Worse Luck

1 1 Worse Luck Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova What does it mean to think an ethico-aesthetics, in the present moment? Felix Guattari's book Chaosmosis ( 1 995) suggests, in what is referred to in its subtitle as 'an ethico-aesthetic paradigm', the pre-eminence of a broad-ranging conception of aesthet­ ics for understanding the current conjunction in culture, philosophy, politics and life. We want to revisit the domain of this book, and especially the concept of the ethico­ aesthetic in two ways, first in relation to culture and cultural theory and second in relation to the present global conjuncture beyond those two and the different kinds of fatalism it breeds. As such, ethico-aesthetics is deeply linked to the question of phy­ sis, of nature and of ecology and needs to be thought through at multiple scales of immanence, including those of fundamental forces such as chance or heat, in terms of potential disaster, as well as those of the intimate, public, intellectual, habitual, political and aesthetic. Guattari's book, and his work in general, including its connections to relatively sub­ merged currents, such as the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and later cybernetics, in its 'epistemological' phase, suggests that aesthetics becomes a crucial compositional force in the contemporary world.! But further, in its conjunctive form with ethics, it provides a means of slipping a few tumbrels on the polymorphous lock of understanding of the kinds of forces and conditions that are operative today. Ethico-aesthetics thus, provides a means of recognizing the multifarious dynamics that must be taken into account and that are to be experimented with in the formation of politics and aesthetics as, in their mutant forms, they are currently found in the world. Not only do figurations of chance, theories of probability or risk evaluations acquire aesthetic tonalities but it is also through the lens of ethico-aesthetic critique and invention that such elements in the formation and propagation of modes of liVing, of being in crisis and of advancing towards a range ecological collapses, can be understood. Deleuze and Guattari write in the affirmative. They do so to write themselves out of numerous orthodoxies, to create a space inside the shuttered grimness of the decade following that of the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, and to recognize an ontology of being that is constituted by difference, multiplicity and the inevitability of the new. As such, to build an ethico-aesthetics also means to work in relation to other conditions of such ontology. Among these is the question of chance again, in its position within the wider understanding of the variability of causation in the conditions of a univocity

1 60 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze of being, and the way in which chance can in turn be reconfigured and interpreted as an ethico-aesthetic term by means of ways of living, imagining and experience. To write in the present moment of chance as an ethico-aesthetic means to write about the figurations of chance that run through history, formulated by fate, risk and luck. The notion of the ethico-aesthetic in Guattari works with an understanding of aes­ thetics that is prior to the separation of aesthetics from 'life'. That is to say that although it traverses fields in which aesthetics is explicitly refined and worked on in relatively laboratory-like conditions, such as art, its domain has no a priori institutional or con­ ceptual limit. This is of crucial interest because such an approach does not find itself wincing at the anticipation of capture or recuperation, or conversely relishing a saving purity, in the context of art but rather, recognizes such factors as part of a wider set of compositional dynamics which are to be navigated and manipulated, ignored or indeed gambled with or endured. One way into the aesthetics of chance and of economies of luck is through the discussion of the ideal game in Deleuze's Logic of Sense. A classical understanding of games, running through from Huizinga to contemporary studies of computer games entails that one enters the game willingly and that the game comprises 'the magic cir­ cle: a zone in which the norms of the outer world are suspended, in order to follow through the iterations of logic, skill and luck inherent to the game (Huizinga, 1 939; Salen and Zimmerman, 2003). Each game has its own economy of chance and an end point of triumph or loss and refers simply to the constrained range of activity within the circle, the iterations of cards, pieces or gameplay. One can immediately see the attraction of games and the special dispensation they can arrange from the norms of life by the honing and focusing of particular kinds of sensibility and experience they make possible. But what is so fascinating in many games is the staging of their eruption from the magic circle into an all-consuming mayhem of other forms of energy, such as the deep implication of violence within football, and in a game as serene and mad as chess, the multiple filiations of the cold war with world chess championships (mind games, accusations of conspiracy and manipulations, actual conspiracy and manipulation, vast tranches of propaganda on both sides and the effect on and conduct of all this by eminent players). More recently, the game is backlit by the shadow of the computational overlords finally forcing humans to accept their subordination to first Deep Thought and then Deep Blue. The tension of the game is stirred, often to an immense degree, by such things, but manages to maintain its gravitation towards the zone of play, governed at times by the addition of surplus rules or procedural agreements covering the staging of the game. The interplay between rule sets and their distributions of potentiality and with other kinds of drives generates scintillating, obliterating, compulsive tensions that inhabit and stretch the game. The games Alice experiences in Wonderland are of a different sort, no longer organ­ ized around hypotheses of chance but played out in an open indeterminate universe traversed and textured by momentary adherences, prognoses and gambles (2004: 58). Rules change, the players become pieces, animals become instruments, the universes of reference and action convulse from moment to moment in passages of cruelty and

Worse Luck 161 vivaciousness. The magic circle itself becomes subject to convulsion, fragmenting into an infinitely fissiparous cascade of throws of the dice, at each point of which the dice itself and the form of the throw mutate, staging the Hickering between Deleuze's Berg­ sonian interpretation of the figures of Chronos and Aion, or crudely put, of pulsed time, that of beats, repetitions and refrains, striations and that of the time of pure becoming, the one shearing off from the other in a dance of pulsions and becomings.2 We want to suggest here that the cultural figure of luck is a means of understanding and experiencing the tensions between these forms of time, but more importantly for our purposes here, the operations of chance. Luck and Fate are forms of hypotheses. But they are also a means of explaining or experiencing the differing ontological loads, the variable exposures and ability to act upon a condition of chance that people, cul­ tures, ecologies, moments, undergo. In order to get to this point, we want to sketch a relation to the understanding of chance in Deleuze and in Guattari. To tentatively start, one can suggest that chance manifests most strongly in the writing of the early Deleuze/ but is transfigured by an exuberant proliferation of kinds into chaos and generative multiplicity in later work. This current of chaos is readily apparent in Difference and Repetition but comes exemplarily to the fore in What Is Philosophy? By the time of A Thousand Plateaus, however, there is no chance as such to be read of because the proliferation of causes, quasi-causes, becomings, side-effects, creative processuality refines and multiplies the universe of dynamics articulated in the text.4 Among the fundamental ontological inevitability of chance then, A Thousand Plateaus proliferates multiple kinds of rela­ tion to it, many kinds of monsters, multiple kinds of causality, with greater or lesser ranges of relations to chance as it is supplemented by ideas of non-linearity. Neverthe­ less, the fundamental relation to chance is worth returning to in order to trace out the particular ethico-aesthetic trajectories and inHections it evokes. Deleuze's figuration of chance in Nietzsche and Philosophy is drawn through Zar­ athustra who places chance in relation to eternity through the roll of the dice of the gods upon the tables of the earth and the sky (Nietzsche, 2003). And in Logic of Sense, the two tables of sky and earth, have Aion5, the indefinite time of the event, as player of the game (Deleuze, 2004a, b: 63). Both tables act as the place of the roll of the dice and the place that it falls back, time as actual and as virtual and their interweaving through modalities of becoming. As in Carroll, with the dining table and the multipli­ cation table placed side by side, there is no symmetry between these two. These two figures of time, that of construction and that of a plenitude of indeterminacy, interact with the germinations of chance, generating reality, echoing the insight that, 'Ontol­ ogy is the dice throw, the chaosmos from which the cosmos emerges' ( 1 994: 1 99). Here there is a fundamental interplay (following Mallarme)6 between necessity and chance - the roll of the dice never finally decides things but invokes the conditions for more chance. Nietzsche's figuration of chance is always in dialogue with Darwin, a Darwinism not reduced to a system of laws but of indeterminate interactions between ontogenetic forces. To embrace chance is to put the dice in the mighty cooking pot of Zarathustra (Deleuze, 1 986: 28) and thus to affirm the whole of chance, its rolling and its settling, at once, a lesson, or recognition, that is both harsh and liberating, and not without the

162 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze condition of reconstitution by further roll of the dice. As Bifo says in his book on Guat­ tari, 'truth must be thought in singular terms, as a gamble' (Berardi, 2008: 53) but not simply one gamble, and without inherent rules, a condition ramified at each moment. In turn, the ethos of chance as one of innocence, the open, coupled with necessity, is itself born of and reconstitutes the open, and in turn is disturbed and perpetuated by the action of chance, of change upon change. The game, in Deleuze and Guattari, is to multiply the means of recognizing and experiencing the multiplicity of ways by which things occur. As such, the stake of a metaphysics is to become adequate to the world and consequently, such grand formulations as chance, will, causation, subcon­ scious, history, are never enough and must themselves be recognized as roll of the dice with all their concomitant hauntings and lingerings or misses of chance in which new deformations of chance may arise. A deformation of another kind, of relation to chance through the play of the game, is the context in which Jean Baudrillard addresses Deleuze's 'Tenth Series of the Ideal Game' in Logic of Sense. His account begins with an affirmation and intensification of the regime of the magic circle as a place of self-chosen fate that overcomes mere nature. Having a certain resonance with Deleuze's tender elaboration of masochism in Cold­ ness and Cruelty, this is an account that is pleasingly perverse ( 1 991 ) . Nevertheless, the grounds for this twist are of a rather different order, as Baudrillard maintains that the multiplicity of dynamics called upon by Deleuze and Guattari are, as a philosophy of desire, rather too readily subsumed within the regime of meaning, or ordering, a risk that, to him, is better handled by the cool and measured raptures of a dandy or the explicitly artificial adoption of ritual. Here, relying on a differentiation from the law - configured as nature - there is an emphasis on the game as a choice of arbitrary rules and orders, rather than the 'naturalness' of chance. The game is solely internal, adopted, chosen and must be played out, even, or especially, when deadly. The impor­ tance of such a measure being that, ' [b]y choosing the rule one is delivered from the law' (Baudrillard, 1 99 1 : 133). Deleuze, for Baudrillard, by being so gushingly affirmative of the univocity of chance and being, proposes a species of anti-morality, and in doing so valorizes the random, turning it into a good just as, in another manner, science also poses its own techno­ cratic morality, that of the Grand Neutral Aleatorium (a very literal example of which is discussed below) ( 199 1 : 143). Indeed, Deleuze cites Nietzsche echoing the sermon on the mount, 'let chance come to me, it is as innocent as a little child' (Deleuze, 1986: 26). Baudrillard suggests that to affirm chance in the way that is done in the Logic of Sense is to step aside slightly from it. This is a second-order function that, while still being in itself subject to chance, sets up a reflexive swerve within it, a little turbulence among the lines. The understanding of luck, the game, as operating within the tur­ bulence of chance, the introduction of a social, political understanding, redolent of a certain range of religiosity and erotics, that Baudrillard makes possible is compelling, but it is a relation to chance that is ultimately anthropocentric, even if euphorically tragic as such, in a way that Darwin, Nietzsche and Deleuze are not. That is to say, that within its domain of reference, it provides a highly compelling gambit. The question that a reading of Seductions therefore poses is to recognize or inhabit chance, despite the necessary differentiation that any act of recognition requires, is

163 Worse Luck also to encounter the limits of one's capacity of recognition, something celebrated most fully in Nietzsche in his writings on knowledge. Chance itself, through a mil­ lion throws of the dice, may produce monsters, fragments of logical or even ostensibly rational order.' The suggestion here is that these discussions offer the development of a sensual and political understanding of chance that establishes it as the grounding ontological condition for modes of being that may indeed be perversely synthetic but which more broadly constitute one of the scales of the ethico-aesthetic. One might say that such a line of enquiry replays something of the joke: Joseph has had a life of bad luck, an atrocious wife, a grinding job, asinine and repulsive children, he prays to God to give him some luck - the chance to win the lottery and resolve all his woes and lamentations. Nothing happens. He prays again this time, really hard. God, please, give me a chance for all my years of misery, help me win the lottery and have a little ease. Nothing happens. Life, or what passes for it, continues in its usual painful manner. Joseph tries praying for the third time. This time God answers, a little wearily. He says, 'Ok Joseph, I'll try and sort you out. But give me a little help will you. At least buy a lottery ticket . . . ' Chance must be prepared, but chance prepares itself. Given this, background layer, what does a sense of the ethico-aesthetic as genera­ tive of forms of savoir vivre, or of subjectival dynamics more broadly present? First of all, that there is some useful artfulness in Baudrillard's move towards an embrace of artificiality. Ultimately, given his emphasis on sensibility rather than ontological states, it seems they offer no real contradiction to the wild nature of the true game gestured towards in Logic of Sense, offering instead a gaming of such conditions. Baudrillard after all, perhaps, asks, what does one do in the context of ontological chance from the perspectival point of contemporary subjectival forces? This is a question worth developing, but additionally to expand, beyond the simple register of the human to encompass the ecological considerations which also run through such a scale. Here, we should attend to the warning of Clement Rosset in, The Logic of the Worse ( 1 979), who says that chance is impossible to think about, because to do so always poses reasons, some kind of categorical operation which betrays it by fixing it in an armature of understanding which delimits it as fundamental chance. Becoming open to chaos is also an encounter with the unknowable, misapprehension itself then adding to the mix. Chance thus adds to its ontogenetic force by the interplay of non-knowledge, gamings, ruses and modes of luck. Dark vitalism proliferates in forms of stupidity and cleverness, but also in the ecological interplay of forms of luck, as structuration of ontological loads. Certain humans, for example, form relations to luck by working the odds, displacing potential loss onto certain kinds of life: oil spills engendered by cost­ cutting; floods rendered devastating by inadequate preparation (Harvey, 2006). Within the background ontological chaos of chance, certain kinds of monstrous accretions of chance occur, monstrous in the teratological sense, driving evolution and the relentless occurrence of events. And within this recognition of chance as a basic ontological force, the generation of styles of the articulation of chance becomes a capacity in itself. Here, we want to suggest that relations to chance produce actuali­ zations of the world through a number of lines or modes of emergence with distinct ethico-aesthetics, such as risk, fate and luck. Risk appears as a form of chance that is .

1 64 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze prone to being managed, in a manner that is probabilistic, post-probabilistic, math­ ematical, out of control. Fate is a transcendental form of chance. Luck is a taming of chance, a domestication. Chance as risk Perhaps related back to God's exasperation at the player who refuses to begin the game, and to the question of how one might know that he is a good player rather than apathetic, Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, suggests that a bad player makes use of several throws of the dice by use of the spider's web of reason, mitigating and anticipating, warding off, fortune ( 1 986: 26-7). As the spider's web of reason extends, it also attempts to fold chance inwards and make it tractable. Indeed, by virtue of certain experiments, modes of unreason are also mobilized in a rationalized manner. Numerous instruments, devices and technical infrastructures are elaborated to man­ age such staging.8 An endearing example of such is Galton's Board, a set of pegs or nails set into a board like a bagatelle or pachinko game except with evenly spaced pegs following the dimensions of a Gaussian curve, setting out a distribution of chance with a triangular­ shaped profile. Balls are dropped onto the board, each time they hit a peg they have, given a further layer of probability given by variation in material properties (Kozlov and Mitrofanova, 2002: 43 1-9) an equal chance of falling to either side. Given a series of such a process of falling, striking and falling again, the balls have a greater likelihood of falling in the centre of the distribution range of the board, with those falling on the outer edges of the range being much more rare. Here we have a conflation of both constructivist notions of chance, in that they are produced by specific configuration of chance as an idea in mathematical terms - that of a binomial distribution - and in those produced in the idiosyncrasies of its realization in the form of a specific instance, with, also, an interrelation with chance as a pure force. This artefact is a means of not only entering into and inhabiting chance but also constructing it, most importantly, through an axiomatic object. It suggests one mode of an ethico-aesthetic of relation to chance, enunciated through a mathematical model, a fairly reduced one to be sure, but, in the rattle and clatter of its operation, one that vibrates rather thrillingly.9 As a device with a variable history of ending up in unsuspected places, the Galton's Board plugs reason into the unreason through its use in certain long-lived experi­ ments in the use of psychic powers by the US military during the cold war. Alleged psychics were paid, over several decades to sit on a sofa in front of a large glassed board, watching polystyrene balls bounce to the bottom, the silence and slowness of the spheres contributing time and peace towards their efforts to predict the point at which the balls would end their fall. The point of such attempts at prediction being the entertainment of the possibility that marginally psychic powers might be turned to strategic use. The progress of such a fall is something that operates not only at the level of its mathematical contrivance, as an ideational and axiomatic force, but also in the

Worse Luck 165 specificity of its actual occurrence. As such it brings into a state of flickering resolu­ tion the delineation of the relation between what Logic of Sense articulates as the event which produces the problematic that it is then turned into (2004: 54). History, becom­ ing, produces events that are apprehended, interpreted and made redundant as prob­ lematics. Each fall is unique, but apprehended by the problematic, the mechanism, in and of which it manifests as such. The different modalities of time intersect here, but we can also say that their interrelation is structured by preformation, not only by the endless rolling back and forward of the dice but also by the tables or grid of pegs upon which it falls. And such action is integrated in a multi-scalar way with numerous forms of prehension not the least of which, in carrying through the relation of reason and unreason, is in the reversals and enhancements of fortune promised by modelling ( Lane et al., 20 1 1 ), risk management (Power, 2007), the biopolitical force of statistics ( Hacking, 1 990; Foucault, 2007) or probabilistic methods to mark out, summarize and shape chance. Just as Galton's Board provides one route into the understanding and shaping of chance, so there are numerous others, each with their own range of quali­ ties and dynamics, moving across instantiations, and each as events opening up new roles of the dice, and instigating the possibility of new problematizations. Such prob­ lematizations may fail to cohere, haunt chances but never resolve them, or drive new unfoldings of the possible without ever being manifest as more than an unrealized iteration of chance. Here, while Galton's Board has similarities to the ideal state form of hierarchy (with the simple but telling, though perhaps more ostensible, difference of a uniform distribution, with all options of traversal taken simultaneously) provided with 'a system of vertical communications - via the region, the district and the kolkhoz committee' ( Platonov, 1 999: 1 58), each of these transmissions may end in conditions of vagueness or irresolution, tighten into full stops. Given the perfection of the board, there is not enough happening to make it truly complex. It is left to the matter of dreams to allow the ball to leap sideways and backwards, or thicken or sleight into new kinds of machining of chance. Actions on randomness produced by its theorization are manifold; King Oleg sends his stallion away in order to evade the fate set in play by the prophecy of the horse causing his death, only to be bitten by a snake on encounter with its skeleton.1o Robert K. Merton, in describing how, for instance, fears of bankruptcy threaten to produce bankruptcy, introduces the concept of the 'self fulfilling prophecy' (Merton, 1 968). The first is a form of fate, the navigation and construction of which we turn to below, the second a form of structural delirium engendered by contemporary modes of luck gone recursive by their anticipation. Luck here becomes a means of traversing chance, but in a way that is entangled with its problematization, its equal entanglement in ordering and prehension. In a famous paper on investments, Cowles and Herbert Jones showed that the value of stocks tended to go in sequences, rather than in reversals. That is, if they were announced to be going up, they would be more likely to continue going up, and down if down (Cowles and Jones, 1937; Mackenzie, 2006). They warn, however, that forecasting based on this apparent effect, 'Could not be employed by speculators with any assur­ ance of consistent or large profits' (Cowles and Jones, 1 937: 294).

1 66 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze Actions of the observer, mimesis, repetition, anticipation, precaution, whether automated or not, all striate and churn chance, and here chance also mediates between the rule and the law in processes of subjectivation that, along with those in financial judgement and other fields, move across from micro to macro scales, as patterns that bring together, dice, tables, horses fields, banks, economic manias and collapses, gold rushes and stagnations, all on a roll. As William Burroughs, in a phrase reminiscent of the probability theory of Thomas Bayes,ll says, 'Now every child knows there is one law of gambling: winning and losing come in streaks. Plunge when you win, fold when you lose' (Burroughs, 1 959: 1 07). Luck, here, is an ethos, a savoir vivre, but one that also needs to be formulated in terms of a dark vitalist plunge into loss if it is to elicit some sense from the relations between gambles, as entry points into chaos. Here there is a reintroduction of the relation between law and the game but not so cleanly framed as in the measures taken as risk management, a structuration of the abyss. Here it is useful to recognize the inSight of Franco Berardi's work on the modes of alienation that cut through and constitute the modern soul, the shameful bouts of depression that are constitutive of and subvent the contemporary economy (Berardi, 2009). Panic and depression are the psychic states, alongside 'irrational exuberance' that are among those that struggle to become adequate to the formation of stock markets and economies, a wretchedness of the soul that is itself always subject to another bout of arbitrage and hedging, like the habit of the alcoholic, for whom, as Deleuze tells it via 'Under the Volcano's' mescal-suffused Consul, the next glass is always the last. Scaled up, as Susan George notes, countries reduced to the role of producers of primary goods, held in permanent structural debt, to be paid back with the yields of deforestation, are looped into a system of obligation and pillage (George, 1 988). As an ecological resource, chance itself is deleted in such contexts. Chance and fate In terms of the ethico-aesthetic structuration and experience of chance, a mode that implies a radicality of ontogenetic propulsion is the ancient one of fate. Outside of any necessarily anthropological register, fate is invoked both as a method and explanation to stage the unfolding of chance within an immediate displacement, a substitution of one state or process by another, an annihilation, an eternal change. The explica­ tory power of fate makes shocking neighbours of otherwise unrelated phenomena: the gesture of an SS officer choOSing the next victim and the stupid gratuity of winning a lottery. An ethico-aesthetic of fate should involve a panoply of such instruments. Here, not only Gods throw dice, but humans draw lots. Drawing a lot, a conditional object endowed with the capacity to make a categorical judgement, yes or no, black or white, life or death, makes, indeed usurps, some of the ontogenetic and phylogenetic mechan­ ics (a spermatozoid entering an egg destines all of the other sperm cells to mortifica­ tion), while obscuring more complex, multiple lines of actualization. Drawing lots can exist in the form of complex systems, but here a lot itself is dispersed into the process of becoming, an equilibrium and disequilibrium of a catastrophe.

Worse Luck 167 The Chernobyl explosion can be seen as producing such a chain reaction of order out of chaos out of order out of chaos; an order of catastrophe, an order of the nuclear plant, an order of the current thriving of biodiversity in Chernobyl region, where such rare species as the lynx can be found due to the removal of the anthropogenic factor, an order of mutation, an order of thyroid gland cancer, leukaemia in children, an order of the beta-decay of Pu-241 producing an ever-growing level of Am-241 , which will only reach its maximum in the second half of the twenty-first century; where all order is a fluctuation in chaos. Fate can be 'chosen: or produced, too, when the only available lot is drawn. Hero­ ism is a form of response to fate, and its embrace, a propUlsion of fate itself. Whereas the Athenian democracy of the fifth century BC relied on sortition, a process in which political positions were filled by a selection process decided by black and white beans being drawn along the candidates' names (James, 1 956), contemporarily official forms of throwing oneself into fate are circumscribed by a very few delineated spaces and procedures, such as horse races or lotteries. Here the lottery is a very public form, the degeneration of an abstract form or decision-making process into banal fate is celebrated as a prize to the commoner, a divine throw of the dice disrupting the mun­ dane to produce a tabloid event, whereas more complex alterations of fate are hid­ den in dispersed networks of incidents, connections, processes, objects and decisions. Ecological disasters such as oil spills are primary examples here: fateful, they are in question, out of sight; governed by network logic, they have every and no clear point of entry, no black and white beans, no lots to draw. Ironically, human agency is aban­ doned here. Luck as homey In his meditation on globalization and violence, Arjun Appadurai recognizes uncer­ tainty and incompleteness as a driving force in the generation of ethnic and national certainties, things to hold on to in the context of globalization (Appadurai, 2006: 9). The distribution of certainty and uncertainty across the globe is a crucial means of understanding the composition of the world. Certainty and uncertainty also have dif­ ferent kinds of valence and meaning in different locations for different people, ecolo­ gies and societies at different times. The distribution of certainty is not only a crucial political question but also a thoroughly experiential one. At the level of the individual, it is often experienced as luck, a curse, a run of good fortune, the luck of being born into a non-starving family or that of an inability to find water. Things move from risk to luck and back again, and in so doing they change the ontological status. A stroke of luck, whether good or bad, is a domestic form of chance conjoining the scales of oikos with ecology. As an element in the ecology of actors, this scale is a combination that measures risk and chance, a lucky event is a conceptualiza­ tion, a form of understanding, but one that is also manifest as essentially a belief, a myth, as something subject to magic. Luck, chance and risk are all models that link the divinatory to the computational each having a history of relation to sorcery.12 As a mythical force, luck depends on belief, even if it is the faulty logic of a belief in the

1 68 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze disbelief in the belief in which there is belief: 'Certainly, I don't believe that a horseshoe brings luck, but I heard that it brings luck even to those that don't believe in it'. Luck is a means of explaining chance in advance of its occurrence or after it has taken place, in this it mimics the virtual of aion. But it is also a form of staging multiple arrangements within which chance can be played; it is a form of energetic and ignorant living through the throw of the dice, a r hythmanalysis of the self working on the beats of chronos. With insight, empathy and effort, the need for luck as a scarce resource can be diminished; for example, the need for the luck of surviving a landmine explo­ sion is removed by an effective ban on landmines, the application of the precautionary principle. Those for whom reliance on luck is as good as any other measure available, because no other measures are available, are complex figures: accursed, holy, invisible, in some cases and also repositories, turning points and improvised devices for bearing and yielding ontological loads. To make your home in bad luck takes some doing. But such luck in turn, may also be subject to kinds of master planning. Luck is found in correlation with technical instruments, precision, political measurements: whether one falls in or out of a massacre of the innocents may rely on possessing docu­ ments (a related regulatory measure to the luck of the landmine treaty) or by how one's measurements stand up to a rule marked in centimetres. High or low interest rates are a form in which luck is personalized, a chance assessment in the economy of debt. Per­ sonalized luck may be disastrous for the ecology; and its instrumentalization, as with risk, brings it into certain ranges of dependency on the distribution of political will. Luck is not nice. Luck is a factor, in its domestic mode often taking the role of a document, or a rule and adherence to it, good luck is always fitted with a downwards spiral en suite and play with or against it is never exhausted, unless of course, it ends. Luck can be connected to a bifurcation imposed by choice that can itself be enacted by chance or explained by luck in the dynamic network of chance, where choice is an interruption, the participation of agents of a different order and kind. Luck is an anti-reason, a superstition that has its own logic, a kind of vaccinatory ruse by which the unreason of chance becomes recursive. Luck is the taming of chance that is replayed in order to enter into a harmony with larger networks. It is an unjust form of harmony to be found within the unreason of life, or rather than a harmony, a kind of non-correspondence between things, an unsympathetic magic. It is not quite the case that forms of luck pertaining to non-human animals are always bad, simply that with humans in a place to observe them it may seem likely that they are so. What bad luck for a badger to cross the road, carelessly leaving itself with a spilled belly as a monument to the unused chance for a driver to release the accelerator pedal. A good harvest makes a lucky year with plentiful food allowing for the survival of two chicks rather than one, thus saving the life of the second Sibling, normally sac­ rificed under harsher conditions (Forbes, 2007). What a good harvest that 27 million chickens are killed every day in the United States and how easy it is to palpate a nerv­ ous twitch of outrage like the lazy artist installing the instant scandal of an animal's corpse. Such contexts in turn, end as nearly nothing - the breakdown of matter on asphalt, or the chance for new viruses, such as HSN 1 , to breed given the unspeakably good conditions for such in the well-ordered mechanism of the battery farm. Leaving nothing to chance prompts chance itself to evolve.

Worse Luck 169 The figure of the dice, like that of Galton's board or the system oflots is too granular at times to encompass chance rather than produce it. Zarathustra, we remember, threw his dice into the cooking pot in order to fuse its fragmentary parts, rather than simply affirm its articulation in a branching system. Chance is more flowing, coiled and mul­ tivalent, as much as it is also abrupt and fatal or recursive. There is something truthful captured in Rosset's observation that to describe chance is to ruin it. But this is in a sense to see chance as solely naturaL While we need a non-anthropocentric sense of chance in order to recognize its ecological dimensions, the assertion of a dark vitalism is in a sense to understand the nature of chance as it intersects with the kinds of chance rendered as formalisms and blindnesses and structures generated by humans, and in turn by further structurations, including descriptors, of chance. This is something dis­ tinct from the games that Baudrillard describes, (in which luck is a means of making sense of chance, a way of making chance tailored to you, the scalar level at which it is experienced) but speaks of other kinds of systematics, economies and abstract instru­ ments of luck with their varying forms of concretization and problematic, and how they in turn feedback into our capacities, the rolling again of the dice. Ascription of an event to causation by Luck is a way of aVOiding attentiveness, of shrugging off analysis. Luck is a means of taming chance, making it safe. As an ethico-aesthetic approach, it is a refashioning of chance to make sense. This may not be appropriate. This is the risk of its domestication. Nevertheless, luck, while being a trivialized form of determinism, is a forming of the charming of chance and assumes an ethico-aesthetic dimension to the way it is lived and endured or gamed. The ontological condition of chance is necessarily ironic, in that things play by multiple layers of interlocking, fraying law, interpreted in turn as the scalar prolifera­ tion of the irony of problematics and humour, the hypnotic stupidity of the depths of possibility. Here we can wager the assertion that it is also possible to invent chance - for chance to turn upon chance and to create the unprecedented. Luck, fate and risk are all forms of such invention, among others, as well as declensions from it. In the present conjunc­ tion we are faced with the challenge of the means of inventing chance, not taming it. But, worse luck, we have yet to gather a vocabulary of sufficient harshness to attend to the deletions of chance that our species also seems capable of provoking nor one yet adequate to knowingly affirm them. Notes See, for the development of a related argument, Maurizio Lazzarato, 'The Aesthetic Paradigm: in, Simon O'Sullivan and Stephen Zepke eds, Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, Continuum, London, 2008. 2 A critical assessment of the apparent roots of these concepts in Stoic thought is made by John Sellars, 'Aion and Chronos: Deleuze and the Stoic theory of time; Collapse vol. 3, pp. 1 77-205. See also, John Sellars, Stoicism, Acumen, Durham, 2006. See, for a discussion of Chronos and Aion, Richard Pinhas and Gilles Deleuze, http:// www. webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle = 5&groupe=Anti+ Oedipe+ et+ Mille + Plateaux&langue= 2.

1 70 Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze 3 In Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense, and in Nietzsche and Philosophy. 4 Indeed, coupling a re-reading of the text with the powerful analytical techniques of the digital humanities (press 'find' in an e-book) allow us to note that in A Thousand Plateaus there is mention of chance only in the inverse (' it is not by chance that') . 5 Here a s another form of Osiris-Dionysis. 6 In the well-known work, 'A throw of the dice will never abolish chance� 7 This is the kind of mad affirmation found in Bataille's introduction to his book on Nietzsche, part of the somme atheologique, of the war years and written in the frenzied closing months of 1 944. 8 Much of Naseem Nicholas Taleb's, Black Swan, the impact of the highly improbable, Penguin London, 2007, is concerned with such matters. 9 There is more than a familial relation to Charles Darwin's understanding of chance and that of Galton's distribution; indeed in Downe House an exhibit showing a variant of the board exemplifies a simplified version of Darwin's writings on pigeon breeding, selection by characteristics. lO See, Alexander P ushkin, 'The Song of the Wise Oleg; in Anthology of Russian Literature from the Earliest Period to the Present Time: volume two, the nineteenth century, Leo Wiener, ed., Benjamin Blom, New York, 1 967. 1 1 Bunhill Fields, a non -conformist graveyard to the east of central London, filled largely in the eighteenth century, contains the graves of both Bayes and William Blake. The latter, in Songs of Innocence and Experience, a theorist and proponent of an ethos of chance, the potential filiations of which themselves make for an intriguing set of possibilities. 12 For a discussion of the relation between computation and sorcery, see Florian Cramer, Words Made Flesh, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, 2005. References Appadurai, A. (2006), Fear of Small Numbers. Durham: Duke University Press. Baudrillard, J. ( 1 99 1 ) , Seduction. New York: St. Martin's Press. Berardi, F. (2008), Felix (translated by G. Mecchia and C. J. Stivale) . London: Palgrave Macmillan. -. (2009), The Soul at Work,from Alienation to Autonomy ( translated by F. Cadel and G. Mechia). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) . Burroughs, W. ( 1 959), Naked Lunch. London: Paladin. Cowles, A. and Jones, H. E. ( 1 937), 'Some a posteriori probabilities in stock market action', Econometrica, S, 280-94. Cramer, F. ( 1 986), Nietzsche and Philosophy (translated by H. Tomlinson). London: Continuum. -. ( 1 99 1 ) , Coldness and Cruelty (translated by J. McNeil). New York: Zone Books. -. (2004a), Logic of Sense. London: Continuum. -. (2004b), Difference and Repetition ( translated by P. Patton). London: Athlone. -. (2005), Words Made Flesh. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute. Forbes, S. (2007), A Natural History of Families. P rinceton: Princeton University Press. Foucault, M. (2007), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1 978-79 (edited by M. Senellart and translated by G. Burchell). London: Palgrave Macmillan. George, S. ( 1 988), A Fate Worse than Debt. London: Pelican.

Worse Luck 171 Gu�tt�ri, E ( 1 995), Chaosmosis, a n Ethico-Aesthetic Pa ra digm (translated b y P. B�ins �nd J. Pefanis ) . Sydney: Power Public�tions. Hacking, 1. ( I 990), The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, D. (2006), Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. London: Verso. Huizinga, J. ( I 939), Homo Ludens, a Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press. Jam es, c. L. R. ( 1 956), 'Every cook can govern: A study of democracy in ancient Greece, its meaning for today: Correspondence, 2, ( 1 2). [online] Available at http://www.marx­ ists.orgl archiveljames-elrIworksl 1 956/061 every-cook.htm. Kozlov, V. V. and Mitrofanova, M. Y. (2002) , 'Galton board', Regular Chaotic Dynamics, 8, 431 -9. Lane, S. N., Landstrom, C. and Whatmore, S. J. (201 1 ) , 'Imagining flood futures, risk assessment and management in practice' Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369, ( 1 942) , 784-1806. Lazzarato, M. (2008), 'The aesthetic paradigm', in, S. O'Sullivan and S. Zepke (eds), Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New. London: Continuum. Mackenzie, D. (2006), An Engine, not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Merton, R. K. ( 1 968) , Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Nietzsche, F. (2003), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (translated by R. J. Hollingdale). London: Penguin. Platonov, A. ( 1 999), 'Fourteen Little Red Huts: in The Portable Platonov (translated by R. Chandler). Moscow and Birmingham: Glas. Power, M. (2007), Organized Uncertainty: Designing a World of Risk Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pushkin, A. ( 1 967), 'The Song of the Wise Oleg: in L. Wiener (eds), Anthology of Russian Literature from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. New York: B. Blom. Rosset, C. ( 1 979), La Logique de Pire: Elements pour un Philosophie Tragique. Paris: Presses Universitaire de France. Salen, K. and Zimmerman, E. (2003), The Rules of Play. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Sellars, J. (2006), Stoicism. Durham: Acumen. Taleb, N. N. (2007), Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. London: Penguin.