
“First you must know the problem. Confront it. Then you must forget the problem.
Not to foreclose yourself from it totally, but to repress it so that it is always there.
Ready for anamnesis.
You must remember what life was like before the problem, and you must
forget the feeling of the inevitability (the too-real aspect) of the problem.
So that you can act.
To produce a material outcome.
To bring about a material change.
A real change” (Cody without Organs, Negative Maps: Fetishistic Disavowal and Reflexive Impotence & Existential Problems Are Real Problems (2nd edition).
Walter White makes a crucial mistake when understanding himself as a secret. He misrecognizes his ‘secrets’ (the secret of being a Criminal, and the secret of his good side) as being something underneath a particular mask.
For Žižek, misrecognition consists of mixing up a particular quality of a thing, with the overall structure of the event which sets in motion relations which produce the given quality22.
For example, after Walter murders Gus Fring by blowing him up in a nursing home, Walter teams up with Jesse Pinkman and Mike Ehrmantraut to revitalize the dormant meth market. Mike begrudgingly teams up with Walter in order to acquire the funds to provide hushmoney to the leftovers of Frings former operation. After their first cook is sold, Walter becomes angry with Mike because they are now receiving a significantly lower cut of the profits than Walter had hoped.
However, as Mike bites back:
“Just because you shot Jesse James, don’t make you Jesse James”.
This rebubtle is crucial because it shows that Walter fails to recognize the difference in kind between himself, and the relations which compose the secret. To put in Žižekian terms, he misrecognizes the difference between form and symptom. Walter thinks that he is the plane (the form of the secret, the abstract machine which governs concrete assemblages), when in reality he is just a concept produced on the plane (a symptom).
Similarly, for Henri Bergson, one of Deleuze’s favorite philosophers, misrecognition more often takes the form of badly stated problems23. However for Bergson, badly stated problems are ones that misrecognize when a problem consists of differences in degree when in reality it is differences in kind (or vise versa). As such, Walter White mistakenly believes that he is more evil as Heisenburg and more good as Walter White (mistaking quality with quantity). In reality, the difference does not lay in the goodness or badness of either articulations of the multiplicity of Walter White. Nor is the difference in kind of Heisenburg and Walter as being different things in themselves.
Rather, the true differences lie elsewhere in their forms.
In What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the concept and the plane of immanence where concepts populate, as well as the concept-creator.
The key difference between concepts and planes is that “concepts are concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine, but the plane is the abstract machine of which these assemblages are the working parts” (Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix. What Is Philosophy?). Concepts are machines which operate as parts (such as an engine), planes are the totality of a machine. Furthermore, the concept-creator is synonymous to an engineer who constructs concepts. However, importantly, concept-creators do not construct the plane themselves.
Although concepts belong to the realm of philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari lament on how concepts have been co-opted under capitalism, thus transforming the product into a material concept constructed by the abstract labor of the worker24. As such, since concepts have a material dimension, there is an objectivity to concepts: how they are done, as opposed to thought.
Just like how belief for Žižek is something embodied in the things people do (thus making belief something objective), Deleuze and Guattari argue that concepts are things-in-themselves, even if these things are intensities.
Therefore, the true differences in kind are threefold:
Walter White as a concept-creator (philosopher, dark chemical-sorcerer) who enters into the plane of the secret. Walter affects and is affected by the plane. Walter, with his limited power, can construct concepts as weapons, but this does not mean he is or that he constructed the plane. Walter enters into composition and decomposition with the plane.
The plane of the secret which has its own autonomy. The plane predates Walter, as well as Gus, and can be traced to the secret society of the drug cartel, as well as the hindsociety which the secret society is a double of. In Breaking Bad, the secret is protected by Madrigal Electromotive GmbH -- a multinational joint-corporation which is used to launder drug money.
Other concept-creators (Gus, Mike, the DEA, Madrigal Electromotive GmbH, and even Skylar), and their concepts (The Law, Judgment, Family, and Business) which collide into each other causing relative territorialization and deterritorialization of the others.
Under this new framework, we could say that Walter begins by entering into the plane of the secret, which has its genealogical roots in the Drug Cartel, as well as Gus’s collaboration with Madrigal Electromotive GmbH. Just like how it isn’t possible to say whose face is the real face (Walter or Heisenbug), we can also not say which expression of the business is the most real.
Is Madrigal Electromotive GmbH the double, or is it the drug trade?
A common theme within Breaking Bad is the idea that the most effective kind of secret is the one that is hidden in plain sight. Walter, Gus, and Madrigal Electromotive GmbH are prime examples of this. All of these bodies seemingly succeed (albeit, only within a limited duration) in constructing a double which is itself hollow, imbued with metaphysical niceties.
Yet, again, it would be better to say that they enter the plane of the secret which itself works by creating doubles as concepts (ad infinitum), which allow the plane to maintain an air of imperceptibility. So instead of visualizing this doubling as a splitting into two, we would say that the secret operates by a double movement -- expanding and contracting. The exterior moves out and allows itself to be seen, and at the same time, the interior replicates empty containers to throw the Law off course.
If we bring back the early example of Frued’s reversal of dreams and reality, we could see that when Walter enters into the secret, he fabricates hollow doubles (Drug Lord, Father, Gambling Addict, Lonely Husband etc.). But these doubles, as Žižek tells us, are merely symptoms of a more elusive secret.
Both of these expressions of Walter as Becoming-Secret serve a similar Oedipal function for the majority of the show. Though Walter undergoes many changes throughout the series, what remains consistent until the end of the show is that he claims to do everything for his family.
It is only later, once he knows he has come to the end of his journey, that he can admit his symptoms were not the secret themselves, but only a particular manifestation of the plane of the secret. Walter White was himself a symptom of the fantasy. Like Gus Fring, he learned the art of how to hide in plain sight, which really means to enter in the secret plane.
As such, it is at the end of the show where Walter realizes that he wasn’t hiding in plain sight, but rather in plane sight. That is, within the imperceptibility of the flowing and expanding plane which molds its constituents as symptoms. In turn, these constituent-concepts misrecognize themselves as the plane itself.
Such is the egotistical grandeur of Walter White! Walter seeks to be ‘the danger’ and ‘the one who knocks’. He wants to become the plane itself, when in reality he is at most a concept-creator, and at worst, subordinate to the workings of the already-existing plane of the secret. Walter White isn’t a secret himself, but is instead the commodity-symptom which obscures the real form of the secret.
References and Footnotes
Key Texts:
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming Animal…”, subsection “memories of a secret”.
Giles Deleuze, Bergsonism.
Slajov Zizek, Sublime Object of Ideology, chapter one.
Karl Marx, Capital Vol 1., chapter one.
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Capitalism & Schizophrenia; A Thousand Plateaus - HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? p152.
Ibid, p150.
Lacan, "RSI", Ornicar? 4, p.106; qtd in Zizek, Sublime Object 2nd ed., p18.
Ibid, p286.
"The full body without organs belongs to the realm of antiproduction; but yet another charac-teristic of the connective or productive synthesis is the fact that it couples production with antiproduction, with an element of antiproduction." - Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Capitalism & Schizophrenia; Anti-Oedipus - THE DESIRING-MACHINES, p8.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 'The Freudian Unconscious and ours' - THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION, p2
Ibid, p28.
Mark Fisher, Ghosts Of My Life, p22-23.
Which means that an act is bad when ever it directly decomposes a relation, whereas it is good when ever it directly compounds its relation with other relations." - Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p35., (footnote: [c]oncerning "direct" and "indirect," Ethics, IV, cor. and schol.)
"On the plane of consistency, a body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude" - Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Capitalism & Schizophrenia; A Thousand Plateaus, Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible., p260.
"The credit goes to Spinoza for calling attention to these two dimensions of the Body, and for having defined the plane of Nature as pure longitude and latitude. Latitude and longitude are the two elements of a cartography [...] [w]e reserve the name haecceity for it." - Ibid., p261.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar II, The Purloined Letter: Chapter XVI.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part I, section 43.
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Capitalism & Schizophrenia; A Thousand Plateaus, How do you make yourself a Body without Organs?
Cody Tatley, Creative Destruction; VIOLENCE & DANCING.
Cody Tatley, Maty Candelaria, Negative Map, What is Creative Destruction? And the Negative Mapping of Capital.
Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction.
C.F Deleuze and Guattari’s “How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs” from A Thousand Plateaus
See “Becoming and Dialectics in Batman and Avatar” by CodywithoutOrgans and I.
“The secret is elevated from a finite content to the infinite form of secrecy. This is the point at which the secret attains absolute imperceptibility, instead of being linked to a whole interplay of relative perceptions and reactions. We go from a content that is well defined, localized, and belongs to the past, to the a priori general form of a nonlocalizable something that has happened” (Deleuze and Guattari).
C.F. Marx, Capital: "Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language".
Also see Jack F’s essay on “Bergsonism, On Intuition - Part 2”: “A movement of intuition is always properly situated to the experience, and utilizes a double-fold nature to either move to broaden its horizon, or narrow it or tighten it, in its ends. In this way we are pushed beyond our own experience: through an extraordinary broadening out that forces us to think of a pure perception identical to the whole of matter, a pure memory identical to the totality of the past”.
Cf. Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek: ““Consequently, the essential feature of commodity fetishism does not consist of the famous replacement of men with things ('a relation between men assumes the form of a relation between things'); rather, it consists of a certain misrecognition which concerns the relation between a structured network and one of its elements: what is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between elements, appears as an immediate property of one of the elements, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other elements”.
C.f. Deleuze’s book Bergsonism.
C.f. Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy: “Finally, the most shameful moment came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication,
Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix. What Is Philosophy? (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) (p. 10). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition”