​Historical riots represent a challenge for the state because, in demanding the departure of those who rule it, they invariably expose it to a brutal, unprepared change, even to the possibility of its complete collapse (that is precisely what happened in Iran, thirty years ago, to the Shah's monarchical regime). At the same time, riots do not possess all the keys - far from it to the nature and extent of the change to which they expose the state. What is going to happen in the state is in no wise prefigured by a riot. 

Admittedly, in mass movements with a historical dimension there are always people who sincerely believe the opposite. They think that the popular democratic practices of the movement (of any historical riot, no matter when and where it occurs) form a kind of paradigm for the state to come. Egalitarian assemblies are held; everyone has the right to speak; social, religious, racial, national, sexual and intellectual differences are no longer of any significance. Decisions are ​always collective. In appearance at least: seasoned militants know how to prepare for an assembly by a prior, closed meeting that will in fact remain secret. But no matter, it is indeed true that decisions will invariably be unanimous, because the strongest, most appropriate proposal emerges from the discussion. And it can then be said that 'legislative' power, which formulates the new directive, not only coincides with 'executive power', which organizes its practical consequences, but also with the whole active people symbolized by the assembly. 

Why not extend these features of mass democracy, which are so powerful and inspiring, to the state in its entirety? Quite simply because between the democracy of the riot and the routine, repressive, blind system of state decisions - even, and especially, when they claim to be 'democratic' - there is such a wide gulf that Marx could only imagine overcoming it at the end of a process of the state's withering away. And, to be brought to a successful conclusion, that process required not mass democracy everywhere, but its dialectical opposite: a transitional dictatorship which was compacted and implacable. 

Marx was unquestionably right, and I shall return to the rational paradox of an inevitable continuity between the egalitarian democracy established within itself by an historical riot and the popular dictatorship exercised without, in the direction of enemies and suspects, whereby an attempt is made to achieve political fidelity to the riot. 

​For now it suffices for us to note that a historical riot does not by itself offer any alternative to the power it intends to overthrow. There is a very important difference between 'historical riot' and 'revolution': the second, at least since Lenin, has been regarded as possessing within itself the resources required for an immediate seizure of power.

​That is why rioters have always complained about the fact that the new regime, following the riotous overthrow of the previous one, is in the main identical to it. The prototype of such similarity is the construction of a regime dominated by political personnel from the putative 'opposition' to the Empire after the fall of Napoleon III, the lost war and the riots of 4 September 1870. To make it perfectly clear whose side it was on, this 'new' government was to display an especial antipopular ferocity a few months later, by remorselessly massacring thousands of communard workers.

The communist party, such as it was conceived by the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party and then the Bolsheviks, is a structure which, derived from a rigorous ​analysis of the Paris Commune by Lenin, declared itself capable of incorporating an alternative to the existing government and founding a new state after the complete destruction of the old Tsarist apparatus. 

When the figure of riot becomes a political figure - in other words, when it possesses within itself the political personnel it requires and resort to the state's professional nags becomes unnecessary - we can say that what has arrived is the end if the intervallic period, because a new politics has been able to seize on the rebirth of History symbolized by a historical riot. 

To return to the historical riots in the Arab world, especially Egypt and Tunisia, we already know that they are going to continue while becoming divided. Some of the rioters - the youngest, the most determined or the best organized - are going to declare that the transitional governments which have been established with difficulty, and which often conceal the persistence of the most important institutions of the old regime (for example, the army in Egypt), are so remote from the popular movement that they do not want them any more than they did Ben Ali or Mubarak. But for the moment these protests are not generating the idea on whose basis fidelity to the riot can be organized. Hence a vibrant indecision which, from a purely formal standpoint, closely equates the situation in the Arab world with situations already witnessed in the nineteenth century. 

​Ultimately, we cannot avoid the question: what criteria make it possible to evaluate a riot, to assess the scope of the historical reawakening it incorporates? 

​From the outset, the Western powers, and the media dependent on them, have had a ready-made answer. According to them, the desire inspiring the riots in the Arab countries is 'freedom' in the sense given this term by Westerners - namely, 'freedom of opinion' in the fixed framework of unbridled capitalism ('free enterprise') and a state based on parliamentary representation ('free elections', which select between various practically indistinguishable managers of the established system). 

Basically, our rulers and our dominant media have suggested a simple interpretation of the riots in the Arab world: what is expressed in them is what might be called a desire for the West. A desire to 'enjoy' everything that we, the drowsy, satiated inhabitants of the affluent countries, already 'enjoy' . A desire finally to be included in the 'civilized world' which Westerners, incorrigible descendants of racist colonists, are so ​certain of representing that they set up international 'courts' to judge anyone who asserts different values (which are indeed sometimes disreputable), or so much as affects to shake off the oppressive tutelage of the 'international community' (admittedly sometimes in purely self-interested fashion). In so doing, Westerners wrapped in the flag of Right forget that their alleged power to state the Good is nothing but the modernized name for imperial interventionism. 

Any mass movement is obviously an urgent demand for liberation. With respect to regimes as despotic, corrupt and in thrall to imperial beck and call as those of Ben Ali and Mubarak, such a demand is wholly legitimate. That this desire as such is a desire for the West is infinitely more debatable.

It must be remembered that the West as a power has not hitherto shown any evidence that it was in the least concerned with organizing freedom in the places it intervenes in, often with arms. What counts for our 'civilized' men is: 'Are you with us or against us?' This gives the phrase 'with us' the meaning of a slavish inclusion in the planetary market economy, organized in the relevant countries by corrupt personnel, in close collaboration with a counterrevolutionary police force and army, trained, equipped and commanded by officers, secret agents and racketeers who are just like back home. 'Friendly countries' such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico and many others are just as despotic and corrupt as Ben Ali's Tunisia or Mubarak's Egypt, if not much more so. But we scarcely hear those ​who emerged on the occasion of the events in Tunisia or Egypt as ardent defenders of all riots in favour of freedom pronouncing on that subject. One senses that our states prefer the firm calm ensured by friendly despots to the uncertainty of riots. But once a riot is open to being interpreted as a desire for the West, and even better ends up being such, our politicians and media will accord it a warm reception. 

​However, such an outcome is not guaranteed. The very fact that, via the handy megaphone of BernardHenri Levy, the French and British have ended up purely and simply inventing rag-tag and bob tail 'rebels' in Libya -of whom the only real effective ones have declared themselves to be ex-al-Qaeda (what a paradox!), but all of whom for the moment are under their heel (Libya is the only place in the world where people have the absurd idea of shouting 'Long live Sarkozy!') - arming them, leading them and guaranteeing them the supporting fire of their air forces, demonstrates the extent to which our governments ultimately fear the expression in genuine rebellions of anything other than an inordinate love of imperial civilizations. That people should be referring, after five months of action by French and British planes with American logistical support, their attack helicopters, and their officers and agents on the ground, to a moving 'rebel victory' is frankly ridiculous.

But this is the kind of victory (Alain Juppe stating, in a telling admission, 'We did the job') that Westerners adore. For when genuine popular rebellions are ​involved, they cannot help thinking that perhaps, after all, they are dealing with people who do not wish to shout themselves hoarse in support of Cameron, Sarkozy or Obama. Maybe - as their anxiety mounts all these episodes contain an Idea, as yet unformulated, which is highly displeasing to them. A conception of democracy completely opposed to their own, perhaps. In this state of uncertainty, they conclude, let us get our machine guns ready and confirm that they are in working order. 

In these conditions we must attempt to define more precisely what a popular movement reducible to a 'desire for the West' is or might be; and what the current riots, should they rise above this lethal temptation, could be. 

Let us try, then. A riot subject to a desire for the West takes the immediate form of an anti -despotic riot, whose negative, popular power is indeed that of the crowd, but whose affirmative power has no other norm than those vaunted by the West. A popular movement corresponding to this definition has every chance of ending in very modest constitutional reforms and elections firmly controlled by the 'international community'. From these, to the general surprise of supporters of the riot, there will emerge victorious either some well-known hired guns of Western interests, or a version of those 'moderate Islamists' from whom our rulers are gradually learning that there is nothing to fear. I propose to say that at the end of such a process we will have witnessed a phenomenon of Western inclusion. 

Among us the dominant interpretation of what is happening is that this phenomenon is the natural, legitimate outcome of the riots in the Arab world under the rubric of 'victory of democracy' . 

​Moreover, this explains why, by contrast, riots are brutally repressed and execrated when they occur at home. If a 'good riot' demands inclusion in the West, why on earth rise up where this inclusion is well established, in our robust civilized democracy? From time to time the flea-ridden, the Arabs, the blacks, the Orientals and other workers from hell may, without exaggeration, demand to be 'like us' - all the more so because it will not happen tomorrow, and in the meantime the good old colonial plunder that fuels our serenity will continue in various forms. At home, on the other hand, they only have the right to work and vote in silence. If not, look out! Cameron and his little London gulag for inner-city youth, Sarkozy and his anti-rabble Karchers, are guarding the walls of civilization. 

If it is true, as Marx foresaw, that the space of realization of emancipatory ideas is global (something, incidentally, that was not really true of twentieth century revolutions), then a phenomenon of Western inclusion cannot be regarded as genuine change. What would be a genuine change would be an exit from the West, a 'de-Westernization', and it would take the form of an exclusion. A daydream, you will say. But it could be that it is right there, in front of our eyes. And in any event this is what we must dream, because this dream makes it possible, without reneging on everything we have stood for or sinking into the 'no future' of nihilism, to go through the painful years of an intervallic period. ​

​ALAIN BADIOU​/THE REBIRTH OF HISTORY/ Times Of Riots and Uprisings

It is this fundamental turnaround that the new reversal of the definition of man records: man is a will served by an intelligence. Will is the rational power that must be delivered from the quarrels between the idea-ists and the thing-ists. It is also in this sense that the Cartesian equality of the cogito must be specified. In place of the thinking subject who only knows himself by withdrawing from all the senses and from all bodies, we have a new thinking subject who is aware of himself through the action he exerts on himself as on other bodies.

Here is how Jacotot, according to the principles of universal teaching, made his own translation of Descartes’s famous analysis of the piece of wax: 

I have ideas when I like. Descartes knew well the power of will over understanding. But he knew it precisely as the power of the false, as the cause of error: the haste to affirm when the idea isn’t clear and distinct. The opposite must be said: it is the lack of will that causes intelligence to make mistakes. The mind’s original sin is not haste, but distraction, absence. “To act without will or reflection does not produce an intellectual act. The effect that results from this cannot be classed among the products of intelligence, nor can it be compared to them. One can see neither more nor less action in inactivity; there is nothing. Idiocy is not a faculty; it is the absence or the slumber or the relaxation of [intelligence].”

Intelligence’s act is to see and to compare what has been seen. It sees at first by chance. It must seek to repeat, to create the conditions to re-see what it has seen, in order to see similar facts, in order to see facts that could be the cause of what it has seen. It must also form words, sentences, and figures, in order to tell others what it has seen. In short, the most frequent mode of exercising intelligence, much to the dissatisfaction of geniuses, is repetition. And repetition is boring. The first vice is laziness. It is easier to absent oneself, to half-see, to say what one hasn’t seen, to say what one believes one sees. “Absent” sentences are formed in this way, the “therefores” that translate no mental adventure. “I can’t” is one of these absent sentences. “I can’t” is not the name of any fact. Nothing happens in the mind that corresponds to that assertion. Properly speaking, it doesn’t want to say anything. Speech is thus filled or emptied of meaning depending on whether the will compels or relaxes the workings of the intelligence. Meaning is the work of the will. This is the secret of universal teaching. It is also the secret of those we call geniuses: the relentless work to bend the body to necessary habits, to compel the intelligence to new ideas, to new ways of expressing them; to redo on purpose what chance once produced, and to reverse unhappy circumstances into occasions for success: 

Once more universal teaching proclaims: an individual can do anything he wants. But we must not mistake what wanting means. Universal teaching is not the key to success granted to the enterprising who explore the prodigious powers of the will. Nothing could be more opposed to the thought of emancipation than that advertising slogan. And the Founder became irritated when disciples opened their school under the slogan, “Whoever wants to is able to.” The only slogan that had value was “The equality of intelligence.” Universal teaching is not an expedient method. It is undoubtedly true that the ambitious and the conquerors gave ruthless illustration of it. Their passion was an inexhaustible source of ideas, and they quickly understood how to direct generals, scholars, or financiers faultlessly in sciences they themselves did not know. But what interests us is not this theatrical effect. What the ambitious gain in the way of intellectual power by not judging themselves inferior to anyone, they lose by judging themselves superior to everyone else. What interests us is the exploration of the powers of any man when he judges himself equal to everyone else and judges everyone e​lse equal to him. By the will we mean that self-reflection by the reasonable being who knows himself in the act. It is this threshold of rationality, this consciousness of and esteem for the self as a reasonable being acting, that nourishes the movement of the intelligence. The reasonable being is first of all a being who knows his power, who doesn’t lie to himself about it. 

Jacques Rancière/The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation)

​Precisely, say the superior minds. The opposite fact is obvious. That intelligence is unequal is evident to everyone. First of all, in nature, no two beings are identical. Look at the leaves falling from the tree. They seem exactly the same to you. Look more closely and disabuse yourself. Among the thousands of leaves, there are no two alike. Individuality is the law of the world. And how could this law that applies to vegetation not apply a fortiori to this being so infinitely more elevated in the vital hierarchy that is human intelligence? Therefore, each intelligence is different. Second, there have always been, there always will be, there are everywhere, beings unequally gifted for intellectual things: scholars and ignorant ones, intelligent people and fools, open minds and closed minds. We know what is said on the subject: the difference in circumstances, social milieu, education . . . Well, let’s do an experiment: let’s take two children who come from the same milieu, raised in the same way. Let’s take two brothers, put them in the same school, make ​them do the same exercises. And what will we see? One will do better than the other. There is therefore an intrinsic difference. And the difference results from this: one of the two is more intelligent, more gifted; he has more resources than the other. Therefore, you can clearly see that intelligence is unequal.

​​How to respond to this evidence? Let’s begin at the beginning: with the leaves that superior minds are so fond of. We fully recognize that they are as different as people so minded could desire. We only ask: how does one move from the difference between leaves to the inequality of intelligence? Inequality is only a kind of difference, and it is not the one spoken about in the case of leaves. A leaf is a material thing while a mind is immaterial. How can one infer, without paralogism, the properties of the mind from the properties of matter? 

It is true that this terrain is now occupied by some fierce adversaries: physiologists. The properties of the mind, according to the most radical of them, are in fact the properties of the human brain. Difference and inequality hold sway there just as in the configuration and functioning of all the other organs in the human body. The brain weighs this much, so intelligence is worth that much. Phrenologists and cranioscopists are busy with all this: this man, they tell us, has the skull of a genius; this other doesn’t have a head for mathematics. Let’s leave these protubérants to the examination of their protuberances and get down to the serious business. One can imagine a consequent materialism that would be concerned only with brains, and that could apply to them everything that is applied to material beings. And so, effectively, the propositions of intellectual emancipation would be nothing but the dreams of bizarre brains, stricken with a particular form of that old mental malady called melancholia. In this case, superior minds— that is to say, superior brains— would in fact have authority over inferior minds in the same way man has authority over animals. If this were simply the case, nobody would discuss the inequality of intelligence. Superior brains would not go to the unnecessary trouble of proving their superiority over inferior minds— in capable, by definition, of understanding them. They would be content to dominate them. And they wouldn’t run into any obstacles: their intellectual superiority would be demonstrated by the fact of that domination, just like physical superiority. There would be no more need for laws, assemblies, and governments in the political order than there would be for teaching, explications, and academies in the intellectual order.

​Such is not the case. We have governments and laws. We have superior minds that try to teach and convince inferior minds. What is even stranger, the apostles of the inequality of intelligence, in their immense majority, don’t believe the physiologists and make fun of the phrenologists. The superiority they boast of can’t be measured, they believe, by instruments. Materialism would be an easy explanation for their superiority, but they make a different case. Their superiority is spiritual. They are spiritualists, above all, because of their own good opinion of themselves. They believe in the immaterial and immortal soul. But how can something immaterial be susceptible to more or less? This is the superior minds’ contradiction. They want an immortal soul, a mind distinct from matter, and they want different degrees of intelligence. But it’s matter that makes differences. If one insists on inequality, one must accept the theory of cerebral loci; if one insists on the spiritual principle, one must say that it is the same intelligence that applies, in different circumstances, to different material objects. But the superior minds want neither a superiority that would be only material nor a spirituality that would make them the equals of their inferiors. They lay claim to the differences of materialists in the midst of the elevation that belongs to immateriality. They paint the cranioscopist’s skulls with the innate gifts of intelligence.

And yet they know very well that the shoe pinches, and they also know they have to concede something to the inferiors, even if only provisionally. Here, then, is how they arrange things: there is in every man, they say, an immaterial soul. This soul permits even the most humble to know the great truths of good and evil, of conscience and duty, of God and judgment. In this we are all equal, and we will even concede that the humble often teach us in these matters. Let them be satisfied with this and not pretend to intellectual capacities that are the privilege— often dearly paid for— of those whose task is to watch over the general interests of society. And don’t come back and tell us that these differences are purely social. Look instead at these two children, who come from the same milieu, taught by the same masters. One succeeds, the other doesn’t. Therefore ... 

So be it! Let’s look then at your children and your  therefore. One succeeds better than the other, this is a fact. If he succeeds better, you say, this is because he is more intelligent. Here the explanation becomes obscure. Have you shown another fact that would be the cause of the first? If a physiologist found one of the brains to be narrower or lighter than the other, this would be a fact. He could therefore-ize deservedly. But you haven’t shown us another fact. By saying “ He is more intelligent,” you have simply summed up the ideas that tell the story of the fact. You have given it a name. But the name of a fact is not its cause, only, at best, its metaphor. The first time you told the story of the fact by saying, “He succeeds better.” In your retelling of it you used another name: “He is more intelligent.” But there is no more in the second statement than in the first. “This man does better than the other because he is smarter. That means precisely: he does better because he does better. . . . This young man has more resources, they say. ‘What is more resources?’ I ask, and they start to tell me the story of the two children again; so more resources, I say to myself, means in French the set of facts I just heard; but that expression doesn’t explain them at all.” 

It’s impossible, therefore, to break out of the circle. One must show the cause of the inequality, at the risk of borrowing it from the protubérants, or be reduced to merely stating a tautology. The inequality of intelligence explains the inequality of intellectual manifestations in the way the virtus dormitiva explains the effects of opium.

Jacques Rancière -The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation)

​To recapitulate: politics exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part. It begins when the equality of anyone and everyone is inscribed in the liberty of the people. This liberty of the people is an empty property, an improper property through which those who are nothing purport that their group is identical to the whole of the community. Politics exists as long as singular forms of subjectification repeat the forms of the original inscription of the identity between the whole of the community and the nothing that separates it from itself-in other words, the sole count of its parts. Politics ceases wherever this gap no longer has any place, wherever the whole of the community is reduced to the sum of its parts with nothing left over. 

​There are several ways of thinking of the whole as the sole sum of its parts. The sum may be made up of individuals, small machines intensely exploiting their own freedom to desire, to undertake, and to enjoy. It may be made up of social groups building their interests as responsible partners. It may be made up of communities, each endowed with recognition of its identity and its culture. In this regard, the consensual state is tolerant. But what it no longer tolerates is the supernumerary party, the one that throws out the count of the community. What it needs is real parties, having both their own properties and the common property of the whole. What it cannot tolerate is a nothing that is all. The consensus system rests on these solid axioms: the whole is all, nothing is nothing. By eliminating the parasitical entities of political subjectification, little by little the identity of the whole with the all is obtained, which is the identity of the principle of the whole with that of each of its parts, beneficiaries of the whole. This identity is called humanity. 

And this is where the trouble starts. The consensus system celebrated its victory over totalitarianism as the final victory of law over nonlaw and of realism over utopias. It was gearing up to welcome into its space-freed from politics and called Europe-the democracies born of the destruction of the totalitarian states. But just about everywhere .it looks it sees the landscape of humanity, freed from totalitarianism and the utopias, as a landscape of fundamentalisms of identity. On the ruins of the totalitarian states, ethnicism and ethnic wars break out. Religion and religious states once consecrated as a natural barrier to Soviet expansion take on the figure of the fundamentalist threat. This threat even springs up in the heart of consensus states, wherever those workers who are no longer anything more than immigrants live, wherever individuals turn out to be incapable of meeting the requirement that they militate for their own integrity. In the face of this threat, consensus communities witness the rebirth of sheer rejection of those whose ethnicity or religion cannot be borne. The consensus system represents itself to itself as the world of law as opposed to the world of nonlawthe world of barbaric identity, religion, or ethnicity. But in that world of subjects strictly identified with their ethnicity, their race, or with that people guided by divine light, in these wars between tribes fighting to occupy the entire territory of those who share their identity, the consensus system also contemplates the extreme caricature of its reasonable dream: a world cleansed of surplus identities, peopled by real bodies endowed with properties expressed by their name. The consensus system announced a world beyond the demos, a world made up of individuals and groups simply showing common humanity. It overlooked just one thing: between individuals and humanity, there is always a partition of the perceptible, a configuration that determines the way in which the different parties have a part in the community. And there are two main modes of division: counting a part of those who have no part and not counting such a part-the demos or the ethnos. The consensus system thought its expansion was boundless: Europe, the international community, the citizenry of the world, and, finally, humanity-all so many names for a whole that is equal to the sum of its elements, each having the common property of the whole. What it discovers is a new, radical figure of the identity between all and nothing. The new figure, the nonpolitical figure of the all identical to nothing, of an integrity everywhere under attack, is also, from now on, called humanity. Man "born free and everywhere in chains" has become man born human and every where inhuman.  

Beyond the forms of democratic dispute, what is indeed spreading is the reign of a humanity equal to itself, directly attributed to each one, exposed in each one to its own shattering; an all inhabited by its nothingness, a humanity showing itself, demonstrating itself everywhere to be denied. The end of the great subjectifications of wrong is not the end of the age of the "universal victim"; it is, on the contrary, its beginning. The militant democracy of old went through a whole series of polemical forms of "men born free and equal in law." The various forms of "us" have taken on different subject names to try the litigious power of "human rights," to put the inscription of equality to the test, to ask if human rights, the rights of man, were more or less than the rights of the citizen, if they were those of woman, of the proletarian, of the black man and the black woman, and so on. And so "we" have given human rights all the power they could possibly have: the power of the inscription of equality amplified by the power of its rationale and its expression in the construction of litigious cases, in the linking of a world where the inscription of equality is valid and the world where it is not valid. The reign of the "humanitarian" begins, on the other hand, wherever human rights are cut off from any capacity for polemical particularization of their universality, where the egalitarian phrase ceases to be phrased, interpreted in the arguing of a wrong that manifests its litigious effectiveness. Humanity is then no longer polemically attributed to women or to proles, to blacks or to the damned of the earth. Human rights are no longer experienced as political capacities. The predicate "human" and "human rights" are simply attributed, without any phrasing, without any mediation, to their eligible party, the subject "man." The age of the "humanitarian" is one of immediate identity between the ordinary example of suffering humanity and the plenitude of the subject of humanity and of its rights. The eligible party pure and simple is then none other than the wordless victim, the ultimate figure of the one excluded from the logos, armed only with a voice expressing a monotonous moan, the moan of naked suffering, which saturation has made inaudible. More precisely, this person who is merely human then boils down to the couple of the victim, the pathetic figure of a person to whom such humanity is denied, and the executioner, the monstrous figure of a person who denies humanity. The "humanitarian" regime of the "international community" then exercises the administration of human rights in their regard, by sending supplies and medicine to the one and airborne divisions, more rarely, to the other. 

​The transformation of the democratic stage into a humanitarian stage may be illustrated by the impossibility of any mode of enunciation. At the beginning of the May '68 movement in France, the demonstrators defined a form of subjectification summed up in a single phrase: "We are all German Jews." This phrase is a good example of the heterological mode of political subjectification: the stigmatizing phrase of the enemy, keen to track down the intruder on the stage where the classes and their parties were counted, was taken at face value, then twisted around and turned into the open subjectification of the uncounted, a name that could not possibly be confused with any real social group, with anyone's actual particulars. 

Obviously, a phrase of this kind would be unspeakable today for two reasons. The first is that it is not accurate: those who spoke it were not German and the majority of them were not Jewish. Since that time,  ​the advocates of progress as well as those of law and order have decided to accept as legitimate only those claims made by real groups that take the floor in person and themselves state their own identity. No one has the right now to call themselves a prole, a black, a Jew, or a woman if they are not, if they do not possess native entitlement and the social experience. "Humanity" is, of course, the exception to this rule of authenticity; humanity's authenticity is to be speechless, its rights are back in the hands of the international community police. And this is where the second reason the phrase is now unspeakable comes in: because it is obviously indecent. Today the identity "German Jew" immediately signifies the identity of the victim of the crime against humanity that no one can claim without profanation. It is no longer a name available for political subjectification but the name of the absolute victim that suspends such subjectification. The subject of contention has become the name of what is out of bounds. The age of humanitarianism is an age where the notion of the absolute victim debars polemical games of subjectification of wrong. The episode known as the "new philosophy" is entirely summed up in this prescription: the notion of massacre stops thought in its tracks as unworthy and prohibits politics. The notion of the irredeemable then splits consensual realism: political dispute is impossible for two reasons, because its violence cripples reasonable agreement between parties and because the facetiousness of its polemical embodiments is an insult to the victims of absolute wrong. Politics must then yield before massacre, thought bow out before the unthinkable. 

Only, the doubling of the consensual logic of submission to the sole count of parties with the ethical/humanitarian logic of submission to the unthinkable of genocide starts to look like a double bind. The distribution of roles, it is true, may allow the two logics to be exercised separately, but only unless some provocateur comes along and lashes out at their point of intersection, a point they so obviously point to, all the while pretending not to see it. This point is the possibility of the crime against humanity's being thinkable as the entirety of extermination. This is the point where the negationist provocation strikes, turning the logic of the administrators of the possible and the thinkers ​of the unthinkable back on them, by wielding the twin argument of the impossibility of an exhaustive count of extermination and of its unthinkability as an idea, by asserting the impossibility of presenting the victim of the crime against humanity and of providing a sufficient reason why the executioner would have perpetrated it.  

This is in effect the double thrust of the negationist argument to deny the reality of the extermination of the Jews in the Nazi camps. It plays on the classic sophist paradoxes of the unending count and division ad infinitum. As early as 1950, Paul Rassinier fixed the parameters of negationism's sales pitch in the form of a series of questions whose answers let it appear every time that, even if all the elements of the process were established, their connections could never be entirely proved and still less could it be proved that they were a result of a plan entirely worked out, programmed and immanent in each of its steps. Most certainly, said Rassinier, there were Nazi proclamations advocating the extermination of all Jews. But declarations have never in themselves killed anyone. Most certainly, there were plans for gas chambers. But a plan for a gas chamber and a working gas chamber are two different things-as different as a hundred potential talers and a hundred real talers. Most certainly, there were gas chambers actually installed in a certain number of camps. But a gas chamber is only ever a gasworks that one can use for all sorts of things, and nothing about it proves that it has the specific function of mass extermination. Most certainly, there were, in all the camps, regular selections at the end of which prisoners disappeared and were never seen again. But there are thousands of ways of killing people or simply letting them die, and those who disappeared will never be able to tell us how they disappeared. Most certainly, finally, there were prisoners in the camps who were effectively gassed. But there is nothing to prove that they were the victims of a systematic overall plan and not of simple sadistic torturers. 

We should pause for a moment to look at the two prongs of this line of argument: Rassinier claimed in 1950 that the documents that would establish a logical connection between all these facts, linking them as one unique event, were missing. He also added that it was doubtful ​they would ever be found. Since then, though, documents have been found in sufficient abundance, but the revisionist provocation still has not given in. On the contrary, it has found new followers, a new level of acceptance. The more its arguments have revealed themselves to be inconsistent on the factual level, the more its real force has been shored up. This force is to damage the very system of belief according to which a series of facts is established as a singular event and as an event subsumed in the category of the possible. It is to damage the point where two possibilities must be adjusted to each other: the material possibility of the crime as a total linking of its sequences and its intellectual possibility according to its qualification as absolute crime against humanity. The negationist provocation stands up not because of the proofs it uses to oppose the accumulation of adverse proofs. It stands up because it leads each of the logics confronting each other in it to a critical point where impossibility finds itself established in one or another of its figures: as a missing link in the chain or the impossibility of thinking the link. It then forces these logics into a series of conflicting movements whereby the possible is always caught up by the impossible and verification of the event by the thought of what is unthinkable in it. 

The first aporia is that of the law and of the judge. French public opinion cried out against the judges who let ex-militiaman Paul Touvier off on the charge of the "crime against humanity." But before we get indignant, we should reflect on the peculiar configuration of the relationships between the law, politics, and science implied in such a matter. The juridical notion of the "crime against humanity;' initially annexed to war crimes, was freed from those to allow the pursuit of crimes that legal prescriptions and government amnesties had allowed to go unpunished. The sorry fact is that nothing by rights defines the humanity that is the object of the crime. The crime is then established not because it is recognized that humanity has been attacked in its victim, but because it is recognized that the agent who carried it out was, at the time of its execution, an underling simply obeying the collective planned will of a state "practicing a policy of ideological hegemony." The judge is then required to become a historian in order to establish the ​existence of such a policy, to trace the continuity from the original intention of a state to the action of one of its servants, at the risk of once again ending up in the aporias of division ad infinitum. The original judges of militiaman Touvier did not find the continuous thread of a "policy of ideological hegemony" leading from the birth of the Vichy State to the criminal act of that state's militiaman. The second lot of judges resolved the problem by making Touvier a direct subordinate of the German Nazi State. The accused argued in his defense that he showed humanity by doing less than the planned collective will required him to do. Let us suppose for a moment that an accused were to put forward conversely that he did more, that he acted without orders and without ideological motivation, out of pure personal sadism. Such an accused would be no more than an ordinary monster, escaping the legal framework of the crime against humanity, clearly revealing the impossibility of the judge's putting together the agent and the patient of the crime against humanity. 

​This is the double catch on which the negationist argument plays. The impossibility of establishing the event of the extermination in its totality is supported by the impossibility of thinking the extermination as belonging to the reality of its time. The paradoxes that distinguish formal cause from material cause and efficient cause from final cause would have rapidly run out of steam if they merely reflected the impossibility of the four causes being able to be joined into one single sufficient principle of reason. Beyond the quibbling about the composition of the gases and the means of producing sufficient quantity, the negationist provocation calls on the "reason" of the historian in order to ask if, in their capacity as an educated person, they can find in the modes of rationality (which complex industrial and state systems in our century obey) the necessary and sufficient reason for a great modern state's abandoning itself to the designation and mass extermination of a radical enemy. The historian, who has all the facts at their fingertips ready to respond, then is caught in the trap of the notion that governs historical reasoning: for a fact to be admitted, it must be thinkable; for it to be thinkable, it must belong to what its time makes thinkable for its imputation not to be anachronistic. In a famous book, Lucien Febvre alleges that Rabelais was not a nonbeliever. 3 Not that we have any proof that he was not-that kind of truth is precisely a matter for the judge, not the historian. The truth of the historian is that Rabelais was not a nonbeliever because it was not possible for him to be, because his time did not offer the possibility of this possibility. The thought event consisting in the clear and simple position of not believing was impossible according to this particular truth: the truth of what a period in time makes thinkable, of what it authorizes the existence. To break out of this truth is to commit a mortal sin as far as the science of history goes: the sin of anachronism. 

How does one get from that impossibility to the impossibility that the extermination took place? Not only through the perversity of the provocateur who carries a certain reasoning to the point of absurdity and scandal, but also through the overturning of the metapolitical regime  ​of truth. Lucien Febvre's truth was that of a sociological organicism, of the representation of society as a body governed by the homogeneity of collective attitudes and common beliefs. This solid truth has become a hollow truth. The necessary subscription of all individual thought to the common belief system of one's time has become just the hollowness of a negative ontological argument: what is not possible according to one's time is impossible. What is impossible cannot have been. The formal play of the negative ontological argument thereby chimes with the "reasonable" opinion that a great modern industrial state like Germany had no need to invent the insanity of the extermination of the Jews. The historian who has refuted all the liar's proofs cannot radically refute his lie because he cannot refute the idea of the truth that sustains it. The historian brings to the judge the connection between the facts that the judge had been missing. But, at the same time, the rationality of the historian shifts the rationality of the linking of the facts toward the rationality of their possibility. 4 It is therefore necessary for the law to outlaw the falsification of history. It is necessary, in short, for the law to do the work the historian cannot do, entrusted as they were with the job that the law cannot do. 

This double aporia is, of course, only the mark of the law's and of science's adherence to a certain system of belief, the system of belief peculiar to the consensus system: realism. Realism claims to be that sane attitude of mind that sticks to observable realities. It is in fact something quite different: it is the police logic of order, which asserts, in all circumstances, that it is only doing the only thing possible to do. The consensus system has absorbed the historical and objective necessity of former times, reduced to the congruous portion of the "only thing possible" that the circumstances authorize. The possible is thereby the conceptual exchanger of"reality" and "necessity:' It is also the final mode of "truth" that metapolitics perfected can offer the logic of the police order, the truth of the impossibility of the impossible. Realism is the absorption of all reality and all truth in the category of the only thing possible. In this logic, the possible/truth in all its scholarly authority is required to fill in all the holes in the possible/reality. The more unsteady ​the performances of managerial realism, the more it needs to legitimize itself through monotonius reiteration of the impossibility of the impossible, even if it means protecting this negative self-legitimization behind the thin barrier of the law that determines the point at which the emptiness of the truth must end, the limit that the argument of the impossibility of the impossible must not overstep. Hence the strange phenomenon of a law that outlaws the lie at a time when the law is trying to wipe out all the "taboos" that cut it off from a society itself devoted to infinite enjoyment of every sacrilege. What is at play here is not respect for the victims or holy terror but preservation of the flimsiest of secrets: the simple nullity of the impossibility of the impossible, which is the final truth of metapolitics and the ultimate legitimization of the managers of the only thing possible. More than it robs the negationists of speech, the ban rules out showing the simple emptiness of the argument of the unthinkable. There is absolutely nothing outside what is thinkable in the monstrousness of the Holocaust; nothing that goes beyond the combined capabilities of cruelty and cowardice when these benefit from all the means at the disposal of modern states; nothing these states are not capable of whenever there is a collapse in the forms of nonidentary subjectification of the count of the uncounted, wherever the democratic people is incorporated into the ethnic people.  

​No doubt Hannah Arendt's argument of the "banality of evil" leaves us intellectually dissatisfied. It has been criticized for banalizing the overwhelming hate aimed at a specific victim. But the argument is reversible. The Jewish identity eradicated by the Nazi extermination was no different from that of ordinary anti-Semitic fantasies. So it is indeed in the capacity to put together the means of extermination that the specific difference lies. Moreover, we do not need to be intellectually satisfied here. It is not a matter of explaining genocide. Clearly the problem has been put the wrong way around. Genocide is not a topical object that today impinges on our thinking with the effect of shaking up politics and philosophy. Rather, it is governmental curbing of politics, with its remainder or its humanitarian double, that has turned genocide into a philosophical preoccupation, engaging philosophy, as ethics, to somehow deal with what in this remnant the law and science cannot get atthat identity of the human and the inhuman that the consensus state has delegated to them to worry about. And it is from this standpoint that we should locate the discussion. No "good" explanation of genocide contrasts with the bad. Ways of locating the relationship between thought and the event of genocide either enter or fail to enter into the circle of the unthinkable. 

The complexity of the play of this "unthinkable" is pretty well illustrated by a text of Jean-Francois Lyotard. For Lyotard, any reflection on the Holocaust must deal with the specificity of the victim, the specificity of the plan to exterminate the Jewish people as a people who have witnessed an original debt of humanity toward the Other, thought's native impotence to which Judaism bears witness and which GrecoRoman civilization has always been keen to forget. But two ways of assigning thought to the event are inextricably intertwined in his demonstration. At first the issue seems to be about the type of memory or forgetting required by the event of genocide that has come to pass. It is then a matter of measuring the consequences the notion of genocide may have for Western philosophy's reconsideration of its history, without worrying about "explaining" genocide. But the moment this history is thought of in terms of repression, the name "Jew" becomes the name of the witness of this "forgotten" of which philosophy would like to forget the necessity of forgetting. The Holocaust then finds itself assigned the "philosophical" significance of the desire to get rid of what is repressed, by eliminating the sole witness to this condition of the Other as hostage, which is initially the condition of thought. The "philosophical" identity of the victim, of the witness/hostage, then becomes the reason for the crime. It is the identity of the witness of thought's impotence that the logic of a civilization demands be forgotten. And so we have the double knot of the powerfulness of the crime and the powerlessness of thought: on the one hand, the reality of the event is once again lodged in an infinite gap between the determination of the cause and the verification of the effect, and on the other hand, the demand that it be thought becomes the very place where thought, by confronting the monstrous effects of the denial of its own impotence, locks itself into a new figure of the unthinkable. The knot established between what the event demands of thought and the thought that commanded the event then allows itself to be caught up in the circle of ethical thinking. Ethics is thinking that hyperbolizes the thought content of the crime to restore thought to the memory of its native impotence. But ethics is also thinking that tars all thought and all politics with its own impotence, by making itself the custodian of the thought of a catastrophe from which no ethics, in any case, was able to protect us.

Ethics, then, is the form in which "political philosophy" turns its initial project on its head. The initial project of philosophy was to eliminate politics to achieve its true essence. With Plato, philosophy proposed to achieve itself as the basis of the community, in place of politics, and this achievement of philosophy proved, in the final analysis, to mean elimination of philosophy itself. The social science of the nineteenth century was the modern manner in which the project of the elimination/realiziation of politics was achieved as realization/elimination of philosophy. Ethics is today the final form of this realization/elimination. It is the proposition put to philosophy to eliminate itself, to leave it to the absolute Other to atone for the flaws in the notion of the Same, the crimes of philosophy "realized" as soul of the community. Ethics infinitizes the crime to infinitize the injunction that it has itself addressed by the hostage, the witness, the victim: that philosophy atone for the old pretension of philosophical mastery and the modern illusion of humanity freed from alienation, that it submit to the regime of infinite otherness that distances every subject from itself. Philosophy then becomes the reflection of the mourning that now takes on evil as well as government reduction of dikaion to sumpheron. In the name of ethics, it takes responsibility for evil, for the inhumanity of man that is the dark side of the idyll of consensus. It proposes a cure for the effacement of the political figures of otherness in the infinite otherness of the Other. It thus enlists in a perfectly determined relationship with politics-the one set out by Aristotle in the first book of Politics by separating political "humanity" from the twin figure of the stranger to the city: the subhuman or superhuman. The subhuman or superhuman is the monster or the god; it is the religious couple of the monstrous and the divine. Ethics sets thought up precisely in the face-to-face between the monster and the god/ which is to say that it takes on as its own mourning the mourning of politics. 

Certainly one can only approve philosophy's present concern to be modest, meaning, conscious of the combined power and powerlessness of thought, of its puny power in relation to its own immoderation. It remains to be seen how this modest thinking is to be achieved in practice, the mode in which it claims to exercise its moderation. The present modesty of the state, as we have seen, is first of all modesty in relation to politics, in other words, hyperbolization of the normal practice of the state, which is to live off the elimination of politics. We should make sure that the modesty of philosophy is not also modesty at something else's expense, that it is not the final twist of this realization/elimination of politics that "political philosophy " lives off: the mourning of politics proclaimed as expiation of the faults of"realized" philosophy. There is no mourning of politics to be reflected upon, only its present difficulty and the manner in which this difficulty forces it to adopt a specific modesty and immodesty. Politics today must be immodest in relation to the modesty forced on it by the logics of consensual management of the "only thing possible." It must be modest in relation to the domain where it has been put by the immodest modesty of ethical philosophy: the domain of the immoderate remains of modest politics, meaning, the confrontation with naked humanity and the inhumanity of the human.

Political action finds itself today trapped in a pincer movement between state managerial police and the world police of humanitarianism. On the one hand, the logics of consensus systems efface the traces of political appearance, miscount, and dispute. On the other, they summon politics, driven from the scene, to set itself up from the position of a globalization of the human that is a globalization of the victim, a definition of a sense of the world and of a community of humanity based on the figure of the victim. On the one hand, they reduce the division involved in the count of the uncounted to a breakdown of groups open to presenting their identity; they locate the forms of political subjectivity within places of proximity (home, job, interest) and bonds of identity (sex, religion, race, culture). On the other, they globalize it, they exile it in the wilderness of humanity's sheer belonging to itself. They even recruit the very concern to reject the logics of consensus to imagine the basis of a non-identity-based community as being a humanity of the victim or hostage, of exile or of not belonging. 

But political impropriety is not not belonging. It is belonging twice over: belonging to the world of properties and parts and belonging to the improper community, to that community that egalitarian logic sets up as the part of those who have no part. And the place of its impropriety is not exile. It is not the beyond where the human, in all its nakedness, would confront itself or its other, monster and/or divinity. Politics is not the consensual community of interests that combine. But nor is it the community of some kind of being-between, of an interesse that would impose its originarity on it, the originarity of a being-incommon based on the esse (being) of the inter (between) or the inter proper to the esse.8 It is not the achievement of some more originally human humanity, to be reactivated within the mediocrity of the rule of interests or outside different disastrous embodiments. Politics' second nature is not the community's reappropriation of its original nature; it ought to be thought of effectively as second. The interesse is not the sense of community that the recapturing, in its originarity, of existence, being or "an alternative being," would deliver. The inter of a political interesse is that of an interruption or an interval. The political community is a community of interruptions, fractures, irregular and local, through which egalitarian logic comes and divides the police community from itself. It is a community of worlds in community that are intervals of subjectification: intervals constructed between identities, between spaces and places. Political being-together is a being-between: between identities, between worlds. Much as the "declaration of identity" of the accused, Blanqui, defined it, "proletarian" subjectification affirmed a community of wrong as an interval between a condition and a profession. It was the name given to beings situated between several names, several identities, several statuses: between the condition of noisy tool-wielder and the condition of speaking human being, between the condition of citizen and the condition of noncitizenship, between a definable social figure and the faceless figure of the uncounted. Political intervals are created by dividing a condition from itself. They are created by drawing a line between identities and places defined in a set place in a given world, and identities and places defined in other places and identities and places that have no place there. A political community is not the realization of a common essence or the essence of the common. It is the sharing of what is not given as being in-common: between the visible and the invisible, the near and the far, the present and the absent. This sharing assumes the construction of ties that bind the given to what is not given, the common to the private, what belongs to what does not belong. It is in this construction that common humanity argues for itself, reveals itself, and has an effect.

The simple relationship between humanity and its denial never creates a community of political dispute, as current events never cease to show us. Between exposure of the inhumanity suffered by the displaced or massacred populations of Bosnia, for example, and the feeling of belonging to common humanity, compassion and goodwill are not enough to knit the ties of a political subjectification that would include, in the democratic practice of the Western metropolises, a bond with the victims of Serb aggression or with those men and women resisting it. The simple feeling of a common essence and the wrong done to it does not create politics, not even particular instances of politics that would, for example, place a bond with the raped women of Bosnia under the banner of the women's movement. The construction of wrong as a bond of community with those who do not belong to the same common remains lacking. All the bodies shown and all the living testimonies to the massacres in Bosnia do not create the bond that was once created, at the time of the Algerian War and the anticolonialist movements, by the bodies, completely hidden from view and from any examination, ​of the Algerians thrown in the Seine by the French police in October 1961. Around those bodies, which disappeared twice, a political bond was effectively created, made up not of identification with the victims or even with their cause but of a disidentification in relation to the "French" subject who massacred them and removed them from any count. The denial of humanity was thus constructable within the local, singular universality of a political dispute, as French citizenry's litigious relationship with itself. The feeling of injustice does not go to make up a political bond through a simple identifying that would appropriate the disappropriation of the object of wrong. In addition, there has to be the disappropriation of identity that constitutes an appropriate subject for conducting the dispute. Politics is the art of warped deductions and mixed identities. It is the art of the local and singular construction of cases of universality. Such construction is only possible as long as the singularity of the wrong-the singularity of the local argument and expression of law-is distinguished from the particularization of right attributed to collectivities according to their identity. And it is also only possible as long as its universality is separate from the naked relationship between humanity and inhumanity. 

The reign of globalization is not the reign of the universal. It is the opposite. It is in fact the disappearance of the places appropriate to its rationale. There is a world police and it can sometimes achieve some good. But there is no world politics. The "world" can get bigger. The universal of politics does not get any bigger. There remains the universality of the singular construction of disputes, which has no more to hope for from the newfound essence of a globalization more essentially "worldwide" than simple identification of the universal with the rule of law. We will not claim, as the "restorers" do, that politics has "simply" to find its own principle again to get back its vitality. Politics, in its specificity, is rare. It is always local and occasional. Its actual eclipse is perfectly real and no political science exists that could map its future any more than a political ethics that would make its existence the object solely of will. How some new politics could break the circle of cheerful consensuality and denial of humanity is scarcely foreseeable or decidable right now. Yet there are good reasons for thinking that it will not be able to get around the overblown promises of identity in relation to the consensual logics of the allocation of parts or the hyperbole that summons thought to a more original globalization or to a more radical experience of the inhumanity of the human. 

 Jacques Ranciere - Disagreement (Politics and Philosophy​)

by Alain Badiou

​Learning from the striking novelty of the riots in the Arab countries - especially their endurance, their determination, their unarmed tenacity, their unforeseen independence - we can, I believe, first of all propose a simple definition of an historical riot: it is the result of the transformation of an immediate riot, more nihilistic than political, into a pre-political riot. The case of the Arab countries then teaches us that for this the following are required. 

1 . A transition from limited localization (assemblies' attacks and destructive acts on the very site of the rebels) to the construction of an enduring central site, where the rioters install themselves in an essentially peaceful fashion, asserting that they will stay put until they receive satisfaction. Therewith we also pass from the limited and, in a sense, wasted time of the immediate riot, which is an amorphous, high-risk assault, to the extended time of the historical riot, which instead resembles old sieges of a town, except that it involves laying siege to the state. In reality, everyone knows that destruction cannot last, except in 'major wars': an immediate riot can hold out for between one and five days at the most. In its monumental site, even when surrounded and harassed by the police, or on the main avenues it ritually occupies on a set day of the week, with the crowd constantly growing, an historical riot holds out for weeks or months. 

​2. For that to happen there must be a transition from extension by imitation to qualitative extension. This means that all the components of the people are progressively unified on the site thus constructed: popular and student youth, obviously, but also factory workers, intellectuals of all sorts, whole families, large numbers of women, employees, civil servants, even some police officers and soldiers, and so forth. People of different religious faiths mutually protect the others' prayer times; people of conflicting origin engage in peaceful discussion as if they had always known one another. And a multiplicity of voices, absent or virtually absent from the clamour of an immediate riot, asserts itself; placards describe and demand; banners incite the crowd. Even the reactionary world press will end up referring to the 'Egyptian people' in connection with those occupyingTahrir Square. At this point the threshold of historical riot is crossed: established localization, possible l0ngue duree, intensity of compact presence, multifaceted crowd counting as the whole people. As Trotsky, who was conversant with the subject, might have said: 'The masses have mounted the stage of history.' 

3.  It was also necessary to make a transition from the nihilistic din of riotous attacks to the invention of a single slogan that envelops all the disparate voices: 'Mubarak, clear off!' Thus is created the possibility of a victory, since what is immediately at stake in the riot has been decided. At the antipodes of destructive desires for revenge, the movement can persist in anticipation of a specific material satisfaction: the departure of a man whose name - a short while before taboo, but now publicly condemned to ignominious erasure - is brandished. 

​From everything we have witnessed over the last few months let us remember the following: a riot becomes historical when its localization ceases to be limited, but grounds in the occupied space the promise of a new, long-term temporality; when its composition stops being uniform, but gradually outlines a unified representation in mosaic form of all the people; when, finally, the negative growling of pure rebellion is succeeded by the assertion of a shared demand, whose satisfaction confers an initial meaning on the word 'victory' . 

In this very general framework we must stress from the outset what constitutes the specifically historical rarity of the Tunisian and Egyptian riots in early 2011: ​in addition to the fact that they have taught or reminded us of the laws of the transition from immediate riot to historical riot, they were fairly rapidly victorious. There you had regimes which had long seemed securely in place, which had organized non-stop police surveillance and remorselessly employed torture, which were surrounded by the solicitude of all the imperial 'democratic' powers, large or small, which were constantly oiled by corrupting manna from these powers - and here they were overthrown, or at least those who were their emblem (Ben Ali and Mubarak) were overthrown, by completely unforeseen popular action directed by no established organization. This entails that the riotous dimension of these actions is not in doubt.

Such phenomena are sufficient in themselves for us to speak of a 'rebirth of History' in connection with the riots. How many years back do we have to go to find the overthrow of a centralized, well-armed power by huge crowds with their bare hands? Thirty-two years, when the Shah ofIran, who just like Ben Ali was regarded as a Westerner and modernizer, and just like him was adored, subsidized and armed by our rulers, was overthrown by gigantic street demonstrations against which armed force was unavailing. But then we were precisely at the end of a long historical sequence when riots, wars of national liberation, revolutionary initiatives, guerrillas and youth uprisings had conferred on the idea of History its full meaning, charged as it is with sustaining and validating radical political options. Between 1950 at the earliest and 1980 at the latest, the ideas of revolution and communism were banally selfevident for masses of people throughout the world. However, a number of militants in our countries threw in the towel from the early 1970s onwards, starting down the distressing path of renegacy and rallying to the established order under the moth-eaten banner of 'anti-totalitarianism'. The Cultural Revolution in China, that Paris Commune of the epoch of socialist states,2 foundered on its own anarchic violence - was it perhaps merely a collection of immediate riots? - in 1976, with Mao's death. On their own in the world, a few groups attempted to preserve the means for a new sequence. In this sense the Iranian Revolution was terminal, not inaugural. In its obscure paradoxicality (a revolution led by an ayatollah, a popular rising embedded in a theocratic context), it heralded the end of the clear days of revolutions. In this it coincided with the working-class movement Solidarnosc in Poland. This highly significant popular uprising against a corrupt, moribund socialist state reminded us that action by the popular masses is always possible, even in a situation blasted by foreign occupation and a political regime imposed from without. Solidarnosc also reminded us that such action derives particular strength from being centred on factories and their workers. But aside from its critical force, the Polish movement remained bereft of any new idea about the country's possible destiny, and was incongruously cheered on by a future pope and an utterly reactionary clergy. Moreover, the outcome of the Iranian Revolution - the oxymoron represented by the expression 'Islamic republic' - did not, as indicated by its name, possess any universal vocation. Nor did the sad fate of the Polish state 'liberated' from communism: fanatically capitalist, xenophobic and slavishly pro-American. 

​Obviously, we do not know what the historical riots in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and other Arab counties are going to lead to. We are in the initial post-riot period, and everything is uncertain. But it is clear that, unlike the Polish historical riot or the Iranian Revolution, which closed a sequence in a violent, paradoxical darkening of their ideological context, the revolts in the Arab countries are opening a sequence, by leaving their own context undecided. They are stirring up and altering historical possibilities, to the extent that the meaning which their initial victories will retrospectively assume will in large part determine the meaning of our future. 

While preserving their purely even tal dimension, which is thus subtracted from 'scientific' prediction, I believe that we can inscribe these riotous tendencies as characteristic actions of what I shall call intervallic periods. 

What is an intervallic period? It is what comes cifter a period in which the revolutionary conception of political action has been sufficiently clarified that, notwithstanding the ferocious internal struggles punctuating its development, it is explicitly presented as an alternative to the dominant world, and on this basis has secured massive, disciplined support. In an intervallic period, by contrast, the revolutionary idea of the preceding period, which naturally encountered formidable obstacles - relentless enemies without and a provisional inability to resolve important problems within - is dormant. It has not yet been taken up by a new sequence in its development. An open, shared and universally practicable figure of emancipation is wanting. The historical time is defined, at least for all those unamenable to selling out to domination, by a sort of uncertain interval of the Idea. 

It is during such periods that the reactionaries can say, precisely because the revolutionary road is faint, even illegible, that things have resumed their natural course. Typically, this is what happened in 1815 with the restorationists of the Holy Alliance, for whom feudal social relations and their monarchical synthesis represented the sole order worthy of God, so that republican, plebeian revolution was nothing but a monstrosity encapsulated in the Terror and the diabolical figure of Robespierre. And this, typically, is what people have tried to make us believe for thirty years. We know from reliable sources (say the sanctimonious democrats and new Tartuffes) that the totalitarian aberration, lethal ideocracy, the socialist states, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism and the intellectual and practical movements that discovered the principle of their intense existence ​in them, were nothing but inefficient, criminal impostures, encapsulated in the diabolical figure of Stalin. The peaceful course of things - the only valid thing on offer - is the natural harmony between unbridled capitalism and impotent democracy. Impotent because servile towards the site of real power - Capital - and firmly 'controlled' when it comes to working-class and popular aspirations. 

​For the intervallic period we are still in, running from 1980 to 2011 (and beyond?) - a period in which classical capitalism has been revived following the collapse of the state forms of the communist road issued from the Bolshevik revolution - 'liberal democracy' is what 'liberal monarchy' was for the intervallic period when modern capitalism took off, following the crushing of the final bursts of the republican revolution (1815-50). 

During these intervallic periods, however, discontent, rebellion and the conviction that the world should not be as it is, that capitalo-parliamentarianism is in no wise 'natural' , but utterly sinister -all this exists. At the same time, it cannot fmd its political form, in the first instance because it cannot draw strength from the sharing of an Idea. The force of rebellions, even when they assume an historical significance, remains essentially negative (,let them go', 'Ben Ali out', 'Mubarak clear off'). It does not deploy a slogan in the affirmative element of the Idea. That is why collective mass action can only take the form of a riot, at best directed towards its historical form, which is also called a 'mass movement' . 

Let us recapitulate: the riot is the guardian of the history of emancipation in intervallic periods. 

​Let us return to the period 1S15-50 in France and Europe, for our own interval bears an uncanny resemblance to that Restoration. It followed the Great Revolution and, like our own last thirty years, its vertebral column was a virulent reactionary restoration, which was politically constitutionalist and economically liberal. Yet from the start of the 1830s it was a major period of riots, which were often momentarily or seemingly victorious (the 'Trois Glorieuses' of 1830, workers' riots pretty much everywhere, the 1848 'revolution', and so on). These were precisely the riots, sometimes immediate, sometimes more historical, characteristic of an intervallic period: after 1850 the republican idea, now insufficient for demarcation from bourgeois reaction, would have to be succeeded by the communist Idea. 

That the awakening of History, in the form of a riot and its possible immediate victory, is not generally contemporaneous with the revival of the Idea, which would give the riot a real political future, is a very old observation. This decoupling is fully evident in some of the riots of the sans-culottes, of the bras nus, during the French Revolution itself. These riots could not make do with revolutionary ideology in its strictly republican form. They presupposed an ideological hereafter, which had not taken shape. Consequently, in the absence of any real subjective sharing of an Idea, it was impossible for them to resolve the problem of the ​transition from riot, albeit historical, to the consistency of an organized politics. 

The inevitable lagging of riots, in as much as they are the mass sign of a reopening of History, behind the most contemporary questions of politics, themselves bequeathed by the pre-intervallic moment when there existed a broad vision of the politics of emancipation, is doubtless the most striking empirical proof of the fact that History does not contain within itself a solution to the problems it places on the agenda. However brilliant and memorable the historical riots in the Arab world, they finally come up against universal problems of politics that remained unresolved in the previous period. At the centre of these is to be found the problem of politics par excellence - namely, organization. Only, as Mao puts it, 'to have order in organization you must have it in ideology'. But ideology is only ever the set of abstract consequences of an Idea or (if you prefer) of one or several principles. 

In short, guardians of the history of emancipation in an intervallic period, historical riots point to the urgency of a reformulated ideological proposal, a powerful Idea, a pivotal hypothesis, so that the energy they release and the individuals they engage can give rise, in and beyond the mass movement and the reawakening of History it signals, to a new figure of organization and hence of politics. So that the political day which follows the reawakening of History is likewise a new day. So that tomorrow is genuinely different from today. So that, in sum, the lesson contained in the last verse ​of a famous poem by Brecht, 'In Praise of Dialectics', is wholly valid: 

Today, injustice goes with a certain stride,
The oppressors move in for ten thousand years.
Force sounds certain; it will stay the way it is.
No voice resounds except the voice of the rulers
And on the markets, exploitation says it out loud:
I am only just beginning.
But of the oppressed, many now say: What we want will never happen.
Whoever is still alive must never say 'never' !
Certainty is never certain.
It will not stay the way it is.
When the rulers have already spoken
Then the ruled will start to speak.
Who dares say 'never'?
Who's to blame if oppression remains? We are.
Who can break its thrall? We can.
Whoever has been beaten down must rise to his feet! Whoever is lost must fight back!
Whoever has recognized his condition - how can anyone stop him?
Because the vanquished of today will be tomorrow's victors
And never will become: already today! 

ALAIN BADIOU​/THE REBIRTH OF HISTORY/ Times Of Riots and Uprisings

​In this section, we will introduce some important properties of neural networks. These properties partially explain the popularity neural network gains these days and also motivate the necessity of exploring deeper architecture. To be specific, we will discuss a set of universal approximation properties, in which each property has its condition. Then, we will show that although a shallow neural network is an universal approximator, deeper architecture can significantly reduce the requirement of resources while retaining the representation power. At last, we will also show some interesting properties discovered in the 1990s about backpropagation, which may inspire some related research today. 

The step from perceptrons to basic neural networks is only placing the perceptrons together. By placing the perceptrons side by side, we get a single one-layer neural network and by stacking one one-layer neural network upon the other, we get a multi-layer neural network, which is often known as multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) (Kawaguchi, 2000).
​
One remarkable property of neural networks, widely known as universal approximation property, roughly describes that an MLP can represent any functions. Here we discussed this property in three different aspects: 

​• Boolean Approximation: an MLP of one hidden layer1 can represent any boolean function exactly.

​• Continuous Approximation: an MLP of one hidden layer can approximate any bounded continuous function with arbitrary accuracy.

​• Arbitrary Approximation: an MLP of two hidden layers can approximate any function with arbitrary accuracy.

​We will discuss these three properties in detail in the following paragraphs. To suit different readers’ interest, we will first offer an intuitive explanation of these properties and then offer the proofs. 

​This approximation property is very straightforward. In the previous section we have shown that every linear preceptron can perform either AND or OR. According to De Morgan’s laws, every propositional formula can be converted into an equivalent Conjunctive Normal Form, which is an OR of multiple AND functions. Therefore, we simply rewrite the target Boolean function into an OR of multiple AND operations. Then we design the network in such a way: the input layer performs all AND operations, and the hidden layer is simply an OR operation.

​The formal proof is not very different from this intuitive explanation, we skip it for simplicity.

​Continuing from the linear representation power of perceptron discussed previously, if we want to represent a more complex function, showed in Figure 4 (a), we can use a set of linear perceptrons, each of them describing a halfspace. One of these perceptrons is shown in Figure 4 (b), we will need five of these perceptrons. With these perceptrons, we can bound the target function out, as showed in Figure 4 (c). The numbers showed in Figure 4 (c) represent the number of subspaces described by perceptrons that fall into the corresponding region. As we can see, with an appropriate selection of the threshold (e.g. θ = 5 in Figure 4 (c)), we can bound the target function out. Therefore, we can describe any bounded continuous function with only one hidden layer; even it is a shape as complicated as Figure 4 (d).

​This property was first shown in (Cybenko, 1989) and (Hornik et al., 1989). To be specific, Cybenko (1989) showed that, if we have a function in the following form: 

f(x) is dense in the subspace of where it is in. In other words, for an arbitrary function g(x) in the same subspace as f(x), we have 

where e > 0. In Equation 3, σ denotes the activation function (a squashing function back then), wi denotes the weights for the input layer and ωi denotes the weights for the hidden layer.

​This conclusion was drawn with a proof by contradiction: With Hahn-Banach Theorem and Riesz Representation Theorem, the fact that the closure of f(x) is not all the subspace where f(x) is in contradicts the assumption that σ is an activation (squashing) function.

​Till today, this property has drawn thousands of citations. Unfortunately, many of the later works cite this property inappropriately (Castro et al., 2000) because Equation 3 is not the widely accepted form of a one-hidden-layer neural network because it does not deliver a thresholded/squashed output, but a linear output instead. Ten years later after this property was shown, Castro et al. (2000) concluded this story by showing that when the final output is squashed, this universal approximation property still holds.

Note that, this property was shown with the context that activation functions are squashing functions. By definition, a squashing function σ : R → [0, 1] is a non-decreasing function with the properties limx→∞ σ(x) = 1 and limx→−∞ σ(x) = 0. Many activation functions of recent deep learning research do not fall into this category. 

Before we move on to explain this property, we need first to show a major property regarding combining linear perceptrons into neural networks. Figure 5 shows that as the number of linear perceptrons increases to bound the target function, the area outside the polygon with the sum close to the threshold shrinks. Following this trend, we can use a large number of perceptrons to bound a circle, and this can be achieved even without knowing the threshold because the area close to the threshold shrinks to nothing. What left outside the circle is, in fact, the area that sums to N / 2 , where N is the number of perceptrons used.

​Therefore, a neural network with one hidden layer can represent a circle with arbitrary diameter. Further, we introduce another hidden layer that is used to combine the outputs of many different circles. This newly added hidden layer is only used to perform OR operation. Figure 6 shows an example that when the extra hidden layer is used to merge the circles from the previous layer, the neural network can be used to approximate any function. The target function is not necessarily continuous. However, each circle requires a large number of neurons, consequently, the entire function requires even more.

​This property was showed in (Lapedes and Farber, 1988) and (Cybenko, 1988) respectively. Looking back at this property today, it is not arduous to build the connections between this property to Fourier series approximation, which, in informal words, states that every function curve can be decomposed into the sum of many simpler curves. With this linkage, to show this universal approximation property is to show that any one-hiddenlayer neural network can represent one simple surface, then the second hidden layer sums up these simple surfaces to approximate an arbitrary function. 

As we know, one hidden layer neural network simply performs a thresholded sum operation, therefore, the only step left is to show that the first hidden layer can represent a simple surface. To understand the “simple surface”, with linkage to Fourier transform, one can imagine one cycle of the sinusoid for the one-dimensional case or a “bump” of a plane in the two-dimensional case. 

​Then, with f1(x) + f2(x), we create a simple surface with height 2h from t1 ≤ x ≤ t2. This could be easily generalized to n-dimensional case, where we need 2n sigmoid functions (neurons) for each simple surface. Then for each simple surface that contributes to the final function, one neuron is added onto the second hidden layer. Therefore, despite the number of neurons need, one will never need a third hidden layer to approximate any function. 

​Similarly to how Gibbs phenomenon affects Fourier series approximation, this approximation cannot guarantee an exact representation.

The universal approximation properties showed a great potential of shallow neural networks at the price of exponentially many neurons at these layers. One followed-up question is that how to reduce the number of required neurons while maintaining the representation power. This question motivates people to proceed to deeper neural networks despite that shallow neural networks already have infinite modeling power. Another issue worth attention is that, although neural networks can approximate any functions, it is not trivial to find the set of parameters to explain the data. In the next two sections, we will discuss these two questions respectively. 

The universal approximation properties of shallow neural networks come at a price of exponentially many neurons and therefore are not realistic. The question about how to maintain this expressive power of the network while reducing the number of computation units has been asked for years. Intuitively, Bengio and Delalleau (2011) suggested that it is nature to pursue deeper networks because 1) human neural system is a deep architecture (as we will see examples in Section 5 about human visual cortex.) and 2) humans tend to represent concepts at one level of abstraction as the composition of concepts at lower levels. Nowadays, the solution is to build deeper architectures, which comes from a conclusion that states the representation power of a k layer neural network with polynomial many neurons need to be expressed with exponentially many neurons if a k − 1 layer structured is used. However, theoretically, this conclusion is still being completed. 

​This conclusion could trace back to three decades ago when Yao (1985) showed the limitations of shallow circuits functions. Hastad (1986) later showed this property with parity circuits: “there are functions computable in polynomial size and depth k but requires exponential size when depth is restricted to k − 1”. He showed this property mainly by the application of DeMorgan’s law, which states that any AND or ORs can be rewritten as OR of ANDs and vice versa. Therefore, he simplified a circuit where ANDs and ORs appear one after the other by rewriting one layer of ANDs into ORs and therefore merge this operation to its neighboring layer of ORs. By repeating this procedure, he was able to represent the same function with fewer layers, but more computations.

Moving from circuits to neural networks, Delalleau and Bengio (2011) compared deep and shallow sum-product neural networks. They showed that a function that could be expressed with O(n) neurons on a network of depth k required at least O(2 √ n ) and O((n − 1)k ) neurons on a two-layer neural network. 

Further, Bianchini and Scarselli (2014) extended this study to a general neural network with many major activation functions including tanh and sigmoid. They derived the conclusion with the concept of Betti numbers, and used this number to describe the representation power of neural networks. They showed that for a shallow network, the representation power can only grow polynomially with respect to the number of neurons, but for deep architecture, the representation can grow exponentially with respect to the number of neurons. They also related their conclusion to VC-dimension of neural networks, which is O(p 2 ) for tanh (Bartlett and Maass, 2003) where p is the number of parameters.

Recently, Eldan and Shamir (2015) presented a more thorough proof to show that depth of a neural network is exponentially more valuable than the width of a neural network, for a standard MLP with any popular activation functions. Their conclusion is drawn with only a few weak assumptions that constrain the activation functions to be mildly increasing, measurable, and able to allow shallow neural networks to approximate any univariate Lipschitz function. Finally, we have a well-grounded theory to support the fact that deeper network is preferred over shallow ones. However, in reality, many problems will arise if we keep increasing the layers. Among them, the increased difficulty of learning proper parameters is probably the most prominent one. Immediately in the next section, we will discuss the main drive of searching parameters for a neural network: Backpropagation. 

​Before we proceed, we need to clarify that the name backpropagation, originally, is not referring to an algorithm that is used to learn the parameters of a neural network, instead, it stands for a technique that can help efficiently compute the gradient of parameters when gradient descent algorithm is applied to learn parameters (Hecht-Nielsen, 1989). However, nowadays it is widely recognized as the term to refer gradient descent algorithm with such a technique.

Compared to a standard gradient descent, which updates all the parameters with respect to error, backpropagation first propagates the error term at output layer back to the layer at which parameters need to be updated, then uses standard gradient descent to update parameters with respect to the propagated error. Intuitively, the derivation of backpropagation is about organizing the terms when the gradient is expressed with the chain rule. The derivation is neat but skipped in this paper due to the extensive resources available (Werbos, 1990; Mitchell et al., 1997; LeCun et al., 2015). Instead, we will discuss two interesting and seemingly contradictory properties of backpropagation.

​Gori and Tesi (1992) studied on the problem of local minima in backpropagation. Interestingly, when the society believes that neural networks or deep learning approaches are believed to suffer from local optimal, they proposed an architecture where global optimal is guaranteed. Only a few weak assumptions of the network are needed to reach global optimal, including 

​• Pyramidal Architecture: upper layers have fewer neurons

​• Weight matrices are full row rank

​• The number of input neurons cannot smaller than the classes/patterns of data. 

​However, their approaches may not be relevant anymore as they require the data to be linearly separable, under which condition that many other models can be applied. 

​On the other hand, Brady et al. (1989) studied the situations when backpropagation fails on linearly separable data sets. He showed that there could be situations when the data is linearly separable, but a neural network learned with backpropagation cannot find that boundary. He also showed examples when this situation occurs.

​His illustrative examples only hold when the misclassified data samples are significantly less than correctly classified data samples, in other words, the misclassified data samples might be just outliers. Therefore, this interesting property, when viewed today, is arguably a desirable property of backpropagation as we typically expect a machine learning model to neglect outliers. Therefore, this finding has not attracted many attentions.

However, no matter whether the data is an outlier or not, neural network should be able to overfit training data given sufficient training iterations and a legitimate learning algorithm, especially considering that Brady et al. (1989) showed that an inferior algorithm ​was able to overfit the data. Therefore, this phenomenon should have played a critical role in the research of improving the optimization techniques. Recently, the studying of cost surfaces of neural networks have indicated the existence of saddle points (Choromanska et al., 2015; Dauphin et al., 2014; Pascanu et al., 2014), which may explain the findings of Brady et al back in the late 80s.

Backpropagation enables the optimization of deep neural networks. However, there is still a long way to go before we can optimize it well.

by ​PETER ZHANG

​When the velocity of progress increases beyond a certain point, it becomes indistinguishable from crisis.

​(Barfield 1993: 152)

​(McLuhan 1994: 70–71)

​(Guattari 1996: 264)

​Arguably, print media were the constitutive ground of humanism, whereas digital media are the constitutive ground of posthumanism. If humanism implies a picture of the world with humans at the centre, it is reasonable to associate posthumanism with a picture of the world in which posthumans are no more than nodes actualizing themselves as transient permutations in chance encounters with myriad other nodes inhabiting the same relational field. Print media created a culture of standardization, which is a recipe for competition. Digital media are a great retriever and destabilizer, and, as such, make for diversity.1 Print media correlate with a Darwinistic sense of ecology, which emphasizes competition, natural selection and survival of the fittest.2 Digital media reinforce a Bergsonian sense of ecology, which emphasizes creative evolution, differentiation and the notion of ‘different for’ as well as ‘different from’.3 A Bergsonian environmental ecology is typified by the profusion of symbioses and contrapuntal relations, just as a Bergsonian mental ecology is characterized by the proliferation of productive interfaces and negentropic encounters. Such a mental ecology affords what Flusser (2011) calls ‘a continuous cerebral orgasm’ (128). Print media intensify a sedentary mentality that prizes possessions, the actual and certainty. Digital media revive a nomadic sensibility that cherishes experience, the virtual and adventurousness.

​Humanism is to Newtonian physics as posthumanism is to quantum physics. Humanism is a species of ontologism, whereas posthumanism belongs with an interological orientation. The latter is more attuned to ecological thinking of Bergson style, which foregrounds relationality, reciprocity, co-functioning and co-evolution. In terms of propensity, the culture grounded in digital media points in the direction of interology and ecological thinking. The fact that digital media have been exploited to intensify possessive capitalism is attributable to a cultural lag – ‘[w]e look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backwards into the future’, as Marshall McLuhan puts it (McLuhan and Carson 2003: 386–87). We are yet to precipitate the advent of a full-fledged posthumanism, which is still no more than an imminent event on the horizon and the meaning of which is better left unsettled rather than prematurely reified. It is wrongheaded, though, to assume that digital media will simply awaken us to the relational nature of our existence without also controlling and alienating us.4 There is such a thing called digital betrayal, which is starkly understudied

​Ecological awareness was triggered by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 and intensified by digital media, which enhance network logic and relational orientation, and obsolesce linear logic and entity orientation. Sputnik marked the figure/ground reversal of the technosphere and the biosphere. That is to say, the biosphere has since become a figure against the ground of the technosphere. The latter has become our second nature, pun intended. As the total ground, Spinozan Nature encompasses both spheres.5 The world has since entered into a post-evolutionary era. The implication is that evolution and morphogenesis in Spinozan Nature will be driven by involutions and interfusions between the biological and the technological. For one thing, genetic engineering erases the boundary between the biosphere and the technosphere. It ‘may be defined as the attempt to store acquired information within the biomass, to transform the biomass into a cultural memory’, as Flusser (1988) points out. The human–computer assemblage has functioned as a great accelerator in this process.

From today’s horizon, an adequate discussion about ecology necessarily involves technology, which includes everything from money, the phonetic alphabet, the printing press, information technology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, bionics, robotics, bioengineering, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, to defence technology and much more. The working assumption of media ecology as a style of exploration into the human condition is that a technology is a medium, and a medium is an environment. It was insightful of Guattari (1989) to see the environmental, social and mental ecologies as being in dynamic relation with one another. The picture, however, is incomplete if we do not explicitly recognize and take into consideration a fourth ecology, namely, the ecology of technologies or media, which bears significantly upon the three ecologies examined by Guattari. This is not to suggest that Guattari does not pay sufficient attention to the role played by technology in our sociality and mental ecology.6

​Over the course of human history, there have been a series of break boundaries. The invention of the phonetic alphabet, the printing press, telegraphy and the computer are among the eminent ones. Each historically new technology or medium radically transforms humans’ relation to the natural environment, human sociality and the ecology of mind. In a predominantly oral society, for example, somebody who writes is presumably a posthuman. To offload one’s memory onto a surface of inscription entails not only a different way of using one’s brain but also a different mental posture towards everything else, including nature and other people. The technology of writing is more or less a Trojan Horse. Objectification, detachment, subject–object dichotomy, action without reaction, linear-mindedness and the divorce of vision from other senses are the psychic goods hidden therein.7 Historically, this psychic inclination was intensified by the phonetic alphabet and consummated by the printing press.

The computer makes another good example. Without the computer, the invention of the atomic bomb and the decoding of the human genome map would be unthinkable. To use Paul Virilio’s vocabulary, the information bomb catalyzed the advent of both the atomic bomb and the genetic bomb (Virilio and Lotringer 2002: 143). The natural environment has now been turned into the content of an information environment which resides largely between computers. The socius has more or less been reduced to a mediated metaphor of itself. Thanks to computer networks, mental ecology has become a tangible sensation. Guattari (1996) points out that as a result of new computer technology, ‘intelligence and sensibility have undergone a total mutation […] We are currently witnessing a mutation of subjectivity that perhaps surpasses the invention of writing, or the printing press, in importance’ (268).

​Media ecology, however, has its own deficiencies. For one thing, it concerns itself mainly with the psychic and social consequences of technologies or media, but does not pay as much attention to their environmental impact, even though it has been inspired by the root metaphor of ecology. Furthermore, it takes the human body–mind, with its myriad capacities, potentialities, extendabilities and affectabilities as the etymology of technology. As such, it betrays an anthropocentric, anthropotropic and humanist bias. It is time for us to make a strategic shift of perspective and envision the world in terms of the ecology of machinic assemblages, which encompasses all four dimensions, namely, the environmental, the technological, the social and the mental. For the Spinozist, the four dimensions are really one. Culture is simply nature becoming self-conscious and self-reflexive. This is an at once monistic and pluralistic view of the world, a view that is thoroughly Spinozan and Deleuzean.

A recurrent example in Deleuze’s work is the contrapuntal, or symbiotic relationship between the wasp and the orchid, which forms a miniscule rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 10). Counterpoint is a root metaphor in Jakob von Uexküll’s work, which has deeply informed that of Deleuze. The wasp is part of the orchid’s reproductive system, whereas the orchid is part of the wasp’s digestive system. To use Samuel Butler’s logic, the wasp is the orchid’s way of making more orchids. This logic applies to the relationship between humans and machines. Humans are machines’ way of making more machines. Put otherwise, humans are the sex organs of machines, ‘permitting [them] to reproduce and constantly evolve to higher forms’ (McLuhan and Zingrone 1995: 264). The prospect of love and sex with robots simply adds another wrinkle to the picture, calling to mind Shakespeare’s title, Love’s Labour’s Lost. If the celibate machine interrupts reproduction, the noncelibate machine interrupts it even more. McLuhan takes the reasoning a step further when he points out, ‘Projecting current trends, the love machine would appear a natural development in the near future – not just the current computerized datefinder, but a machine whereby ultimate orgasm is achieved by direct mechanical stimulation of the pleasure circuits of the brain’ (McLuhan and Zingrone 1995: 253).

Over the course of history, humans have had symbiotic relationships, and co-evolved, with everything from birds, dogs, horses, bacteria and crops to medicine, cars, computers, smartphones, primitive, modern and digital megamachines as well as intrusive micromachines.8 Staring at the smartphone while walking, for example, may end up enhancing our peripheral vision. Flusser (1999) suggests that there is a difference in kind between the hand-man, the tool-man, the machine-man and the robot-man (44–45). To use Deleuze’s language, the difference resides in the nature of the machinic assemblages that take up humans as their constituent elements. Humans have participated in the ecosystem as elements of machinic assemblages all along. The hyphen in the phrase, ‘the human-technology assemblage’, is intrinsically interesting. It denotes an interface, a middle, implies co-functioning and interbeing and points in the direction of involution and becoming. As the hallmark of interology, it is synonymous with Deleuze’s notion of ‘AND’. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) point out that the middle is where things pick up speed (25). The human-technology assemblage is a recipe for acceleration, thanks to which humanity is now pausing on the threshold of another break boundary.

The human-technology assemblage has diversified and evolved so much that there is barely any natural enemy to hold it in check anymore. Darwinian natural selection has relaxed and yielded to artificial selection (Virilio and Lotringer 2002: 103–05). Evolution has been rendered obsolete by postevolution.9 Bergsonian differentiation has been largely overtaken and superseded by teratological experimentation (Virilio and Lotringer 2002: 114–16). Put otherwise, creative evolution has given way to the making of monsters through runaway prosthetics and ethically glaucomatous genetic engineering. Peter Sloterdijk responded to the genetic reform of the species’ properties by announcing the end of the era of humanism and the beginning of the ‘human park’ (Virilio and Lotringer 2002: 144). Virilio’s deep anxiety about the creation of superhumans and subhumans, the pluralization of the human species and the rise of super-racism is highly warrantable (Virilio and Lotringer 2002: 107– 09). The anxiety has been haunting humans for a long time and manifests itself in a whole series of sci-fi narratives, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Ray ​Kurzweil’s futuristic writings on singularity have been born of the same anxiety/prospect, regardless of his stance.10

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) indicate that, when involution transpires between two terms, both terms will end up being transfigured (306).11 Involution is a matter of double becoming, so to speak. The man-horse assemblage makes a good example; the hyphen in between may well stand for the stirrup. Double becoming occurs in this assemblage, so does the release of a speed vector. The reasoning applies to humanity AND technology. In Bergsonism, Deleuze (1991) points out, ‘Evolution takes place from the virtual to actuals. Evolution is actualization, actualization is creation’ (98). This is essentially a nutshell statement about élan vital (the virtual) and creative evolution (actualization). The idea is somewhat analogous to the notion of totipotence. Perhaps Zennists would say the essence of the virtual is sunyata. As a life form, humanity is full of versatility and potentiality. That is to say, the life impulse that manifests itself as humanity is open-ended and spontaneously self-recreating. Its encounter with technology, which is an artificial environmental cause, will bear upon the form it assumes. Élan vital is precisely what Zennists call ‘self nature’ and what Taoists call qi, which has the natural capacity to intuit and self-intuit, and which is to be intuitively grasped. The encounter with technology not only gives humanity an opportunity to intuit its self nature but also sets up the conditions for involution to transpire between its self nature and second nature.

A question arises, though: ‘Is the human form a contingent manifestation of élan vital or is it simply a prison house for the latter?’ Deleuze’s vitalistic corpus seems to be ambivalent about this, and rightly so. As such, it lends itself to divergent appropriations. For one thing, the sophistical-minded Deleuze shows an interest in reversing the Platonic hierarchy between model (e.g. God), copy (e.g. humans) and simulacrum (e.g. posthumans), which automatically puts him in the camp of posthumanists.12 An adequate way of thinking about the question hinges on the fundamental difference between Darwinian evolution (the gist of which is the sifting out of difference) and Bergsonian evolution (the essence of which is the proliferation of difference).13 The human body–mind is a singular outcome of this proliferation and in turn furthers and accelerates the proliferation. In this sense, humanity’s pursuit of singularity is more or less a folly, since it is always already singular. All it needs to do is realize its singular nature. To pursue singularity when one is already singular is to look for one’s donkey while riding it, as the Chinese idiom has it. Humanity needs to awaken to the fact that it is in lack of nothing and therefore there is no point seeking anything outside itself. Instead of adding anything to its nature, humanity should eliminate all the blinders that prevent it from seeing its nature, and all the hindrances that keep it out of touch with its nature. Resingularization as a legitimate and necessary ethical project means nothing else.

The discourse of technological singularity is misled and misleading precisely for the above reason. It embodies an interest in augmenting life all the way to a turning point, where the ‘unnatural nuptial’ between technology and the élan vital supposedly trapped within the human form begets an eternally blissful species of life dubbed as posthumanity.14 The assumption is that life made from eggs and sperm is pathetic and inadequate. Absent critical engagement and meaningful re-envisioning, the discourse of technological singularity can easily become hegemonic and block our ethical vision. We are better off without being single-mindedly wedded to such a discourse. ​Paradoxically, singularity is supposed to be radically plural.15 To grasp singularity adequately means to become awakened to the infinite virtualities beyond the reified version of singularity valorized by the high priests of the technoscientific formation.

McLuhan points out, ‘Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind’ (McLuhan and Carson 2003: 67). One thing this quote indicates is that McLuhan holds a nondualistic view of biology and technology. Likewise, ‘Leroi-Gourhan has gone the farthest toward a technological vitalism taking biological evolution in general as the model for technical evolution’, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 407) point out. Post-evolution, however, is not simply the technologization of evolution. Rather, it is better conceived as the evolution of machinic assemblages that take up elements in the biosphere and technosphere as their components. The protagonists in the story are no longer individual species but bio-techno-socio-semiotic assemblages forming their own phyla but communicating transversally with other assemblages. The motive force of this process is no longer simply élan vital (i.e. life impulse, life force, life energy, qi/chi/ki), which intuitively and spontaneously differentiates itself to occupy available niches in nature so life forms end up being different both from and for each other (this idea about élan vital is in perfect accord with Zhuangzi’s notion of natural diversity). Rather, the process is increasingly driven by the combined follysophy of humans and their cerebral extensions, including super powerful computers, big data, mathematical models, algorithms, bots, artificial intelligence, and the like. The tragedy is that Spinozan Nature has reached the point where robot bees have to be built to pollinate crops. Bergson (1911) sees intuition as superior to the intellect, which ‘is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life’ (165, original emphasis). This understanding is in perfect accord with the Zen sensibility. Our ecological crisis is more or less attributable to the dominance of the intellect, which is a passive term as compared with the more active ones like reason and intuition (Burke 1945: 148). Humanity has long passed its age of innocence, when the idea of ecology never stirred in its consciousness. We have gained abundance at the expense of plenitude. The top imperative of our age is neither production nor consumption, neither calculation nor computation, but the reenchantment of the world. We have much to learn from Vico’s poetic wisdom, and the so-called ‘primitive thinking’, among other things.

Accelerationism has been a buzzword in the air for a while. If the intention is to stick it to capitalism, then accelerationism is more or less a species of sociopolitical jujitsu. Or, it can be heard as an apocalyptic discourse, with ‘apocalypse’ to be understood as a revelation, as Virilio (2009a) suggests (43). It bears mentioning that Deleuze rarely puts one-sided emphasis on acceleration alone. Instead, it is almost always coupled with deceleration: ‘speeds and slownesses’, which together give rhythm to life, and mark the (optimal and pessimal) thresholds of perception.16 For Virilio (2009a), speed betokens the aging of the world (41). As a conservative thinker, he is interested in conserving the youthfulness of the world. Surprisingly or not, the sentiment is shared by Flusser, the predominantly sanguine futurologist and visionary of the telematic society. Consider this quote:

​(Flusser 2013: 127, original emphasis)

​The point is that, with our total situation in mind, both Virilio and Flusser lean toward deceleration. To use Virilio’s words, ‘the purpose of ethics is to slow down the rate at which things happen’ (2006: 27).

As a species, we are faced with an Aristotelian problematic like never before: what is the phronētic thing to do? How shall we become? The phrase ‘life on the threshold’ precisely captures a Kritical moment, which is necessarily a pluralistic moment with inexhaustible virtualities.17 If we read singularity simply as a turning point, as Deleuze (1990) teaches us to, then this moment which Spinozan Nature now confronts is a singular moment in and of itself (52). A turn may well be a return (a chiasmus), or a right-angle divergence. Awakening to the Kritical nature of the moment humanity is facing entails an attitude of prudence, which means selective affirmation in light of the total ground. Insofar as we choose to live by a vitalistic philosophy, the affirmation of élan vital will be the only affirmation worth affirming (Nietzsche’s double affirmation). There is only one true religion which is the religion of life.

Élan vital craves only its own intensities. It naturally desires singularity, if we understand singularity as the turning point or threshold of intensity which marks a qualitative difference. In a sense, in envisioning ‘a continuous cerebral orgasm’, Flusser (2011) is already talking about singularity (128).18 For what is an orgasm if not the crossing of a threshold of intensity. In this sense, singularity connotes plenitude, bliss, intensity taken to a bursting point, the suspension of time and the sensation of freedom. In the same vein, the flow experience theorized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2008) is an instance of singularity. The chapter in A Thousand Plateaus on ‘becoming intense’ (both words are essential) embodies a will to singularity. So does the entire book, as the title implies. For Zennists, singularity means satori. In the eyes of neurophysiologists, singularity means a specific mental catastrophe, which is to say, an improbable event that transforms the brain for good. Nietzsche reached singularity in his raptures (Marsden 2002). Michelangelo savoured singularity in his ecstasy. The Buddha achieved singularity the moment he was enlightened. Confucius achieved singularity when he attained the Tao at the age of 70.19 A jazz band may reach singularity in a good jam session. Postwar history reached singularity in 1968, which unleashed far more becomings than 1989. The movie, Across the Universe, is commendable precisely because it is about singularization, as opposed to conformity.

Virilio teaches us to imagine life in terms of intensity rather than longevity. As he puts it, ‘What does it mean to live a day intensely? I would say it’s to put your finger on relativity. A day can last a thousand years, and a thousand years can last a day’ (Virilio and Lotringer 2008: 150).20 To use the words of the epileptic Dostoevski, ‘for that moment you’d give your whole life’ (Virilio 2009b: 43).21 No creature intuits this ethos better than the tick, which, once awakened by a mammal, displays an astounding intensity of life. It spends almost its entire life craving that singular spurt of intensity. The immediacy of death after that does not make its life any less complete. In the immense cosmos, it knows no other time except for its own duration, and it cannot ​care less about the time it spends on waiting, which can last a good number of years. Per this understanding, life extension, especially the kind pursued by technological singularitarians, is pointless. As Flusser (2013) puts it, ‘openness to death is the real dwelling of man’ (74).

​It is true that Virilio associates intensity with speed, as the following quote indicates: ‘Being alive means to be lively, quick. Being lively means beingspeed, being-quickness’ (Virilio and Lotringer 2008: 150). Yet he cautions against the ‘fatal coupling’ between ‘metabolic speed, the speed of the living, and technological speed, the speed of death which already exists in cars, telephones, the media, missiles’ (Virilio and Lotringer 2008: 150).22 The more we shift toward technological speed for thrills, kicks, highs and intensities, the less life’s native liveliness is called upon. This understanding is in line with McLuhan’s point that technology has a narcotic or numbing effect (McLuhan 1994: 41–47).23 When film images are shown at 60 frames per second (as opposed to the standard 24 frames per second), viewers are no longer able to process them. They will be influenced at a subliminal level. Speed conditions us, so to speak. When the speed of communication approaches that of light, humans are turned into paralytic, phototropic, hallucinated idiots. Mediated immediacy and instantaneity induce reflex but preempt reflection, thus setting up the conditions for a communism of affects while liquidating the democracy of reflection. The affective turn in the humanities is but a symptom of and delayed response to the acceleration and proliferation of communication, especially communication by means of technical images.

Psychedelics add a peculiar wrinkle to the picture since ‘[a]ll drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of speed’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 282). Watts (2007) implies that psychedelics tend to speed up one’s consciousness, relative to which time seems to slow down: ‘[o]ne’s normally compulsive concern for the future decreases, and one becomes aware of the enormous importance and interest of what is happening at the moment’ (83). In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley reports how mescaline makes him singularly perceptive and intensely aware of inward and outward reality. Yet he reminds us, ‘What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin [sic], the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time’ (Huxley 1990: 33). In the same vein, Chogyam Trungpa, the late Tibetan Buddhist guru, ‘did not change in the slightest’ during his LSD trips (Hayward 2008: 68).24 He did not need mind alteration to see reality. After all, it is not about psychedelics, or even the state of consciousness induced by them.25 Deleuze (1990) observes, ‘To the extent that the pure event is each time imprisoned forever in its actualization, counter-actualization liberates it, always for other times’ (161). Singularity is to be liberated from its psychedelics-induced actualizations.

​If psychedelics afford microperceptions, the effect can be achieved by other means as well. Zen meditation, for example, has the potential to lower one’s threshold of perception significantly. Certain Zen practitioners are said to be able to hear their own blood flow, heartbeat, and ‘bowel movement’ (in a literal, non-euphemistic sense) while covering their ears. William Burroughs has it right: ‘Imagine that everything that can be attained by chemical means is accessible by other paths’ (cited by Deleuze 1990: 161). That is precisely the attitude of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and the attitude promoted in this article: ‘To succeed in getting drunk, but on pure water (Henry Miller). To succeed in getting high, but by abstention [sic]’ (286). ‘Changing the means’ is essential (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 286). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) point out further: ‘Drugs are too unwieldy to grasp the imperceptible and ​becomings-imperceptible; drug users believed that drugs would grant them the plane, when in fact the plane must distill its own drugs, remaining master of speeds and proximities’ (286). To paraphrase the point, the plane of immanence must develop its internal alchemy.

​Guattari (1996) associates singularity with alterity and nonconformity to standard models (131).26 His thinking is in line with Bergson’s notion of élan vital as movement of differentiation and Deleuze’s point about difference and repetition – only the adequately different repeats itself, only the vitalistically virtuous returns. In this sense, singularity is intrinsically at one with the political philosophy and ethics of vitalism, which resides in the affirmation of the active force of life and the elimination of hindrances. It is never simply a technological matter. As a matter of fact, technology more often than not is deployed to block the paths of singularization, to condition people, to keep them from exceeding the norm. It takes an infant, a minorized psyche, or an awakened mind–body with a rigorous understanding of the innocence of becoming to achieve singularity.27 Singularity is more spiritual and ethicopolitical than technological. In an age when marijuana is legalized in one place after another, the qualitative difference between singularities and petty stoners confronts us ever more urgently and publicly. There is a world of difference between marijuana and Mahayana. Singularity through smoking some substance is literally a pipedream.

For Deleuze (1997), singularity connotes becoming, its grammatical marker is the indefinite article and ‘indefinite’ implies ‘non-actualized’. In minor literature, language itself undergoes transmutation or minorization and becomes syntactically singular and inimitable. In Pure Immanence, Deleuze (2001) associates singularity with the event and the virtual, as distinguished from the actual (29–31). The actual belongs with the Buddhist notion of ‘it is’, whereas the virtual belongs with the notion of ‘it is not’. In this negation resides the highest affirmation, which is the affirmation of the virtual and openness. The capacity to intuit the virtual in the merely actualized is a mark of awakening. The whole notion of immanence means nothing else. Deleuze (2001) calls this mode of consciousness ‘transcendental empiricism’, which has a striking resemblance with the Zen sensibility (25). If we take virtual to be more or less synonymous with spiritual, singularity is then at one with the spiritual. The word ‘spiritual’ literally has qi (at once spiritus/breath and élan vital/life energy) in it. This train of thought is circular, and necessarily so. And the expression, ‘spiritual singularity’, is usefully redundant or tautological – useful as an antidote to the discourse of technological singularity. Spiritual singularity is to technological singularity as taiji is to boxing. The former in each pair maximizes the virtual, which is the very essence of élan vital, whereas the latter in each pair exploits and exhausts it.28

Spiritual singularity takes preparation to reach and time to ripen. The rate at which technology evolves, however, tends to surpass the rate at which our spirit matures. The lag is being amplified as we speak. If humanity’s future rests on a mass singularization or spiritual awakening, the total ground we are facing today seems to necessitate the precipitation of such awakening. People need mediators, if not daemons, to singularize. Digital media by nature are unfit for serving this function. One needs to unravel their false promises. With their maximalist bias, digital media have made a vast amount of spiritual knowledge available to the greatest number of people ever. Apparently more and more people have access to the resources for spiritualization and singularization. But one needs to realize that digital media also amount toa new hindrance. There is a crucial distinction between spiritual knowledge and spiritual life. The latter is a matter of ritual, and enactive cognition, rather than mere information. Digital media motivate a new stripe of conformism precisely at the level of ritual rather than content, which has become fabulously diverse. The irony is that preparing and posting images of their spiritual lives have become an incorrigible ritual among many spiritual practitioners. The consequent busyness is nothing unfamiliar. Spiritual praxis as a deeply contenting ritual culminating in nothing but itself has been coopted as the content of the ritual of image making and sharing. Life as aesthetics yields to life for aesthetics, thus losing its sacred aura. The former is nondualistic, whereas the latter dualistic. Digital megamachines like Facebook, for example, deterritorialize spiritual practitioners from their ritual spacetime and reterritorialize them onto cyberspacetime, which is vampiric and sacrilegious in nature. Facebook is a vanity fair that feeds off people’s mimetic desire. A karmascape is pure and simple. It is a spatiotemporal black hole that drains people’s life energy and hinders them from potential spiritual awakening. 

1. However, as the lingua franca of the digital age, the digital code also reduces everything into ones and zeroes. 
2. It bears pointing out that there is a subtle distinction between Darwin’s own thought and Darwinism. In a sense, Darwin’s thought is to Darwinism as Plato’s thought is to Platonism. The latter in each pair tends to be more reified or caricaturized than the former. For one thing, Darwin himself puts as much emphasis on symbiosis as on competition and natural selection. 
3. Hershock (2012) offers a nutshell version of this Bergsonian vision Although it is possible to see species within an ecosystem as in competition with one another over scarce environmental resources, it is more accurately reflective of evolutionary dynamics to see species as distinctively freeing up environmental resources and placing them into effective circulation. Evolutionary niches are not constrained spaces in which species take refuge, but rather resource frontiers opened through creatively expanding the scope of relationalities activated and maintained within a given environment. (50) He points out further, ‘Change-from does not simply imply change-to, but also change-for’ (75). The irony is that although digital media cast a favourable light upon and afford the valorization of this Bergsonian vision, the digital age is also a time when the intuition or creative intelligence native to élan vital is overshadowed by computational or algorithmic intelligence, which derives from the intellect. Notably, intuition is a species of intelligence that precedes the evolutionary emergence of the brain and therefore does not rely on the brain. It is superior to the intellect. Our age is dominated by computational intelligence. We idolize what is inferior, so to speak. Therein lies our folly, if not perversity. 
4. A tentative tetrad on digital media is in order here. Digital media (1) Enhance speed of calculation and computation; retrieval, remediation; simulation; structural, systems-analytic, cybernetic thinking; and the experience of time as the eternal present. (2) Obsolesce historical consciousness; the experience of time as a straight line; processoriented, ‘progressive’ ideologies; (3) Retrieve magical, mythical consciousness, and nomadism; (4) Pushed to an extreme, reverse into hallucination, somnambulism; global surveillance, creepiness; and the becoming-functionary of humans. This understanding is Flusserian for the most part. If McLuhan’s root metaphor for the electric milieu is Poe’s maelstrom, then Flusser’s root metaphor for the digital milieu is the hurricane, the whirlwind (Flusser 2003: 44–45). 
5. This understanding is shared by Deleuze (1995), who points out, ‘Guattari and I want to get back to our joint work and produce a sort of philosophy of Nature, now that any distinction between nature and artifice is becoming blurred’ (155). 
6. For instance, Guattari (1996) points out, ‘The physical and mental activity of man finds itself in increasing adjacence to technical, computer and communication devices’ (269). This quote points to the zone of proximity between humanity and technology and their co-functioning. 
7. McLuhan and Logan (1977) attribute such psychic impacts to the phonetic alphabet only, calling them the alphabet effect (373–83). This view has been criticized as being ethnocentric. 
8. Such symbioses are not unproblematic. Mumford (1967) draws our attention to megamachines taking up capable but resistant human bodies as their constituent elements (188–94), whereas Virilio (Virilio and Lotringer 2002) calls attention to micromachines intruding into and augmenting the human body (100–01). In the former case, there is machinic enslavement, whereas in the latter, endo-colonization. McLuhan is more concerned with humans becoming the servomechanisms of their technological extensions. As he puts it, Whenever we watch a TV screen or read a book, we are absorbing these extensions of ourselves into our individual system and experiencing an automatic ‘closure’ or displacement of perception; we can’t escape this perpetual embrace of our daily technology unless we escape the technology itself and flee to a hermit’s cave. By consistently embracing all these technologies, we inevitably relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. Thus, in order to make use of them at all, we must serve them as we do gods. The Eskimo is a servomechanism of his kayak, the cowboy of his horse, the businessman of his clock, the cyberneticist – and soon the entire world – of his computer. (McLuhan and Zingrone 1995: 264) Becoming-machine is a problematic brought up long, long ago by Zhuangzi: does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. (Zhuangzi re-cited by McLuhan 1994: 63) The challenge, as Zhuangzi teaches us, is to thing things rather than being thinged by things. A passage in The Demon’s Sermon on the Martial Arts addresses and points beyond this problematic and is worth contemplating: Haven’t you seen a man riding on a horse? The man who rides well runs the horse to the east and west, but his mind is tranquil and his unhurried body is unmoving and at peace. Seen from the side, the horse and the man seem to be firmly fastened together. And if he simply restrains the horse’s errors, he will be doing nothing contrary to the horse’s nature. Thus, though the man is mounted on the saddle and is master of the horse, the horse is not troubled by this, and moves with its own understanding. The horse forgets the man, the man forgets the horse, and their spirits are one and do not go in different ways. You could say that there is no man in the saddle, and no horse under it. (cited by Wilson 2012: 90) This mode of horse riding is characterized by wuwei, effortlessness and nonduality, and calls to mind the image of the centaur. Riding becomes nonriding and turns into a spiritual practice. Put differently, the man-horse assemblage has crossed a threshold and reached singularity. Similarly, Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1953) offers an enlightened narrative of the author’s apprenticeship in the art of archery and the spiritualization of archery and archer alike. Eventually, duality is overcome, the subject–object dichotomy is dissolved, shooting is transformed into nonshooting, and the archer-bow-arrow assemblage (which is what we really mean when we speak of the bowman) crosses a threshold to become singularity. The title of the Zen classic, The Gateless Pass, precisely implies that to achieve satori is to cross a seemingly impassable threshold and reach singularity. What comes off as a supreme spiritual achievement in the eyes of Zennists, McLuhan sees as nothing more than robotism, which is an anachronistic view of things in this context, to say the least. 
9. For one thing, ‘[b] iological engineering is making possible unlimited remodeling of life forms’, as Guattari (1996) points out (103). 
10. Kurzweil (2005) foretells that something like a cosmic awakening will happen in what he calls Epoch Six (21). But the kind of awakening he envisions is more informational than spiritual. It also smacks of technological determinism. Lanier (2013) associates Kurzweil’s vision with Alan Turing’s trope of futurism, according to which ‘[p]eople might turn into information rather than be replaced by it. This is why Ray Kurzweil can await being uploaded into a virtual heaven’ (127). Speaking of Bay Area culture, Lanier (2013) points out, ‘the new attitude is that technology is selfdetermined, that it is a giant supernatural creature growing on its own, soon to overtake people. The new cliché is that today’s “disruptions” will deterministically lead to tomorrow’s “Singularity”’ (217). Lanier (2013) suggests that what Kurzweil offers is more or less a new iteration of technological nirvana but the kind of extreme artificial longevity will be selective and inaccessible to the demos (327, 367).  
11. Here is the original wording: deterritorialization is always double, because it implies the coexistence of a major variable and a minor variable in simultaneous becoming (the two terms of a becoming do not exchange places, there is no identification between them, they are instead drawn into an asymmetrical block in which both change to the same extent, and which constitutes their zone of proximity). 
12. Taking this quote, ‘God made man in his image and resemblance. Through sin, however, man lost the resemblance while maintaining the image. We have become simulacra. We have forsaken moral existence in order to enter into aesthetic existence’ (Deleuze 1990: 257). Posthumans constitute a further departure from the model and fit the category of ‘aesthetic existence’ perfectly well. The sophistic impulse is a negentropic impulse. It is culturally productive, rather than merely conservative. 
13. A line by Deleuze (1983) supports this idea: ‘Nietzsche criticises Darwin for interpreting evolution and chance within evolution in an entirely reactive way’ (42).
14. This understanding is supported by Lanier’s point that with the advent of the idea of singularity, a rapture, messiah or other supernatural discontinuity in the future has become part of the discussion of the natural future (Lanier 2013: 125).
15. It is notable that Kurzweil and Lanier both have a singular (as against plural) understanding of singularity. They both spell it as ‘the Singularity’, which is telling. Here is a line by Deleuze (2001) that offers a clue as to the pluralistic nature of singularity: ‘One is always the index of a multiplicity: an event, a singularity, a life […]’ (30). 
16. Speeds and slownesses are a recurrent motif in Deleuze’s corpus. They both go beyond the thresholds of perception. As Deleuze puts it, they have in common the imperceptible, like the vast slowness of massive Japanese wrestlers, and all of a sudden, a decisive gesture so swift that we didn’t see it. Speed has no privilege over slowness: both fray the nerves, or rather, train them and give them mastery. (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 93) In a sense, the capacity to perceive speeds and slownesses is a mark of singularity.
17. The spelling ‘Kritical’ invokes the original Greek sense of Krisis, which implies that the body or body politic is suspended between life and death, and that some urgent intervention is called for. A Krisis is a singular temporal juncture that is at once a risky moment and an opportunity.
18. Here is how Flusser (2011) puts it, What I have tried to put into words here is both a feverishly involved and a passionate state of mind, something like a synthesis of what absorbs people in artistic and scientific creativity, in political activism, in revolutionary proclamations, in chess and roulette, in the stock market, and in libidinous dreams. It is  state of mind that does not intensify and then fall away, as in an orgasm, but that maintains itself at its orgiastic climax without interruption through a lifetime. For this state of mind is not physical but cerebral. Images are steering the telematic society in this direction: toward a continuous cerebral orgasm. (128) What Flusser envisions has a striking resemblance with what Deleuze and Guattari mean by ‘a thousand plateaus’. The main difference is that for Deleuze and Guattari, this state of mind has nothing to do with technical images. Artists (per Huxley) and Zen masters remain in this state of mind all the time (the true Zen master has the capacity for unconditional happiness, which is to say, regardless of external circumstances). Victor Turner would call it a liminal state. Liminality and interality are synonymous terms. This passionate state of mind is arguably the summum bonum (i.e. highest good) of interology.
19. This understanding is based on a line from The Analects: ‘At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right’ (Waley 1938: 88). 
20. The same sentiment is crystallized by a Japanese poem: The morning glory blooms for an hour, Yet it differs not at heart From the giant pine which lives a thousand year. (Cited by Watts 2003: 19)
21. Epileptics tend to experience a moment of singular intensity prior to the onset of epilepsy (cf. Virilio 2009b: 19–50). 
22. Cars, for example, deterritorialize us from the earth but reterritorialize us onto themselves. As a result, we are put into a state of paradoxical sedentariness. 
23. Readers of McLuhan tend to overemphasize technology as extension and enhancement and underemphasize technology as anaesthetization. A line by Flusser (2011), if repurposed, captures the latter quite well: ‘as soon as the body is anaesthetized [by some technological extension], consciousness becomes quiet and numb: an-aesthetic’ (145). McLuhan gives a lucid explanation in ‘Playboy Interview’: all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a selfprotective numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what’s happening to it. It’s a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. I call this peculiar form of selfhypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. (McLuhan and Zingrone 1995: 237) A line in The Gutenberg Galaxy puts this idea in a nutshell: ‘Every technology contrived and outered by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization’ (McLuhan 1962: 153).
24. For Chogyam Trungpa, LSD was ‘interesting, not as a way to genuine spiritual experience, but as a way to encounter “supersamsara,” in other words to exaggerate our normal minds so much that we could see their insanity as vividly as in a mirror’ (Hayward 2008: 67).
25. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) put it, To reach the point where ‘to get high or not to get high’ is no longer the question, but rather whether drugs have sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing through the holes in the world and following the lines of flight at the very place where means other than drugs become necessary. (186)
26. As such, singularity belongs to the simulacrum. Like Deleuze, Guattari displays an interest in reversing the Platonic hierarchy among model, copy and simulacrum.
27. As Guattari (1996) puts it, ‘infants, precisely they are the ones who are able to assume difference and singularity’ (131). This immediately calls to mind a line by Laozi: ‘Rely exclusively on your vital force, and become perfectly soft: can you play the infant?’ (Lynn 1999: 65). The implication is that the infant is closest to élan vital. Notably, ‘vital force’ is a translation for the Chinese concept qi. All is to suggest that there are strong resonances between Taoism and Bergsonism. A line by Deleuze (2001) belongs here, too: ‘Small children […] are infused with an immanent life that is pure power and even bliss’ (30)
28. It bears mentioning that the virtual as Deleuze means it bristles with virtue (i.e. puissance or power as potential), whereas the virtual as IT people mean it (as in ‘virtual reality’) saps virtue (i.e. what a body–mind can do). The former is ethically loaded, whereas the latter is ethically neutral at best, if not draining.

​ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

​The author thanks Kenneth Surin, Robert Ivie, Peter Hershock, Joff Bradley, Blake Seidenshaw and Peter Berkman for offering helpful input as the article was being composed. He also thanks Gregg Lambert for sharing a Whiteheadian understanding of life: life craves only its own intensities; life desires.

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​- Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire (1987), Dialogues, New York: Columbia University Press.
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                         ——— (1999), The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, London: Reaktion Books.
                  ——— (2003), The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.  
                     ——— (2011), Into the Universe of Technical Images, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
                       ——— (2013), Post-history, Minneapolis: Univocal. Guattari, Félix (1989), ‘The three ecologies’, New Formations, 8, pp. 131–47.
                          ——— (1996), The Guattari Reader, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. 
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- Kurzweil, Ray (2005), The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, New York: Viking.  
- Lanier, Jaron (2013), Who Owns the Future, New York: Simon & Schuster.
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              ——— (1994), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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- Mumford, Lewis (1967), The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.
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                    ——— (2009a), Grey Ecology, New York: Atropos Press.
               ——— (2009b), The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
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                  ——— (2008), Pure War, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
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                ——— (2007), Does It Matter? Novato, California: New World Library.
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​SUGGESTED CITATION

- Zhang, P. (2016), ‘The four ecologies, post-evolution and singularity’, Explorations in Media Ecology, 15: 3+4, pp. 335–346, doi: 10.1386/ eme.15.3-4.335_1

​CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Peter Zhang is Associate Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan.

Contact: School of Communications, 273 Lake Superior Hall, Grand Valley
State University, Allendale, MI 49401.
E-mail: [email protected]

Peter Zhang has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

​by Alain Badiou

​As I write these lines, we are being treated to speeches by Cameron, the British prime minister who is already implicated in several murky affairs, about the riots in impoverished parts of London. Here too the reversion· to the anti-popular idiom of the nineteenth century is striking. Those involved are nothing but gangs, hooligans, thieves, brigands - in short, 'dangerous classes' contrasted, as in the days of Queen Victoria, with a morbid cult of property, defence of material possessions and good citizens (the ones who never rebel against anything). All this is coupled with the announcement of a ruthless, sustained repression, which is blind on principle. On this point we can trust Cameron. Catching up with the quasi-concentration camp use of prison in the United States, and having perfected a ferocious set oflaws under the 'socialist' Blair, the United Kingdom has many more prisoners as a percentage of its population than France, which does not pull any punches when it comes to locking up youth. 

​To sow terror, TV obligingly runs footage of police squads, hulking brutes kitted out and armed to the teeth, who delightedly smash in doors with battering rams (when it comes to the property of the poor, they don't give a damn), and rush into the flats to remove with spectacular brutality a young man who has doubtless been denounced anonymously, or caught on one of the countless cameras with which Her Majesty's Government has filled the public space, transforming it into a gigantic stage of which the police are the constant voyeurs. At the same time, the courts are handing down staggering sentences pell-mell on bottle-throwers; petty thieves of tins of shoe polish; people who have abused the forces oflaw and order; burners of dustbins; loudmouths; those with a penknife on them; those who insulted the government; people who were running; those who, emulating their neighbours, smashed windows; those who uttered obscenities; people who hung around with their hands in their pockets; those who were doing nothing - highly suspicious; and even people who were not there, and whom justice must ask where they were. As Cameron nobly put it, going one step further than his police, 'It is criminality pure and simple and it has to be confronted and defeated.' For Cameron, who envisages 3,000 people being brought before the courts, and for his police, who have stated that they are hunting 30,000 suspects, tens of thousands of criminals have, bizarrely, suddenly been seen to erupt onto the streets ... 

As ever, as in France, what gets forgotten in all this is the real crime, as well as the actual victim: the person (often persons) killed by the police. With utter uniformity, riots by the popular youth in the 'suburbs' (the banlieues - a word which, like faubourgs in the past, refers to the huge working-class and poor areas of our spruce towns and cities, the dark continent of our megalopolises) are provoked by the actions of the police. The spark that 'lights a prairie fire' is always a state murder. Just as uniformly, the government and its police not only categorically refuse to accept the slightest responsibility for the whole affair, but use the riot as a pretext for reinforcing the arsenal of the police and criminal justice system. As a result of this view of things, the banlieues are spaces where one finds juxtaposed a contemptuous lack of interest in such hopeless zones on the part of the public authorities and heavy, violent, repressive incursions. All this on the model of 'native quarters' in colonial cities, black ghettos in the American belle epoque, or Palestinian reservations on the West Bank. Servile intellectuals rush to the aid of the repression, regarding the more or less swarthy youth as an 'Islamist' rabble hostile to 'our values'. What are these celebrated values? We all know. They are called Property, Occident, Laicism. This is the dreadful POL, the dominant ideology in all countries that make themselves out to be civilized.

In the name of POL, 'public opinion' will demand 'zero tolerance' of our fellow citizens in the so-called banlieues. Note, by the way, that while there is 'zero tolerance' for the young black who steals a screwdriver, ​there is infinite tolerance for the crimes of bankers and government embezzlers which affect the lives of millions. Sophisticated intellectuals, who shed tears at the sight of the millionaire director of the IMF in handcuffs, consider the government 'lax' in the inner cities and think one cannot see enough Arabs and blacks in chains. 
In the name of this same POL, when dealing with those weak countries in Africa where we 'have interests', the same public opinion will demand that we exercise our 'right to intervene'. Courageous champions of the values that really count, our governments will flatten under bombs a petty tyrant they once adored, but who has become recalcitrant or superfluous. Obviously, there will be no question of touching those, more powerful and better advised, who possess key resources, are armed to the teeth and, sensing the wind change, have introduced opportune, appropriate 'reforms'. This means: have waved some declarations in favour of POL in the face of sainted Western opinion.

​For our values, for POL, always read POLice. ​

In these processes, where the state puts on its most hideous expression, a no less detestable consensus is forged over a particularly reactive conception that can be summarized thus: the destruction or theft of a few goods in the frenzy of a riot is infinitely more culpable than the police assassination of a young man -the assassination that caused the riot. The government and press hastily assess the damage. And here is the vicious idea spread by all this: the death of the young man - a 'black ​hooligan', no doubt, or an Arab 'known to the police' - is nothing compared with all these additional costs. Let us grieve not for the death, but for the insurance companies. Against the gangs and thieves, let us stand guard, shoulder to shoulder with the police, in front of our property, which is coveted by a rabble foreign to our values, hostile to POL, because it is impoverished (no Property), derived from Africa (not the Occident), and Islamist (anti -Laicist). 

​Here, by contrast, it will be asserted that the life of a young man is priceless - all the more so in that he is one of the countless people abandoned by our society. To believe that the intolerable crime is to burn a few cars and rob some shops, whereas to kill a young man is trivial, is typically in keeping with what Marx regarded as the principal alienation of capitalism: the primacy of things over existence,1 of commodities over life and machines over workers, which he encapsulated in the formula: 'Le mort saisit Ie vif'. Of this lethal dimension of capitalism the Camerons and Sarkozys are the zealous cops. 

I know full well that the kind of riot triggered by state murders -for example, in 2005 in Paris or 2011 ​in London -is violent, anarchic and ultimately without enduring truth. I know full well that it destroys and plunders without a concept, just as the Beautiful, according to Kant, 'pleases without a concept' . I shall come back to this point with all the more insistence in that it is precisely my problem: if riots are to signal a reawakening of History, they must indeed accord with an Idea. 

​For now, however, a philosopher will be permitted to lend an ear to the signal rather than rushing to judgement. 

​Today, there are riots throughout the world, from workers' and peasants' riots in China to youth riots in England, from the astonishing tenacity of crowds under gunfire in Syria to the massive protests in Iran, from Palestinians demanding the unity of Fatah and Hamas to Chicano sans-papiers in the United States. There are all sorts of riots, often very violent, but sometimes barely hinted at, mobilizing either specific social groups or whole populations. They are prompted by governments' and/or employers' decisions, electoral controversies, the activities of the police or an occupying army, even by simple episodes in people's existence. They immediately take a militant turn or develop in the shadow of a more official protest. They are blindly progressive or blindly reactionary (not every riot is up for grabs ... ). What they all have in common is that they stir up masses of people on the theme that things as they are must be regarded as unacceptable. 

We can distinguish between three types of riot, ​which I shall respectively call immediate riot, latent riot and historical riot. In this chapter I shall deal with the first type. The others will be the subject of the next two chapters.

​An immediate riot is unrest among a section of the population, nearly always in the wake of a violent episode of state coercion. Even the famous Tunisian riot, which triggered the series of 'Arab revolutions' in early 2011, was initially an immediate riot (in response to the suicide of a street vendor prevented from selling and struck by a policewoman). 

​Some of the defining characteristics of such a riot possess a general significance, and consequently an immediate riot is often the initial form of an historical riot. 

First of all, the spearhead of an immediate riot, particularly the inevitable clashes with the forces of law and order, is youth. Some commentators have regarded the role of 'youth' in the riots in the Arab world as a sociological novelty, and have linked it to the use of Facebook or other vacuities of alleged technical innovation in the postmodern age. But who has ever seen a riot whose front ranks were made up of the elderly? As was evident in China in 1966-67 and France in 1968, but also in 1848 and at the time of the Fronde, during the Taiping Rebellion - and, ultimately, always and everywhere - popular and student youth form the hard core of riots. Their capacity for assembly, mobility and linguistic and tactical invention, like their inadequacies in discipline, strategic ​tenacity and moderation when required, are constants of mass action. Moreover, drums, fires, inflammatory leaflets, running through the back streets, circulating words, ringing bells - for centuries these have served their purpose in people suddenly assembling somewhere, just as sheep-like electronics does today. In the first instance, a riot is a tumultuous assembly of the young, virtually always in response to a misdemeanour, actual or alleged, by a despotic state. (But riots show us that in a sense the state is always despotic; that is why communism organizes its withering away.)

Next, an immediate riot is located in the territory of those who take part in it. The issue of the localization of riots is, as we shall see, quite fundamental. When a riot is restricted to the site where its participants live (most often the crumbling districts of cities), it stops there, in its immediate form. It is only when it constructs - most often in the city centre - a new site, where it endures and is extended, that it changes into an historical riot. An immediate riot, stagnating in its own social space, is not a powerful subjective trajectory. It rages on itself; it destroys what it is used to. It lets fly at the meagre symbols of the 'wealthy' existence it is in contact with every day - particularly cars, shops and banks. If it can, it destroys the sparse symbols of the state, thus demolishing its very weak presence: virtually abandoned police stations, unglamorous schools, community centres experienced as paternalistic plasters on the running sores of neglect. All this fuels the hostility of POL-style public opinion ​towards the rioters: 'Look! They're destroying the few things they've got!' Such opinion does not want to know that, when something is one of the few 'benefits' granted you, it becomes the symbol not of its particular function, but of the general scarcity, and that the riot detests it for that reason. Hence the blind destruction and pillaging of the very place the rioters live in, which is a universal characteristic of immediate riots. For our part, we shall say that all this achieves a weak localization, an inability of the riot to displace itself.

That is not to say that an immediate riot stops at one particular site. On the contrary, we observe a phenomenon dubbed contagion: an immediate riot spreads not by displacement, but by imitation. And this imitation occurs in sites that are similar, even largely identical, to the initial focal point. Youth on a housing estate in Saint-Ouen are going to do the same thing as those on an estate in Aulnay-sous-Bois. The popular districts of London are all going to be affected by the collective fever. Everyone remains in situ, but there they do what they have heard it said that others are doing. This process is indeed an extension of the riot, but once again we shall say that it is a limited extension, characteristic of an immediate riot or the immediate stage of a riot. It is only in discovering the means for an extension which cannot be reduced to an imitation that a riot assumes an historical dimension. BaSically, it is when an immediate riot extends to sectors of the population which, by virtue of their status, social composition, sex or age, are remote from its constitutive core that a genuine ​historical dimension is on the agenda. The entry onto the stage of ordinary women is invariably the first sign of such a generalized extension. An immediate riot, if one stops at its initial dynamic, can only combine weak localizations (at the site of the rioters) with limited extensions (through imitation). 

​Finally, an immediate riot is always indistinct when it comes to the subjective type it summons and creates. Because this subjectivity is composed solely of rebellion, and dominated by negation and destruction, it does not make it possible dearly to distinguish between what pertains to a partially universalizable intention and what remains confined to a rage with no purpose other than the satisfaction of being able to crystallize and find hateful objects to destroy or consume. As we know, obscurely mixed up with a mass of young people outraged by the death of their 'brother' are countless degrees of collusion with organized crime, which exists wherever poverty, social rejection, the absence of any public concern, and above all the lack of a rooted political organization that is the vector of powerful slogans induce a dislocation of popular unity and a temptation to engage in dubious expedients to circulate money where there is none. Organized crime, big-time or small-time, is a significant form of corruption of popular subjectivity by the dominant ideology of profit. The presence of organized crime in an immediate riot, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the circumstances, is inevitable. It should certainly be recognized by the rioters as a form of complicity ​with the dominant order: after all, capitalism is merely the social power of an 'honourable' organized crime. But in as much as it is immediate, a riot cannot really purify itself. Hence, in among the destruction of hated symbols, the profitable pillaging, the sheer pleasure in smashing what exists, the joyous whiff of gunpowder and guerrilla warfare against the cops, one cannot really see clearly. The subject of immediate riots is always impure. That is why they are neither political nor even pre-political. In the best of cases - and this is already a good deal - they make do with paving the way for an historical riot; in the worst, they merely indicate that the existing society, which is always a state organization of Capital, does not possess the means altogether to prevent the advent of an historical sign of rebellion in the desolate spaces for which it is responsible. ​

ALAIN BADIOU /  THE REBIRTH OF HISTORY (Times Of Riots and Uprisings)

​Many philosophers argue that humans are a distinctive kind of creature, that capacities distinguishing humans from nonhumans give us a moral dignity denied to nonhumans. This status supposedly merits special protections (not currently extended to nonhumans) and special claims on the resources to cultivate those capacities reserved for humans alone.

​To motivate this claim, I need to distinguish three related philosophical positions: Humanism,
​Transhumanism and Posthumanism and explain how they are related.

Most humanists claim that the capacities – such as rationality or sociability - that distinguishus from cats, dogs and chimps also single us out for special treatment . 
For Kant, this capacity to choose the reasons for our actions  –  to form a will, as he puts it, - isthe only thing that is good in an unqualified way (Kant 1948, 62).
Even thinkers who allow that the human capacity for self-shaping is just one good among a plurality of equivalent but competing goods claim that “autonomy” confers a dignity on humans that should be protected by laws and cultivated by the providing the means to exercise it. Thus most humanists hold some conception of what makes a distinctively human life avaluable one and have developed precepts and methods for protecting and developing these valuable attributes. At the risk of over simplifying, the generic humanist techniques for achieving this are politics and education. 
For example, in Politics 1 Aristotle claimed that virtues like justice, courage or generosity need a political organization to provide the leisure, training, opportunities and resources to develop and exercise these valuable traits: ​

​Clearly, this is a very schematic statement and needs some unpacking. 
For example, it does not explain what “ceasing to be human” could involve. If Clark and the transhumanists are right, then ceasing to be human is not just a matter of altering one’s hardware or wetware. A human cyborg modified to live in hostile environments like the depths of the sea or space might look strange to us but might use a natural language whose morphology and syntax is learnable unmodified humans, value her autonomy and have characteristic human social emotions such as exclusive feelings towards other family members or amour-propre. Thus many of the traits with which we pick out humans from nonhumans could well generalize beyond morphology.

​If we assume Speculative Posthumanism it seems we can adopt either of two policies towards the posthuman prospect.

​However, Vinge’s scenario gives us reasons for thinking that the differences between humans and posthumans could be so great as to render accounting impossible or problematic in the cases that matter. The differences stressed in Vinge’s essay are cognitive: posthumans might be so much smarter than humans that we could not understand their thoughts or anticipate the transformative effects of posthuman technology. There might be other very radical differences. Posthumans might have experiences so different from ours that we cannoten visage living a posthuman life would be like, let alone whether it would be worthwhile or worthless one. Finally, the structure of posthuman minds might be very different from our kind of subjectivity.

​Moral personhood presumably has threshold cognitive and affective preconditions such as the capacity to evaluate actions, beliefs and desires (practical rationality) and a capacity for the emotions, and affiliations informing these evaluations. However, human-style practical reasonmight not be accessible to a being with nonsubjective phenomenology. Such an entity couldbe incapable of experiencing itself as a bounded individual with a life that might go better orworse for it.

I’ve suggested that the alienness of posthumans presents us with an ethical difficulty because they might be so much different to humans that we cannot understand them sufficiently tofigure out whether their lives are worth living. However, it can be objected that I may be overstating the difficulty here. Yes, posthumans might be have weirdly and seemingly incomprehensibly. But there are plenty of things that aredifficult to understand that we can understand if we just put ourselves in the right situation. Some areas of science are difficult to understand in non-ideal circumstances – e.g. if we don’t know the math - but become much easier when we have the math. Moreover, the very idea of a form of life that is humanly-incomprehensible in principle seems questionable. It implies that there is a “glassy essence” of human whose laws determine that certain things are incomprehensible to us. To be sure, there are some things we know that we cannot know –  e.g. whether an arbitrary computer program will halt or go one forever. But what we cannot comprehend we cannot know that we do not know – since then we would at least need to comprehend it. Thus the claim that posthumans could be so radically weird that they would be beyond our ken inprinciple could never be demonstrated. If transhumanists are right, then plenty of things that may be incomprehensible for us that might not be if we upgraded ourselves with the right cognitive enhancements or extensions orsimply made careful observations and interpretations. So characterizing the posthuman as justintrinsically weird is suspect. Maybe nothing is that weird! The dated non-existence of posthumans is a bigger impediment to knowledge than their hypothetical strangeness. There are, after all, no posthumans yet. The emergence of posthumans would be unprecedented. Thus there are no empirical regularities to appeal to when predicting how they will emerge or what they will be like.
Vinge’s singularity scenario is a conceivable recipe for posthumans but we don’t yet know if it’s a feasible one. Even if a singularity is possible the nature of what comes out the other side of it is unpredictable. That’s what makes it singular.  
It follows that if there are ideal or best situations for coming to understand posthumans, they are going to be ones in which posthumans exist. To date there are no posthumans. 
Now, the principle of accounting stated:
(Accounting)Humans and transhumans have a duty to evaluate the outcomes of their technical activities of these differences with a view to maximizing the chances of good  posthuman outcomes or minimizing the chances of bad ones.

(EOAm) If we are obliged to understand something, we are obliged to bring about thenecessary (only) conditions for understanding it (Moderate Epistemic obligation).
​

The diachronic emergence assumption seems to follow from the claim that the emergence of posthumans– whatever or whoever they turn out to be – would be akin in many ways to the emergence of an entirely new biological species like Homo sapiens. There are cases of species such the “naked mole rat” (a mammal that lives in hives organized around a single fertile female) whose nature was predicted with some accuracy before their discovery. However, the eusociality of mole rats– while unusual among mammals – is common among social insects like ants, termites and wasps. Posthumans generated by an unprecedented tech genetic process might exhibit properties that are not exhibited by any historical kind that humans have encountered up to now. Thus the claim that posthumans would be diachronically emergent seems supportable.​

​If this is right, then we have a very strong interest in producing or becoming posthumans. This is not to deny that we could have countervailing interests. For example, given the radical uncertainty surrounding a posthuman emergence or “disconnection” from human life and society (See Roden 2012) some argue that we should observe the precautionary principle when considering how to develop the NBIC suite. However, allowing for countervailing reasons, the argument for an interest in becoming posthuman remains compelling for transhumanists who claim that we have an overriding interest in cultivating human capacities with NBIC technologies. Thus the transhumanist commitment to humanism must be is ethically unsustainable.

Dark posthumanism by David Roden

​Roden's presentation at the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium, Dublin, 12-13 May, 2016

Billions of years in the future, the Time Traveller stands before a dark ocean, beneath a bloated red sun. The beach is dappled with lichen and ice. The huge crabs and insects which menaced him on his visit millions of years in its past are gone. Apart from the lapping of red-peaked waves on the distant shore, everything is utterly still. Nonetheless, a churning weakness and fear deters him from leaving the saddle of the time machine.

He thinks he sees something black flop awkwardly over a nearby sandbar; but when he looks again, all is still. That must be a rock, he tells himself.

Studying the unknown constellations, he feels an enveloping chill. Then twilight segues to black. The old sun is being eclipsed by the moon or some other massive body.

The wind moans out of utter darkness and cold. A deep nausea hammers his belly. He is on the edge of nothing.

​The object passes and an an arc of blood opens the sky. By this light he sees what moves in the water. Wells writes: “It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it. It seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about.”.

During the Traveller’s acquaintance with it, the creature gives no indication of purpose. Its “flopping” might be due to the action of the waves. It might lack a nervous system, let alone a mind replete with thoughts, beliefs or desires. In contrast, we learn much of the Traveller’s state. He feels horror at the awful blackness of the eclipse; pain breathing in the cold; “a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight”.

It is as if Wells’ text edges around what cannot be carried from that shore. There is no heroic saga of discovery, cosmic exploration or “first contact”; no extended reflection on time and human finitude. There is just a traumatic, pain-filled encounter.

When viewed against the backdrop of “Weird” literature, however, the event on the shoreline seems more consequential. As China Miéville has argued, the Weird is defined by its preoccupation with the radically alien. This is in stark opposition to the Gothic specter, that always signifies a representation in play between an excluded past and an uncertain future (Miéville 2012).

Monsters like H P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu do not put representation in play. They shred it. As Mieville writes:

The monstrous reality is indicated by grotesque avatars and transformations whose causes erode political order and sanity itself. In Jeff VanderMeer’s recent Southern Reach trilogy a fractious bureaucracy in a looking-glass USA is charged with managing a coastline that has been lost to some unearthly power. This proves inimical to human minds and bodies even as it transforms “Area X” into a lush Edenic wilderness. As we might expect, bureaucratic abstraction falters in its uncertain borders. The Reach’s attempts to define, test and explore Area X are comically inappropriate – from herding terrified rabbits across the mysterious barrier that encloses it, to instituting “round-the-clock” surveillance of an immortal plant specimen from an unsanctioned expedition (VanderMeer 2014a, b, c). All that remains to VanderMeer’s damaged protagonists is a misanthropic acceptance of something always too distant and strange to be understood, too near not to leave in them the deepest scars and ecstasies.

This misanthropy is implied in Wells’ earlier shoreline encounter. An unstory from a far future that is perhaps not alive or unalive. A moment of suspense and inconsequence that can reveal nothing because it inscribes the limits of stories.

Yet this alien is not the “gaseous invertebrate” of negative theology – but an immanent other, or as Miéville puts it, “a bad numinous, manifesting often at a much closer scale, right up tentacular in your face, and casually apocalyptic” (Miéville 2012, 381). It is this combination of inaccessibility and intimacy, I will argue, that makes the Weird apt for thinking about the temporally complex politics of posthuman becoming.[1]

In Posthuman Life I argue for a position I call “Speculative posthumanism” (SP). SP claims, baldly, that there could be posthumans: that is, powerful nonhuman agents arising through some human-instigated technological process.

I’ve argued that the best way to conceptualize the posthuman here is in terms of agential independence – or disconnection. Roughly, an agent is posthuman if it can act outside of the “Wide Human” – the system of institutions, cultures, and techniques which reciprocally depend on us biological (“narrow”) humans (Roden 2012; Roden 2014: 109-113).

Now, as Ray Brassier usefully remind us in the context of the realism debate, mind-independence does not entail unintelligibility (“concept-independence”). This applies also to the agential independence specified by the Disconnection Thesis (Brassier 2011, 58). However, I think there are reasons to allow that posthumans could be effectively uninterpretable. That is, among the class of possible posthumans – we have reason to believe that there might be radical aliens.

But here we seem to confront an aporia. For in entertaining the possibility of uninterpretable agents we claim a concept of agency that could not be applied to certain of its instances, even in principle.

This can be stated as a three-way paradox.

Each of these statements is incompatible with the conjunction of the other two; each seems independently plausible.

Something has to give here. We might start with proposition 3.

3) implies a local correlationism for agency. That is to say: the only agents are those amenable to “our” practices of interpretative understanding. 3) denies that there could be evidence-transcendent agency such procedures might never uncover.

Have we good reason to drop 3?

I think we do. 3) entails that the set of agents would correspond to those beings who are interpretable in principle by some appropriate “we” – humans, persons, etc. But in-principle interpretability is ill defined unless we know who is doing the interpreting.

That is, we would need to comprehend the set of interpreting subjects relevantly similar to humans by specifying minimal conditions for interpreterhood. This would require some kind of a priori insight presumably, since we’re interested in the space of possible interpreters and not just actual ones.

How might we achieve this? Well, we might seek guidance from a phenomenology of interpreting subjectivity to specify its invariants (Roden 2014: Ch 3).[2] However, it is very doubtful that any phenomenological method can even tell us what its putative subject matter (“phenomenology”) is. I’ve argued that much of our phenomenology is “dark”; having dark phenomenology yields minimal insight into its nature or possibilities (Roden 2013; Roden 2014 Ch4).

If transcendental phenomenology and allied post-Kantian projects (see Roden 2017) fail to specify the necessary conditions for be an interpreter or an agent, we should embrace an Anthropologically Unbounded Posthumanism which rejects a priori constraints on the space of posthuman possibility. For example, Unbounded Posthumanism gives no warrant for claiming that a serious agent must be a “subject of discourse” able to measure its performances against shared norms.[3]

Thus the future we are making could exceed current models of mutual intelligibility, or democratic decision making (Roden 2014 Ch8). Unbounded posthumanism recognizes no a priori limit on posthuman possibility. Thus posthumans could be weird. Cthulhu-weird. Area X weird. Unbounded Posthumanism is Dark Posthumanism – it circumscribes an epistemic void into which we are being pulled by planetary scale technologies over which we have little long run control (Roden 2014: ch7).

To put some bones on this: it is conceivable that there might be agents far more capable of altering their physical structure than current humans. I call an agent “hyperplastic” if it can make arbitrarily fine changes to its structure without compromising its agency or its capacity for hyperplasticity (Roden 2014, 101-2; Roden Unpublished).

A modest anti-reductionist materialism of the kind embraced by Davidson and fellow pragmatists in the left-Sellarsian camp implies that such agents would be uninterpretable using an intentional idiom because intentional discourse could have no predictive utility for agents who must predict the effects of arbitrarily fine-grained self-interventions upon future activity. However, the stricture on auto-interpretation would equally apply to heterointerpretation. Hyperplastic agents would fall outside the scope of linguistic interpretative practices. So, allowing this speculative posit, anti-reductionism ironically implies the dispensability of folk thinking about thought rather than its ineliminability.

Hyperplastics (H-Pats) would be unreadable in linguistic terms or intentional terms, but this is not to say that they would be wholly illegible. It’s just that we lack future proof information about the appropriate level of interpretation for such beings – which is consonant with the claim that there is no class of interpretables or agents as such.

Encountering H-Pats might induce the mental or physical derangements that Lovecraft and VanderMeer detail lovingly. To read them might have to become more radically plastic ourselves – more like the amorphous, disgusting Shoggoths of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Shoggothic hermeneutics is currently beyond us – for want of such flexible or protean interlocutors. But the idea of an encounter that shakes and desolates us, transforming us in ways that may be incommunicable to outsiders, is not. It is the unnarratable that the Weird tells in broken analogies,[4] agonies and elisions. This is why the Weird Aesthetic is more serviceable as a model for our relationship to the speculative posthuman than any totalizing conception of agency or interpretation.

In confronting the posthuman future, then, we are more like Wells’ broken time traveller than a voyager through the space of reasons. Our understanding of the posthuman – including the interpretation of what even counts as Disconnection – must be interpreted aesthetically; operating without criteria or pre-specified systems of evaluation. It begins, instead, with xeno-affects, xeno-aesthetics, and a subject lost for words on a “forgotten coast” (See VanderMeer 2014c).

[1] One of the things that binds the otherwise fissiparous speculative realist movement is an appreciation of Weird writers like Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. For in marking the transcendence of the monstrous, the Weird evokes the “great outdoors” that subsists beyond any human experience of the world. Realists of a more rationalist bent, however, can object that the Weird provides a hyperbolic model of the independence of reality from our representations of it.

 https://enemyindustry.wordpress.com

The historical riots of recent times -those that indicate the possibility of a new situation in the history of politics, without for now being in a position to realize that possibility -are obviously the multifaceted uprisings in a number of Arab countries. I shall base myself on these uprisings in the next chapter to define precisely what an historical riot is: a riot which is neither (below it) an immediate riot, nor (beyond it) the large-scale advent of a new politics.

What is to be said about our 'Western' countries? 
We shall call 'Western' the countries which proudly call themselves by that name: countries historically situated at the leading edge of capitalist development, with a vigorous imperial and bellicose tradition behind them, still equipped with an economic and financial strike force that allows them to purchase corrupt governments the world over, and with a military strike force which enables them to intimidate all potential enemies of their domination. Let us add that these countries are extremely satisfied with their state system, which they call 'democracy' - a system that is in fact particularly attuned to the peaceful coexistence of the various fractions of the governing oligarchy, which, in agreement on the basics (market economy, parliamentary regime, vigilant hostility towards anything dissimilar from them and whose generic name is 'communism'), are nevertheless separated by various nuances. 

The Western countries have experienced immediate riots, and without a doubt will experience them on a much vaster scale than anything we have seen for ten years. They have not experienced an historical riot for around forty years. My view is that an era has opened, if not of their possibility, then at least of the possibility of their possibility. By this I mean an evental rupture creating the possibility of the unforeseen historical unfolding of some immediate riot. 
What leads me to advance this ( optimistic) hypothesis is what I call the existence in our countries, which are affluent albeit in crisis, and content although funerary, of a subjectivity of latent riot.
​
​I shall start with an example. 
Among the countless anti-popular crimes of the Sarkozy government, which in all likelihood is the most reactionary government France has had since Petain, there is, as everyone knows, a pension reform clamorously demanded by 'the markets' of which Sarkozy is the compliant commensal. Basically, it involves working much longer for much less. The 'counter' to ​this measure, taken in hand by the trade unions, was at once massive and very weak. People marched in their millions, but the union leaderships Visibly started out defeated. Their real objective was limited to the need to control the masses and avoid 'things getting out of control', so as to patiently await better times with the election of a 'left' apparatchik as president.

However, it has been noted that inside this movement, as defeated from within by its leaders as the French army was in 1940 by its own generals, who far preferred Hitler to the Communists, several symptoms implicitly tended towards riot. First of all, the repeated chant of 'Sarkozy resign', which is typical of historical riots (we shall see why), frequently went up despite the 'apolitica1' instructions of the ruling bureaucracies. Secondly, people registered the obvious dissent in the processions of several big union battalions, which were much more aggressive than their bosses, and which wanted more now. We should doubtless include in this the surprising decision of the petrol refinery workers' union, which for several days mounted a blockade of petrol deliveries - an action of a very real brutality with potentially large-scale consequences (the police soon intervened). Without a doubt these phenomena primed something that always occurs at a time of riot: a division in apparatuses, whatever they may be, under the subjective pressure of the slogans through which collective action tends to unify the people. Finally, and especially, the invention of new forms of action of a virtually riotous character, even though it was not extended, prepared the future. In particular, we might cite the practice of 'proxy' strikes or 'free' strikes: a specific factory or establishment goes on strike even though its wage-earners declare themselves to be at work. This involves an external popular detachment, mainly composed of people not obliged to work (retired people, students, holidaymakers, unemployed people, and so on), occupying the site and blocking production, with the agreement of the relevant wage-earners obviously. Thus the strike situation is absolutely real even though the wage-earners are not legally on strike and can get paid. This procedure makes it possible to extend a strike with an occupation - an extension which especially today, when life is very difficult for the working poor and unions are much too weak to support strike funds, remains impossible beyond a few days in most instances. 

This kind of action is quasi-riotous for several reasons. Firstly, it scorns the habitual reactionary opinion according to which the affairs of a site are those of its wage-earners and them alone. Secondly, it unwaveringly challenges the no less reactionary judgement that it is immoral to go on strike while declaring oneself not to be on strike. Thirdly, it absolutely links 'strike' and 'occupation', habitually separated by at least one rung in the ladder of the violence of action. It thereby creates a shared localization, and not merely a limited localization, as would be the case if only the wage-earners participated in the occupation. Fourthly, it has to be prepared for the inevitable arrival of the police, which puts on the agenda the classic debate in riots between peaceful abandonment of the site or staying put and resisting. Finally, and above all, it effects in action a link between several social strata that are generally separated, thus creating on the spot a new subjective type beyond the fragmentation reproduced by both the state and its union appendages. The clearest evidence for this is that sizeable actions of this kind for example, the occupation of certain airports or the stoppage of sewage plants - have been prepared and decided by committees with various names, but whose major feature is that they mix students, youth, wageearners (whether unionized or not), retired people, intellectuals, and so on. Thus a significant dimension of the most significant riots was generated locally, and with a view to immediate actions: the creation of a new type of popular unity, heedless of state stratifications and resulting from seemingly disparate subjective trajectories. 

In favour of the riotous latency of these actions, it can also be argued that the principal media, servants of 'democratic wisdom' - in other words, POL ideology - have studiously avoided regarding them as the sole real novelty in the situation, the sole future promise of a movement as loose as it is vast, and have referred to them as little as possible. 

We can say that, over and above its penumbra of defeatism, the 'mobilization' (tiresome word) against the Sarkozy law on pensions contained a latent riotous subjectivity. A single spark, a spectacular incident, a violent escalation, even an ill-understood trade union slogan, would have been enough for the so-called 'mobilization' to take a much more resolute turn, to escape locally and forcefully from the capitaloparliamentarian consensus and construct, at least for a time, some impregnable popular sites. 
​
​Thus, even in our anxiety-ridden countries, tempted by the most extreme reaction, the latency of riot attests to the fact that circumstances can extract from our apathy an unforeseeable life beyond our lethal 'democracies' 

ALAIN BADIOU /THE REBIRTH OF HISTORY/Times  Of Riots and Uprising

I am often criticized, including in the 'camp' of potential political friends, for not taking account of the characteristics of contemporary capitalism, for not offering a 'Marxist analysis' of it. Consequently, for me communism is an ethereal idea; at the end of the day, I am allegedly an idealist without any anchorage in reality. Moreover, I am inattentive to the astonishing mutations of capitalism, mutations that authorize us to speak (with an eager expression) of a 'postmodern capitalism' .
 
For example, during an international conference on the idea of communism, Antonio Negri - I was (and remain) very pleased he participated - publicly took me as an example of those who claim to be communists without even being Marxists. In short, I replied that that was better than claiming to be Marxist without even being communist. Since it is commonly held that Marxism consists in assigning a determinant role to the economy and the social contradictions which derive from it, who isn't 'Marxist' today? The foremost 'Marxists' are our masters, who tremble and gather by night as soon as the stock market wobbles or the growth rate dips. Put the word ' communism' in front of them, on the other hand, and they will jump up and take you for a criminal. 

Here, without concerning myself with opponents and rivals, I would like to say that I too am a Marxist - naively, completely and so naturally that there is no need to reiterate it. Does a contemporary mathematician worry about demonstrating fidelity to Euclid or Euler? Genuine Marxism, which is identified with rational political struggle for an egalitarian organization of society, doubtless began around 1 848 with Marx and Engels. But it made progress thereafter, with Lenin, Mao and a few others. I was brought up on these historical and theoretical teachings. I believe I am well aware of the problems that have been resolved, and which it is pointless to start reinvestigating; and of the problems that remain outstanding, and which require of us radical rectification and strenuous invention. Any living knowledge is made up of problems, which have been or must be constructed or reconstructed, not of repetitive descriptions. Marxism is no exception to this. It is neither a branch of economics (theory of the relations of production), nor a branch of sociology (objective description of 'social reality'), nor a philosophy (a dialectical conceptualization of contradictions). It is, let us reiterate, the organized knowledge of the political means required to undo existing society and finally realize an egalitarian, rational figure of collective organization for which the name is 'communism'. 
​
However, I would like to add that when it comes to the 'objective ' data about contemporary capitalism I do not think I am badly informed. Globalization? The relocation of numerous sites of industrial production to countries with low labour costs and an authoritarian political regime? The transition during the 1980s in our old developed countries from an auto-centred economy, with a continual increase in workers' wages and social redistribution organized by the state and trade unions, to a liberal economy integrated into global trade and therefore export-orientated, specializing, privatizing profits, socializing risks and assuming a planetary increase in inequalities? A very rapid concentration of capital under the leadership of finance capital? The utilization of novel means whereby the velocity of circulation of capital initially, and of commodities subsequently, has significantly accelerated (generalization of air transport, universal telephony, financial machinery, the Internet, programmes geared to ensuring the success of instantaneous decisions, and so on)? The sophistication of speculation thanks to new derivative products and a subtle mathematics of risk combination? A spectacular decline of the peasantry, and the whole rural organization of society, in our countries? The absolute imperative, as a result, of constructing the urban petty bourgeoisie as a pillar of the existing social and political regime? The widespread resurrection, in the first instance among extremely rich grands bourgeois, of the conviction as old as Aristotle that the middle classes are the alpha and omega of 'democratic 'life? A planetary struggle, sometimes muffled and sometimes of an extreme violence, to secure cheap access to raw materials and energy sources, particularly in Africa - continent of every variety of 'Western' despoliation and, consequently, atrocity? I know all this reasonably well, as in truth does everyone . 

The issue is whether this anecdotal compendium amounts to a 'postmodern' capitalism, a new capitalism, a capitalism worthy of Deleuze and Guattari's desiring machines, a capitalism that by itself generates a collective understanding of a new kind, which provokes the rising up of a hitherto subjugated constituent power, a capitalism that bypasses the old power of states, a capitalism that proletarianizes the multitude and makes workers of the immaterial intellect out of petit-bourgeois - in short, a capitalism of which communism is the immediate flip-side, a capitalism whose Subject is in a way the same as that of the latent communism which supports its paradoxical existence. A capitalism on the eve of its metamorphosis into communism. Such, roughly but accurately, is Negri's position. But such, more generally, is the position of all those who are fascinated by the technological changes and continuous expansion of capitalism over the last thirty years and who, dupes of the dominant ideology (' everything is changing all the time and we are chasing after this memorable change '), imagine they are witnessing a prodigious sequence of History - whatever their ultimate judgement on the quality of this sequence.  

My position is the exact opposite: contemporary capitalism possesses all the features of classical capitalism. It is strictly in keeping with what is to be expected of it when its logic is not counteracted by resolute, locally victorious class action. As regards the development of Capital, let us take Marx's predictive categories and we shall see that it is only now that their self-evidence is being fully attested. Did not Marx refer to the 'world market'? But what was the world market in 1860 compared with what it is today, which people have in vain seen fit to rename 'globalization'? Did not Marx conceive the ineluctable character of capital concentration?What did this concentration amount to? What was the size of firms and financial institutions when he predicted it, compared with the monsters thrown up every day by new mergers? It has long been objected to Marx that agriculture remained characterized by a system of family farms, whereas he announced that concentration would definitely affect landed property. But today we know that in fact the proportion of the population living off agriculture in the so-called developed countries (those where imperial capitalism is established unchecked) is, so to speak, insignificant. And what is the average size of landed property today, compared with what it was when the peasantry represented 40 per cent of the total population of France? Marx rigorously analyzed the inevitable character of cyclical crises, which testify, inter alia, to the absolute irrationality of capitalism, and the compulsory character of imperial activities and wars alike . In his lifetime several very grave crises confirmed these analyses; and colonial and inter-imperialist wars rounded off the proof. But when it comes to the quantity of value that went up in smoke, all of this was as nothing compared with the crisis of the 1 930s or the current crisis, or compared with the two world wars of the twentieth century, various ferocious colonial wars, and the Western 'interventions' of today and tomorrow. If we consider the situation in the world as a whole, and not just in our backyard, even the pauperization of enormous masses of the population is increasingly self-evident. 
​
Basically, today's world is exactly the one which, in a brilliant anticipation, a kind of true science fiction, Marx heralded as the full unfolding of the irrational and, in truth, monstrous potentialities of capitalism. Capitalism entrusts the fate of peoples to the financial appetites of a tiny oligarchy. In a sense, it is a regime of gangsters. How can we accept the law of the world being laid down by the ruthless interests of a camarilla of inheritors and parvenus? Cannot those whose only norm is profit reasonably be called 'gangsters'? Individuals who are ready, in the service of this norm, to trample over millions of people if necessary? That the fate of millions of people actually depends on the calculations of such gangsters is now so patent, so conspicuous, that acceptance of this 'reality', as the gangsters' scribblers call it, is ever more surprising. The spectacle of states pathetically frustrated because a small, anonymous troop of self-proclaimed evaluators has given them a bad mark, as would an economics prof to dunces, is at once farcical and highly disturbing. So, dear voters, you have put in power people who tremble at night like schoolchildren when they learn in the early hours that representatives of the 'market' - i.e. the speculators and parasites of the world of property and capital - have rated them AAB rather than AAA? Is it not barbarous, this consensual hold over our official masters by unofficial masters, whose sole concern is their current and future profits in the lottery in which they stake their millions? Not to mention that their anguished bawling - 'a! a! b ! ' - will have to be paid for by compliance with the mafia's commands, which are invariably of the following kind: ' Privatize everything. Abolish help for the weak, the solitary, the sick and the unemployed. Abolish all aid for everyone except the banks. Don't look after the poor; let the elderly die. Reduce the wages of the poor, but reduce the taxes of the rich. Make everyone work until they are ninety. Only teach mathematics to traders, reading to big property-owners and history to on-duty ideologues.' And the execution of these commands will in fact ruin the life of millions of people. 

But here too Marx's forecast has been confirmed, even surpassed, by our reality. He characterized the governments of the 1 840s and ' 50s as ' Capital's executives' . This supplies the key to the mystery: at the end of the day, the rulers and the gangsters of finance come from the same world. The formula ' Capital's executives' is perfectly correct only today, and all the more so in that no difference exists here between right-wing governments (Sarkozy, Merkel) and 'left-wing' ones (Obama, Zapatero, Papandreou) . 
​
​So we are indeed the witnesses of a retrograde consummation of the essence of capitalism, of a return to the spirit of the 1850s, coming after the restoration of reactionary ideas that followed the 'red years' ( 1960-80), just as the 1850s were made possible by the counterrevolutionary Restoration of 1815-40 after the Great Revolution of 1792-94. 

Admittedly, Marx thought that proletarian revolution, under the banner of communism, would cut short, and spare us, this full unfolding of capitalism, whose horror he clearly perceived. In his view it was indeed a case of communism or barbarism. The tremendous efforts to vindicate him on this score during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century did in fact significantly check and deflect the logic of capitalism, especially after the Second World War. For around thirty years, following the collapse of the socialist states as viable alternative forms (the case of the USSR), or their subversion by a virulent state capitalism following the failure of an explicitly communist mass movement (the case of China in the years 1 965-68), we have had the dubious privilege of finally witnessing the confirmation of all Marx's predictions about the real essence of capitalism and the societies it rules. As to barbarism, we are already there, and are rapidly going to sink further into it. But it conforms, even in detail, to what Marx hoped the power of the organized proletariat would forestall. 
​
Contemporary capitalism is therefore not in any sense creative and postmodern. Reckoning itself shot of its communist enemies, it is merrily proceeding along the lines whose overall direction was perceived by Marx, following the classical economists and continuing their work from a critical perspective. It is certainly not capitalism and its political servants that are bringing about the rebirth of History, if by 'rebirth' is understood the emergence of a capacity, at once destructive and creative, whose aim is to make a genuine exit from the established order. In this sense, Fukuyama was not wrong: the modern world, having arrived at its complete development and conscious that it is bound to die - if only (which is plausible, alas) in suicidal violence - no longer has anything to think about but 'the end of History', just as Wotan, in Act II of Wagner's Die Walkiire, explains to his daughter Briinnhilde that his only thought is 'the end! The end! '. 
​If there is to be a rebirth of History, it will not come from the barbaric conservatism of capitalism and the determination of all state apparatuses to maintain its demented pattern. The only possible reawakening is the popular initiative in which the power of an Idea will take root. 

Alain Badiou 'THE REBIRTH OF HISTORY' (Times Of Riots and Uprising)

BURROUGHS: I don't know about where fiction ordinarily directs itself, but I am quite deliberately addressing myself to the whole area of what we call dreams. Precisely what is a dream? A certain juxtaposition of word and image. I've recently done a lot of experiments with scrapbooks. I'll read in the newspaper something that reminds me of or has relation to something I've written. I'll cut out the picture or article and paste it in a scrapbook beside the words from my book. Or I'll be walking down the street and I'll suddenly see a scene from my book and I'll photograph it and put it in a scrapbook. I've found that when preparing a page, I'll almost invariably dream that night something relating to this juxtaposition of word and image. In other words, I've been interested in precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines. I do a lot of exercises in what I call time travel, in taking coordinates, such as what I photographed on the train, what I was thinking about at the time, what I was reading and what I wrote; all of this to see how completely I can project myself back to that one point in time.

INTERVIEWER: In Nova Express you indicate that silence is a desirable state.

BURROUGHS: The most desirable state. In one sense a special use of words and pictures can conduce silence. The scrapbooks and time travel are exercises to expand consciousness, to teach me to think in association blocks rather than words. I've recently spent a little time studying hieroglyph systems, both the Egyptian and the Mayan. A whole block of associations—boonf!—like that! Words—at least the way we use them—can stand in the way of what I call nonbody experience. It's time we thought about leaving the body behind. 

INTERVIEWER: Marshall McLuhan said that you believed heroin was needed to turn the human body into an environment that includes the universe. But from what you've told me, you're not at all interested in turning the body into an environment. 

BURROUGHS: NO, junk narrows consciousness. The only benefit to me as a writer (aside from putting me into contact with the whole carny world) came to me after I went off it. What I want to do is to learn to see more of what's out there, to look outside, to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings. Beckett wants to go inward. First he was in a bottle and now he is in the mud. I am aimed in the other direction: outward. 

​INTERVIEWER: Have you been able to think for any length of time in images, with the inner voice silent? 

​BURROUGHS : I'm becoming more proficient at it, partly through my work with scrapbooks and translating the connections between words and images. Try this: Carefully memorize the meaning of a passage, then read it; you'll find you can actually read it without the words' making any sound whatever in the mind's ear. Extraordinary experience, and one that will carry over into dreams. When you start thinking in images, without words, you're well on the way. 

​INTERVIEWER: Why is the wordless state so desirable? 

BURROUGHS: I think it's the evolutionary trend. I think that ​words are an around-the-world, ox-cart way of doing things, awkward instruments, and they will be laid aside eventually, probably sooner than we think. This is something that will happen in the space age. Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear. Many of them are afraid of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege. This is one objection to the cut-ups. There's been a lot of that, a sort of superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you can't cut up these words. Why can't I? I find it much easier to get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers— doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent person—than from those who are. 

​INTERVIEWER: HOW did you become interested in the cut-up technique? 

BURROUGHS: A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, "Minutes to Go," was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, "The Waste Land" was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in "The Camera Eye" sequences in U.S.A. I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done. 

​INTERVIEWER: What do cut-ups offer the reader that conventional narrative doesn't? 

BURROUGHS: Any narrative passage or any passage, say, of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right. A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images—real Rimbaud images—but new ones.

​INTERVIEWER: YOU deplore the accumulation of images and at the same time you seem to be looking for new ones. 

​BURROUGHS: Yes, it's part of the paradox of anyone who is working with word and image, and after all, that is what a writer is still doing. Painter too. Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one's range of vision consequently expands. 

​INTERVIEWER: Instead of going to the trouble of working with scissors and all those pieces of paper, couldn't you obtain the same effect by simply free-associating at the typewriter?

BURROUGHS: One's mind can't cover it that way. Now, for example, if I wanted to make a cut-up of this [picking up a copy of the Nation], there are many ways I could do it. I could read crosscolumn; I could say: "Today's men's nerves surround us. Each technological extension gone outside is electrical involves an act of collective environment. The human nervous environment system itself can be reprogrammed with all its private and social values because it is content. He programs logically as readily as any radio net is swallowed by the new environment. The sensory order." You find it often makes quite as much sense as the original. You learn to leave out words and to make connections. [Gesturing] Suppose I should cut this down the middle here, and put this up here. 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. 

​INTERVIEWER: YOU believe that an audience can be eventually trained to respond to cut-ups?

BURROUGHS: Of course, because cut-ups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That's a cut-up. I was sitting in a lunchroom in New York having my doughnuts and coffee. I was thinking that one does feel a little boxed in in New York, like living in a series of boxes. I looked out the window and there was a great big Yale truck. That's cut-up—a juxtaposition of what's happening outside and what you're thinking of. I make this a practice when I walk down the street. I'll say, When I got to here I saw that sign, I was thinking this, and when I return to the house I'll type these up. Some of this material I use and some I don't. I have literally thousands of pages of notes here, raw, and I keep a diary as well. In a sense it's traveling in time.
​
​Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: For Godsake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you. I mean, I walk down the street with friends. I ask, "Did you see him, that person who just walked by?" No, they didn't notice him. I had a very pleasant time on the train coming out here. I haven't traveled on trains in years. I found there were no drawing rooms. I got a bedroom so I could set up my typewriter and look out the window. I was taking photos, too. I also noticed all the signs and what I was thinking at the time, you see. And I got some extraordinary juxtapositions. For example, a friend of mine has a loft apartment in New York. He said, "Every time we go out of the house and come back, if we leave the bathroom door open, there's a rat in the house." I look out the window, there's Able Pest Control.

​INTERVIEWER: The one flaw in the cut-up argument seems to lie in the linguistic base on which we operate, the straight declarative sentence. It's going to take a great deal to change that. 

BURROUGHS: Yes, it is unfortunately one of the great errors of Western thought, the whole either-or proposition. You remember Korzybski and his idea of non-Aristotelian logic. Either-or thinking just is not accurate thinking. That's not the way things occur, and I feel the Aristotelian construct is one of the great shackles ​of Western civilization. Cut-ups are a movement toward breaking this down. I should imagine it would be much easier to find acceptance of the cut-ups from, possibly, the Chinese, because you see already there are many ways that they can read any given ideograph. It's already cut up. 

​INTERVIEWER: What will happen to the straight plot in fiction?

​BURROUGHS: Plot has always had the definite function of stage direction, of getting the characters from here to there, and that will continue, but the new techniques, such as cut-up, will involve much more of the total capacity of the observer. It enriches the whole aesthetic experience, extends it. 

INTERVIEWER: Nova Express is a cut-up of many writers? 

BURROUGHS: Joyce is in there. Shakespeare, Rimbaud, some writers that people haven't heard about, someone named Jack Stern. There's Kerouac. I don't know, when you start making these fold-ins and cut-ups you lose track. Genet, of course, is someone I admire very much. But what he's doing is classical French prose. He's not a verbal innovator. Also Kafka, Eliot, and one of my favorites is Joseph Conrad. My story "They Just Fade Away" is a fold-in (instead of cutting, you fold) from Lord Jim. In fact, it's almost a retelling of the Lord Jim story. My Stein is the same Stein as in Lord Jim. Richard Hughes is another favorite of mine. And Graham Greene. For exercise, when I make a trip, such as from Tangier to Gibraltar, I will record this in three columns in a notebook I always take with me. One column will contain simply an account of the trip, what happened: I arrived at the air terminal, what was said by the clerks, what I overheard on the plane, what hotel I checked into. The next column presents my memories: that is, what I was thinking of at the time, the memories that were activated by my encounters. And the third column, which I call my reading column, gives quotations from any book that I take with me. I have practically a whole novel alone on my trips to Gibraltar. Besides Graham Greene, I've used other books. I used The Wonderful Country by Tom Lea on one trip. Let's see... and Eliot's The Cocktail Party; In Hazard by Richard Hughes. For example, I'm reading The Wonderful Country and the hero is just crossing the frontier into Mexico. Well, just at this point I come to the Spanish frontier, so I note that down in the margin. Or I'm on a boat or a train and I'm reading The Quiet American; I look around and see if there's a quiet American aboard. Sure enough, there's a quiet sort of young American with a crew cut, drinking a bottle of beer. It's extraordinary, if you really keep your eyes open. I was reading Raymond Chandler, and one of his characters was an albino gunman. My God, if there wasn't an albino in the room. He wasn't a gunman. 
​
Who else? Wait a minute, I'll just check my coordinate books to see if there's anyone I've forgotten—Conrad, Richard Hughes, science fiction, quite a bit of science fiction. Eric Frank Russell has written some very, very interesting books. Here's one, The Star Virus; I doubt if you've heard of it. He develops a concept here of what he calls Deadliners, who have this strange sort of seedy look. I read this when I was in Gibraltar, and I began to find Deadliners all over the place. The story of a fish pond in it, and quite a flower garden. My father was always very interested in gardening. 

​INTERVIEWER: In view of all this, what will happen to fiction in the next twenty-five years? 

BURROUGHS : In the first place, I think there's going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative process, and I think the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific. And I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images? Already some of the very beautiful color photography appears in whiskey ads, I notice. Science will also discover for us how association blocks actually form. 

​INTERVIEWER: DO you think this will destroy the magic?

​BURROUGHS: Not at all. I would say it would enhance it. 

​INTERVIEWER: Have you done anything with computers?

​BURROUGHS: I've not done anything, but I've seen some of the computer poetry. I can take one of those computer poems and then try to find correlatives of it—that is, pictures to go with it; it's quite possible. 

​INTERVIEWER: Does the fact that it comes from a machine diminish its value to you?

BURROUGHS: I think that any artistic product must stand or fall on what's there. 

​INTERVIEWER: Therefore, you're not upset by the fact that a chimpanzee can do an abstract painting?

BURROUGHS: If he does a good one, no. People say to me, "Oh, this is all very good, but you got it by cutting up." I say that has nothing to do with it, how I got it. What is any writing but a cut-up? Somebody has to program the machine; somebody has to do the cutting up. Remember that I first made selections. Out of hundreds of possible sentences that I might have used, I chose one.

Interview With William S. Burroughs​ in The Third Mind (1978) by  William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysi​  
The Viking Press, New York, N.Y.
A Seaver book

Maurice Nadeau: Could you briefly explain how your collaboration came into being?

Felix Guattari: This collaboration is not the product of a simple meeting of two individuals. Aside from a combination of circumstances, we were also led to it by a whole political context. Initially it was less a question of pooling knowledge than the accumulation of our uncertainties, and even a certain distress in the face of the turn of events after May '68.

We are part of a generation whose political consciousness was born in the enthusiasm and naivete of the Liberation, with its conspiratorial mythology of fascism. And the questions left hanging by the other failed revolution that was May ' 68 were developed for us based on a counterpoint that was all the more troubling because, like many others, we were worried about the future being readied for us, one that could make you miss the fascism of yore. 

Our starting point was to consider that during these crucial periods something along the order of desire manifested itself on the scale of society as a whole, then was repressed, liquidated, as much by the forces of power as by political parties and so-called worker unions and, to a certain extent, by leftist organizations themselves. 

​And we would no doubt have to go back in time even further. The history of betrayed revolutions, the history of the betrayal of the desire of the masses is becoming identified with the history of the Workers' Movement plain and simple. Whose fault is that? Beria's, Stalin's, Khrushchev's! It was not the right program, the right organization, the right alliance. We did not re-read Marx in the original text ... there is no doubt about that! But the raw evidence remains: the revolution was possible, the socialist revolution was within reach, it really exists, it is not a myth weakened by the transformations of industrial societies. 

Under certain conditions the masses express their revolutionary will, their desires sweep aside all obstacles, open unheard-of horizons, but the last to notice it are the organizations and men who are supposed to represent them. Leaders betray, it's obvious. But why do those who are led continue to listen to them? Wouldn't that be the result of an unconscious complicity, of an interiorization of the repression, operating on several levels, from power to bureaucrats, from bureaucrats to militants and from militants to the masses themselves? We certainly saw this after May '68. 

Fortunately, the recouping and the brainwashing spared tens of thousands-maybe more-who are now immune to the ravages of bureaucracies of all categories, and who intend to retaliate against the dirty tricks of power and bosses as well as against their maneuvers of dialogue, participation, integration, which rely on the complicity of traditional workers' organizations. 

We have to recognize that current attempts to renew forms of popular struggle are still hard to extricate from tedium and revolutionary boy-scoutism, which, to say the least, is not too concerned about the systematic liberation of desire. "Desire, that's all you ever say!" That ends up irritating serious people, the responsible militants. So we are certainly not going to recommend that desire be taken seriously. It is rather urgent to undermine the spirit of seriousness. A theory of desire in history should not strive to be serious. And, from this point of view, perhaps Anti-Oedipus is still too serious a book, too intimidating. Theoretical work shouldn't be reserved for specialists. A theory's desire and its statements should stick as closely as possible to the event and to the collective enunciation of the masses. In order to come to that, it will be necessary to forge another breed of intellectuals, another breed of analysts, another breed of militants, with the different types blending and melting into each other. 

We started with the idea that one should not consider desire as a subjective superstructure which phases in and out. Desire never stops shaping history, even in its worst periods. The German masses had come to desire Nazism. After Wilhelm Reich, one cannot avoid facing that truth. Under certain conditions, the desire of the masses can turn against their own interests. What are those conditions? That's the whole question. 

In order to answer that, we realized that one cannot simply attach a Freudian wagon to the Marxist-Leninist train. First one must get rid of a stereotyped hierarchy between an opaque economic infrastructure and social and ideological superstructures conceived of in such a way that they repress questions of sex and expression on the side of representation, as far away as possible from production. The relations of production and the relations of reproduction participate in the same pairing of productive forces and antiproductive structures. We should move desire on the side of the infrastructure, on the side of production, and the family, the ego and the person on the side of antiproduction. This is the only way to prevent the sexual from remaining permanently cut off from the economic. 

There exists, according to us, a desiring-production which, before all actualization in the familial division of sexes and persons as well as the social division of work, invests the various forms of production of jouissance and the existing structures in order to repress them. Under different regimes, it is the same desiring energy that we find on the revolutionary face of history, with the working class, science and the arts, and that we find on the face of relations of exploitation and of state power insofar as they both presuppose the unconscious participation of the oppressed. 

If it is true that social revolution is inseparable from a revolution of desire, then the question shifts: under what conditions will the revolutionary avant-garde be able to free itself from its unconscious complicity with repressive structures and elude power's manipulation of the masses' desire that makes them "fight for their servitude as though it were their salvation"? If the family and family ideologies assume a nodal role, as we think they do, then how should one assess the function of psychoanalysis which, the first to raise these questions, was also the first to abandon them again by promoting a modern myth of familial repression with Oedipus and castration?
​
In order to move in this -direction, we think it necessary to stop approaching the unconscious through neurosis and the family, in order to adopt the more specific approach of the schizophrenic process of desiring-machines-which has little to do with institutional madness. 
​A militant struggle is necessary against reductive explanations and adaptive techniques of suggestion based on Oedipal triangulation. Refusing to grasp compulsively a complete object, symbolic of all despotism. Drifting towards real multiplicities. Ceasing to dismiss both man and machine whose relationship, on the contrary, constitutes desire itself. Promoting another logic, a logic of real desire, establishing the primacy of history over structure; another analysis, extricated from symbolism and interpretation; and another militancy, with the means to free itself from fantasies of the dominant order. 

Gilles Deleuze: As for the technique of this book, writing it between the two of us did not create any particular problem, but had a specific function, of which we gradually became aware. One thing is very startling in books on psychiatry or even on psychoanalysis, and that is the pervasive duality between what an alleged mental patient says and what the doctor reports. Between the "case" and the commentary or the analysis of the case. Logos versus pathos: the mental patient is supposed to say something, and the doctor to say what it means in terms of symptom or meaning. This allows for the complete distortion of what the mental patient says, a hypocritical selection. 

We don't claim to have written a madman's book, just a book in which one no longer knows-and there is no reason to knowwho exactly is speaking, a doctor, a patient, an untreated patient, a present, past, or future patient. That's why we used so many writers and poets; who is to say if they are speaking as patients or doctorspatients or doctors of civilization. Now, strangely, if we have tried to go beyond this traditional duality, it's precisely because we were writing together. Neither of us was the madman, neither of us the psychiatrist; there had to be two of us in order to find a process that was not reduced either to the psychiatrist or his madman, or to a madman and his psychiatrist. 
​
The process is what we call a flux. Now, once again, the flux is a notion that we wanted to remain ordinary and undefined. This could be a flux of words, ideas, shit, money, it could be a financial mechanism or a schizophrenic machine: it goes beyond all dualities. We dreamed of this book as a flux-book. 

Maurice Nadeau: Precisely, starting in your first chapter, there is this notion of "desiring-machine" which remains obscure for the layman and that we would like to see defined. All the more so that it answers everything, suffices for everything ... 

Gilles Deleuze: Yes, we give the machine its greatest extension: in relation to the fluxes. We define the machine as any system that cuts the fluxes. Thus, sometimes we speak of technical machines, in the ordinary sense of the word, sometimes of social machines, sometimes of desiring-machines.

Because, for us, the machine does not in any way conflict with either man or nature (to argue that forms and relations of production are not related to the machine would really require a lot of convincing). On the other hand, the machine is not in any way reduced to mechanics. Mechanics refers to the protocol of some technical machines; or else the particular organization of an organism. But machinism is something else entirely: it designates every system that cuts off fluxes going beyond both the mechanics of technology and the organization of the organism, whether it be in nature, society, or man.

For example, the desiring-machine is a nonorganic system of the body; it is in this sense that we speak of molecular machines or micro-machines. More preciseli in relation to psychoanalysis: we hold two things against psychoanalysis-not understanding what delirium is, because it does not see that delirium invests the entire social field; and not understanding what desire is, because it does not see that the unconscious is a factory and not a stage.
​
What is left if psychoanalysis understands nothing about either delirium or desire? These two reproaches really make one: what interests us is the presence of machines of desire, molecular micromachines in the great molar social machines. How they operate and function within one another. 

Raphael Pividal: If you had to define your book in terms of desire, I'd like to ask: how does this book respond to desire? What desire? Whose desire?

Gilles Deleuze: It's not as a book that it can respond to desire, but according to what surrounds it. A book cannot be worth anything on its own. Still the fluxes: there are a lot of people working in similar directions, in other fields. And then there are the younger generations: it's unlikely they'll buy a certain type of discourse, now epistemological, now psychoanalytical, now ideological. It's beginning to tire everyone out. We say: Oedipus and castration, make the best of them, because it's not going to last. Until now psychoanalysis has been left alone: there have been attacks on psychiatry, the psychiatric hospital, but psychoanalysis seemed untouchable, uncompromised. We are trying to show that psychoanalysis is worse than the hospital, precisely because it operates through all the pores of capitalist society and not in special places of confinement. And because it is profoundly reactionary in its practice and theory, not only in its ideology. And because it fulfills specific functions.
​
Felix says that our book is addressed to people who are now between 7 and 15 years old. Ideally, because in fact it is still too difficult, too cultivated, and makes too many compromises. We have not been able to be direct enough, clear enough. Nevertheless, I must say that the first chapter, which has seemed difficult to many favorable readers, does not require any prior knowledge. In any case, if a book responds to a desire, it is insofar as there are already a lot of people who can't stand a current type of discourse. It helps refocus a number of efforts, and make works or desires resonate. In short, a book can only respond to a desire politically, outside the book. For example, an association of angry users of psychoanalysis wouldn't be a bad place to start. 

Fransois Chatelet: What seems important to me is the irruption of such a text amidst books of philosophy (for this book is thought of as a book of philosophy). Now Anti-Oedipus smashes everything. 

In its appearance, first, through the "form" of the text itself: 'curse words' are used starting with the second line, as though a provocation. One believes, at first, that this won't go on, and then it does. That's all they talk about: "coupled machines," and "coupled machines" are singularly obscene, or scatalogical. 
​
​Moreover, I experienced it as a materialist irruption. It's been a long time since this happened. One has to admit that methodology is becoming a pain in the ass. With the imperialism of methodology, any research work or deepening of a subject is ruined. I've fallen into that trap so I know what I'm talking about. In short, I evoke a materialist irruption because I'm thinking of Lucretius. I don't know if that will please you. Too much or not enough. 

Gilles Deleuze: If that's true, that's perfect. That would be wonderful. In any case, there is no methodological problem in our book. Nor any problem of interpretation. Because the unconscious doesn't mean anything; because machines don't mean anything. They merely work, produce arid break down, because all we're looking for is how something functions in the real. 
​
​There is no epistemological problem either: we couldn't care ' less about returning to Freud or Marx. If someone tells us that we have misunderstood Freud, we won't argue about it, we'll say too bad, there is so much to do. It's curious that epistemology has always hidden an imposition of power, an organization of power. As far as we're concerned, we don't believe in any specificity of writing or even of thought. 

​Roger Dadoun: Up until now, the discussion has taken place on a "molar" level-to use a dichotomy that is fundamental in your interpretation-that is, on the level of great conceptual ensembles. We have not managed to take the plunge that would lead us to the "molecular" level, that is, to microanalyses that would help us understand how you have "engineered" your work. This would be particularly valuable for the analysis-the schizoanalysis, perhaps?of the political cogs of the text. It would be particularly interesting to know how fascism and May '68, the dominant "note" of the book, intervened, not "molarly," that would be too banal, but "molecularly," in the fabrication of the text.​

Serge Leclaire: Actually I get the impression that this book is engineered so that every intervention "on the molecular level" will be digested by the machine of the book.

I think that, by your own admission, your intention to come up with "a book where all possible duality would be suppressed" was achieved beyond your wildest hopes. That puts your readers, if they are somewhat perceptive, in a situation that leaves them only the prospect of being absorbed, digested, tied up and quashed in the admirable operationality of this machine.

So there is a dimension here that I question, and that I would be willing to ask you about, namely, what is the function of such a bookcontraption [livre-machinJ?1 Because at first it seems to be perfectly totalizing, absorbing, liable to integrate and absorb all the questions one might attempt to raise, by backing the interlocutor into a corner by the very fact that he is speaking and asking a question.

Let's do this experiment right away, if you will, and let's see what happens.

One of the major parts of the desiring-machines, if I have understood you properly, is "the partial object," which, for someone who has not yet managed to get rid altogether of the psychoanalytic uniform, calls to mind a psychoanalytical concept, namely, the Kleinian one of the "partial object." Even if one claims, as you do, not without humor, to "make fun of concepts." 
In this use of the partial object as an essential part of the desiring-machine, one thing seems to me very significant: you still try to "define" it. You say: the partial object can only be defined positively. That's what surprises me. First of all, how does the positive description differ essentially from the negative imputation that you denounce? 

Above all: the slightest psychoanalytical experience makes it clear that the partial object can only be defined "differently" and "in relation to the signifier."

Here, your "contraption," if I may say so, can only be "lacking" its object (the banished lack pops up again!). Even though it is written, as a book is, it claims to be a text without a signifier, a text that would tell the truth about the truth, keeping close to an alleged reality, quite simply. As though that were possible without distance or intention of all duality. Very well. A contraption of this sort can have its use; the future will tell. But as for desire, the good news of which it claims to bring to society more effectively than psychoanalysis, I repeat, it can only be lacking its object.
​
I believe that your desiring-machine which should only work by breaking down, that is, skipping and backfiring, happens to be disarmed: a "positive" object, devoid of any duality as well as of any "lack," it ends up working ... like a Swiss clock! 

Felix Guattari: I don't think that one should situate the partial object either positively or negatively, but rather as a participant of nontotalizable multiplicities. It is only in an illusory fashion that it is inscribed in reference to a complete object such as the body proper, or even the fragmented body. By opening the series of partial objects, beyond the breast and the feces, to the voice and the gaze, Jacques Lacan signified his refusal to close them off and reduce them to the body. The voice and the gaze escape the body, for example, by becoming more and more adjacent to audio-visual machines. 

I'll leave aside the question of how, according to Lacan, the phallic function, insofar as it overcodes each of the partial objects, does not give them back a certain identity, and, by assigning them a lack, does not call for another form of totalization, this time in the symbolic order. Whatever the case, it seems to me that Lacan has always tried to extricate the object of desire from all the totalizing references that could threaten it: beginning with the mirror stage, libido escaped the "substantialist hypothesis" and symbolic identification supplanted an exclusive reference to the organism; tied down to the function of speech (parole) and to the field of language, the drive shattered the framework of topics that were closed in on themselves; whereas the theory of the "a" object perhaps contains the seed that allows to liquidate the totalitarianism of the signifier. 
​
​By becoming an "a" object, the partial object detotalized, deterritorialized, and permanently distanced itself from an individuated corporeity; it is in a position to swing over to real multiplicities and to open itself up to the molecular machinisms of every kind that are shaping history. 

Gilles Deleuze: Yes, it's curious that Leclaire would be saying that our machine works too well, and is capable of digesting everything. That's exactly what we held against psychoanalysis. It's curious that a psychoanalyst would reproach us with that in turn. I'm saying this because we have a special relationship with Leclaire: he wrote a text called "the reality of desire," which, before we did, goes in the direction of a machine-unconscious and uncovers final elements of the unconscious which are no longer either figurative or structural.

It seems our agreement does not go all the way, since Leclaire reproaches us for not understanding what a partial object is. He says it's not important to define it positively or negatively, because, in any case, it's something else, it's "different." But we are not really interested in categories of objects, even partial ones. It's not certain that desire has to do with objects, even partial ones. We are talking about machines, flux, sampling, detachments, residue. We are doing a critique of the partial object. And surely Leclaire is right to say that it doesn't really matter if the partial object is defined positively or negatively. But he is only right theoretically. For if we consider the way it functions, if we ask what psychoanalysis does with the partial object, how it makes it work, then knowing whether it enters a negative or positive function is no longer inconsequential. 
​
​Is it true or not that psychoanalysis uses the partial object to base its ideas of lack, absence, or signifier of absence, and to legitimate its use of castration? Even when it invokes the notions of difference or the different, it's psychoanalysis that uses the partial object in a negative way in order to fuse desire to a fundamental lack. What we hold against psychoanalysis is that it resorts to a pious conception, based on lack and castration, a sort of negative theology that involves infinite resignation (the Law, the impossible, etc.). It is against this that we propose a positive conception of desire, desire that produces, not desire that is lacking in something. Psychoanalysts are still pious. 

Serge Leclaire: I won't challenge your criticism any more than I acknowledge its pertinence. I'll simply emphasize that it seems based on the hypothesis of a somewhat ... totalitarian reality. Without signifiers, without flaw, splitting, or castration. Ultimately, one wonders what makes the "true difference" you invoke. It should be situated, you say, not between ... let's see ... 

Gilles Deleuze: Between the imaginary and the symbolic ... 

Serge Leclaire: ... between the real on one hand, which you present as the ground, the underlying element, and something like the superstructures that would be the imaginary and the symbolic.  
​
​Now, I think the question of "true difference" is, in fact, the question raised in the problem of the object. Just now, Felix, in referring to Lacan's teachings (and you came back to them), situated the "a" object in relation to the "ego," to the person, etc.

Felix Guattari: ... the person and the family ... 

Serge Leclaire: Now, the concept of the "a" object in Lacan is part of a quaternary which includes the signifier, which is dual (S1 and S2), and the subject (the crossed out S). True difference, if this expression were to be used, would be situated between the signifier on the one hand and the "a" object on the other.
​
I don't mind that at no moment it would be advisable, for either pious or impious reasons, to use the term of signifier. Whatever the case, I don't see how you can challenge some duality and promote the "a" object as self-sufficient, like some substitute for an impious God. I don't think you can support a thesis, a project, an action, a "contraption," without introducing somewhere a duality, and all it entails. 

Felix Guattari: I'm not at all sure that the concept of the "a" object in Lacan is anything but a vanishing point, an escape, precisely, from the despotic character of signifying chains. 

Serge Leclaire: What interests me most, and what I am trying to articulate in a way quite obviously different from yours, is how desire is deployed in the social machine. I don't think we can go without a precise clarification of the object's function. Then it will be necessary to specify its relationship with other elements at work in the machine, "signifying" elements (symbolic and imaginary ones, if you prefer). These relationships don't operate in a single direction, that is, the "signifying" elements have a backlash effect on the object. 

If we want to understand something about what is happening in terms of desire in the social machine, we have to go through that narrow pass that the object constitutes right now. It's not enough to assert that everything is desire, but show how that happens. I will add a final question: what do you use your "contraption" for?
​
​What relation can there be between the fascination of a flawless machine and the true excitement of a revolutionary project? That's the question I'm asking you, on the level of action. 

Roger Dadoun: In any case, your "machine" -or your "contraption" [machin]-works. It works very well in literature, for example, for capturing the flow or the "schizo" circulation in Artaud's Heliogabalus; it works for entering more deeply into the bipolar schizoid/ paranoid oscillation of an author like Romain Rolland; it works for a psychoanalysis of dreams-for Freud's dream, known as "Irma's injection," which is theatrical in an almost technical sense, with its staging, close-ups, etc., it's like a film. It remains to be seen how this works for the -child ... 

Henri Torrubia: Working in a psychiatric ward, I would especially like to emphasize one of the nodal points of your theses on schizoanalysis. You assert-with arguments that, to me, are very illuminating-the primacy of social investment and the productive and revolutionary essence of desire. This raises such theoretical, ideological, and practical problems that you should expect a general outcry.
​
We know, in any case, that to undertake an analytical psychology in a psychiatric establishment, without the possibility for "each" person to keep questioning the institutional network itself, is either a waste of time or, in the best of cases, won't go very far. In the current climate, moreover, nothing can go very far. That being the case, when an essential conflict emerges somewhere, when something goes wrong, which is precisely the sign that something like the desiring-production is liable to emerge, and which, of course, questions the social and its institutions, we immediately see reactions of panic and formations of resistance. This resistance takes various forms: meetings of synthesis, coordination, declarations, etc., and, more subtly, classic psychoanalytical interpretation with its usual effect of exterminating desire as you conceive of it. 

Raphael Pividal: Serge Leclaire, you have made several remarks, most of them in discrepancy with what Guattari says. Because the book, in a fundamental way, examines the analytical practice, your profession in a sense, and you have taken the problem in a partial way. You've only accepted it by submerging it in your own language, with theories that you've developed, where you give greater importance to fetishism, that is to say, precisely, to the partial object. You take refuge in this sort of language to reduce Deleuze and Guattari to details. Everything in Anti-Oedipus that concerns the birth of the state, the role of the state, schizophrenia, you say nothing about. You say nothing about your daily practice. You say nothing about the true problem of psychoanalysis, that of the patient. Of course, you, Serge Leclaire, are not being put on trial, but this is the point to which you should respond: the relationship of psychoanalysis to the state, to capitalism, to History; to schizophrenia.

Serge Leclaire: I agree with the aim you propose. When I emphasize the precise point of the object, I mean to highlight, through an example, the type of operation the contraption produced can perform.

Granted that the criticism of Deleuze and Guattari concerning the change of direction, the thwarting of psychoanalytic discovery, the fact that nothing or scarcely anything was said concerning the relations of the analytical practice or schizophrenia with the political world, or the social, I do not object entirely. It is not enough to signal one's intention to do it, it has to be done pertinently. Our two authors have tried, and it's their attempt that we are discussing here.
 
I simply said, and will say again, that the proper approach to the problem seems to me to go through an extremely specific pass: the place of the object, the function of the drive in a social formation. 

I simply said, and will say again, that the proper approach to the problem seems to me to go through an extremely specific pass: the place of the object, the function of the drive in a social formation. 
​
Just a remark in regard to the "it works" which is put forward as an argument in favor of the pertinence of the machine, or the book in question. Of course it works. And I was going to say that for me, too, in a certain sense, it works. One may note that any theoretically invested practice initially has a good chance of working. This is not a criterion in itself. 

Roger Dadoun: The main problem that your book raises is no doubt this: how will it work politically, since you acknowledge the political as a principal "machination." Witness the scope or the meticulousness with which you dealt with the "socius" and, notably, its ethnographic, anthropological aspects. 

Pierre Clastres: Deleuze and Guattari, the former a philosopher, the latter a psychoanalyst, are reflecting together on capitalism. In order to conceive capitalism, they go through schizophrenia, in which they see the effects and limits of our society. And in order to conceive schizophrenia, they go through Oedipal psychoanalysis, but like Attila: in their wal{e, nothing much is left standing. Between the two, between the description of familialism (the Oedipal triangle) and the project of schizoanalysis, there is the biggest chapter in Anti-Oedipus, the third, "Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men." This essentially concerns societies that are usually the ethnologists' object of study. What is ethnology doing here?

It ensures the consistency of Deleuze and Guattari's undertalcing, which is very strong, by shoring up their argument with non-Western examples (an examination of primitive societies and barbaric empires). If the authors were merely saying: in capitalism, things work this way, and in other types of societies, they work differently, we would not have left the realm of the most tedious comparatism. It isn't that at all, because they show "how things work differently." Anti-Oedipus is also a general theory of society and of societies. In other words, Deleuze and Guattari write about Savages and Barbarians what until now ethnologists have not written. 

It is certainly true (we didn't write it, but we knew it) that the world of Savages relies on an encoding of fluxes: nothing escapes the control of primitive societies, and if there is a slip-it happens-the society always finds a way to block it. It's also quite true that the imperial formations impose an overencoding on the savage elements integrated into the Empire, without necessarily destroying the encoding of the flux that persists on the local level of each element. The example of the Incan Empire illustrates Deleuze and Guattari's point of view perfectly. They say impressive things about the systems of cruelty such as writing on the body among the Savages, about writing's place in the system of terror among the Barbarians. It seems to me that ethnologists should feel at home in Anti-Oedipus. That does not mean that everything will be accepted right away. One should expect a certain reticence (to say the least) in the face of a theory that asserts the primacy of the genealogy of debt, replacing the structuralism of exchange. One might also wonder whether the idea of Earth does not somewhat crush that of territory. But all of this means that Deleuze and Guattari are not taking ethnologists lightly: they ask them real questions, questions that require reflection. 

Is this a return to an evolutionist interpretation of history? A return to Marx, beyond Morgan? Not at all. Marxism kind of found its way to the Barbarians (the Asiatic mode of production) but never quite knew what to do with the Savages. Why? Because if, in the Marxist perspective, the passage from barbarism (Oriental despotism or feudalism) to civilization (capitalism) is thinkable, on the other hand nothing allows one to think of the passage from savagery to barbarism. There is nothing in territorial machines (primitive societies) that would allow one to say that it anticipates what will come after: no caste system, no class system, no exploitation, not even work (if work, by essence, is alienated). So where does History, class struggle, deterritorialization, etc., come from? 

Deleuze and Guattari answer this question, for they do know what to make of the Savages. And their answer is, in my view, the most vigorous, most rigorous discovery in Anti-Oedipus: it concerns the theory of the "Urstaat," the cold monster, the nightmare, the state, which is the same everywhere and "which has always existed." Yes, the state exists in primitive societies, even in the tiniest band of nomad-hunters. It exists, but it is constantly being warded off, it is constantly being prevented from becoming a reality. A primitive society is a society that devotes all its efforts to preventing the chief from becoming a chief (and that can go as far as murder). If history is the history of class struggles (in societies where there are classes, of course) then one can say that the history of classless societies is the history of their struggle against the latent state, it's the history of their effort to encode the flux of power. 
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Certainly, Anti-Oedipus does not tell us why the primitive machine has, here or there, failed to encode the flux of power, this death which keeps rising from within. There is indeed not the slightest reason for a tribe to let its chief act the chief (we could demonstrate this through ethnographic examples). So where does the Urstaat so completely and suddenly come from? It comes from the outside, necessarily, and one might hope that the follow-up to Anti-Oedipus will tell us more about this. Encoding, overcoding, decoding and flux: these categories establish the theory of society, whereas the idea of Urstaat, whether warded off or triumphant, establishes the theory of History. This is radically new thought, a revolutionary way of thinking. ​

Pierre Rose: To me, what proves the practical importance of Deleuze and Guattari's book is that it challenges the virtue of commentary. It is a book that wages war. It concerns the situation of the working classes and Power. The angle is the critique of the analytical institution, but the question is not reduced to that. 

"The unconscious is the political," Lacan said in '67. Analysis made its claim to universality through that. It is when it gets close to the political that it legitimates oppression most blatantly. It is the trick by which the subversion of the Subject who allegedly knows, turns into submission in the face of a new transcendental trinity of Law, Signifier, Castration: "Death is the life of the Spirit, what use is there in rebelling?" The question of Power was erased by the conservative irony of tightest Hegelianism which undermines the question of the unconscious, from Kojeve to Lacan. 

This legacy, at least, had high standards. We're also done with the more sordid tradition of the theory of ideologies, which has haunted Marxist theory since the Second International, that is, since Jules Guesde's thought crushed Fourier's thought. 

What the Marxists did not manage to break down was the theory of reflection, or what has been done with it. Yet the Leninist metaphor of the "little screw" in the "big machine" is radiant: the overthrow of Power in people's minds is a transformation that is produced in all the cogs and wheels of the social machine. 
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​The way in which the Maoist concept of "ideological revolution" breaks with the mechanistic opposition of ideology and the politicoeconomic sweeps aside the reduction of desire to the "political" (Parliament and party struggles) and politics to the speeches (of the leader) in order to restore the reality of multiple wars on multiple fronts. This method is the only one to come near to the critique of the state in Anti-Oedipus. It is impossible for a critical work that starts with Anti-Oedipus to become a university operation, a lucrative activity for the whirling dervishes of Being and Time. It takes back its effect, conquered against the instruments of Power, in the real, it will help all the assaults against the police, the courts, the army, the power of the state in the factory, and outside. 

Gilles Deleuze: What Pividal said earlier, what Clastres just said seems absolutely right to me. The essential thing for us is the problem of the relationships between machines of desire and social machines, their different gears, their immanence in regard to each other. That is: how unconscious desire is an investment in social, economic and political fields. How sexuality, or what Leclaire perhaps would call the choice of sexual objects, only expresses such investments, which are in fact investments of flux. How our loves are derived from universal History and not from mommy and daddy. Through a beloved woman or man, a whole social space is invested, and can be in different ways. So we are trying to show how the fluxes flow into different social fields, what they flow on, what they are invested with, encoding, overcoding, decoding.

Can one say that psychoanalysis has touched upon all this in the slightest way, for example with its ridiculous explanations of fascism, when it makes everything stem from images of father and mother, or familialist and pious signifiers like the Name of the Father? Serge Leclaire says that if our system works, that's not a proo£ because everything works. That's certainly true. We say so as well: Oedipus, castration, that works very well. But what are their effects, at what cost do they work? That psychoanalysis appeases, relieves, that it teaches us resignation we can live with, that is certain. But we are saying that it has usurped its reputation of promoting, or even of participating, in an effective liberation. It has crushed phenomena of desire on a familial stage, crushed the whole political and economic dimension of the libido in a conformist code. As soon as the "patient" begins to talk about politics, to rave about politics, look at what psychoanalysis does with it. Look at what Freud did with Schreber. politics, look at what psychoanalysis does with it. Look at what Freud did with Schreber. 
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​As for ethnography, Pierre Clastres said it all or, in any case, the best for us. What we are trying to do is to put the libido in relation with the "outside." The flux of women among primitives is connected to the fluxes of herds, flows of arrows. All of a sudden, a group becomes nomadic. All of a sudden, warriors arrive at the village square, look at the China Wall. What are the flows of a society, what are the fluxes capable of subverting it, and what is the position of desire in all of this? Something always happens to the libido, and it comes from far off on the horizon, not from inside. Shouldn't ethnology, as much as psychoanalysis, be in contact with this outside world?

Maurice Nadeau: We should perhaps stop here .. . I would like to thank Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari for their elucidations regarding a book that is likely to revolutionize many disciplines and that seems even more significant to me in terms of the particular way in which its authors approach questions that concern us all. I also thank Frans;ois Chatelet for having organized and presided over this discussion and, of course, the specialists who were kind enough to participate. ​

Felix Guattari/Chaosophy/TEXTS AND INTERVIEWS 1972-1977 
Edited by Sylvere Lotringer 
Published by Semiotext(e) 2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057
​www.semiotexte.com

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 

We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infinite variabilities, the appearing and disappearing of which coincide. They are infinite speeds that blend into the immobility of the colorless and silent nothingness they traverse, without nature or thought. This is the instant of which we do not know whether it is too long or too short for time. We receive sudden jolts that beat like arteries. We constantly lose our ideas. That is why we want to hang on to fixed opinions so much, We ask only that our ideas are linked together according to a minimum of constant rules. All that the association of ideas has ever meant is providing; us with these protective rules-resemblance, continuity, causality-which enable us to put some order into ideas, preventing our "fantasy" (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire. But there would not be a little order in ideas if there was not also a little order in things or states of affairs, like an objective anti-chaos: "If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy..., my empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing red color to bring to mind heavy cinnabar."! And finally, at the meeting point of things and thought, the sensation must recur-that of heaviness whenever we hold cinnabar in our hands, that of red whenever we look at it as proof or evidence of their agreement with our bodily organs that do not perceive the present without imposing on it a conformity with the past. This is all that we ask for in order to make an opinion for ourselves, like a sort of "umbrella," which protects us from chaos. 
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Our opinions are made up from all this. But art, science, and philosophy require more: they cast planes over the chaos. These three disciplines are not like religions that invoke dynasties of gods, or the epiphany of a single god, in order to paint a firmament on the umbrella, like the figures of an Urdoxa from which opinions stem. Philosophy, science, and art want us to tear open the firmament and plunge into the chaos. We defeat it only at this price. And thrice victorious I have crossed the Acheron. The philosopher, the scientist, and the artist seem to return from the land of the dead. What the philosopher brings back from the chaos are variations that are still infinite but that have become inseparable on the absolute surfaces or in the absolute volumes that lay out a secant [secant] plane of immanence: these are not associations of distinct ideas, but reconnections through a zone of indistinction in a concept. The scientist brings back from the chaos variables that have become independent by slowing down, that is to say, by the elimination of whatever other variabilities are liable to interfere, so that the variables that are retained enter into determinable relations in a function: they are no longer links to properties in things, but finite coordinates on a secant plane of reference that go from local probabilities to a global cosmology. The artist brings back from the chaos varieties that no longer constitute a reproduction or the sensory in the organ but set up being or the sensory, a being of sensation, on an organic plane of composition that is able to restore the infinite. The struggle with the chaos that Cezanne and Klee have shown in action in painting, at the heart of painting, is found in another way in science and in philosophy: it is always a matter of defeating chaos by a secant plane that crosses it. Painters go through a catastrophe, or through a conflagration, and leave the trace of this passage on the canvas, as of the leap that leads them from chaos to composition. Mathematical equations do not enjoy a tranquil certainty, which would be the sanction of a dominant scientific opinion, but arise from an abyss that makes the mathematician "readily skip over calculations," in anticipation of not being able to bring about or arrive at the truth without "colliding here and there". And philosophical thought does not bring its concepts together in friendship without again being traversed by a fissure that leads them back to hatred or disperses them in the coexisting chaos where it is necessary to take them up again, to seek them out, to make a leap. It is as if one were casting a net, but the fisherman always risks being swept away and finding himself in the open sea when he thought he had reached port. The three disciplines advance by crises or shocks in different ways, and in each case, it is their succession that makes it possible to speak of "progress." It is as if the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy because another struggle develops and takes on the more importance the struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself. 

In a violently poetic text, Lawrence describes what produces poetry: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent-Wordsworth's spring or Cezanne's apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. Then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communication. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the "cliches" of opinion." The painter does not paint on an empty canvas, and neither does the writer write on a blank page; but the page or canvas is already so covered with preexisting, preestablished cliches that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision. When Fontana slashes the colored canvas with a razor, he does not tear the color in doing this. On the contrary, he makes us see the area of plain, uniform color, of pure color, through the slit. Art indeed struggles with chaos, but it does so in order to bring forth a vision that illuminates it for an instant, a Sensation. Even houses: Soutine's drunken houses come from chaos, knocking up against one another and preventing one another from falling back into it; Monet's house also rises up like a slit through which chaos becomes the vision of roses. Even the most delicate pink opens on to chaos, like flesh on the flayed body." A work of chaos is certainly no better than a work of opinion; art is no more made of chaos than it is of opinion. But if art battles against chaos it is to borrow weapons from it that it turns against opinion, the better to defeat it with tried and tested arms. Because the picture starts out covered with cliches, the painter must confront the chaos and hasten the destructions so as to produce a sensation that defies every opinion and cliche (how many times"). Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos, a composed chaos--neither foreseen nor preconceived. Art transforms chaotic variability into chaoid variety, as in Greco's black and green conflagration, for example, or Turner golden conflagration, or de Stael's red conflagration. Art struggles with chaos but it does so in order to render it sensory, even through the most charming character, the most enchanted landscape (Watteau). 
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​Science is perhaps inspired by a similar sinuous, reptilian movement. A struggle against chaos seems to be an essential part of science when it puts slow variability under constants or limits, when it thereby refers it to centers of equilibrium, when it subjects it to a selection that retains only a small number of independent variables within coordinate axes, and when between these variables it installs relationships whose future state can be determined on the basis of the present (determinist calculus) or, alternatively, when it introduces so many variables at once that the state of affairs is only statistical (calculus of probabilities). In this sense we speak of a specifically scientific opinion won from chaos, as we do of a communication defined sometimes by initial pieces of information, sometimes by large-scale pieces of information, which usually go from the elementary to the composite, or from the present to the future, or from the molecular to the molar. But, here again, science cannot avoid experiencing a profound attraction for the chaos with which it battles. If slowing down is the thin border that separates us from the oceanic chaos, science draws as close as it can to the nearest waves by positing relationships that are preserved with the appearance and disappearance of variables (differential calculus). The difference between the chaotic state where the appearance and disappearance or a variability blend together, and the semi-chaotic state that manifests a relationship as the limit of the variables that appear or disappear becomes ever smaller. As Michel Serres says of Leibniz, "There would be two infra-consciousnesses: the deeper would be structured like any set whatever, a pure multiplicity or possibility in general, an aleatory mixture of signs; the less deep would be covered by combinatory schemas of this multiplicity.?" One could conceive or a series of ​coordinates or phase spaces as a succession of filters, the earlier of which would be in each case a relatively chaotic state, and the later a chaoid state, so that we would cross chaotic thresholds rather than go from the elementary to the composite. The opinion offers us a science that dreams of unity, of unifying its laws, and that still searches today for a community of the four forces. Nevertheless, the dream of capturing a bit of chaos is more insistent, even if the most diverse forces stir restlessly within it. Science would relinquish all the rational unity to which it aspires for a little piece of chaos that it could explore.

Art takes a bit of chaos in a frame in order to form a composed chaos that becomes sensory, or from which it extracts a chaoid sensation as variety, but science takes a bit of chaos in a system of coordinates and forms a referenced chaos that becomes Nature, and from which it extracts an aleatory function and chaoid variables. In this way one of the most important aspects of modern mathematical physics appears in the action of "strange" or chaotic attractors: two neighboring trajectories in a determinate system of coordinates do not remain so and diverge in an exponential manner before coming together through operations of stretching and folding that are repeated and intersect with chaos? If equilibrium attractors (fixed points, limit cycles, cores) express science's struggle with chaos, strange attractors reveal its profound attraction to chaos, as well as the constitution of a chaosmos internal to modern science (everything that, in one way or another, was misrepresented in earlier periods, notably in the fascination for turbulences). We thus come back to a conclusion to which art led us: the struggle with chaos is only the instrument of a more profound struggle against opinion, for the misfortune of people comes from opinion. Science turns against opinion, which lends to it a religious taste for unity or unification. But it also turns within itself against properly scientific opinion as Urdoxa, which consists sometimes indeterminist prediction (Laplace's God) and sometimes in probabilistic evaluation (Maxwell's demon): by releasing itself from initial pieces of information and large-scale pieces of information, ​science substitutes for communication the condition of creativity defined by singular effects and minimal fluctuations. Creation is the aesthetic varieties or scientific variables that emerge on a plane that is able to crosscut chaotic variability. As for pseudosciences that claim to study the phenomena of opinion, the artificial intelligences of which they make use maintain as their models probabilistic processes, stable attractors, an entire logic of the recognition of forms; but they must achieve chaoid states and chaotic attractors to be able to understand both thought's struggle against opinion and its degeneration into opinion (one line in the development of computers is toward the assumption of a chaotic or chaoticizing system). 

This is what confirms the third case, which is no longer sensory variety or functional variable but conceptual variation as it appears in philosophy. Philosophy struggles in turn with the chaos as undifferentiated abyss or ocean of dissemblance. But this does not mean that philosophy ranges itself on the side of opinion, nor that opinion can take its place. A concept is not a set of associated ideas like an opinion. Neither is it an order of reasons, a series of ordered reasons that could rigorously constitute a kind of rationalised Urdoxa. To reach the concept it is not even enough for phenomena to be subject to principles analogous to those that associate ideas or things, or to principles that order reasons. As Michaux says, what suffices for "current ideas" does not suffice for "vital ideas"-those that must be created. Ideas can only be associated as images and can only be ordered as abstractions; to arrive at the concept we must go beyond both of these and arrive as quickly as possible at mental objects determinable as real beings. This is what Spinoza or Ficht« have already shown: we must make use of fictions and abstractions, but only so far as is necessary to get to a plane where we go from real being to real being and advance through the construction of concepts," We have seen how this result can be achieved to the extent that variations become inseparable according to zones of neighborhood or indiscernibility: they then cease being associable according to the caprice of imagination, or discernible and capable of twing' ordered according to the exigencies of reason, in order to form genuine conceptual blocs. A concept is a set of inseparable variations that is produced or constructed on a plane of immanence insofar as the latter crosscuts the chaotic variability and gives it consistency (reality). A concept is therefore a chaoid state par excellence; it refers back to a chaos rendered consistent, become Thought, mental chaosmos. And what would thinking be if it did not constantly confront chaos? Reason shows us its true face only when it "thunders in its crater."  Even the cogito is only an opinion, an Urdoxa at best, if we do not extract from it the inseparable variations that make it a concept, if we do not give up finding an umbrella or shelter in it, unless we stop presupposing an immanence that would be accommodated to itself, so that, on the contrary, it can set itself up on a plane of immanence to which it belongs that which takes it back to the open sea. In short, chaos has three daughters, depending on the plane that cuts through it: these are the Chaoids - art, science, and philosophy - as forms of thought or creation. We call Chaoids the realities produced on the planes that cut through the chaos in different ways. 

The brain is the junction - not the unity - of the three planes. Certainly, when the brain is considered as a determinate function it appears as a complex set both of horizontal connections and of vertical integrations reacting on one another, as is shown by cerebral "maps." The question, then, is a double one: are the connections preestablished, as if guided by rails, or are they produced and broken up in fields of forces? And are the processes of integration localized hierarchical centers, or are they rather forms (Gestalten) that achieve their conditions of stability in a field on which the position of center itself depends? In this respect the importance of Gestalt theory concerns the theory of the brain just as much as the conception of perception, since it is directly opposed to the status of the cortex as it appears from the point of view of conditioned reflexes. But, whatever point of view is considered, it is not difficult to show that similar difficulties are encountered whether paths are ready - made or self-producing', and whether centers are mechanical or dynamical. Ready-made paths that are followed step by step imply a preestablished track, but trajectories constituted within a field of forces proceed through resolution of tensions also acting step by step (for example, the tension of reconciliation between the fovea and the luminous point projected on the retina, the latter having a structure analogous to a cortical area): both schemas presuppose a "plane," not an end or a program, but a survey of the entire field. This is what Gestalt theory does not explain, any more than mechanism explains preassembly [premontage]. 
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It is not surprising that the brain, treated as a constituted object of science, can be an organ only of the formation and communication of opinion: this is because step-by-step connections and centered integrations are still based on the limited model of recognition (gnosis and praxis; "this is a cube"; "this is a pencil"), and the biology of the brain is here aligned on the same postulates as the most stubborn logic. Opinions are pregnant forms, like soap bubbles according to the Gestalt, with regard to milieus, interests, beliefs, and obstacles. Thus it seems difficult to treat philosophy, art, and even science as "mental objects," simple assemblages of neurones in the objectified brain, since the derisory model of recognition confines these latter within the doxa. If the mental objects of philosophy, art, and science (that is to say, vital ideas) have a place, it will be in the deepest of the synaptic fissures, in the hiatuses, intervals, and mean times of a nonobjectifiable brain, in a place where to go in search of them will be to create. It will be a bit like tuning a television screen whose intensities would bring out that which escapes the power of objective definition." That is to say, thought, even in the form it actively assumes in science, does not depend upon a brain made up of organic connections and integrations: according to phenomenology, thought depends on man's relations with the world with which the brain is necessarily in agreement because it is drawn from these relations, as excitations are drawn from the world and reactions from man, including their uncertainties and failures. "Man thinks, not the brain"; but this ascent of phenomenology beyond the brain toward a Being - in the world, through a double criticism of mechanism and dynamism, hardly gets us out of the sphere of opinions. It leads us only to an Urdoxa posited as original opinion, or meaning of meanings."? 

Will the turning point not be elsewhere, in the place where the brain is "subject," where it becomes a subject? It is the brain that thinks and not mans-the latter being only a cerebral crystallisation. We will speak of the brain as Cezanne spoke of the landscape: man absents from, but completely within the brain. Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject, Thought-brain. They are the three planes, the rafts on which the brain plunges into and confronts the chaos. What are the characteristics of this brain, which is no longer defined by connections and secondary integrations? It is not a brain behind the brain but, first of all, a state of the survey without distance, at ground level, a self-survey that no chasm, fold, or hiatus escapes. It is a primary, "true form" as Ruyer defined it: neither a Gestalt nor a perceived form but a form in itself that does not refer to any exterual point of view, any more than the retina or striated area of the cortex refers to another retina or cortical area' it is , an absolute consistent form that surveys itself independently of any supplementary dimension, which does not appeal therefore to any transcendence, which has only a single side whatever the number of its dimensions, which remains copresent to all its determinations without proximity or distance, traverses them at infinite speed, without limit speed, and which makes of them so many inseparable variations on which it confers an equipotential without confusion.!' We have seen that this was the status of the concept as pure event or reality of the virtual. And doubtless concepts are not limited to just one and the same brain since each one of them constitutes a "domain of survey," and the transitions from one concept to another remain irreducible insofar as a new concept does not render its copresence or ​equipotential of determinations necessary in turn. 

Nor will we say that every concept is a brain. But the brain, under its first aspect of absolute form, appears as the faculty of concepts, that is to say, as the faculty of their creation, at the same time that it sets up the plane of immanence on which concepts are placed, move, change order and relations, are renewed, and never cease being created. The brain is the mind itself. At the same time that the brain becomes subject or rather "superject," as Whitehead puts it the concept becomes object as created, as event or creation itself; and philosophy becomes the plane of immanence that supports the concepts and that the brain lays out. Cerebral movements also give rise to conceptual personae. 
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It is the brain that says I, but I is an other. It is not the same brain as the brain of connections and secondary integrations, although there is no transcendence here. And this I is not only the "I conceive" of the brain as philosophy, it is also the "I feel" of the brain as art. Sensation is no less brain than the concept. If we consider the nervous connections of excitation-reaction and the integrations of perception-action, we need not ask at what stage on the path or at what level sensation appears, for it is presupposed and withdrawn. The withdrawal is not the opposite but a correlate of the survey. Sensation is excitation itself, not insofar as it is gradually prolonged and passes into the reaction but insofar as it is preserved or preserves its vibrations. Sensation contracts the vibrations of the stimulant on a nervous surface or in a cerebral volume: what comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears. This is its way or responding to chaos. Sensation itself vibrates because it contracts vibrations. It preserves itself because it preserves vibrations: it is Monument, It resonates because it makes its harmonics resonate. Sensation is the contracted vibration that has become quality, variety. That is why the brain-subject is here called soul or force, since only the soul preserves by contracting that which matter dissipates, or radiates, furthers, reflects, refracts, or converts. Thus the search for sensation is fruitless if we go no farther than reactions and the excitations that they prolong, than actions and the perceptions that they rellect: this is because the soul (or rather, the force), as Leibniz said, does nothing, or does not act, but is only present; it preserves. Contraction is not an action but a pure passion, a contemplation that preserves the before in the after. Sensation, then, is on a plane that is different from mechanisms, dynamisms, and finalities: it is on a plane of composition where sensation is formed by contracting that which composes it, and by composing itself with other sensations that contract it in turn. The sensation is pure contemplation, for it is through contemplation that one contracts, contemplating oneself to the extent that one contemplates the elements from which one originates. Contemplating is creating, the mystery of passive creation, sensation. Sensation fills out the plane of composition and is filled with itself by filling itself with what it contemplates: it is "enjoyment" and "self-enjoyment."' It is a subject, or rather an inject. Plotinus defined all things as contemplations, not only people and animals but plants, the earth, and rocks. These are not Ideas that we contemplate through concepts but the elements of matter that we contemplate through sensation. The plant contemplates by contracting the elements from which it originates-light, carbon, and the salts-and it fills itself with colors and odors that in each case qualify its variety, its composition: it is sensation in itself.':' It is as if flowers smell themselves by smelling what composes them, first attempts of vision or of sense of smell, before being perceived or even smelled by an agent with a nervous system and a brain.

Of course, plants and rocks do not possess a nervous system. But, if nerve connections and cerebral integrations presuppose a brain force as faculty of feeling coexistent with the tissues, it is reasonable to suppose also a faculty of feeling that coexists with embryonic tissues and that appears in the Species as a collective brain; or with the vegetal tissues in the "small species." Chemical affinities and physical causalities themselves refer to primary forces capable preserving their long chains by contracting their elements and maling them resonate: no causality is intelligible without this subjective instance. Not every organism has a brain, and not all life is organic, but everywhere there are forces that constitute micro brains, of an organic life of things. We can dispense with Fechner's or Conan Doyle's splendid hypothesis of a nervous system of the earth only because the force of contracting or of preserving, that is to say of feeling appears only as a global brain in relation to the elements, contracted directly and to the mode of contraction, which diller depending on the domain and constitute precisely irreducible varieties. But, in the final analysis, the same ultimate elements and the same withdrawn force constitute a single plane of composition bearing' all the varieties of the universe. Vitalism has always had two possible interpretations: that of an Idea that acts, but is not that acts therefore only from the point of view of an external cerebral knowledge (from Kant to Claude Bernard); or that of a force that is but does not act that is, therefore, a pure internal Awareness (from Leibniz to Ruyer). If the second interpretation seems to us to be imperative it is because the contraction that preserves is always in a state of detachment in relation to an action or even to movement and appears as a pure contemplation without knowledge. This can be seen even in the cerebral domain par excellence of apprenticeship or the formation of habits: although everything seems to take place by active connections and progressive integrations, from one test to another, the tests or cases, the occurrences, must, as Hume showed, be contracted in a contemplating "imagination" while remaining distinct in relation to actions and to knowledge. Even when one is a rat, it is through contemplation that one "contracts" a habit. It is still necessary to discover, beneath the noise of actions, those internal creative sensations or those silent contemplations that bear witness to a brain. 

These first two aspects or layers of the brain-subject, sensation as much as the concept, are very fragile. Not only objective disconnections and disintegrations but all immense weariness results in sensations, which have now become woolly, letting escape the elements and vibrations it finds increasingly difficult to contract. Old age is this very weariness: then, there is either a fall into mental chaos outside of the plane of composition or a falling-back on ready-made opinions, on cliches that reveal that an artist, no longer able to create new sensations, no longer knowing how to preserve, contemplate, and contract, no longer has anything to say. The case of philosophy is a bit different, although it depends upon a similar weariness. In this case, weary thought, incapable of maintaining itself on the plane of immanence, can no longer bear the infinite speeds of the third kind that, in the manner of a vortex, measure the concept's copresence to all its intensive components at once (consistency). It falls back on the relative speeds that concern only the succession of movement from one point to another, from one extensive component to another, from one idea to another, and that measure simple associations without being able to reconstitute any concept. No doubt these relative speeds may be very great, to the point of simulating the absolute, but they are only the variable speeds of opinion, of discussion or "repartee," as with those untiring young people whose mental quickness is praised, but also with those weary old ones who pursue slow-moving opinions and engage in stagnant discussions by speaking all alone, within their hollowed head, like a distant memory of their old concepts to which they remain attached so as not to fall back completely into the chaos. 
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No doubt, as Hume says, causalities, associations, and integrations inspire opinions and beliefs in us that are ways of expecting and recognising something (including "mental objects"): it will rain, the water will boil, this is the shortest route, this is the same figure from a different view. But, although such opinions frequently slip in among scientific propositions, they do not form part of them; and science subjects these processes to operations of a different nature, which constitute an activity of knowing and refer to a faculty of knowledge as the third layer of a brain-subject that is no less creative than the other two. Knowledge is neither a form nor a force but function: "I function."  The subject now appears as an "eject," because it extracts elements whose principal characteristic is distinction, discrimination: limits, constants, variables, and functions, all those functions and prospects that form the terms of the scientific proposition. Geometrical projections, algebraic substitutions and transformations consist not in recognising something through variations but in distinguishing variables and constants, or in progressively discriminating the terms that tend toward successive limits. Hence, when a constant is assigned in a scientific operation, it is not a matter of contracting cases or moments in a single contemplation but one of establishing a necessary relation between factors that remain independent. The fundamental actions of the scientific faculty of knowledge appear to us in this sense to be the following: setting limits that mark a renunciation of infinite speeds and layout a plane of reference; assigning variables that are organized in series tending toward these limits; coordinating the independent variables in such a way as to establish between them or their limits necessary relations on which distinct functions depend, the plane of reference being a coordination in actuality; determining mixtures or states of affairs that are related to the coordinates and to which functions refer. It is not enough to say that these operations of scientific knowledge are functions of the brain; the functions are themselves the folds of a brain that layout the variable coordinates of a plane of knowledge (reference) and that dispatch partial observers everywhere. 

There is still an operation that clearly shows the persistence of chaos, not only around the plane of reference or coordination but in the detours of its variable surface, which are always put back into play. These are operations of branching and individuation: if states of affairs are subject to them it is because they are inseparable from the potentials they take from chaos itself and that they do not actualize without risk of dislocation or submergence. It is therefore up to science to make evident the chaos into which the brain itself, as subject of knowledge, plunges. The brain does not cease to coustitute limits that determine functions of variables in particularly extended areas; relations between these variables (connections) manifest all the more an uncertain and hazardous characteristic, not only in electrical synapses, which show a statistical chaos but in chemical synapses, which refer to a deterministic chaos.!" There are not so much cerebral centres as points, concentrated in one area and disseminated in another, and "oscillators," oscillating molecules that pass from one point to another. Even in a linear model like that of the conditioned reflex, Erwin Straus has shown that it was essential to understand the intermediaries, the hiatuses and gaps. Arborized paradigms give way to rhizomatic figures, a centred systems, networks of finite automatons, chaoid states. No doubt this chaos is hidden by the reinforcement of opinion generating facilitating paths, through the action of habits or models of recognition; but it will become much more noticeable if, on the contrary, we consider creative processes and the bifurcations they imply. And individuation, in the cerebral state of affairs, is all the more functional because it does not have the cells themselves for variables, since the latter constantly die without being renewed, making the brain a set of little deaths that puts constant death within us. It calls upon a potential that is no doubt actualized in the determinable links that derive from perceptions, but even more in the free effect that varies according to the creation of concepts, sensations, or functions themselves. 

The three planes, along with their elements, are irreducible: plane of immanence of philosophy, plane of composition of art, plane of reference or coordination of science; form of concept, force of sensation, function of knowledge; concepts and conceptual personae, sensations and aesthetic figures, figures and partial observers. Analogous problems are posed for each plane: in what sense and how is the plane, in each case, one or multiple-what unity, what multiplicity? But what to us seem more important now are the problems of interference between the planes that join up in the brain. A first type of interference appears when a philosopher attempts to create the concept or a sensation or a function (for example, a concept peculiar to Riemannian space or to irrational number); or when a scientist tries to create functions of sensations, like Fechner or in theories of color or sound, and even functions of concepts, as Lautman demonstrates for mathematics insofar as the latter actualizes virtual concepts; or when an artist creates pure sensations of concepts or functions, as we see in the varieties of abstract art or in Klee. In all these cases the rule is that the interfering discipline must proceed with its own methods. For example, sometimes we speak of the intrinsic beauty of a geometrical figure, an operation, or a demonstration, but so long as this beauty is defined by criteria taken from science, like proportion, symmetry, dissymmetry, projection, or transformation, then there is nothing aesthetic about it: this what Kant demonstrated with such force.l" The function must be grasped within a sensation that gives it percepts and affects composed exclusively by art, on a specific plane of creation that wrests it from any reference (the intersection of two black lines or the thickness of color in the right angles in Mondrian; or the approach of chaos through the sensation of strange attractors in Noland or Shirley Jaffe). 

​These, then, are extrinsic interferences, because each discipline remains on its own plane and utilises its own elements. But there is a second, intrinsic type of interference when concepts and conceptual personae seem to leave a plane of immanence that would correspond to them, so as to slip in among the functions and partial observers, or among the sensations and aesthetic figures, on another plane; and similarly in the other cases. These sidings are so subtle, like those of Zarathustra in Nietzsche's philosophy or of Igitur in Mallarme's poetry, that we find ourselves on complex planes that are difficult to qualify, In turn, partial observers introduce into science sensibilia that are sometimes close to aesthetic figures on a mixed plane. 
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Finally, there are interferences that cannot be localised. This is because each distinct discipline is, in its own way, in relation with a negative: even science has a relation with a nonscience that echoes its effects. It is not just a question of saying that art must form those of us who are not artists, that it must awaken us and teach us to fed, and that philosophy must teach us to conceive, or that science must teach us to know. Such pedagogics are only possible if each of the disciplines is, on its own behalf, in an essential relationship with the No that concerns it. The plane of philosophy is prephilosophical insofar as we consider it in itself independently of the concepts that come to occupy it, but nonphilosophy is found where the plane confronts chaos. Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience. They do not need the No as beginning, or as the end in which they would be called upon to disappear by being realized, but at every moment of their becoming or their development. Now, ifthe three Nos are still distinct in relation to the cerebral plane, they are no longer distinct in relation to the chaos into which the brain plunges. In this submersion it seems that there is extracted from chaos the shadow of the "people to come" in the form that art, but also philosophy and science, summon forth: mass-people, worldpeople, brain-people, chaos-people-nonthinking thought that lodges in the three, like Klee's nonconceptual concept or Kandinsky's internal silence. It is here that concepts, sensations, and functions become undecidable, at the same time as philosophy, art, and science become indiscernible, as if they shared the same shadow that extends itself across their different nature and constantly accompanies them.

excerpt from the book: What Is Philosophy?/Conclusion: From Chaos to the Brain
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 

​by ​Jacques Rancière

In this case, that constraint had taken the form of the command Jacotot had given. And it resulted in an important consequence, no longer for the students but for the master. The students had learned without a master explicator, but not, for all that, without a master. They didn’t know how before, and now they knew how. Therefore, Jacotot had taught them something. And yet he had communicated nothing to them of his science. So it wasn’t the masters science that the student learned. His mastery lay in the command that had enclosed the students in a closed circle from which they alone could break out. By leaving his intelligence out of the picture, he had allowed their intelligence to grapple with that of the book. Thus, the two functions that link the practice of the master explicator, that of the savant and that of the master had been dissociated. The two faculties in play during the act of learning, namely intelligence and will, had therefore also been separated, liberated from each other. A pure relationship of will to will had been established between master and student: a relationship wherein the master’s domination resulted in an entirely liberated relationship between the intelligence of the student and that of the book— the intelligence of the book that was also the thing in common, the egalitarian intellectual link between master and student. This device allowed the jumbled categories of the pedagogical act to be sorted out, and explicative stultification to be precisely defined. There is stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another. A person— and a child in particular— may need a master when his own will is not strong enough to set him on track and keep him there. But that subjection is purely one of will over will. It becomes stultification when it links an intelligence to another intelligence. In the act of teaching and learning there are two wills and two intelligences. We will call their coincidence stultification. In the experimental situation Jacotot created, the student was linked to a will, Jacotot’s, and to an intelligence, the book’s— the two entirely distinct. We will call the known and maintained difference of the two relations— the act of an intelligence obeying only itself even while the will obeys another will--emancipation. 
This pedagogical experiment created a rupture with the logic of all pedagogies. The pedagogues’ practice is based on the opposition between science and ignorance. The methods chosen to render the ignorant person learned may differ: strict or gentle methods, traditional or modern, active or passive; the efficiency of these methods can be compared. From this point of view, we could, at first glance, compare the speed of Jacotot’s students with the slowness of traditional methods. But in reality there was nothing to compare. The confrontation of methods presupposes a minimal agreement on the goals of the pedagogical act: the transmission of the master’s knowledge to the students. But Jacotot had transmitted nothing. He had not used any method. The method was purely the student’s. And whether one learns French more quickly or less quickly is in itself a matter of little consequence. The comparison was no longer between methods but rather between two uses of intelligence and two conceptions of the intellectual order. The rapid route was not that of a better pedagogy. It was another route, that of liberty— that route that Jacotot had experimented with in the armies of Year II, the fabrication of powders or the founding of the Ecole Polytechnique, the route of liberty responding to the urgency of the peril, but just as much to a confidence in the intellectual capacity of any human being. Beneath the pedagogical relation of ignorance to science, the more fundamental philosophical relation of stultification to emancipation must be recognized. There were thus not two but four terms in play. The act of learning could be produced according to four variously combined determinations: by an emancipatory master or by a stultifying one, by a learned master or by an ignorant one. 
The last proposition was the most difficult to accept. It goes without saying that a scientist might do science without explicating it. But how can we admit that an ignorant person might induce science in another? Even Jacotot s experiment was ambiguous because of his position as a professor of French. But since it had at least shown that it wasn’t the master’s knowledge that instructed the student, then nothing prevented the master from teaching something other than his science, something he didn’t know. Joseph Jacotot applied himself to varying the experiment, to repeating on purpose what chance had once produced. He began to teach two subjects at which he was notably incompetent: painting and the piano. Law students would have liked him to be given a vacant chair in their faculty. But the University of Louvain was already worried about this extravagant lecturer, for whom students were deserting the magisterial courses, in favor of coming, evenings, to crowd into a much too small room, lit by only two candles, in order to hear: “I must teach you that I have nothing to teach you.” The authority they consulted thus responded that he saw no point in calling this teaching. Jacotot was experimenting, precisely, with the gap between accreditation and act. Rather than teaching a law course in French, he taught the students to litigate in Flemish. They litigated very well, but he still didn’t know Flemish. 

The experiment seemed to him sufficient to shed light: one can teach what one doesn’t know if the student is emancipated, that is to say, if he is obliged to use his own intelligence. The master is he who encloses an intelligence in the arbitrary circle from which it can only break out by becoming necessary to itself. To emancipate an ignorant person, one must be, and one need only be, emancipated oneself, that is to say, conscious of the true power of the human mind. The ignorant person will learn by himself what the master doesn’t know if the master believes he can and obliges him to realize his capacity: a circle of power homologous to the circle of powerlessness that ties the student to the explicator of the old method (to be called from now on, simply, the Old Master). But the relation of forces is very particular. The circle of powerlessness is always already there: it is the very workings of the social world, hidden in the evident difference between ignorance and science. The circle of power, on the other hand, can only take effect by being made public. But it can only appear as a tautology or an absurdity. How can the learned master ever understand that he can teach what he doesn’t know as successfully as what he does know? He cannot but take that increase in intellectual power as a devaluation of his science. And the ignorant one, on his side, doesn’t believe himself capable of learning by himself, still less of being able to teach another ignorant person. Those excluded from the world of intelligence themselves subscribe to the verdict of their exclusion. In short, the circle of emancipation must be begun. 
­Here lies the paradox. For if you think about it a little, the “ method” he was proposing is the oldest in the world, and it never stops being verified every day, in all the circumstances where an individual must learn something without any means of having it explained to him. There is no one on earth who hasn’t learned something by himself and without a master explicator. Let’s call this way of learning “universal teaching” and say of it: “In reality, universal teaching has existed since the beginning of the world, alongside all the explicative methods. This teaching, by oneself, has, in reality, been what has formed all great men.” But this is the strange part: “ Everyone has done this experiment a thousand times in his life, and yet it has never occurred to someone to say to someone else: I’ve learned many things without explanations, I think that you can too. . . . Neither I nor anyone in the world has ventured to draw on this fact to teach others.” To the intelligence sleeping in each of us, it would suffice to say: age quod agis, continue to do what you are doing, “learn the fact, imitate it, know yourself, this is how. nature works.” Methodically repeat the method of chance that gave you the measure of your power. The same intelligence is at work in all the acts of the human mind.
But this is the most difficult leap. This method is practiced of necessity by everyone, but no one wants to recognize it, no one wants to cope with the intellectual revolution it signifies. The social circle, the order of things, prevents it from being recognized for what it is: the true method by which everyone learns and by which everyone can take the measure of his capacity. One must dare to recognize it and pursue the open verification of its power— otherwise, the method of powerlessness, the Old Master, will last as long as the order of things. 
Who would want to begin? In Jacotots day there were all kinds of men of goodwill who were preoccupied with instructing the people: rulers wanted to elevate the people above their brutal appetites, revolutionaries wanted to lead them to the consciousness of their rights; progressives wished to narrow, through instruction, the gap between the classes; industrialists dreamed of giving, through instruction, the most intelligent among the people the means of social promotion. All these good intentions came up against an obstacle: the common man had very little time and even less money to devote to acquiring this instruction. Thus, what was sought was the economic means of diffusing the minimum of instruction judged necessary for the individual and sufficient for the amelioration of the laboring population as a whple. Among progressives and industrialists the favored method was mutual teaching. This allowed a great number of students, assembled from a vast locale, to be divided up into smaller groups headed by the more advanced among them, who were promoted to the rank of monitors. In this way, the masters orders and lessons radiated out, relayed by the monitors, into the whole population to be instructed. Friends of progress liked what they saw: this was how science extended from the summits to the most modest levels of intelligence. Happiness and liberty would trickle down in its wake.
That sort of progress, for Jacotot, smelled of the bridle. ‘A perfected riding-school,” he said. He had a different notion of mutual teaching in mind: that each ignorant person could become for another ignorant person the master who would reveal to him his intellectual power. More precisely, his problem wasn’t the instruction of the people: one instructed the recruits enrolled under one’s banner, subalterns who must be able to understand orders, the people one wanted to govern— in the progressive way, of course, without divine right and only according to the hierarchy of capacities. His own problem was that of emancipation: that every common person might conceive his human dignity, take the measure of his intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it. The friends of Instruction were certain that true liberty was conditioned on it. After all, they recognized that they should give instruction to the people, even at the risk of disputing among themselves which instruction they would give. Jacotot did not see what kind of liberty for the people could result from the dutifulness of their instructors. On the contrary, he sensed in all this a new form of stultification. Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies. And whoever emancipates doesn’t have to worry about what the emancipated person learns. He will learn what he wants, nothing maybe. He will know he can learn because the same intelligence is at work in all the productions of the human mind, and a man can always understand another man’s words. Jacotot’s printer had a retarded son. They had despaired of making something of him. Jacotot taught him Hebrew. Later the child became an excellent lithographer. It goes without saying that he never used the Hebrew for anything— except to know what more gifted and learned minds never knew: it wasn't Hebrew. 
The matter was thus clear. This was not a method for instructing the people; it was a benefit to be announced to the poor: they could do everything any man could. It sufficed only to announce it. Jacotot decided to devote himself to this. He proclaimed that one could teach what one didn’t know, and that a poor and ignorant father could, if he was emancipated, conduct the education of his children, without the aid of any master explicator. And he indicated the way of that “universal teaching”— to learn something and to relate to it all the rest by this principle: all men have equal intelligence.
People were affected in Louvain, in Brussels, and in La Haye; they took the mail carriage from Paris and Lyon; they came from England and Prussia to hear the news; it was proclaimed in Saint Petersburg and New Orleans. The word reached as far as Rio de Janeiro. For several years polemic raged, and the Republic of knowledge was shaken at its very foundations. 
All this because a learned man, a renowned man of science and a virtuous family man, had gone crazy for not knowing Flemish.

​by ​Jacques Rancière

In 1818, Joseph Jacotot, a lecturer in French literature at the University of Louvain, had an intellectual adventure.
A long and eventful career should have made him immune to surprises: he had celebrated his nineteenth birthday in 1789. He was at that time teaching rhetoric at Dijon and preparing for a career in law. In 1792, he served as an artilleryman in the Republican armies. Then, under the Convention, he worked successively as instructor for the Bureau of Gunpowder, secretary to the Minister of War, and substitute for the director of the Ecole Polytechnique. When he returned to Dijon, he taught analysis, ideology, ancient languages, pure mathematics, transcendent mathematics, and law. In March 18 15, the esteem of his countrymen made him a deputy in spite of himself. The return of the Bourbons forced him into exile, and by the generosity of the King of the Netherlands he obtained a position as a professor at half-pay. Joseph Jacotot was acquainted with the laws of hospitality and counted on spending some calm days in Louvain.
Chance decided differently. The unassuming lecturers lessons were, in fact, highly appreciated by his students. Among those who wanted to avail themselves of him were a good number of students who did not speak French; but Joseph Jacotot knew no Flemish. There was thus no language in which he could teach them what they sought from him. Yet he wanted to re­spond to their wishes. To do so, the minimal link of a thing in common had to be established between himself and them. At that time, a bilingual edition of Télémaque was being published in Brussels. The thing in common had been found, and Telemachus made his way into the life of Joseph Jacotot. He had the book delivered to the students and asked them, through an interpreter, to learn the French text with the help of the translation. When they had made it through the first half of the book, he had them repeat what they had learned over and over, and then told them to read through the rest of the book until they could recite it. This was a fortunate solution, but it was also, on a small scale, a philosophical experiment in the style of the ones performed during the Age of Enlightenment. And Joseph Jacotot, in 1818, remained a man of the preceding century. 
​But the experiment exceeded his expectations. He asked the students who had prepared as instructed to write in French what they thought about what they had read: ​He expected horrendous barbarisms, or maybe a complete inability to perform. How could these young people, deprived of explanation, understand and resolve the difficulties of a language entirely new to them? No matter! He had to find out where the route opened by chance had taken them, what had been the results of that desperate empiricism. And how surprised he was to discover that the students, left to themselves, managed this difficult step as well as many French could have done! Was wanting all that was necessary for doing? Were all men virtually capable of understanding what others had done and understood?

Such was the revolution that this chance experiment unleashed in his mind. Until then, he had believed what all conscientious professors believe: that the important business of the master is to transmit his knowledge to his students so as to bring them, by degrees, to his own level of expertise. Like all conscientious professors, he knew that teaching was not in the slightest about cramming students with knowledge and having them repeat it like parrots, but he knew equally well that students had to avoid the chance detours where minds still incapable of distinguishing the essential from the accessory, the principle from the consequence, get lost. In short, the essential act of the master was to explicate: to disengage the simple elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds. To teach was to transmit learning and form minds simultaneously, by leading those minds, according to an ordered progression, from the most simple to the most complex. By the reasoned appropriation of knowledge and the formation of judgment and taste, a student was thus elevated to as high a level as his social destination demanded, and he was in this way prepared to make the use of the knowledge appropriate to that destination: to teach, to litigate, or to govern for the lettered elite; to invent, design, or make instruments and machines for the new avant-garde now hopefully to be drawn from the elite of the common people; and, in the scientific careers, for the minds gifted with this particular genius, to make new discoveries. Undoubtedly the procedures of these men of science would diverge noticeably from the reasoned order of the pedagogues. But this was no grounds for an argument against that order. On the contrary, one must first acquire a solid and methodical foundation before the singularities of genius could take flight. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
This is how all conscientious professors reason. This was how Joseph Jacotot, in his thirty years at the job, had reasoned and acted. But now, by chance, a grain of sand had gotten into the machine. He had given no explanation to his “students” on the first elements of the language. He had not explained spelling or conjugations to them. They had looked for the French words that corresponded to words they knew and the reasons for their grammatical endings by themselves. They had learned to put them together to make, in turn, French sentences by themselves: sentences whose spelling and grammar became more and more exact as they progressed through the book; but, above all, sentences of writers and not of schoolchildren. Were the schoolmaster’s explications therefore superfluous? Or, if they weren’t, to whom and for what were they useful?​

Thus, in the mind of Joseph Jacotot, a sudden illumination brutally highlighted what is blindly taken for granted in any system of teaching: the necessity of explication. And yet why shouldn’t it be taken for granted? No one truly knows anything other than what he has understood. And for comprehension to take place, one has to be given an explication, the words of the master must shatter the silence of the taught material.
And yet that logic is not without certain obscurities. Consider, for example, a book in the hands of a student. The book is made up of a series of reasonings designed to make a student understand some material. But now the schoolmaster opens his mouth to explain the book. He makes a series of reasonings in order to explain the series of reasonings that constitute the book. But why should the book need such help? Instead of paying for an explicator, couldn’t a father simply give the book to his son and the child understand directly the reasonings of the book? And if he doesn’t understand them, why would he be any more likely to understand the reasonings that would explain to him what he hasn’t understood? Are those reasonings of a different nature? And if so, wouldn’t it be necessary to explain the way in which to understand them? 
So the logic of explication calls for the principle of a regression ad infinitum: there is no reason for the redoubling of reasonings ever to stop. What brings an end to the regression and gives the system its foundation is simply that the explicator is the sole judge of the point when the explication is itself explicated. He is the sole judge of that, in itself, dizzying question: has the student understood the reasonings that teach him to understand the reasonings? This is what the master has over the father: how could the father be certain that the child has understood the book’s reasonings? What is missing for the father, what will always be missing in the trio he forms with the child and the book, is the singular art of the explicator: the art of distance. The masters secret is to know how to recognize the distance between the taught material and the person being instructed , the distance also between learning and understanding. The explicator sets up and abolishes this distance— deploys it and reabsorbs it in the fullness of his speech.
This privileged status of speech does not suppress the regression ad infinitum without instituting a paradoxical hierarchy. In the explicative order, in fact, an oral explication is usually necessary to explicate the written explication. This presupposes that reasonings are clearer, are better imprinted on the mind of the student, when they are conveyed by the speech of the master, which dissipates in an instant, than when conveyed by the book, where they are inscribed forever in indelible characters. How can we understand this paradoxical privilege of speech over writing, of hearing over sight? What relationship thus exists between the power of speech and the power of the master?
This paradox immediately gives rise to another: the words the child learns best, those whose meaning he best fathoms, those he best makes his own through his own usage, are those he learns without a master explicator, well before any master explicator. According to the unequal returns of various intellectual apprenticeships, what all human children learn best is what no master can explain: the mother tongue. We speak to them and we speak around them. They hear and retain, imitate and repeat, make mistakes and correct themselves, succeed by chance and begin again methodically, and, at too young an age for explicators to begin instructing them, they are almost all— regardless of gender, social condition, and skin color— able to understand and speak the language of their parents. 
And only now does this child who learned to speak through his own intelligence and through instructors who did not ex­plain language to him— only now does his instruction, properly speaking, begin. Now everything happens as though he could no longer learn with Hie aid of the same intelligence he has used up until now, as though the autonomous relationship between apprenticeship and verification were, from this point on, alien to him. Between one and the other an opacity has now set in. It concerns understanding, and this word alone throws a veil over everything: understanding is what the child cannot do without the explanations of a master— later, of as many masters as there are materials to understand, all presented in a certain progressive order. Not to mention the strange circumstance that since the era of progress began, these explications have not ceased being perfected in order better to explicate, to make more comprehensible, the better to learn to learn— without any discernible corresponding perfection of the said comprehension. Instead, a growing complaint begins to be heard: the explicative system is losing effectiveness. This, of course, necessitates reworking the explications yet again to make them easier to understand by those who are failing to take them in. 
The revelation that came to Joseph Jacotot amounts to this: the logic of the explicative system had to be overturned. Explication is not necessary to remedy an incapacity to understand. On the contrary, that very incapacity provides the structuring fiction of the explicative conception of the world. It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such. To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself. Before being the act of the pedagogue, explication is the myth of pedagogy, the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid. The explicator’s special trick consists of this double inaugural gesture. On the one hand, he decrees the absolute beginning: it is only now that the act of learning will begin. On the other, having thrown a veil of ignorance over everything that is to be learned, he appoints himself to the task of lifting it. Until he came along, the child has been groping blindly, figuring out riddles. Now he will learn. He heard words and repeated them. But now it is time to read, and he will not understand words if he doesn’t understand syllables, and he won’t understand syllables if he doesn’t understand letters that neither the book nor his parents can make him understand— only the master’s word. The pedagogical myth, we said, divides the world into two. More precisely, it divides intelligence into two. It says that there is an inferior intelligence and a superior one. The former registers perceptions by chance, retains them, interprets and repeats them empirically, within the closed circle of habit and need. This is the intelligence of the young child and the common man. The superior intelligence knows things by reason, proceeds by method, from the simple to the complex, from the part to the whole. It is this intelligence that allows the master to transmit his knowledge by adapting it to the intellectual capacities of the student and allows him to verify that the student has satisfactorily understood what he learned. Such is the principle of explication. From this point on, for Jacotot, such will be the principle of enforced stultification.

To understand this we must rid ourselves of received images. The stultifier is not an aged obtuse master who crams his students’ skulls full of poorly digested knowledge, or a malignant character mouthing half-truths in order to shore up his power and the social order. On the contrary, he is all the more efficacious because he is knowledgeable, enlightened, and of good faith. The more he knows, the more evident to him is the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignorant ones. The more he is enlightened, the more evident he finds the difference between groping blindly and searching methodically, the more he will insist on substituting the spirit for the letter, the clarity of explications for the authority of the book. Above all, he will say, the student must understand, and for that we must explain even better. Such is the concern of the enlightened pedagogue: does the little one understand? He doesn’t understand. I will find new ways to explain it to him, ways more rigorous in principle, more attractive in form— and I will verify that he has understood. 
​A noble concern. Unfortunately, it is just this little word, this slogan of the enlightened— understand— that causes all the trouble. It is this word that brings a halt to the movement of reason, that destroys its confidence in itself, that distracts it by breaking the world of intelligence into two, by installing the division between the groping animal and the learned little man, between common sense and science. From the moment this slogan of duality is pronounced, all the perfecting of the ways of making understood, that great preoccupation of men of methods and progressives, is progress toward stultification. The child who recites under the threat of the rod obeys the rod and that’s all: he will apply his intelligence to something else. But the child who is explained to will devote his intelligence to the work of grieving: to understanding, that is to say, to understanding that he doesn’t understand unless he is explained to. He is no longer submitting to the rod, but rather to a hierarchical world of intelligence. For the rest, like the other child, he doesn’t have to worry: if the solution to the problem is too difficult to pursue, he will have enough intelligence to open his eyes wide. The master is vigilant and patient. He will see that the child isn’t following him; he will put him back on track by explaining things again. And thus the child acquires a new intelligence, that of the master’s explications. Later he can be an explicator in turn. He possesses the equipment. But he will perfect it: he will be a man of progress. 

So goes the world of the explicated explicators. So would it have gone for Professor Jacotot if chance hadn’t put him in the presence of a fact. And Joseph Jacotot believed that all reasoning should be based on facts and cede place to them. We shouldn’t conclude from this that he was a materialist. On the contrary, like Descartes, who proved movement by walking, but also like his very royalist and very religious contemporary Maine de Biran, he considered the fact of a mind at work, acting and conscious of its activity, to be more certain than any material thing. And this was what it was all about: the fact was that his students had learned to speak and to write in French without the aid of explication. He had communicated nothing to them about his science, no explications of the roots and flexions of the French language. He hadn’t even proceeded in the fashion of those reformer pedagogues who, like the preceptor in Rousseau’s Emile, mislead their students the better to guide them, and who cunningly erect an obstacle course for the students to learn to negotiate themselves. He had left them alone with the text by Fénelon, a translation— not even interlinear like a Schoolbook— and their will to learn French. He had only given them the order to pass through a forest whose openings and clearings he himself had not discovered. Necessity had constrained him to leave his intelligence entirely out of the picture— that mediating intelligence of the master that relays the printed intelligence of written words to the apprentice’s. And, in one fell swoop, he had suppressed the imaginary distance that is the principle of pedagogical stultification. Everything had perforce been played out between the intelligence of Fénelon who had wanted to make a particular use of the French language, the intelligence of the translator who had wanted to give a Flemish equivalent, and the intelligence of the apprentices who wanted to learn French. And it had appeared that no other intelligence was necessary. Without thinking about it, he had made them discover this thing that he discovered with them: that all sentences, and consequently all the intelligences that produce them, are of the same nature. Understanding is never more than translating, that is, giving the equivalent of a text, but in no way its reason. There is nothing behind the written page, no false bottom that necessitates the work of an other intelligence, that of the explicator; no language of the master, no language of the language whose words and sentences are able to speak the reason of the words and sentences of a text. The Flemish students had furnished the proof: to speak about Télémaque they had at their disposition only the words of Télémaque. Fénelon’s sentences alone are necessary to understand Fénelons sentences and to express what one has understood about them. Learning and understanding are two ways of expressing the same act of translation. There is nothing beyond texts except the will to express, that is, to translate. If they had understood the language by learning Fénelon, it wasn’t simply through the gymnastics of comparing the page on the left with the page on the right. It isn’t the aptitude for changing columns that counts, but rather the capacity to say what one thinks in the words of others. If they had learned this from Fénelon, that was because the act of Fénelon the writer was itself one of translation: in order to translate a political lesson into a legendary narrative, Fénelon transformed into the French of his century Homer’s Greek, Vergil’s Latin, and the language, wise or naïve, of a hundred other texts, from children’s stories to erudite history. He had applied to this double translation the same intelligence they employed in their turn to recount with the sentences of his book what they thought about his book. 
But the intelligence that had allowed them to learn the French in Télémaque was the same they had used to learn their mother tongue: by observing and retaining, repeating and verifying, by relating what they were trying to know to what they already knew, by doing and reflecting about what they had done. They moved along in a manner one shouldn’t move along— the way children move, blindly, figuring out riddles. And the question then became: wasn’t it necessary to overturn the admissible order of intellectual values? Wasn’t that shameful method of the riddle the true movement of human intelligence taking possession of its own power? Didn’t its proscrip­tion indicate above all the will to divide the world of intelligence into two? The advocates of method oppose the nonmethod of chance to that of proceeding by reason. But what they want to prove is given in advance. They suppose a little animal who, bumping into things, explores a world that he isn’t yet able to see and will only discern when they teach him to do so. But the human child is first of all a speaking being. The child who repeats the words he hears and the Flemish student “ lost” in his Télémaque are not proceeding hit or miss. All their effort, all their exploration, is strained toward this: someone has
addressed words to them that they want to recognize and respond to, not as students or as learned men, but as people; in the way you respond to someone speaking to you and not to someone examining you: under the sign of equality.

The fact was there: they had learned by themselves, without a master explicator. What has happened once is thenceforth always possible. This discovery could, after all, overturn the principles of the professor Jacotot. But Jacotot the man was in a better position to recognize what great variety can be expected from a human being. His father had been a butcher before keeping the accounts of his grandfather, the carpenter who had sent his grandson to college. He himself had been a professor of rhetoric when he had answered the call to arms in 1792. His companions vote had made him an artillery captain, and he had showed himself to be a remarkable artilleryman. In 1793, at the Bureau of Powders, this Latinist became a chemistry instructor working toward the accelerated forming of workers being sent everywhere in the territory to apply Fourcroys discoveries. At Fourcroy’s own establishment, he had become acquainted with Vauquelin, the peasants son who had trained himself to be a chemist without the knowledge of his boss. He had seen young people arrive at the Ecole Polytechnique who had been selected by improvised commissions on the dual basis of their liveliness of mind and their patriotism. And he had seen them become very good mathematicians, less through the calculations Monge and Lagrange explained to them than through those that they performed in front of them.* He himself had apparently profited from his administrative functions by gaining competence as a mathematician— a competence he had exercised later at the University of Dijon. Similarly, he had added Hebrew to the ancient languages he taught, and composed an Essay on Hebrew Grammar. He believed, God knows why, that that language had a future. And finally, he had gained for himself, reluctantly but with the greatest firmness, a competence at being a representative of the people. In short, he knew what the will of individuals and the peril of the country could engender in the way of unknown capacities, in circumstances where urgency demanded destroying the stages of explicative progression. He thought that this exceptional state, dictated by the nation’s need, was no different in principle from the urgency that dictates the exploration of the world by the child or from that other urgency that constrains the singular path of learned men and inventors. Through the experiment of the child, the learned man, and the revolutionary, the method of chance so successfully practiced by the Flemish students revealed its second secret. The method of equality was above all a method of the will. One could learn by oneself and without a master explicator when one wanted to, propelled by one’s own desire or by the constraint of the situation.

Translated ​by Kristin Ross

Jacques Rancière /The Ignorant Schoolmaster/ Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation
Stanford University Press  
Stanford, California 
​© This book is printed on acid-free paper