by H. P. Lovecraft If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelfpaper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s research. I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend had wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp. Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows: MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow. One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea. Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of Strange Experience. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to Follow. The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N.Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34◦ 210, W. Longitude 152◦ 170 with one living and one dead man aboard. The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern. This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the twomasted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49◦ 510 W. Longitude 128◦ 340, encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting. Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto. This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle? March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line— the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23rd the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this— and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul. That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address. After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what Old Castro had told Legrasse about the Great Ones; “They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.” Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reembarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more. He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution. I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton. Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air. Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47◦ 90, W. Longitude 126◦ 430 come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough! I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description. Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality. Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity. Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away. It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable. Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset. The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness. Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight. Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and ˚Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water. Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously. But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squidhead with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam. That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus. Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories. That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives. Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye. The Call of Cthulhu/H. P. Lovecraft/Chapter 3: The Madness from the Sea
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Axiom I. The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus. Proposition I. This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama, and games. Georges Dumézil, in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology, has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the magician-king and the jurist-priest. Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer. Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposition term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violent and the calm, the quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated, the “bond” and the “pact,” etc. But their opposition is only relative; they function as a pair, in alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or constituted in themselves a sovereign unity. “At once antithetical and complementary, necessary to one another and consequently without hostility, lacking a mythology of conflict: a specification on any one level automatically calls forth a homologous specification on another. The two together exhaust the field of the function.” They are the principal elements of a State apparatus that proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions, and forms a milieu of interiority. It is a double articulation that makes the State apparatus into a stratum. It will be noted that war is not contained within this apparatus. Either the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war— either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, “seizes” and “binds,” preventing all combat—or, the State acquires an army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of a military function. As for the war machine in itself, it seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere. Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna no less than to Mitral. He can no more be reduced to one or the other than he can constitute a third of their kind. Rather, he is like a pure and immeasurable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis. He unties the bond just as he betrays the pact. He brings a furor to bear against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus. He bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incomprehensible cruelty at times, but at others of unequaled pity as well (because he unties bonds...). He bears witness, above all, to other relations with women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between “states”: a veritable becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies outside dualities of terms as well as correspondences between relations. In every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus. Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function. “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomas of Go against the State of chess, nomas against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere...). Another justice, another movement, another space-time. “They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext...” “In some way that is incomprehensible they have pushed right into the capital. At any rate, here they are; it seems that every morning there are more of them.” Luc de Heusch analyzes a Bantu myth that leads us to the same schema: Nkongolo, an indigenous emperor and administrator of public works, a man of the public and a man of the police, gives his half-sisters to the hunter Mbidi, who assists him and then leaves. Mbidi’s son, a man of secrecy, joins up with his father, only to return from the outside with that inconceivable thing, an army. He kills Nkongolo and proceeds to build a new State. “Between” the magical-despotic State and the juridical State containing a military institution, we see the flash of the war machine, arriving from without. From the standpoint of the State, the originality of the man of war, his eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity, deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin. Dumézil analyzes the three “sins” of the warrior in the Indo-European tradition: against the king, against the priest, against the laws originating in the State (for example, a sexual transgression that compromises the distribution of men and women, or even a betrayal of the laws of war as instituted by the State). The warrior is in the position of betraying everything, including the function of the military, or of understanding nothing. It happens that historians, both bourgeois and Soviet, will follow this negative tradition and explain how Genghis Khan understood nothing: he “didn’t understand” the phenomenon of the city. An easy thing to say. The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking. What complicates everything is that this extrinsic power of the war machine tends, under certain circumstances, to become confused with one of the two heads of the State apparatus. Sometimes it is confused with the magic violence of the State, at other times with the State’s military institution. For instance, the war machine invents speed and secrecy; but there is all the same a certain speed and a certain secrecy that pertain to the State, relatively, secondarily. So there is a great danger of identifying the structural relation between the two poles of political sovereignty, and the dynamic interrelation of these two poles, with the power of war. Dumézil cites the lineage of the Roman kings: there is a Romulus-Numa relation that recurs throughout a series, with variants and an alternation between these two types of equally legitimate rulers; but there is also a relation with an “evil king,” Tullus Hostilius, Tarquinius Superbus, an upsurge of the warrior as a disquieting and illegitimate character.8 Shakespeare’s kings could also be invoked: even violence, murders, and perversion do not prevent the State lineage from producing “good” kings; but a disturbing character like Richard III slips in, announcing from the outset his intention to reinvent a war machine and impose its line (deformed, treacherous and traitorous, he claims a “secret close intent” totally different from the conquest of State power, and another --an other—relation with women). In short, whenever the irruption of war power is confused with the line of State domination, everything gets muddled; the war machine can then be understood only through the categories of the negative, since nothing is left that remains outside the State. But, returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine is seen to be of another species, of another nature, of another origin. One would have to say that it is located between the two heads of the State, between the two articulations, and that it is necessary in order to pass from one to the other. But “between” the two, in that instant, even ephemeral, if only a flash, it proclaims its own irreducibility. The State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will continually cause it problems. This explains the mistrust States have toward their military institutions, in that the military institution inherits an extrinsic war machine. Karl von Clausewitz has a general sense of this situation when he treats the flow of absolute war as an Idea that States partially appropriate according to their political needs, and in relation to which they are more or less good “conductors.” Trapped between the two poles of political sovereignty, the man of war seems outmoded, condemned, without a future, reduced to his own fury, which he turns against himself. The descendants of Hercules, Achilles, then Ajax, have enough strength left to proclaim their independence from Agamemnon, a man of the old State. But they are powerless when it comes to Ulysses, a man of the nascent modern State, the first man of the modern State. And it is Ulysses who inherits Achilles’ arms, only to convert them to other uses, submitting them to the laws of the State— not Ajax, who is condemned by the goddess he defied and against whom he sinned. No one has portrayed the situation of the man of war, at once eccentric and condemned, better than Kleist. In Penthesilea, Achilles is already separated from his power: the war machine has passed over to the Amazons, a Stateless woman-people whose justice, religion, and loves are organized uniquely in a war mode. Descendants of the Scythians, the Amazons spring forth like lightning, “between” the two States, the Greek and the Trojan. They sweep away everything in their path. Achilles is brought before his double, Penthesilea. And in his ambiguous struggle, Achilles is unable to prevent himself from marrying the war machine, or from loving Penthesilea, and thus from betraying Agamemnon and Ulysses at the same time. Nevertheless, he already belongs enough to the Greek State that Penthesilea, for her part, cannot enter the passional relation of war with him without herself betraying the collective law of her people, the law of the pack that prohibits “choosing” the enemy and entering into one-to-one relationships or binary distinctions. Throughout his work, Kleist celebrates the war machine, setting it against the State apparatus in a struggle that is lost from the start. Doubtless Arminius heralds a Germanic war machine that breaks with the imperial order of alliances and armies, and stands forever opposed to the Roman State. But the Prince of Homburg lives only in a dream and stands condemned for having reached victory in disobedience of the law of the State. As for Kohlhaas, his war machine can no longer be anything more than banditry. Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State triumphs to be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disciplined, military organ of the State apparatus, or to turn against itself to become a double suicide machine for a solitary man and a solitary woman? Goethe and Hegel, State thinkers both, see Kleist as a monster, and Kleist has lost from the start. Why is it, then, that the most uncanny modernity lies with him? It is because the elements of his work are secrecy, speed and affect.” And in Kleist the secret is no longer a content held within a form of interiority; rather, it becomes a form, identified with the form of exteriority that is always external to itself. Similarly, feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a “subject,” to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects and these affects are so many instances of the becoming-woman, the becoming-animal of the warrior (the bear, she-dogs). Affects transpierce the body like arrows, they are weapons of war. The deterritorialization velocity of affect. Even dreams (Homburg’s, Pentheselea’s) are externalized, by a system of relays and plug-ins, extrinsic linkages belonging to the war machine. Broken rings. This element of exteriority—which dominates everything, which Kleist invents in literature, which he is the first to invent—will give time a new rhythm: an endless succession of catatonic episodes or fainting spells, and flashes or rushes. Catatonia is- “This affect is too strong for me,” and a flash is: “The power of this affect sweeps me away,” so that the Self (Moi) is now nothing more than a character whose actions and emotions are desubjectified, perhaps even to the point of death. Such is Kleist’s personal formula: a succession of nights of madness and catatonic freezes in which no subjective interiority remains There is much of the East in Kleist: the Japanese fighter, interminably still who then makes a move too quick to see. The Go player. Many things in modern art come from Kleist. Goethe and Hegel are old men next to Kleist. Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State? Is the war machine already overtaken, condemned, appropriated as part of the same process whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorphosis, affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself? whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorphosis, affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself? Originally appearing in A Thousand Plateaus Translated by Brian Massumi
by Anthony Enns
In January 1953, William S. Burroughs traveled to South America in search of yagé, a drug he hoped would allow him to establish a telepathic link with the native tribes. He documented this trip in a series of letters to Allen Ginsberg which he wrote on typewriters rented by the hour in Bogotà and Lima and which he eventually published as a book ten years later. Critics have interpreted this period as a seminal point in Burroughs’s career, largely due to the fact that the transcriptions of his drug experiences became the starting point for Naked Lunch. However, this experience also seems significant because it reveals Burroughs’s desire to achieve a primitive, pre-literate state—a goal which remained central to his work, but which later manifested in his manipulations of media technologies. Burroughs’s work thus offers a perfect illustration of Marshall McLuhan’s claim that the electric age would effect a return to tribal ways of thinking: ‘[S]ince the telegraph and the radio, the globe has contracted, spatially, into a single large village. Tribalism is our only resource since the electro-magnetic discovery’ (1962:219). And Burroughs’s rented typewriters seem to stand somewhere between these two worlds, as he used them to translate his primitive/mythic experiences into a printed book, a commodity more appropriate to Western culture and the civilized world of ‘typographic man’.
In this chapter, I argue that the representations of writing machines in Burroughs’s work, as well as his manipulations of writing machines in his working methods, demonstrate the effects of the electric media environment on subjectivity, as well as its broader impact on the national and global level. I further argue that McLuhan’s theories provide an ideal context for understanding the relationship between media, subjectivity, and globalization in Burroughs’s work, because they explain how the impact of the electric media environment on human consciousness is inherently linked to a wider array of social processes whose effects can be witnessed on both mental and geopolitical states. McLuhan and Burroughs were also contemporaries, and there is ample evidence that they drew ideas from one another’s work. McLuhan, for example, was the first critic to note that Burroughs’s novels effectively replicate the experience of the electric media environment (1964a:517), and he explicitly borrowed the term ‘mosaic’ from Naked Lunch to describe the format of television programming (1964b:204). In the original, unpublished version of The Third Mind, which Burroughs and Brion Gysin assembled from 1964 to 1965, Burroughs also included a paragraph from McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, which claimed that electric media technologies were producing new mental states by releasing the civilized world from the visual emphasis of print (McLuhan 1962:183). However, despite the fact that Burroughs was clearly influenced by McLuhan, he also distanced himself from the overt optimism of McLuhan’s ‘global village’, thus avoiding the problem of technological determinism. In other words, rather than claiming that the electric media environment would automatically improve the human condition by enabling a greater degree of involvement and democracy, Burroughs repeatedly emphasized that this possibility was dependent on our ability to take control of the media. Burroughs’s representations and manipulations of writing machines thus prefigure much of the contemporary work concerning the potential uses of the Internet and the worldwide web as either corporate environments or new tools of democracy.
WRITING MACHINES AND THE ELECTRIC MEDIA ENVIRONMENT
Although several critics have already discussed Burroughs’s work in terms of the impact of media on subjectivity, these discussions generally focus on electric media technologies such as sound and film recording, and they often overlook mechanical machines like the typewriter. In her book How We Became Posthuman, for example, N. Katherine Hayles examines the impact of media on subjectivity in The Ticket that Exploded through Burroughs’s use of sound recording technology. She argues that Burroughs’s novel represents the tape recorder as a metaphor for the human body, which has been programmed with linguistic ‘pre-recordings’ that ‘function as parasites ready to take over the organism’ (1999:211). She also points out that the tape recorder subverts the disciplinary control of language by externalizing the mind’s interior monologue, ‘recording it on tape and subjecting the recording to various manipulations’, or by producing new words ‘made by the machine itself’ (1999:211). These manipulations reveal the ways in which electric media are capable of generating texts without the mediation of consciousness, thus enabling ‘new kinds of subjectivities’ (1999:217). Hayles therefore suggests that information technologies, for Burroughs, represent the threat of language to control and mechanize the body; at the same time, they can be employed as potential tools for subverting those same disciplinary forces.
Hayles’s conclusions could be amplified, however, by also examining Burroughs’s use of writing machines, which play a larger role in his work and in his working method. Hayles notes, for example, that Burroughs performed some of the tape recorder experiments he describes in The Ticket that Exploded, such as his attempts to externalize his sub-vocal speech or his experiments with ‘inching tape’, which are collected in the album Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, but even she admits that ‘paradoxically, I found the recording less forceful as a demonstration of Burroughs’s theories than his writing’ because ‘the aurality of his prose elicits a greater response than the machine productions it describes and instantiates’ (1999:216). This paradox is resolved, however, if one considers the typewriter as Burroughs’s primary tool for manipulating and subverting the parasitical ‘word’, and thus as the essential prototype for many of his theoretical media interventions. Throughout his life, Burroughs repeatedly emphasized that he was dependent on the typewriter and was incapable of writing without one: ‘I can hardly [write] with the old hand’ (Bockris 1981:1). Burroughs once attempted to use a tape recorder for composition, but this experiment proved to be a failure: ‘In the first place, talking and writing are quite different. So far as writing goes I do need a typewriter. I have to write it down and see it rather than talk it’ (Bockris 1981:6). When giving advice to young writers, Burroughs was also fond of quoting Sinclair Lewis: ‘If you want to be a writer, learn to type’ (AM 36). James Grauerholz notes that in 1950, Burroughs himself wrote his first book, Junky, ‘longhand, on lined paper tablets’, which were then typed up by Alice Jeffreys, the wife of a friend; however, Burroughs was soon ‘disappointed with Jeffreys’ work on the manuscripts […] which he felt she had overcorrected, so he bought a typewriter and learned to type, with four fingers: the index and middle finger of each hand’ (Grauerholz 1998:40). From the very beginning of his career, therefore, Burroughs was aware of the influence of writing technologies on the act of writing itself, and all of his subsequent works were mediated by the typewriter. This machine thus became a privileged site where the effects of media technologies were both demonstrated and manipulated.
The notion that the typewriter is inherently linked to the electric media environment—and, by extension, the digital media environment—has also become a popular theme in contemporary media studies. Friedrich Kittler, for example, argues that there was a rupture at the end of the nineteenth century when writing was suddenly seen as deficient and was stripped of its ability to store acoustic and optical information, resulting in their separation into three different media technologies: gramophone, film and typewriter (1999:14). Kittler also claims that the typewriter ‘unlinks hand, eye, and letter’, thus replicating the disembodying effects of electric media technologies (1990:195), and that the ultimate impact of this separation is that ‘the act of writing stops being an act […] produced by the grace of a human subject’ (1999:203–4). Scott Bukatman similarly points out that ‘[w]hat first characterizes typing as an act of writing is an effect of disembodiment’ (1993:634), and he extends this argument to the digital realm by suggesting that the typewriter ‘produces an information space divorced from the body: a proto-cyberspace’ (1993:635).
Burroughs’s work repeatedly illustrates the notion that writing machines have an effect on subjectivity by mediating the act of writing, and writers are repeatedly described as disembodied agents, ‘recording instruments’, or even ‘soft typewriters’, who simply transcribe and store written information. While writing Naked Lunch, for example, Burroughs claimed that he was an agent from another planet attempting to decode messages from outer space, and within the novel itself he describes the act of writing as a form of spiritual ‘possession’ (NL 200). This notion is not simply a metaphor for creativity, but rather it reappears in descriptions of his own writing process: ‘While writing The Place of Dead Roads, I felt in spiritual contact with the late English writer Denton Welch […] Whole sections came to me as if dictated, like table-tapping’ (Q xviii). The writer is thus removed from the actual composition of the text, and the act of writing becomes the practice of taking dictation on a typewriter. In the essay ‘The Name Is Burroughs’, Burroughs also reports a recurring ‘writer’s dream’ in which he reads a book and attempts to remember it: ‘I can never bring back more than a few sentences; still, I know that one day the book itself will hover over the typewriter as I copy the words already written there’ (AM 9). In ‘The Retreat Diaries’, he claims that ‘[w]riters don’t write, they read and transcribe’ (BF 189), and he also describes dreams in which he finds his books already written: ‘In dreams I sometimes find the books where it is written and I may bring back a few phrases that unwind like a scroll. Then I write as fast as I can type, because I am reading, not writing’ (190). Burroughs even incorporates these dreams into the narrative of The Western Lands, where a writer lies in bed each morning watching ‘grids of typewritten words in front of his eyes that moved and shifted as he tried to read the words, but he never could. He thought if he could just copy these words down, which were not his own words, he might be able to put together another book’ (WL 1–2). The act of typing thus replaces the act of writing, because the words themselves have already been written and the writer’s job is simply to type them out.
By disembodying the user and creating a virtual information space, Burroughs’s writing machines also prefigure the globalizing impact of electric media technologies. John Tomlinson, for example, argues that contemporary information technologies have a ‘deterritorializing’ effect because ‘they lift us out of our cultural and indeed existential connection with our discrete localities and, in various senses, open up our lifeworlds to a larger world’ (1999:180). McLuhan also points out that the electric media environment not only fragments narrative and information, but also reconfigures geopolitical power. According to McLuhan, for example, the visual emphasis of typography led to both individualism and nationalism, because the printed book introduced the notion of point of view at the same time that it standardized languages: ‘Closely interrelated, then, by the operation and effects of typography are the outering or uttering of private inner experience and the massing of collective national awareness, as the vernacular is rendered visible, central, and unified by the new technology’ (1962:199). Electric media, on the other hand, represent a vast extension of the human nervous system, which emphasize the auditory over the visual and global awareness over individual experience: ‘[W]ith electricity and automation, the technology of fragmented processes suddenly fused with the human dialogue and the need for over-all consideration of human unity. Men are […] involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience’ (McLuhan 1964b:310–11). This leads to a greater degree of interdependence and a reduction in national divisions, because ‘[i]n an electrically configured society […] all the critical information necessary to manufacture and distribution, from automobiles to computers, would be available to everyone at the same time’, and thus culture ‘becomes organized like an electric circuit: each point in the net is as central as the next’ (McLuhan and Powers 1989:92). The absence of a ‘ruling center’, McLuhan continues, allows hierarchies to ‘constantly dissolve and reform’, and information technologies therefore carry the threat of ‘politically destabilizing entire nations through the wholesale transfer of uncensored information across national borders’ (McLuhan and Powers 1989:92). Rather than seeing this development as essentially negative, however, McLuhan adds that it will result in ‘a dense electronic symphony where all nations—if they still exist as separate entities—may live in a clutch of spontaneous synesthesia, painfully aware of the triumphs and wounds of one other’ (McLuhan and Powers 1989:95).
Burroughs also illustrates the deterritorializing effects of media technologies, and he frequently refers to the construction of national borders and identities as simply a function of global systems of control and manipulation. In his essay ‘The Bay of Pigs’, for example, Burroughs writes:
There are several basic formulas that have held this planet in ignorance and slavery. The first is the concept of a nation or country. Draw a line around a piece of land and call it a country. That means police, customs, barriers, armies and trouble with other stone-age tribes on the other side of the line. The concept of a country must be eliminated. (BF 144)
The process of nation-building, in other words, is nothing more than the exercise of control. In ‘The Limits of Control’, Burroughs also points out that ‘the mass media’ has the power to spread ‘cultural movements in all directions’, allowing for the cultural revolution in America to become ‘worldwide’ (AM 120). The mass media therefore presents the possibility of an ‘Electronic Revolution’, which would not only cross national borders but also eliminate them (Job 174–203). By creating a sprawling, virtual information space, Burroughs’s novels illustrate the ways in which media technologies could potentially fragment national identities and global borders; they also reveal the interconnections between information technologies and world markets, where cultural and economic exchanges gradually become inseparable.
THE ADDING MACHINE AND BUREAUCRATIC POWER
Bukatman’s claim that the virtual information space of the typewriter is linked to the modern development of cyberspace can be most clearly seen by tracing the history of the Burroughs Adding Machine, which was patented by Burroughs’s paternal grandfather in 1885. The Adding Machine was a device for both calculating and typing invoices, and thus it shared many common features with the typewriter, including a ribbon reverse that later became standard on all typewriters. Although the typewriter was often seen as a separate technology because it was designed for business correspondence rather than accounting, a brief look at the history of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company indicates that the divisions between calculating and typing machines were never that clearly defined. In the 1920s, for example, the company also marketed the MoonHopkins machine, which combined the functions of an electric typewriter and a calculating machine, and in 1931 it even began producing the Burroughs Standard Typewriter. This merging of calculating and typing machines reached its full realization with the development of business computers in the early 1950s, and the Burroughs Adding Machine Company was also involved in the earliest stages of this transition. In 1951, for example, it began work on the Burroughs Electronic Accounting Machine (BEAM), and in 1952 it built an electronic memory system for the ENIAC computer. In 1961 it also introduced the B5000 Series, the first dual-processor and virtual memory computer, and in 1986 it merged with Sperry to form the Unisys Corporation, which released the first desktop, single-chip mainframe computers in 1989. The Adding Machine and the typewriter thus both stand at the beginning of a historical trajectory, where the distinction between words and numbers became increasingly blurred and where typing gradually transformed into ‘word processing’.
Burroughs clearly shares the legacy of this joint development of calculating and typing machines, as well as the development of a powerful corporate elite in America. The adding machine makes frequent appearances in his work, where it often represents the manipulative and controlling power of information. In The Ticket that Exploded, for example, Burroughs defines ‘word’ itself as ‘an array of calculating machines’ (TE 146). The novel also employs the linear, sequential and standardizing functions of calculating and typing machines as a metaphor to describe the mechanization of the body, or ‘soft typewriter’. The narrator claims, for example, that the body ‘is composed of thin transparent sheets on which is written the action from birth to death—Written on “the soft typewriter” before birth’ (TE 159). Tony Tanner points out that the ‘ticket’ in the title of the novel also ‘incorporates the idea that we are all programmed by a prerecorded tape which is fed into the self like a virus punchcard so that the self is never free. We are simply the message typed onto the jelly of flesh by some biological typewriter referred to as the Soft Machine’ (1971:135). The ‘soft typewriter’ therefore represents the body as an information storage device, upon which the parasitical ‘word’ has been inscribed. The fact that the Burroughs Adding Machine Company also produced ticketeers and was an early innovator in computer punch card technology further emphasizes this notion of the parasitical ‘word’ as a machine or computer language—a merging of words and numbers into a system of pure coding designed to control the functions of the machine.
There are also moments in Burroughs’s work when writing machines appear synonymous with the exercise of bureaucratic power, as can be seen in his description of the nameless ‘Man at The Typewriter’ in Nova Express, who remains ‘[c]alm and grey with inflexible authority’ as he types out writs and boardroom reports (NE 130). This connection between machines and bureaucratic power is also illustrated in The Soft Machine, where Mayan priests establish an oppressive regime based on an information monopoly. They employ a regimented calendar in order to manipulate the bodies and minds of the population, and access to the sacred codices is strictly forbidden: ‘[T]he Mayan control system depends on the calendar and the codices which contain symbols representing all states of thought and feeling possible to human animals living under such limited circumstances—These are the instruments with which they rotate and control units of thought’ (SM 91). The narrator repeatedly refers to this system as a ‘control machine’ for the processing of information, which is emphasized by the fact that the priests operate it by pushing ‘buttons’ (SM 91), like a typewriter or a computer. This connection between writing machines and bureaucratic authority is extended even further when the narrator goes to work at the Trak News Agency, whose computers actually invent news rather than record it. The narrator quickly draws a parallel between the Mayan codices and the mass media: ‘I sus [sic] it is the Mayan Caper with an IBM machine’ (SM 148). In other words, like the Mayan priests, who exercise a monopoly over written information in order to control and manipulate the masses, the Trak News Agency similarly controls people’s perception of reality through the use of computers: ‘IBM machine controls thought feeling and apparent sensory impressions’ (SM 148–9).
The notion that the news industry manipulates and controls people’s perceptions of reality is a recurring theme throughout Burroughs’s work. In The Third Mind, for example, he writes:
‘Reality’ is apparent because you live and believe it. What you call ‘reality’ is a complex network of necessity formulae…association lines of word and image presenting a prerecorded word and image track. How do you know ‘real’ events are taking place right where you are sitting now? You will read it tomorrow in the windy morning ‘NEWS’…(3M 27)
He also cites two historical examples where fabricated news became real: ‘Remember the Russo-Finnish War covered from the Press Club in Helsinki? Remember Mr. Hearst’s false armistice closing World War I a day early?’ (3M 27). In the chapter ‘Inside the Control Machine’, Burroughs more explicitly argues that the world press, like the Mayan codices, functions as a ‘control machine’ through the same process of repetition and association:
By this time you will have gained some insight into the Control Machine and how it operates. You will hear the disembodied voice which speaks through any newspaper on lines of association and juxtaposition. The mechanism has no voice of its own and can talk indirectly only through the words of others…speaking through comic strips…news items…advertisements…talking, above all, through names and numbers. Numbers are repetition and repetition is what produces events. (3M 178)
Like the Mayan codices, therefore, the modern media also illustrates the merging of words and numbers in a machinic language of pure control. Burroughs adds, however, that the essential difference between these two systems is that the ‘Mayan control system required that ninety-nine percent of the population be illiterate’ while ‘the modern control machine of the world press can operate only on a literate population’ (3M 179). In other words, the modern control machine is an extension of the printing press because it uses literacy in order to maintain social hierarchies and keep readers in a passive state of detachment. In order to overthrow these hierarchies, it is therefore necessary not simply to develop the literacy skills the Mayans lacked, but also to subvert the control machine itself and the standards of literacy it enforces.
THE ‘FOLD-IN’ METHOD AND AUDITORY SPACE
The narrator of The Soft Machine quickly discovers that understanding the nature of the Trak News Agency’s control machine is the first step to defeating it: ‘Whatever you feed into the machine on subliminal level the machine will process—So we feed in “dismantle thyself” […] We fold writers of all time in together […] all the words of the world stirring around in a cement mixer and pour in the resistance message’ (SM 149). In other words, the narrator is able to dismantle the control system by manipulating the writing machine and disrupting its standard, linear sequence of information. This manipulation involves the use of a technique Burroughs referred to as the ‘cut-up’ or ‘foldin’ method: ‘A page of text—my own or someone else’s—is folded down the middle and placed on another page—The composite text is then read across half one text and half the other’ (3M 95–6). Burroughs frequently employed this method in his own work, and it is perhaps the clearest example of how the typewriter creates ‘new kinds of subjectivity’ by displacing the author as the controlling consciousness of the text. In a 1965 Paris Review interview, Burroughs explained the essential difference between this method and simply free associating at the typewriter: ‘Your mind simply could not manage it. It’s like trying to keep so many chess moves in mind, you just couldn’t do it. The mental mechanisms of repression and selection are also operating against you’ (Knickerbocker 1965:25). The ultimate goal of this technique, in other words, is to short-circuit the literate mind and use the typewriter to achieve a more primitive state of awareness, which McLuhan describes as precisely the effect of the electric media environment.
Burroughs’s justification for the ‘fold-in’ method also emphasizes the basic inadequacy of print in comparison to developments in other media: ‘[I]f writing is to have a future it must at least catch up with the past and learn to use techniques that have been used for some time past in painting, music and film’ (3M 95). Burroughs thus saw this method as enabling the typewriter to manifest the properties of other media, including sound recording. This connection between the typewriter and sound may appear confusing, as his novels remain essentially visual, but McLuhan points out that the distinction between visual and auditory space actually refers to the way in which media technologies structure information:
Television, radio and the newspaper […] deal in auditory space, by which I mean that sphere of simultaneous relations created by the act of hearing. We hear from all directions at once; this creates a unique, unvisualizable space. The all-at-once-ness of auditory space is the exact opposite of lineality, of taking one thing at a time. It is very confusing to learn that the mosaic of a newspaper page is ‘auditory’ in basic structure. This, however, is only to say that any pattern in which the components coexist without direct lineal hook-up or connection, creating a field of simultaneous relations, is auditory, even though some of its aspects can be seen. The items of news and advertising that exist under a newspaper dateline are interrelated only by that dateline. They have no interconnection of logic or statement. Yet they form a mosaic or corporate image whose parts are interpenetrating […] It is a kind of orchestral, resonating unity, not the unity of logical discourse. (McLuhan 1963:43)
Burroughs’s ‘fold-in’ method thus transforms standardized, linear texts into a ‘mosaic’ of information, which parallels the structure of television, radio, and newspapers. Even though Burroughs’s ‘cut-up’ novels remain essentially visual, they create an auditory space because they provide connections between texts that are not based on ‘logic or statement’, and they behave more like the ‘sphere of simultaneous relations created by the act of hearing’. Such an understanding of auditory space helps to explain Burroughs’s notion of the ‘fold-in’ method as manifesting the properties of music, or McLuhan’s paradoxical notion of the typewriter as both a tool that regulates spelling and grammar and ‘an oral and mimetic instrument’ that gives writers the ‘freedom of the world of jazz’ (1964b:230).
The function of this method can be most clearly seen in The Ticket that Exploded, where the narrator describes a ‘writing machine’ that
shifts one half one text and half the other through a page frame on conveyor belts […] Shakespeare, Rimbaud, etc. permutating through page frames in constantly changing juxtaposition the machine spits out books and plays and poems—The spectators are invited to feed into the machine any pages of their own text in fifty-fifty juxtaposition with any author of their choice any pages of their choice and provided with the result in a few minutes. (TE 65)
The machine thus performs the ‘fold-in’ method by fragmenting and rearranging texts, and it further disrupts the written word through the use of ‘calligraphs’: ‘The magnetic pencil caught in calligraphs of Brion Gysin wrote back into the brain metal patterns of silence and space’ (TE 63). The possibility of ‘silence and space’, therefore, is represented through a break with print technology. This is most clearly illustrated on the last page of the novel—an actual calligraph composed by Brion Gysin, in which English and Arabic words alternate in various permutations of the phrase ‘Silence to say good bye’ (TE 203). The function of the machine is thus mirrored in the construction of the book itself, which was also composed using the ‘fold-in’ method and contains passages spliced in from other authors, including lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Because the novel contains the formula for its own selfgenerating reproduction, Gérard-Georges Lemaire uses the term ‘writing machine’ interchangeably to refer to both the content and method of Burroughs’s work, and he points out that Burroughs’s machine not only ‘escapes from the control of its manipulator’, but ‘it does so in that it makes it possible to lay down a foundation of an unlimited number of books that end by reproducing themselves’ (3M 17). In other words, the parasitical ‘word’ is externalized from the writer’s own consciousness and reproduces itself in a series of endless permutations.
TYPESETTING EXPERIMENTS, THREE-COLUMN CUT-UPS AND THE GRID
Another method Burroughs employs to transform the printed word into an auditory space can be seen in his typesetting experiments, which were clearly inspired by the structure of newspapers and magazines. By presenting a series of unrelated texts in parallel columns, the newspaper suggests interconnections which are not based on logic or reason, and many of Burroughs’s stories from the 1960s and early 1970s reveal a growing interest in the effects of typesetting, one example being ‘The Coldspring News’. When this piece was originally published in White Subway, it was divided into two columns, and the sections contained bold titles, thus imitating newspaper headlines (WS 39, see BF for a reprint without the threecolumn format). The title of the story was also designed to resemble a masthead, with Burroughs listed as ‘Editor’ rather than author (WS 39). Subsequent editions removed this formatting, but Robert Sobieszek points out that Burroughs continued these experiments in his collages, many of which ‘were formatted in newspaper columns and often consisted of phrases rearranged from front pages of the New York Times along with photos or other illustrations’ (1996:55). Sobieszek also notes that in 1965 Burroughs created his own version of Time magazine, including
a Time cover of November 30, 1962, collaged over by Burroughs with a reproduction of a drawing, four drawings by Gysin, and twenty-six pages of typescripts comprised of cut-up texts and various photographs serving as news items. One of the pages is from an article on Red China from Time of September 13, 1963, and is collaged with a columnal typescript and an irrelevant illustration from the ‘Modern Living’ section of the magazine. A full-page advertisement for JohnsManville products is casually inserted amid all these texts; its title: ‘Filtering’. (1996:37)
These experiments therefore offer another illustration of the ways in which the press mediates or ‘filters’ our experience of reality, and because the typewriter enables such interventions, allowing writers to compose texts in a standardized font that is easily reproducible, these collages offer a perfect illustration of McLuhan’s claim that ‘[t]he typewriter fuses composition and publication’ (1964b:228).
A similar kind of typesetting experiment can be seen in Burroughs’s film scripts, such as The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1975), where he uses multiple columns to describe the sound and image tracks of a non-existent film about the gangster Dutch Schultz. By using Hollywood terminology, as well as employing various gangster film clichés, Burroughs effectively imitates the language and style of Hollywood films. The script also includes photographs from Hollywood films and press clippings concerning the actual Schultz, thus blurring the boundaries between fictional and documentary sources and exposing the ways in which the mass media, including both the film industry and the world press, effectively determines and controls people’s perceptions of reality. The script also performs a similar kind of intervention as his earlier typesetting experiments by employing separate columns for sounds and images. In other words, rather than following the strict format of traditional screenplays, Burroughs’s script simultaneously represents both an imitation and a subversion of yet another institutional form of textual production. The sound and image columns are also reminiscent of the ‘Exhibition’ in The Ticket that Exploded, which isolates and manipulates sound and image tracks in order to create random and striking juxtapositions that draw the spectator’s attention to the constructed nature of the media itself (TE 62–8).
The purpose of these interventions, therefore, is ultimately not to participate in the mass media but rather to subvert and dismantle its methods of presenting information. This is most apparent in Burroughs’s three-column cut-ups, in which three separate columns of text are combined on the same page. Although these cut-ups resemble Burroughs’s newspaper and magazine collages, the purpose of the juxtaposed columns is ultimately to subvert the newspaper format, not to replicate it. This method is clearly based on the theoretical tape recorder experiment Burroughs describes in The Ticket that Exploded, where he suggests recording various sides of an argument onto three tape recorders and allowing them to argue with each other (TE 163). The purpose of this experiment is to externalize language and remove it from the body, while at the same time deflating the power of words through their simultaneous and overlapping transmission in a nonsensical cacophony of sound. Like the three tape recorders, the three columns of text also produce multiple, competing voices simultaneously vying for the reader’s attention, and the reader has to choose whether to read the columns in sequence from beginning to end, to read the individual pages in sequence, jumping between columns at the bottom of each page, or to read across the page from left to right, jumping between columns on every line. These compositions thus represent a radically new kind of information space—a proto-hypertext—in which the role of the author is displaced and linear structure is disrupted. In some of these compositions, such as ‘Who Is the Third That Walks Beside You’, Burroughs even decenters his own authority by combining found documents with excerpts from his novels (BF 50–2). He effectively makes these already cut-up passages even more disorienting by removing them from their original context, resplicing them into new arrangements and setting them in juxtaposition to one another. As if to emphasize the purpose behind this procedure, he also includes a passage from The Ticket that Exploded, in which he encourages the reader to ‘disinterest yourself in my words. Disinterest yourself in anybody’s words, In the beginning was the word and the word was bullshit’ [sic] (BF 51).
Burroughs’s grids represent yet another method of manipulating written information. The grids follow the same logic as Burroughs’s three-column cut-ups, although the vertical columns are also divided horizontally into a series of boxes, thus multiplying the number of potential links the reader is able to make between the blocks of text. Burroughs employs this method in many of his collages, such as To Be Read Every Which Way, in which he divides four vertical columns of text into nine rows, thus creating 36 boxes of text which can be read in any order (Sobieszek 1996:27). Much of this work was compiled for the original edition of The Third Mind, which was never published; however, in his essay ‘Formats: The Grid’, Burroughs describes this method as ‘an experiment in machine writing that anyone can do on his own typewriter’ (Burroughs 1964:27), and he illustrates the process using material taken from reviews of Naked Lunch:
I selected mostly unfavorable criticism with a special attention to meaningless machine-turned phrases such as ‘irrelevant honesty of hysteria,’ ‘the pocked dishonored flesh,’ ‘ironically the format is banal,’ etc. Then ruled off a grid (Grid I) and wove the prose into it like start a sentence from J. Wain in square 1, continue in squares 3, 5 and 7. Now a sentence from Toynbee started in squares 2, 4 and 6. The reading of the grid back to straight prose can be done say one across and one down. Of course there are many numbers of ways in which the grid can be read off. (Burroughs 1964:27)
Like the ‘fold-in’ method, therefore, the grid illustrates the displacement of the author as the controlling consciousness of the text; other than choosing which texts to use, the author has little to no control over the ultimate arrangement. Burroughs adds, for example, that ‘I found the material fell into dialogue form and seemed to contain some quite remarkable prose which I can enthuse over without immodesty since it contains no words of my own other than such quotations from my work as the critics themselves had selected’ (1964:27). Burroughs also notes that these textual ‘units are square for convenience on the typewriter’, but that this grid represents ‘only one of many possible grids […] No doubt the mathematically inclined could progress from plane to solid geometry and put prose through spheres and cubes and hexagons’ (1964:27). Like his three-column cut-ups, therefore, the grids also represent a kind of proto-hypertext, where the number of possible pathways and links between blocks of text are multiplied even further and the potential number of mathematical permutations seems virtually limitless. The grids are thus a logical extension of the auditory space created by the ‘fold-in’ method, and they seem to resemble Oulipian writing experiments, such as Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Millard de Poemes, a sonnet containing 10 possible choices for each of the 14 lines, thus comprising 1014 potential poems.
WRITING MACHINES AND THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
Burroughs’s writing machines not only illustrate the manipulation and subversion of information as a way of dismantling hierarchies of control, but they also illustrate the impact of media technologies on national identities and global borders by revealing the ways in which the electric media environment also reconfigures space and time. The revolutionary potential of the ‘fold-in’ method is even more pronounced in The Soft Machine, for example, because the act of shifting between source texts is played out within the narrative as shifts across space and time. ‘The Mayan Caper’ chapter opens with an astounding claim: ‘I have just returned from a thousandyear time trip and I am here to tell you […] how such time trips are made’ (SM 81). The narrator then offers a description of the procedure, which begins ‘in the morgue with old newspapers, folding in today with yesterday and typing out composites’ (SM 81). In other words, the ‘fold-in’ method is itself a means of time travel, because ‘when I fold today’s paper in with yesterday’s paper and arrange the pictures to form a time section montage, I am literally moving back to yesterday’ (SM 82). The narrator is then able to overthrow the Mayan control machine by employing the ‘fold-in’ method on the sacred codices and calendars. By once again altering the time sequence, the priests’ ‘order to burn [the fields] came late, and a year’s crop was lost’ (SM 92). Soon after, the narrator leads the people in a rebellion against the priests: ‘Cut word lines […] Smash the control machine—Burn the books—Kill the priests—Kill! Kill! Kill!’ (SM 92–3). This scene is perhaps the clearest illustration of Burroughs’s notion that the electric media environment allows for the spread of cultural revolution worldwide, as media technologies like the newspaper enable information to be conveyed rapidly across space and time, regardless of national borders, thus emphasizing group awareness over individual experience and global interdependence over national divisions.
Because the borders between the blocks of text in Burroughs’s grids are so fluid, they also seem to function as a corollary to the spatial architecture of the transnational ‘Interzone’ in Naked Lunch. This ‘Composite City’ is described as a vast ‘hive’ of rooms populated by people of every conceivable nation and race (NL 96). Because these inhabitants have clearly been uprooted from their ‘discrete localities’ and placed in a labyrinthine space, which appears completely removed from space and time, Interzone would appear to be the most perfect illustration of Tomlinson’s notion of the deterritorializing effect of media technologies. Burroughs also describes Interzone as ‘a single, vast building’, whose ‘rooms are made of a plastic cement that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowd into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next house’ (NL 162). Interzone therefore represents a kind of virtual grid, in which people are converted into units of information that pass freely across barriers without resistance. The transfer of bodies through walls thus serves as a metaphor for the structure of the text itself, which contains rapid shifts and jumps that allow characters to travel inexplicably across space and time. These shifts are largely due to the method with which the book was originally written. Burroughs wrote the sections in no particular order, and the final version of the novel was ultimately determined by the order in which the pages were sent to the compositor. This process once again reflects the structure of hypertexts in that linearity is absent and the reader is free to choose multiple pathways: ‘You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point’ (NL 203). Burroughs also emphasizes that the beginning and the ending of the novel are artificial constructs and that the novel includes ‘many prefaces’ (NL 203). The fact that the virtual information space of the text is essentially a product of writing machines is made even more explicit when Burroughs describes these shifts as the effect of ‘a broken typewriter’ (NL 86).
This rapidly shifting and disorienting atmosphere also reflects the drug-induced state in which Burroughs began writing the novel. His description of the city, for example, quickly merges with his description of the effects of yagé, which is further reflected in his apparently random and disconnected prose style: ‘Images fall slow and silent like snow […] everything is free to enter or to go out […] Everything stirs with a writhing furtive life.…The room is Near East, Negro, South Pacific, in some familiar place I cannot locate.… Yage is space-time travel’ (NL 99). This passage would seem to support McLuhan’s claim that Burroughs’s drug use represents a ‘strategy of by-passing the new electric environment by becoming an environment oneself’ (1964a:517), an interpretation which Burroughs rejects in his 1965 Paris Reviewinterview: ‘No, junk narrows consciousness. The only benefit to me as a writer […] came to me after I went off it’ (Knickerbocker 1965:23). Subsequent critics, such as Eric Mottram, have attempted to reconcile this disagreement by turning the discussion away from the effects of media on mental states and arguing instead that the essential similarity between Burroughs and McLuhan is their mutual interest in the globalizing power of electric media: ‘Burroughs corrects McLuhan’s opinion that he meant that heroin was needed to turn the body into an environment […] But his books are global in the sense that they envisage a mobile environmental sense of the network of interconnecting power, with the purpose of understanding and then attacking it’ (Mottram 1971:100). This disagreement can be resolved, however, by considering the difference between heroin, which ‘narrows consciousness’, and yagé, which eliminates individualism and effects a return to tribal ways of thinking. At the same time that Burroughs rejects McLuhan’s claim, for example, he also adds that he wants ‘to see more of what’s out there, to look outside, to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings’ (Knickerbocker 1965:23). These are precisely the reasons why Burroughs sought yagé, and it is only under the influence of this drug that he effectively reproduces the conditions of the electric media environment within his own body.
The auditory space of the text therefore parallels the physical geography of Interzone, and any sense of the individual—including any sense of the author as the controlling consciousness of the text—dissolves in a larger awareness of human unity. Such a reading might imply that Interzone illustrates McLuhan’s notion of a ‘global village’, which enables a greater degree of equality between nations. The narrator adds, however, that Interzone is also ‘a vast silent market’, whose primary purpose is to conduct business transactions (NL 96). Interzone therefore not only represents a deterritorialized space marked by fluid borders and rapid transfers, but it also illustrates the essential link between cultural and economic exchange because it is impossible to separate the sharing of cultural ideas and differences from the exchange of goods and services. According to Fredric Jameson, for example, the term ‘globalization’ itself refers to the combined effect of both new information technologies and world markets, and it ‘affirms a gradual de-differentiation of these levels, the economic itself gradually becoming cultural, all the while the cultural gradually becomes economic’ (1998:70). McLuhan was also aware that the effects of electric media technologies would be far more devastating on the Third World than on Western culture: ‘In the case of the First World […] electronic information dims down nationalism and private identities, whereas in its encounter with the Third World of India, China, and Africa, the new electric information environment has the effect of depriving these people of their group identities’ (McLuhan and Powers 1989:165). Because Interzone illustrates both the economic and cultural effects of globalization, it is perhaps easy to understand why Interzone does not represent a more harmonious and egalitarian ‘global village’. The loss of group identities and economic stability, and the constant presence of European colonials, only seem to heighten the level of corruption and inefficiency already present in the city, such as the ‘drunken cop’ who registers new arrivals ‘in a vast public lavatory’, where the ‘data taken down is put on pegs to be used as toilet paper’ (NL 98). Business itself is also represented as an essentially hopeless process, in which useless products are endlessly waiting to be passed through customs, and embassies direct all inquiries to the ‘We Don’t Want To Hear About It Department’ (NL 163).
Like the ‘global village’, therefore, Interzone represents a virtual or deterritorialized space in which people of every imaginable nationality and race are able to meet and exchange information. But unlike the ‘global village’, Interzone is a labyrinth of both communication and economic exchange, which ultimately subdues and disempowers its inhabitants. The key to liberating the global space of the electric media environment, according to Burroughs, is to subvert and manipulate the media technologies themselves, thus drawing the hypnotized masses out of their waking dream and making them more aware of the degree to which media technologies condition their perceptions of reality. In Naked Lunch, for example, Burroughs states that the ultimate purpose of conventional narrative transitions is ‘to spare The Reader stress of sudden space shifts and keep him Gentle’ (NL 197). By manipulating the linear function of his own writing machines, Burroughs attempts to reject these conventions and transform the gentle reader into a potential revolutionary, who would no longer be passive and detached but rather aware and involved.
CONCLUSION
Burroughs most clearly represents the manipulation and subversion of electric media technologies through his own experimental methods of constructing texts. Burroughs also repeatedly represents writing machines within his work to illustrate the effects of information technologies on subjectivity, as well as their potential use for either positive or negative ends—as control machines or weapons of resistance. Burroughs similarly depicts the global impact of the electric media environment by illustrating the ways in which writing machines are capable of spreading either cultural revolution or cultural imperialism, depending on whether or not people are capable of appropriating and manipulating them. The texts which I have focused on in this chapter, which include examples of Burroughs’s work from the 1950s to the early 1970s, can therefore be seen as exposing and subverting the influence of writing machines on the material conditions of their own production in order to provide a model of technological reappropriation that could potentially be extended on a global scale. Burroughs’s work thus retains an empowering notion of human agency while also complicating the divisions between self and other.
REFERENCES
Bockris, V. (1981) With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, rev. edition (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996).
Bukatman, S. (1993) ‘Gibson’s Typewriter’, South Atlantic Quarterly 92(4), pp. 627–45. Burroughs, William S. (1964) ‘Formats: The Grid’, Insect Trust Gazette, 1, p. 27. —(1975) The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: A Fiction in the Form of a Film Script (New York: Viking), pp. 37–46. Grauerholz, J. (1998) ‘A Hard-Boiled Reporter’, IN WV pp. 37–46. Hayles, N. K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Jameson, F. (1998) ‘Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue’, IN Jameson, F., and Miyoshi, M. eds, The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp. 54–77. Kittler, F. (1990) Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Cullens, C., and Metteer, M. trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press). —(1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Winthrop-Young, G., and Wutz, M. trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Knickerbocker, C. (1965) ‘William Burroughs: An Interview’, Paris Review 35, pp. 13–49. McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). — (1963) ‘The Agenbite of Outwit’, Location 1(1), 41–4. — (1964a) ‘Notes on Burroughs’, The Nation 28 December 1964, pp. 517–19. — (1964b) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill) — (1963) ‘The Agenbite of Outwit’, Location 1(1), 41–4. —— (1964a) ‘Notes on Burroughs’, The Nation 28 December 1964, pp. 517–19. — (1964b) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill) Mottram, E. (1971) William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (Buffalo, NY: Intrepid). Sobieszek, R. (1996) Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Thames & Hudson). Tanner, T. (1971) City of Words: American Fiction 1950–70 (London: Jonathan Cape). Tomlinson, J. (1999) Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Retaking the Universe (William S.Burroughs in the Age of Globalization)
Part 2: Writing, Sign, Instrument: Language and Technology/Burroughs’s Writing Machines/Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com by Jason Morelyle I am not an addict. I am the addict. The addict I invented to keep this show on the junk road. I am all the addicts and all the junk in the world. I am junk and I am hooked forever. Now I am using junk as a basic illustration. Extend it. I am reality and I am hooked, on, reality. —William S. Burroughs, ‘The Beginning is Also the End’ (BF 62) Maybe the target is not to discover who we are but to refuse who we are. —Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’ Addiction and control: in the work of William S. Burroughs, the two issues are inextricably and irrevocably bound together. The concepts of ‘power’, ‘control’, ‘control machine’, and ‘control society’ are crucial aspects of Burroughs’s trajectory; as elements in the equation of his ‘lifelong preoccupation’ (Q xxiii), manifestations of control are treated with varying degrees of intensity throughout his work, and its drives and stratagems within such discursive formations as the mass media, organized religion, the government, the State, the nuclear family, science, institutionalized medicine, Western capitalist technocracies, instrumental reason, and, importantly, language (the Word) are represented in multifarious variations. Moreover, addiction, ‘the algebra of need’, functions as a kind of counterpoint, a sinister collaborator invested in the machinations of control: addiction to capital, addiction to materialism, addiction to the media, even addiction to the ego, subjectivity and notions of ‘self’. As Timothy S. Murphy proposes in his superb work, Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (1997), subjectivity in Burroughs’s work ‘itself is a form of addiction to language, to the “I” of self-consciousness and identity as an instrument of control, both of the phenomenal world by the “I” and of the “I” itself by the ideological structure of its socius’. When subjectivity is seen as a form of addiction in Burroughs’s work we can begin to chart how he uses addiction as a trope for subjectivity, attempting, in effect, to re-inscribe or rescript how subjectivity is formed in a society of control. In other words, Burroughs’s work contains resources not simply for theorizing, but also for resisting control, especially in his representations of the socalled drug addict, a figure that is often understood as a subject formed at the limits of ‘straight’ society. There are many examples throughout Burroughs’s work that suggest how the drama of resistance might unfold, and perhaps one of the more compelling means through which he approaches this problem is through the rescripting or rewriting of subjectivity to determine methods of thinking about and moving toward ‘freedom’ under a regime of control. As Michel Foucault noted some months before his death, it is imperative that we promote ‘new forms of subjectivity’ through the refusal of certain kinds of individualities and subjectivities that have been imposed on us (Foucault 1983:216). As a figure of subjectivity, Burroughs’s rendering of addiction provides a means of grasping how subjectivity is formed by power through the subjectivation (assujetissement) of a control society, where this term designates both the ‘becoming’ of the subject and the processes of subjection itself (Butler 1997:83). In order to understand the implications of what a society of control might be, we must come to terms with new forms of subjectivity that emerge from the new relations or ‘diagram’ of power that comprises such a society. Burroughs’s work not only offers us a way of beginning to grasp what form this new subjectivity might assume, but it also provides blueprints for how we can begin conceptualizing the possibility of a resistant subject. In other words, Burroughs’s rendering of ‘addiction’ can be read as a trope of subjectivity, but a subjectivity that is formulated specifically as strategically resistant to a control society: under the regime of control and junk, the addicted subject is a resistant, modulatory subject who realizes, like Mr Martin, ‘The Man of a Thousand Lies’ quoted in the epigraph, that there are ‘realities’ alternative to those imposed by control that can be generated by alternative subjectivities. Although in many respects the emergence of the concept of addiction and the taxonomy of the addict as we have come to know it today are largely symptoms and side-effects of the growing dominance of nineteenth-century Western politico-medical discourse, many commentators have persuasively argued that the concept of ‘drug’ (the ‘supplement’) and the ‘logic’ of addiction are deeply embedded in the historicity of Western culture as a whole, a ‘structure that is philosophically and metaphysically at the basis of our culture’ (Ronell 1992:13). The meaning of the term ‘addiction’ can be traced to the Latin verb addicere, which in Roman law referred to a formal ‘giving over’ or delivery by sentence of court and implied a surrender, or dedication, of the sentence to a master. To be both literally and figuratively ‘sentenced’—simultaneously condemned and bound by language—suggests, according to David Lenson, that the user has lost control of language and of consciousness itself, and that the user is, in a way, ‘spoken’ for by another: ‘Instead of saying, one is said’ (1995:35). It is telling that ‘addiction’ implies that one is acted upon or spoken for by an external-madeinternal entity. One facet of Burroughs’s approach to addiction falls very much along these lines, signaling an internalized possession, a kind of subjectivation of a user by some externalized force or entity usually figured as the ‘controllers’, the Nova Mob, and so on. Yet it is also interesting that the ‘addict’—as emerging from the disciplinary enclosure of institutionalized medicine and psychiatry—is traditionally viewed by these disciplines as being ‘possessed’, because it is just this definition that Burroughs tries to disassemble. In Burroughs, the subject-as-addict, the modulatory subject, attempts to release himself from the nightmare of possession, from the trap of being spoken for by an-other; the definition of addiction in the traditional sense is implicitly a definition of the control society itself, something that Burroughs spent his entire life describing and attempting to eradicate. POWER, DISCIPLINE, CONTROL Power, for Foucault, is a ‘multiplicity of force relations’, the name one attributes to a ‘complex strategical situation’ in society (Foucault 1976:92–3), and a heterogeneous network that circulates through the sociopolitical whole in a ‘capillary’ fashion. Because power cannot be ‘sought in the primary existence of a central point’, power should not be thought of as a ‘privilege’ that is possessed, or as an ‘institution’ or ‘structure’ that assumes the ‘sovereignty of the state [and] the form of law’ (Foucault 1975:26); power is not a strength one is endowed with (Foucault 1976:93), a material ‘thing’ that can be consciously transferred, exchanged, and directed at a given class or individual, and is not ‘a general system of domination exerted by one group over another’. Power, then, is not hierarchical, flowing from the top down, but ‘comes from below’—that is, it is a mobile and localized field of relations, ‘self-producing’, ‘everywhere’, and ‘exercised from innumerable points’ not because it can consolidate ‘everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next […] in every relation from one point to another’ (93–4). Power is decentralized and relational, a strategy performed through a variety of social and political practices in society. As such, power is not ‘external’ to or ‘outside’ of social relations, but constitutive of and coextensive with them. Importantly, Foucault conceives of power as positive and productive, and insists that it should not be thought of in negative terms, as dominating, repressive, or exclusionary: ‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it abstracts, it “masks”, it “conceals”. Power produces. It produces reality, produces knowledge, and produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (Foucault 1975:194). This, then, is where the analyst or, to use Foucault’s term, genealogist of power must focus her attention, on the interrelation between knowledge and power, because just as it is ‘not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge’ it is ‘impossible for knowledge not to engender power’ (Foucault 1977:52). For Foucault, discourses are self-referential ‘coherent’ bodies of statements that produce versions of reality by generating ‘knowledge’ about concepts or objects; hence, discourses ‘write the rules’ about what can be known and said about—for example, medical discourses, legal discourses, discourses about science, politics, and the insane. ‘Knowledge is that of which one can speak in a discursive practice, and which is specified by that fact: the domain constituted by the different objects that will or will not acquire a scientific status’ (Foucault 1969:201). The analysis of discourse must take place at the level of determining how and where subjects or objects of knowledge emerge, what new relations of power they might effect, and how regimes of ‘truth’ are produced. ‘Truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it into a “regime” of truth’ (Foucault 1980b:133). Foucault uses an analytics of power and discourse in an attempt to ‘create a history of the different modes […] [so that] human beings are made into subjects’ (Foucault 1983:208). Crucially, the subject is not only constituted in power, but constituted by it: power does not operate upon or outside relationships, but across and through them. Power produces, forms, and initiates the subject through the ‘primary submission’ of subjection, where ‘power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our very existence […] [what] initiates and sustains our agency’ (Butler 1997:2). In this way, we see how the focus is not so much on power per se, but on the subject and the formation of the subject through subjectivation. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Foucault contends, disciplinary power began to emerge in response to monarchicalbased juridical forms of power that understood power as repressive and negative; disciplinary power, on the other hand, is necessarily positive, a kind of ‘nonsovereign’ power (Foucault 2002:36) that produces docile bodies with maximum efficiency, a ‘unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a “political” force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force’ (Foucault 1975:221). Disciplinary power and its technologies, understood as one of ‘bourgeois society’s great inventions’, was instrumental in the formation of industrial capitalism and its corresponding culture (Foucault 2002:36; 1975:221) and materialized in a variety of forms: military barracks, schools, factories, hospitals, and prisons. The point was that such technologies extracted time, labor, and usefulness from consenting, docile bodies, rather than the commodities and wealth that the sovereign model demanded. Hence, since the emergence of disciplinary power, what we have in modern society is the shift from an administration of force (sovereign) to an administration by compliance (discipline). Taking Michel Foucault’s meditations on power and government as an implicit starting point, Gilles Deleuze captures the sense of what a control society may be when he contends that over the course of the twentieth century, our society has been confronted with a general crisis in relation to all ‘environments of enclosure’ and has registered a new formulation or ‘diagram’ of power; we have, he claims, been undergoing a transformation from a disciplinary society to a society of control or ‘modulation’ (Deleuze 1990:3). Although the society of control is defined very differently from the sovereign regimes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the ‘modern’ disciplinary regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this does not necessarily mean that these two regimes have completely disappeared. As Foucault contends, we must see such transitions not in terms of a ‘replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society’ or the replacement of a ‘disciplinary society by a society of government’; rather, we should see it ‘as a triangle, sovereignty–discipline–government’ (Foucault 1978:102). Just as some features of a sovereign regime remain in a disciplinary society, so do features of disciplinary society remain in a society of control. As Michael Hardt points out, power never leaves a vacuum. Instead, what we are seeing in a society of control is not so much a complete disintegration of environments of enclosure such as the prison, the family, or the factory, but rather the ‘generalization of the logics’ of disciplinary institutions ‘across the entire society, spreading like a virus’ (1998:30–1). Control societies will employ many strategies of disciplinary regimes, in that the authority of disciplinary regimes is no longer contained in particular institutions and environments of enclosure, but is spread out in a ‘continuous network’ (Deleuze 1990:5) in which the socius is not ‘emptied of the disciplinary institutions but completely filled with the modulations of control’ (Hardt 1998:31). In a society of control, all disciplinary institutions—education, policing, psychiatry, production—subsume every aspect of experience so that the object of these institutions is life itself. Just as discipline entails a discontinuous molding of the individual who is ‘always starting again’ and who ‘never ceases passing from one closed environment to the next’ (Deleuze 1990:4, 2), in a society of control ‘one is never finished with anything’ (4). The distinction between the two can be seen in the difference between a limited, segregated incarceration and the limitless postponements of continuous variation. Where disciplinary practice molded behavior and fashioned subjects, practices of control continuously modulate and integrate. As such, the connection between society and State is no longer seen in the ‘mediation and organization’ of disciplinary institutions, but rather in how the State is set ‘in motion directly through the perpetual circuitry of social production’ (Hardt 1998:31). Like a sovereign regime or a disciplinary society, however, the modus operandi of control society is power, and the ways in which power is integrated into social life; the difference is that this integration takes place in an increasingly synthesized, complete and total fashion. Thus, a society of control, like a society of sovereignty or disciplinarity, is still rooted in the ‘diagram’ (Deleuze 1986:70–93) of power. Although its strategies and relational formulae are modified, the power/knowledge equation still remains the concomitant force. Power may never leave a vacuum, but its strategies and relations do shift, especially when it comes to resistance to power itself. A society of control will not set out to contain or limit resistance as in a regime of sovereignty or discipline, but will instead seek to diffuse it. Burroughs’s understanding of control directly addresses this issue because he recognizes that the subject—the ‘agent’ Inspector Lee, for instance—resists control on a continuous basis while also being thoroughly dependent on it. Perhaps one of the more important ways that a society of control is formulated in Burroughs’s work is in the figure of junk, where the ‘theory’ of junk and junk addiction itself is troped into a ‘general’ theory of power, a ‘mold of monopoly and possession’ (NL xxxvi). Throughout Burroughs’s corpus of work, not only are subjectivity and language shaped, affected and infected by the overriding theme of control/junk, these mechanisms are manifestations of control/junk. However, Burroughs’s taxonomy of addiction can be profitably understood as other than being simply ‘addiction’ in the normative sense; junk and junk addiction can be seen, he writes, as a ‘cellular equation that teaches the user facts of general validity’ (J xvi). Burroughs is implicitly stating that the subject, formed within a control society, is dependent on the relations of power that comprise that society for its sense of self. ‘Facts’ of general validity here are read as structures of knowledge, regimes of truth, and systems of ‘word and image’—the very ‘facts’ that work in and through subjectivation. The challenge for both Burroughs and Foucault, however, lies in the fact that power does not simply suppress the subject; it produces the subject as well. The subject needs power like it needs junk because it is only through such a dependency that it can be recognized within the category of ‘subject’ itself. Subjectivity—what Burroughs sometimes refers to as the ‘human form’ (BF 64)—is thoroughly dependent on ‘word and image’ (see 64–5), and as such is both limited and created by the discursive mechanisms of word and image (see 45–6). ‘[I]mage is junk’ (NE 52) and ‘junk is image’ (9 [note]), Burroughs maintains, and addiction to junk constitutes normative subjectivity itself—that which must be subverted. This, of course, is one of the central problems facing Burroughs, because if subjectivity—addiction—is the system that we must all struggle against, then the only tool we have in this struggle is subjectivity itself. Coming to terms with this problem is a matter of formulating the ways in which power is organized, be it through the stratagems of disciplinarity or the maneuverings of a society of control. In this sense, the troping of junk and junk addiction into a ‘general’ theory of power is reminiscent of Foucault’s notion of power; junk, like power, is everywhere and nowhere, a modulated space without a circumference or a middle, and as such, one ‘becomes addicted’ to power-as-addiction, dependent on it not only for one’s understanding of the world, but for one’s sense of self as well: There is no true or real ‘reality’—’Reality’ is simply a more or less constant scanning pattern—The scanning pattern we accept as ‘reality’ has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet, a power primarily oriented towards total control. (NE 53) The ‘imposition’ of ‘reality’ by the ‘controlling power’ resonates with the ‘pyramid of junk’ outlined in the deposition-introduction to Naked Lunch, where ‘one level [eats] the level below […] right up to the top or tops since there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world and all built on principles of monopoly’ (NL xxxvi). Given the attributes of ‘monopoly’, ‘imposition’, and ‘controlling’, it would seem that Burroughs is portraying a hierarchical or transcendental model of power: sovereign, top-down, and utilitarian. However, those at the ‘top’ of the pyramid are just as implicated in the system as those at the ‘bottom’ because junk, the ‘evil virus’, like power, is a heterogeneous network and does not recognize or ‘need’ hierarchical systems to function: ‘[the] junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product’ (NL xxxvii). The ‘product’—in this case, in the form of junk and power that ‘constitutes’ reality—is not an ‘object’ to be passed around or imposed on another, but is in effect that which is doing the passing. Junk, like power, is not hierarchical, flowing from the top down, but ‘comes from below’, in a mobile field of relations that is everywhere, and ‘exercised from innumerable points’. Burroughs’s rendering of the control/power/junk formula as constituent of ‘reality’ allows for a highly innovative and radicalized understanding of the world and oneself because, as a figuration of power, addiction provides a means of understanding those relations of power that make ‘possible’ the range of ethics, knowledges, actions, and experiences that mold the field of relationships that circumscribes the process of subject formation, a procedure that points to the potential development of new forms of subjectivity. This figuring of junk advances an understanding of control and power alternative to that of a ‘top down’ structure. Burroughs is adamant that locating power in a sovereign entity such as the State, and resisting it based on that assumption, only results in replicating that oppressive system: ‘Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz writes: “He who opposes force alone forms that which he opposes and is formed by it” ’ (BF 106). RESISTANCE, RESCRIPTION, AND MODULATORY SUBJECTIVITYA society of control permeates the entirety of social life, submitting subjects to specific ways of acting, thinking, and existing beyond the confines of disciplinary enclosures where subjectivation takes place on a continuous and contiguous basis. In a control society, discourses are no longer limited to specific domains, but have spilled over and saturated the total field of relations. Recalling that truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power that produce and sustain it, in a society of control this circular relation is compressed, and truth and power become even more inextricably connected than they were in previous disciplinary regimes. When truth and power are coexistent, there is no need for disciplines, no need for institutions of policing, education, or medicine, because these institutions are everywhere. As Burroughs points out, in a society of complete control, ‘[n]o police force is necessary’ (AM 117). This is why, according to Burroughs, we must avoid reproducing certain forms of control when resisting a society of control; hence, we must move towards initiating new ways of thinking. Towards the end of his life, Foucault became more and more concerned with the notion of detaching power from truth towards the possibility of ‘constituting a new politics of truth’ (Foucault 1980b:133) and initiating new forms of subjectivity. In a society of control, this mode of thinking becomes more and more difficult: ‘“New concepts can only arise when one achieves a measure of disengagement from enemy conditions. On the other hand disengagement is difficult in a concentration camp is it not?” ’ (BF 106). The ‘altered self’ or a ‘new form’ of subjectivity is represented in the addict-as-subject and emerges as a modulatory subject directly engaged in the strategic games of power and control; such a modulatory subjectivity constantly moves towards, but never transcends, the limits not only of what constitutes a society of control itself, but of what, in effect, constitutes subjectivity. In other words, resistance in a control society emerges at the site of the subject. The addict is a modulatory or ‘undulatory’ subjectivity that reshapes and reforms itself in a continuously shifting movement that can be seen in Burroughs’s shape shifters, in the oscillating perspectives and floating ‘authorial I’, in the decentralized network of control and junk itself. In Nova Express, for example, Inspector Lee, in detailing how arrests are made, explains that Nova criminals are not ‘three-dimensional organisms […] but they need threedimensional human agents to operate’ (NE 56). The point at which Nova criminals ‘intersect’ with human agents are known as ‘coordinate points’, sites that the criminals—the controllers—can occupy in a limitless series. Yet, the ‘one thing that carries over from one human host to another and establishes identity of the controller […] is habit’ (NE 56). The transitory, modulatory subjectivity of the controllers is still limited in some ways by its addiction to identity. This is also underscored in the narrative point of view of Nova Express, especially at those points where the narrative suddenly breaks away from Inspector Lee’s ‘I’ and shifts into the removed third-person narrative of the ‘nameless’ narrator referred to as ‘Bill’, ‘I&I’ and ‘Bill&Iam’. These are instances of breaking away, or at least attempting to break away, from the normative confines of junkidentity. As such, Burroughs points to the modulatory-addict as existing at the extremes of control society, constantly testing and interrogating the limits of what constitutes subjectivity. Where or how might resistance to power, ‘freedom’ in the form of subjectivity, emerge in a society of control? Is there a way to resist strategies of power? This problem relates back to Foucault’s proposition that power is productive. When Burroughs writes that the ‘illusion of a separate inviolable identity limits your perceptions and confines you in time’ (AM 133), he is not advocating a destruction of the ‘self’, a thought that he admitted was ‘terrifying’ (133); rather, he is proposing a configuration that prompts the shift, alteration, or production of one’s notion of self. When power is conceived as functioning not ‘on’ or ‘outside’ its subjects, and does not act on them ‘from above’ but through, within, and ‘from below’, this indicates that power is not ‘despotic’ or limiting, but quite the opposite—that it is productive. Seen in this way, the antithesis of power is limitation and totalization. This is why Deleuze implies that power, in the guise of politics, is a potentially creative, even experimental force (Deleuze and Parnet 1977:137). Power, then, is productive, and must encompass resistance: ‘in relations of power, there is necessarily the possibility of resistance, for if there were no possibility of resistance […] there would be no relations of power’ (Foucault 1984:12). And just as power creates its own resistance, a society of control will create its own perforations and undermine its own aspirations to totality. In his essay ‘The Limits of Control’, Burroughs distinguishes between control and use, and points to the stagnancy of total control as the ‘basic impasse’ of all ‘control machines’: [C]ontrol also needs opposition or acquiescence; otherwise it ceases to be control […] I control a slave, a dog, a worker; but if I establish complete control somehow, as by implanting electrodes in the brain, then my subject is little more than a tape recorder, a camera, a robot. You don’t control a tape recorder—you use it […] All control systems try to make control as tight as possible, but at the same time, if they succeeded completely, there would be nothing left to control. (AM 117) Similarly, in the essay ‘Mind War’, Burroughs surmises that a society of ‘world control’ would look like an ‘elitist World State very much along the lines laid down by the Nazis’, controlled by a ‘theocracy trained in psychic control techniques implemented by computerized electronic devices that would render opposition psychologically impossible’ (AM 151). If there were no ‘points of insubordination’ (Foucault 1983:225) or possibilities of dissent within relations of power, there would be, simply, ‘complete control’ (AM 117) in the form of enslavement, submission, and pure use. Just as a ‘society without power relations’ is only an ‘abstraction’ (Foucault 1983:222), the ‘relationship between power and freedom’s refusal to submit’ cannot be separated (221). Foucault maintained that it is a mode of action that defines a relationship of power, a mode of action that does not act on others, but on their actions—‘a set of actions upon other actions’ (Foucault 1983:220). Burroughs echoes this sentiment in writing that this ‘is a game planet’ and that although there cannot be a final victory because that would ‘mean the end of the war game’, all the players must ‘believe in final victory’ in order for the game to function (AM 155). Yet when we see the relationship of power, the ‘game’, as a series—or as an array—of actions upon the actions of others, one must include a crucial element: freedom (Foucault 1983:221). It is the alteration of the self that ‘produces a modification of one’s activity in relation to others, and hence a modification in power relations, even if only at the micro-level to begin with’ (O’Farrell 1989:129). Hence, freedom, for Foucault as well as for Burroughs, constitutes the delimitation of domination in order to make space for the freedom of human relations, which is the space of possibility for the creation of new forms of subjectivity. Burroughs’s modulatory subject is a subject that experiences itself not only formed within relations of power, but also as having power, capable of relaying and redeploying the strategies of power themselves. Burroughs’s fascination with control and his rendering of the subject-as-addict—the modulatory subject—shores up not so much a ‘transcendence’ of the limits of cultural norms or a ‘moving outside’ the limits of the self, but more an exploration of discursive limits. Transgression, as Foucault insists, is not related to limits in the same way that the prohibited is related to the lawful, or the outside to the inside, but it ‘takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust’ (Foucault 1963:35). It is crucial to understand that Burroughs’s work in no way represents a literal moving ‘beyond’ or standing ‘beside’ oneself, but an interrogation of the limits of the self that points to the possibility of sociopolitical transformation within a society of control. What we tend to see in Burroughs is a ‘creation of the self’, the representation of the experience of self-formation in the face of the social and political forces that are incessantly affecting us on a daily basis. Through the lens of Burroughs’s radicalized perspective, the formulation of a modular subjectivity is a generative force, and signals the possibility of promoting new forms of subjectivity, of bringing one to experience oneself as an agent with and constituted by power; he underscores the necessity of distinguishing alternative modes of liberation and resistance to dominant, normalizing systems of thought exercised in a society of control. Burroughs’s representations of control and his re-signification of the subject as a modulatory subject is a gesture toward empowerment, a shift towards perceiving how we can interrupt the flow between power and truth. This, he warns, is perhaps one of the only ways that we can create power relationships that can be viably developed and employed within a society of control. REFERENCESButler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Deleuze, G. (1986) Foucault, Hand, S. trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). — (1990) ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October, 1992 No. 59, Winter, pp. 3–7. Deleuze, G., and Parnet, C. (1977) Dialogues, 2nd edition, Tomlison, H., and Habberjam, B. trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Dreyfus, H., and Rabinow, P. (1983) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Foucault, M. (1963) ‘Preface to Transgression’, IN Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). — (1969) The Archaeology of Knowledge, Smith, S. A. M. trans. 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Gautier, J. D., and s. j. trans., IN Bernauer, J., and Rasmussen, D. (1987) The Final Foucault (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 1–20. —(2002) Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, Macey, D. trans. (New York: Picador). First publication of collected lectures. Hardt, M. (1998) ‘The Withering of Civil Society’, IN Kaufman, E., and Heller, K. J. (1998) Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 23–9. Lenson, D. (1995) On Drugs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Murphy, T. S. (1997) Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (Berkeley: University of California Press). O’Farrell, C. (1989) Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? (New York: St Martin’s Press). Ronell, A. (1992) Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Retaking the Universe (William S.Burroughs in the Age of Globalization) Part1: Theoretical Depositions/'Speculating Freedom': Addiction, Control and Rescriptive Subjectivity in the Work of William S. Burroughs /Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com La Société du Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) is a black and white 1973 film by the Situationist Guy Debord based on his 1967 book of the same name. It was Debord's first feature-length film. It uses found footage and detournement in a radical Marxist critique of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society. The 88 minute film took a year to make and incorporates an apparent jumble of footage from feature films juxtaposed with still photographs, industrial films, early 1970s glossy 'lifestyle' TV ads, and news footage of unrest in the streets. The feature films include The Battleship Potemkin, October, Chapaev, The New Babylon, The Shanghai Gesture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rio Grande, They Died with Their Boots On, Johnny Guitar, and Mr. Arkadin, as well as other Soviet films. Throughout the film, there are intertitles consisting of quotations from The Society of the Spectacle, along with Debord (in voice-over) reading texts from Marx, Machiavelli, the 1968 Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne, Tocqueville, Émile Pouget, and Sergey Solovyov and others. Without citations, these quotes are hard to decipher, especially with the conflicting subtitles (which exist even in the French version): but that is part of Debord's goal to "problematize reception" (Greil and Sanborn) and force the viewer to be active. In addition, the words of some of the authors are detourned through deliberate misquoting. Footage of historical events is included, such as the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald (the assassin of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963), the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Paris riots in May 1968, along with clips of people such as Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon and the Spanish anarchist Durruti. In 1984, Debord withdrew his films from circulation because of the negative press and the assassination of his friend and patron Gerard Lebovici. Since Debord's suicide in 1994, Debord's wife Alice Becker-Ho has been promoting Debord's film. A DVD box set titled Guy Debord: Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes was released in 2005 and contains Debord's seven films. Directed by Guy Debord Written by Guy Debord Narrated by Guy Debord Music by Michel Corrette Release date: 1973 Running time: 88 min. Country: France Language: French Albert Camus What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by saying "no"? He means, for example, that "this has been going on too long," "up to this point yes, beyond it no," "you are going too far," or, again, "there is a limit beyond which you shall not go." In other words, his no affirms the existence of a borderline. The same concept is to be found in the rebel's feeling that the other person "is exaggerating," that he is exerting his authority beyond a limit where he begins to infringe on the rights of others. Thus the movement of rebellion is founded simultaneously on the categorical rejection of an intrusion that is considered intolerable and on the confused conviction of an absolute right which, in the rebel's mind, is more precisely the impression that he "has the right to . . ." Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right. It is in this way that the rebel slave says yes and no simultaneously. He affirms that there are limits and also that he suspects—and wishes to preserve—the existence of certain things on this side of the borderline. He demonstrates, with obstinacy, that there is something in him which "is worth while . . ." and which must be taken into consideration. In a certain way, he confronts an order of things which oppresses him with the insistence on a kind of right not to be oppressed beyond the limit that he can tolerate. In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringment of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself. Thus he implicitly brings into play a standard of values so far from being gratuitous that he is prepared to support it no matter what the risks. Up to this point he has at least remained silent and has abandoned himself to the form of despair in which a condition is accepted even though it is considered unjust. To remain silent is to give the impression that one has no opinions, that one wants nothing, and in certain cases it really amounts to wanting nothing. Despair, like the absurd, has opinions and desires about everything in general and nothing in particular. Silence expresses this attitude very well. But from the moment that the rebel finds his voice—even though he says nothing but "no"—he begins to desire and to judge. The rebel, in the etymological sense, does a complete turnabout. He acted under the lash of his master's whip. Suddenly he turns and faces him. He opposes what is preferable to what is not. Not every value entails rebellion, but every act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value. Or is it really a question of values? Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, even if only for a moment. Up to now this identification was never really experienced. Before he rebelled, the slave accepted all the demands made upon him. Very often he even took orders, without reacting against them, which were far more conducive to insurrection than the one at which he balks. He accepted them patiently, though he may have protested inwardly, but in that he remained silent he was more concerned with his own immediate interests than as yet aware of his own rights. But with loss of patience—with impatience—a reaction begins which can extend to everything that he previously accepted, and which is almost always retroactive. The very moment the slave refuses to obey the humiliating orders of his master, he simultaneously rejects the condition of slavery. The act of rebellion carries him far beyond the point he had reached by simply refusing. He exceeds the bounds that he fixed for his antagonist, and now demands to be treated as an equal. What was at first the man's obstinate resistance now becomes the whole man, who is identified with and summed up in this resistance. The part of himself that he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and proclaims it preferable to everything, even to life itself. It becomes for him the supreme good. Having up to now been willing to compromise, the slave suddenly adopts ("because this is how it must be . . .") an attitude of All or Nothing. With rebellion, awareness is born. But we can see that the knowledge gained is, at the same time, of an "all" that is still rather obscure and of a "nothing" that proclaims the possibility of sacrificing the rebel to this "All." The rebel himself wants to be "all"— to identify himself completely with this good of which he has suddenly become aware and by which he wants to be personally recognized and acknowledged—or "nothing"; in other words, to be completely destroyed by the force that dominates him. As a last resort, he is willing to accept the final defeat, which is death, rather than be deprived of the personal sacrament that he would call, for example, freedom. Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees. Values, according to good authorities, "most often represent a transition from facts to rights, from what is desired to what is desirable (usually through the intermediary of what is generally considered desirable)."The transition from facts to rights is manifest, as we have seen, in rebellion. So is the transition from "this must be" to "this is how I should like things to be," and even more so, perhaps, the idea of the sublimation of the individual in a henceforth universal good. The sudden appearance of the concept of "All or Nothing" demonstrates that rebellion, contrary to current opinion, and though it springs from everything that is most strictly individualistic in man, questions the very idea of the individual. If the individual, in fact, accepts death and happens to die as a consequence of his act of rebellion, he demonstrates by doing so that he is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of a common good which he considers more important than his own destiny. If he prefers the risk of death to the negation of the rights that he defends, it is because he considers these rights more important than himself. Therefore he is acting in the name of certain values which are still indeterminate but which he feels are common to himself and to all men. We see that the affirmation implicit in every act of rebellion is extended to something that transcends the individual in so far as it withdraws him from his supposed solitude and provides him with a reason to act. But it is already worth noting that this concept of values as pre-existant to any kind of action contradicts the purely historical philosophies, in which values are acquired (if they are ever acquired) after the action has been completed. Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? It is for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something in him which does not belong to him alone, but which is common ground where all men—even the man who insults and oppresses him—have a natural community. Two observations will support this argument. First, we can see that an act of rebellion is not, essentially, an egoistic act. Of course, it can have egoistic motives. But one can rebel equally well against lies as against oppression. Moreover, the rebel—once he has accepted the motives and at the moment of his greatest impetus—preserves nothing in that he risks everything. He demands respect for himself, of course, but only in so far as he identifies himself with a natural community. Then we note that rebellion does not arise only, and necessarily, among the oppressed, but that it can also be caused by the mere spectacle of oppression of which someone else is the victim. In such cases there is a feeling of identification with another individual. And it must be pointed out that this is not a question of psychological identification—a mere subterfuge by which the individual imagines that it is he himself who has been offended. On the contrary, it can often happen that we cannot bear to see offenses done to others which we ourselves have accepted without rebelling. The suicides of the Russian terrorists in Siberia as a protest against their comrades' being whipped is a case in point. Nor is it a question of the feeling of a community of interests. Injustices done to men whom we consider enemies can, actually, be profoundly repugnant to us. There is only identification of one's destiny with that of others and a choice of sides. Therefore the individual is not, in himself alone, the embodiment of the values he wishes to defend. It needs all humanity, at least, to comprise them. When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical. But for the moment we are only talking of the kind of solidarity that is born in chains. It would be possible for us to define the positive aspect of the values implicit in every act of rebellion by comparing them with a completely negative concept like that of resentment as defined by Scheler. Rebellion is, in fact, much more than pursuit of a claim, in the strongest sense of the word. Resentment is very well defined by Scheler as an autointoxication—the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence. Rebellion, on the contrary, breaks the seal and allows the whole being to come into play. It liberates stagnant waters and turns them into a raging torrent. Scheler himself emphasizes the passive aspect of resentment and remarks on the prominent place it occupies in the psychology of women who are dedicated to desire and possession. The fountain-head of rebellion, on the contrary, is the principle of superabundant activity and energy. Scheler is also right in saying that resentment is always highly colored by envy. But one envies what one does not have, while the rebel's aim is to defend what he is. He does not merely claim some good that he does not possess or of which he was deprived. His aim is to claim recognition for something which he has and which has already been recognized by him, in almost every case, as more important than anything of which he could be envious. Rebellion is not realistic. According to Scheler, resentment always turns into either unscrupulous ambition or bitterness, depending on whether it is implanted in a strong person or a weak one. But in both cases it is a question of wanting to be something other than what one is. Resentment is always resentment against oneself. The rebel, on the contrary, from his very first step, refuses to allow anyone to touch what he is. He is fighting for the integrity of one part of his being. He does not try, primarily, to conquer, but simply to impose. Finally, it would seem that resentment takes delight, in advance, in the pain that it would like the object of its envy to feel. Nietzsche and Scheler are right in seeing an excellent example of this in the passage where Ter-tullian informs his readers that one of the greatest sources of happiness among the blessed will be the spectacle of the Roman emperors consumed in the fires of hell. This kind of happiness is also experienced by the decent people who go to watch executions. The rebel, on the contrary, limits himself, as a matter of principle, to refusing to be humiliated without asking that others should be. He will even accept pain provided his integrity is respected. It is therefore hard to understand why Scheler completely identifies the spirit of rebellion with resentment. His criticism of the resentment to be found in humani-tarianism (which he treats as the non-Christian form of love for mankind) could perhaps be applied to certain indeterminate forms of humanitarian idealism, or to the techniques of terror. But it rings false in relation to man's rebellion against his condition—the movement that enlists the individual in the defense of a dignity common to all men. Scheler wants to demonstrate that humanitarian feelings are always accompanied by a hatred of the world. Humanity is loved in general in order to avoid having to love anybody in particular. This is correct, in some cases, and it is easier to understand Scheler when we realize that for him humanitarianism is represented by Bentham and Rousseau. But man's love for man can be born of other things than a mathematical calculation of the resultant rewards or a theoretical confidence in human nature. In face of the utilitarians, and of Emile's preceptor, there is, for example, the kind of logic, embodied by Dostoievsky in Ivan Karamazov, which progresses from an act of rebellion to metaphysical insurrection. Scheler is aware of this and sums up the concept in the following manner: "There is not enough love in the world to squander it on anything but human beings." Even if this proposition were true, the appalling despair that it implies would merit anything but contempt. In fact, it misunderstands the tortured character of Karamazov's rebellion. Ivan's drama, on the contrary, arises from the fact that there is too much love without an object. This love finding no outlet and God being denied, it is then decided to lavish it on human beings as a generous act of complicity. Nevertheless, in the act of rebellion as we have envisaged it up to now, an abstract ideal is not chosen through lack of feeling and in pursuit of a sterile demand. We insist that the part of man which cannot be reduced to mere ideas should be taken into consideration—the passionate side of his nature that serves no other purpose than to be part of the act of living. Does this imply that no rebellion is motivated by resentment? No, and we know it only too well in this age of malice. But we must consider the idea of rebellion in its widest sense on pain of betraying it; and in its widest sense rebellion goes far beyond resentment. When Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, says that he puts his love above God and would willingly go to hell in order to be reunited with the woman he loves, he is prompted not only by youth and humiliation but by the consuming experience of a whole lifetime. The same emotion causes Eckart, in a surprising fit of heresy, to say that he prefers hell with Jesus to heaven without Him. This is the very essence of love. Contrary to Scheler, it would therefore be impossible to overemphasize the passionate affirmation that underlies the act of rebellion and distinguishes it from resentment. Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended. But, to sum up, are not rebellion and the values that it implies relative? Reasons for rebellion do seem to change, in fact, with periods and civilizations. It is obvious that a Hindu pariah, an Inca warrior, a primitive native of central Africa, and a member of one of the first Christian communities had not at all the same ideas about rebellion. We could even assert, with considerable assurance, that the idea of rebellion has no meaning in these particular cases. However, a Greek slave, a serf, a condottiere of the Renaissance, a Parisian bourgeois during the Regency, a Russian intellectual at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a contemporary worker would undoubtedly agree that rebellion is legitimate, even if they differed about the reasons for it. In other words, the problem of rebellion seems to assume a precise meaning only within the confines of Western thought. It is possible to be even more explicit by remarking, like Scheler, that the spirit of rebellion finds few means of expression in societies where inequalities are very great (the Hindu caste system) or, again, in those where there is absolute equality (certain primitive societies). The spirit of rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society. One might be tempted to affirm that it is relative to the development of individualism if the preceding remarks had not put us on our guard against this conclusion. On the basis of the evidence, the only conclusion that can be drawn from Scheler's remark is that, thanks to the theory of political freedom, there is, in the very heart of our society, an increasing awareness in man of the idea of man and, thanks to the application of this theory of freedom, a corresponding dissatisfaction. Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man's awareness of it. We can only deduce from this observation that rebellion is the act of an educated man who is aware of his own rights. But there is nothing which justifies us in saying that it is only a question of individual rights. Because of the sense of solidarity we have already pointed out, it would rather seem that what is at stake is humanity's gradually increasing self-awareness as it pursues its course. In fact, for the Inca and the pariah the problem never arises, because for them it had been solved by a tradition, even before they had had time to raise it—the answer being that tradition is sacred. If in a world where things are held sacred the problem of rebellion does not arise, it is because no real problems are to be found in such a world, all the answers having been given simultaneously. Metaphysic is replaced by myth. There are no more questions, only eternal answers and commentaries, which may be metaphysical. But before man accepts the sacred world and in order that he should be able to accept it— or before he escapes from it and in order that he should be able to escape from it—there is always a period of soulsearching and rebellion. The rebel is a man who is on the point of accepting or rejecting the sacred and determined on laying claim to a human situation in which all the answers are human—in other words, formulated in reasonable terms. From this moment every question, every word, is an act of rebellion while in the sacred world every word is an act of grace. It would be possible to demonstrate in this manner that only two possible worlds can exist for the human mind: the sacred (or, to speak in Christian terms, the world of grace ) and the world of rebellion. The disappearance of one is equivalent to the appearance of the other, despite the fact that this appearance can take place in disconcerting forms. There again we rediscover the All or Nothing. The present interest of the problem of rebellion only springs from the fact that nowadays whole societies have wanted to discard the sacred. We live in an unsacrosanct moment in history. Insurrection is certainly not the sum total of human experience. But history today, with all its storm and strife, compels us to say that rebellion is one of the essential dimensions of man. It is our historic reality. Unless we choose to ignore reality, we must find our values in it. Is it possible to find a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion and its absolute values? That is the question raised by rebellion. We have already noted the confused values that are called into play by incipient rebellion. Now we must inquire if these values are to be found again in contemporary forms of rebellious thought and action, and if they are, we must specify their content. But, before going any farther, let us note that the basis of these values is rebellion itself. Man's solidarity is founded upon rebellion, and rebellion, in its turn, can only find its justification in this solidarity. We have, then, the right to say that any rebellion which claims the right to deny or destroy this solidarity loses simultaneously its right to be called rebellion and becomes in reality an acquiescence in murder. In the same way, this solidarity, except in so far as religion is concerned, comes to life only on the level of rebellion. And so the real drama of revolutionary thought is announced. In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limit it discovers in itself—a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist. Rebellious thought, therefore, cannot dispense with memory: it is a perpetual state of tension. In studying its actions and its results, we shall have to say, each time, whether it remains faithful to its first noble promise or if, through indolence or folly, it forgets its original purpose and plunges into a mire of tyranny or servitude. Meanwhile, we can sum up the initial progress that the spirit of rebellion provokes in a mind that is originally imbued with the absurdity and apparent sterility of the world. In absurdist experience, suffering is individual. But from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience. Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe. The malady experienced by a single man becomes a mass plague. In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the "cogito" in the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel—therefore we exist. Albert Camus/The Rebel/ Part One: The Rebel/FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, NOVEMBER 1991 Copyright © 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc 'The arts require witnesses,' Marmontel once said. A century later Auguste Rodin asserted that it is the visible world that demands to be revealed by means other than the latent images of the phototype. In the course of his famous conversations with the sculptor, Paul Gsell remarked, apropos Rodin's 'The Age of Bronze' and 'St John the Baptist', 'I am still left wondering how those great lumps of bronze or stone actually seem to move, how obviously immobile figures appear to act and even to be making pretty strenuous efforts. Rodin retorts, 'Have you ever looked closely at instantaneous photographs of men in motion? ... Well then, what have you noticed?' 'That they never seem to be making headway. Generally, they seem to be standing still on one leg, or hopping.' 'Exactly! Take my "St John", for example. I've shown him with both feet on the ground, whereas an instantaneous photograph taken of a model performing the same movement would most likely show the back foot already raised and moving forward. Or else the reverse — the front foot would not yet be on the ground if the back leg in the photograph were in the same position as in my statue. That is precisely why the model in the photograph would have the bizarre look of a man suddenly struck with paralysis. Which confirms what I was just saying about movement in art. People in photographs suddenly seem frozen in mid-air, despite being caught in full swing: this is because every part of their body is reproduced at exactly the same twentieth or fortieth of a second, so there is no gradual unfolding of a gesture, as there is in art.' Gsell objects, 'So, when art interprets movement and finds itself completely at loggerheads with photography, which is an unimpeachable mechanical witness, art obviously distorts the truth.' 'No', Rodin replies, 'It is art that tells the truth and photography that lies. For in reality time does not stand still, and if the artist manages to give the impression that a gesture is being executed over several seconds, their work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image in which time is abruptly suspended. ...' Rodin then goes on to discuss Gericault's horses, going flat out in the painting 'Race at Epsom', and the critics who claim that the photographic plate never gives the same impression. Rodin counters that the artist condenses several successive movements into a single image, so if the representation as a whole is false in showing these movements as simultaneous, it is true when the parts are observed in sequence, and it is only this truth that counts since it is what we see and what impresses us. Prompted by the artist to follow the progress of a character's action, the spectator, scanning it, has the illusion of seeing the movement performed. This illusion is thus not produced mechanically as it would later be with the snapshots of the chronophotographic apparatus, through retinal retention - photosensitivity to light stimuli — but naturally, through eye movement. The veracity of the work therefore depends, in part, on this solicitation of eye (and possibly body) movement in the witness who, in order to sense an object with maximum clarity, must accomplish an enormous number of tiny, rapid movements from one part of the object to another. Conversely, if the eye's motility is transformed into fixity by artificial lenses or bad habits, the sensory apparatus undergoes distortion and vision degenerates. ... In his greedy anxiety to achieve his end, which is to do the greatest possible amount of good seeing in the shortest possible time, the starer neglects the only means whereby this end can be achieved. Besides, Rodin insists, the veracity of the whole is only made possible through the lack of precision of details conceived merely as so many material props enabling either a falling short of or a going beyond immediate vision. The work of art requires witnesses because it sallies forth with its image into the depths of a material time which is also our own. This sharing of duration is automatically defeated by the innovation of photographic instantaneity, for if the instantaneous image pretends to scientific accuracy in its details, the snapshot's image-freeze or rather image-time-freeze invariably distorts the witness's felt temporality, that time that is the movement of something created? The plaster studies on show in Rodin's atelier at Meudon reveal a state of evident anatomical breakdown — huge, unruly hands and feet, dislocated, distended limbs, bodies in suspension — the representation of movement pushed to the limits of collapse or take-off. From here it is only a step to Clement Ader and the first aeroplane flight, the conquest of the air through mobilisation of something heavier than air which is followed, in 1895, by cinematography's mobilisation of the snapshot, retinal take-off, that moment when, with the achievement of metabolic speeds, 'all that we called art seems to have become paralytic, while the film-maker lights up the thousand candles of his projectors'. When Bergson asserts that mind is a thing that endures, one might add that it is our duration that thinks, feels, sees. The first creation of consciousness would then be its own speed in its time-distance, speed thereby becoming causal idea, idea before the idea.5 It is thus now common to think of our memories as multidimensional, of thought as transfer, transport (metaphora) in the literal sense. Already Cicero and the ancient memory-theorists believed you could consolidate natural memory with the right training. They invented a topographical system, the Method of Loci, an imagerymnemonics which consisted of selecting a sequence of places, locations, that could easily be ordered in time and space. For example, you might imagine wandering through the house, choosing as loci various tables, a chair seen through a doorway, a windowsill, a mark on a wall. Next, the material to be remembered is coded into discreet images and each of the images is inserted in the appropriate order into the various loci. To memorise a speech, you transform the main points into concrete images and mentally 'place' each of the points in order at each successive locus. When it is time to deliver the speech, all you have to do is recall the parts of the house in order. The same kind of training is still used today by stage actors and barristers at court. It was members of the theatre industry like Kammerspiel theorists Lupu Pick and the scenarist Carl Mayer who, at the beginning of the 1920s, took the whole thing to ludicrous lengths as a film technique, offering the audience a kind of cinematic huis clos occurring in a unique place and at the exact moment of projection. Their film sets were not expressionist but realist so that familiar objects, the minutiae of daily life, assume an obsessive symbolic importance. According to its creators, this was supposed to render all dialogue, all subtitles superfluous. The silent screen was to make the surroundings speak the same way practitioners of artificial memory made the room they lived in, the theatre boards they trod speak, in retrospect. Following Dreyer and a host of others, Alfred Hitchcock employed a somewhat similar coding system, bearing in mind that viewers do not manufacture mental images on the basis of what they are immediately given to see, but on the basis of their memories, by themselves filling in the blanks and their minds with images created retrospectively, as in childhood. For a traumatised population, in the aftermath of the First World war, the Kammerspiel cinema altered the conditions of invention of artificial memory, which was itself also born of the catastrophic disappearance of the scenery. The story goes that the lyrical poet Simonides of Chios, in the middle of reciting a poem at a banquet, was suddenly called away to another part of the house. As soon as he left the room, the roof caved in on the other guests and, as it was a particularly heavy roof, they were all crushed to a pulp. But with his sharpened memory, Simonides could recall the exact place occupied by each of the unfortunate guests and the bodies could thus be identified. It then really dawned on Simonides what an advantage this method of picking places and filling them in with images could be in practising the art of poetry. In May 1646 Descartes wrote to Elizabeth, 'There is such a strong connection between body and soul that thoughts that accompanied certain movements of our body at the beginning of our lives, go on accompanying them later.' Elsewhere he tells how he once as a child loved a little girl with a slight squint, and how the impression his brain received through sight whenever he looked at her wandering eyes remained so vividly present that he continued to be drawn to people with the same defect for the rest of his life. The moment they appeared on the scene, the first optical devices (Al-Hasan ibn al-Haitam aka Alhazen's camera obscura in the tenth century, Roger Bacon's instruments in the thirteenth, the increasing number of visual prostheses, lenses, astronomic telescopes and so on from the Renaissance on) profoundly altered the contexts in which mental images were topographically stored and retrieved, the imperative to re-present oneself, the imaging of the imagination which was such a great help in mathematics according to Descartes and which he considered a veritable part of the body, veram partem corporis. Just when we were apparently procuring the means to see further and better the unseen of the universe, we were about to lose what little power had of imagining it. The telescope, that epitome of the visual prosthesis, projected an image of a world beyond our reach and thus another way of moving about in the world, the logistics of perception inaugurating an unknown conveyance of sight that produced a telescoping of near and far, a phenomenon of acceleration obliterating our experience of distances and dimensions. More than a return to Antiquity, the Renaissance appears today as the advent of a period when all intervals were cleared, a sort of morphological 'breaking and entering' that immediately impacted on the reality-effect: once astronomic and chronometric apparatuses went commercial, geographical perception became dependent on anamorphic processes. Painters such as Holbein, who were contemporaries of Copernicus, practised a kind of iconography in which technology's first stab at leading the senses astray occupied centre stage thanks to singularly mechanistic optical devices. Apart from the displacement of the observer's point of view, complete perception of the painted work could only happen with the aid of instruments such as glass cylinders and tubes, the play of conical or spherical mirrors, magnifying glasses and other kinds of lenses. The reality-effect had become a dissociated system, a puzzle the observer was unable to solve without some traffic in light or the appropriate prostheses. Jurgis Baltrusaitis reports that the Jesuits of Beijing used anamorphic equipment as instruments of religious propaganda to impress the Chinese and to demonstrate to them 'mechanically' that man should experience the world as an illusion of the world. In a celebrated passage of / Saggiatore (1623), Galileo exposes the essential features of his method: 'Philosophy is written in the immense Book of Nature which is constantly before our very eyes and which cannot be (humanly) understood unless one has previously learned the language and alphabet in which it is written. It is written in mathematical characters... . We imagine it (mathematically) because it remains continually before our very eyes from the moment we first see the light of day. If, in this parabola, the duration of the visible seems simply to persist, geomorphology has disappeared or is at least reduced to an abstract language plotted on one of the first great industrial media (with all the artillery so vital to the disclosure of optical phenomena). The celebrated Gutenberg Bible had by then been in print for nearly two centuries and the book trade in Europe, with a printing works in every town and a great number of them in the capitals, had already disseminated its products in the millions. Significantly, the 'art of writing artificially' as it was then called, was also, from its inception, placed at the service of religious propaganda, the Catholic Church at first, then the Reformation. But it was also an instrument of diplomatic and military propaganda, a fact that would later earn it the name thought artillery, well before Marcel L'Herbier labelled his camera a rotary image press. A connoisseur of optical mirages, Galileo now no longer preferred to form images in the world directly in order to imagine it; he took up instead the much more limited oculomotor labour of reading. From Antiquity, a progressive simplification of written characters can t>e discerned, followed by a simplification of typographical composition which corresponded to an acceleration in the transmission of messages and led logically to the radical abbreviation of the contents information. The tendency to make reading time as intensive as speaking time stemmed from the tactical necessities of military conquest and more particularly of the battlefield, that occasional field of perception, privileged space of the vision of the trooper, of rapid stimuli, slogans and other logotypes of war. The battlefield is the place where social intercourse breaks off, where political rapprochement fails, making way for the inculcation of terror. The panoply of acts of war thus always tends to be organised at a distance, or rather, to organise distances. Orders, in fact speech of any kind, are transmitted by long-range instruments which, in any case, are often inaudible among combatants' screams, the clash of arms, and, later, the various explosions and detonations. Signal flags, multicoloured pennants, schematic emblems then replace faltering vocal signals and constitute a delocalised language which can now be grasped via brief and distant glances, inaugurating a vectorisation that will become concrete in 1794 with the first aerial telegraph line between Paris and Lille and the announcement, at the Convention, of the French troops' victory at Conde-sur-1'Escaut. That same year, Lazare Carnot, organiser of the Revolution's armies, recorded the speed of transmission of military information that was at the very heart of the nation's political and social structures. He commented that if terror was the order of the day, it could thereafter hold sway at the front just as well and at the same time as behind the lines. Some time later, at the moment when photography became instantaneous, messages and words, reduced to a few elementary signs, were themselves telescoped to the speed of light. On 6 January 1838 Samuel Morse, the American physicist and painter of battle-scenes, succeeded in sending the first electric-telegraph message from his workshop in New Jersey. (The term meaning to write at a distance was also used at the time to denote certain stagecoaches and other means of fast transport.) The race between the transtextual and the transvisual ran on until the emergence of the instantaneous ubiquity of the audiovisual mix. Simultaneously tele-diction and television, this ultimate transfer finally undermines the age-old problematic of the site where mental images are formed as well as that of the consolidation of natural memory. 'The boundaries between things are disappearing, the subject and the world are no longer separate, time seems to stand still', wrote the physicist Ernst Mach, known particularly for having established the role of the speed of sound in aerodynamics. In fact the teletopological phenomenon remains heavily marked by its remote beginnings in war, and does not bring the subject closer to the world. ... In the manner of the combatant of antiquity, it anticipates human movement, outstripping every displacement of the body and abolishing space. With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation. This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organisation, precede gesture and speech and their co-ordination in knowing, recognising, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never ever passive. Communicational experiments with newborn babies are particularly instructive. A small mammal condemned, unlike other mammals, to prolonged semi-immobility, the child, it seems, hangs on maternal smells (breast, neck ...), but also on eye movements. In the course of an eye-tracking exercise that consists of holding a child of about three months in one's arms, at eye level and face to face, and turning it gently from right to left, then from left to right, the child's eyes 'bulge' in the reverse direction, as makers of old porcelain dolls clearly saw, simply because the infant does not want to lose sight of the smiling face of the person holding it. The child experiences this exercise in the expansion of its field of vision as deeply gratifying; it laughs and wants to go on doing it. Something very fundamental is clearly going on here, since the infant is in the process of forming a lasting communicational image by mobilising its eyes. As Lacan said, communication makes you laugh and so the child is in an ideally human position. Everything I see is in principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, marked on the map of the 7 can'. In this important formulation, Merleau-Ponty pinpoints precisely what will eventually find itself ruined by the banalisation of a certain teletopology. The bulk of what I see is, in fact and in principle, no longer within my reach. And even if it lies within reach of my sight, it is no longer necessarily inscribed on the map of the 'I can'. The logistics of perception in fact destroy what earlier modes of representation preserved of this original, ideally human happiness, the 'I can' of sight, which kept art from being obscene. I have often been able to confirm this watching models who were perfectly happy to pose in the nude and submit to whatever painters and sculptors wanted them to do, but flatly refused to allow themselves to be photographed, feeling that that would amount to a pornographic act. There is a vast iconography evoking this prime communicational image. It has been one of the major themes in Christian art, presenting the person of Mary (named Mediator) as the initial map of the Infant-God's 7 can\ Conversely, the Reformation's rejection of consubstantiality and of such close physical proximity intervenes during the Renaissance, with the proliferation of optical devices. ... Romantic poetry is one of the last movements to employ this type of cartography. In Novalis, the body of the beloved (having become profane) is the universe in miniature and the universe is merely the extension of the beloved's body. So in spite of all this machinery of transfer, we get no closer to the productive unconscious of sight, something the surrealists once dreamed of in relation to photography and cinema. Instead, we only get as far as its unconsciousness, an annihilation of place and appearance the future amplitude of which is still hard to imagine. The death of art, heralded from the beginning of the nineteenth century, turns out to be merely an initial, disquieting symptom of this process, despite being unprecedented in the history of human societies. This is the emergence of the deregulated world that Hermann Rauschning, the author of The Revolution of Nihilism, spoke about in November 1939 in relation to Nazism's project: the universal collapse of all forms of established order, something never before seen in human memory. In this unprecedented crisis of representation (bearing absolutely no relation to some kind of classic decadence), the age-old act of seeing was to be replaced by a regressive perceptual state, a kind of syncretism, resembling a pitiful caricature of the semi-immobility of early infancy, the sensitive substratum now existing only as a fuzzy morass from which a few shapes, smells, sounds accidentally leap out ... more sharply perceived. Thanks to work like that of W. R. Russell and Nathan (1946), scientists have become aware of the relationship of post-perceptual visual processes to time. The storage of mental images is never instantaneous; it has to do with the processing of perception. Yet it is precisely this storage process that is rejected today. The young American film-maker Laurie Anderson, among others, is able to declare herself a mere voyeur interested only in details; as for the rest, she says, T use computers that are tragically unable to forget, like endless rubbish dumps.' Returning to Galileo's simile of deciphering the book of the real, it is not so much a question here of what Benjamin called the imageilliteracy of the photographers incapable of reading their own photographs. It is a question of visual dyslexia. Teachers have been saying for a long time now that the last few generations have great difficulty understanding what they read because they are incapable of re-presenting it to themselves.... For them, words have in the end lost their ability to come alive, since images, more rapidly perceived, were supposed to replace words according to the photographers, the silent film-makers, the propagandists and advertisers of the early twentieth century. Now there is no longer anything to replace, and the number of the visually illiterate and dyslexic keeps mutliplying. Here again, recent studies of dyslexia have established a direct connection between the subject's visual abilities, on the one hand, and language and reading on the other. They frequently record a weakening of central (foveal) vision, the site of the most acute sensation, along with subsequent enhancing of a more or less frantic peripheral vision - a dissociation of sight in which the heterogeneous swamps the homogeneous. This means that, as in narcotic states, the series of visual impressions become meaningless. They no longer seem to belong to us, they just exist, as though the speed of light had won out, this time, over the totality of the message. If we think about light, which has no image and yet creates images, we find that the use of light stimuli in crowd control goes back a long way. The inhabitant of the ancient city, for instance, was not the indoors type; he was out on the street, except at nightfall for obvious safety reasons. Commerce, craft, riots and daily brawls, traffic jams. ... Bossuet was worried about this chronic lightweight who could not keep still, did not stop to think where he was going, who no longer even knew where he was and would soon be mistaking night for day. At the end of the seventeenth century, police lieutenant La Reynie came up with 'Lighting Inspectors' to reassure the Parisian public and encourage them to go out at night. When he quit his post in 1697, having been promoted chief of police, there were 6,500 lanterns lighting up the capital which would soon be known by contemporaries as the city of light for 'the streets are ablaze all through winter and even of a full moon', as the Englishman Lister wrote, comparing Paris to London which enjoyed no such privilege. In the 18th century the by now rather shady population of Paris mushroomed and the capital became known as the New Babylon. The brightness of its lighting signalled not just a desire for security, but also individual and institutional economic prosperity, as well as the fact that 'brilliance is all the rage' among the new elites - bankers, gentlemen farmers and the nouveaux riches of dubious origins and careers. Whence the taste for garish lights which no lampshade could soften. On the contrary, they were amplified by the play of mirrors multiplying them to infinity. Mirrors turned into dazzling reflectors. A giorno lighting now spilled out of the buildings where it once helped turn reality into illusion — theatres, palaces, luxury hotels, princely gardens. Artificial light was in itself a spectacle soon to be made available to all, and street lighting, the democratisation of lighting, is designed to trick everyone's eyes. There is everything from old-fashioned fireworks to the light shows of the engineer Philippe Lebon, the inventor of the gaslight who, in the middle of a social revolution, opened the Seignelay Hotel to the public so they might appreciate the value of his discovery. The streets were packed at night with people gazing upon the works of lighting engineers and pyrotechnists known collectively as impressionists. But this constant straining after 'more light' was already leading to a sort of precocious disability, a blindness; the eye literally popped out of its socket. In this respect the delegation of sight to Niepce's artificial retinas, took on its full meaning. Faced with such a permanent regime of bedazzlement, the range of adaptability of the eye's crystalline lens was quickly lost. Madame de Genlis, then governess to the children of Louis-Philippe, pointed to the damage caused by the abuse of lighting: 'Since lamps have come into fashion, it is the young who are wearing glasses; good eyes are now only to be found among the old who have kept up the habit of reading and writing with a candle shaded by a candle guard. That perverted peasant and Paris pedestrian, Restif de la Bretonne, observing life with the rustic's sharp eye, soon gave way to a new, anonymous, ageless character who no longer took to the streets looking for a man, like Diogenes with his lantern burning in broad daylight. He now sought light itself, for where there is light there is the crowd. According to Edgar Allan Poe, our man no longer inhabited the big city strictly speaking (London, as it happens), but the dense throng. His only itinerary was that of the human stream wherever it was bound, wherever it was to be found. All was dark yet splendid, Poe wrote, and the man's only terror was the risk of losing the crowd thanks to the strange light effects, to the speed with which the world of light vanishes. ...' For this man, frowning furiously, shooting frantic looks here, there and everywhere towards all those swarming round him, drowning in the flood of images, one face constantly being gobbled up by another, the endless surging throng permitted only the briefest glance at any one face. When, having pursued him for hours, the exhausted author finally caught up and planted himself right in front of him, the man was pulled up short for a second, but looked straight through the author without even seeing him, then immediately flitted off on his merry manic way. In 1902 it was Jack London's turn to come to London and he too followed, step by step, the people of the abyss. Urban lighting had by then become a torture for the mass of social rejects of the capital of the world's most powerful Empire. The vast mob of the homeless represented more than 10 per cent of London's population of six million. They were not allowed to sleep at night anywhere, whether in parks, on benches or on the street; they had to keep walking till dawn, when they were finally allowed to lie down in places' where there was little danger of anyone seeing them. No doubt because contemporary architects and townplanners have no more than anyone else been able to escape such psychotropic disorders (the topographical amnesia described by neuropathologists as the Elpenor Syndrome or incomplete awakening), one can say, with Agnes Varda, that the most distinctive cities bear within them the capacity of being nowhere ... the dream decor of oblivion. So, in Vienna, in 1908, Adolf Loos delivered his celebrated discourse Ornament and Crime, a manifesto in which he preaches the standardisation of total functionalism and waxes lyrical about the fact that 'the greatness of our age lies in its inability to produce a new form of decoration'. For, he claims, 'in fashioning ornaments human labour, money and material are ruined'. Loos considered this a real crime 'which we cannot simply shrug off. This would be followed by Walter Gropius' 'industrial-building production standards', the ephemeral architecture of the Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero, the Berlin Licht-Burg, Moholy-Nagy's space-light modulators, Kurt Schwerdtfeger's reflektorische Farblichtspiel of 1922. ... In fact, the constructivist aesthetic would forever continue to hide behind the banalisation of form, the transparency of glass, the fluidity of vectors and the special effects of machines of transfer or transmission. When the Nazis came to power, busily persecuting 'degenerate artists' and architects and extolling the stability of materials and the durability of monuments, their resistance to time and to the obliviousness of history, they were actually putting the new psychotropic power to good use for propaganda purposes. Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, organised the Nazi Zeppelin Field festivities and advocated the value of ruins. For the party rally at Nuremberg in 1935, he used 150 anti-aircraft searchlights with their beams pointing upwards, making a rectangle of light in the night sky. ... He wrote: 'Within these luminous walls, the first of their kind, the rally took place with all its rituals. ... I now feel strangely moved by the idea that the most successful architectural creation of my life was a chimera, an immaterial mirage.'18 Doomed to disappear at first light, leaving no more material trace than a few films and the odd photograph, the 'crystal castle' was especially aimed at Nazi militants who, according to Goebbels, obey a law they are not even consciously aware of but which they could recite in their dreams. On the basis of 'scientific' analysis of the stenographic speed of his various speeches, Hitler's master of propaganda had invented, again in his own estimation, a new mass language which 'no longer has anything to do with archaic and allegedly popular forms of expression'. He added: 'This is the beginning of an original aesthetic style, a vivid and galvanising form of expression.' At least he was good at self-promotion. Such declarations recall those of Futurists such as the Portuguese Mario de Sa-Carneiro (d.1916) celebrating The Assumption of the Acoustic Waves: Aaagh! Aaagh!: The vibrating mass is pressing in. ... I can even feel myself being carried along by the air, like a ball of wool!' Or Marinetti who, as a war correspondent in Libya, was inspired by wireless telegraphy and all the other techniques of topographical amnesia besides - explosives, projectiles, planes, fast vehicles - to compose his poems. The Futurist movements of Europe did not last. They disappeared m a few short years, nudged along by a bit of repression. In Italy they were responsible for anarchist and fascist movements - Marinetti was a personal friend of II Duce - but all were quickly swept from the political stage. No doubt they had come a little too close to the bone in exposing the conjunction between communication technologies and the totalitarianism that was then taking shape before 'Newly annointed eyes Futurist, Cubist, intersectionist eyes, which never cease to quiver, to absorb, to radiate all that spectral, transferred, substitute beauty, all that unsupported beauty, dislocated, standing out. .. .' With topographical memory, one could speak of generations of vision and even of visual heredity from one generation to the next. The advent of the logistics of perception and its renewed vectors for delocalising geometrical optics, on the contrary, ushered in a eugenics of sight, a pre-emptive abortion of the diversity of mental images, of the swarm of image-beings doomed to remain unborn, no longer to see the light of day anywhere. This problematic was beyond scientists and researchers for a long time. The work of the Vienna School, such as that of Riegl and Wickhoff, addressed the implied relations between modes of perception and the periods when they were on the agenda. But for the most part research remained limited to the investigation, de rigeur at the time, of the socio-economics of the image. Throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth, studies of humanmemory processes were also largely functionalist, inspired in the main by the various learning processes and the conditioning of animals; here too, electrical stimuli played a part. The military supported such research and so, subsequently, did ideologues and politicians keen to obtain immediate practical social spin-offs. In Moscow, in 1920 a Russian committee was set up to promote collaboration between Germany and the Soviet Union in the area of racial biology. Among other things the work of the German neuropathologists sojourning in the Soviet capital was supposed to locate man's 'centre of genius' as well as the centre of mathematical learning. ... The committee came under the authority of Kalinin, who was to be president of the praesidium of the Supreme Soviet Council from 1937 to 1946. This was the real beginning, technically and scientifically speaking, of power based on hitherto unrecognised forms of postural oppression and, once again, the battlefield would ensure rapid deployment of the new physiological prohibitions. As early as 1916, during the first great mediatised conflict in history, Doctor Gustave Lebon had remarked: 'Old-fashioned psychology considered personality as something clearly defined, barely susceptible to variation.... This person endowed with a fixed personality now appears to be a figment of the imagination. With the relentless churning up of the war's landscapes, he noted that the personality's alleged fixity had depended to a large extent, till then, on the permanence of the natural environment. But what kind of permanence did he have in mind, and which environment? Is it the environment Clausewitz refers to, that battlefield where, beyond a certain threshold of danger, reason thinks of itself differently? Or, more precisely, is it the environment which is constantly targeted, intercepted by an optical arsenal going from the 'line of sight' of the firearm - cannons, rifles, machine guns, used on an unprecedented scale - to cameras, the high-speed equipment of aerial intelligence, projecting an image of a de-materialising world? The origin of the word propaganda is well known: propaganda fide, propagation of the faith. The year 1914 not only saw the physical deportation of millions of men to the battlefields. With the apocalypse created by the deregulation of perception came a different kind of diaspora, the moment of panic when the mass of Americans and Europeans could no longer believe their eyes, when their faith in perception became slave to the faith in the technical sightline [line of faith]: in other words, the visual field was reduced to the line of a sighting device. A little later the director Jacques Tourneur confirmed the truth of this: 'In Hollywood I soon learned that the camera never sees everything. I could see everything, but the camera only sees sections.' But what does one see when one's eyes, depending on sighting instruments, are reduced to a state of rigid and practically invariable structural immobility? One can only see instantaneous sections seized by the Cyclops eye of the lens. Vision, once substantial, becomes accidental. Despite the elaborate debate surrounding the problem of the objectivity of mental or instrumental images, this revolutionary change in the regime of vision was not clearly perceived and the fusion-confusion of eye and camera lens, the passage from vision to visualisation, settled easily into accepted norms. While the human gaze became more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary, became even faster. Today professional and amateur photographers alike are mostly happy to fire off shot after shot, trusting to the power of speed and the large number of shots taken. They rely slavishly on the contact sheet, preferring to observe their own photographs to observmg some kind of reality. Jacques-Henri Lartigue, who called his camera his memory's eye, abandoned focusing altogether, knowing without looking what his Leica would see, even when holding it at arm's length, the camera becoming a substitute for both eye and body movements at once. The reduction in mnesic choices which ensued from this dependence on the lens was to become the nodule in which the modelling of vision would develop and, with it, all possible standardisations of ways of seeing. Thanks to work on animal conditioning like that of Thorndike (1931) and McGeoch (1932), a new certainty was born. To retrieve a specific target attribute, it was no longer necessary to activate a whole array of attributes, any single one of them being able to act independently. This fact once again begged the frequently asked question of the trans-situational identity of mental images. From the beginning of the century the perceptual field in Europe was invaded by certain signs, representations and logotypes that were to proliferate over the next twenty, thirty, sixty years, outside any immediate explanatory context, like beak-nosed carp in the polluted ponds they depopulate. Geometric brand-images, initials, Hitler's swastika, Charlie Chaplin's silhouette, Magritte's blue bird or the red lips of Marilyn Monroe: parasitic persistence cannot be explained merely in terms of the power of technical reproducibility, so often discussed since the nineteenth century. We are in effect looking at the logical outcome of a system of message-intensification which has, for several centuries, assigned a primordial role to the techniques of visual and oral communication. On a more practical note, Ray Bradbury recently remarked: 'Filmmakers bombard with images instead of words and accentuate the details using special effects. ... You can get people to swallow anything by intensifying the details.' The phatic image — a targeted image that forces you to look and holds your attention - is not only a pure product of photographic and cinematic focusing. More importantly it is the result of an everbrighter illumination, of the intensity of its definition, singling out only specific areas, the context mostly disappearing into a blur. During the first half of the twentieth century this kind of image immediately spread like wildfire in the service of political or financial totalitarian powers in acculturated countries, like North America, as well as in destructured countries like the Soviet Union and Germany, which were carved up after revolution and military defeat. In other words, in nations morally and intellectually in a state of least resistance. There the key words of poster ads and other kinds of posters would often be printed on a background in just as strong a colour. The difference between what was in focus and its context, or between image and text, was nevertheless stressed here as well, since the viewer had to spend more time trying to decipher the written message or simply give up and just take in the image. Since the fifth century, Gerard Simon notes, the geometrical study of sight formed part of the pictorial techniques artists were bent on codifying. Thanks to the celebrated passage in Vitruvius, we also know that from Antiquity artists were at pains to give the illusion of depth, particularly in theatre sets.' But in the Middle Ages the background came to the surface in pictorial representation. All the characters, even the most minute details - the context, if you like - remain on the same plane of legibility, of visibility. Only their exaggerated size, the way they loom forward suggesting pride of place, draws the observer's attention to certain important personages. Here everything is seen in the same light, in a transparent atmosphere, a brightness further highlighted by golds and halos, by ornaments. These are holy pictures, establishing a theological parallel between vision and knowledge, for which there are no blurred areas. The latter make their first appearance with the Renaissance when religious and cosmogonical uncertainties begin to proliferate along with the proliferation of optical devices. Once you have smoke effects or distant mists, it is just a short step to the notion of the non finito, the unfinished vision of pictorial representation or statuary. In the eighteenth century, with the fashion in geological follies and the curling lines of the rococo and the baroque, architects like Claude Nicolas Ledoux at the Arc-et-Senans saltworks revelled in playing up the contrasts in the chaotic arrangement of matter, with untidy piles of stone blocks escaping the creator's grip on geometry. At the same time monumental ruins, real or fake, were very much in vogue. Some sixty years later, chaos had taken over the entire structure of the painted work. The composition decomposes. The Impressionists deserted their studios and wandered off to catch real life in the act, the way the photographers were doing but with the advantage, soon to be lost, of colour. With Edgar Degas, painter and amateur photographer, composition came close to framing, to positioning within the range of the viewfinder: the subjects seem decentred, segmented, viewed from above or below in an artificial, often harsh light, like the glare of the reflectors used by professional photographers at the time. 'We must free ourselves from nature's tyranny', Degas wrote of an art which, in his terms, sums itself up rather than extends itself ..., and which also becomes more intense. This goes to show how apt was the nickname given to the new school of painting when Monet's canvas 'Impression Sunrise' was shown: impressionist, like the pyrotechnists who created those eye-dazzling displays of flashing, flooding lights. From the disintegration of composition we move on to that of sight. With pointillism, Georges Seurat reproduced the visual effect of the 'pitting' of the first daguerreotypes as well as applying a system of analogous dots to colour. In order to be restored, the image had to be seen at a certain distance, the observers doing their own focusing, exactly as with an optical apparatus, the dots then dissolving in the effect of luminance and vibrating within emerging figures and forms. It was not long before these too disintegrated and soon only a visual message worthy of morse code will survive, like Duchamp's retinal stimulator, or aspects of Op Art from Mondrian. With the same implacable logic, publicity-seekers pop up on the art scene. Futurism is upon us, notably in the form of Depero's promotional architecture, followed by Dada in 1916 and then Surrealism. In Magritte's view, painting and the traditional arts from this moment on lose any sense of the sacred. An advertising executive by profession, Magritte wrote: 'What surrealism officially means is an advertising firm run with enough nous and conformism to be able to do as well as other businesses to which it is opposed only in certain details of pure form. Thus, "surrealist woman" was just as stupid an invention as the pinup girl who has now taken her place. ... I'm not much of a surrealist at all, then. To me, the term also signifies "propaganda" (a dirty word) and all the inanity essential to the success of any 'propaganda'. But the syncretism, the nihilism, of which the techniques of the pseudo-communications company are carriers, are also to be found in Magritte as anxiety-producing symptoms. For Magritte, words are 'slogans that oblige us to think in a certain preordained order ... contemplation is a banal feeling of no interest'. As for 'the perfect painting', this could only produce an intense effect for a very short time. With the industrial multiplication of optical equipment, the artist's human vision is no more than one process among many of obtaining images. The following generation would attack 'the very essence of art', thereby putting the finishing touches to their own suicide. In 1968 Daniel Buren explained to Georges Boudaille: it's funny when you realise that art was never a problem of depth but one of form. ... The only solution lies in the creation — if the word can still be used — of something totally unconnected with what has gone before, completely unburdened by the past. This thing would thereby express itself just for the sake of it. Artistic communication is then cut off, no longer exists... Well before this, Duchamp wrote: i have never stopped painting. Every painting must exist in your mind before it is painted on the canvas and it always loses something in the painting. I'd rather see my painting without the murk.' The painter takes his body with him, Valery said. Merleau-Ponty added: it's hard to see how a Mind could paint'. If art poses the enigma of the body, the enigma of technique poses the enigma of art. In fact devices for seeing dispense with the artist's body in so far as it is light that actually makes the image. We have all had enough of hearing about the death of God, of man, of art and so on since the nineteenth century. What in fact happened was simply the progressive disintegration of a faith in perception founded in the Middle Ages, after animism, on the basis of the unicity of divine creation, the absolute intimacy between the universe and the God-man of Augustinian Christianity, a material world which loved itself and contemplated itself in its one God. In the West, the death of God and the death of art are indissociable; the zero degree of representation merely fulfilled the prophecy voiced a thousand years earlier by Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, during the quarrel with the iconoclasts: if we remove the image, not only Christ but the whole universe disappears.' Notes 1. Paul Gsell, Auguste Rodin. L'Art: Entretiens reunis par Paul Gsell (Paris: Grasset/Fasquelle, 1911). The quotation from Marmontel is adapted from his Contes moraux: 'Music is the only talent that can be enjoyed by itself; all others require witnesses.' 2. Aldous Huxley, The Art of Seeing (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943). 3. Pascal, Reflexions sur la geometrie en general, vol. Vll no. 33. The studies of Marey and Muybridge fascinated Parisian artists of the period, particularly Kupka and Duchamp whose celebrated canvas 'Nude Descending a Staircase', was rejected in 1912 by the Salon des Independants. Already in 1911, when Gsell's interviews with Rodin appeared, Duchamp claimed to show static compositions using static directions for the various positions taken by a form in motion without trying to create cinematic effects through painting. If he too claimed that movement is in the eye of the beholder, he hoped to obtain it through formal decomposition. 4. Tristan Tzara, 'Le Photographe a l'envers Man Ray' in Sept Manifestes DADA (Paris, 1992) - modified. 5. Paul Virilio, Esthetique de la disparition (Paris: Balland, 1980). 6. The important work of Norman E. Spear, The Processing of Memories: Forgetting and Retention (Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1978). 7. ATX 414. Descartes does not completely spurn the imagination as is too often claimed. 8. Paul Virilio, L'Espace critique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984) and Guerre et cinema I: Logistique de la perception (Paris: Editions de l'Etoile Cahiers du cinema, 1984; London: War and Cinema, Verso, 1986). 9. Jean-Louis Ferrier, Holbein. Les ambassadeurs (Paris: Denoel, 1977). 10. Oculomotor activity: the co-ordination of eye and body movements, especially the hands. 11. Jules Romains, La Vision extra-retinienne et le sens paroptique (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). First published in 1920, this work was ahead of its time and was re-issued in 1964. 'Experiments on extra-retinal vision show that certain lesions of the eye (strabismic amblyopia for example) cause the subject to reject consciousness: the eye keeps its qualities, the image manages to form on it, but this is repelled more and more insistently by consciousness, sometimes to the point of complete blindness.' 12. W. R. Russell and Nathan, Traumatic Amnesia (Brain, 1946). Studies of forms of traumatism suffered by returned soldiers. 13. M.-J. Deribere, Prehistoire et histoire de la lumiere (Paris: France-Empire, 1979). 14. Correspondence with Claude Niepce, 1816. 15. Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd [First appeared in America in December 1840 in both The Casket and Gentleman's Magazine.} 16. Jack London, The People of the Abyss (London: Journeyman, 1977; originally published 1903). A report. 17. The Elpenor Syndrome, from the name of a hero of The Odyssey who fell off the roof of Circe's temple. Exercising normal automatic motor functions in waking up in an unfamiliar place, the subject was stricken with topographical amnesia. ... Because this often occurs on board fast transport, the General Secretary of the SNCF [French Rail], Vincent Bourrel, has called attention to the number of accidents resembling the historic one at the turn of the century when French President Deschanel fell from a train. 18. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld, 1970); Spandau: The Secret Diaries (London: Collins, 1976) [translation modified]. 19. 'Pessoa et le futurisme portuguais', Action poetique, 110, winter 1987. 20. Gustave Lebon, Enseignements psychologiques de la guerre europeenne (Paris: Flammarion, 1916). 21. As Jean Rouch was later to write about the Russian film-maker: 'The Kino Eye is Dziga Vertov's gaze ... left eyebrow down a little, nose tightly pinched so as not to get in the way of sight, pupils open at 3.5 or 2.9, but the focus on infinity, on vertigo ... way past the soldiers on the attack.' In a few millennia, we lost 'that obscure faith in perception which questions our mute life, that combination of the world and ourselves which precedes reflection1. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et I'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). 22. Watkins and Tulving, 'Episodic memory: when recognition fails', Psychological Bulletin, 1974. 23. Liberation, 24 November 1987. 24. Gerard Simon, Le Regard, I'etre et I'apparance (Paris: Le Seuil, 1988). 25. Quoted by Georges Roque in his essay on Magritte and advertising, Ceci nest pas un Magritte (Paris: Flammarion, 1983). 26. 'L'art n'est plus justifiable ou les points sur les i', interview with Daniel Buren recorded by Georges Boudaille in Les lettres franqaises, March 1968. 27. Merleau-Ponty, L'oeil et I'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Paul Virilio/The Vision Machine/ Chapter 1: A Topographical Amnesia INDIANA University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis HTTP://|UPRESS.INDIANA.EDU "For most of our lifetime civil war has been raging in the world of art and entertainment. . . . Moving pictures, gramophone records, radio, talking pictures. ..." This is the view of Donald McWhinnie, an analyst of the radio medium. Most of this civil war affects us in the depths of our psychic lives, as well, since the war is conducted by forces that are extensions and amplifications of our own beings. Indeed, the interplay among media is only another name for this civil war" that rages in our society and our psyches alike. "To the blind all things are sudden," it has been said. The crossings or hybridizations of the media release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion. There need be no blindness in these matters once we have been notified that there is anything to observe. It has now been explained that media, or the extensions of man, are "make happen" agents, but not "make aware" agents. The hybridising or compounding of these agents offers an especially favourable opportunity to notice their structural components and properties. "As the silent film cried out for sound so does the sound film cry out for colour," wrote Sergei Eisenstein in his Notes of a Film Director. This type of observation can be extended systematically to all media: "As the printing press cried out for nationalism, so did the radio cry out for tribalism" These media, being extensions of ourselves, also depend on us for their interplay and their evolution. The fact that they do interact and spawn new progeny has been a source of wonder over the ages. It need baffle us no longer if we trouble to scrutinise their action. We can, if we choose, think things out before we put them out. Plato, in all his striving to imagine an ideal training school, failed to notice that Athens was a greater school than any university even he could dream up. In other words, the greatest school had been put out for human use before it has been thought out. Now, this is especially true of our media. They are put out long before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought of at all. Everybody notices how coal and steel and cars affect the arrangements of daily existence. In our time, a study has finally turned to the medium of language itself as shaping the arrangements of daily life, so that society begins to look like a linguistic echo or repeat of language norms, a fact that has disturbed the Russian Communist party very deeply. Wedded as they are to nineteenth-century industrial technology as the basis of class liberation, nothing could be more subversive of the Marxian dialectic than the idea that linguistic media shape social development, as much as do the means of production. In fact, of all the great hybrid unions that breed furious release of energy and change, there is none to surpass the meeting of literate and oral cultures. The giving to man of an eye for an ear by phonetic literacy is, socially and politically, probably the most radical explosion mat can occur in any social structure. This explosion of the eye, frequently repeated in "backwards areas," we call Westernisation. With literacy now about to hybridise the cultures of the Chinese, the Indians, and the Africans, we are about to experience such a release of human power and aggressive violence as makes the previous history of phonetic alphabet technology seem quite tame. That is only the East side story, for the electric implosion now brings oral and tribal ear culture to the literate West. Not only does the visual, specialist, and fragmented Westerner has now to live in closest daily association with all the ancient oral cultures of the earth, but his own electric technology now begins to translate the visual or eye man back into the tribal and oral pattern with its seamless web of kinship and interdependence. We know from our own past the kind of energy that is released, as by fission, when literacy explodes the tribal or family unit. What do we know about the social and psychic energies that develop by electric fusion or implosion when literate individuals are suddenly gripped by an electromagnetic field, such as occurs in the new Common Market pressure in Europe? Make no mistake, the fusion of people who have known individualism and nationalism is not the same process as the fission of "backwards" and oral cultures that are just coming to individualism and nationalism. It is the difference between the "A" bomb and the "H" bomb. The latter is more violent, by far. Moreover, the products of electric fusion are immensely complex, while the products of fission are simple. Literacy creates very much simpler kinds of people than those that develop in the complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies. For the fragmented man creates the homogenised Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes. The oral man's inner world is a tangle of complex emotions and feelings that the Western practical man has long ago eroded or sup-pressed within himself in the interest of efficiency and practicality. The immediate prospect for literate, fragmented Western man encountering the electric implosion within his own culture is his steady and rapid transformation into a complex and depth-structured person emotionally aware of his total interdependence with the rest of human society. Representatives of the older Western individualism are even now assuming the appearance, for good or ill, of Al Capp's General Bull Moose or of the John Birchers, tribally dedicated to opposing the tribal. Fragmented, literate, and visual individualism is not possible in an electrically patterned and imploded society. So what is to be done? Do we dare to confront such facts at the conscious level, or is it best to becloud and repress such matters until some violence releases us from the entire burden? For the fate of implosion and interdependence is more terrible for a Western man than the fate of explosion and independence for tribal man. It may be merely temperament in my own case, but I find some easing of the burden in just understanding and clarifying the issues. On the other hand, since consciousness and awareness seem to be a human privilege, may it not be desirable to extend this condition to our hidden conflicts, both private and social? The present book, in seeking to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase of human autonomy. Let us now note a few of the effects of media hybrids, or of the interpenetration of one medium by another. Life at the Pentagon has been greatly complicated by jet travel or example. Every few minutes an assembly gong rings to summon many specialists from their desks to hear a personal report from an expert from some remote part of the world Meantime, the undone paperwork mounts on each desk. And each department daily dispatches personnel by jet to remote areas for more data and reports. Such is the speed of this process of the meeting of the jet plane, the oral report, and the typewriter that those going forth to the ends of the earth often arrive unable to spell the name of the spot to which they have been sent to experts. Lewis Carroll pointed out that as large-scale maps got more and more detailed and extensive, they would tend to blanket agriculture and rouse the protest of farmers. So why not use the actual earth as a map of itself? We have reached a similar point of data gathering when each stick of chewing gum we reach for is acutely noted by some computer that translates our least gesture into a new probability curve or some parameter of social science. Our private and corporate lives have become information processes just because we have put our central nervous systems outside us in electric technology. That is the key to Professor Boorstin's bewilderment in The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream. The electric light ended the regime of night and day, of indoors and out-of-doors. But it is when the light encounters already existing patterns of human organisation mat the hybrid energy is released. Cars can travel all night, ballplayers can play all night, and windows can be left out of buildings. In a word, the message of the electric light is a total change. It is pure information without any content to restrict its transforming and informing power. If the student of media will but meditate on the power of this medium of electric light to transform every structure of time and space and work and society that it penetrates or contacts, he will have the key to the form of the power that is in all media to reshape any lives that they touch. Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both. It is a peculiar bias of those who operate media for the owners that they are concerned about the program content of radio, or press, or film. The owners themselves are concerned more about the media as such and are not inclined to go beyond "what the public wants" or some vague formula. Owners are aware of the media as power, and they know that this power has little to do with "content" or the media within the media. When the press opened up the "human interest" keyboard after the telegraph had restructured the press medium, the newspaper killed the theatre, just as TV hit the movies and the night dubs very hard. George Bernard Shaw had the wit and imagination to fight back. He put the press into the theatre,! taking over the controversies and the human interest world of the press for the stage, as Dickens had done for the novel. The movie took over the novel and the newspaper and the stage, all at once. Then TV pervaded the movie and gave the theater-in-the-round back to the public. What I am saying is that media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses but among themselves, when they interact among themselves. Radio changed the form of the news story as much as it altered the film image in the talkies. TV caused drastic changes in radio programming, and in the form of the thing or documentary novel. It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. Radio and gramophone and tape recorder gave us back the poet's voice as an important dimension of the poetic experience. Words became a kind of painting with light, again. But TV, with its deep-participation mode, caused young poets suddenly to present their poems in cafes, in public parks, anywhere. After TV, they suddenly felt the need for personal contact with their public. (In print-oriented Toronto, poetry-reading in the public parks is a public offence. Religion Pities are permitted, but not poetry as many young poets recently discovered.) John O'Hara, the novelist, wrote in The New York Times Book Review of November 27, 1955. : "You get a great satisfaction from a book. You know your reader is captive inside those covers, but as a novelist, you have to imagine the satisfaction he's getting. Now, in the theaterٛ well, I used to drop in during both productions of Pal Joey and watch, not imagine, the people enjoy it. I'd willingly start my next novel-- about a small town--right now, but I need the diversion of a play. " In our age artists are able to mix their media diet as easily as their book diet. A poet like Yeats made the fullest use of oral peasant culture in creating his literary effects. Quite early, Eliot made a great impact on the careful use of jazz and film form. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock gets much of its power from an inter-penetration of film form and jazz idiom. But this mix reached its greatest power in The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes. Prufrock uses not only film form but the film theme of Charlie Chaplin, as did James Joyce in Ulysses. Joyce's Bloom is a deliberate takeover from Chaplin ("Chorney Choplain," as he called him in Finnegans Wake). And Chaplin, just as Chopin had adapted the pianoforte to the style of the ballet, hit upon the wondrous media mix of ballet and film in developing his Pavlova-like alternation of ecstasy and waddle. He adopted the classical steps of ballet to a movie mime that converged exactly the right blend of the lyric and the ironic that is found also in Prufrock and Ulysses. Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium to use or to release the power of another. In a simpler form, it is the technique employed by Charles Boyer in his kind of French-English blend of urbane, throaty delirium. The printed book had encouraged artists to reduce all forms of expression as much as possible to the single descriptive and narrative plane of the printed word. The advent of electric media released art from this straitjacket at once, creating the world of Paul Klee, Picasso, Braque, Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers, and James Joyce. A headline in The New York Times Book Review (September 16. 1962) trills: There's Nothing Like a Best Seller to Set Hollywood a - tingle. Of course, nowadays, movie stars can only be lured from the beaches or science-fiction or some self-improvement course by the cultural lure of a role in a famous book. That is the way that the interplay of media now affects many in the movie colony. They have no more understanding of their media problems than does Madison Avenue. But from the point of view of the owners of the film and related media, the best seller is a form of insurance that some massive new gestalt or pattern has been isolated in the public psyche. It is an oil strike or a gold mine that can be depended on to yield a fair amount of boodle to the careful and canny processer. Hollywood bankers, that is, are smarter than literary historians, for the latter despite popular taste except when it has been filtered down from lecture course to literary handbook. Lillian Ross in Picture wrote a snide account of the filming of The Red Bodge of Courage. She got a good deal of easy kudos for a foolish book about a great film by simply assuming the superiority of the literary medium to the film medium. Her book got much attention as a hybrid. Agatha Christie wrote far above her usual good level in a group of twelve short stories about Hercule Poirot, called The Labours of Hercules. By adjusting the classical themes to make reasonable modern parallels, she was able to lift the detective form to extraordinary intensity. Such was, also, the method of James Joyce in Dubliners and Ulysses, when the precise classical parallels created the true hybrid energy. Baudelaire said Mr Eliot, "taught us how to raise the imagery of common life to first intensity." It is done, not by any direct heave-ho of poetic strength, but by a simple adjustment of situations from one culture in hybrid form with those of mother. It is precisely in this way that during wars and migrations new cultural mix is the norm of ordinary daily life. Operations Research programs the hybrid principle as a technique of creative discovery. When the movie scenario or picture story was applied to the idea article, the magazine world had discovered a hybrid that ended the supremacy of the short story. When wheels were put in the tandem form, the wheel principle combined with the linear typographic principle to create aerodynamic balance. The wheel crossed with industrial, linear form released the new form of the aeroplane. The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses. Marshall McLuhan/ Understanding Media (The extensions of man)/ Hybrid Energy: Les Liaisons Dangereuses Conversation with Claire Parnet, 1986 What are you doing in this book? Is it a homage to Michel Foucault? Do you reckon his thought isn't properly understood? Are you analyzing the similarities and differences between his work and yours and what you reckon you owe to him? Or are you, rather, trying to present a mental portrait of Foucault ? I felt a real need to write this book. When someone that you like and admire dies, you sometimes need to draw their picture. Not to glorify them, still less to defend them, not to remember, but rather to produce a final likeness you can find only in death, that makes you realize "that's who they were." A mask, or what he himself called a double, an overlay. Different people will find different likenesses or overlays. But in the end he's most like himself in becoming so different from the rest of us. It's not a question of points I thought we had in common, or on which we differed. What we shared was bound to be rather indefinite, a sort of background that allowed me to talk with him. I still think he's the greatest thinker of our time. You can do the portrait of a thought just as you can do the portrait of a man. I've tried to do a portrait of his philosophy. The lines or touches are of course mine, but they succeed only if he himself comes to haunt the picture. You wrote in Dialogues: "I can talk about Foucault, say he told me this or that, explain how I see him. That's irrelevant, unless I've actually come to terms with the set of chiseled sounds, compelling gestures, ideas that are all tinder and fire, extreme concentration and abrupt conclusions, laughs and smiles that seem dangerous the very moment one feels their tenderness. . . "Is there something "dangerous" in Foucault's thought that also explains the passion it continues to arouse? Dangerous, yes, because there's a violence in Foucault. An intense violence, mastered, controlled, and turned into courage. He was trembling with violence on some demonstrations. He saw what was intolerable in things. This may be something he shared with Genet. He was a man of passion, and he himself gave the word "passion" a very precise sense. One can't but think of his death as a violent death that came and interrupted his work. And his style, at least up to the last books that attained a kind of serenity, is like a lash, it's a whip twisting and relaxing. Paul Veyne paints a portrait of Foucault as a warrior. Foucault always evokes the dust or murmur of battle, and he saw thought itself as a sort of war machine. Because once one steps outside what's been thought before, once one ventures outside what's familiar and reassuring, once one has to invent new concepts for unknown lands, then methods and moral systems break down and thinking becomes, as Foucault puts it, a "perilous act," a violence whose first victim is oneself. The objections people make, even the questions they pose, always come from safe ashore, and they're like lumps of mud flung at you to knock you down and stop you getting anywhere rather than any help: objections always come from lazy, mediocre people, as Foucault knew better than anyone. Melville said: "For the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool,-then had I rather be a fool than a wise man.-I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more. . . Thought-divers . . . have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began."2 People will readily agree that intense physical pursuits are dangerous, but thought too is an intense and wayward pursuit. Once you start thinking, you're bound to enter a line of thought where life and death, reason and madness, are at stake, and the line draws you on. You can think only on this witches' line, assuming you're not bound to lose, not bound to end up mad or dead. That's something that always fascinated Foucault, the switching, the constant juggling of what's close and distant in death or madness. Was everything already implicit in Madness and Civilization, or are there rather successive advances, crises, changes of direction? The question of madness runs right through Foucault's work. Though of course he criticized Madness and Civilization for still giving too much weight to an "experience of madness." He shifted from a phenomenology to an epistemology where madness is trapped in a "knowledge" varying from one historical formation to another. Foucault always used history like this, he saw it as a way of avoiding madness. But the experience of thinking cannot itself be detached from some broken line running through the different figures of knowledge. To think about madness is to experience not madness but thought: it becomes madness only when it breaks down. This said, does Madness and Civilization already contain in principle everything else, for example the conceptions Foucault came to form of discourse, knowledge, and power? Certainly not. There's something great writers often go through: they're congratulated on a book, the book's admired, but they aren't themselves happy with it, because they know how far they still are from what they're trying to do, what they're seeking, of which they still have only an obscure idea. That's why they've so little time to waste on polemics, objections, discussions. I think Foucault's thought is a thought that didn't evolve but went from one crisis to another. I don't believe thinkers can avoid crises, they're too seismic. There's a wonderful remark in Leibniz: "Having established these things, I thought I was coming into port, but when I started to meditate upon the union of the soul with the body, I was as it were thrown back onto the open sea." Indeed, this ability to break the line of thought, to change direction, to find themselves on the open sea, and so discover, invent, is what give thinkers a deeper coherence. Madness and Civilization was of course itself the result of a crisis. Out of it came a whole conception of knowledge, fully elaborated in the Archaeology of knowledge - that is, in his theory of utterance-but leading into a new crisis, that of '68. For Foucault it was a great period of energy and exhilaration, of creative gaiety: Discipline and Punish bears its mark, and that's where he moves from knowledge to power. He moves into this new area to which he'd earlier drawn attention, which he'd marked out but not explored. And of course it's a radicalization: '68 stripped bare all power relations wherever they were operating, that is, everywhere. Previously, Foucault had primarily analyzed forms, and now he moved on to the play of forces underpinning those forms. He leaps into something formless, into the element of what he himself calls "micro-physics." And this takes him right through to the first volume of The History of Sexuality. But after that book there's yet another, very different, crisis-more internal, perhaps more depressive, more secret, the feeling of facing an impasse? There were lots of interconnected reasons, and maybe we'll come back to this point, but I got the impression that Foucault wanted to be left alone, to be on his own with a few close friends, to take a distance without even moving away, to reach a point where relations broke down. That was my impression, anyway, maybe it was quite wrong. He seemed to still be working on the history of sexuality, but he was taking a completely different line, he was discovering long-term historical formations (down from the Greeks), whereas up to that point he'd restricted himself to short-term formations (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), he was reorienting all his research in terms of what he called modes of subjectification. It was nothing to do with returning to the subject, he was creating something new, breaking out along a new line, a new exploration no longer concerned with knowledge and power in the same way. Another radicalization, if you like. Even his style changed, no longer scintillating, with sudden flashes of brilliance, but taking on an ever more austere, ever purer linearity, almost calm. It wasn't all just theory, you see. Thinking's never just a theoretical matter. It was to do with vital problems. To do with life itself. It was Foucault's way of coming through this new crisis: he was tracing the line that would take him through, and into new relations with knowledge and power. Even if it killed him. That seems a silly thing to say: it wasn't the discovery of subjectification that killed him. And yet. . . "some opening, or I'll suffocate . . . " There's one key thing that runs right through Foucault's work: he was always dealing with historical formations (either short-term or, toward the end, long-term ones), but always in relation to us today. He didn't have to make this explicit in his books, it was quite obvious, and he left the business of making it still clearer to interviews in newspapers. That's why Foucault's interviews are an integral part of his work. Discipline and Punish deals with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but can in no way be divorced from today's prisons and the Information Group set up by Foucault and Defert after '68. Historical formations interest him only because they mark where we come from, what circumscribes us, what we're in the process of breaking out of to discover new relations in which to find expression. What he's really interested in is our present-day relation to madness, our relation to punishment, our relation to power, to sexuality. Not the Greeks, but our relation to subjectification, our ways of constituting ourselves as subjects. Thinking is always experiencing, experimenting,3 not interpreting but experimenting, and what we experience, experiment with, is always actuality,4 what's coming into being, what's new, what's taking shape. History isn't experimentation, it's only the set of conditions, negative conditions almost, that make it possible to experience, experiment with, something beyond history. Without history the experiments would remain indeterminate, divorced from any particular conditions, but the experimentation itself is philosophical rather than historical. Foucault's more thoroughly philosophical than anyone else in the twentieth century, probably the only philosopher: he's completely escaped from the nineteenth century, which is why he can talk about it so well. That's what it meant for Foucault to put his life into his thought: his relation to power, and then the relation to oneself, was a matter of life or death, of madness or a new sanity. Subjectification wasn't for Foucault a theoretical return to the subject but a practical search for another way of life, a new style. That's not something you do in your head: but then where, these days, are the seeds of a new way of existing, communally or individually, beginning to appear; and are there any of these seeds in me? We must, of course, examine the Greeks; but only because, according to Foucault, it was they who invented this notion, this practice, of a way of life. . . There was a Greek experience, Christian experiences, and so on, but it's not the Greeks or Christians who are going to experience things for us these days. Is it so very tragic, Foucault's thought? Isn't it shot through with humor too? In all great writers you find a humorous or comic level along with the other levels, not just seriousness, but something shocking even. There's a general outlandishness in Foucault: not only outlandish punishments, which produce the great comic passages in Discipline and Punish, but the outlandishness of things, and of words. There was a lot of laughter in Foucault, in his life as well as his books. He particularly liked Roussel and Brisset, who at the close of the nineteenth century invented strange "procedures" for manipulating words and phrases. And Foucault's book of 1963 on Roussel is already, so to speak, the poetic and comic version of the theory of utterance set out in the Archaeology of knowledge. Roussel takes two phrases that have very disparate senses but differ only minimally (/es bandes du vieux pillard and /es bandes du vieux billardI6) and proceeds to conjure up visual scenes, extraordinary spectacles to connect the two phrases, twist one into the other. Working along other lines, with a crazy etymology, Brisset conjures up scenes corresponding to the way he takes a word apart. Foucault finds here already a whole conception of the relations between the visible and the utterable. And the reader's struck by the way Foucault seems to come upon themes reminiscent of Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty: "A visibility beyond the gaze .. .The eye lets things be seen by grace of their being." It's as though, implicitly, he's taking Roussel as a precursor of Heidegger. And it's true that in Heidegger too there's a whole etymological procedure bordering on madness. I really liked Foucault's pages on Roussel, because I got a more vague sense of a certain similarity between Heidegger and another author rather like Roussel in some ways,Jarry. Jarry defines pataphysics etymologically as going beyond metaphysics, and explicitly bases it on the visible or the being of phenomena. But what do you get by transposing things from Heidegger to Roussel (or Jarry)? Foucault gets a complete transformation of the relations between the visible and utterable seen in the light of the "procedures" mentioned: rather than any agreement or homology (any consonance), you get an endless struggle between what we see and what we say, brief clutchings, tussles, captures, because we never saywhat we see and never see what we say. The visible bursts out between two propositions, and an utterance bursts out between two things. Intentionality gives way to a whole theater, an endless interplay between the visible and the utterable. Each breaks open the other. Foucault's criticism of phenomenology is there, unannounced, in Raymond Roussel. And then there's the emphasis on "one," in Foucault as in Blanchot: you have to begin by analyzing the third person. One speaks, one sees, one dies. There are still subjects, of course-but they're specks dancing in the dust of the visible and permutations in an anonymous babble. The subject's always something derivative. It comes into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says,what one sees. Foucault draws from this a very intriguing conception of "infamous men," a conception imbued with a quiet gaiety. It's the opposite of Bataille: the infamous man isn't defined by excessive evil but etymologically, as an ordinary man, anyone at all, suddenly drawn into the spotlight by some minor circumstance, neighbors complaining, a police summons, a trial . . . It's a man confronting Power, summoned to appear and speak. He's more like something out of Chekhov than Kafka. In Chekhov there's a story about a little maid who strangles a baby because she hasn't being able to get any sleep for nights and nights, and one about a peasant who's taken to court for unbolting railway lines to get weights for his fishing rod. The infamous man is Dasein. The infamous man's a particle caught in a shaft of light and a wave of sound. Maybe "fame" works the same way:being taken over by a power, an instance of power that makes us appear and speak. There was a point where Foucault got tired of been famous: whatever he said, people were just waiting to praise or criticize it, they didn't even attempt to understand it. How could he ever again produce something unexpected? You can't work without the unexpected. To be an infamous man was a sort of dream for Foucault, his comic dream, his way of laughing: am I infamous? His essay on The Life of Infamous Men is a masterpiece. Would you say that article also expresses a crisis? Absolutely, yes, the article has various levels. The fact is that Foucault, after the first volume of The History of Sexuality in 1976, didn't publish any books for eight years: he suspended work on the rest of The History of Sexuality, even though the contents had already been announced. It was fascinating material, "the children's crusade" and so on," which he must have completed most of the research. What happened at this point, and during those years? If there was really was a crisis, it must have involved many very different interacting factors: disappointment, perhaps, about the way things were going elsewhere, with the eventual failure of the prison movement; on another level, the collapse of more recent hopes, Iran, Poland; the way Foucault became ever more dissatisfied with French social and cultural life; in his work, the feeling of growing misunderstandings about the first volume of The History of Sexuality and of what he was trying to do in the History; and finally, the most personal element perhaps, a feeling that he had himself reached an impasse, that he needed solitude and strength to deal with something relating not only to his thought but also to his life. If he'd reached an impasse, what did it come down to? Foucault had up to that point analyzed formations of knowledge and apparatuses of power; he'd reached the composites of power and knowledge in which we live and speak. And that was still the viewpoint of the History's first volume: establishing the corpus of utterances relating to sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ascertaining around which foci of powers these utterances take shape, either normalizing or, conversely, challenging those powers. The first volume thus remains within the method Foucault had earlier managed to establish. But I think he must have come up against the question of whether there was anything "beyond" power-whether he was getting trapped in a sort of impasse within power relations. He was,you might say, mesmerized by and trapped in something he hated. And it was no use telling himself that coming up against power relations was the lot of modern (that is, infamous) man, that it's power that makes us speak and see, it wasn't enough, he needed "some opening"... He couldn't stay locked in what he'd discovered. The first volume did of course identify points of resistance to power; it's just that their character, their origin, their production were still vague. Perhaps Foucault had the feeling that he must at all costs cross that line, get to the other side, go still further than knowledge and power. Even if it meant reconsidering the whole project of The History of Sexuality. And that's just what he's telling himself in the very fine piece on infamous men: "Always the same inability to cross the line, to get to the other side. . . always the same choice, on the side of power, of what it say or has people say". "It's nothing to do with him repudiating his earlier work. It's all his earlier work, rather, that pushes him into this new confrontation. Only readers who've "accompanied" Foucault in his research can understand this. That's why it's so stupid to hear that "he saw he'd made a mistake, and had to reintroduce the subject." He never reintroduced the subject, and never had to do anything but what his work demanded: he left behind composites of knowledge and power and entered into a final line of research, like Leibniz "thrown back onto the open sea." There was no other option but to pursue this new discovery, or stop writing. What is this "line," or this relation that's no longer a power relation? Isn't it foreshadowed earlier on? It's difficult to talk about. It's a line that's not abstract, though it has no particular shape. It's no more in thought than in things, but it's everywhere thought confronts some thing like madness, and life some thing like death. Miller used to say you find it in any molecule, in nerve fibers, in the threads of a spider's web. It's the fearsome whaling line, which Melville says (in Moby-Dick) can carry us off or strangle us as it flies out. For Michaux it's the line of drugs, "headlong acceleration," the "whiplash of a frenzied coachman." It may be a painter's line, like Kandinsky's, or the one leading to Van Gogh's death. I think we ride such lines whenever we think bewilderingly enough or live forcefully enough. They're lines that go beyond knowledge (how could they be "known"?), and it's our relations to these lines that go beyond power relations (as Nietzsche says,who could call it "a will to control"?). Are you saying they're already there in all Foucault's work? That's true, it's the line Outside. The Outside, in Foucault as in Blanchot from whom he takes the word, is something more distant than any external world. But it's also something closer than any inner world. So you get an endless switching between closeness and distance. Thinking doesn't come from within, but nor is it something that happens in the external world. It comes from this Outside, and returns to it, it amounts to confronting it. The line outside is our double, with all the double's otherness. Foucault was always talking about it, in Raymond Rousell in a homage to Blanchot, in The Order of Things. In The Birth of the Clinic there's a whole passage on Bichat... to me a model of Foucault's method or procedure: he's analyzing Bichat's conception of death epistemologically, and it's the most thorough, the most brilliant analysis imaginable. But you get the feeling that there's something more to the text, that there's a passion there that goes beyond summarizing some long-dead author. The thing is, Bichat put forward what's probably the first general modern conception of death, presenting it as violent, plural, and coextensive with life. Instead of taking it, like classical thinkers, as a point, he takes it as a line that we're constantly confronting, and cross in either direction only at the point where it ends. That's what it means to confront the line Outside. Passionate men die like Captain Ahab, or like the Parsee rather, chasing their whale. They cross the line. There's something of that in Foucault's death. Beyond knowledge and power, there's a third side, the third element of the "system" ... An acceleration, one might almost say, that makes it impossible to distinguish death and suicide. This line, if it's so "fearsome," how can we make it endurable? Is this what the fold is all about: the need to fold the line? Yes, this line's deadly, too violent and fast, carrying us into breathless regions. It destroys all thinking, like the drugs Michaux had to stop using. It's nothing but délire and madness, like Captain Ahab's "monomania." We need both to cross the line, and make it endurable, workable, thinkable. To find in it as far as possible, and as long as possible, an art of living. How can we protect ourselves, survive, while still confronting this line? Here a frequent theme of Foucault's comes in: we have to manage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe-in short, think. Bending the line so we manage to live upon it, with it: a matter of life and death. The line itself is constantly unfolding at crazy speeds as we're trying to fold it to produce "the slow beings that we are," to get (as Michaux says) to "the eye of the hurricane": both things are happening at once. This idea of folding (and unfolding) always haunted Foucault: not only is his style, his syntax, shaped by folding and unfolding, so is the way language works in the book on Roussel ("folding words"), the way thought works in The Order of Things, and above all the way what Foucault discovers in his last books as an art of living (subjectification) works. The fold and unfolding is something familiar to readers of Heidegger. It's arguably the key to the whole of Heidegger's philosophy ("to approach Thought is to be on the way to the Fold of Being and beings"). In Heidegger we find the Open, the fold of Being and beings as the condition for any visibility of phenomena, and human reality as the being of distance. In Foucault we find the outside, the folding of the line Outside, and human reality as the being of the Outside. Maybe that's why Foucault in his last interviews compares his approach with Heidegger's. And yet taken as a whole, these two ways of thinking are so different, the problems addressed are so different, that the similarity remains very external: in Foucault there's no such thing as experience in the phenomenological sense, but there are always knowledges and powers already in place, which both reach their limit and vanish in the line Outside. Foucault seems to me closer to Michaux, sometimes even to Cocteau: he brings out the relation between them in terms of a problem of living, breathing (just as he transposed a Heideggerian theme into Roussel so as to transform it). The Cocteau who, in a posthumous book called precisely The Difficulty of Being, explains that dreaming works at amazing speeds, unfolding "the folding whose intervention makes eternity endurable," but that waking life has to fold the world so we can endure it, so that everything doesn't confront us at once. Or more specifically, the Michaux whose very titles and subtitles might have inspired Foucault: The Space Within, The Distant Interior, Life Among Folds, Locked In (subtitled Poetic Capacities, Slices of Knowledge. . . ). It's in The Space Within that Michaux writes: "Children are born with twenty-two folds. These have to be unfolded. Then a man's life is complete. And he dies. There are no more folds to undo. Men hardly ever die without still having a few more folds to undo. But it has happened." You can't get much closer to Foucault than that. Yougetjust the same sense of folding and unfolding. Only in Foucault there are four primary folds instead of twenty-two: the folding of our body (ifwe're Greeks, or our flesh, if we're Christians-so there are many possible variations for each fold), the folding of a force impinging on itself rather than other forces, truth enfolded in relation to us, and finally the ultimate folding of the line outside, to produce an "expectant interiority." But it's alwaysthe same question, running from Roussel through to Michaux, that produces this poetic philosophy: how far can we unfold the line without falling into a breathless void, into death, and how can we fold it, but without losing touch with it, to produce an inside copresent with the outside, corresponding to the outside? It's a matter of "practices." Rather than talking of a more or less hidden influence of Heidegger on Foucault, I think one should talk of a convergence of Holderlin-Heidegger on the one hand, and Roussel- or Michaux-Foucault on the other. But they're working along very different paths. Is this what "subjectification" is all about? Why that word? Yes, this folding of the line is precisely what Foucault eventually comes to call the "process of subjectification," when he begins to examine it directly. It's easier to understand when you see why, in his two last books, he attributes it to the Greeks. The tribute's more Nietzschean than Heideggerian and is, in particular, a very clear and original view of the Greeks: in politics (and elsewhere) the Greeks invented a power relation between free men, it's free men who govern free men. Given that, it's not enough for force to be exerted on other forces or to suffer the effects of other forces, it has to be exerted upon itself too: the man fit to govern others is the man who's completely mastered himself. By bending force back on itself, by setting force in a relation to itself, the Greeks invent subjectification. We're no longer in the domain of codified rules of knowledge (relations between forms), and constraining rules of power (the relation of force to other forces), but in one of rules that are in some sense optional (self relation): the best thing is to exert power over yourself. The Greeks invent an aesthetic way of existing. That's what subjectification is about: bringing a curve into the line, making it turn back on itself, or making force impinge on itself. So we get ways of living with what would otherwise be unendurable. What Foucault says is that we can only avoid death and madness if we make existing into a "way," an "art." It's idiotic to say Foucault discovers or reintroduces a hidden subject after having rejected it. There's no subject, but a production of subjectivity: subjectivity has to be produced, when its time arrives, precisely because there is no subject. The time comes once we've worked through knowledge and power; it's that work that forces us to frame the new question, it couldn't have been framed before. Subjectivity is in no sense a knowledge formation or power function that Foucault hadn't previously recognized; subjectification is an artistic activity distinct from, and lying outside, knowledge and power. In this respect Foucault's a Nietzschean, discovering an artistic will out on the final line. Subjectification, that's to say the process of folding the line outside, mustn't be seen as just a way of protecting oneself, taking shelter. It's rather the only way of confronting the line, riding it: you may be heading for death, suicide, but as Foucault says in a strange conversation with Schroeter, suicide then becomes an art it takes a lifetime to learn. Isn't that a return to the Greeks, though? And "subjectification," isn't it an equivocal word that does actually reintroduce a subject? No, there's definitely no return to the Greeks. Foucault hated returning anywhere. He only ever talked about what he himself was living through; and mastering oneself, or rather the production of self, speaks for itself in Foucault. What he says is that the Greeks "invented" subjectification, and did so because their social system, the rivalry between free men, made this possible (in games, oratory, love. . . and so on). But processes of subjectification are extraordinarily varied: Christian ways are altogether different from the Greek way, and not just after the Reformation, but from primitive Christianity onward, the production of individual or collective subjectivity takes all sorts of paths. We should remember the passages in Renan about the Christians' new aesthetics of existence: an aesthetic way of existing to which Nero, in his own way,contributes, and which goes on to find its highest expression in Francis of Assisi. A confrontation with death, with madness. The key thing, for Foucault, is that subjectification isn't to do with morality, with any moral code: it's ethical and aesthetic, as opposed to morality, which partakes of knowledge and power. So there's a Christian morality but also a Christian ethics/aesthetics, and all sorts of conflicts and compromises between the two. We might say the same these days: what is our ethics, how do we produce an artistic existence, what are our processes of subjectification, irreducible to our moral codes? Where and how are new subjectivities being produced? What can we look for in present-day communities? Foucault may well go right back to the Greeks, but what interests him in The Use of Pleasure, as in his other books, is what's happening, what we are and what we're doing, today: whether recent or distant, a historical formation is analyzed only as it differs from us, and in order to trace out that difference. How can anyone see a contradiction between the theme of "the death of man" and that of artistic subjectifications? Or between rejecting morality and discovering ethics? The problem changes, and something new is created. The simple fact that subjectivity is produced, that it's a ''way, ''should be enough to convince one the word should be treated very carefully. Foucault says "an art of oneself that's the exact opposite of oneself. . . " If there's a subject, it's a subject without any identity. Subjectification as a process is personal or collective individuation, individuation one by one or group by group. Now, there are many types of individuation. There are subject-type individuations ("that's you. . . ," "that's me. . . "), but there are also event type individuations where there's no subject: a wind, an atmosphere, a time of day,a battle. . . One can't assume that a life, or a work of art, is individuated as a subject; quite the reverse. Take Foucault himself: you weren't aware of him as a person exactly. Even in trivial situations, say when he came into a room, it was more like a changed atmosphere, a sort of event, an electric or magnetic field or something. That didn't in the least rule out warmth or make you feel uncomfortable, but it wasn't like a person. It was a set of intensities. It sometimes annoyed him to be like that, or to have that effect. But at the same time all his work fed upon it. The visible is for him mirrorings, scintillations, flashes, lighting effects. Language is a huge "there is," in the third person-as opposed to any particular person, that's to say an intensive language, which constitutes his style. In the conversation with Schroeter, once again, he develops an opposition between "love" and "passion," and presents himself as a creature of passion rather than love. It's an extraordinary text; since it's only an informal conversation, Foucault doesn't try to provide any philosophical basis for the distinction. He talks about it on an immediate, vital level. The distinction is nothing to do with constancy or inconstancy. Nor is it one between homosexuality and heterosexuality, though that's discussed in the text. It's a distinction between two kinds of individuation: one, love, through persons, and the other through intensity, as though passion dissolved persons not into something undifferentiated but into a field of various persisting and mutually interdependent intensities ("a constantly shifting state, but not tending toward any given point, with strong phases and weak phases, phases when it becomes incandescent and everything wavers for an unstable moment we cling to for obscure reasons, perhaps through inertia; it seeks, ultimately, to persist and to disappear. . . being oneself no longer makes any sense. . ."). Love's a state of, and a relation between, persons, subjects. But passion is a subpersonal event that may last as long as a lifetime ("I've been living for eighteen years in a state of passion about someone, for someone"), a field of intensities that individuates independently of any subject. Tristan and Isolde, that may be love. But someone, referring to this Foucault text, said to me: Catherine and Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, is passion, pure passion, not love. A fearsome kinship of souls, in fact, something not altogether human (who is he? A wolf. . . ). It's very difficult to express, to convey-a new distinction between affective states. Here we come up against the unfinished character of Foucault's work. He might perhaps have given this distinction a philosophical range as wide as life. It should teach us, at least, to be very careful about what he calls a "mode of subjectification." For such modes involve subjectless individuations. That may be their main feature. And perhaps passion, the state of passion, is actually what folding the line outside, making it endurable, knowing how to breathe, is about. All those who are so saddened by Foucault's death may perhaps rejoice in the way that such a monumental body of work breaks off with an appeal to passion. In Foucault as in Nietzsche we find a critique of truth. In each of them there's a world of captures, clutchings, struggles. But everything in Foucault seems colder, more metallic, like the great descriptive clinical tableaux. . . Foucault does draw on Nietzsche. To take one specific instance: Nietzsche prided himself on being the first to produce a psychology of priests and to analyze the nature of their power (priests treat the community as a "flock," which they control by infecting it with ressentiment and guilty conscience). Foucault rediscovers the theme of "pastoral" power, but his analysis takes a different direction: he defines this power as "individuative," that is, as an attempt to take over the mechanisms individuating members of the flock. In Discipline and Punish he'd shown how in the eighteenth century political power became individuative through "disciplines"; but he eventually discovered pastoral power at the root of that tendency. You're right, the fundamental link between Foucault and Nietzsche is a criticism of truth, framed by asking what "will" to truth is implied by a "true" discourse, a will the discourse can only conceal. Truth, in other words, doesn't imply some method for discovering it but procedures, proceedings, and processes for willing it. We always get the truths we deserve, depending on the procedures of knowledge (linguistic procedures in particular), the proceedings of power, and the processes of subjectification or individuation available to us. So to get at the will to truth directly, we have to consider untrue discourses, which become confused with the procedures that produce them, like those of Roussel or Brisset: their untruth can also be seen as truth in the wild state. Foucault and Nietzsche have three main things in common. The first is their conception of force. Power in Foucault, like power in Nietzsche, isn't just violence, isn't just the relation of a force to a being or an object, but corresponds to the relation of a force to the other forces it affects, or even to forces that affect it (inciting, exciting, inducing, seducing, and so on, are affects). Secondly, there's the relation between forces and form: any form is a combination of forces. This already comes out in Foucault's great descriptive tableaux. But more particularly in all the stuff about the death of man and the way it relates to Nietzsche's superman. The point is that human forces aren't on their own enough to establish a dominant form in which man can install himself. Human forces (having an understanding, a will, an imagination, and so on) have to combine with other forces: an overall form arises from this combination, but everything depends on the nature of the other forces with which the human forces become linked. So the resulting form won't necessarily be a human form, it might be an animal form of which man is only an avatar, a divine form he mirrors, the form of a single God of which man is just a limitation (thus, in the seventeenth century, human understanding appears as the limitation of an infinite understanding). A Man-form, then, appears only in very special and precarious conditions: that's what Foucault analyses in The Order of Things as the nineteenth century's project, in terms of the new forces with which man was then combining. Now, everyone says man's coming into relation these days with still other forces (the cosmos in space, the particles in matter, the silicon in machines. . . ): a new form is coming out of this, and it's already ceased to be human. . . Nothing excites so many stupid reactions as this simple, precise, and grand theme in Nietzsche and Foucault. The third common point, finally, has to do with processes of subjectification: once again, this is nothing to do with constituting a subject, it's about creating ways of existing, what Nietzsche called inventing new possibilities of life, already seeing its origin in the Greeks. Nietzsche saw this as the highest dimension of the will to power, artistic will. Foucault would eventually characterize this dimension by the way force impinges on or inflects itself, and would himself take up the history of the Greeks and Christians, orienting it along these lines. The key thing, as Nietzsche said, is that thinkers are always, so to speak, shooting arrows into the air, and other thinkers pick them up and shoot them in another direction. That's what happens with Foucault. Whatever he takes up he thoroughly transforms. He's always creating. You say he's more metallic than Nietzsche. Maybe he even changed what the arrow was made of. You have to compare them in musical terms, in terms of their respective instruments (procedures, proceedings, and processes): Nietzsche went through a Wagnerian phase but came out of it. Foucault went through Webern, but he's perhaps closest to Varese, yes, metallic and strident, calling for the instruments of our "actuality." excerpt from the book: Negotiations, 1972-1990/part three: Michel Foucault by Gilles Delleuze Why Study Power? The Question of the SubjectThe ideas which I would like to discuss here represent neither a theory nor a methodology. I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects. The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire generale, philology, and linguistics. Or again, in this first mode, the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labors, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or, a third example, the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology. In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call "dividing practices." The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectivizes him. Examples are the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the "good boys." Finally, I have sought to study-it is my current work-the way a human being turns himself into a subject. For example, I have chosen the domain of sexuality-how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of "sexuality." Thus, it is not power but the subject which is the general theme of my research. It is true that I became quite involved with the question of power. It soon appeared to me that, while the human subject is placed in relations of production and of signification, he is equally placed in power relations which are very complex. Now, it seemed to me that economic history and theory provided a good instrument for relations of production and that linguistics and semiotics offered instruments for studying relations of signification; but for power relations we had no tools of study. We had recourse only to ways of thinking about power based on legal models, that is: What legitimates power? Or, we had recourse to ways of thinking about power based on institutional models, that is: What is the state? It was therefore necessary to expand the dimensions of a definition of power if one wanted to use this definition in studying the objectivizing of the subject. Do we need a theory of power? Since a theory assumes a prior objectification, it cannot be asserted as a basis for analytical work. But this analytical work cannot proceed without an ongoing conceptualization. And this conceptualization implies critical thought-a constant checking. The first thing to check is what I shall call the "conceptual needs." I mean that the conceptualization should not be founded on a theory of the object-the conceptualized object is not the single criterion of a good conceptualization. We have to know the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualization. We need a historical awareness of our present circumstance. The second thing to check is the type of reality with which we are dealing. A writer in a well-known French newspaper once expressed his surprise: "Why is the notion of power raised by so many people today? Is it such an important subject? Is it so independent that it can be discussed without taking into account other problems?" This writer's surprise amazes me. I feel skeptical about the assumption that this question has been raised for the first time in the twentieth century. Anyway, for us it is not only a theoretical question but a part of our experience. I'd like to mention only two "pathological forms"-those two "diseases of power"-fascism and Stalinism. One of the numerous reasons why they are, for us, so puzzling is that in spite of their historical uniqueness they are not quite original. They used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies. More than that: in spite of their own internal madness, they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality. What we need is a new economy of power relations-the word "economy" being used in its theoretical and practical sense. To put it in other words: since Kant, the role of philosophy is to prevent reason from going beyond the limits of what is given in experience; but from the same moment-that is, since the development of the modern state and the political management of society-the role of philosophy is also to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality, which is a rather high expectation. Everybody is aware of such banal facts. But the fact that they're banal does not mean they don't exist. What we have to do with banal facts is to discover-or try to discover-which specific and perhaps original problem is connected with them. The relationship between rationalization and excesses of political power is evident. And we should not need to wait for bureaucracy or concentration camps to recognize the existence of such relations. But the problem is: What to do with such an evident fact? Shall we try reason? To my mind, nothing would be more sterile. First, because the field has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. Second, because it is senseless to refer to reason as the contrary entity to nonreason. Last, because such a trial would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the rationalist or the irrationalist. Shall we investigate this kind of rationalism which seems to be specific to our modern culture and which originates in Aufklirung? I think that was the approach of some of the members of the Frankfurt School. My purpose, however, is not to start a discussion of their works, although they are most important and valuable. Rather, I would suggest another way of investigating the links between rationalization and power. It may be wise not to take as a whole the rationalization of society or of culture but to analyze such a process in several fields, each with reference to a fundamental experience: madness, illness, death, crime, sexuality, and so forth. I think that the word "rationalization" is dangerous. What we have to do is analyze specific rationalities rather than always invoke the progress of rationalization in general. Even if the Aufkldrung has been a very important phase in our history and in the development of political technology, I think we have to refer to much more remote processes if we want to understand how we have been trapped in our own history. I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, it consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies. For example, to find out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the field of insanity. And what we mean by legality in the field of illegality. And, in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations. As a starting point, let us take a series of oppositions which have developed over the last few years: opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live. It is not enough to say that these are anti-authority struggles; we must try to define more precisely what they have in common. 1. They are "transversal" struggles; that is, they are not limited to one country. Of course, they develop more easily and to a greater extent in certain countries, but they are not confined to a particular political or economic form of government. 2. The aim of these struggles is the power effects as such. For example, the medical profession is not criticized primarily because it is a profit-making concern but because it exercises an uncontrolled power over people's bodies, their health, and their life and death. 3. These are "immediate" struggles for two reasons. In such struggles people criticize instances of power which are the closest to them, those which exercise their action on individuals. They do not look for the "chief enemy" but for the immediate enemy. Nor do they expect to find a solution to their problem at a future date (that is, liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle). In comparison with a theoretical scale of explanations or a revolutionary order which polarizes the historian, they are anarchistic struggles. But these are not their most original points. The following seem to me to be more specific. 4. They are struggles which question the status of the individual: on the one hand, they assert the right to be different, and they underline everything which makes individuals truly individual. On the other hand, they attack everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself, and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way. These struggles are not exactly for or against the "individual" but rather they are struggles against the "government of individualization." 5. They are an opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge, competence, and qualification: struggles against the privileges of knowledge. But they are also an opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations imposed on people. There is nothing "scientistic" in this (that is, a dogmatic belief in the value of scientific knowledge), but neither is it a skeptical or relativistic refusal of all verified truth. What is questioned is the way in which knowledge circulates and functions, its relations to power. In short, the regime du savoir. 6. Finally, all these present struggles revolve around the question: Who are we? They are a refusal of these abstractions, of economic and ideological state violence, which ignore who we are individually, and also a refusal of a scientific or administrative inquisition which determines who one is. To sum up, the main objective of these struggles is to attack not so much "such or such" an institution of power, or group, or elite, or class but rather a technique, a form of power. This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word "subject": subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to. Generally, it can be said that there are three types of struggles: either against forms of domination (ethnic, social, and religious); against forms of exploitation which separate individuals from what they produce; or against that which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others in this way (struggles against subjection, against forms of subjectivity and submission). I think that in history you can find a lot of examples of these three kinds of social struggles, either isolated from each other or mixed together. But even when they are mixed, one of them, most of the time, prevails. For instance, in the feudal societies, the struggles against the forms of ethnic or social domination were prevalent, even though economic exploitation could have been very important among the revolt's causes. In the nineteenth century, the struggle against exploitation came into the foreground. And nowadays, the struggle against the forms of subjectionagainst the submission of subjectivity-is becoming more and more important, even though the struggles against forms of domination and exploitation have not disappeared. Quite the contrary. I suspect that it is not the first time that our society has been confronted with this kind of struggle. All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book-all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity. I know what objections can be made. We can say that all types of subjection are derived phenomena, that they are merely the consequences of other economic and social processes: forces of production, class struggle, and ideological structures which determine the form of subjectivity. It is certain that the mechanisms of subjection cannot be studied outside their relation to the mechanisms of exploitation and domination. But they do not merely constitute the "terminal" of more fundamental mechanisms. They entertain complex and circular relations with other forms. The reason this kind of struggle tends to prevail in our society is due to the fact that, since the sixteenth century, a new political form of power has been continuously developing. This new political structure, as everybody knows, is the state. But most of the time, the state is envisioned as a kind of political power which ignores individuals, looking only at the interests of the totality or, I should say, of a class or a group among the citizens. That's quite true. But I'd like to underline the fact that the state's power (and that's one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power. Never, I think, in the history of human societies-even in the old Chinese society-has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques and of totalization procedures. This is due to the fact that the modern Western state has integrated in a new political shape an old power technique which originated in Christian institutions. We can call this power technique the pastoral power. First of all, a few words about this pastoral power. It has often been said that Christianity brought into being a code of ethics fundamentally different from that of the ancient world. Less emphasis is usually placed on the fact that it proposed and spread new power relations throughout the ancient world. Christianity is the only religion which has organized itself as a church. And as such, it postulates in principle that certain individuals can, by their religious quality, serve others not as princes, magistrates, prophets, fortune-tellers, benefactors, educationalists, and so on but as pastors. However, this word designates a very special form of power. 1. It is a form of power whose ultimate aim is to assure individual salvation in the next world. 2. Pastoral power is not merely a form of power which commands; it must also be prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of the flock. Therefore, it is different from royal power, which demands a sacrifice from its subjects to save the throne. 3. It is a form of power which does not look after just the whole community but each individual in particular, during his entire life. 4. Finally, this form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people's minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it. This form of power is salvation oriented (as opposed to political power). It is oblative (as opposed to the principle of sovereignty); it is individualizing (as opposed to legal power); it is coextensive and continuous with life; it is linked with a production of truth-the truth of the individual himself. But all this is part of history, you will say; the pastorate has, if not disappeared, at least lost the main part of its efficiency. This is true, but I think we should distinguish between two aspects of pastoral power-between the ecclesiastical institutionalization, which has ceased or at least lost its vitality since the eighteenth century, and its function, which has spread and multiplied outside the ecclesiastical institution. An important phenomenon took place around the eighteenth century-it was a new distribution, a new organization of this kind of individualizing power. I don't think that we should consider the "modern state" as an entity which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence, but, on the contrary, as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns. In a way, we can see the state as a modern matrix of individualization or a new form of pastoral power. A few more words about this new pastoral power. 1. We may observe a change in its objective. It was no longer a question of leading people to their salvation in the next world but rather ensuring it in this world. And in this context, the word "salvation" takes on different meanings: health, well-being (that is, sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, protection against accidents. A series of "worldly" aims took the place of the religious aims of the traditional pastorate, all the more easily because the latter, for various reasons, had followed in an accessory way a certain number of these aims; we only have to think of the role of medicine and its welfare function assured for a long time by the Catholic and Protestant churches. 2. Concurrently the officials of pastoral power increased. Sometimes this form of power was exerted by state apparatus or, in any case, by a public institution such as the police. (We should not forget that in the eighteenth century the police force was not invented only for maintaining law and order, nor for assisting governments in their struggle against their enemies, but for assuring urban supplies, hygiene, health, and standards considered necessary for handicrafts and commerce.) Sometimes the power was exercised by private ventures, welfare societies, benefactors, and generally by philanthropists. But ancient institutions, for example the family, were also mobilized at this time to take on pastoral functions. It was also exercised by complex structures such as medicine, which included private initiatives with the sale of services on market economy principles, but which also included public institutions such as hospitals. 3. Finally, the multiplication of the aims and agents of pastoral power focused the development of knowledge of man around two roles: one, globalizing and quantitative, concerning the population; the other, analytical, concerning the individual. And this implies that power of a pastoral type, which over centuries-for more than a millennium-had been linked to a defined religious institution, suddenly spread out into the whole social body; it found support in a multitude of institutions. And, instead of a pastoral power and a political power, more or less linked to each other, more or less rival, there was an individualizing "tactic" which characterized a series of powers: those of the family, medicine, psychiatry, education, and employers. At the end of the eighteenth century, Kant wrote, in a German newspaper-the Berliner Monatschrift-a short text. The title was "Was heisst Aufklarung?" It was for a long time, and it is still, considered a work of relatively small importance. But I can't help finding it very interesting and puzzling because it was the first time a philosopher proposed as a philosophical task to investigate not only the metaphysical system or the foundations of scientific knowledge but a historical event-a recent, even a contemporary event. When in 1784 Kant asked, Was heisst Aufklarung?, he meant, What's going on just now? What's happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living? Or in other words: What are we? as Aufkldrer, as part of the Enlightenment? Compare this with the Cartesian question: Who am I? I, as a unique but universal and unhistorical subject? I, for Descartes, is everyone, anywhere at any moment? But Kant asks something else: What are we? in a very precise moment of history. Kant's question appears as an analysis of both us and our present. I think that this aspect of philosophy took on more and more importance. Hegel, Nietzsche ... The other aspect of "universal philosophy" didn't disappear. But the task of philosophy as a critical analysis of our world is something which is more and more important. Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and of what we are in this very moment. Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political "double bind," which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state's institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. How Is Power Exercised?For some people, asking questions about the "how" of power would limit them to describing its effects without ever relating those effects either to causes or to a basic nature. It would make this power a mysterious substance which they might hesitate to interrogate in itself, no doubt because they would prefer not to call it into question. By proceeding this way, which is never explicitly justified, they seem to suspect the presence of a kind of fatalism. But does not their very distrust indicate a presupposition that power is something which exists with three distinct qualities: its origin, its basic nature, and its manifestations? If, for the time being, I grant a certain privileged position to the question of "how," it is not because I would wish to eliminate the questions of "what" and "why." Rather, it is that I wish to present these questions in a different way: better still, to know if it is legitimate to imagine a power which unites in itself a what, a why, and a how. To put it bluntly, I would say that to begin the analysis with a "how" is to suggest that power as such does not exist. At the very least it is to ask oneself what contents one has in mind when using this all-embracing and reifying term; it is to suspect that an extremely complex configuration of realities is allowed to escape when one treads endlessly in the double question: What is power? and Where does power come from? The little question, What happens?, although flat and empirical, once scrutinized is seen to avoid accusing a metaphysics or an ontology of power of being fraudulent; rather, it attempts a critical investigation into the thematics of power. "How," not in the sense of "How does it manifest itself?" but "By what means is it exercised?" and "What happens when individuals exert (as they say) power over others?" As far as this power is concerned, it is first necessary to distinguish that which is exerted over things and gives the ability to modify, use, consume, or destroy them-a power which stems from aptitudes directly inherent in the body or relayed by external instruments. Let us say that here it is a question of "capacity." On the other hand, what characterizes the power we are analyzing is that it brings into play relations between individuals (or between groups). For let us not deceive ourselves; if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others. The term "power" designates relationships between partners (and by that I am not thinking of a zero-sum game but simply, and for the moment staying in the most general terms, of an ensemble of actions which induce others and follow from one another). It is necessary also to distinguish power relations from relationships of communication which transmit information by means of a language, a system of signs, or any other symbolic medium. No doubt communicating is always a certain way of acting upon another person or persons. But the production and circulation of elements of meaning can have as their objective or as their consequence certain results in the realm of power; the latter are not simply an aspect of the former. Whether or not they pass through systems of communication, power relations have a specific nature. Power relations, relationships of communication, and objective capacities should not therefore be confused. This is not to say that there is a question of three separate domains. Nor that there is on one hand the field of things, of perfected technique, work, and the transformation of the real; on the other that of signs, communication, reciprocity, and the production of meaning; and finally, that of the domination of the means of constraint, of inequality, and the action of men upon other men.' It is a question of three types of relationships which in fact always overlap one another, support one another reciprocally, and use each other mutually as means to an end. The application of objective capacities in their most elementary forms implies relationships of communication (whether in the form of previously acquired information or of shared work); it is tied also to power relations (whether they consist of obligatory tasks, of gestures imposed by tradition or apprenticeship, of subdivisions and the more or less obligatory distribution of labor). Relationships of communication imply finalized activities (even if only the correct putting into operation of elements of meaning) and, by virtue of modifying the field of information between partners, produce effects of power. They can scarcely be dissociated from activities brought to their final term, be they those which permit the exercise of this power (such as training techniques, processes of domination, the means by which obedience is obtained) or those, which in order to develop their potential, call upon relations of power (the division of labor and the hierarchy of tasks). Of course, the coordination between these three types of relationships is neither uniform nor constant. In a given society there is no general type of equilibrium between finalized activities, systems of communication, and power relations. Rather, there are diverse forms, diverse places, diverse circumstances or occasions in which these interrelationships establish themselves according to a specific model. But there are also "blocks" in which the adjustment of abilities, the resources of communication, and power relations constitute regulated and concerted systems. Take, for example, an educational institution: the disposal of its space, the meticulous regulations which govern its internal life, the different activities which are organized there, the diverse persons who live there or meet one another, each with his own function, his well-defined character-all these things constitute a block of capacitycommunication-power. The activity which ensures apprenticeship and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behavior is developed there by means of a whole ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differentiation marks of the "value" of each person and of the levels of knowledge) and by the means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy). These blocks, in which the putting into operation of technical capacities, the game of communications, and the relationships of power are adjusted to one another according to considered formulae, constitute what one might call, enlarging a little the sense of the word, "disciplines." The empirical analysis of certain disciplines as they have been historically constituted presents for this very reason a certain interest. This is so because the disciplines show, first, according to artificially clear and decanted systems, the manner in which systems of objective finality and systems of communication and power can be welded together. They also display different models of articulation, sometimes giving preeminence to power relations and obedience (as in those disciplines of a monastic or penitential type), sometimes to finalize activities (as in the disciplines of workshops or hospitals), sometimes to relationships of communication (as in the disciplines of apprenticeship), sometimes also to a saturation of the three types of relationship (as perhaps in military discipline, where a plethora of signs indicates, to the point of redundancy, tightly knit power relations calculated with care to produce a certain number of technical effects). What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them become more and more obedient, nor that they set about assembling in barracks, schools, or prisons; rather, that an increasingly better invigilated process of adjustment has been sought after-more and more rational and economic-between productive activities, resources of communication, and the play of power relations. To approach the theme of power by an analysis of "how" is therefore to introduce several critical shifts in relation to the supposition of a fundamental power. It is to give oneself as the object of analysis power relations and not power itself-power relations which are distinct from objective abilities as well as from relations of communication. This is as much as saying that power relations can be grasped in the diversity of their logical sequence, their abilities, and their interrelationships. What constitutes the specific nature of power?The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action, even if, of course, it is integrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear upon permanent structures. This also means that power is not a function of consent. In itself it is not a renunciation of freedom, a transference of rights, the power of each and all delegated to a few (which does not prevent the possibility that consent may be a condition for the existence or the maintenance of power); the relationship of power can be the result of a prior or permanent consent, but it is not by nature the manifestation of a consensus. Is this to say that one must seek the character proper to power relations in the violence which must have been its primitive form, its permanent secret, and its last resource, that which in the final analysis appears as its real nature when it is forced to throw aside its mask and to show itself as it really is? In effect, what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks on the wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity, and if it comes up against any resistance, it has no other option but to try to minimize it. On the other hand, a power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that "the other" (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up. Obviously the bringing into play of power relations does not exclude the use of violence any more than it does the obtaining of consent; no doubt the exercise of power can never do without one or the other, often both at the same time. But even though consensus and violence are the instruments or the results, they do not constitute the principle or the basic nature of power. The exercise of power can produce as much acceptance as may be wished for: it can pile up the dead and shelter itself behind whatever threats it can imagine. In itself the exercise of power is not violence; nor is it a consent which, implicitly, is renewable. It is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions. Perhaps the equivocal nature of the term "conduct" is one of the best aids for coming to terms with the specificity of power relations. For to "conduct" is at the same time to "lead" others (according to mechanisms of coercion which are, to varying degrees, strict) and a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities.* The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome. Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. This word must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. "Government" did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather, it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not only cover the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but also modes of action, more or less considered or calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. The relationship proper to power would not, therefore, be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government. When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others, when one characterizes these actions by the government of men by other men-in the broadest sense of the term-one includes an important element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole, there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.) Consequently, there is no face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom, which are mutually exclusive (freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay. In this game freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical determination). The relationship between power and freedom's refusal to submit cannot, therefore, be separated. The crucial problem of power is not that of voluntary servitude (how could we seek to be slaves?). At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an "agonism"*-of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation. How is one to analyze the power relationship?One can analyze such relationships, or rather I should say that it is perfectly legitimate to do so, by focusing on carefully defined institutions. The latter constitute a privileged point of observation, diversified, concentrated, put in order, and carried through to the highest point of their efficacity. It is here that, as a first approximation, one might expect to see the appearance of the form and logic of their elementary mechanisms. However, the analysis of power relations as one finds them in certain circumscribed institutions presents a certain number of problems. First, the fact that an important part of the mechanisms put into operation by an institution are designed to ensure its own preservation brings with it the risk of deciphering functions which are essentially reproductive, especially in power relations between institutions. Second, in analyzing power relations from the standpoint of institutions, one lays oneself open to seeking the explanation and the origin of the former in the latter, that is to say, finally, to explain power to power. Finally, insofar as institutions act essentially by bringing into play two elements, explicit or tacit regulations and an apparatus, one risks giving to one or the other an exaggerated privilege in the relations of power and hence to see in the latter only modulations of the law and of coercion. This does not deny the importance of institutions on the establishment of power relations. Instead, I wish to suggest that one must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa, and that the fundamental point of anchorage of the relationships, even if they are embodied and crystallized in an institution, is to be found outside the institution. Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible-and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence. The analysis of power relations demands that a certain number of points be established concretely: 1. The system of differentiations which permits one to act upon the actions of others: differentiations determined by the law or by traditions of status and privilege; economic differences in the appropriation of riches and goods, shifts in the processes of production, linguistic or cultural differences, differences in know-how and competence, and so forth. Every relationship of power puts into operation differentiations which are at the same time its conditions and its results. 2. The types of objectives pursued by those who act upon the actions of others: the maintenance of privileges, the accumulation of profits, the bringing into operation of statutary authority, the exercise of a function or of a trade. 3. The means of bringing power relations into being: according to whether power is exercised by the threat of arms, by the effects of the word, by means of economic disparities, by more or less complex means of control, by systems of surveillance, with or without archives, according to rules which are or are not explicit, fixed or modifiable, with or without the technological means to put all these things into action. 4. Forms of institutionalization: these may mix traditional predispositions, legal structures, phenomena relating to custom or to fashion (such as one sees in the institution of the family); they can also take the form of an apparatus closed in upon itself, with its specific loci, its own regulations, its hierarchical structures which are carefully defined, a relative autonomy in its functioning (such as scholastic or military institutions); they can also form very complex systems endowed with multiple apparatuses, as in the case of the state, whose function is the taking of everything under its wing, the bringing into being of general surveillance, the principle of regulation, and, to a certain extent also, the distribution of all power relations in a given social ensemble. 5. The degrees of rationalization: the bringing into play of power relations as action in a field of possibilities may be more or less elaborate in relation to the effectiveness of the instruments and the certainty of the results (greater or lesser technological refinements employed in the exercise of power) or again in proportion to the possible cost (be it the economic cost of the means brought into operation or the cost in terms of reaction constituted by the resistance which is encountered). The exercise of power is not a naked fact, an institutional right, nor is it a structure which holds out or is smashed: it is elaborated, transformed, organized; it endows itself with processes which are more or less adjusted to the situation. One sees why the analysis of power relations within a society cannot be reduced to the study of a series of institutions, not even to the study of all those institutions which would merit the name "political." Power relations are rooted in the system of social networks. This is not to say, however, that there is a primary and fundamental principle of power which dominates society down to the smallest detail; but, taking as point of departure the possibility of action upon the action of others (which is coextensive with every social relationship), multiple forms of individual disparity, of objectives, of the given application of power over ourselves or others, of, in varying degrees, partial or universal institutionalization, of more or less deliberate organization, one can define different forms of power. The forms and the specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. It is certain that in contemporary societies the state is not simply one of the forms or specific situations of the exercise of power-even if it is the most important-but that in a certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to it. But this is not because they are derived from it; it is rather because power relations have come more and more under state control (although this state control has not taken the same form in pedagogical, judicial, economic, or family systems). In referring here to the restricted sense of the word "government," one could say that power relations have been progressively governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions. Relations of power and relations of strategy.The word "strategy" is currently employed in three ways. First, to (designate the means employed to attain a certain end; it is a question of rationality functioning to arrive at an objective. Second, to designate the manner in which a partner in a certain game acts with regard to what he thinks should be the action of the others and what he considers the others think to be his own; it is the way in which one seeks to have the advantage over others. Third, to designate the procedures used in a situation of confrontation to deprive the opponent of his means of combat and to reduce him to giving up the struggle; it is a question, therefore, of the means destined to obtain victory. These three meanings come together in situations of confrontation-war or games-where the objective is to act upon an adversary in such a manner as to render the struggle impossible for him. So strategy is defined by the choice of winning solutions. But it must be borne in mind that this is a very special type of situation and that there are others in which the distinctions between the different senses of the word "strategy" must be maintained. Referring to the first sense I have indicated, one may call power strategy the totality of the means put into operation to implement power effectively or to maintain it. One may also speak of a strategy proper to power relations insofar as they constitute modes of action upon possible action, the action of others. One can therefore interpret the mechanisms brought into play in power relations in terms of strategies. But most important is obviously the relationship between power relations and confrontation strategies. For, if it is true that at the heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom, then there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight. Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal. A relationship of confrontation reaches its term, its final moment (and the victory of one of the two adversaries), when stable mechanisms replace the free play of antagonistic reactions. Through such mechanisms one can direct, in a fairly constant manner and with reasonable certainty, the conduct of others. For a relationship of confrontation, from the moment it is not a struggle to the death, the fixing of a power relationship becomes a target-at one and the same time its fulfillment and its suspension. And in return, the strategy of struggle also constitutes a frontier for the relationship of power, the line at which, instead of manipulating and inducing actions in a calculated manner, one must be content with reacting to them after the event. It would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of insubordination which, by definition, are means of escape. Accordingly, every intensification, every extension of power relations to make the insubordinate submit can only result in the limits of power. The latter reaches its final term either in a type of action which reduces the other to total impotence (in which case victory over the adversary replaces the exercise of power) or by a confrontation with those whom one governs and their transformation into adversaries. Which is to say that every strategy of confrontation dreams of becoming a relationship of power, and every relationship of power leans toward the idea that, if it follows its own line of development and comes up against direct confrontation, it may become the winning strategy. In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric, and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings which make visible those fundamental phenomena of "domination" which are present in a large number of human societies. Domination is in fact a general structure of power whose ramifications and consequences can sometimes be found descending to the most recalcitrant fibers of society. But at the same time it is a strategic situation more or less taken for granted and consolidated by means of a long-term confrontation between adversaries. It can certainly happen that the fact of domination may only be the transcription of a mechanism of power resulting from confrontation and its consequences (a political structure stemming from invasion); it may also be that a relationship of struggle between two adversaries is the result of power relations with the conflicts and cleavages which ensue. But what makes the domination of a group, a caste, or a class, together with the resistance and revolts which that domination comes up against, a central phenomenon in the history of societies is that they manifest in a massive and universalizing form, at the level of the whole social body, the locking together of power relations with relations of strategy and the results proceeding from their interaction. The Subject and Power Author(s): Michel Foucault Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4, (Summer, 1982), pp. 777-795 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343197
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In the face of the discreet devaluation of territorial space which followed from the conquest of circumterrestrial space, geostrategy and geopolitics come on and do their number together as part of the stage show of a regime of perverted temporality, where TRUE and FALSE are no longer relevant. The actual and the virtual have gradually taken their place, to the great detriment of the international economy, as the Wall Street computer crash of 1987, moreover, clearly demonstrated.
Dissimulating the future in the ultra-short time of an on-line 'compunication' (computer communication), Intensive time will then replace the extensive time in which the future was still laid out in substantial periods of weeks, months, years to come. The age-old duel between arms and armour, offensive and defensive, then becomes irrelevant. Both terms now merge in a new 'high-tech mix', a paradoxical object in which decoys and countermeasures just go on developing, rapidly acquiring a predominantly defensive thrust, the image becoming more effective as ammunition than what it was supposed to represent!
Faced with this fusion of the object with its equivalent image, this confusion between presentation and televised representation, the processes of real-time deception will win out over the weapons systems of classic deterrence. East-West conflict in the way the reality of deterrence itself is interpreted will gradually be transformed with the first fruits of nuclear disarmament.
The traditional opposition between deterrence and self-defence will then be replaced by an alternative: deterrence, based on parading apocalyptic weapons, or self-defence, based on this uncertainty about reality, about the very credibility of means implemented. These include the famous American 'Strategic Defense Initiative', or 'Star Wars', whose plausibility is in no way assured.
Remember that there were, at this point, three main classes of weapons: weapons defined either by range or by function, and erratic weapons, the latter prefiguring the decoys and countermeasures mentioned above.
If first-generation nuclear deterrence led to a growing sophistication in weapons systems (enhanced range, precision, miniaturisation of warheads, intelligence ... ), this sophistication has itself indirectly led to an increased sophistication in decoys and other countermeasures, which is why rapid target discrimination is so important, not so much now between true and false missiles, as between true and false radar signatures, between plausible and implausible images, whether acoustic, optical or thermal ...
In the age of 'generalised simulation' of military missions (ground, navy or air) we thus land smack bang in the middle of the age of total dissimulation — a war of images and sounds, tending to take over from the missile war of the nuclear deterrence arsenal.
The Latin root of the word secret means to segregate, to remove from understanding. Today this segregation is no longer a matter of spatial distance but of time-distance. It has become more useful to deceive about duration, to make the image of the trajectory secret, than camouflaging explosives carriers (aircraft, rockets and so on). And so a new ballistics' discipline has emerged: tracking.
It is now more vital to trick the enemy about the virtuality of the missile's passage, about the very credibility of its presence, than to confuse them about the reality of its existence. This is where the spontaneous generation STEALTH aircraft come in, those 'discreet' weapons, 'furtive' carriers, virtually invisible to detection ...
At this juncture we enter a third weapons age, following the prehistoric age of weapons defined by range, and the historic age of 'functional' weapons. With erratic and random weapons we move into the post-historic age of the arsenal. ERW are discreet weapons whose functioning depends entirely on the definitive split between real and figurative. Objective lie, unidentified virtual object, they may be classic carriers, made invisible by radar by their smooth aerodynamic shape and special radar-absorbent paint; they may be kinetic kill vehicles (KKV), using only speed of impact; or kinetic-energy weapons, which are electronic decoys. 'Projective images', ammunition of a new order that dangerously fascinate and deceive the opponent in what is probably a forerunner of the enhanced radiation weapon, or neutron bomb, acting at the speed of light itself.
This equipment of deception, this arsenal of dissimulation, has way overshot deterrence. Deterrence can now only take effect by virtue of information, through the disclosure of destructive capabilities, since an unknown weapons system would hardly be in danger of deterring the other player/adversary in a strategic game that calls for announcement, for the advertising of means. Whence the usefulness of military shows and the famous 'spy satellites' that guarantee strategic balance.
'If I were to sum up in one sentence the current stance on smart bombs and saturation attack weapons', W. J. Perry, a former US State Under-Secretary of Defense explained, 'I'd say as soon as you can see a target you can hope to destroy it.'
This statement betrays the new situation as well as partly accounting for the disarmament currently under way. If what is perceived is already finished, what was previously invested exclusively in the deployment of forces must now be invested in dissimulation. So decoy research and development has come to play a leading role in the military-industrial complex, yet one that is itself discreet. Censorship regarding 'deception techniques' far exceeds what once surrounded the military secret of the invention of the atomic bomb.
That there has been a reversal in deterrence strategy is obvious. Unlike arms that need to be known to be genuinely dissuasive, 'furtive' weapons can only work if their existence is concealed. This reversal muddies the waters of East-West strategy considerably, since it undermines the very principle of nuclear deterrence in favour of a 'strategic-defense initiative' that no longer rests on the deployment of new arms in space, as President Reagan maintained, but on the uncertainty principle, the unknown quantity in a relative-weapons system whose credibility is no more beyond doubt than its visibility.
This makes the decisive new importance of the 'logistics of perception' clearer, as well as accounting for the secrecy that continues to surround it. It is a war of images and sounds, rather than objects and things, in which winning is simply a matter of not losing sight of the opposition. The will to see all, to know all, at every moment, everywhere, the will to universalised illumination: a scientific permutation on the eye of God which would forever rule out the surprise, the accident, the irruption of the unforeseen.
So, besides the industrial innovation of 'repeating weapons', followed by automatic weapons, we also have the innovation of repeating images provided by the photoframe. The video signal then takes over where the radio signal left off, with the videogram in its turn further extending this will to second sight and bringing with it the added possibility of real-time reciprocal telesurveillance - twentyfour hours a day. The last phase of the strategy will finally be ensured by the vision machine. The Perceptron, say, will use computer graphics and automatic recognition of shapes (not just contours and silhouettes) - as though the chronology of the invention of cinema were being relived in a mirror, the age of the magic lantern giving way once more to the age of the recording camera, in anticipation of digital holography.
In the face of such representational open slather, the philosophical questions of plausibility and implausibility override those concerning the true and the false. The shift of interest from the thing to its image, and especially from space to time, to the instant, leads to a shift in polarities from the old black-and-white real-figurative dichotomy to the more relative actual-virtual.
Unless .. . unless what we are seeing is the emergence of a mix, a fusion-confusion of the two terms, the paradoxical occurrence of a unisex reality, beyond good and evil, applying itself this time to the now crucial categories of space and time and their relative dimensions, as a number of discoveries in the areas of quantum indivisibility and superconductivity would already suggest.
If we look at recent developments in 'deception strategy', we find that currently when military staff talk about 'the electronic environment' and the need for a new meteorology in order to ascertain the exact position of countermeasures over enemy territory, they are clearly translating this mutation in the very concept of environment, as well as in the concept of the reality of events occurring within it. The unpredictability and rapid transformation of atmospheric phenomena become doubly uncertain and ephemeral, but this time in relation to the state of electromagnetic waves, those countermeasures that allow a territory to be defended.
If, as Admiral Gorchkov claims: 'The winner of the next war will be the side who made the most of the electromagnetic spectrum', then we must consider the real environment of military action from now on to be not the tangible, visible, audible environment, but the optoelectronic environment, certain operations already being carried out, according to military jargon, beyond optical range thanks to real-time radioelectric pictures.
To grasp this transmutation in the field of action properly we have to refer back to the principle of relative illumination once more. If the categories of space and time have become relative (critical), this is because the stamp of the absolute has shifted from matter to light and especially to light's finite speed. It follows that that which serves to see, to understand, to measure and therefore to conceive reality, is not so much light as its velocity. From now on, speed is less useful in terms of getting around easily than in terms of seeing and conceiving more or less clearly. The time frequency of light has become a determining factor in the apperception of phenomena, leaving the spatial frequency of matter for dead. Whence the unheard of possibility of real-time special effects, decoys that do not so much affect the nature of the object - a missile, say - as the image of its presence, in the infinitesimal instant in which the virtual and the real are one and the same thing for the sensor or the human observer.
Take the centroidal-effect decoy for example. The principle here consists, in the first instance, in superimposing on the radar-image that the missile 'sees' an image entirely created by the decoy. This image is more attractive than the real one of the ground target and just as credible for the enemy missile. When this preliminary phase of deception is successful, the missile's homing head locks on to the unit's centre of gravity - 'decoy-image', 'ground target-image'. The deceived missile then only has to be dragged beyond the ship, the entire operation taking no more than a few fractions of a second. As Henri Martre, the head of Aerospatiale, pointed out not long ago: 'Future materials will be conditioned by advances in components and miniaturisation. It is most likely electronics that will end up destroying a weapon's reliability'.
So after the nuclear disintegration of the space of matter, which led to the implementation of a global deterrence strategy, the disintegration of the time of light is finally upon us. This will most likely involve a new mutation of the war game, with deception finally defeating deterrence.
Today 'extensive' time, which worked at deepening the wholeness of infinitely great time, has given way to 'intensive' time. This deepens the infinitely small of duration, of microscopic time, the final figure of eternity rediscovered outside the imaginary of the extensive eternity of bygone centuries.
Intensive eternity, in which the instantaneity offered by the latest technologies contains the equivalent of what the infinitely small space of matter contains. The core of time, a temporal atom there in each present instant, an infinitesimal point of perception from where extent and duration are differently conceived, this relative difference between them reconstitutes a new real generation, a degenerate reality in which speed prevails over time and space, just as light already prevails over matter, or energy over the inanimate. If all that appears in light appears in its speed, which is a universal constant, if speed is no longer particularly useful, as we once thought, in displacement or transportation, if speed serves primarily to see, to conceive the reality of the facts, then duration, like extent, must absolutely be 'brought to light'. All durations, from the most minute to the most astronomical, will then help to expose the intimacy of the image and its object, of space and representations of time. Physics currently proposes to do this by tripling the once-binary concept of the interval: on top of the familiar intervals of the 'space' type (negative sign) and the 'tome' type (positive sign), we have the new interval of the 'light' type (zero sign). The interface of the live television screen or the computer monitor are perfect examples of this third type of interval.
Since the time-frequency of light has become the determining factor in relative apperception of phenomena and subsequently of the reality principle, the vision machine is well and truly an 'absolute-speed machine', further undermining traditional notions of geometric optics like observables and non-observables. Actually, if photo-cinematography is still inscribed in extensive time, promoting expectation and attention by means of suspense, real-time video computer graphics is already inscribed in intensive time, promoting the unexpected and a short concentration span by means of surprise machine'. The production of sightless vision is itself merely the reproduction of an intense blindness that will become the latest and last form of industrialisation: the industrialisation of the non-gaze.
Seeing and non-seeing have always enjoyed a relationship of reciprocity, light and dark combining in the passive optics of the camera leans. But with the active optics of the video computer, notions like toning light down or bringing it up change completely, privileging a more or less marked intensification of light. And this amplification is nothing other than the negative or positive change in the velocity of photons - the trace photons leave in the camera as they pass through it being itself linked to the variable speed of the calculations image digitalisation requires, the PERCEPTRON'S computer functioning like a sort of ELECTRONIC OCCIPITAL CORTEX.
Don't forget, though, that 'image' is just an empty word here since the machine's interpretation has nothing to do with normal vision (to put it mildly!). For the computer, the optically active electron image is merely a series of coded impulses whose configuration we cannot begin to imagine since, in this 'automation of perception', image feedback is no longer assured. That being, of course, the whole idea.
We should also note, though, that eyesight is itself merely a series of light and nerve impulses that our brain quickly decodes (at 20 milliseconds per image), the question of the 'observation energy' that enables us to observe phenomena remaining unanswered, even now, despite our progress in understanding psychological and physiological blindness.
Speed of light or light of speed? The question remains untouched, despite the above-mentioned possibility of a third form of energy: kinematic energy or image energy. This fusion of physical optics and relative kinematics would take its place alongside the two main officially recognised forms of energy - potential and kinetic (active) - thereby throwing light on the controversial scientific term: observed energy.
Observed energy or observation energy? That is still the question, and it is bound to become topical, with the profusion of countless prostheses of computer-enhanced perception of which the Perceptron would be the logical outcome; an outcome of paradoxical logic, though, since 'objective perception' - how machines might perceive things — will be forever beyond us.
Faced with this ultimate in automation, the usual categories of energetic reality are no longer much help. If real time prevails over real space, if the image prevails over the object present, to say nothing of the being, if the virtual prevails over the real, we need to try and analyse the fallout from this logic of 'intensive' time on different physical representations. While the age of 'extensive' time continued to justify dialectic logic by drawing a clear distinction between potential and real, the age of intensive time demands a better resolution of the reality principle, one in which the notion of virtuality would itself come in for a bit of tinkering.
This is why I propose we accept the logical paradox of a veritable 'observation energy' made possible by the Theory of Relativity. The latter sets up the speed of light as a new absolute and thereby introduces a third type of interval - light - alongside the classic intervals of space and time. If the path of light is absolute, as its zero sign indicates, this is because the principle of instantaneous emission and reception change-over has already superceded the principle of communication which still required a certain delay.
Taking into account the third type of energy would therefore help modify the very definition of the real and the figurative, since the question of REALITY would become a matter of the PATH of the light interval, rather than a matter of the OBJECT and space-time intervals. Surpassing 'objectivity' in this untimely manner, the light-type interval would spawn the being of the path, after the being of the subject and the being of the object. As the former would define the appearance or, more precisely, the trans-appearance of what is, the question for philosophy would stop being: 'At what space-time distance is observed reality?' It would become: 'At what power, in other words, at what speed, is the perceived object?' The third type of interval thereby necessarily adds to the third type of energy: the energy of the kinematic optics of relativity. Accordingly, if the finite speed of light is the absolute that takes over where Newton's now relativised space and time leave off, the path now steals the jump on the object. Once this happens, how can we possibly locate the 'real' or the 'figurative' except through some kind of 'clearance' which becomes indistinguishable from an 'illumination' or 'clarification', spatio-temporal spacing being, to the attentive observer, only a particular figure of light, or more precisely still, of the light of speed?
And if speed is not a phenomenon but, indeed, the relationship between phenomena (relativity itself), the question raised of the observation distance of phenomena comes down to the question of the power of perception (mental or instrumental). This is why we urgently need to evaluate light signals of perceptual reality in terms of intensity, that is 'speed', rather than in terms of 'light and dark' or reflection or any of the other now outdated shorthand.
When physicists still talk today about observed energy, they are definitely misusing the term, and this mistake affects scientific practice itself, since it is speed more than light which allows us to see, to measure and thereby conceive reality.
Some little time ago, the review Raison presente asked: 'Has contemporary physics done away with the real?' Done away with it? Not on your life! But it has resolved it, of course — only, in the sense in which we now speak of better 'image resolution'. Since Einstein, Niels Bohr and company, the temporal and spatial resolution of the real has been being brought off at an endlessly accelerating rate!
At this point we should remember that relativity would not exist without the relative optics (physical optics) of the observer. Einstein was accordingly tempted to call his theory the Theory of Viewpoint in reference to the 'point of view' which necessarily becomes identical with the relative fusion of optics and kinematics, and which is another name for the 'energy of the third kind' which I propose adding to the other two.
In fact if every image (visual, sound) is the manifestation of an energy, of an unrecognised power, the discovery of retinal retention is much more than insight into a time lag (the imprint of the image on the retina). It is the discovery of a freeze-frame effect which speaks to us of some kind of unscrolling, of Rodin's time that 'does not stand still'; in other words of the intensive time of human perceptiveness. If fixing does occur, at a given moment of sight, this is actually because there exists an energetics of optics, the 'kinematic energetic' finally being merely the manifestation of a third form of power, without which distance and the three-dimensional would not apparently exist, since the said 'distance' could not exist without 'delay', (outdistancing only appearing thanks to the illumination of perception. Much as the ancients, in their own way, understood to be the case.
But by way of conclusion, let us return to the crisis in perceptive faith, to the automation of perception that is threatening our understanding. Apart from video optics, the vision machine will also use digital imaging to facilitate recognition of shapes. Note, though, that the synthetic image, as the name implies, is in reality merely a 'statistical image' that can only emerge thanks to rapid calculation of the pixels a computer graphics system can display on a screen. In order to decode each individual pixel, the pixels immediately surrounding it must be analysed. The usual criticism of statistical thought, as generating rational illusions, thus necessarily comes down to what we might here call the visual thought of the computer, digital optics now being scarcely more than a statistical optics capable of generating a series of visual illusions, 'rational illusions', which affect our understanding as well as reasoning.
In acquiring a closed-circuit optics, statistical science - the art of providing information on objective future trends as well as, more recently, an art of persuasion - will probably see its power and power of conviction considerably enhanced, along with its discrimination capacities.
Bringing users a 'subjective' optical interpretation of observed phenomena and not just 'objective' information about proposed events, the vision machine is in real danger of accentuating the splitting of the reality principle, the synthetic image no longer having anything in common with the statistical inquiry as it is normally conducted. They are already talking about digital experiments that will dispense completely with classic 'analytical reflection'. And aren't they also talking about an artificial reality involving digital simulation that would oppose the 'natural reality' of classical experience?
'Intoxication is a number', according to Charles Baudelaire. Digital optics is indeed a rational metaphor for intoxication, statistical intoxication, that is: a blurring of perception that affects the real as much as the figurative, as though our society were sinking into the darkness of a voluntary blindness, its will to digital power finally contaminating the horizon of sight as well as knowledge.
As a mode of representation of statistical thought today dominant thanks to data banks, synthetic imagery should soon contribute to the development of this one last mode of reasoning.
Don't forget that the whole idea behind the Perceptron would be to encourage the emergence of fifth-generation 'expert systems', in other words an artificial intelligence that could be further enriched only by acquiring organs of perception. ... Let me end with a fable based on a very real invention this time, the calculator pen. It is very straightforward. All you have to do is write the computation on paper, as you would if you were doing the sum yourself. When you finish writing, the little screen built into the pen displays the result. Magic? No way. While you are writing, an optical system reads the numbers formed and the electronic component does the sum. So much for the facts. The fable concerns what my pen, a blind pen this time, will write down for you, the reader, as the final words of this book. Imagine for a moment that to write the book I have borrowed technology's state-of-the-art pen: the reader pen. What do you think will come up on the screen, abuse or praise? Only, have you ever heard of a writer who writes for his pen... ?
Paul Virilio/The Vision Machine/ Chapter 5: The Vision Machine
INDIANA University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis HTTP://|UPRESS.INDIANA.EDU
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'Now objects perceive me', the painter Paul Klee wrote in his Notebooks. This rather startling assertion has recently become objective fact, the truth. After all, aren't they talking about producing a 'vision machine' in the near future, a machine that would be capable not only of recognising the contours of shapes, but also of completely interpreting the visual field, of staging a complex environment close-up or at a distance? Aren't they also talking about the new technology of 'visionics': the possibility of achieving sightless vision whereby the video camera would be controlled by a computer? The computer would be responsible for the machine's - rather than the televiewer's - capacity to analyse the ambient environment and automatically interpret the meaning of events. Such technology would be used in industrial production and stock control; in military robotics, too, perhaps.
Now that they are preparing the way for the automation of perception, for the innovation of artificial vision, delegating the analysis of objective reality to a machine, it might be appropriate to have another look at the nature of the virtual image. This is the formation of optical imagery with no apparent base, no permanency beyond that of mental or instrumental visual memory. Today it is impossible to talk about the development of the audiovisual without also talking about the development of virtual imagery and its influence on human behaviour, or without pointing to the new industrialisation of vision, to the growth of a veritable market in synthetic perception and all the ethical questions this entails. This should be considered not only in relation to control of surveillance, and the attendant persecution mania, but also primarily in relation to the philosophical question of the splitting of viewpoint, the sharing of perception of the environment between the animate (the living subject) and the inanimate (the object, the seeing machine). Questions which introduce, de facto, the question of 'artificial intelligence' since no expert system, no fifthgeneration computer could come into being without the capability of apprehending the surrounding milieu.
Once we are definitively removed from the realm of direct or indirect observation of synthetic images created by the machine for the machine, instrumental virtual images will be for us the equivalent of what a foreigner's mental pictures already represent: an enigma.
Having no graphic or video graphic outputs, the automatic-perception prosthesis will function like a kind of mechanized imaginary from which, this time, we would be totally excluded. This being the case, how can we possibly turn around and reject the factual nature of our own mental images since we would have to call on them to be able to guess, to work out roughly what the vision machine was picking up?
This impending mutation of the movie or video-recording camera into a computerised vision machine necessarily brings us back to the debate about the subjective or objective nature of mental imagery.
Increasingly relegated to the realm of idealism or subjectivism - in other words, the irrational - mental images have remained in the dark for quite a while as far as science goes. This has been the case despite the fact that the huge spread of photography and film meant an unprecedented proliferation of new images in competition with the usual array. It was not until the 60s and work on optoelectronics and computer graphics that people began to take a fresh look at the psychology of visual perception, notably in the United States. In France studies in neurophysiology led to quite a change in the status of mental imagery. J.-P. Changeux, for instance, in a recent work, no longer talks of images but of mental objects, going so far as to spell out that it will not be long before these appear on the screen. In two hundred years the philosophical and scientific debate itself has thus similarly shifted from the question of the objectivity of mental images to the question of their reality. The problem, therefore, no longer has much to do with the mental images of consciousness alone. It is now essentially concerned with the instrumental virtual images of science and their paradoxical facticity.
To my mind, this is one of the most crucial aspects of the development of the new technologies of digital imagery and of the synthetic vision offered by electron optics: the relative fusion/confusion of the factual (or operational, if you prefer) and the virtual; the ascendancy of the 'reality effect' over a reality principle already largely contested elsewhere, particularly in physics.
How can we have failed to grasp that the discovery of retinal retention that made the development of Marey's chronophotography and the cinematography of the Lumiere brothers possible, also propelled us into the totally different province of the mental retention of images?
How can we accept the factual nature of the frame and reject the objective reality of the cinemagoer's virtual image, that visual retention which is not produced solely by the retina, as we once thought, but by the way our nervous system records ocular perceptions? More to the point, how can we accept the principle of retinal retention without also having to accept the role of memorisation in immediate perception?
The moment high-speed photography was invented, making cinema a concrete possibility, the problem of the paradoxically real nature of 'virtual' imagery was in fact posed.
Any take (mental or instrumental) being simultaneously a time take, however minute, exposure time necessarily involves some degree of memorisation (conscious or not) according to the speed of exposure. Hence the familiar possibility of subliminal effects once film is projected at over 60 frames a second.
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The problem of the objectivisation of the image thus largely stops presenting itself in terms of some kind of paper or celluloid support surface - that is, in relation to a material reference space. It now emerges in relation to time, to the exposure time that allows or edits seeing.
So the act of seeing is an act that proceeds action, a kind of preaction partly explained by Searle's studies of 'intentionality'. If seeing is in fact foreseeing, no wonder forecasting has recently become an industry in its own right, with the rapid rise of professional simulation and company projections, and ultimately, hypothetically, the advent of 'vision machines' designed to see and foresee in our place. These synthetic-perception machines will be capable of replacing us in certain domains, in certain ultra high-speed operations for which our own visual capacities are inadequate, not because of our ocular system's limited depth of focus, as was the case with the telescope and the microscope, but because of the limited depth of time of our physiological 'take'.
Physicists normally distinguish two main categories of energetics: potential (static) energy, and kinetic energy, which causes movement. Perhaps we might now need to add a third category: kinematic energy, energy resulting from the effect of movement, and its varying speed, on ocular, optical or optoelectronic perception.
Let' s not forget, either, that there is no such thing as 'fixed sight', or l hat the physiology of sight depends on the eye's movements, which a re simultaneously incessant and unconscious (motility) and constant a n d conscious (mobility). Or that the most instinctive, leastcontrolled glance is first a sort of circling of the property, a complete banning of the visual field that ends in the eye's choice of an object.
As Rudolf Arnheim understood, sight comes from a long way off. It is a kind of dolly in, a perceptual activity that starts in the past in order to illuminate the present, to focus on the object of our immediate perception.
The space of sight is accordingly not Newton's space, absolute space, but Minkovskian event-space, relative space. And it is not only the dim brightness of these stars that comes to us from out of the distant past, out of the mists of time. The weak light that allows us to apprehend the real, to see and understand our present environment, itself comes from a distant visual memory without which there would be no act of looking.
After synthetic images, products of info-graphic software, after the digital image processing of computer-aided design, we are on the verge of synthetic vision, the automation of perception. What will be the effects, the theoretical and practical consequences for our own 'vision of the world' of Paul Klee's intuition's becoming reality? This doubling of the point of view cannot be compared to the proliferation of surveillance cameras in public places over a dozen or more years. Although we know that the imagery from video cameras in banks and supermarkets is relayed to a central control-room, although we can guess the presence of security officers, eyes glued to control monitors, with computer-aided perceptions — visionics - it is actually impossible to imagine the pattern, to guess the interpretation produced by this sightless vision.
Unless you are Lewis Carroll, it is hard to imagine the viewpoint of a doorknob or a button on a cardigan. Unless you are Paul Klee, it is not easy to imagine artificial contemplation, the wide-awake dream of a population of objects all busy staring at you.
Behind the wall, I cannot see the poster; in front of the wall, the poster forces itself on me, its image perceives me.
This inversion of perception, which is what advertising photography suggests, is now pervasive, extending from roadside hoardings to newspapers and magazines. Not a single representation of the kind avoids the 'suggestiveness' which is advertising's raison d'etre. The graphic or photographic quality of the advertising image, its high definition as they say, is no longer a guarantee of some kind of aesthetic of precision, of photographic sharpness etc. It is merely the search for a stereoscopic effect, for a third dimension. This then in itself becomes what the message projects, a commercial message of some kind that strives, through our gaze, to attain the depth, the density of meaning it sadly lacks. So let's not entertain any further illusions about photography's commercial prowess. The phatic image that grabs our attention and forces us to look is no longer a powerful image; it is a cliche attempting, in the manner of the cineframe, to inscribe itself in some unfolding of time in which the optic and the kinematic are indistinguishable.
Being superficial, the advertising photo, in its very resolution, participates in the decadence of the full and the actual, in a world of transparency and virtuality where representation gradually yields to genuine public presentation. Inert despite a few antiquated gimmicks, the advertising photograph no longer advertises anything much apart from its own decline in the face of what the real-time telepresence of objects can do, as home shopping and banking already make clear. Surely we have all seen trucks plastered with ads filing past in close formation like so many ambulatory commercial breaks, putting a derisory finishing touch to the usual audiovisual fix on TV.
Guaranteed to have public use-value due to the poor definition of the video image, and still able to impress readers and passers-by, the publicity shot will probably see this advantage diminish with highdefinition television, the opening of a window whose cathodic transparency will soon replace the transparency effect of the classic display window. Far be it from me to deny photography an aesthetic value. It is just that there is also a logic, a logistics of the image, and it has evolved through different periods of propagation, as we know. The age of the image's formal logic was the age of painting, engraving and etching, architecture; it ended with the eighteenth century. The age of dialectic logic is the age of photography and film or, if you like, the frame of the nineteenth century. The age oi paradoxical logic begins with the invention of video recording, holography and computer graphics .. . as though, at the close of the twentieth century the end of modernity were itself marked by the end of a logic of public representation.
Now, although we may be comfortable with the reality of the formal logic of traditional pictorial representation and, to a lesser degree, the actuality of the dialectical logic governing photographic and cinematic representation,1 we still cannot seem to get a grip on the virtualities of the paradoxical logic of the videogram, the hologram or digital imagery.
This probably explains the frantic 'interpretosis' that still surrounds these technologies today in the press, as well as the proliferation and instant obsolescence of different computer and audiovisual equipment.
Lastly, paradoxical logic emerges when the real-time image dominates the thing represented, real time subsequently prevailing over eal space, virtuality dominating actuality and turning the very cone pt of reality on its head. Whence the crisis in traditional forms of Public representation (graphics, photography, cinema .. . ) to the great advantage of presentation, of a paradoxical presence, the longstance telepresence of the object or being which provides their very existence, here and now.
This is, ultimately, what 'high definition' or high resolution means; and it no longer applies to the (photographic, television) image, but to reality itself.
With paradoxical logic, what gets decisively resolved is the reality of the object's real-time presence. In the previous age of dialectical logic, it was only the delayed-time presence, the presence of the past, that lastingly impressed plate and film. The paradoxical image thus acquires a status something like that of surprise, or more precisely, of an 'accidental transfer'. There is a correspondence here between the reality of the image of the object, captured by the lens of the pick-up camera, and the virtuality of its presence, captured by a real-time 'surprise pick-up' (of sound). This not only makes it possible to televise given objects, but also allows tele-interaction, remote control and computerised shopping. But getting back to photography, if advertising's photographic cliche begins the process whereby the phatic image radically reverses the dependent perceiver-perceived relationship, thereby beautifully illustrating Paul Klee's phrase now objects perceive me, this is because it is already more than a brief memorandum, more than the photographic memento of a more or less distant past. It is in fact will, the will to engage the future, yet again, and not just represent the past. The photogram, furthermore, had already begun to manifest such a will at the end of the last century, well before the videogram finally pulled it off. So, to an even greater extent that the documentary shot, the publicity shot foreshadows the phatic image of the audiovisual. This public image has today replaced former public spaces in which social communication took place. Avenues and public venues from now on are eclipsed by the screen, by electronic displays, in a preview of the 'vision machines' just around the corner. The latter will be capable of seeing and perceiving in our place. Remember we have already witnessed the recent appearance of the Motivac, a new device for measuring TV audiences which is a sort of black box built into the set. The Motivac is no longer happy just to indicate when the set is turned on, as its predecessors were; it indicates the actual presence of people in front of the screen. ... This makes for a fairly basic vision machine, certainly, but one which clearly points the way in mediametric monitoring, especially when you remember how zapping has devastated the audience of commercials. Really, once public space yields to public image, surveillance and street lighting can be expected to shift too, from the street to the domestic display terminal. Since this is a substitute for the City terminal, the private sphere thus continues to lose its relative autonomy.
The recent installation of TV sets in prisoners' cells rather than just recreation rooms ought to have alerted us. Not enough has been said about this decision even though it represents a typical mutation in the evolution of attitudes regarding incarceration. Since Bentham, goal has normally been identified with the panoptic, in other words, with a central surveillance system in which prisoners find themselves continually under someone's eye, within the warder's field of vision.
From now on, inmates can monitor actuality, can observe televised events — unless we turn this around and point out that, as soon as viewers switch on their sets, it is they, prisoners or otherwise, who are in the field of television, a field in which they are obviously powerless to intervene. ...
'Surveillance and punishment' go hand in hand, Michel Foucault once wrote. In this imaginary multiplication of inmates, what other kind of punishment is there if not envy, the ultimate punishment of advertising? As one prisoner put it when asked about the changes: 'Television makes being in gaol harder. You see all you're missing out on, everything you can't have.' This new situation not only involves imprisonment in the cathode-ray tube, but also in the firm, in postindustrial urbanisation.
From the town, as theatre of human activity with its church square and market place bustling with so many present actors and spectators, to CINECITTA and then TELECITTA, bustling with absent televiewers, it was just a short step through that venerable urban invention, the shopwindow. This putting behind glass of objects and people, the implementation of a transparency that has intensified over the past few decades, has led, beyond the optics of photography and cinema, to an optoelectronics of the means of television broadcasting. These are now capable of creating not only window-apartments and houses, but window-towns window-nations, media megacities that have the paradoxical power of bringing individuals together longdistance, around standardised opinions and behaviour.
'You can get people to swallow anything at all by intensifying the details', Bradbury claimed. In the way voyeurs only latch on to the suggestive details, it is indeed the intensive details, the very intensity of the message, that counts now, rather than any exploration of the scope or space of the public image.
'Unlike cinema', Hitchcock said, 'with television there is no time for suspense, you can only have surprise'. This is the very definition of the paradoxical logic of the videoframe which privileges the accident, the surprise, over the durable substance of the message. This is already what happened within the dialectical logic of the cineframe, simultaneously valorising as it did the extensiveness of duration and an extension of representational range.
Whence the sudden welter of instantaneous retransmission equipment, in town, in the office, at home: all this real-time TV monitoring tirelessly on the lookout for the unexpected, the impromptu, what-ever might suddenly crop up, anywhere, any day, at the bank, the supermarket, the sports ground where the video referee has not long taken over from the referee on the field.
This is the industrialisation of prevention, or prediction: a sort of panic anticipation that commits the future and prolongs 'the industrialisation of simulation', a simulation which more often than not involves the probable breakdown of and damage to the systems in question. I'll say it again: this doubling up of monitoring and surveillance clearly indicates the trend in relation to public representation. It is a mutation that not only affects civilian life and crime, but also the military and strategic areas of Defence.
Taking measures against an opponent often means taking countermeasures vis-a-vis the opponent's threats. Unlike defensive measures, unlike visible, ostentatious fortifications, countermeasures involve secrecy, the greatest possible dissimulation. The power of the countermeasure thereby resides in its apparent non-existence.
The chief tack of warfare is accordingly not some more or less ingenious stratagem. In the first instance, it involves the elimination of the appearance of the facts, the continuation of what Kipling meant when he said: 'Truth is the first casualty of war'. Here again, it is less a matter of introducing some manoeuvre, an original tactic, than of strategically concealing information by a process of disinformation; and this process is less to do with fake effects - once we accept the lie as given - than with the obliteration of the very principle of truth. Moral relativism has always been offensive, from time immemorial, because it has always been involved in the same process. A phenomenon of pure representation, such relativism is always at work in the appearance of events, of things as they happen, precisely because we always have to make a subjective leap in order to recognize the shapes, objects and scenes we are witness to. This is where the 'strategy of deterrence', involving decoys, electronic and other countermeasures, comes into its own. The truth is no longer masked by eliminated, meaning the truth of the real image, the image of the real space of the object, of the missile observed. It is eclipsed by the image televised 'live', or, more precisely, in real time. What is now phoney is not the space of things so much as time, the present time of military objects that, in the end, serve more to threaten than actually to fight.
The three tenses of decisive action, past, present and future, have been surreptitiously replaced by two tenses, real time and delayed time, the future having disappeared meanwhile in computer programming, and on the other hand, in the corruption of this so-called 'real' time which simultaneously contains both a bit of the present and a bit of the immediate future. When a missile threatening in 'real time' is picked up on a radar or video, the present as mediatised by the display console already contains the future of the missile's impending arrival at its target.
In fact, deterrence is a major figure in disinformation or, more precisely, according to the English jargon, in deception. Most politicians agree this is preferable to the truth of real war, the virtual nature of the arms race and the militarisation of science being perceived, despite the economic waste, as 'beneficial', in contrast to the real nature of a confrontation that would end in immediate disaster.
But even if common sense agrees that the choice of 'the nuclear non-war' is preferable, who can help but notice that so-called deterrence is not peace, but a relative form of conflict, a transfer of war from the actual to the virtual. This is the deception of the war of mass extermination whose means, deployed and endlessly perfected, have been throwing the political economy out of kilter and dragging our societies down into the mire of a general loss of a sense of reality that permeates all aspects of normal life. It is also incredibly revealing when you think that the atomic bomb, that weapon of deterrence par excellence, itself grew out of theoretical discoveries in a branch of physics that owes everything, or almost everything, to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Even if Albert Einstein is certainly not guilty of inventing the bomb, as public opinion will have it, he is, on the other hand, among those principally responsible for spreading the notion of relativity. Scrapping the 'absolute' nature of classic notions of space and time was the scientific equivalent, in this case, of deception regarding the reality of observed facts. This crucial turn of events was kept hidden from the public and affects strategy as well as philosophy, economics and the arts. 'Micro-' or 'macro-physical', the contemporary world of the immediate post-war period could no longer count on the reality of the facts, or even of the very existence of some kind of truth. After the demise of revealed truth, scientific truth suddenly bit the dust. Existentialism clearly spelled out the concomitant bewilderment. In the end the Balance of Terror is this very uncertainty. The crisis in determinism thus not only affects quantum mechanics, it also affects the political economy, whence all the East-West interpretation fever, that great game of deterrence, with its myriad scenarios starring heads of state in the Pentagon, the Kremlin and wherever else. 'We must put out excess rather than the fire', Heraclitus wrote. As our protagonists see it, the principle of deterrence reverses these terms, putting out the fire of nuclear war and thereby promoting an exponential growth in scientific and technological excess. And the avowed aim of this excess is endlessly to raise the stakes of confrontation while piously pretending to prevent it, forever to rule it out.
Paul Virilio/The Vision Machine/ Chapter 5: The Vision Machine
INDIANA University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis HTTP://|UPRESS.INDIANA.EDU This is a transcript of a 1972 conversation between the post-structuralist philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, which discusses the links between the struggles of women, homosexuals, prisoners etc.. to class struggle, and also the relationship between theory, practice and power. This transcript first appeared in English in the book ‘Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault’ / edited by Donald F. Bouchard MICHEL FOUCAULT: A Maoist once said to me: "I can easily understand Sartre's purpose in siding with us; I can understand his goals and his involvement in politics; I can partially understand your position since you've always been concerned with the problem of confinement. But Deleuze is an enigma." I was shocked by this statement because your position has always seemed particularly clear to me. GILLES DELEUZE: Possibly we're in the process of experiencing a new relationship between theory and practice. At one time, practice was considered an application of theory, a consequence; at other times, it bad an opposite sense and it was thought to inspire theory, to be indispensable for the creation of future theoretical forms. In any event, their relationship was understood in terms of a process of utilisation. For us, however, the question is seen in a different light. The relationships between theory and practice are far more partial and fragmentary. on one side, a theory is always local and related to a limited field, and it is applied in another sphere, more or less distant from it. The relationship which holds in the application of a theory is never one of resemblance. Moreover, from the moment theory moves into its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and blockages which require its relay by another type of discourse (it is through this other discourse that it eventually passes to a different domain). Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall and practice is necessary for piercing this wall. For example, your work began in the theoretical analysis of the context of confinement, specifically with respect to the psychiatric asylum within a capitalist society in the nineteenth century. Then you became aware of the necessity for confined individuals to speak for themselves, to create a relay (it's possible, on the contrary, that your function was already that of a relay in relation to them); and this group is found in prisons -- these individuals are imprisoned. It was on this basis that You organised the information group for prisons (G.I.P.)(1), the object being to create conditions that permit the prisoners themselves to speak. It would be absolutely false to say, as the Maoist implied, that in moving to this practice you were applying your theories. This was not an application; nor was it a project for initiating reforms or an enquiry in a traditional sense. The emphasis was altogether different: a system of relays within a larger sphere, within a multiplicity or parts that are both theoretical and practical. A theorising intellectual, for us, is no longer a subject, a representing or representative consciousness. Those who act and struggle are no longer represented, either by a group or a union that appropriates the right to stand as their conscience. Who speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity, even with in the person who speaks and acts. All of us are "groupuscules."(2) Representation no longer exists; there are only action-theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks. FOUCAULT: It seems to me that the political involvement of the intellectual was traditionally the product of two different aspects of his activity: his position as an intellectual in bourgeois society, in the system of capitalist production and within the ideology it produces or imposes (his exploitation, poverty, rejection, persecution, the accusations of subversive activity, immorality, etc); and his proper discourse to the extent that it revealed a particular truth, that it disclosed political relationships where they were unsuspected. These two forms of politicisation did not exclude each other, but, being of a different order, neither did they coincide. Some were classed as "outcasts" and others as "socialists." During moments of violent reaction on the part of the authorities, these two positions were readily fused: after 1848, after the Commune, after 1940. The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. The intellectual spoke the truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were forbidden to speak the truth: he was conscience, consciousness, and eloquence. In the most recent upheaval (3) the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of the power-the idea of their responsibility for "consciousness" and discourse forms part of the system. The intellectual's role is no longer to place himself "somewhat ahead and to the side" in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of "knowledge," "truth," "consciousness," and "discourse. " In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional, as you said, and not totalising. This is a struggle for power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to "awaken consciousness" that we struggle (the masses have been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge, and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie), but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance. A "theory " is the regional system of this struggle. DELEUZE: Precisely. A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate. We don't revise a theory, but construct new ones; we have no choice but to make others. It is strange that it was Proust, an author thought to be a pure intellectual, who said it so clearly: treat my book as a pair of glasses directed to the outside; if they don't suit you, find another pair; I leave it to you to find your own instrument, which is necessarily an investment for combat. A theory does not totalize; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself. It is in the nature of power to totalise and it is your position. and one I fully agree with, that theory is by nature opposed to power. As soon as a theory is enmeshed in a particular point, we realise that it will never possess the slightest practical importance unless it can erupt in a totally different area. This is why the notion of reform is so stupid and hypocritical. Either reform are designed by people who claim to be representative, who make a profession of speaking for others, and they lead to a division of power, to a distribution of this new power which is consequently increased by a double repression; or they arise from the complaints and demands of those concerned. This latter instance is no longer a reform but revolutionary action that questions (expressing the full force of its partiality) the totality of power and the hierarchy that maintains it. This is surely evident in prisons: the smallest and most insignificant of the prisoners' demands can puncture Pleven's pseudo-reform (5). If the protests of children were heard in kindergarten, if their questions were attended to, it would be enough to explode the entire educational system. There is no denying that our social system is total without tolerance; this accounts for its extreme fragility in all its aspects and also its need for a global form of repression. In my opinion, you were the first-in your books and in the practical sphere-to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others. Pe ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this "theoretical" conversion-to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf. FOUCAULT: And when the prisoners began to speak, they possessed an individual theory of prisons, the penal system, and justice. It is this form of discourse which ultimately matters, a discourse against power, the counter-discourse of prisoners and those we call delinquents and not a theory about delinquency. The problem of prisons is local and marginal: not more than 100,000 people pass through prisons in a year. In France at present, between 300,000 and 400,000 have been to prison. Yet this marginal problem seems to disturb everyone. I was surprised that so many who had not been to prison could become interested in its problems, surprised that all those who bad never heard the discourse of inmates could so easily understand them. How do we explain this? Isn't it because, in a general way, the penal system is the form in which power is most obviously seen as power? To place someone in prison, to confine him to deprive him of food and heat, to prevent him from leaving, making love, etc.-this is certainly the most frenzied manifestation of power imaginable. The other day I was speaking to a woman who bad been in prison and she was saying: "Imagine, that at the age of forty, I was punished one day with a meal of dry bread." What is striking about this story is not the childishness of the exercise of power but the cynicism with which power is exercised as power, in the most archaic, puerile, infantile manner. As children, we learn what it means to be reduced to bread and water. Prison is the only place where power is manifested in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as moral force. "I am within my rights to punish you because you know that it is criminal to rob and kill . . . ... What is fascinating about prisons is that, for once, power doesn't hide or mask itself; it reveals itself as tyranny pursued into the tiniest details; it is cynical and at the same time pure and entirely "justified," because its practice can be totally formulated within the framework of morality. It's brutal tyranny consequently appears as the serene domination of Good over Evil, of order over disorder. DELEUZE: Yes, and the reverse is equally true. Not only are prisoners treated like children, but children are treated like prisoners. Children are submitted to an infantilisation which is alien to them. On this basis, it is undeniable that schools resemble prisons and that factories are its closest approximation. Look at the entrance to a Renault plant, or anywhere else for that matter: three tickets to get into the washroom during the day. You found an eighteenth-century text by Jeremy Bentham proposing prison reforms; in the name of this exalted reform, be establishes a circular system where the renovated prison serves as a model and where the individual passes imperceptibly from school to the factory, from the factory to prison and vice versa. This is the essence of the reforming impulse, of reformed representation. On the contrary, when people begin to speak and act on their own behalf, they do not oppose their representation (even as its reversal) to another; they do not oppose a new representativity to the false representativity of power. For example, I remember your saying that there is no popular justice against justice; the reckoning takes place at another level. FOUCAULT: I think that it is not simply the idea of better and more equitable forms of justice that underlies the people's hatred of the judicial system, of judges, courts, and prisons, but aside from this and before anything else the singular perception that power is always exercised at the expense of the people. The anti-judicial struggle is a struggle against power and I don't think that it is a struggle against injustice, against the injustice of the judicial system, or a struggle for improving the efficiency of its institutions. It is particularly striking that in outbreaks of rioting and revolt or in seditious movements the judicial system has been as compelling a target as the financial structure, the army, and other forms of power. My hypothesis -but it is merely a hypothesis- is that popular courts, such as those found in the Revolution, were a means for the lower middle class, who were allied with the masses, to salvage and recapture the initiative in the struggle against the judicial system. To achieve this, they proposed a court system based on the possibility of equitable justice, where a judge might render a just verdict. The identifiable form of the court of law belongs to the bourgeois ideology of justice. DELEUZE: On the basis of our actual situation, power emphatically develops a total or global vision. That is, all the current forms of repression (the racist repression of immigrant workers, repression in the factories, in the educational system, and the general repression of youth) are easily totalised from the point of view of power. We should not only seek the unity of these forms in the reaction to May '68 but more appropriately, in the concerted preparation and organisation of the near future, French capitalism now relies on a "margin" of unemployment and has abandoned the liberal and paternal mask that promised full employment. In this perspective, we begin to see the unity of the forms of repression: restrictions on immigration, once it is acknowledged that the most difficult and thankless jobs go to immigrant workers-repression in the factories, because the French must reacquire the "taste" for increasingly harder work; the struggle against youth and the repression of the educational system, because police repression is more active when there is less need for young people in the work force. A wide range of professionals (teachers, psychiatrists, educators of all kinds, etc.) will be called upon to exercise functions that have traditionally belonged to the police. This is something you predicted long ago, and it was thought impossible at the time: the reinforcement of all the structures of confinement. Against this global policy of power, we initiate localised counter-responses, skirmishes, active and occasionally preventive defences. We have no need to totalise that which is invariably totalized on the side of power; if we were to move in this direction, it would mean restoring the representative forms of centralism and a hierarchical structure. We must set up lateral affiliations and an entire system of the net- works and popular bases, and this is especially difficult. In any case, we no longer define reality as a continuation of politics in the traditional sense of competition and the distribution of power, through the so-called representative agencies of the Communist Party or the General Workers Union(6). The reality is what actually happens in factories, in schools, in barracks, in prisons, in police stations. And this action carries a type of information which is altogether different from that found in newspapers (this explains the kind of information carried by the Agence de Press Liberation (7) FOUCAULT: Isn't this difficulty of finding adequate forms of struggle a result of the fact that we continue to ignore the problem of power? After all, we had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power. It may be that Marx and Freud cannot satisfy our desire for understanding this enigmatic thing which we call power, which is at once visible and invisible, present and hidden, ubiquitous. Theories of government and the traditional analyses of their mechanisms certainly don't exhaust the field where power is exercised and where it functions. The question of power re- mains a total enigma. Who exercises power? And in what sphere? We now know with reasonable certainty who exploits others, who receives the profits, which people are involved, and we know how these funds are reinvested. But as for power . . . We know that it is not in the hands of those who govern. But, of course, the idea of the "ruling class" has never received an adequate formulation, and neither have other terms, such as "to dominate ... .. to rule ... .. to govern," etc. These notions are far too fluid and require analysis. We should also investigate the limits imposed on the exercise of power the relays through which it operates and the extent of its influence on the often insignificant aspects of the hierarchy and the forms of control, surveillance, prohibition, and constraint. Everywhere that power exists, it is being exercised. No one, strictly speaking, has an official right to power; and yet it is always excited in a particular direction, with some people on one side and some on the other. It is often difficult to say who holds power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see who lacks power. If the reading of your books (from Nietzsche to what I anticipate in Capitalism and Schizophrenia (8) has been essential for me, it is because they seem to go very far in exploring this problem: under the ancient theme of meaning, of the signifier and the signified, etc., you have developed the question of power, of the inequality of powers and their struggles. Each struggle develops around a particular source of power (any of the countless, tiny sources- a small-time boss, the manager of "H.L.M.,"' a prison warden, a judge, a union representative, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper). And if pointing out these sources-denouncing and speaking out is to be a part of the struggle, it is not because they were previously unknown. Rather, it is because to speak on this subject, to force the institutionalised networks of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to find targets, is the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power. if the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of struggle, it is because they confiscate, at least temporarily, the power to speak on prison conditions at present, the exclusive property of prison administrators and their cronies in reform groups. The discourse of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive. It may not seem like much; but what if it turned out to be more than we expected? A whole series of misunderstandings relates to things that are "hidden," "repressed," and "unsaid"; and they permit the cheap "psychoanalysis" of the proper objects of struggle. It is perhaps more difficult to unearth a secret than the unconscious. The two themes frequently encountered in the recent past, that "writing gives rise to repressed elements" and that "writing is necessarily a subversive activity," seem to betray a number of operations that deserve to be severely denounced. DELEUZE: With respect to the problem you posed: it is clear who exploits, who profits, and who governs, but power nevertheless remains something more diffuse. I would venture the following hypothesis: the thrust of Marxism was to define the problem essentially in terms of interests (power is held by a ruling class defined by its interests). The the question immediately arises: how is it that people whose interests are not being served can strictly support the existing power structure by demanding a piece of the action? Perhaps, this is because, in terms of investments, whether economic or unconscious, interest is not the final answer; there are investments of desire that function in a more profound and diffuse manner than our interests dictate. But of course, we never desire against our interests, because interest always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it. We cannot shut out the scream of Reich: the masses were not deceived; at a particular time, they actually wanted a fascist regime! There are investments of desire that mould and distribute power, that make it the property of the policeman as much as of the prime minister; in this context, there is no qualitative difference between the power wielded by the policeman and the prime minister. The nature of these investments of desire in a social group explains why political parties or unions, which might have or should have revolutionary investments in the name of class interests, are so often reform-oriented or absolutely reactionary on the level of desire. FOUCAULT: As you say, the relationship between desire, power, and interest are more complex than we ordinarily think, and it is not necessarily those who exercise power who have an interest in its execution; nor is it always possible for those with vested interests to exercise power. Moreover, the desire for power establishes a singular relationship between power and interest. It may happen that the masses, during fascist periods, desire that certain people assume power, people with whom they are unable to identify since these individuals exert power against the masses and at their expense, to the extreme of their death, their sacrifice, their massacre. Nevertheless, they desire this particular power; they want it to be exercised. This play of desire, power, and interest has received very little attention. It was a long time before we began to understand exploitation, and desire has had and continues to have a long history. It is possible that the struggles now taking place and the local, regional, and discontinuous theories that derive from these struggles and that are indissociable from them stand at the threshold of our discovery of the manner in which power is exercised. DELEUZE: In this context, I must return to the question: the present revolutionary movement has created multiple centres, and not as the result of weakness or insufficiency since a certain kind of totalization pertains to power and the forces of reaction. (Vietnam, for instance, is an impressive example of localised counter-tactics). But bow are we to define the networks, the transversal links between these active and discontinuous points, from one country to another or within a single country? FOUCAULT: The question of geographical discontinuity which you raise might mean the following: as soon as we struggle against exploitation, the proletariat not only leads the struggle but also defines its targets, its methods, and the places and instruments for confrontation; and to ally oneself with the proletariat is to accept its positions, its ideology, and its motives for combat. This means total identification. But if the fight is directed against power, then all those on whom power is exercised to their detriment, all who find it intolerable, can begin the struggle on their own terrain and on the basis of their proper activity (or passivity). In engaging in a struggle that concerns their own interests, whose objectives they clearly understand and whose methods only they can determine, they enter into a revolutionary process. They naturally enter as allies of the proletariat, because power is exercised the way it is in order to maintain capitalist exploitation. They genuinely serve the cause of the proletariat by fighting in those places they find themselves oppressed. Women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals have now begun a specific struggle against the particularised power, the constraints and controls, that are exerted over them. Such struggles are actually involved in the revolutionary movement to the degree that they are radical, uncompromising and no reformist, and refuse any attempt at arriving at a new disposition of the same power with, at best, a change of masters. And these movements are linked to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat to the extent that they fight against the controls and constraints which serve the same system of power. In this sense, the overall picture presented by the struggle is certainly not that of the totalization you mentioned earlier,this theoretical totalization under the guise of "truth." The generality of the struggle specifically derives from the system of power itself, from all the forms in which power is exercised and applied. DELEUZE: And which we are unable to approach in any of its applications without revealing its diffuse character, so that we are necessarily led--on the basis of the most insignificant demand to the desire to blow it up completely. Every revolutionary attack or defence, however partial, is linked in this way to the workers' struggle. This discussion was recorded March 4, 1972; and it was published in a special issue of L'Arc (No. 49, pp. 3-10), dedicated to Gilles Deleuze. It is reprinted here by permission of L'Arc. (All footnotes supplied by the editor). 1. "Groupe information de prisons": Foucault's two most recent publications (I, Pierre Riviere and Surveiller et Punir)result from this association. 2. Cf. above "Theatrum Philosophicum," p. 185 in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. 3. May 1968, popularly known as the "events of May." 4. See L'Ordre du discourse, pp. 47-53 in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. 5, Rene Pleven was the prime minister of France in the early 1950. 6. "Confederation Generale de Travailleurs", General Confederation of Workers. 7. Liberation News Agency. 8. Nietzsche et la Philosophie (Paris: P.U.F., 1962) and Capitalisme et schizophrenia, vol. 1, 'Anti-Oedipus, in collaboration with F. Guattari (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1912). Both books are now available in English. 9. Habitations à Loyer Modéré - moderate rental housing." |
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