After our long critical discussion of knowledge in the zone of strata and power in the strategic zone, we have laid a good foundation for understanding Foucault’s diagram of the outside. On such a basis, we are going to embark on our textual analysis through the critical reading of “self” in the zone of subjectivation. Alice’s knowledge of her “self” in Wonderland or Looking-Glass Land is constantly challenged, and two major exciting but meanwhile anxious sources for her sense of giddiness are her size alterations and clashes of different logics or orders of knowledge in her adventures. Usually critics think it is Alice who falls asleep in her dreams, starts her adventures, and wakes up again back to the reality.
Nevertheless, using our particle model of virtual images encircling the actual and Foucault’s diagram of the outside, we are reading Wonderland and Looking-Glass stories as two virtual dreams encircle Alice’s actual world of identities and come to react upon it to open up her statements and visibilities of knowledge-being in her world of identities that stabilize her formal categories of knowledge. Therefore, what constitutes Alice’s subjectivity are first of all her pre-pubescent height (the “self-evident” visibility) and secondly her lessons (the statement), both of which irreducibly encounter the virtual images in her dreams.
Nevertheless, we need to figure out what roles the informal and non-stratified diagram of forces and the claws of the outside play in virtual dreams. We would say that in Alice’s Wonderland and Looking-Glass dreams, her subjectivity encounters the informal and non-stratified diagram of forces, of which her constant size alterations (unformed pure
matter), and underground and lateral “a-logics” (non-formalized pure functions) make holes in Alice’s subjectivity in reality, opening up things and words without these two forms ever coinciding. But the real role of the claws of the outside is that they constantly fold in to create a coextensive inside in the central chamber of her “self,” and help resist the impasse of the
“death” of Alice’s life. The strong clashes between her actual Knowledge-Being and (almost) virtual Power-Being give her sense of giddiness and bestow upon her life an ethical subject:
that is, a Self-Being of fold in a process of ever-new modes of subjectivation. Each folding-in means first a clash between Alice’s actual Knowledge-Being and (almost) virtual Power-Being, whose mutual grappling then contributes to a momentary solution for the problematic truth of Alice’s subject. Another lottery-drawing will soon come when the forces of man in Alice’s subjectivity enter into a new relation with other composing forces from the outside. As Deleuze notes, “man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides. . .” (F 89).
Thus, we can argue that Alice’s face from her world of identities is washed away by the “ebb and flow” of altering size and deviating logic in her virtual dreams. Interestingly, Alice’s pre-pubescent height in reality becomes a standard for measuring any deviations from it, but those continual size alterations after Alice ingests food and drinks turn back against this
“standard” measurement to un-standardize it. By the same token, what Alice sees (visions) and hears (auditions) in reality become a yardstick to measure “out-of-the-way” things in her fantastic adventures in her dreams, but those virtual images turn back against Alice’s world of identities that is bent on controlling her curious dreams.
On the basis of such hypothesis, we will begin our discussion on Alice’s constant size alterations and confusing clashes between different logics or orders of knowledge by looking into Carroll’s fantastic visual device: asterisks. We are under the impression that whenever Alice shuts up or opens out like a telescope, Carroll uses “asterisks” to emphasize her sense of giddiness in Wonderland. As Donald Gray notes, these asterisks are used to “emphasize the
147
abrupt changes characteristic of the strangely ordered experience of Wonderland” (11). In
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, size alterations (sometimes proportional while at other
times partial) begin to take place usually after Alice ingests food or drinks. For example, the first block of asterisks appears after Alice finishes the “Drink Me” bottle. She shuts up like a telescope and shrinks to “only ten inches high”: “the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden” (AW 11). However, without the golden key from the now pretty high table, she cannot possibly unlock the door. The second block of asterisks appears when Alice finishes the “Eat Me” cake. She opens out like the largest telescope and grows to “nine feet high” (AW 14). This time, Alice is tall enough to reach for the little golden key on the table, but too tall for the now too small door that leads to the garden. It is in this sense that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is the most telling when Alice’s height is perfect for the door but without the key, or Alice has the key to the door but without the right size. The third block of asterisks shows up after Alice breaks off a bit of both sides of a round mushroom, and nibbles a little of the right-hand bit and swallows a morsel of the left-hand bit to try out the effect it will have (AW 41-42). As a matter of fact, Alice’s size alterations take place on more than these three occasions with blocks of asterisks in Wonderland. In Looking-Glass Land, probably because of no obvious abrupt changes in size, there are fewer changes in Alice’s size and all happen without asterisks: Alice as a God like invisible player of chess (in relation to small chess pieces in her hands), Alice as a Pawn on the chessboard (in comparison with whom the Red Queen is half a head taller), and Alice waking up to her reality (the Red Queen is shaken to a doll-sized RQ and finally to Black Kitten).Table 2.3
Change of Alice’s Size