by Jacques Ranciere 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)
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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.
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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
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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. 1.Universal Approximation PropertyThe 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. 1.1 Representation of any Boolean FunctionsThis 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. 1.2 Approximation of any Bounded Continuous FunctionsContinuing 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. 1.3 Approximation of Arbitrary FunctionsBefore 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. 2. The Necessity of DepthThe 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. 3. Backpropagation and Its PropertiesBefore 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. 3.1 Backpropagation Finds Global Optimal for Linear Separable DataGori 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. 3.2 Backpropagation Fails for Linear Separable DataOn 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. Haohan Wang and Bhiksha Raj - On the Origin of Deep Learning Language Technologies Institute School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University by PETER ZHANG When the velocity of progress increases beyond a certain point, it becomes indistinguishable from crisis. (Barfield 1993: 152) When the technology of a time is powerfully thrusting in one direction, wisdom may well call for a countervailing thrust. (McLuhan 1994: 70–71) By what means, in the current climate of passivity, could we unleash a mass awakening, a new renaissance? (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: Today, to engage oneself with freedom, and more radically, to engage oneself in the survival of the human species on the face [of] the Earth, implies strategies in order to delay progress. This reaction is today the only dignified one. We can no longer be revolutionaries, which means, to be opposed to the operative program through other programs. We can only be saboteurs, which means, to throw sand on the apparatus’ wheels. With effect: every current emancipatory action is, when intelligent, a subversive action. (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. REFERENCES --- Barfield, Owen (1993), A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and Fiction by Owen Barfield, Albany: SUNY Press. - Bergson, Henri (1911), Creative Evolution, New York: Henry Holt and Company. - Burke, Kenneth (1945), A Grammar of Motives, New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (2008), Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York: Harper Perennial. - Deleuze, Gilles (1983), Nietzsche and Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (1990), The Logic of Sense, New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (1991), Bergsonism, New York: Zone Books. ——— (1995), Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (1997), ‘Literature and life’, Critical Inquiry, 23:2, pp. 225–30. ——— (2001), Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, New York: Zone Books. - Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. - Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire (1987), Dialogues, New York: Columbia University Press. - Flusser, Vilém (1988), On memory (electronic or otherwise). A contribution to a roundtable at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, September 14. ——— (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. - Hayward, Jeremy (2008), Warrior-king of Shambhala: Remembering Chogyam Trungpa, Boston: Wisdom Publications. - Herrigel, Eugen (1953), Zen in the Art of Archery, New York: Pantheon Books. - Hershock, Peter (2012), Valuing Diversity: Buddhist Reflection on Realizing a More Equitable Global Future, Albany: SUNY Press. - Huxley, Aldous (1990), The Doors of Perception and Heave and Hell, New York: Harper & Row. - 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. - Lynn, Richard John (1999), The Classic of the Way and Virtue, New York: Columbia University Press. - Marsden, Jill (2002), After Nietzsche: Notes Towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. - McLuhan, Eric and Zingrone, Frank (eds) (1995), Essential McLuhan, New York: BasicBooks. - McLuhan, Marshall (1962), The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ——— (1994), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. - McLuhan, Marshall and Carson, David (2003), The Book of Probes, Corte Madera, CA: Ginko Press, Inc. - McLuhan, Marshall and Logan, Robert K. (1977), ‘Alphabet, mother of invention’, Et cetera, 34, pp. 373–83. - Mumford, Lewis (1967), The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. - Virilio, Paul (2006), Art and Fear, New York: Continuum. ——— (2009a), Grey Ecology, New York: Atropos Press. ——— (2009b), The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). - Virilio, Paul and Lotringer, Sylvere (2002), Crepuscular Dawn, New York: Semiotext(e). ——— (2008), Pure War, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). - Waley, Arthur (trans.) (1938), The Analects of Confucius, New York: Vintage Books. - Watts, Alan (2003), Become What You Are, Boston: Shambhala. ——— (2007), Does It Matter? Novato, California: New World Library. - Wilson, William Scott (2012), The One Taste of Truth: Zen and the Art of Drinking Tea, Boston: Shambhala. 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 ...
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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.)
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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)
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by David Roden 1.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. However, I will argue that if we are committed to developing human capacities and welfare using advanced (NBIC) technologies our commitment to other humans and our interest in remaining human cannot be overriding. This is because such policies couldengender posthumans. The prospect of a posthuman dispensation should, be properly evaluated rather than discounted. But, I will argue evaluation (accounting) is not liable to be achievable without posthumans. Thus transhumanists – who justify the technological enhancement and redesigning of humans on humanist grounds - have a moral interest in making posthumans or becoming posthuman that is not reconcilable with the priority humanists have traditionally attached to human welfare and the cultivation of human capacities. 2.To motivate this claim, I need to distinguish three related philosophical positions: Humanism, Transhumanism and Posthumanism and explain how they are related. Humanism (H) For the purposes of this argument, a philosophical humanist is anyone who believes that humans are importantly distinct from non-humans. For example, many humanists have claimed that humans are distinguished by their reasoning prowess from nonhuman animals. One traditional view common to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant and others is that humans are responsive to reasons while animals respond only to sensory stimuli and feeling. Being rational allows humans to bypass or suppress emotions such as fear or anger and (for better or worse) cultivate normatively sanctioned forms of action and affection. Responsiveness to reasons is both a cognitive and a moral capacity. The fact that I can distinguish between principles like equality and freedom, for example, allows me to see these as alternative principles of conduct: "The power to set an end - any end whatsoever— is the characteristic of humanity (as distinguished from animality)" (Kant 1948, 51). 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: Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature apolitical animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, iseither a bad man or above humanity; he is like the "Tribeless, lawless, hearthlessone, " whom Homer denounces - the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; hemay be compared to an isolated piece at draughts... Rousseau and Marx, likewise see the political as the setting in which humans become fully human. Liberal political philosophers might be more wary of attributing intrinsic value to politics but most see the social goods secured by it as the sine qua non of a decent existence. Transhumanism (H+) Transhumanists avow core humanist values and aspiration. They think that human-distinctive attributes like rationality and autonomy are good, as are human social emotions and human aesthetic sensibilities (Bostrom 2005). They also think that these capacities should be cultivated where possible and protected: e.g. by ensuring basic liberties and providing the resources for their fullest possible development. However, they believe that the traditional methods that humanists have used to develop human capacities are limited in their scope by the material constraints of human biology and that of nature more generally. Our biological and material substrate was not a political issue until relatively recently because we lacked the technology to alter it. Although Aristotle, Hume and Kant proposed theories of human nature, this nature was like an encapsulated black box. One could know what it did and why it did it, but not how it did it. Thus a basic cognitive function, such as imagination is described by Kant as a “hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations wecan divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty” (Kant 1978,A141- 2/B180 – 1). Transhumanists believe that prospective developments in a suite of technologies called the NBIC technologies and sciences will at last allow humans unprecedented control over their own and morphology. NBIC stands for Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science. Nanotechnology – very fast and precise atom-scale manufacturing, (ProgrammableMatter, New Materials, Post-Scarcity Economics). Biotechnology – manipulating life and living systems at the genetic/sub-cellular level, synthetic life (Genetic Enhancement, Ageing Cures) Information Technology – computing, cybernetics (Artificial Intelligence, BrainMachine Interfaces) Cognitive Science- understanding the architecture and implementation details of human and nonhuman minds (Cognitive Enhancement, Mind-Uploading). The smarter we are the more effectively we can develop techniques for developing human capacities: e.g. by eliminating starvation or scarcity with new agricultural and manufacturing techniques, finding cures for diseases or by becoming better democratic deliberators. Thus if advancing human welfare is a moral priority, and extending human cognitive capacities is the best way of achieving this, we should extend our cognitive capacities using NBIC technologies all other things being equal (A supplementary argument for a transhuman politics assumes that certain capacities are necessarily characterized in terms of some end or fulfilment. Thus they are exercised appropriately when their possessor strives to refine and improve them – See Mulhall 1998). The exercise of rationality requires many cognitive aptitudes: perception, working and long-term memory, general intelligence and the capacity to acquire cultural tools such as languages and reasoning methods. There appear to have been. There appear to have been significant increases the level of generalintelligence in industrialized countries during the twentieth century – particularly at the lower end of the scale. These may be explained by public health initiatives such as the removal of organic lead from paints and petrol, improved nutrition and free public education. These increases, if real, are a clear social good. However, there seems to be a limit to the effect of environmental factors upon cognition because the efficiency of our brains isconstrained by the speed, interconnectedness, noisiness and density of the neurons packed into our skulls. Thus the best scientists, philosophers or artists currently alive are no more intelligent or creative than Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz or Kant. There are far more thinkers on the planet than in Aristotle’s time and they are better equipped than ever before but their minds, it seems, are no more able than those of previous artists, scientists and philosophers. For transhumanist thinkers like Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil, this suggests that many major improvements of intelligence will require us to escape our biology by outsourcing ourthinking to non-biological platforms such as computing devices. The components of the fastest computers operate tens of millions times faster than the spiking frequency of thefastest human nerve cell (neuron) so this suggests an obvious way in which humans transcend the biological limitations on our brains. Many early 21st century humans offload the tedious tasks like arithmetic, memorizing character strings like phone numbers or searching for the local 24-hour dry cleaner to computing devices. Transhumanists claim that the process of outsourcing biologically basedcognition onto non-biological platforms is liable to accelerate as our artificially intelligent devices get more intelligent and as we devise smarter ways of integrating computing hardware into our neurocomputational wetware. Here the convergence of nanotechnology, information technology and biotechnology is liable to be key. Transhumanists see future-humans becoming ever more intimate with responsive computer systems that can extend physical functions using robotic limbs or arms well as cognitive functions such as perceptionor working memory (Kurzweil 2005). Thus it is possible that future humans or transhumans will be increasingly indistinguishable from their technology. Humans will become “cyborgs” or cybernetic organisms like the Borg in the TV series Star Trek with many of the functions associated with thinking, perceptionand even consciousness subserved by increasingly fast and subtle computing devices. As Trek aficionados will be aware, the Borg are not an attractive ideal for the humanist who values individual autonomy and reason. They are technological swarm intelligence – like anant or termite colony - whose individual members are slaved to goals of the Collective. Collectively the Borg possesses great cognitive powers and considerable technical prowess. However, these powers emerge from the interactions of highly networked “drones”, each of which has its human rationality, agency and sociability violently suppressed. However, many argue that it is naïve to associate the status of the cyborg with that of dehumanized machines. The cognitive scientist and philosopher Andy Clark has argued that the integration of technology into biology is a historical process that has defined human beings since the development of flint tools, writing and architecture. We are, in Clark’s words, “Natural Born Cyborgs” whose mental life has always extruded into culturally constructed niches such as languages and archives: The promise, or perhaps threatened, transition to a world of wired humans and semi-intelligent gadgets is just one more move in an ancient game. . . We are alreadymasters at incorporating nonbiological stuff and structure deep into our physical andcognitive routines. To appreciate this is to cease to believe in any post-human futureand to resist the temptation to define ourselves in brutal opposition to the very worldsin which so many of us now live, love and work (Clark 2003, 142). If this is the case, then perhaps the wired, transhuman future that I am sketching here will still be inhabited by beings whose aspirations and values will be recognizable to humanists like Aristotle, Rousseau and Kant. These transhuman descendants might still value autonomy, sociability and artistic expression. They will just be much better at being rational, sensitive and expressive. Perhaps, also, these skills will repose in bodies that are technologically modified by advanced biotechnologies tobe heal thier and far more resistant to ageing or damage than ours. But the capacities thatdefine that humanist tradition here are not obviously dependent on a particular kind of physical form. For this reason transhumanists believe that we should add morphological freedom – the freedom of physical form – to the traditional liberal rights of freedom of movement andfreedom of expression. We should be free do discover new forms of embodiment – e.g. new ways of integrating ourselves with cognitive technologies – in order to improve on the resultsof traditional humanizing techniques like liberal arts education or public health legislation. Posthumanism (SP) As someone who shares many of the humanist values and aspirations that I’ve described, I’ll admit to finding the transhuman itinerary for our future attractive. Perhaps some version of itwill also be an ecological and economic necessity as we assume responsibility for a planetary ecosystem populated by nine billion humans. However, there is a catch. While the technological prospectus I’ve given may result in beings that are recognizably like us: only immeasurably smarter, nicer, weller and more capable. It might produce beings that are not human at all in some salient respect. Such technologically engendered nonhumans – or posthumans – may not be the kinds of beings to which humanist values apply. They may still be immeasurably smarter and morerobust than we are, but also alien ways that we cannot easily understand. I call the position according to which there might be posthumans “Speculative Posthumanism” distinguish it from posthuman philosophies not directly relevant to this discussion. The speculative posthumanist is committed to the following claim: (SP) Descendants of current humans could cease to be human by virtue of a history of technical alteration. 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. Some argue that the self-shaping, reflective rationality that Kant thought distinguished humanity from animality is an obvious constituent of a “human essence”. An essential property of a kind is a property that no member of that kind can lack. If this is right, thenlosing the capacity for practical rationality by some technological process (as with the Borg) is a decisive, if unappealing, path to posthumanity. It can be objected of course that members of the human species (very young children) lack the capacity to exercise reflective rationality while other humans (individuals with severe mental disabilities) are not able to acquire it. Thus that it cannot be a necessary condition for humanity. Being rational might better be described as a qualification for moral personhood: where a person is simply a rational agent capable of shaping its own life and living on fair terms with other persons. If posthumans were to qualify as moral persons by this or some other criterion we appear tohave a basis for posthuman republicanism. The fact that other beings may be differentlyembodied from regular humans – intelligent robots, cyborgs or cognitively enhanced animals – does not, it seems, prevent us living with them as equals. However, it is possible to conceive of technological alterations producing life forms or worlds so alien that they are not recognizably human lives or worlds. In a 1993 article “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to survive in the posthuman era” the computer scientist Vernor Vinge argued that the invention of a technology for creating entities with greater than human intelligence would lead to the end of human dominion of the planet and the beginning of a posthuman era dominated by intelligences vastly greater than ours (Vinge 1993). For Vinge, this point could be reached via recursive improvements in the technology. If humans or human-equivalent intelligences could use the technology to create super-human-intelligences the resultant entities could make even more intelligent entities, and so on. Thus a technology for intelligence creation or intelligence amplification would constitute a singular point or “singularity” beyond which the level of mentation on this planet might increase exponentially and without limit. The form of this technology is unimportant for Vinge’s argument. It could be a powerful cognitive enhancement technique, a revolution in machine intelligence or synthetic life, or some as yet unenvisaged process. However, the technology needs to be “extendible” in as much that improving it yields corresponding increases in the intelligence produced. Our only current means of producing human-equivalent intelligence is non-extendible: “If we have better sex . . . it does not follow that our babies will be geniuses” (Chalmers 2010: 18). The “posthuman” minds that would result from this “intelligence explosion” could be so vast, according to Vinge, that we have no models for their transformative potential. The best we can do to grasp the significance of this “transcendental event” is to draw analogies with an earlier revolution in intelligence: the emergence of posthuman minds would be as much astep - change in the development of life on earth as the “The rise of humankind”. Vinge’s singularity hypothesis – the claim that intelligence-making technology wouldgenerate posthuman intelligence by recursive improvement – is practically and philosophically important. If it is true and its preconditions feasible, its importance mayoutweigh other political and environmental concerns for these are predicated on human invariants such as biological embodiment, which may not obtain following a singularity. However, even if a singularity is not technically possible – or not imminent – the Singularity Hypothesis (SH) still raises a troubling issue concerning our capacity to evaluate the long-run consequences of our technical activity in areas such as the NBIC technologies. This is because Vinge’s prognosis presupposes a weaker, more general claim to the effect that activity in NBIC areas or similar might generate forms of life which might be significantly alien or “other” to ours. If we assume Speculative Posthumanism it seems we can adopt either of two policies towards the posthuman prospect. Firstly, we can account for it: that is, assess the ethical implications of contributing to the creation of posthumans through our current technological activities. 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. We might not be able to coherently imagine what these impersonal phenomenologies are like (e.g. to say of them that they are “impersonal” is not to commit ourselves regarding the kinds of experiences might furnish). This failure may simply reflect the centrality of human phenomenological invariants to the ways humans understand the relationship between mind and world rather than any insight into the necessary structure of experience (Metzinger 2004: 213). Thomas Metzinger has argued that our kind of subjectivity comes in a spatio-temporal pocket of an embodied self and a dynamic present whose structures depends on the fact that our sensory receptors and motor effectors are “physically integrated within the body of a single organism”. Other kinds of life – e.g. “conscious interstellar gas clouds” or (somewhat more saliently) post-human swarm intelligences composed of many mobile processing units - might have experiences of a radically impersonal nature (Metzinger 2004:161). For this reason, we may just opt to discount the possibility of posthumanity when considering the implications of our technological activity: considering only its implications for humans or for their souped-up transhuman cousins. However, surely humans and transhumans have a duty to evaluate the outcomes of theirtechnical activities of these differences with a view to maximizing the chances of goodposthuman outcomes or minimizing the chances of bad ones (Principle of Accounting). From the human/transhuman of view some posthuman worlds might be transcendently good. But others could lead to a very rapid extinction of all humans, or something even more hellish. Charles Stross’ brilliant futurist novel - Accelerando envisages human social systems being superseded by Economics 2.0: a resource allocation system in which supply and demand relationships are computed too rapidly for those burdened by a “narrative chain” of personal consciousness to keep up. Under Economics 2.0 first person subjectivity is replaced “with a journal file of bid/request transactions” between autonomous software agents. Whole inhabited planets are pulverized and converted to more “productive” ends (Stross 2006: 177). This post-singularity scenario is depicted as comically dreadful in Stross’ novel. It is bad for humans and transhumans who prove incapable of keeping up with the massively accelerated intelligences implementing E 2.0. However, as the world-builder of Accelerando's future, Stross is able to stipulate the moral character of Economics 2.0. If we were confronted with posthumans, things might not be so easy. We cannot assume, for example, that a posthuman world lacking humans would be worse than one with humans but no posthumans. If posthumans were as unlike humans as humans are unlike non-human primates, a fair evaluation of their lives might be beyond us. Thus accounting for our contribution to making posthumans seems obligatory but may alsobe impossible with radically alien posthumans, while discounting our contribution is irresponsible. We can call this double bind: “the posthuman impasse”. If the impasse is real rather than apparent, then there may be no principles by which to assess the most significant and disruptive long-term outcomes of current developments in NBIC (and related) technologies. One might try to circumvent the impasse by casting doubt on Speculative Posthumanism. It is conceivable that further developments in technology, on this planet at least, will never contribute to the emergence of significantly nonhuman forms of life. However, Speculative Posthumanism is a weaker claim than SH and thus more plausible. Vinge’s essay specifies one recipe for generating posthumans. But there might be posthuman difference-makers that do not require recursive self-improvement. Moreover, we know that Darwinian natural selection has generated novel forms of life in the evolutionary past since humans are one such. Since there seems to be nothing special about the period of terrestrial history in which we live it seems hard to credit that comparable novelty resulting from some combination of biological or technological factors might not occur in the future. Is there any way round the impasse that is compatible with Speculative Posthumanism? I will argue that there is, though some ethicists may still prefer more venerable methods like hoping for the best. Is there any way round the impasse that is compatible with Speculative Posthumanism? I will argue that there is, though some ethicists may still prefer more venerable methods like hoping for the best. 3. Becoming PosthumanI’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. So if we make this strong epistemic obligation assumption: EOAS: If we are obliged to understand something, we are obliged to bring about the best conditions for understanding it (Strong Epistemic Obligation Principle). Then we a) have plausible route to Accounting and b) we are obliged by EOAS to adopt it: 1. Understanding posthumans is not possible only if there is a human cognitive essence. 2. There is no human cognitive essence (assumption). 3. Understanding posthumans is possible (1, 2) 4. Given their dated non-existence, the best conditions for understanding posthumansinvolve us making posthumans or becoming posthuman (True for any non-existent technological artefact). 5.We are obliged to attempt to understand posthumans (Accounting). 6.If we are obliged to understand something, we are obliged to bring about the bestconditions for understanding it (Strong Epistemic Obligation Principle). 7. We are obliged to bring about the best conditions for understanding posthumans (5,6) Conclusion: We are obliged to make posthumans or become posthuman (4, 7) However, EOAS does seem strong –perhaps excessively. There might be cases where we are obliged to understand something but have no overriding duty to choose the best method of doing this because it would be dangerous, cruel or otherwise deleterious to do so. We can, however, weaken the principle to: (EOAm) If we are obliged to understand something, we are obliged to bring about thenecessary (only) conditions for understanding it (Moderate Epistemic obligation). Then we can still generate our original conclusion by placing stronger constraints on understanding rather than stronger obligations to understand. We can do this by assuming that posthuman nature is a “diachronically emergent” phenomenon. A diachronically emergent behaviour or property occurs as a result of a temporally extended process, but cannot be inferred from the initial state of that process. It can only be derived by allowing the process to run its course (Bedau 1997). If posthumans are diachronically emergent phenomena their morally salient characteristicsand effects will not be predictable prior to their occurrence. While this constrains our ability to prognosticate about posthuman makers, it leaves other aspects of their epistemology quite open. As Paul Humphrey reminds us, diachronic emergence is a one-time event. Once we observe a formerly diachronically emergent event we are in a position to predict tokens of thesame type of emergent property from causal antecedents that have been observed to generateit in the past (Humphrey 2008). 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. References Bedau, Mark A. 1997. “Weak Emergence”. Philosophical Perspectives 11:375-399. Bostrom, N. 2005.‘ A History of Transhumanist Thought’ . Journal of Evolution and Technology 14: 1-25. Chalmers, David J. 2010. “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”. Journal of Consciousness Studies. Clark, Andy. 2003. Natural Born Cyborgs. Oxford: OUP. Cranor, Carl F. 2004. “Toward Understanding Aspects of the Precautionary Principle”. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 29 (3): 259 – 279. Humphreys, Paul. 2008. “Computational and Conceptual Emergence”. Philosophy of Science 75 (5): 584-594. Kant, I. (1778). Critique of Pure Reason Trans. Norman Kemp-Smith. London: Macmillan. Kant, Immanuel. 1948. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Trans. H.J. Paton under the title The Moral. Kurzweil, Ray (2005). The Singularity is Near . London: Duckworth. Law.London: Hutchinson. Metzinger, Thomas. 2004. Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity.Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press 2004. Stephen Mulhall (1998). “Species?being, teleology and individuality part II: Kant on human nature”, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 3:1, 49-58 Roden, David (2012). “The Disconnection Thesis”, in The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, edited by Amnon Eden, Johnny Søraker, Jim Moor, and Eric Steinhart. Springer Frontiers Collection. Stross, Charles. 2006. Accelerando. London: Orbit.Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: Tor. Vinge, Vernor. 1993. “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post -Human Era”, Vision-21:Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace. Accessed 8 December 2007. David Roden
Dark Posthumanism 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: For Cthulhu, in its creator’s words, “there is no language.” “The Thing cannot be described.” Even its figurine “resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy” (Lovecraft, “Call”). The Color Out of Space “obeyed laws that are not of our cosmos” (“Colour”). The Dunwich Horror was “an impossibility in a normal world” (“Dunwich”).(Miéville 2012, 379 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). References Brassier, R., 2011. Concepts and objects. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, pp.47-65. Bakker, R.S., 2009. Neuropath. Macmillan. Colebrook, C., 2014. Sex after life: Essays on extinction, Vol. 2. Open Humanities Press. Derrida, J. and Moore, F.C.T., 1974. White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy. New Literary History, 6(1), pp.5-74. Harman, G., 2012. Weird realism: Lovecraft and philosophy. John Hunt Publishing. Malpas, J. E. 1992. Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning: Holism, Truth, Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miéville, C., 2012. On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) Not Cannies. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 23(3 (86), pp.377-392. Roden, David. (2012), “The Disconnection Thesis”. In A. Eden, J. Søraker, J. Moor & E. Steinhart (eds), The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, London: Springer. Roden, David. 2013. “Nature’s Dark Domain: An Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology”. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 72: 169–88. Roden, David (2014), Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. London: Routledge. Roden, David (2017). ‘On Reason and Spectral Machines: Robert Brandom and Bounded Posthumanism’., in Philosophy After Nature edited by Rosie Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn, London: Roman and Littlefield, pp. 99-119. Roden (Unpublished). “Reduction, Elimination and Radical Uninterpretability: the case of hyperplastic agents” https://www.academia.edu/15054582/Reduction_Elimination_and_Radical_Uninterpretability O’Sullivan, S., 2010. From aesthetics to the abstract machine: Deleuze, Guattari and contemporary art practice. Deleuze and contemporary art, pp.189-207. Thacker, E., 2015. Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy. John Hunt Publishing. VanderMeer, J., 2014a. Annihilation: A Novel. Macmillan. VanderMeer, J., 2014b. Authority: A Novel. Macmillan VanderMeer, J., 2014c. Acceptance: A Novel. Macmillan. [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. [2] For example, one that supports pragmatic accounts like Davidsons’s with an ontology of shared worlds and temporal horizons. See, for example, Malpas 1992 and Roden 2014 Ch3. [3] I’ve given reasons to generalize this argument against hermeneutic a priori’s. Analytic Kantian accounts, of the kind championed by neo-Sellarsians like Brassier, cannot explain agency and concept-use without regressing to claims about ideal interpreters whose scope they are incapable of delimiting (Roden 2017). [4] In Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” we are told that the demonic entity called “Azathoth” lies “at the center of ultimate Chaos where the thin flutes pip mindlessly”. The description undermines its metaphorical aptness, however, since ultimate chaos would also lack the consistency of a center. The flute metaphor only advertises the absence of analogy; relinquishing the constraints on interpretation that might give it sense. We know only that terms like “thin flutes” designate something for which we have no concept. Commenting on his passage in his book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Graham Harman suggests that the “thin and mindless flutes” should be understood as “dark allusions to real properties of the throne of Chaos, rather than literal descriptions of what one would experience there in person” (Harman 2012: 36-7) 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.
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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
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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 .
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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.
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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)
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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. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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]. 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. 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. 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. 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 The Emancipatory MasterIn 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 Circle of PowerThe 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. 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 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? The Explicative OrderThus, 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. Chance and WillSo 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 This interview was conducted in Paris on 29 August 2002. Peter Hallward: One of your constant concerns has been to analyse and condemn any posture of mastery, particularly theoretical, pedagogical, “academic” mastery. So may I ask why you started teaching? How did you first get involved with education? Jacques Rancière: I became involved almost unwittingly, when I went through the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), which was set up to train teachers. I am, in the first instance, a student. I am one of those people who is a perpetual student and whose professional fate, as a consequence, is to teach others. “Teaching” obviously implies a certain position of mastery, “researcher” implies in some way a position of knowledge, “teacher-researcher” implies the idea of the teacher adapting a position of institutional mastery to one of mastery based on knowledge. At the outset, I was immersed in an Althusserian milieu, and consequently marked by its idea of forms of authority linked specifically to knowledge. But I was also caught up in the whole period of 1968, which threw into question the connection between positions of mastery and knowledge. I went through it all with the mentality of a researcher: I thought of myself, above all, as someone who did research and let others know about his research. Which meant, for example, that as a teacher I always resisted divisions into levels (advanced, intermediate, etc.). At the University of Paris VIII, where I have taught for most of my career, there were no levels in the philosophy department and I have always tried hard to maintain this lack of division into levels. In my courses I often have people of all different levels, in the belief that each student does what he or she can do and wants to do with what I say. P.H.: I suppose you must have made your initial decision to take up teaching and research path at about the age of fifteen or sixteen: did you grow up in a milieu where this option was encouraged? J.R.: As a child, I wanted to go to the ENS because I wanted to be an archaeologist. But by the time I got into the ENS I’d lost that sense of vocation. It has to be said, too, that this was a time when, for people like me, there wasn’t really much of a choice: you were good in either arts or sciences. And if you were good in arts, you aimed for what was considered the best in the field, which is to say, the ENS. That, rather than any vocation to teach, is how I ended up there. P.H.: And your initial collaboration with Althusser, was it a true conversion or the result of a theoretical interest? What happened at that point? J.R.: Several things happened. First, there was my interest in Marxism, which was not at all part of the world I’d been brought up in. For people like me, our interest in Marxism before Althusser had to follow some slightly unorthodox paths. The people who had written books on Marx, the authorities on Marx at the time, were priests like Father Calvez, who had written a hefty book on Marx’s thought, or people like Sartre. So, I arrived at Marxism with a sort of Marxian corpus which was hardly that of someone from the communist tradition, but which did provide access to Marx at a time when he didn’t have a university presence and when theory was not very developed within the French Communist Party. In relation to all that, Althusser represented a break. People told me about him when I first entered the ENS: they said he was brilliant. He really did offer a way of breaking with the Marxist humanist milieu in which we had been learning about Marx at the time. So, of course, I was enthusiastic, because Althusser was seductive, and I was working against myself in a way, because following Althusser’s thinking meant breaking with the sort of Marxism that I had known, that I was getting to know, and with those forms of thought that did not share its sort of theoretical engagement. P.H.: Would it be too simple to say that Althusser was a teacher, whereas Sartre was something else – not a researcher or a teacher, but a writer or an intellectual, I guess? J.R.: I don’t know if you can say “teacher.” In the end, Althusser taught relatively little. His words seduced us, but they were those of certain written texts as much as anything oral. He was like the priest of a religion of Marxist rigour, or of the return to the text. It wasn’t really the rigour of his teaching that appealed so much as an enthusiasm for his declaration that there was virgin ground to be opened up. His project to read Capital was a little like that: the completely naive idea that we were pioneers, that no one had really read Marx before and that we were going to start to read him. So there were two sides to our relation with Althusser. There was, first of all, a sense of going off on an adventure: for the seminar on Capital, I was supposed to talk, to explain to people the rationality of Capital, when I still hadn’t read the book. So I rushed about, rushed to start reading the various volumes of Capital, in order to be able to talk to others about them. There was this adventurous side, but there was something else as well: our roles as pioneers put us in a position of authority, it gave us the authority of those who know, and it instituted a sort of authority of theory, of those who have knowledge, in the midst of a political eclecticism. Thus, there was an adventurous side and a dogmatic side to it all, and they came together: the adventure in theory was at the same time dogmatism in theory. P.H.: It’s the role of the pioneer you’ve held on to. Did your break with Althusser take place during the events of May 1968? What happened exactly? J.R.: For me, the key moment wasn’t the events of May 1968, which I watched from a certain distance, but rather the creation of Paris VIII. With the creation of a philosophy department full of Althusserians, we had to decide what we were going to do. It was then I realised that Althusser stood for a certain power of the professor, the professor of Marxism who was so distant from what we had seen taking place in the student and other social movements it was almost laughable. At the time, what really made me react was a programme for the department put together by Etienne Balibar, a programme to teach people theoretical practice as it should be taught. I came out rather violently against this programme, and from that point began a whole retrospective reflection on the dogmatism of theory and on the position of scholarly knowledge we had adopted. That’s more or less how things started for me, not with the shock of 1968 but with the aftershock. Which is to say, with the creation of an institution, an institution where we were, in one sense, the masters. It was a matter of knowing what we were going to do with it, how we were going to manage this institutional mastery, if we were going to identify it with the transmission of science or not. P.H.: How did that work at Paris VIII? How did you bring the rather anarchic side of egalitarian teaching together with the institutional necessity of granting degrees, verifying qualifications, etc.? J.R.: At the time, I had thought very little about an alternative pedagogical practice. I had more or less given up on philosophy, the teaching of philosophy, and academic practice. What seemed important was direct political practice, so for a time I stopped reflecting on and thinking of myself as creating a new pedagogical practice or a new type of knowledge. This was linked to the fact that the diploma in philosophy at Paris VIII was quickly invalidated. We no longer gave national diplomas, so we were no longer bound by the criteria needed to award them. For a good while, then, I was absolutely uninterested in rethinking pedagogy: I was thinking, first, of militant practice and then, when that was thrown into question, of my practice as a researcher. For years my main activity was consulting archives and going to the Bibliothèque Nationale. My investment in the practice of teaching was fairly limited. P.H.: Did your courses continue more or less as usual, that is, as lectures? J.R.: Not entirely. It varied: there were lectures, but there were also courses which took the form of conversations and interventions. P.H.: La Leçon d’Althusser [1974] insists on the urgency of the time, a time full of possibilities, when it was still possible to present Marxism as a way of thinking an imminent victory. When you started to work on the nineteenth century and on proletarian thinking in the 1830s and 1840s, was that partly to compensate for philosophical defeat in the present? J.R.: I don’t think so. In the beginning, mine was a fairly naive approach: to try to understand what the words “workers’ movement,” “class consciousness,” “workers’ thought,” and so on really meant, and what they concealed. Basically, it was clear that the Marxism we had learned at school and had seen practised by Marxist organisations was a long way from the reality of forms of struggle and forms of consciousness. I wanted to construct a genealogy of that difference. P.H.: A difference that begins in the moment just before Marx? J.R.: What I wanted to do, starting out from the present, from 1968 (and from what had been proved inappropriate not only by Althusserianism and the Communist Party but also by the movements of the Left more generally), was to rewrite the genealogy of the previous century and a half. In particular, I wanted to return to the moment of Marxism’s birth to try to mark the difference between Marxism and what could have been an alternative workers’ tradition. This project soon swerved off course. Initially it was a matter of searching for genuine forms of workers’ thinking, a genuine workers’ movement. In relation to Marxism, then, mine was a rather identitarian perspective. But the more I worked the more I realised that what was at issue was precisely a form of movement that broke with the very idea of an identitarian movement. Being a “worker” wasn’t in the first instance a condition reflected in forms of consciousness or action; it was a form of symbolisation, the arrangement of a certain set of statements or utterances. I became interested in reconstituting the world that made these utterances [énonciations] possible. P.H.: Many of your contemporaries abandoned Marxism rather quickly, having come to the conclusion that the proletariat – as the universal subject of an eventually singular history, the class that incarnates the dissolution of class – seemed to lead more or less directly to the Gulag. You, on the other hand, continued to reflect on the proletariat in its singularity, but by resituating it in an historical sequence that seemed better able to anticipate the risks of dogmatism and dictatorship. It was still a question of a universal singularity, but a singularity in some sense absent from itself, a deferred, differentiated singularity. J.R.: In the end, what interested me was a double movement, the movement of singularisation and its opposite. On the one hand, there was a movement away from the properties that characterised the worker’s being and the forms of statement that were supposed to go along with that condition. On the other hand, this withdrawal itself created forms of universalisation, forms of symbolisation which also constituted the positivity of a figure. What interested me was always this play between negativation and positivation. I was interested in thinking it through as an impossible identification, since the intellectual revolution in question here was, in the first instance, a work of disidentification. The proletarians of the 1830s were people seeking to constitute themselves as speaking beings, as thinking beings in their own right. But this effort to break down the barrier between those who think and those who don’t came to constitute a sort of shared symbolic system, a system forever threatened by new positivation. As a result, you could no longer say that there had been an authentic workers’ movement somewhere, one that had managed to escape all forms of positivation and deterioration. I wanted to show that these forms of subjectivation or disidentification were always at risk of falling into an identitarian positivation, whether that was a corporative conception of class or the glorious body of a community of producers. It wasn’t a matter of opposing a true proletariat to some corporatist degeneration or to the Marxists’ proletariat; rather, I wanted to show how the figure of subjectivation itself was constantly unstable, constantly caught between the work of symbolic disincorporation and the constitution of new bodies. P.H.: Sometimes you present political practice as a sort of ex nihilo innovation, almost like the constitution of a new world, even if the world in question is extremely fragile, uncertain, ephemeral. Don’t you need to consider political innovation alongside the development of its conditions of possibility? I mean, for instance, on the political side of things, the role played by civic institutions and state organisations, the public space opened up, in Athens, in France, by the invention of democratic institutions (that is, the sort of factors you generally relegate to the sphere of the police, as opposed to the sphere of politics). And on the linguistic side of things, I’m thinking of some sort of preliminary equality of competences, a basic sharing of the symbolic domain. Such might be the objection of someone working in the Habermasian tradition. In short, which comes first: the people or the citizen? J.R.: I don’t know if you can say that one of those comes before the other, because so many of these things work retroactively. There is an inscription of citizenship because there is a movement which forces this inscription, but this movement to force inscription almost always refers back to some sort of pre-inscription. Men who are free and equal in their rights are always supposed already to exist in order that their existence can be proclaimed and their legal inscription enforced. I would say, though, that this equality or legal freedom produces nothing in itself. It exists only in so far as it defines a possibility, in so far as there is an effective movement which can grasp it and bring it into existence retroactively. For me the question of a return to origins is hopeless. If we take modern democracy, it is clear it works by recourse to an earlier inscription. There is always an earlier inscription, be it 1789, the American or English Revolution, Christianity, or the ancient city-state; as a result, the question of origins doesn’t really come up. As to the origin of origins, you can conceive it in different ways: it could be an originary anthropology of the political, but I know I don’t have the means or tools to think of it this way. It could be a transcendental condition, but, for me, this transcendental condition can work only as a process of retroactive demonstration. I don’t have any answers as to real, actual origins, and I don’t think you can set out something like a transcendental condition for there being people in general. P.H.: Nonetheless, you insist on an equality that exists once people speak, once they say to themselves they are equal as people who speak. Doesn’t this equality, however, establish at the very same time the conditions of an inequality between people who speak more or less well? An abstract equality between players taking part in the same game and following the same rules always exists, but obviously that doesn’t stop there being winners and losers. Is it a matter of a real equality or some sort of inclusion presupposed by participation in the game (which, in the end, is less a matter of equality than of formal similarity)? J.R.: It isn’t a formal similarity. Rather, it is the necessity of some minimal equality of competence in order for the game to be playable. As I said when I went back to Joseph Jacotot [discussed in detail in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987)] in Disagreement (1995): for an order to be transmitted and executed there has to be a minimal level of linguistic equality. This is the problem that troubles Aristotle: slaves need to understand what they are told. Aristotle gets around it by saying that the slave participates in language by understanding it but not possessing it. He discerns a kind of hard kernel in the possession of language, which he opposes to its simple use. But what is this possession, this hexis, which he opposes to the simple fact of understanding? He never explains it. I don’t have an irenic understanding of language as some sort of common patrimony which allows everyone to be equal. I’m just saying that language games, and especially language games that institute forms of dependence, presume a minimal equality of competence in order that inequality itself can operate. That’s all I’m saying. And I say this not to ground equality but to show, rather, how this equality only ever functions polemically. If it is a transcendental category, its only substance lies in the acts which make manifest its effectiveness. P.H.: Isn’t there a quasi-transcendental or at least transhistorical aspect to your idea that the political actor, the universal actor, is always to be found on the side of those who aren’t accounted for in the organisation of society? Politics as you conceive it always concerns the mobilisation of those who aren’t included in the social totality, who constitute a part of society which groups those who belong to no identifiable social part (or who have no particular share [part] of society) and who thus establish themselves as the incarnation of the universal interest. The examples you give (Athenian democracy, 1789, proletarian singularity, etc.), are they thus examples of a more general rule: that politics only happens when the excluded are able to affirm themselves in universal terms? What leads you to believe that this remains the rule in today’s and tomorrow’s political conflicts? It’s difficult to imagine a genuine conception of the universal in the USA today, for example, when people are so caught up in the conflict between the abstract power of the market and various communitarian and identitarian movements. J.R.: It isn’t a question of belief so much as of defining the political. There are clearly all sorts of government and many different modes of domination and management. If “politics” has a meaning, and a meaning that applies to everything we seek to elaborate as specifically political, for me its meaning is just this: there is a whole that constitutes itself other than as a collection of existing parts. For me, this is the only condition under which we can speak of politics. Which doesn’t stop there being states, communities, and collectivities, all of which operate according to their different logics. But we must distinguish this very specific form, where the capacity for power is attributed to those who have no particular ability to exercise it, where the accounting of the whole is dissociated from any organic conception, from the generality of forms of assembly, government, and domination. I think that the USA is indeed a barely political community. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t conflicts. But there is a whole structured system of being together which is not only thought but also massively practised in terms of belonging or membership (perhaps founded on sub-memberships), in terms of properties and rights attached to memberships, and so on. For me, all this defines an ethical rather than a political conception of community. This conception doesn’t necessarily have disastrous consequences, even though it seems to in the USA today. I see it as a question of definition: a community is political when it authorises forms of subjectivation for the uncounted, for those unaccounted for. This needn’t imply a visible category which identifies itself as “the excluded” and which wants to identify the community with itself – in that case we’d be back in ethics. I am simply saying that when there is a properly political symbolising of the community, then this, in the last instance, is where it lies. Inequality first takes effect as a miscounting or misaccounting, an inequality of the community to itself. Now as to the question: is politics still possible today? I would say that politics is always possible, there is no reason for it to be impossible. But is politics actually imminent? Here, obviously, I share your sadness, if not your pessimism, about the current state of public affairs. P.H.: There has often been, for instance, in the anti-colonial struggles, in the struggle for civil rights in the USA, a universalist moment, as you conceive it. This moment rarely lasts, however, and many Americans might say that under the circumstances there were good reasons to replace Martin Luther King with Malcolm X – in short, that in the reality of the struggle a choice had to be made: to adopt some sort of militant particularism or accept the effective end of the struggle. J.R.: I wouldn’t claim to advise American political movements, especially those that took place in the past. I think that we are always ambiguously placed, at constant risk of being coercively pinned down. Either you are taken in by a universal that is someone else’s, that is, you trust some idea of citizenship and equality as it operates in a society that in fact denies you these things, or you feel you must radically denounce the gap between idea and fact, usually by recourse to some identitarian logic. At this point, though, whatever you manage to achieve comes because you show yourself to belong to this identity. It’s very difficult, but I think that politics consists of refusing this dilemma and putting the universal under stress. Politics involves pushing both others’ universal and one’s own particularity to the point where each comes to contradict itself. It turns on the possibility of connecting the symbolic violence of a separation with a reclaiming of universality. The double risk of what goes by the name of liberalism still remains: on the one hand, submission to the universal as formulated by those who dominate; on the other hand, confinement within an identitarian perspective in those instances where the functioning of this universal is interrupted. No movement has really managed to avoid both risks altogether. P.H.: Does your idea of democracy presuppose democracy as it is supposed to have existed for several centuries, that is, where the place of power is in principle empty, such that it might be occupied, at least occasionally, by exceptional figures of universal interest? J.R.: I don’t think the place of power is empty. Unlike Claude Lefort, I don’t tie democracy to the theme of an empty place of power. Democracy is first and foremost neither a form of power nor a form of the emptiness of power, that is, a form of symbolising political power. For me, democracy isn’t a form of power but the very existence of the political (in so far as politics is distinct from knowing who has the right to occupy power or how power should be occupied), precisely because it defines a paradoxical power – one that doesn’t allow anyone legitimately to claim a place on the basis of his or her competences. Democracy is, first of all, a practice, which means that the very same institutions of power may or may not be accompanied by a democratic life. The same forms of parliamentary powers, the same institutional frameworks can either give rise to a democratic life, that is, a subjectivation of the gap between two ways of counting or accounting for the community, or operate simply as instruments for the reproduction of an oligarchic power. P.H.: It isn’t first and foremost a question of power? This is Slavoj Zizek’s objection, when he reads you (briefly) in his The Ticklish Subject [1999]: that you posit unrealistic, impossibly ideal conditions for political practice, and as a result end up just keeping your hands clean. How might we organise a true popular mobilisation without recourse to power, the party, authority, etc.? J.R.: I’m not saying you need absolutely no power. I’m not preaching spontaneity as against organisation. Forms of organisation and relations of authority are always being set up. The fact that I don’t much care for the practices of power and the forms of thought they engender is a secondary, personal concern. The central problem is theoretical. Politics may well have to do with powers and their implementation, but that doesn’t mean that politics and power are one and the same. The essential point is that politics cannot be defined simply as the organisation of a community. Nor can it be defined as the occupation of the place of government, which isn’t to say that this place doesn’t exist or doesn’t have to be occupied. It is the peculiar tendency of what I call the police to confuse these things. Politics is always an alternative to any police order, regardless of both the forms of power the former must develop and the latter’s organisation, form or value. P.H.: But, leaving aside the business of government, how are we to think the organisation of political authority in this sense? What sorts of organisation enable the insurrection of the excluded or the militant mobilisation of universal interest? It’s obvious you’re not a party thinker. But how are we to pursue a politics without party which will, nevertheless, remain a militant politics? Is this something that needs to be reinvented within each political episode? J.R.: I don’t think there are rules for good militant organisation. If there were, we’d already have applied them and we’d certainly be further along than we are at the moment. All I can define are forms of perception, forms of utterance. As to how these are then taken up by organisations, I must admit that I’ve never been able to endure any one of them for very long, but I know I have nothing better to propose. P.H.: Towards the end of Disagreement, I think, you say there was a genuine political movement in France at the time of the Algerian war, a subversive movement, that was clearly different from the movements of generalised “sympathy” which developed around the recent conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Timor. Can you see the beginnings of a new movement of this type, against the aggressor, in some currents of antiAmerican and anti-globalisation thinking? J.R.: That is difficult to define today. It’s easy to see that people are inspired by the dream of a political movement that would define itself in opposition to the domination of international capitalism. In reality, though, no political movement has yet defined itself against international capital. To this point they have been defined within national frameworks, or as relations between distinct peoples and their national states, or possibly as three-way relations, as was the case with Algeria and with the anti-imperialist struggles more generally. In such cases the national stage split on the international stage and allowed the uncounted to be accounted for. This threeway game, this political cause of the other, seems impossible today. The anti-globalisation movements want to take on capital as world government directly. But capital is precisely a government that isn’t one: it isn’t a state, and it doesn’t recognise any “people” inside or outside it who might serve as its point of reference or offer themselves for subjectivation. The idea of the multitude proposed by Negri and Hardt is a direct response to this absence of points at which political subjectivation might take hold. In the end, their idea rests on the transposition of a Marxian economic schema by which the forces of production break through the external framework of the relations of production. Capital escapes all political holds. The vast demonstrations of recent years have, in fact, sought to force it onto the political stage through the institutional or policing instruments by which it operates. The idea of a direct relation between the multitude and empire seems to me to bypass the problem of constituting a global political stage. I’m not sure that we will ever attain a directly political form of anti-capitalist struggle. I don’t think there can be an anti-imperialist politics which isn’t mediated by relations to states, bringing into play an inside and an outside. It’s easy to sense the difficulties that the anti-globalisation movements and their theorists have when it comes to current forms of imperialism – for example, with American politics after 11 September. It’s clear that the rules of the game are being mixed up today. At the time of the big anti-imperialist movements against the Vietnam War, for instance, we had a clear sense of who was the aggressor and who was under attack; we could play on the obvious contradiction between internal democratic discourse and external imperialist aggression. Again, when the USA supported such and such a dictatorship in the name of the struggle against communism, we could demonstrate the discrepancy between the declared struggle for democracy and the reality of supporting dictatorships. What has characterised the whole period after 11 September, however, has been the erasure of these signs of contradiction. The war in Afghanistan was presented directly as a war of good against evil. The contradictions between inside and outside, like those between words and deeds, have disappeared in favour of a general moralising of political life. The global reign of the economy is accompanied by a global reign of morality, in which it is harder for political action to find its stakes. P.H.: So, for you, national mediation remains essential and effective for the moment? J.R.: I think national mediation remains effective, yes, because it’s there that the relation between a structure of inclusion and what it excludes plays itself out. If lots of things are happening around those “without” – particularly around immigrants “without papers [sanspapiers]” – it is because the example of those without papers exposes the contradiction between affirming free circulation in a world without borders and the practices of keeping borders under surveillance and defining groups of people who cannot cross them. So, I think there are specific scenes of contradiction in confining some people while allowing others to circulate freely, but not one great nomadic movement of the multitude against empire or one overarching relation between the system and its peripheries. P.H.: A last question on politics. You say that “the essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space. It is to get the world of its subjects and its operations to be seen.” 2 You want to distinguish all political action – every instance of dissensus – from what you call the domain of the police, the domain of social coordination, the government, etc. But don’t we have to think of politics in relation to all the various ways that social inequality is structured, in relation, for example, to education, the organisation of urban life, conditions of employment, economic power, etc.? J.R.: There I think you’re attributing to me an idea that isn’t mine but Badiou’s. I think that it is indeed possible to define what is specific to politics, and in such a way as to separate political practice and the ideas of political community from all forms of negotiation between the interests of social groups. That’s why I say that the political isn’t the social. But I’d also say that the “social” as an historical configuration isn’t some sort of shameful empirical magma – situational,state-controlled, and so on (rather as Badiou imagines it) – which the political act would escape from. On the contrary, I think that the social is a complex domain, that what we call the social is a sort of mixture where the policing logics which determine how things are to be distributed or shared out among social groups encounter the various ways of configuring the common space which throw these same distributions into question. What we call “social benefits” are not only forms of redistributing national income; they are always also ways of reconfiguring what is shared or common. In the end, everything in politics turns on the distribution of spaces. What are these places? How do they function? Why are they there? Who can occupy them? For me, political action always acts upon the social as the litigious distribution of places and roles. It is always a matter of knowing who is qualified to say what a particular place is and what is done in it. So, I think that politics constantly emerges from questions traditionally thought of as social, that politics runs through labour movements and strikes, as well as around educational questions. You could say that the great political movements in France over the last twenty years have been connected with social questions, those of school and university, the status of employees, the sanspapiers or the unemployed – all fundamentally questions we might call social. But what does social mean? It means that what is at stake in institutional problems relating to school or nationality, or in problems arising around the distribution of work and wealth (employment or social benefits), is really the configuring of what is shared or common. I’m thinking, for example, of the movements in France that grew up around university selection in 1986, or around pensions and social benefits in the autumn of 1995. The battle over selection reminded us that the school and university system is not simply an instrument of “training” or “reproduction”; it is also the institution by which a society signifies to itself the meaning of the community that institutes it. In the same way, questions relating to pensions, health, and social security not only concern what are referred to as employees’ privileges and rights but also engage with the idea of the configuration of the common sphere. Whether healthcare and pensions operate by a system of redistribution and solidarity, or through individual private insurance, doesn’t just concern the privileges that employees may have acquired at any historical moment: it touches on the configuring of the common sphere. Within any so-called social negotiation there is always negotiation over what the community holds as common. P.H.: You quote Hannah Arendt from time to time: do you feel close to her conception of politics, politics as a place of negotiation, a place of performances and appearances (rather than timeless essences), of the vita activa valued above the pretensions of theory, philosophy, and the vita contemplativa? J.R.: Let’s say there’s some ground for agreement, coupled with a very strong disagreement (a disagreement which is also a reaction against the dominant uses and interpretations of her work today). The basis of agreement is that politics is a matter of appearance [apparence], a matter of constituting a common stage or acting out common scenes rather than governing common interests. That said, in Hannah Arendt this fundamental affirmation is linked to the idea that the political stage is blurred or cluttered by the claims of the social – I’m thinking of what she has to say about the French Revolution and the role of pity, where compassion for the “needy” clouds the purity of the political scene. To my mind this just returns us to some of the most traditional preconceptions about there being two distinct sorts of life: one able to play the political game of appearance and the other supposedly devoted to the sole reality of reproducing life. Her conception of political appearance simply mirrors the traditional (that is, Platonic) opposition, which reserves the legitimate use of appearance for one form of life alone. For me, by contrast, the appearance of the demos shatters any division between those who are deemed able and those who are not. Her opposition between the political and the social returns us to the old oppositions in Greek philosophy between men of leisure and men of necessity, the latter being men whose needs exclude them from the domain of appearance and, hence, from politics. A significant part of what I’ve managed to write about politics is a response to Hannah Arendt’s use, in On Revolution, of John Adams’s little phrase, that the misfortune of the poor lies in their being unseen. She says that such an idea could only have occurred to someone who was already a participant in the distinction of political life, that it cannot be shared by the poor in question, because they do not realise they are not seen – so a demand for visibility has no meaning for them. However, all my work on workers’ emancipation showed that the most prominent of the claims put forward by the workers and the poor was precisely the claim to visibility, a will to enter the political realm of appearance, the affirmation of a capacity for appearance. Hannah Arendt remains a prisoner of the tautology by which those who “cannot” think a thing do not think it. As I understand it, though, politics begins exactly when those who “cannot” do something show that in fact they can. That is the theoretical differend. As for practice, Arendt’s distinction between the political and the social has been widely used (during the events of December 1995 to justify governmental policies, for example). “Liberals” and “republicans” keep on reciting their Hannah Arendt to show that politics – which is to say, the state and the government – is above social pettiness, a realm of common collective interests that transcends corporate egoisms. P.H.: Michelet figures prominently in your The Names of History [1992]. Did his conception of history as the history of collective liberty, of a people becoming conscious of itself, the story of a hitherto silent people’s entry into speech, inspire you in one way or another? And what is Michelet’s relation, say, to the egalitarian thought of a Jacotot (as you describe it in The Ignorant Schoolmaster)? J.R.: I wanted, above all, to show how Michelet had invented a new form of mastery, one based on anonymous collective speech. It’s the Romantic thesis of a speech that is supposed to come from below in opposition to the dominant, noisy voices of the day. But Michelet never lets this speech from below actually be spoken, in its own terms. He converts the speech of revolutionary assemblies into a kind of discourse of the earth: a discourse of the fields or the city, of rural harvests or the mud in the streets, the silent word of truth as opposed to the actual words of speakers. What I tried to explain was the constitution of this paradigm of the silent masses (as distinct from the noisy people), the poetico-political paradigm of a great anonymous, unconscious thought expressing itself not through people’s words but through their silence, which then becomes a scientific paradigm in history and sociology. This wordless speech is something completely different from Jacotot and his affirmation of the capacity to speak of those who “don’t know how,” that is, his presupposition and verification of the equality of intelligences. There are two ways of thinking equality. It can be thought in terms of intellectual emancipation founded on the idea of man as a “literary animal” – an idea of equality as a capacity to be verified by anybody. Or it can be thought in terms of the indifferentiation of a collective speech, a great anonymous voice – the idea that speech is everywhere, that there is speech written on things, some voice of reality itself which speaks better than any uttered word. This second idea begins in literature, in Victor Hugo’s speech of the sewer that says everything, and in Michelet’s voice of the mud or the harvest. Later, this poetic paradigm becomes a scientific one. The obvious problem is that these two paradigms, these two ways of thinking the equality of the nameless, which are opposed in theory, keep mixing in practice, so that discourses of emancipation continually interweave the ability to speak demonstrated by anyone at all together with the silent power of the collective. P.H.: This is perhaps a good moment to move on to questions of aesthetics. Your book on Mallarmé came out in 1996, followed by La Parole muette in 1998. Since then you seem to have been working mainly on topics relating to art, literature, and aesthetics. Why the shift in interest? Was it something foreseen, something you had been anticipating? J.R.: I’ve never had a programme for the future, have never programmed my future projects. So, I’ve never imagined my work developing from politics to aesthetics, especially since it has always sought to blur boundaries. What I wanted to show when I wrote Nights of Labor [1981] was that a so-called political and social movement was also an intellectual and aesthetic one, a way of reconfiguring the frameworks of the visible and the thinkable. In the same way, in Disagreement I tried to show how politics is an aesthetic matter, a reconfiguration of the way we share out or divide places and times, speech and silence, the visible and the invisible. My personal interests have most often drawn me to literature and cinema, certainly more than to questions of socalled political science, which in themselves have never interested me very much. And if I was able to write on workers’ history it was because I always had in mind a whole play of literary references, because I saw workers’ texts through a number of models offered by literature, and because I developed a mode of writing and composition that allowed me to break, in practice, with the politics implicit in the traditional way of treating “workers’ speech,” as the expression of a condition. For me, the elaboration of a philosophical discourse or a theoretical scene is always also the putting into practice of a certain poetics. So, for me, there has never been a move from politics to aesthetics. Take the Mallarmé book, for example: what was the core of my interest in Mallarmé? Something like a community of scene [de scène]. The two prose poems in which Mallarmé stages the poet’s relation to the proletarian interested me initially because they replayed in a new way scenes that had already been acted out between proletarians and utopians. Even the relation between day and night in Mallarmé (which is generally understood through the themes of nocturnal anxiety and purity) reminded me strongly of why I had spoken of the nights of labour – not on account of workers’ misfortune, but in recognition of the fact that they annex the night, the time of rest, and thereby break the order of time which keeps them confined to a certain place. All this has always been absolutely connected for me,whether I take it as the aesthetics inherent in politics or the politics inherent in writing. Before Mallarmé, before La Parole muette, even before Disagreement, I led a seminar over several years on the politics of writing – that is, not on “how to write politics” but on “what is properly political in writing.” The work on Michelet was about the birth of a certain way of writing history. Does writing translate properties and transmit knowledge, or does it itself constitute an act, a way of configuring and dividing the shared domain of the sensible? These questions have continued to interest me. This politics of writing is, then, something completely different from the questions of representation by which politics and aesthetics are generally linked. Knowing how writers represent women, workers, and foreigners has never really interested me. My interest has always been in writing as a way of cutting up the universal singular. I’m thinking, for example, of Flaubert’s declarations, such as “I am interested less in the ragged than in the lice who feed on them,” which suppose a whole idea of the relation between the population of a novel and a social population (or the people in a political sense), and which posit a literary “equality” on a level that is no longer the one used to debate political equality. In its own way, literature too introduces a dissensus and a miscounting which are not those of political action. I am interested in the relation between the two, rather than, say, the various forms of “bias” in the representation of social categories in Flaubert. I began to reflect on these things via the question of writing history, and this reflection grew into the work on the politics of literature. Then, on account of my work on history and the writing of history, I happened to be asked by people in the arts to apply my analyses to their fields and problems – both in cinema, in which I’ve always had a personal interest (my first substantial text on cinema, for example, dealt with the relation between the “aesthetic” and the “social” in Rossellini’s Europe 51), and in other, less familiar fields (I was asked to speak, for example, “in my own way” about history for the exhibition Face à l’histoire organised by the Centre Pompidou in 1997). This last invitation gave me the opportunity to work on the question of contemporary art, a topic that had not interested me up to then. So there is a constant aesthetic core in everything I do, even if I only began to speak of literature explicitly at a particular moment, having addressed it until then through questions of history and what one might call the forms of workers’ literary appropriations. Then came requests for me to speak on topics about which I had no real competence. After what I had done, people thought I should have things to say about contemporary art, for example. I didn’t know a lot about it, but I wanted to respond to the challenge, because it was a chance to learn something new, and to learn how to talk about it. P.H.: Is there a conceptual parallel between the status of literature as you describe it in the wake of the Romantic revolution – on the one hand, the writing of everything, a systematic, encyclopaedic, even geological, literature in the manner of Cuvier and Balzac, and, on the other hand, a literature of nothing, a writing which ultimately refers only to itself – and the status of politics? As if they were both efforts to connect everything and nothing, exclusion and the universal? J.R.: There is no direct link between the two, but they both refer back to the same kernel of meaning. It is the ancient fictional or dramatic “plot,” the same organic, Aristotelian idea of the work that bursts either from a profusion of things and signs or from the rarefaction of events and senses. Broadly, literature as a regime of writing defines itself in the period after the Revolution not simply as another way of writing, another way of conceiving of the art of writing, but also as a whole mode of interpreting society and the place of speech in it. Literature defines itself around an idea of speech that somehow exceeds the simple figure of the speaker. It defines itself around the idea that there is speech [ parole] everywhere, and that what speaks in a poem is not necessarily what any speaking intention has put into it. This is all the legacy of Vico. Either that or there is language [langage] everywhere, which is Balzac’s position. There is something like a vast poem everywhere, which is the poem that society itself writes by both uttering and hiding itself in a multitude of signs. Or, if you take the Flaubertian perspective, the “book about nothing” comes to replace the lost totality. In fact, this is still Schiller’s idea of “naive” (as opposed to “sentimental”) poetry as the poem of a world (an idea with colossal force whose effects are still with us), an unconscious or “involuntary” poem for which we must produce an equivalent in the inverse form of a work that relates only to itself. The lost totality rediscovers itself on the side of nothing, but we must look at what this nothing means. Flaubert invents a sort of atomic micrology which is supposed to pulverise the democratic population. At the same time, he contributes to what we could call an aesthetic of equal intensities – opposed to the hierarchies of the representative tradition – which is the aesthetic he addresses to Madame Bovary even as he condemns her. There is a conflictual complicity between the fictional population and the social world that this literature addresses. Flaubert writes “against” Madame Bovary and the “democratic” confusion of art and life, but, at the same time, he writes from the “democratic” point of view which affirms the equality of subjects and intensities. It is this tension that interests me. Literature invents itself as another way of talking about the things politicians talk about. P.H.: For some time now, most aesthetic thinkers have emphasised the importance of modernism and the avant-garde. Among your contemporaries, you are one of the few to pay more attention to Romanticism and to the nineteenth century more generally. For you, the answers to many of the questions that aesthetics asks are still to be found in Schiller, Kant, and Balzac. What is the key to what you call the “aesthetic revolution”? 4 And how do you understand modernism? J.R.: What is the kernel of the aesthetic revolution? First of all, negatively, it means the ruin of any art defined as a set of systematisable practices with clear rules. It means the ruin of any art where art’s dignity is defined by the dignity of its subjects – in the end, the ruin of the whole hierarchical conception of art which places tragedy above comedy and history painting above genre painting, etc. To begin with, then, the aesthetic revolution is the idea that everything is material for art, so that art is no longer governed by its subject, by what it speaks of: art can show and speak of everything in the same manner. In this sense, the aesthetic revolution is an extension to infinity of the realm of language, of poetry. It is the affirmation that poems are everywhere, that paintings are everywhere. So, it is also the development of a whole series of forms of perception which allow us to see the beautiful everywhere. This implies a great anonymisation of the beautiful (Mallarmé’s “ordinary” splendour). I think this is the real kernel: the idea of equality and anonymity. At this point, the ideal of art becomes the conjunction of artistic will and the beauty or poeticity that is in some sense immanent in everything, or that can be uncovered everywhere. That is what you find all through the fiction of the nineteenth century, but it’s at work in the poetry too. For example, it’s what Benjamin isolated in Baudelaire, but it’s something much broader than that too. It implies a sort of exploding of genre and, in particular, that great mixing of literature and painting which dominates both literature and painting in the nineteenth century. It is this blending of literature and painting, pure and applied art, art for art’s sake and art within life, which will later be opposed by the whole modernist doxa that asserts the growing autonomy of the various arts. The entire modernist ideology is constructed on the completely simplistic image of a great anti-representational rupture: at a certain moment, supposedly, nobody represents any more, nobody copies models, art applies its own efforts to its own materials, and in the process each form of art becomes autonomous. Obviously all this falls apart in the 1960s and 1970s, in what some will see as the betrayal of modernism. I think, though, that modernism is an ideology of art elaborated completely retrospectively. “Modernists” are always trying to think Mallarmé and the pure poem, abstract painting, pure painting, or Schoenberg and a music that would no longer be expressive, etc. But if you look at how this came about, you realise that all the so-called movements to define a pure art were in fact completely mixed up with all sorts of other preoccupations – architectural, social, religious, political, and so on. The whole paradox of an aesthetic regime of art is that art defines itself by its very identity with non-art. You cannot understand people like Malevich, Mondrian or Schoenberg if you don’t remember that their “pure” art is inscribed in the midst of questions regarding synaesthesia, the construction of an individual or collective setting for life, utopias of community, new forms of spirituality, etc. The modernist doxa is constructed exactly at the point when the slightly confused mixture of political and artistic rationalities begins to come apart. Remarkably, modernism – that is, the conception of modern art as the art of autonomy – was largely invented by Marxists. Why? Because it was a case of proving that, even if the social revolution had been confiscated, in art the purity of a rupture had been maintained, and with it the promise of emancipation. I’m racing through all this, but I do think that this is what lies behind Adorno or Greenberg: a way of defining art’s radicality by the radicality of its separation, that is, a way of separating art radically from politics in order to preserve its political potential. Afterwards, this complicated dialectic is effaced in the simplistic dogma of modern art as the art of autonomy. Obviously, this dogma does not survive for very long in the face of the reality of artistic practices, and when it collapses, people start saying “Modernity is falling apart.” But it hasn’t: what has fallen apart is just a very partial and belated interpretation of what I call the aesthetic mode of art. P.H.: For you, then, is it a matter of maintaining the contradictory relations of the aesthetic regime, of continuing in the difficult dialectic of whole and nothing, of the controlled inscription of a generalised speech (an anonymous beauty, as you put it) and the vacillation of an ultimately silent discourse which affirms its own unconsciousness and lack of identity? You seek to continue in that tradition, rather than swing in the opposite direction, towards the postmodern, for example, or the post-whatever? J.R.: I don’t really believe in any great historical break between the modern and the postmodern. There aren’t many solid identifying features of an art that would be postmodern. How exactly are you going to define postmodernism? By the return of figuration? But that is only a part of it. By the mixing of genres? But that is much older. For me, if you want to think about breaks, it’s important first of all to understand the continuities – to understand, for example, that modern art was not born, as we still believe, in a simple and radical break with the realist tradition. The categories which allow us to think modern art were entirely elaborated in the modes of focusing perception that were first imposed by the realist novel: indifference to subject, closeups, the primacy of detail and tone. It was often novelists – like the Goncourts, for example – who as art critics reconfigured the logic of visibility in the field of painting (which was still very much figurative), valorising the pictorial material over its subject. Painting was seen in a new way, one that abstracted its subject, before painters themselves abandoned figuration. To take another example: installation is one of the central forms of contemporary art. But you will find an extraordinary passage in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris – a completely mad book from 1874, a great hymn to poetry, and to great modern poetry in particular. Now, what is this great modern poetry? And what is the great monument of the nineteenth century? Les Halles [the central markets] in Paris. Zola installs his painter, Claude Lantier – the impressionist painter as he sees him, a painter in search of modern beauty – in this monument of modernity. At one point, Lantier explains that his most beautiful work wasn’t a painting. Rather, he created his masterpiece the day he redid his cousin the butcher’s window display. He describes this display, how he arranged the blood sausages, dried sausages, turkeys, and hams. Still with Zola, in Au Bonheur des dames you also have the department store as a work of modern art, with the capitalist, Octave Mouret, as the great poet of modernity, the poet of commodity installation. At that time, then, no one made installations, but an indecision between the art of the canvas and the art of display can already be marked. An art that has only developed in the last twenty or thirty years had, in some sense, already found its thought and its visibility. The “modern” solitude of art has always also been its non-solitude. P.H.: But what if you take a hard modernist like Rothko, whose last paintings revolve around blackness, the absence of all figuration, all “application”? J.R.: Sure, but that was an idea of modernism, and, in any case, we know that it wasn’t an idea of pure painting, since at the time Rothko was becoming more and more mystical. Of course, you can cite painters who fit into the exemplary configuration of modernism as it was constructed, most notably, by Greenberg. But, in the end, what is this configuration? A short sequence of abstract art done at a particular moment by artists with roots in other traditions, notably surrealism. You absolutely cannot reduce modern art to this short sequence of abstract painting. Modern art is also constructivism, surrealism, Dadaism, or what have you – all forms of art with roots in Romantic thinking about the relation between art and life. I do not like modernism as a concept, because it seeks to identify an entire regime of art with a few particular manifestations that it presents as exemplary, interprets in an extraordinarily restrictive way, and links to an absolutely uncritical idea of historical time. P.H.: Moving on now to my last questions, which are mostly about the immediate intellectual context of your work. I was struck by your reading of Freud, or rather your literary recontextualising of Freud’s work in L’Inconscient esthétique [2001]. Can you generalise your position a little, to incorporate Lacan, for example – Lacan as a thinker who insists on the primacy of speech, precisely, on the equality and essential anonymity of all speech phenomena, on the importance of listening to speech qua speech, etc.? J.R.: I won’t say very much about Lacan, because I still really don’t know what to think of him or, rather, what to do with his thought. For me, the problem with Lacan is that he seemed to hover between several rationalities. When my generation got to know him, it was the time of the primacy of the signifier, the great structuralist moment, which in my view had no important consequences at the level of aesthetics. What became visible in Lacan’s subsequent work, though, was a whole other legacy, the surrealist legacy of Bataille and all those movements in the 1930s which wanted in their own way to rethink relations between aesthetics and politics – a whole way of thinking the obscure rationality of thought that was not dependent on the Freudian logic of the symptom (itself still linked to an Aristotelian poetics of history as causal agency). Lacan, in this sense, is a lot closer to Romantic poetics than Freud is. Where Freud deciphers, Lacan turns to the silent words that remain silent, those ultimate blocks of nonsense which can either become emblems of an absolute freedom (à la Breton) or embody the accursed share, the opaque residue impenetrable to sense (à la Bataille). For me, that is ultimately the difference Lacan brings. This difference shows up clearly in the uses Freud and Lacan make of Sophocles. Freud obviously constructs everything around the figure of Oedipus, around the link between incestuous desire as an object and an Enlightenment notion of rationality (the path of interpretation reconstituting the causal chain). Lacan, on the other hand, turns more and more to Antigone, whose desire does not lend itself to interpretation, who wants only to maintain a stubborn fidelity to the powers below, who, in short, wants only death. I’m thinking here of Lacan taking up Antigone at the time of the Baader-Meinhof gang, to show that she has nothing to do with the icon of “human rights in the face of power” that she is always made out to be, but is in fact closer to Ulrike Meinhof and the radicality of those German terrorists. The regime of signification in which Lacan constructs Antigone is a lot closer to what one might call aesthetic reason than the one Freud uses. The latter reconstitutes classical causalities, where Antigone as Lacan reconstructs her is closer to those half-obscure figures of the Romantic and realist periods. P.H.: Is there a risk that your idea of silent speech might lead eventually to silence pure and simple? Were you ever tempted by the mystical tendency that runs through the work of Bataille, precisely, and to some extent in the writings of Blanchot, Foucault and Deleuze, for example? J.R.: I’ve never been very receptive to either Blanchot and Bataille or to what the following generation – Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze – made of them. It all struck me as very opaque. Rather, I became sensitive to the question through the whole problematic of the will in the nineteenth century. In nineteenth-century literature, let’s say from Balzac to Zola – not forgetting Strindberg, Ibsen, and what happens in Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy – there is a long train of thought that either challenges the will or carries it on to some final disaster. Thinking through the death drive begins not just with stories of the will exacerbated (as with Vautrin) or annihilated (as with Oblomov) but also with the very logic of the regime of writing proper to literature, its way of untying the representative knot connecting action, will, and meaning. At the heart of the aesthetic regime of art there is an idea that the highest effort of the will is to identify itself with the highest point of its abdication. So, there is something like a race towards nothingness, which is always represented either as the hero’s experience or identified as the force which runs through writing itself. I have found the theme of the self-destructive will, which is generally thought to belong to Schopenhauer and nihilism in the strict sense, throughout the literature of the nineteenth century. And I have been rereading Freud’s texts in this light, telling myself that it is really this he is measuring himself against. I myself have no inclination towards a mysticism of silence, but I do feel very deeply the link between a whole regime of writing and the desertion of a certain idea of meaning, between the privilege of “silent speech” and the dramaturgy of a self-annihilating will. P.H.: Your own writing is often heavily ironic, motivated by a sort of dynamic indignation, as if the weight of history and silence has forced you into a constant movement. Is this part of your resistance to that nihilism? J.R.: I’d say that, broadly speaking, it is less a specific resistance to the death drive than part of a strategy of writing which tries to put uncertainty back into statements. On the one hand, it’s a matter of introducing some give or play into dogmatic statements. On the other, you can only contest the assurance of people with knowledge by undoing the way they construct their other: the one who does not know, the ignorant or naive one. That is why I wanted to give the discourse of workers’ emancipation its share of play, of doubt about what it says. I wanted to shatter the image of the naive believer in a land of milk and honey, to show that workers’ utopian discourse always also knows at a certain point that it is an illusory and ironic discourse, which does not entirely believe what it says. The problem is to challenge the distribution of roles. And that concerns the status of my own assertions as well. I have tried to offer them as probable assertions, to avoid a certain affirmative, categorical style which I know is elsewhere encouraged in philosophy, but which I have never been able to assimilate. P.H.: How do you situate yourself in terms of your contemporaries? Your interest in writing and the deferral of certainties seems to align you, up to a point, with Derrida; on the other hand, your interest in axiomatic equality and exceptional configurations of universality reminds me of Badiou. But it’s hard to imagine two more different conceptions of thought! J.R.: Those are not quite the markers by which I would define myself. I have read Derrida with interest but from a certain distance, from a slightly out-of-kilter perspective. (If I too, in my own way, have tried to reread the Phaedrus, it has been in order to find at work in that text not the pharmakon or dissemination but a sharing out of the modes of speech homologous to the sharing out of the destinies of souls and bodies – in short, a politics of writing.) If, among the thinkers of my generation, there was one I was quite close to at one point, it was Foucault. Something of Foucault’s archaeological project – the will to think the conditions of possibility of such and such a form of statement or such and such an object’s constitution – has stuck with me. As to Badiou, there are doubtless certain similarities: a shared fidelity to a common history, a similar way of thinking politics by separating it from state practice, the question of power, and the tradition of political philosophy. But there is also in Badiou this affirmative posture oriented towards eternity which I absolutely cannot identify with. His idea of absolute disconnection or unrelation, his idea of an event that stands out sharply against the situation, his idea of the quasi-miraculous force of the evental statement – these are ideas I absolutely cannot share. P.H.: To close, what are you working on now? What are your plans for the future? J.R.: I have no great project. I’m still working on questions around the aesthetic regime of art, the relation between aesthetics and politics, what you could call the politics of literature. I’ve now accumulated masses of material on the topic which I don’t quite know what to do with. I have enough material for a five-volume summa on the aesthetic regime of art, but no desire to write it. So I am trying to find forms of writing that allow me to make a few points about what is at stake in thinking the aesthetic regime of art – forms that, through significant objects and angles, allow me to say as much as possible in as little space as possible. I suppose my idea of research is indissociable from the invention of a way of writing. Peter Hallward French Department King’s College London The Strand London WC2R 2LS UK Jacques Rancière c/o Éditions Galilée 9, rue Linné 75005 Paris France ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 8 number 2 august 2003 by Gilles Deleuze What constitutes the unity of In Search of Lost Time? We know, at least, what does not. It is not recollection, memory, even involuntary memory. What is essential to the Search is not in the madeleine or the cobblestones. On the one band, the Search is not simply an effort of recall, an exploration of memory: search, recherche, is to be taken in the strong sense of the term, as we say "the search for truth." On the other hand, Lost Time is not simply "time past"; it is also time wasted, lost track of. Consequently, memory intervenes as a means of search, of investigation, but not the most profound means; and time past intervenes as a structure of time, but not the most profound structure. In Proust, the steeples of Martinville and Vinteuil's little phrase, which cause no memory, no resurrection of the past to intervene, will always prevail over the madeleine and the cobblestones of Venice, which depend on memory and thereby still refer to a "material explanation" (IIT, 3 7 5). What is involved is not an exposition of involuntary memory, but the narrative of an apprenticeship: more precisely, the apprenticeship of a man of letters. (III, 907). The Meseglise Way and the Guermantes Way are not so much the sources of memory as the raw materials, the lines 0f an apprenticeship. They are the two ways of a "formation." Proust constantly insists on this: at one moment or another, the hero does not yet know this or that; he will learn it later on. He is under a certain illusion, which he will ultimately discard. Whence the movement of disappointtments and revelations, which imparts its rhythm to the Search as a whole. One might invoke Proust's Platonism: to learn is still to remember. But however important its role, memory intervenes only as the means of an apprenticeship that transcends recollection both by its goals and by its principles. The Search is oriented to the future, not to the past. Learning is essentially concerned with signs. Signs are the object of a temporal apprenticeship, not of an abstract knowledge. To learn is first of all to consider a substance, an object, a being as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted. There is no apprentice who is not "the Egyptologist" of something. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood, a physician by becoming sensitive to the signs of disease. Vocation is always predestination with regard to signs. Everything that teaches us something emits signs; every act of learning is an interpretation of signs or hieroglyphs. Proust's work is based not on the exposition of memory, but on the apprenticeship to signs. From them it derives its unity and also its astonishing pluralism. The word sign, signe, is one of the most frequent in the work, notably in the final systematization that constitutes Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouve). The Search is presented as the exploration of different worlds of signs that are organized in circles and intersect at certain points, for the signs are specific and constitute the substance of one world or another. We see this at once in the secondary characters: Norpois and the diplomatic code, Saint-Loup and the signs of strategy, Cottard and medical symptoms. A man can be skillful at deciphering the signs of one realm but remain a fool in every other case: thus Cottard, a great clinician. Further, in a shared realm, the worlds are partitioned off: the Verdurin signs have no currency among the Guermantes; conversely Swann's style or Charlus's hieroglyphs do not pass among the Verdurins. The worlds are unified by their formation of sign systems emitted by persons, objects, substances; we discover no truth, we learn nothing except by deciphering and interpreting. But the plurality of worlds is such that these signs are not of the same kind, do not have the same way of appearing, do not allow themselves to be deciphered in the same manner, do not have an identical relation with their meaning. The hypothesis that the signs form both the unity and the plurality of the Search must be verified by considering the worlds in which the hero participates directly. The first world of the Search is the world of, precisely, worldliness. There is no milieu that emits and concentrates so many signs, in such reduced space, at so great a rate. It is true that these signs themselves are not homogeneous. At one and the same moment they are differentiated, not only according to classes but according to even more fundamental "families of mind." From one moment to the next, they evolve, crystallize, or give way to other signs. Thus the apprentice's task is to understand why someone is "received" in a certain world, why someone leases to be so, what signs do the worlds obey, which signs are legislators, and which high priests. In Proust's work, Charlus is the most prodigious emitter of signs, by his worldly power, his pride, his sense of theater, his face, and his voice. But Charlus, driven by love, is nothing at the Verdurins', and even in his own world he will end by being nothing when its implicit laws have changed. What then is the unity of the worldly signs? A greeting from the Due de Guennantes is to be interpreted, and the risk of error are as great in such an interpretation as in a diagnosis. The same is true of a gesture of Mme Verdurin. The worldly sign appears as the replacement of an action or a thought. It stands for action and for thought. It is, therefore, a sign that does not refer to something else, to a transcendent signification or to an ideal content, but has usurped the supposed value of its meaning. This is why worldliness, judged from the viewpoint of actions, appears to be disappointing and cruel, and from the viewpoint of thought, it appears stupid. One does not think and one does not act, but one makes signs. Nothing funny il said at the Verdurins', and Mme Verdurin does not laugh, but Cottard makes a sign that be is saying something funny, Mme Verdurin makes a sign that she is laughing, and her sign is so perfectly emitted that M. Verdurin, not to be outdone, seeks in his turn for an appropriate mimicry. Mme de Guermantes has a heart that is often hard, a mind that is often weak, but she always has charming signs. She does not act for her friends, she does not think with them, she makes signs to them. The worldly sign does not refer to something, it "stands for" it, claims to be equivalent to its meaning. It anticipates action as it does thought, annuls thought as it does action, and declares itself adequate: whence its stereotyped aspect and its vacuity. We must not thereby conclude that such signs are negligible. The apprenticeship would be imperfect and even impossible if it did not pass through them. These signs are empty, but this emptiness confers upon them a ritual perfection, a kind of formalism we do not encounter elsewhere. The worldly signs are the only ones capable of causing a kind of nervous exaltation, expressing the effect upon us of the persons who are capable of producing them (ll, 547- 52). The second circle is that of love. The Charlus-Jupien encounter makes the reader a party to the most prodigious exchange of signs. To fall in love is to individualize someone by the signs he bears or emits. It is to become sensitive to these signs, to undergo an apprenticeship to them (thus the slow individualization of Albertine in the group of young girls). It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, bot love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation. The beloved appears as a sign, a "soul"; the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted. What is involved, here, is a plurality of worlds; the pluralism of love does not concern only the multiplicity of loved beings, but the multiplicity of souls or worlds in each of them. To love its to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved. This is why it ts 50 easy for us to fall in love with women who are not of our "world" nor even our type. It is also why the loved Women are often linked to landscapes that we know sufficiently to long for their reflection in a woman's eyes but are then reflected from a viewpoint so mysterious that they become virtually inaccessible, unknown landscapes: Albertine envelops, incorporates, amalgamates "the beach and the breaking waves." How can we gain access to a landscape that is no longer the one we see, but on the contrary the one in which we are seen? "If she had seen me, what could I have meant to her? From what universe did she select me?" There is, then, a contradiction of love. We cannot interpret the signs of a loved person without proceeding into worlds that have not waited for us in order to take form, that formed themselves with other persons, and in which we are at first only an object among the rest. The lover wants his beloved to devote to him her preferences, gestures, her caresses. But the beloved's gestures, at the very moment they are addressed to us, still express unknown world that excludes us. The beloved gives signs of preference; but because these signs are the same as those that express worlds to which we do not belong, each preference by which we profit draws the image of the possible world in which others might be or are preferred. "All at once his jealousy, as if it were the shadows of his love, was completed by the double of this new smile that she had given him that very evening and that, conversely now, mocked Swann and was filled with love for someone else ... So he came to regret each pleasure be enjoyed with her, each caress they devised whose delight he had been so indiscreet as to reveal to her, each grace be discerned in her, for he knew that a moment later they would constitute new instruments of his torment" (I, 276). The contradiction of love consists of this: the means -we count on to preserve us from jealousy are the very means that develop that jealousy, giving it a kind of autonomy, of independence with regard to our love. The first law of love is subjective: subjectively, jealousy is deeper than love, it contains love's truth. This is because jealousy goes further in the apprehension and interpretation of signs. It is the destination of love, its finality. Indeed, it is inevitable that the signs of a loved person, once we "explicate" them, should be revealed as deceptive: addressed to us, applied to us, they nonetheless express worlds that exclude us and that the beloved will not and cannot make us know. Not by virtue of any particular ill will on the beloved's part, but of a deeper contradiction, which inheres in the nature of love and in the general situation of the beloved. Love's signs are not like the signs of worldliness; they are not empty signs, standing for thought and action. They are deceptive signs that can be addressed to us only by concealing what they express: the origin of unknown worlds, of unknown actions and thoughts that give them a meaning. They do not excite a superficial, nervous exaltation, but the suffering of a deeper exploration. The beloved's lies are the hieroglyphics of love. The interpreter of love's signs is necessarily the interpreter of lies. His fate is expressed in the motto To love without being loved. What does the lie conceal in love's signs? All the deceptive signs emitted by a loved woman converge upon the same secret world: the world of Gomorrah which itself no longer depends on this or that woman (though one Woman can incarnate it better than another) but is the feminine possibility par excellence, a kind of a priori that jealousy discovers. This is because the world expressed by the loved woman is always a world that excludes us, even when she gives us a mark of preference. But, of all the worlds, which one is the most excluding, the most exclusive? "It was a terrible terra incognita on which I had just landed, a new phase of unsuspected sufferings that was ginning. And yet this deluge of reality that submerges us, if it is real in relation to our timid presuppositions, was nonetheless anticipated by them ... The rival was not lib me, the rival's weapons were different; I could not join battle on the same terrain, give Albertine the same pleasures, nor even conceive just what they might be" (IT, Ill 20). We interpret all the signs of the loved woman, but at the end of this painful decipherment, we come up against the sign of Gomorrah as though against the deepest expression of an original feminine reality. The second law of Proustian love is linked with the first: objectively, heterosexual loves are less profound than homosexual ones; they find their truth in homosexuality. For if it is true that the loved woman's secret is the secret of Gomorrah, the lover's secret is that of Sodom. In analogous circumstances, the hero of the Search surprises Vinteuil and surprises Charlus (II, 608). But Mile Vinteuil explicates all loved women, as Charlus implicates all lovers. At the infinity of our loves, there is the original Hermaphrodite. But the Hermaphrodite is not a being capable of reproducing itself. Far from uniting the sexes. it separates them, it is the source from which there continually proceed the two divergent homosexual series, that of Sodom and that of Gomorrah. It is the Hermaphrodite that possesses the key to Samson's prophecy: "The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart" (II, 616). To the point where heterosexual loves are merely the appearance that covers the destination of each sex, concealing the accursed depth where everything is elaborated. And if the two homosexual series are the most profound, it is still in terms of signs. The characters of Sodom, the characters of Gomorrah compensate by the intensity of the sign for the secret to which they are bound. Of a woman looking at Albertine, Proust writes: "One would have said that she was making signs to her as though with a beacon" (II,851). The entire world of love extends from the signs revealing deception to the concealed signs of Sodom and of Gomorrah. The third world is that of sensuous impressions or qualities. It may happen that a sensuous quality gives us a strange joy at the same time that it transmits a kind of imperative. Thus experienced, the quality no longer appears as a property of the object that now possesses it, hut as the sign of an altogether different object that we must try to decipher, at the cost of an effort that always risks failure. It is as if the quality enveloped, imprisoned the soul of an object other than the one it now designates. We develop "this quality, this sensuous impression, like a tiny Japanese paper that opens under water and releases the captive form (I, 47). Examples of this kind are the most famous in the Search and accelerate at its end (the final revelation of "time regained" is announced by a multiplication of signs). But whatever the examples-madeleine, steeples, trees, cobblestones, napkin, noise of a spoon or pipe- we witness the same procedure. First a prodigious joy, so that these signs are already distinguished from the preceding ones by their immediate effect. Further, a kind of obligation is felt, the necessity of a mental effort to seek the sign's meaning (yet we may evade this imperative, out of laziness, or else our investigations may fail out of impotence or bad luck, as in the case of the trees). Then, the sign's meaning appears, yielding to us the concealed object-Combray for the madeleine, young girls for the steeples, Venice for the cobblestones ... It is doubtful that the effort of interpretation end there. For it remaips to be explained why, by the solicitation of the madeleine, Combray is not content to rise up again as it was once present (simple association of ideas) but rises up absolutely, in a form that was never experienced, in its "essence" or its eternity. Or, what amounts to the same thing, it remains to be explained why we experience so intense and so particular a joy. In an important text, Proust cites the madeleine as a case of failure "I had then postponed seeking the profound causes" (III 867). Yet, the madeleine looked like a real success, from a certain viewpoint: the interpreter had found its meaning, not without difficulty, in the unconscious memory of Combray. The three trees, on the contrary, are a real failure because their meaning is not elucidated. We must then assume that in choosing the madeleine as an example of inadequacy, Proust is aiming at a new stage of interpretation, an ultimate stage. This is because of the sensuous qualities or impressions, even properly interpreted, are not yet in themselves adequate signs. But they are no longer empty signs, giving us a factitious exaltation like the worldly signs. They are no longer deceptive signs that make us suffer, like the signs of love whose real meaning prepares an ever greater pain. These are true signs that immediately give us an extraordinary joy, signs that are fulfilled, affirmative, and joyous. But they are material signs. Not simply by their sensuous origin. But their meaning, as it is developed, signifies Combray, young girls, Venice, or Balbec. It is not only their origin, it is their explanation, their development that remains material (Ill, 3 7 5). We feel that this Balbec, that this Venice ... do not rise up as the product of an association of ideas, but in person and in their essence. Yet we are not ready to understand what this ideal essence is, nor why we feel so much joy. "The taste of the little madeleine had reminded me of Combray. But why had the images of Combray and of Venice, at the one moment and at the other, given such a certainty of joy, adequate, with no further proofs, to make death itself a matter of indifference to me?" (III, 867). At the end of the Search, the interpreter understands what had escaped him in the case of the madeleine or even of the steeples: that the material meaning is nothing without an ideal essence that it incarnates. The mistake is to suppose that the hieroglyphs represent "only material objects" (III, 878). But what now pertnits the interpreter to go further is that meanwhile the problem of art has been raised and has received a solution. Now the world of art is the ultimate world of signs, and these signs, as though dematerialized, find their meaning in an ideal essence. Henceforth, the world revealed by art reacts on all the others and notably on the sensuous signs; it integrates them, colors them with an aesthetic meaning, and imbues what was still opaque about them. Then we understand that the sensuous signs already referred to an ideal essence that was incarnated in their material meaning. But without art we should not have understood this, nor transcended the law of interpretation that corresponded to the analysis of the madeleine. This is why all the signs converge upon art; and apprenticeships, by the most diverse paths, are already unconscious apprenticeships to art itself. At the deepest level, the essential is in the signs of art. We have not yet defined them. We ask only the reader's concurrence that Proust's problem is the problem of signs in general and that the signs constitute diferent worlds, worldly signs, empty signs, deceptive signs of love, sensuous material signs, and lastly the essential signs of art (which transform all the others). Gilles Deleuze/ Proust and Signs/ Part I. The Signs/ The Types of Signs Translated by Richard Howard University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri Negri: The problem of politics seems to have always been present in your intellectual life. Your involvement in various movements (prisoners, homosexuals, Italian autonomists, Palestinians), on the one hand, and the constant problematizing of institutions, on the other, follow on from one another and interact with one another in your work, from the book on Hume through to the one on Foucault. What are the roots of this sustained concern with the question of politics, and how has it remained so persistent within your developing work? Why is the relation between movement and institution always problematic? Deleuze: What I've been interested in are collective creations rather than representations. There's a whole order of movement in "institutions" that's independent of both laws and contracts. What I found in Hume was a very creative conception of institutions and law. I was initially more interested in law than politics. Even with Masoch and Sade what I liked was the thoroughly twisted conception of contracts in Masoch, and of institutions in Sade, as these come out in relation to sexuality. And in the present day, I see Francois Ewald's work to reestablish a philosophy of law as quite fundamental. What interests me isn't the law or laws (the former being an empty notion, the latter uncritical notions), nor even law or rights, but jurisprudence. It's jurisprudence, ultimately, that creates law, and we mustn't go on leaving this to judges. Writers ought to read law reports rather than the Civil Code. People are already thinking about establishing a system of law for modern biology; but everything in modern biology and the new situations it creates, the new courses of events it makes possible, is a matter for jurisprudence. We don't need an ethical committee of supposedly well-qualified wise men, but user-groups. This is where we move from law into politics. I, for my own part, made a sort of move into politics around May 68, as I came into contact with specific problems, through Guattari, through Foucault, through Elie Sambar. Anti-Oedipus was from beginning to end a book of political philosophy. Negri: You took the events of '68 to be the triumph of the Untimely, the dawn of counteractualization.2 Already in the years leading up to '68, in your work on Nietzsche and a bit later in Coldness and Cruelty, you 'd given a new meaning to politics—as possibility, event, singularity. You 'd found short-circuits where the future breaks through into the present, modifying institutions in its wake. But then after '68 you take a slightly different approach: nomadic thought always takes the temporal form of instantaneous counteractualization, while spatially only "minority becoming is universal." How should we understand this universality of the untimely? Deleuze: The thing is, I became more and more aware of the possibility of distinguishing between becoming and history. It was Nietzsche who said that nothing important is ever free from a "nonhistorical cloud." This isn't to oppose eternal and historical, or contemplation and action: Nietzsche is talking about the way things happen, about events themselves or becoming. What history grasps in an event is the way it's actualized in particular circumstances; the event's becoming is beyond the scope of history. History isn't experimental,3 it's just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history. Without history the experimentation would remain indeterminate, lacking any initial conditions, but experimentation isn't historical. In a major philosophical work, Clio, Peguy explained that there are two ways of considering events, one being to follow the course of the event, gathering how it comes about historically, how it's prepared and then decomposes in history, while the other way is to go back into the event, to take one's place in it as in a becoming, to grow both young and old in it at once, going through all its components or singularities. Becoming isn't part of history; history amounts only the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to "become," that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Untimely. May 68 was a demonstration, an irruption, of a becoming in its pure state. It's fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It's nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin. They say revolutions turn out badly. But they're constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people's revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men's only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable. Negri: A Thousand Plateaus, which I regard as a major philosophical work, seems to me at the same time a catalogue of unsolved problems, most particularly in the field of political philosophy. Its pairs of contrasting terms—process and project, singularity and subject, composition and organization, lines of flight and apparatuses/strategies, micro and macro, and so on—all this not only remains forever open but it's constantly being reopened, through an amazing will to theorize, and with a violence reminiscent of heretical proclamations. I've nothing against such subversion, quite the reverse . . . But I seem sometimes to hear a tragic note, at points where it's not clear where the "war-machine" is going. Deleuze: I'm moved by what you say. I think Felix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. What we find most interesting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that's constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is Capital itself. A Thousand Plateaus sets out in many different directions, but these are the three main ones: first, we think any society is defined not so much by its contradictions as by its lines of flight, it flees all over the place, and it's very interesting to try and follow the lines of flight taking shape at some particular moment or other. Look at Europe now, for instance: western politicians have spent a great deal of effort setting it all up, the technocrats have spent a lot of effort getting uniform administration and rules, but then on the one hand there may be surprises in store in the form of upsurges of young people, of women, that become possible simply because certain restrictions are removed (with "untechnocratizable" consequences); and on the other hand it's rather comic when one considers that this Europe has already been completely superseded before being inaugurated, superseded by movements coming from the East. These are major lines of flight. There's another direction in A Thousand Plateaus, which amounts to considering not just lines of flight rather than contradictions, but minorities rather than classes. Then finally, a third direction, which amounts to finding a characterization of "war machines" that's nothing to do with war but to do with a particular way of occupying, taking up, space-time, or inventing new space-times: revolutionary movements (people don't take enough account, for instance, of how the PLO has had to invent a space-time in the Arab world), but artistic movements too, are war-machines in this sense. You say there's a certain tragic or melancholic tone in all this. I think I can see why. I was very struck by all the passages in Primo Levi where he explains that Nazi camps have given us "a shame at being human." Not, he says, that we're all responsible for Nazism, as some would have us believe, but that we've all been tainted by it: even the survivors of the camps had to make compromises with it, if only to survive. There's the shame of there being men who became Nazis; the shame of being unable, not seeing how, to stop it; the shame of having compromised with it; there's the whole of what Primo Levi calls this "gray area." And we can feel shame at being human in utterly trivial situations, too: in the face of too great a vulgarization of thinking, in the face of TV entertainment, of a ministerial speech, of "jolly people" gossiping. This is one of the most powerful incentives toward philosophy, and it's what makes all philosophy political. In capitalism only one thing is universal, the market. There's no universal state, precisely because there's a universal market of which states are the centers, the trading floors. But the market's not universalizing, homogenizing, it's an extraordinary generator of both wealth and misery. A concern for human rights shouldn't lead us to extol the "joys" of the liberal capitalism of which they're an integral part. There's no democratic state that's not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery. What's so shameful is that we've no sure way of maintaining becomings, or still more of arousing them, even within ourselves. How any group will turn out, how it will fall back into history, presents a constant "concern." There's no longer any image of proletarians around of which it's just a matter of becoming conscious. Negri: How can minority becoming be powerful? How can resistance become an insurrection ? Reading you, I'm never sure how to answer such questions, even though I always find in your works an impetus that forces me to reformulate the questions theoretically and practically. And yet when I read what you 've written about the imagination, or on common notions in Spinoza, or when I follow your description in The Time-Image of the rise of revolutionary cinema in third-world countries, and with you grasp the passage from image into fabulation, into political praxis, I almost feel I've found an answer. . . Or am I mistaken ? Is there then, some way for the resistance of the oppressed to become effective, and for what's intolerable to be definitively removed? Is there some way for the mass of singularities and atoms that we all are to come forward as a constitutive power, or must we rather accept the juridical paradox that constitutive power can be defined only by constituted power? Deleuze: The difference between minorities and majorities isn't their size. A minority may be bigger than a majority. What defines the majority is a model you have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller, for example ... A minority, on the other hand, has no model, it's a becoming, a process. One might say the majority is nobody. Everybody's caught, one way or another, in a minority becoming that would lead them info unknown paths if they opted to follow it through. When a 'minority creates models for itself, it's because it wants to become a majority, and probably has to, to survive or prosper (to have a state, be recognized, establish its rights, for example). But its power comes from what it's managed to create, which to some extent goes into the model, but doesn't depend on it. A people is always a creative minority, and remains one even when it acquires a majority^ it can be both at once because the two things aren't lived out on the same plane. It's the greatest artists (rather than populist artists) who invoke a people, and find they "lack a people": Mallarme, Rimbaud, Klee, Berg. The Straubs in cinema. Artists can only invoke a people, their need for one goes to the very heart of what they're doing, it's not their job to create one, and they can't. Art is resistance: it resists death, slavery, infamy, shame. But a people can't worry about art. How is a people created, through what terrible suffering? When a people's created, it's through its own resources, but in away that links up with something in art (Garrel says there's a mass of terrible suffering in the Louvre, too) or links up art to what it lacked. Utopia isn't the right concept: it's more a question of a "tabulation" in which a people and art both share. We ought to take up Bergson's notion of tabulation and give it a political meaning. Negri: In your book on Foucault, and then again in your TV interview at INA, you suggest we should look in more detail at three kinds of power: sovereign power, disciplinary power, and above all the control of "communication " that's on the way to becoming hegemonic. On the one hand this third scenario relates to the most perfect form of domination, extending even to speech and imagination, but on the other hand any man, any minority, any singularity, is more than ever before potentially able to speak out and thereby recover a greater degree of freedom. In the Marxist Utopia of the Grundrisse, communism takes precisely the form of a transversal organization of free individuals built on a technology that makes it possible. Is communism still a viable option? Maybe in a communication society it's less Utopian than it used to be? Deleuze: We're definitely moving toward "control" societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. Foucault's often taken as the theorist of disciplinary societies and of their principal technology, confinement (not just in hospitals and prisons, but in schools, factories, and barracks). But he was actually one of the first to say that we're moving away from disciplinary societies, we've already left them behind. We're moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. Burroughs was the first to address this. People are of course constantly talking about prisons, schools, hospitals: the institutions are breaking down. But they're breaking down because they're fighting a losing battle. New kinds of punishment, education, health care are being stealthily introduced. Open hospitals and teams providing home care have been around for some time. One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-school kids or bureaucrat students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it's really its dismantling. In a control-based system nothing's left alone for long. You yourself long ago suggested how work in Italy was being transformed by forms of part-time work done at home, which have spread since you wrote (and by new forms of circulation and distribution of products). One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine—with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermo-dynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. But the machines don't explain anything, you have to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component. Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderful happy past. The quest for "uni-versals of communication" ought to make us shudder. It's true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called "sabotage" ("clogging" the machinery). You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the "transversal organization of free individuals." Maybe, I don't know. But it would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control. Negri: In Foucault and in The Fold, processes of subjectification seem to be studied more closely than in some of your other works. The subject's the boundary of a continuous movement between an inside and outside. What are the political consequences of this conception of the subject^ If the subject can't be reduced to an externalized citizenship, can it invest citizenship with force and life? Can it make possible a new militant pragmatism, at once a pietas toward the world and a very radical construct. What politics can carry into history the splendor of events and subjectivity. How can we conceive a community that has real force but no base, that isn't a totality but is, as in Spinoza, absolute? Deleuze: It definitely makes sense to look at the various ways individuals and groups constitute themselves as subjects through processes of subjectification: what counts in such processes is the extent to which, as they take shape, they elude both established forms of knowledge and the dominant forms of power. Even if they in turn engender new forms of power or become assimilated into new forms of knowledge. For a while, though, they have a real rebellious spontaneity. This is nothing to do with going back to "the subject," that is, to something invested with duties, power, and knowledge. One might equally well speak of new kinds of event, rather than processes of subjectification: events that can't be explained by the situations that give rise to them, or into which they lead. They appear for a moment, and it's that moment that matters, it's the chance we must seize. Or we can simply talk about the brain: the brain's precisely this boundary of a continuous two-way movement between an Inside and Outside, this membrane between them. New cerebral pathways, new ways of thinking, aren't explicable in terms of microsurgery; it's for science, rather, to try and discover what might have happened in the brain for one to start thinking this way or that. I think subjectification, events, and brains are more or less the same thing. What we most lack is a belief in the world, we've quite lost the world, it's been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume. It's what you call pietas. Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people. Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Toni Negri / Futur Anterieur (Spring 1990), /translated by Martin Joughin.
Interview with Friedrich Kittler
Speed, war and politics
PV: At the moment, are we not witnessing a tremendous hype around the Internet, cyberspace and the virtualization of everyday life? Concepts such as ‘tele-shopping’, for example, mean that people will no longer meet face to face, as in the city centres of old, but, instead, stay at home and shop from there. How do you respond to such developments? For me, as an urbanist, it is all profoundly disturbing.
FK: Such developments look like the outcome of a very remarkable and hidden strategy, one that is only now coming to fruition, after having been in the preparation stage for well over fifteen years. 1982, for example, saw the distribution of the first personal computers. That was their name even then. ‘Lonesome cowboys’ you’d put on an office table. However, they could do only one thing: write text. I emphasize the latter because somehow these devices have become better and better over the past few years and now they’re going to swallow up all other media: the telephone, the telegraph, the fax, and, before long, images, sound and CDs too. And on top of that, you can wire them all together, worldwide, thanks to those wonderful networks. Thus, that very modest investment that sits on every third desk in the developed countries metamorphoses in a flash into a global information network. That’s a really big spider and scares all other media to death.
PV: But doesn’t the emergence of global information networks also mean that we have reached, in all possible senses, the frontier velocity of electromagnetic waves?
By this I mean that we have not only achieved the escape velocity that enables us to shoot satellites and people into orbit but also that we have hit the wall of acceleration. This means that world history, which has constantly accelerated from the age of the cavalry to the age of the railway, and from the age of the telephone to the age of radio and television, is now hitting the wall that stands at the limit of acceleration. The question is what happens to a society that stands at the limit point of acceleration? In past societies, for example, progress was predicated on the nature and development of their acceleration. Acceleration was not only related to speeds of memory and calculus, but also of action. Today, though, one can no longer speak only of ‘tele-vision.’ One must also speak of ‘tele-action’. To be ‘interactive’ means to be here, but to act somewhere else at the same time. And yet, I doubt whether the questions I am concerned with are being raised at all today. How many people, for instance, realise that a global historical accident has been triggered as consequence of this situation? For every time a new type of velocity is invented a new type of specific accident occurs. I’m always stating that when the railway was invented, derailment was invented too. Ships, like the Titanic, sink on a given day at a given place. However, since the invention of ‘real time’, we have created the accident of accidents, to speak with Epicurus. That means that historical time itself triggers the accident, as it reaches the frontier of the speed of light. My impression is that what is being bandied about as the progress of communication is in fact merely a step backward, an unbelievable archaism. To reduce the world to one unique time, to one unique situation, because it has exhausted the possibility to devise new systems of acceleration, is an accident without precedent, a historical accident the like of which has never occurred before. Indeed, this is what Einstein called, very judiciously, ‘the second bomb’. The first bomb was the atomic bomb, the second one is the information bomb, that is, the bomb that throws us into ‘real time’. I believe that what people say about the performance of computing also applies to the faculty of looking at the world, to the faculty of shaping the world, of steering it, but also of living in it.
FK: Then probably the two dangers described by Einstein go hand in hand, historically and systematically. For instance, one of the trendy ideologies at the present time is that the new information technologies like the Internet are good for fast, efficient and global communication. But the truth is that both computers and atomic bombs are an outcome of the Second World War. Nobody ordered them. It was the strategic and military situation of the Second World War that brought them into being. Hence, they were not devised as communication tools but as a means of planning and conducting total war. And yet, none of this is currently admitted by the cyberspace ideologists in the USA, Europe, or Japan.
Even so, unlike you, I do not believe that the limit of acceleration has already been reached. For me, the catastrophe, so to speak, lies in the fact that while the current speeds of transmission and calculation cannot be upped much further, it is still possible to extract strategic and economic advantage from the possession of a system that is faster than one’s competitor’s. There is still a difference between secret machines and the machines sold on the market, and this difference is about performance and velocity. And it is still unclear where things are headed. The speed of light is indeed an absolute limit. But that is in a vacuum. However, in real existing technologies, electricity goes much slower than in a vacuum. Consequently, there still lie huge battles ahead in the realm of acceleration, with optical circuits replacing silicon and so on. These developments are going to mean acceleration with a factor of millions. Hence, I have some difficulty in seeing the accident develop already. Yet I do believe that time as a relevant input is indeed eluding some people. To me, the urgent question is: how are culture and politics going to react to the slow demotion of their power? For both are predicated upon everyday speech and the normal human nervous system, which are both slow. However, neither speech nor the nervous system can be handled any more without machines preparing, assisting, and, in the end, even assuming some of their decision-making processes. How does one react to these developments, as a philosopher, as a politician?
Interactivity, information Chernobyl and imperialism
PV: You are totally right in pointing out that the origin of these technologies lies in the Second World War. Indeed, one must state that with the invention of the atomic bomb, something completely different got invented too, something that is presently in crisis by the way, and that is nuclear deterrence. Should we not say the same today in connection with the information bomb? Should we not say that interactivity is in some way a form of radioactivity? This is not a mere metaphor; it is a very concrete thing. Should we therefore consider a different form of deterrence for the next century? I don’t mean military deterrence, which was about preventing the use of the atomic bomb, but social deterrence, which would be about preventing the damage caused by the progress of interactivity. Why? Because, for me, a global society founded on ‘real time’ is simply unthinkable …
And yet, isn’t interactivity already happening, so far as our working and home environments are concerned? Should we not attempt to prevent the consequences of this immediacy of action and information exchange? How will it affect the poor and the weak? Is a social deterrence of the global information society conceivable? For me, such developments carry the same risks as a Chernobyl-like catastrophe, with damaging consequences for people’s way of life and for social relations. Aren’t there signs already today of social disintegration? For instance, isn’t structural unemployment an effect, or a type of fall-out following the explosion, of the information bomb? And this is only the beginning. What is your opinion on these social dimensions of the information bomb?
FK: Sure, the present mass unemployment is caused by the automation of production. I just have this vague feeling that sociologists and politicians are also to blame for the fact there is so much unemployment. For example, information technology is the only technology I know of that is radically reprogrammable. That is, it can constantly turn out new things, as opposed to the assembly line Henry Ford erected in Detroit, where one single make of automobile passed through for dozens of years. Thus, with this basic technology, which was really invented for the purpose of innovation, one could invent all the rest. However, our current conceptions of society and education mean that many people are systematically denied access to this technology. There is, then, an endemic computer illiteracy being created in society, through propaganda, advertising, and marketing strategies, and these prevent many people getting access to the technology. I am sure that today’s hackers would not be able to find a job.
But that is an incomplete answer to your question. As far as an information-Chernobyl is concerned, it might already have happened once, in a primitive version, with the crash of the stock market in 1987. For such crashes show what the consequences are of the fact that, today, business takes place on a world-wide information network. To counter such developments measures are, of course, being taken. But what all this means is that the good old days when everybody could do whatever they wanted with their own computers are now firmly behind us. We are all being controlled through our machines, and the more networked these machines become, the stricter the mechanisms of control and the safeguards will get. And this also holds true for the bureaucracies that are built into that system. At best, the Internet will remain a space of freedom for a year or two, but, within a few years, it will most probably have fallen into the hands of big capital, and then the controls will be put in place. The other danger is that, along with the control mechanisms, the informational bureaucracies – precisely in order to avoid an information Chernobyl – will also expand. Thus, together, big capital and the informational bureaucracies may well simply scuttle the liberalization of information. In other words, it is highly likely that a new hierarchy will be set up as counter to the danger of system collapse, and it will be structurally the same as the one that currently exists between the computer literate and the computer illiterate. Consequently, on one side there will be those who understand the codes, like the cryptographers and cryptologists in the Second World War. But, on the other side, there will be the masses in their billions who are shut out for security reasons.
PV: Of course, and every time technologies have been made speedier, economic accumulation and concentration have also taken place. Today, for example, we are witnessing a conglomerate gigantism, whether it is in the form of Time Warner or Bill Gates. We see monopolies arising from the demise of anti-trust legislation, and all these developments contribute to the centralization of command. At the very moment we are being told that the Internet is bringing us freedom in terms of place and time, we see that by sheer coincidence information trusts are emerging, world-wide conglomerates, which, incidentally, are no longer simple multinational corporations.
I am also wondering whether it is not the case that through this illusion of information-induced freedom a new uniformity is being implanted in a masked form. Something that, thanks to its multiformity, its way of thinking, and its culture, is implanted very easily. We know, for instance, how the medium, in whatever circumstances, devalues the information in the transfer from written text to screen text. We also know that the computer is making us poorer in spirit. For example, whether we want it to or not, the computer synthesizes information. Now, anyone who uses a synthesizer in music – let us say as a stand-in for a violin – knows very well that a real violin has a completely different sound from that of a synthesized violin. And yet, the computer is nothing but an information synthesizer. The content of information is being semantically reduced, something cognitivists know very well, by the way, and this, it seems to me, is something we should take note of. Unfortunately, these things pass unnoticed. As usual, everything negative remains untold, yet it is, interestingly enough, always there, in an embryonic form. How is it possible to state that technologies are being developed, without any attempt being made at learning about the very specific accidents that go with them? And while this obviously holds true for the television, it holds true for multimedia technologies too.
FK: Probably one should act as Bill Gates does and sell things as if they were not what they are. You sell computers, but you tell people that they are desks, or desktops, or you tell them that they are television sets, the television sets of the future. That way, you can throw a thick mist around these devices and their system-specific shortcomings, and sell many of them. This is very much an American marketing strategy, and one may surmise from it that the drive towards trusts and conglomerates is possibly the last historic chance available for the Americans to maintain Pax Americana on the technological road. For example, after it had looked as if the technological advantage had moved to Japan in the 1970s, America succeeded in the early 1990s. But only by virtue of its edge in electronics and computers, and most prominently in its efforts to define the standards under which we are now communicating over the Internet and with other networked machines. The question is: are these standards the best in a human or a mathematical sense? These are two very important aspects. For example, standardization and unification are absolutely in tune with globalization, and it is quite baffling that nobody in Europe – no expert, no industry – is attempting, even in a small way, to question these new standards which are coming the way they do, and as they are, over the big pond.
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Territory, time and technology
PV: For me, the new technologies make space disappear into a void, in its extent and in its time. This is a profound loss, whether one acknowledges it or not. There is also a pollution of the distances and time stretches that hitherto allowed one to live in one place and to have relationships with other people via face-to-face contact, and not through mediation in the form of tele-conferencing or on-line shopping. What is your opinion about this profound loss? Are we not calling an end to ourselves and to the spatial and temporal dimensions of the world this way?
FK: There is indeed a loss of space, because everything now takes place in the diminutive spaces of electronic circuits. But the ironic thing about all this is that I still have difficulty in realizing it, the fact that time has definitely contracted. One of my favourite games is to play with computer graphics. I take a small piece of the world, a very simple central perspective, write a program, and let it run. One picture, which takes a photographer the famous one-thirtieth of a second, will take 5 or 6 minutes of computation time on a very advanced computer. That is, it’s only after those few minutes that the next picture will appear. The simulation, or synthesis of the images of the world is still not taking place in ‘real time’ at all. Look at the problems facing people who produce computer-generated films: they need 20 hours of computation time for one dinosaur, and then the thing walks across the screen for a measly 3 seconds. Here time is still very much a problem, and the historic moment, where the time of the world will really have been overtaken lies far, far ahead. That’s what all these controversies are about.
As for the loss of proximity, I could live with that, in time. Let’s take an example from real life again. It’s no fun to spend your life with just three commands under the MS-DOS operating system, so you open directories, move them around and delete them. But as soon as you’re under UNIX, from the start you’re merely one person amidst 300 programs, of which you know ten at best. So during the first few months you get to know twenty programs, then forty, finally 100. You then discover that you’re not alone any more. Rather, you live with 100 programs, of which you only need twenty, and then you also find that there are two or three programs you never needed to learn, because they’re running in the background. These programs are called ‘daemons’, by the way, and they have a very bizarre proximity to the user. You never see them, and yet they’re constantly doing something for you, like the angel in the mediaeval Angelo Loci. Indeed, I have this feeling that we should slowly let go of that old dream of sociologists, the one that says that society is by nature made up only of human beings. Today – and tomorrow – the term ‘society’ should include people and programs. There are, I think, already possibilities of proximity. Programs are not stupid. After all, it’s why they were written in the first place. They are often more intelligent than your neighbour around the corner.
PV: Yes, but every new technical advance involves a loss of something. For example, the loss of social bonds is linked to the demise of the proximate human being. That is, someone who has a material existence, someone who might even smell bad, who might even be a boring nuisance. Now, though, one can simply zap such people away. The loss of proximity is one of the causes of the current crises in our cities. And yet there is always an actual place where one lives. But, today, it is not what is near that is privileged but what is far away. Indeed, it seems that the person on the computer screen is preferred to the person who is close at hand. This even extends to marriage. In so-called ‘living apart together’ relationships, for instance, men and women live in separate houses, as if they were already divorced. And the children get to learn, as a kind of aside, how to commute constantly between their mother and father. And that is only the beginning. Through ‘cybersex’ one can now have intercourse at a distance too. But aren’t all these examples metaphors of decay? Are these not already an effect of the information bomb? This is how it seems to me, even if I am exaggerating. But who wouldn’t exaggerate when faced with such developments? I am convinced that, as with pointillism and divisionism in the arts of the nineteenth century, nuclear physics, the decay of matter, and, of course, fractal geometry have social consequences. That is, the decay of matter not only affects the social structure of the individual but also the reflexive relationship of the couple, the latter of which is the true basis of the evolution of human history. Why? Because demography is the founding element of history. This is significant, isn’t it? I do not object to computer programs, but I wish the programmers would speak more of men and women. What is your opinion?
FK: Fractal geometry was invented with the aim of making Euclidean geometry somewhat more complex. Suddenly, we have a world that is no longer made up exclusively of straight lines and circles, but one consisting of curvatures and clouds. And all these beautiful things are very similar to human flesh, unlike, for example, the angular buildings of Le Corbusier or the somewhat complicated lines drawn by Phidias of Athens. However, although fractal geometry has always existed in principle, it only became calculable after the invention of the computer. Nevertheless, its complexity is nearer to human beings than Euclidean geometry.
Euclid’s ideas resemble the process described by Foucault and yourself, in which young recruits were drilled and formed into battle lines in the eighteenth century. However, the new mathematics of chaos might very well turn out not to be a model that will necessarily break up couples but, rather, attend to the complexities of the individual. Similarly, the feedback theory could, potentially, attend to the relations within couples. Put bluntly, it seems to me that Freud’s theory about the relationship between men and women is sillier than the theory Bateson elaborated on the grounds of feedback-chains. To be able to show that a two-way conversation is infinitely malleable seems to me to be a considerably more sophisticated description of social linkages than a description that relies on internalized images involving an incessant and lifelong struggle. Thus Bateson’s feedback-based description of informational relations is evidently grounded in the techniques of message dispatching. And, when it was first advanced, it could not be derived from psychology.
The models that are available nowadays to describe complexity are better than the previous models. But why people – and I include myself here – would rather sit in front of a computer than do other things such as have a conversation is difficult to explain. Perhaps it is a fascination with power? For example, in earlier times, some people directed their love away from their wives and families and directed it instead towards an image of Jesus or Mary. Today some people direct their love toward new technologies. But whether it is the technology itself that sucks away our Eros, our libido, or whether it is the handiwork of the people who market it I am not so sure. Technological fundamentalism, integration and social cybernetics
PV: I believe that a caste of ‘technology monks’ is being created in our times, and that there exist monasteries of sorts whose goal it is to pave the way for a new kind of ‘civilization’; one that has nothing to do with civilization as we remember it. The work of these technology monks is not carried out in the way that it was in the Middle Ages. Rather, it is carried out through the revaluation of knowledge, like that achieved for Antiquity. The contribution of monks to the rediscovery of Antiquity is well known. But what is not well known is that we now have technology monks, not mystics, but monks who are busy constructing a society without any points of reference. Indeed, we are confronted with what I call ‘technological fundamentalism’. That is, fundamentalism in the sense of a monotheism of information. No longer the monotheism of the Written Word, of the Koran, of the Bible, of the New Testament, but a monotheism of information in the widest sense of the term. And this information monotheism has come into being not simply in a totally independent manner but also free from any controversy. It is the outcome of an intelligence without reflection or past. And with information monotheism comes what I think of as the greatest danger of all, the slide into a future without humanity. I believe that violence, and even a kind of ‘hyper violence’, springs out of technological fundamentalism.
For example, at present, there is a lot of talk about the problems posed by the resurgence of militant Muslim fundamentalism. Bombs are planted and so on. But I believe that at the same time almost as much work is going into the development of the information bomb; a bomb that will have the same destructive effects on society’s capacity to remember its past, a past that has a structure of its own and shapes the present. We are merely the product of what was. And whoever forgets the past is condemned to live it anew, as the saying goes. And yet this is exactly what is happening with new information and communications technologies. That said, I am not at all inimical to information. It is simply that there is not enough debate about the totalitarian dimensions of information. On the other hand, I do not think that it is appropriate to blame the technology monks for the sins of technological fundamentalism just because no one else takes responsibility for them. The technology monks do not always know about these sins. What’s your opinion on the fundamentalist dimension of information?
FK: I totally agree. Of course, the people who are programming the whole thing are blissfully forgetful of the history of Europe, and the invention of printing and modern calculus which made it all possible. Both came more or less contemporaneously into being around 1450–1500. Book printing made it possible to copy and disseminate everything, and algebra made it possible to calculate everything. But these two things did not happen together. What was written still had the need of police action or the force of love to compel people to do what was described. But when you program, a real kind of ‘integrism’ appears. One does not simply write: what one writes, the program performs – period. And the final coming together of the promises of the printing press and those of modern mathematics, after 500 years of latency, represents infinite power: a true kind of integration in that all previously separated technologies – metallurgy, semiconductors and electricity – now merge together. It is difficult to say whether there is a limit to these developments. Indeed, I think this is the burning question of the moment.
Basically, there are but a few far-seeing scientists who say that the principle of digitization in itself is quite wonderful, but that there are inherent limits to its performance, which, therefore, gives the lie to all the marketing hype. These limits consist in the unremarkable fact that nature is not a computer, and that, therefore, a number of highly complex human phenomena, by their very nature, fall outside the scope of the current processing paradigms. This is, in fact, the only rational hope I have that we have not arrived at the end of history. Because if the digital calculators did not have a kind of internal limitation, they would truly bring world history to an end, in all the aspects that you have mentioned: time would no longer be human time, space would no longer be human space, but merely a corridor within the circuits of these wonderful little machines. But if these little miracles themselves have constraints, then we can envisage without difficulty a twenty-second and a twenty-third century in which the principles of digital machines would not be discarded, but would instead be complemented by some sort of new – yet to be invented – principle.
PV: Isn’t it time for those who build these machines, and who praise their merits, to get together and examine the damaging effects of information monotheism? For example, in 1888, the inventors of the European railway system met in Brussels. Why? Because the development of steam engines was progressing apace, and because the performance of locomotives was increasing rapidly, and the engineers were building more and more fantastic tunnels and more and more stable metallic bridges. But there was a problem: the train dispatching system could not keep pace with the increasing performances of the machines. That’s why they met in Brussels and also why they created what is nowadays called controlled traffic management. The so-called ‘block system’ was devised there. Thus, if the TGV [high-speed train] runs smoothly nowadays, it is because there is an automatic block system and because the position of the signals is repeated in the train driver’s cab. This means that there are hardly any train accidents any more. The starting point of the discussions in Brussels was on the negative, on what did not function. Contact switches and signals were devised, and these became the basis of a very sophisticated form of data management. But why are there no conferences nowadays on the damaging consequences of unemployment? On the wrong turns taken by urbanism? On the obverse side of technical progress? Why don’t we busy ourselves today, just like the engineers of the nineteenth century did, with the specific accidental risks of the railways, that is, the derailment. Why don’t we busy ourselves with the specific – albeit, I admit, immaterial – danger posed by the data networks and the arrival of social cybernetics? If I am not mistaken, I think that both Alan Turing and Norbert Wiener feared the application of cybernetics on society? And now we are being told by politicians like Ross Perrot that social cybernetics is not only progress but the apex of democracy!
It seems to me that it is about time that the people who are working on those programs start implementing a counter-program also, in order to put a limit to these sorts of developments. Why, for example, don’t they apply their intelligence to the negative aspects of technological development? Why do they always conceal the original sins of these techniques, whereas shipbuilding was furthered by making ships waterproof, and the aeronautic industry was furthered by making engines and the monitoring of air space more reliable. Why don’t we have such people in the realm of digitization?
FK: I have only one answer and it is a totally idiosyncratic one. As is often revealed when accidents take place, many firms are made up of one-half engineers and one-half non-technical sales people, such as marketing executives and lawyers. The spokespersons for such firms are always attorneys, with a smattering of MIT professors every now and then. I do not know of any large company where things are in the hands of the people who devise the computer program. Thus the people who devise the program, and who also know what is wrong with computer systems, are basically treated as program slaves. I am sorry to use this term but that is what they are called in the industry itself. However, the people who are in charge of corporate propaganda, the people who actually own the firms, like Bill Gates at Microsoft, have written maybe five pages in the last twenty years, and that is it. This social division precludes discussions about negativity. The people whom you quoted earlier are in fact free academics. They think like physicists but they don’t work for the computer industry. Nevertheless, it is very important to discuss these matters with the people who plan, build and operate computer systems.
Information, catastrophe and violence
PV: Why not discuss them in Brussels then? After all, the block system conference took place in Brussels. I think that you have put your finger on what this is all about: commercial enterprise. But information cannot be allowed to become a commercial enterprise. It is the stuff the world is made of. For example, what we are doing right now has nothing to do with entrepreneurship; it is a dialogue, a conversation. How can one possibly limit the question of information to the realm of the commercial enterprise? Worse still, to enterprises that are evolving into absolute monopolies? We are facing the tyranny of real-time information. But information should be a product of everyday usage, like electricity. We are a phenomenon of matter, of its mass and energy. That is, we constitute, sui generis, history and existence. To be is to speak. Is not the Latin word for infant ‘the one who does not speak’? Now, information is being turned into a product of global enterprises. It is a tragedy that is being sold to us as progress. It makes me angry, especially when I think that Europe is not taking any action on these issues at the moment. For instance, when those who are responsible for the licensing of new computer products met in Brussels in 1994 they were totally enthusiastic for the new systems and products. And those who went there in order to plead for a more sceptical approach were treated as if they were a nuisance. And that happens in the place where European information policies are supposed to be created and implemented.
FK: That is the catastrophe. For are we not talking about the amalgamation of an old definition of copyright, dating from the times of Goethe, with the property rights of intellectual products which have arrived with the invention of the new digital machines? In fact, this most recent definition of copyright not only does away with any kind of author’s right but also with any form of ‘spiritual’ property. Why? Because the new machines can imitate any other machine, and that includes us, in so far as they can imitate our thinking. Thinking machines were of course a gift from England and invented shortly before the war by Turing. His ideas were then imported into the United States, and the big question there was: how can we make a profitable proposition out of this? Well, it looks like they have been tremendously successful over the past fifty or sixty years.
The most scandalous piece of news that has reached me recently is that it has become possible in the US to patent mathematical equations. For 2,000 years such acts were prohibited. Indeed, mathematics was the freest of all sciences and fell outside the scope of patents. But if American concerns succeed in having the European ‘author’s right’ modified to suit their own ends, then exactly the opposite will have been achieved than what was intended by people like Turing. This is a real menace. Information cannot be allowed to be privatized. However, I do not believe that the privatization strategy will hold out in the long run. This is because the machines are proliferating out of control. Consequently, the software cannot, in the end, be protected by patents. And nor should it be in the long run. So far as the hardware is concerned, the machines as such, well, everybody knows that the manufacturing costs are going down all the time. The result of this will be that, in ten years time, what are now the absolute top-notch machines will be had for almost nothing. In short, we may not get informational democracy right away, but we may get zero-cost property soon.
PV: Perhaps, then, instead of looking at these issues from a pessimistic standpoint, we should conclude our conversation by looking at them from a more optimistic one? But this is difficult. For have we not attempted, amidst all the current enthusiasm for tele-technologies, to formulate our critical thinking about their future? However, let us not focus here on the future of the marketization of these products, or on the future of information monopolies, but, rather, on the future development of the machine. Why? Because its development does not run parallel with the sale of computers but with the evolution of its own Live\Virilio.vp Thursday, July 19, 2001 11:55:16 AM Color profile: Disabled Composite Default screen performance. And the evolution of machine performance, as you said, is predicated upon the recognition of the damaging effects of negativity. We should therefore warn people against the archaic instincts of those who pretend to create a global realm of information without bothering to analyse to what extent the reduction of content has destructive consequences. Of course, these consequences not only impact upon small firms and on the millions of people who remain unemployed. They impact upon the actual creation and historical development of human beings themselves, not to mention the development of social thought. And therein lies the key regulative element. For the human memory is not merely the dead memory of the computer hard drive but the living memory of human beings. And without living human memory there is only the violence revealed by the explosion of the information bomb …
from the book: VIRILIO LIVE: Selected Interviews
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by Ron Roberts
UNCLE AL AND UNCLE BILL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
This chapter will construct a relationship between the figures of William S. Burroughs, the ‘High Priest’ of beatnik and punk culture, and Aleister Crowley, the ‘Great Beast’ of black magic. There is a sense in which the work of both authors connects into a larger, more occult network of thought than that which influences popular culture, resulting in a ‘feedback loop’, reprocessing certain aspects of their work and influencing everything from musical projects to contemporary retellings of major superhero stories. The start and end point of this loop is Burroughs’s treatment of magic(k)al practice, particularly in The Place of Dead Roads, and its relationship to Crowley’s esoteric writings.
William S. Burroughs and Aleister Crowley can be seen as dual influences in a number of late twentieth-century movements, both artistic and political. Artistically, the most famous of these is probably Genesis P-Orridge’s Temple ov Psychick Youth [sic] of the 1970s and 1980s, who were heavily influenced by, and worked with, Burroughs. They applied his processes to music, video and writing, while at the same time reading and absorbing the work of Crowley the magician. In a similar vein, Scottish comic-book writer Grant Morrison—called in to overhaul ailing marquee titles such as The Justice League of America (1997–2000), The X-Men (2001–2003) and The Flash (1997–98)—wrote a Burroughsian-influenced conspiracy theory title, The Invisibles (1994–2000). Morrison’s websites are hotbeds of debate concerning magical technique, Burroughs, Crowley, drugs, the Beats and related topics. Toward the end of The Invisibles’s (flagging) run, Morrison provided his readers with a page that was itself a mystical focus (or sigil) asking them to perform Crowleyian VIIIth Degree magic over it (a concept that we shall investigate later in this chapter), so that the comic might continue to be published.
It is not just in the realm of art and comic books that the presence of Burroughs and Crowley can be felt. Musically, Burroughs collaborated with figures as diverse as Kurt Cobain and The Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy, while Crowley’s influence on bands such as Led Zeppelin is well known (see Davis 1985). Finally, while neither Burroughs nor Crowley developed a strongly self-conscious political stance, elements of their politics can be identified within the poppolitical movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, particularly in the anti-globalization movement associated with such figures as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Douglas Rushkoff and Howard Zinn. It can be observed that the majority of work produced by these artists and theorists responds, from the vantage point of various interrelated perspectives on the complexities of Western civilization, to what is rapidly coalescing into a ‘Westernized’ global order.
BURROUGHS AND THE GLOBAL ORDER
An entry point into a salient discussion of the ‘global order’ through the work of both Burroughs and Crowley must consider that their respective writings on the emergence of a consolidated global political and economic system seem to move in different directions: one emphasizing technocratic restrictions, the other delivering a cryptofascist attack on permissiveness and purposelessness. In Naked Lunch (1959), Doctor Benway is one of the ciphers through which Burroughs foretells the development of post-World War II Western society:
Benway is a manipulator and co-ordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control […] ‘I deplore brutality’, he said. ‘It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.’ (NL 20–1)
It could be said that something akin to these ‘control addicts’— variously identified in Burroughs’s fictions as ‘Nova criminals’, alien beings from Minraud and ‘vegetable people’—today administer and propagate a global sociopolitical hegemony. Like the ‘technocracy’ of Theodore Roszak and Herbert Marcuse, Burroughs sees a highly scientific and efficient anti-human impulse in twentieth-century society that stands as the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment process. ‘Under the technocracy’, writes Roszak, ‘we become the most scientific of societies; yet, like Kafka’s [protagonist in The Castle] K., men throughout the “developed world” become more and more the bewildered dependents of inaccessible castles wherein inscrutable technicians conjure with their fate’ (1969:13).
In The Place of Dead Roads, the order outlined in Naked Lunch has come to fruition; the later novel’s primary concern is with the main character’s struggle against the forces of a ‘global order’ that seeks to limit human potential and homogenize the human race. The novel chronicles the battle between the Johnson family (a term lifted from Jack Black’s 1926 vagrancy classic You Can’t Win describing those vagrants who abided by the rules of ‘tramp chivalry’), and the ‘shits’— the forces of ‘truth’, ‘justice’ and ‘moral order’. The Johnsons are a gang in the sense of the Old West, although with a conspiracy-theory spin that transforms them from honorable tramps into a global network of anti-establishment operatives, struggling against the depredations of the ‘powers that be’ (led in the novel by the bounty hunter Mike Chase). The villains in Burroughs’s novels often perform a double function, rapidly shifting from innocuous lowlifes to enemies of humanity, depending on the scene. In The Place of Dead Roads, this trope is noticeable in the shift from western to sci-fi story. It is telling that after a scene in which Kim and his friends invoke a major demon (PDR 92–4)—described with a careful eye to accuracy that draws from both the style of Crowley’s rituals and the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft—the narrative focus becomes more surreally ‘globalized’. Kim’s enemies cease to be homophobic cowboys, upstart gunslingers and lawmen; instead, a stranger and more insidious enemy is theorized: the body-snatching alien invaders of Nova Express. Old Man Bickford and his cronies operate as typical western villains, but their conflict with the Utopian program of Kim Carsons and his Johnson family betrays their identity as the ‘alien’ influence Burroughs sees as responsible for the propagation of Western capitalism and the denial of human potential. It is these ‘aliens’—alien in the sense that they seek to limit individual freedom through control mechanisms and an enforcement of ignorance—who constitute a new global order. For Burroughs, it is this anti-humanitarian impulse (typified by those who vehemently enforce laws surrounding ‘victimless crime’, and those whose nefarious schemes affect governments and nation states) that represents the greatest evil of the post-World War II order. Thus, the global order could constitute everything from a local group opposing a gay bar or hash café, through to the IMF or World Bank controlling the ‘development’ of a nation.
Writing in the first half of the last century, Crowley never formulated a picture of the modern industrial order in as much detail as Burroughs. However, in a preface to his cryptic The Book of the Law, he states:
Observe for yourselves the decay of the sense of sin, the growth of innocence and irresponsibility, the strange modifications of the reproductive instinct with a tendency to become bi-sexual or epicene, the childlike confidence in progress combined with nightmare fear of catastrophe, against which we are yet half unwilling to take precautions. Consider the outcrop of dictatorships […] and the prevalence of infantile cults like Communism, Fascism, Pacifism, Health Crazes, Occultism in nearly all its forms, religions sentimentalized to the point of practical extinction. Consider the popularity of the cinema, the wireless, the football pools and guessing competitions, all devices for soothing fractious children, no seed of purpose in them. Consider sport, the babyish enthusiasms and rages which it excites, whole nations disturbed by disputes between boys. Consider war, the atrocities which occur daily and leave us unmoved and hardly worried. We are children. (1938:13)
It is not too difficult to connect Burroughs’s ‘control addicts’ with the various mechanisms of control (or placation) that Crowley lists above. While Burroughs posits a class of controllers, Crowley tends to see humanity’s regression as a self-inflicted condition. Crowley posits a future Age of Aquarius, or ‘Aeon of Horus’, in which humanity will reach a stage of adolescence. At that time (some point in the twentieth century), decisions would be made affecting the evolution of the species over the next 2,000 years (the standard length of an astrological age); Crowley argues that without the widespread adoption of his Law of Thelema, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’, a combination of infantilism and dictatorial control will result in the stultification of the human race.
This theme of progressive human evolution is also evident in Burroughs’s fiction: his work prophesies a time when human culture will advance, becoming truly post-human, capable of transcending temporal restrictions and making the great leap into space. The first stage in such an evolution is the dissolution of boundaries: geographical, psychic and physical. This doctrine is at one with Crowley’s generalized transgressive maxim: ‘But exceed! Exceed!’ (1938:37). Significantly, these boundaries are located both within the self and imposed upon us by ‘control addicts’ like Doctor Benway. These boundaries, then, fulfill a role not unlike that of ideology, ‘fixing’ the identity of the individual through a combination of internal and external factors. And both Burroughs and Crowley suggest various strategies for the reshaping of the external world through the destruction of internal restriction; that is, the destruction of, or escape from, ‘ideology’ as a negative force. Common to both writers is a belief in the ‘magical’ power of language. Burroughs’s most famous dictum, of language as a virus, echoes Crowley’s maxim that the Will (or Word) of the magician can cause measurable changes in external reality, offering the possibility that the ‘language virus’, this ‘muttering sickness’, may be capable of transforming, rather than simply destroying, its host. SEX MAGIC
Early in Burroughs’s The Place of Dead Roads comes a sequence that distills a few centuries’ worth of cryptic alchemical and magical texts into a page or so of wild west science fiction:
Once he made sex magic against Judge Farris, who said Kim was rotten clear through and smelled like a polecat. He nailed a full-length picture of the Judge to the wall, taken from the society page, and masturbated.
in front of it while he intoned a jingle he had learned from a Welsh nanny:
Slip and stumble (lips peel back from his teeth) Trip and fall (his eyes light up inside) Down the stairs And hit the walllllllllllllllll!
His hair stands up on end. He whines and whimpers and howls the word out and shoots all over the Judge’s leg. And Judge Farris actually did fall downstairs a few days later, and fractured his shoulder bone. (PDR 19–20)
Kim Carsons, the novel’s time- and dimension-traveling assassin protagonist, ‘knew that he had succeeded in projecting a thought form. But he was not overly impressed […] Magic seemed to Kim a hit-and-miss operation, and to tell the truth, a bit silly. Guns and knives were more reliable’ (PDR 20).
Silliness aside, the above extract reflects the VIIIth Degree teachings of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), an order of Knights Templar that, allegedly, brought back the secrets of Tantric Yoga (sexual yoga, where the object of intercourse is not ‘mere’ orgasm, but the ritual unification of participants as the male/female—Shiva/Shakti—principles of the universe) from India. At the invitation of the German leaders of the order (who due to the nature of the young Englishman’s knowledge initially believed him to have stolen their secrets), Crowley took over and restructured the British OTO in 1912, incorporating his own magical symbolism and interest in homosexual sex magic. Initiates were taught to project their sexual energy in a ritual context employing trappings such as mantras, incenses and visualizations to focus the energy and use it as fuel for the Will. Esoteric sex and masturbation becomes, then, ‘the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will’ (1929:xii). Sex as an instrument allowing ‘action at a distance’ is commonplace in Burroughs’s fiction, while the human Will is conceived of not as individual agency, but as part of a larger network. As Burroughs explains: ‘I think what we think of as ourselves is a very unimportant, a very small part of our actual potential […] We should talk about the most mysterious subject of all—sex. Sex is an electromagnetic phenomenon’ (Bockris 1981:60). (There are clear parallels between this conception of sexual energy and Wilhelm Reich’s theories of Orgone power—a topic of great interest to Burroughs—and Michael Bertiaux’s work with the sexual radioactivity he terms ‘Ojas’.
The ‘electromagnetic’—or otherwise mysterious, occult—force generated during sex, and sexual magic in particular, is an important weapon in the fight against the ‘shits’ on the side of order and repression. While Kim rejects magic as a means of performing relatively prosaic acts such as revenge, The Place of Dead Roads later advocates magic as a means for large-scale transformation of the human Will; indeed, in this novel Burroughs considers it necessary for the transformation of the human species. Using the example of the medieval assassins, a quasi-mythical sect led by the fabled Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan i Sabbah, Burroughs outlines the ways in which magical knowledge—especially the nourishment and cultivation of this electromagnetic sexual power—can be used to transform the consciousness into a new order of being. It is this new being that is capable of resisting control, placation and suppression: the homogenizing tools of the ‘control addicts’.
Hassan i Sabbah, a recurring figure in Burroughs’s fiction, acts as a Guardian Angel to Kim, his dictum ‘Nothing is true. Everything is permitted’ an early version of Crowley’s famous Law of Thelema: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’ (see Bockris 1981:116). In The Place of Dead Roads, the Assassins serve as an example of the next step in human evolution, while in earlier novels such as Nova Express (1964) it is the disembodied voice and shadowy presence of Sabbah that stands in opposition to the forces of the ‘control addicts’. The ‘Slave Gods’ of Western civilization demand nothing but servitude; Burroughs makes this clear in an eight-point description of the ‘objectives and characteristics’ of the Slave Gods and their alien followers (PDR 97). Primarily they must ensure that the human race remains earthbound; at all costs, mankind must be prevented from reaching higher realms of existence:
So the Old Man set up his own station, the Garden of Alamut. But the Garden is not at the end of the line. It might be seen as a rest camp and mutation center. Free from harassment, the human artifact [sic] can evolve into an organism suited for space conditions and space travel.
.There is a clear link between the figures of the assassins and comments made elsewhere by Burroughs concerning his beliefs for the future of mankind. When asked if he sees ‘Outer Space as the solution to this cop-ridden planet’, Burroughs replied, ‘Yeah, it’s the only place to go! If we ever get out alive … if we’re lucky’ (Vale and Juno 1982:21). Later in the same interview, Burroughs cites Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self Defence (1952) and David Conway’s Magic: An Occult Primer (1973) as essential texts for those wishing to resist the technocracy’s less obvious control mechanisms.
According to Burroughs, the transformative powers of the assassins came from the homosexual act—an act that does not depend upon dualism and rejects the creative principles of copulation. As we have already seen, the VIIIth Degree of OTO sex magic, with its emphasis on the projection of an outward manifestation of the Will, was rejected by Burroughs as too ‘hit-and-miss’. However, the homosexual act constitutes the XIth Degree of sex magic, almost universally acknowledged in occult circles as the most powerful form of Tantric energy manipulation. Modern magician and Voudon houngan Michael Bertiaux agrees: ‘Those who possess the technical knowledge admit that psychic ability is increased so that all of the forms of low mediumship and crude psychic powers are made perfect, while the higher psychic powers are fully manifested’ (Bertiaux 1988:44).
Crowley gives the theoretical formula of the XIth Degree in his Magick in Theory and Practice. He notes that
[s]uch an operation makes creation impossible […] Its effect is to consecrate the Magicians who perform it in a very special way […] The great merits of this formula are that it avoids contact with the inferior planes, that it is self-sufficient, that it involves no responsibilities, and that it leaves its masters not only stronger in themselves, but wholly free to fulfill their essential Natures. Its abuse is an abomination. (1929:27)
The homophobic stance adopted in the last sentence is clearly a statement Burroughs would have disagreed with; it is an example of the bisexual Crowley making his writing more ‘palatable’ to a wide audience. However, it suggests the same special power Burroughs attributes to the non-dualistic or non-reproductive use of sex magic.
To return to the magical universe explicated in The Place of Dead Roads, it becomes obvious that magic—especially sex magic—is an important weapon in the arsenal of resistance. Burroughs returns to the VIIIth Degree episode quoted earlier in this chapter, commenting that linear narrative itself is a trope used by any global order as an instrument of control. The Slave Gods and their minions, the control addicts, administrate the reality ‘film’ much as a person with a remote control has power over the progression of a videotaped movie. It is the role of the enlightened resistor to ‘cut up’ this straightforward A-B-C conception of time:
Take a segment of film:
This is a time segment. You can run it backward and forward, you can speed it up, slow it down, you can randomize it do anything you want with your film. You are God for that film segment. So ‘God’, then, has precisely that power with the human film. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe is the prerecordings themselves: the master film. The unforgivable sin is to tamper with the prerecordings. Exactly what Kim is doing. (PDR 218)
Burroughs then explicitly links the transcendental powers of sex magic (specifically the episode discussed earlier) with this ‘tampering’ process—a means to resisting and transcending the global order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Despite specific differences that these sex magics maintain in their philosophy, each system proffers sex as a transformative ‘force’ capable of producing a potentially ‘resistant’ state of subjectivity. The vehicle for such change is the development of a ‘hidden’ body that coexists with the physical shell, a ‘ghost in the machine’, or Body of Light. BURROUGHS AND THE BODY OF LIGHT
In his book Queer Burroughs (2001), Jamie Russell draws attention to Burroughs’s use of Crowley’s term ‘Body of Light’. Crowley’s term (there are many others, such as the Voudon ‘Gwos Bon Anj’) describes the astral (or etheric) body that coexists alongside/in the normal, physical self. It is this astral form that possesses the capacity for magical acts and makes contact with other astral entities. Therefore, cultivation of the astral self, this ‘Body of Light’, is essential for acts of magical resistance.
Burroughs had a great interest in ‘other beings’, specifically those termed succubae and incubi, or ‘sexual vampires’. He theorized that these ‘sexual vampires’ are not necessarily negative in their relationships with human beings. In The Place of Dead Roads, Kim Carsons encounters such an entity, and finds the experience both pleasurable and rewarding. Toby, his incubus companion, is a ghostly figure that merges wholly with Kim as they make love: ‘Afterward the boy would slowly separate and lie beside him in the bed, almost transparent but with enough substance to indent the bedding’ (PDR 169). However, sexual contact with disembodied entities brings more than just physical pleasure—the relationship can lead to the accumulation of powerful allies in the fight against those forces seeking to replicate a restrictive form of global order—for example, those working to limit the potential of human evolution, keeping us ignorant and earthbound, or stuck in Crowley’s state of infantilism. Kim Carson finds himself surrounded by a small team of astral sex partners, each of whom brings a special talent to the fight against the enemies of the Johnson family (electronics work, demolition, causing accidents). These sexual familiars can be cultivated using the VIIIth and XIth Degree OTO ritual work: ‘He should make a point of organizing a staff of such spirits to suit various occasions. These should be “familiar” spirits, in the strict sense; members of his family’ (Crowley 1929:169).
Burroughs posits a more extreme use for such beings: as helpers and catalysts in the transformation from earthbound human to space-traveling post-human. Or, perhaps more radically, as potential allies in the conflict on earth:
BURROUGHS: We can only speculate as to what further relations with these beings might lead to, my dear. You see, the bodies of incubi and succubi are much less dense than the human body, and this is greatly to their advantage in space travel. Don’t forget, it is our bodies which must be weightless to go into space. Now, we make the connections with incubi and succubi in some sort of dream state. So I postulate that dreams may be a form of preparation, and in fact training, for travel in space […]
BOCKRIS: Are you suggesting that we collaborate with them in some way which would in fact benefit the future of our travel in space? BURROUGHS: Well, I simply believe that we should pay a great deal of attention to, and develop a much better understanding of, our relations with incubi and succubi. We can hardly afford to ignore their possible danger or use. If we reject a relationship with them, we may be placing our chances of survival in jeopardy. If we don’t dream, we may die. (Bockris 1981:189)
Burroughs’s conception of using these astral forms as aids to enlightenment/evolution is paralleled in Crowley’s work. The invocation of minor spirits from medieval grimoires aside, the central aim of Crowley’s magical practice was the ‘Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel’ (HGA).9 This HGA is quite distinct from any notion of a Christian angel, representing instead that part of the Self that transcends the wheel of karma, or analogously, Burroughs’s ‘prerecorded film’. This perfected self exists beyond the physical boundaries of our shared reality, yet remains a part of the individual. To have the HGA ‘on side’, as it were, advances the Self toward what Crowley terms ‘disincarnation’. This disincarnation is a process of ‘removing […] impurities, of finding in [the] true self an immortal intelligence to whom matter is no more than the means of manifestation’ (1929:185). Thus, with the help of alien intelligences, or perhaps just a more rarefied form of our own mind made alien by its perfection, it may be possible to escape this ‘cop-ridden’ planet once and for all.
There is also a relationship between Burroughs’s ‘some sort of a dream state’ and the astral traveling of Crowley’s system of magic. Just as Kim Carsons seems to fold in and out of various dimensions cognizant with, yet not identical to, our own (from the haunted ‘wild west’ to a twentieth-century United Kingdom on the brink of revolution to futuristic bio-warfare tests in the Middle East), so Crowley tells us of various ‘planes’ of existence coterminous with our own. These planes can be accessed through dream, meditation and the techniques of sex magic discussed earlier. Once there, the magician can begin to master the various forces of the astral plane, meeting and recruiting the sorts of strange beings with which Burroughs populates his novels.
GUNS AND KNIVES ARE MORE RELIABLE
Crowley’s system of magic was intended solely for self-improvement. He eschewed the use of magic for ‘petty’ or mundane affairs; when your child is drowning, he stated, one does not attempt to summon water elementals. You must instead dive in. Similarly, in The Place of Dead Roads, Kim Carsons expresses a preference for direct methods, such as guns and knives, over magical manipulations. A sequence in the novel finds Kim working as an agent of the English Republican Party, a fictitious organization intent on removing the monarchy. In The Revised Boy Scout Manual (1970), a novel in the form of three onehour cassettes, Burroughs cheekily provides the blueprint for an armed insurrection and revolution, including random assassinations, biological warfare and the use of Reich’s concept of ‘Deadly Orgone Radiation’. However, the key to any successful revolution, according to this text, is the use of a right wing, crypto-fascist regime to wrestle power from the ‘democratic’ governance of the hegemonic ‘shits’:
Riots and demonstrations by street gangs are stepped up. Start random assassination. Five citizens every day in London but never a police officer or serviceman. Patrols in the street shooting the wrong people. Curfews. England is rapidly drifting towards anarchy. […] We send out our best agents to contact army officers and organize a rightist coup. We put rightist gangs into it like the Royal Crowns and the Royal Cavaliers in the street. 1. Time for ERP [English Republican Party]! 2. Come out in The Open! (1970:10)
Then the revolution changes tack, just as the reign of terror starts to turn into a Fourth Reich. Burroughs continues:
Why make the usual stupid scene kicking in liquor stores grabbing anything in sight? You wake up with a hangover in an alley, your prick tore from fucking dry cunts and assholes, eye gouged out by a broken beer bottle when you and your buddy wanted the same one—no fun in that. Why not leave it like it is? […]
[…] So we lay it on the line. ‘There’s no cause for alarm, folks, proceed about your daily tasks. But one thing is clearly understood—your lives, your bodies, your properties belong to us whenever and wherever we choose to take them.’ So, we weed out the undesirables and turn the place into a paradise … gettin’ it steady year after year … (1970:11)
In his blackly humorous way, Burroughs turns the military-industrial complex on itself, appropriating the methods of chemical warfare, guerilla fighting and urban pacification from their creators. Magic, mind control and meditation might be all well and good, but there is a voice in Burroughs’s fiction that calls out for physical, as well as psychic, resistance.
In a similar sense, The Book of the Law suggests the use of force as the only real means of removing the mechanisms of a technocratic global technocracy. While he did not share Burroughs’s passion for all things militaristic, the third chapter of the ‘Holy Book of Thelema’ issues the decree of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, the Egyptian god of war and vengeance. In his commentary, from The Law is For All, Crowley states, somewhat provocatively:
An end to the humanitarian mawkishness which is destroying the human race by the deliberate artificial protection of the unfit.
What has been the net result of our fine ‘Christian’ phrases? […] The unfit crowded and contaminated the fit, until Earth herself grew nauseated with the mess. We had not only a war which killed some eight million men, in the flower of their age, picked men at that, in four years, but a pestilence which killed six million in six months. Are we going to repeat the insanity? Should we not rather breed humanity for quality by killing off any tainted stock, as we do with other cattle, and exterminating the vermin which infect it? (1996:157)
The suspicious, crypto-fascist tenor of this passage undermines Crowley’s call to brotherly arms, though its rhetoric may suit the style of an ancient war god. Crowley had a complicated relationship with Fascism, admiring both Hitler and Mussolini, though it was the Italian dictator’s Fascist regime that was responsible for Crowley’s ejection from Sicily in 1923. Crowley also considered his Thelemic teachings to be the missing religious component of National Socialism, and tried to persuade German friends to open a direct channel of communication between himself and the German Chancellor. This relationship was tempered by his round rejection of Nazism’s racialist policies (fuel for a permanent Race War, Crowley surmised), although not, as is clear from the above quotation, their eugenics.
Both writers, then, play with rightist ideas—militarism, eugenics and genocide—as necessary steps in establishing an alternative future: that is, a society free of shits and control freaks and based on a respect for individual freedoms.
Of course, a tolerant society is required for what might be the greatest passion that the two figures had in common: the use of drugs. Burroughs’s relationship with pharmacopoeia hardly needs emphasizing; Naked Lunch was famously written under the effects of majoun, a fudge made from powerful hashish. He continued the use of various narcotics throughout his life. Works such as Junky, The Yage Letters and the Appendix to Naked Lunch outline his encounters with, and attitudes toward, various drugs.
Crowley was also well aware of the effects of illegal substances, going so far as to draw up a table of Kabbalistic correspondences detailing which drug to take to contact a particular god. His Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922a), made popular by a reprint in the 1990s, is a thinly disguised autobiographical account of his heroin and cocaine addiction. However, a text more analogous with Burroughs’s body of work is The Fountain of Hyacinth (1922b), a rare diary that details with candor his attempts to wean himself off cocaine and heroin.
LAST WORDS
The lives of both men present parallel obsessions with drugs, weird sex, weird philosophy, the writing of fiction and a rage against the order established by ‘the shits’. Both struggled with the various mechanisms of social control that were ranged against them, and provided ‘blueprints’ for those activists, adepts, agents and Johnsons seeking to continue the fight. Some points of convergence in these programs of resistance, such as developing the ‘Astral Body’ and the use of ritual magic, may seem outlandish, but they tap into that part of the human psyche that both wishes to believe in such things, and is capable of making such activities fruitful practice. Even so, from a twenty-first century viewpoint, this part of their blueprint may be dismissed as part of the New Age movement, laudable in intent, perhaps, but of no real practical consequence. However, their insistence on the same ‘last resort’—actual armed insurrection and extermination of the agents of global ideology—raises disturbing questions from our post-9/11 perspective. Abstract psychic dabbling is juxtaposed alongside rhetoric that seems to encourage a terroristic approach to anti-global protest and demonstration. That the writing and philosophy of both men still hold a fascination for activists wary of the West’s imperialist imperative—though no countercultural figure has yet to advocate armed resistance on anything like the same scale—stands as testament to the continuing importance of their outrageous lives and works.
Retaking the Universe (William S.Burroughs in the Age of Globalization)
Part 3: Alternatives: Realities and Resistance/The High Priest and the Great Beast at The Place Of Dead Roads /Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com This, then, is the way we must begin, with the secret intelligence of - the secret insight into - duality and reversibility, with speaking evil as in a mental Theatre of Cruelty. Above all, we must not confuse the idea of evil with some kind of objective existence of evil. That has no more meaning than an objective existence of the Real; it is merely the moral and metaphysical illusion of Manichaeism that it is possible to will evil, to do evil, or, alternatively, to denounce it and combat it. Evil has no objective reality. Quite the contrary, it consists in the diverting of things from their 'objective' existence, in their reversal, their 'return' (I wonder if we might not even interpret Nietzsche's 'Eternal Return' in this sense - not as an endless cycle, not as a repetition, but as a turning about, as a reversible form of becoming - die ewige Umkehr). In this sense, in precisely the same way as Canetti conceives vengeance, evil too is automatic. You cannot will it. That is an illusion and a misconception. The evil you can will, the evil you can do and which, most of the time, merges with violence, suffering and death, has nothing to do with this reversible form of evil. We might even say that those who deliberately practise evil certainly have no insight into it, since their act supposes the intentionality of a subject, whereas this reversibility of evil is the reversibility of a form. And it is, at bottom, the form itself that is intelligent, insightful: with evil it is not a question of an object to be understood; we are dealing with a fonn that understands us. In the 'intelligence of evil' we have to understand that it is evil that is intelligent, that it is it which thinks us in the sense that it is implied automatically in every one of our acts. For it is not possible for any act whatever or any kind of talk not to have two sides to it; not to have a reverse side, and hence a dual existence. And this contrary to any finality or objective determination. This dual fonn is irreducible, indissociable from all existence. It is therefore pointless to wish to localize it and even more so to wish to denounce it. The denunciation of evil is still of the order of morality, of a moral evaluation. Now, evil is immoral, not in the way a crime is immoral, but in the way a form is. And the intelligence of evil itself is immoral - it does not aspire to any value judgement, it does not do evil, it speaks it. The idea of evil as a malign force, a maleficent agency, a deliberate perversion of the order of the world, is a deep-rooted superstition. It is echoed at the world level in the phantasmic projection of the Axis of Evil, and in the Manichaean struggle against that power. This is all part of the same imaginary. Hence the principle of the prevention, the forestalling, the prophylaxis, of evil; rather than morality or metaphysics, what we have today is an infection, a microbial epidemic, the corruption of a world whose predestined end is presumed to lie in good. A more subtle misconception is that of a hypostasis of evil as indestructible reality, a kind of primal scene, a sort of substratum of accumulated death-drive. The radicality of evil is seen as that of a naturally inevitable force, associated always with violence, suffering and death. Hence Sloterdijk's hypothesis that 'the reality of reality is the eternal return of violence'. To which he opposes a 'pacifism that is in keeping with our most advanced theoretical intuitions, a deep-level pacifism, based on a radical analysis of the circularity of violence, deciphering the forces that determine its eternal return'. A radical analysis, then, to remedy the radical evil. But can a 'radical' analysis have a finality of whatever kind? Is it not itself part of the process of evil? However that may be, duality and evil are not the same as violence. The dual form, the agon, is a symbolic form and, as such, it might be said to be much nearer to seduction and challenge than to violence. Closer to metamorphosis and becoming than to force and violence. If there were a force of evil, a reality of evil, a source and an origin of evil, one could confront it strategically with all the forces of good. But if evil is a form, and most of the time a form that is deeply buried, one can only bring out that form and come to an understanding with it [etre en intelligence avec elle]. This is how it is, for example, with the Theatre of Cruelty: in that gestural and scenic externalization of all the 'perverse' possibilities of the human spirit, within the framework of an exploration of the roots of evil, there is never any question of tragic catharsis. The point, rather, is to play out fully these perverse possibilities and make drama out of them, but without sublimating or resolving them. 'To speak evil' is to speak this fateful, paradoxical situation that is the reversible concatenation of good and evil. That is to say that the irresistible pursuit of good, the movement of Integral Reality - for this is what good is: it is the movement towards integrality, towards an integral order of the world - is immoral. The eschatological perspective of a better world is in itself immoral. For the reason that our technical mastery of the world, our technical approach to good, having become an automatic and irresistible mechanism, none of this is any longer of the order of morality or of any kind of finality. Nor is to speak and read evil the same thing as vulgar nihilism, the nihilism of a denunciation of all values, that of the prophets of doom. To denounce the reality contract or the reality 'conspiracy' is not at all nihilistic. It is not in any sense to deny an obvious fact, in the style of 'All is sign, nothing is real - nothing is true, everything is simulacrum' - an absurd proposition since it is also a realist one! It is one thing to note the vanishing of the real into the Virtual, another to deny it so as to pass beyond the real and the Virtual. It is one thing to reject morality in the name of a vulgar immoralism, another to do so, like Nietzsche so as to pass beyond good and evil. To be 'nihilistic' is to deny things at their greatest degree of intensity, not in their lowest versions. Now, existence and self-evidence have always been the lowest forms. If there is nihilism, then, it is not a nihilism of value, but a nihilism of form. It is to speak the world in its radicality, in its dual, reversible form, and this has never meant banking on catastrophe, any more than on violence. No finality, either positive or negative, is ever the last word in the story. And the Apocalypse itself is a facile solution. To speak evil is to say that in every process of domination and conflict is forged a secret complicity, and in every process of consensus and balance, a secret antagonism. 'Voluntary servitude' and the 'involuntary', suicidal failing of the power systems - two phenomena that are every bit as strange as each other, on the fringes of which we can make out all the ambivalence of political forms. This is to say that: - immigration, the social question of immigration in our societies, is merely the most visible and crudest illustration of the internal exile of the European in his own society. - terrorism can be interpreted as the expression of the internal dislocation of a power that has become all-powerful a global violence immanent in the world-system itself. Hence the attempt to extirpate it as an objective evil is delusional given that, in its very absurdity, it is the expression of the condemnation that power pronounces on itself. That, as Brecht said of fascism (that it was made up of both fascism and antifascism), terrorism is made up of terrorism and anti-terrorism together. And that, if it is the incarnation of fanaticism and violence, it is the incarnation of the violence of those who denounce it at the same time as of their impotence, and of the absurdity of combating it frontally without having understood anything of this diabolical complicity and this reversibility of terror. The violence you mete out is always the mirror of the violence you inflict on yourself. The violence you inflict on yourself is always the mirror of the violence you mete out. This is the intelligence of evil. If terrorism is evil - and it certainly is in its form, and not at all in the sense in which George W. Bush understands it then it is this intelligence of Evil we need; the intelligence of, the insight into, this internal convulsion of the world order, of which terrorism is both the event moment and the image feedback. excerpt from the book: The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact /'The Intelligence of Evil' by Jean Baudrillard Lecture given at the Philosophical Congress in Bologna, April 10th, 1911 Is it possible for us to recapture this intuition itself? We have just two means of expression, concept and image. It is in concepts that the system develops; it is into an image that it contracts when it is driven back to the intuition from which it comes: so that, if one wishes to go beyond the image by rising above it, one necessarily falls back on concepts, and on concepts more vague, even more general than those from which one started in search of the image and the intuition. Reduced to this form, bottled as it were the moment it comes from the spring, the original intuition will then become superlatively insipid and uninteresting: it will be banal in the extreme. If we were to say for example that Berkeley considers the human soul as partially united with God and partly independent, that it is conscious of itself at every moment as of an imperfect activity which would join a higher activity if there were not, interposed between the two, something which is absolutely passive, we should be expressing all of the original intuition of Berkeley that can be directly translated into concepts, and still we should have something so abstract as to be almost empty. Let us stick to these formulas since we cannot find better ones, but let us try to put a little life into them. Let us take all that the philosopher has written, let us bring back these scattered ideas to the image from which they had descended; and let us raise them enclosed now in the image, up to the abstract formula enlarged by its absorption of the image and ideas, let us now attach ourselves to this formula and watch it, simple as it is, grow simpler still, all the more' simple for our having pushed into it a greater number of things: finally let us rise with it, go up to the point where everything that was given extended in the doctrine contracts in tension: we shall picture to ourselves this time how from this centre of force, which is moreover inaccessible, there springs the impulse which gives the impetus, that is to say the intuition itself. It is from this that the four theses of Berkeley came, because this movement met on its way the ideas and problems the contemporaries of Berkeley were raising. In other times Berkeley would doubtless have formulated other theses; but, the movement being the same, these theses would have been situated in the same way with regard to one another; they would have had the same relationship to one another, like new words of a new sentence through which runs the thread of an old meaning: and it would have been the same philosophy. The relation of a philosophy to earlier and contemporary philosophies is not, then, what a certain conception of the history of systems would lead us to assume. The philosopher does not take pre-existing ideas in order to recast them into a superior synthesis or combine them with a new idea. One might as well believe that in order to speak we go hunting for words that we string together afterwards by means of a thought. The truth is that above the word and above the sentence there is something much more simple than a sentence or even a word: the meaning, which is less a thing thought than a movement of thought, less a movement than a direction. And just as the impulsion given to the embryonic life determines the division of an original cell into cells which in turn divide until the complete organism is formed, so the characteristic movement of each act of thought leads this thought, by an increasing sub-division of itself, to spread out more and more over the successive planes of the mind until it reaches that of speech. Once there it expresses itself by means of a sentence, that is, by a group of preexisting elements; but it can almost arbitrarily choose the first elements of the group provided that the others are complementary to them; the same thought is translated just as well into diverse sentences composed of entirely different words, provided these words have the same connection between them. Such is the process of speech. And such also is the operation by which a philosophy is constituted. The philosopher does not start with preexisting ideas; at most one can say that he arrives at them. And when he gets there the idea thus caught up into the movement of his mind, being animated with a new life like the word which receives its meaning from the sentence, is no longer what it was outside the vortex. One would find the same kind of relationship between a philosophical system and the whole body of scientific knowledge of the epoch in which the philosopher lived. There is a certain conception of philosophy which requires that all the effort of the philosopher should be to embrace in one large synthesis the results of the particular sciences. Indeed, the philosopher, for a long time, was he who possessed universal knowledge; and today even, when the multiplicity of particular sciences, the diversity and complexity of methods, the enormous mass of facts collected make the accumulation of all human knowledge in a single mind impossible, the philosopher remains the man of universal knowledge, in this sense, that if he can no longer know everything, there is nothing that he should not have put himself in a position to learn. But does it necessarily follow, that his task is to take possession of existing science to bring it to increasing degrees of generality, and to proceed, from condensation to condensation, to what has been called the unification of knowledge? May I be pardoned if I consider it strange that this conception of philosophy is proposed to us in the name of science, out of respect for science: I know of no conception more offensive to science or more injurious to the scientist. Here, if you like, is a man who, over a long period of time, has followed a certain scientific method and laboriously gained his results, who says to us: "Experience, with the help of reasoning, leads to this point; scientific knowledge begins here, it ends there; such are my conclusions"; and the philosopher would have the right to answer: "Very well, leave it to me, and I'll show you what I can do with it! The knowledge you bring me unfinished, I shall complete. What you put before me in bits I shall put together. With the same materials, since it is understood that I shall keep to the facts, which you have observed, with the same kind of work, since I must restrict myself as you did to induction and deduction, I shall do more and better than you have done." Truly a very strange pretention! How could the profession of philosopher confer upon him who exercises it the power of advancing farther than science in the same direction as science? That certain scientists are more inclined than others to forge ahead and to generalize their results, more inclined also to turn back and to criticize their methods, that in this particular meaning of the word they should be dubbed philosophers, moreover that each science can and should have its own philosophy thus understood, I am the first to admit. But that particular philosophy is still science, and he who practises it is still a scientist. It is no longer a question, as it was a moment ago, of setting up philosophy as a synthesis of the positive sciences and of claiming, in virtue of the philosopher's mind alone, to raise oneself above science in the generalization of the same facts. Such a conception of the role of the philosopher would be unfair to science. But how much more unfair to, philosophy! Is it not evident that if the scientist stops at a certain point along the road of generalization and synthesis it is because beyond that point objective experience and sure reasoning do not permit us to advance? And hence in claiming to go further in the same direction, should we not be placing ourselves systematically in the arbitrary or at least the hypothetical? To make of philosophy an ensemble of generalities which goes beyond scientific generalization, is to insist that the philosopher be content with the plausible and that probability be sufficient for him. I am perfectly well aware that for most of those who follow our discussions from a distance, our domain is in fact that of the simple possible, at most that of the probable; they would be very much inclined to say that philosophy begins where certitude leaves off. But who among us would like philosophy to be in such a situation? Doubtless everything is not equally verified or verifiable in what a philosophy brings us, and it is the essence of the philosophical method to demand that at many moments, on many points, the mind should take risks. But the philosopher runs these risks only because he has insured himself and because there are things of which be feels himself unshakeably certain. He will make us certain in our turn to the extent that he is able to communicate to us the intuition from whence he draws his strength. The truth is that philosophy is not a synthesis of particular sciences, and that if it often places itself on the terrain of science, if it sometimes embraces in a simpler vision the objects of science, it is not by intensifying science, it is not by carrying the results of science to a higher degree of generality. There would not be place for two ways of knowing, philosophy and science, if experience did not present itself to us under two different aspects; on the one hand in the form of facts side by side with other facts, which repeat themselves more or less, which can to a certain extent be measured, and which in fact open out in the direction of distinct multiplicity and spatiality; on the other hand in the form of a reciprocal penetration which is pure duration, refractory to law and measurement. In both cases, experience signifies consciousness; but in the first case, consciousness unfolds outward and externalizes itself in relation to itself in the exact measure to which it perceives things as external to one another; in the second, it turns back within itself, it takes possession of itself and develops in depth. In thus probing its own depth does it penetrate more deeply into the interior of matter, of life, or reality in general? One could dispute this if consciousness had been superadded to matter as an accident; but I believe I have shown that such a hypothesis, according to the way in which it is generally taken, is absurd or false, self-contradictory or contradicted by the facts. One might still dispute it, if human consciousness, although related to a higher and vaster consciousness, had been put aside, as if man had to stand in a corner of nature like a child being punished. But no! the matter and life which fill the world are equally within us; the forces which work in all things we feel within ourselves; whatever may be the inner essence of what is and what is done, we are of that essence. Let us then go down into our own inner selves: the deeper the point we touch, the stronger will be the thrust which sends us back to the surface. Philosophical intuition is this contact, philosophy is this impetus. Brought back to the surface by an impulsion from the depth, we shall regain contact with science as our thought opens out and disperses. Philosophy then must be able to model itself upon science, and an idea of so-called intuitive origin which could not manage, by dividing itself and subdividing its divisions, to cover the facts observed outwardly and the laws by which science joins them to each other, which would not be capable even of correcting certain generalizations and of rectifying certain observations, would be pure fantasy; it would have nothing in common with intuition. But on the other hand the idea which succeeds in fitting perfectly this dispersion of itself upon the facts and laws, was not obtained by a unification of external experience; for the philosopher did not arrive at unity, he started from it. I am speaking, naturally, of a unity which is at once restricted and relative, like the unity which marks off a living being from the rest of the universe. The process by which philosophy seems to assimilate the results of positive science, like the operation in the course of which a philosophy appears to re-assemble in itself the fragments of earlier philosophies, is not a synthesis but an analysis. Science is the auxiliary of action. And action aims at a result. The scientific intelligence asks itself therefore what will have to be done in order that a certain desired result be attained, or more generally, what conditions should obtain in order that a certain phenomenon take place. It goes from an arrangement of things to a rearrangement, from a simultaneity to a simultaneity. Of necessity it neglects what happens in the interval; or if it does concern itself with it, it is in order to consider other arrangements in it, still more simultaneities. With methods meant to seize the ready-made, it cannot in general enter into what is being done, it cannot follow the moving reality, adopt the becoming which is the life of things. This last task belongs to philosophy. While the scientist, obliged to take immobile views of movement and to gather repetitions along a path where nothing is repeated, intent also upon dividing reality conveniently on successive planes where it is deployed in order to submit it to the action of man, is obliged to use craft with nature, to adopt toward it the wary attitude of an adversary, the philosopher treats nature as a comrade. The rule of science is the one posited by Bacon: obey in order to command. The philosopher neither obeys nor commands; he seeks to be at one with nature. From this point of view, moreover, the essence of philosophy is the spirit of simplicity. Whether we contemplate the philosophical spirit in itself or in its works, whether we compare philosophy to science or one philosophy with other philosophies, we always find that any complication is superficial, that the construction is a mere accessory, synthesis a semblance: the act of philosophising is a simple one. The more we become imbued with this truth, the more we shall be inclined to take philosophy out of the school and bring it into closer contact with life. No doubt the attitude of common-sense, as it results from the structure of the senses, of intelligence and of language, is nearer to the attitude of science than to that of philosophy. By that I do not mean only that the general categories of our thought are the very categories of science, that the highways traced by our senses across the continuity of the real are those along which science will travel, that perception is a science in the process of being born, science an adult perception, and that ordinary knowledge and scientific knowledge, both destined to prepare our action upon things, are necessarily two visions of a kind, although of unequal precision and range; what I wish particularly to say, is that ordinary knowledge is forced, like scientific knowledge and for the same reasons, to take things in a time broken up into an infinity of particles, pulverised so to speak, where an instant which does not endure follows another equally without duration. Movement is for it a series of positions, change a series of qualities, and becoming, generally, a series of states. It starts from immobility (as though immobility could be anything but an appearance, comparable to the special effect that one moving body produces upon another when both move at the same rate in the same direction), and by an ingenious arrangement of immobilities it recomposes an imitation of movement which it substitutes for movement itself: an operation which is convenient from a practical standpoint but is theoretically absurd, pregnant with all the contradictions, all the pseudo-problems that Metaphysics and Criticism find before them. But precisely because it is right there that common sense turns its back upon philosophy, all we shall have to do is to have it make a volte-face on that point in order to head it again in the direction of philosophical thought. Intuition doubtless admits of many degrees of intensity, and philosophy many degrees of depth; but the mind once brought back to real duration will already be alive with intuitive life and its knowledge of things will already be philosophy. Instead of a discontinuity of moments replacing one another in an infinitely divided time, it will perceive the continuous fluidity of real time which flows along, indivisible. Instead of surface states covering, successively some neutral stuff and maintaining with it a mysterious relationship of phenomenon to substance, it will seize upon one identical change which keeps ever lengthening as in a melody where everything is becoming but where the becoming, being itself substantial, has no need of support. No more inert states, no more dead things; nothing but the mobility of which the stability of life is made. A vision of this kind, where reality appears as continuous and indivisible, is on the road which leads to philosophical intuition. For, in order to reach intuition it is not necessary to transport ourselves outside the domain of the senses and of consciousness. Kant's error was to believe that it was. After having proved by decisive arguments that no dialectical effort will ever introduce us into the beyond and that an effective metaphysics would necessarily be an intuitive metaphysics, he added that we lack this intuition and that this metaphysics is impossible. It would in fact be so if there were no other time or change than those which Kant perceived and which, moreover, we too must reckon with; for our usual perception cannot get but of time nor grasp anything else than change. But the time in which we are naturally placed, the change we habitually have before us, are a time and change that our senses and our consciousness have reduced to dust in order to facilitate our action upon things. Undo what they have done, bring our perception back to its origins, and we shall have a new kind of knowledge without having been obliged to have recourse to new faculties. If this knowledge is generalized, speculation will not be the only thing to profit by jt. Everyday life can be nourished and illuminated by it. For the world into which our senses and consciousness habitually introduce us is no more than the shadow of itself: and it is as cold as death. Everything in it is arranged for our maximum convenience, but in it, everything is in a present which seems constantly to be starting afresh; and we ourselves, fashioned artificially in the image of a no less artificial universe, see ourselves in the instantaneous, speak of the past as of something done away with, and see in memory a fact strange or in any case foreign to us, an aid given to mind by matter. Let us on the contrary grasp ourselves afresh as we are, in a present which is thick, and furthermore, elastic, which we can stretch indefinitely backward by pushing the screen which masks us from ourselves farther and farther away; let us grasp afresh the external world as it really is, not superficially, in the present, but in depth, with the immediate past crowding upon it and imprinting upon it its impetus; let us in a word become accustomed to see all things sub specie durationis: immediately in our galvanized perception what is taut becomes relaxed, what is dormant awakens, what is dead comes to life again. Satisfactions which art will never give save to those favoured by nature and fortune, and only then upon rare occasions, philosophy thus understood will offer to all of us, at all times, by breathing life once again into the phantoms which surround us and by revivifying us. In so doing philosophy will become complementary to science in practice as well as in speculation. With its applications which aim only at the convenience of existence, science gives us the promise of well-being, or at most, of pleasure. But philosophy could already give us joy. Henri Bergson/The Creative Mind/Philosophical Intuition Translated by Mabelle L. Andison 1946 Philosophical Library New York Lecture given at the Philosophical Congress in Bologna, April 10th, 1911 I should like to submit to you some reflections on the philosophical mind. It seems to me, and more than one report presented at this Congress bears witness to the fact, that metaphysics at present is tending to become more simplified, to draw closer to life. I think this tendency is a correct one, and that it is along this line we should work. But in so doing we shall be doing nothing revolutionary; we shall merely be giving the most appropriate form to what is the foundation of all philosophy, I mean of any philosophy which is fully conscious of its function and destination. For the complication of the letter must not allow the simplicity of the spirit to be lost to view. If we confine ourselves entirely to doctrines already formulated, to the synthesis in which they then appear to embrace the conclusions of earlier philosophies and all the forms of acquired knowledge, we run the risk of underestimating the essentially spontaneous aspect of philosophical thought. There is a remark that those of us who teach the history of philosophy might make, those who frequently have occasion to come back to the study of the same doctrines and to go ever more deeply into them. A philosophical system seems at first to appear as a complete edifice, expertly designed, where arrangements have been made for the commodious lodging of all problems. In contemplating it in that form we experience an aesthetic joy intensified by a professional satisfaction. Not only, in fact, do we find here order in complexity (an order to which we sometimes like to add our little word as we describe it), but we also have the satisfaction of telling ourselves that we know from whence come the materials and how the building is done. In the problems the philosopher has stated we recognize the questions that were being discussed around him. In the solutions he gives to them we think we recognize, arranged or disarranged, but only slightly modified, the elements of previous or contemporary philosophies. Such a view must have been given to him by this one, another has been suggested by someone else. With what we read, heard and learned we could doubtless reproduce most of what he did. We therefore set to work, we go back to the sources, we weigh the influences, we extract the similitudes, and in the end we distinctly see in the doctrine what we were looking for: a more or less original synthesis of the ideas among which the philosopher lived. But if we go on constantly renewing contact with the philosopher's thought, we can, by a gradual impregnation, be brought to an entirely different view. I do not say that the work of comparison undertaken at the outset was time lost: without this preliminary effort to recompose a philosophy out of what is other than itself, and to link it up to the conditions which surrounded it, we should perhaps never succeed in grasping what it actually is; for the human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old. But, as we seek to penetrate more fully the philosopher's thought instead of circling around its exterior, his doctrine is transformed for us. In the first place its complication diminishes. Then the various parts fit into one another. Finally the, whole is brought together into a single point, which we feel could be ever more closely approached even though there is no hope of reaching it completely. In this point is something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily simple that the philosopher has never succeeded in saying it. And that is why he went on talking all his life. He could not formulate what he had in mind without feeling himself obliged to correct his formula, then to correct his correction: thus, from theory to theory, correcting when he thought he was completing, what he has accomplished, by a complication which provoked more complication, by developments heaped upon developments, has been to convey with an increasing approximation the simplicity of his original intuition. All the complexity of his doctrine, which would go on ad infinitum, is therefore only the incommensurability between his simple intuition and the means at his disposal for expressing it. What is this intuition? If the philosopher has not been able to give the formula for it, we certainly are not able to do so. But what we shall manage to recapture and to hold is a certain intermediary image between the simplicity of the concrete intuition and the complexity of the abstractions which translate it, a receding and vanishing image, which haunts, unperceived perhaps, the mind of the philosopher, which follows him like his shadow through the ins and outs of his thought and which, if it is not the intuition itself, approaches it much more closely than the conceptual expression, of necessity symbolical, to which the intuition must have recourse in order to furnish "explanation". Let us look closely at this shadow: by doing so we shall divine the attitude of the body which projects it. And if we try to imitate this attitude, or better still to assume it ourselves, we shall see as far as it is possible what the philosopher saw. What first of all characterizes this image is the power of negation it possesses. You recall how the demon of Socrates proceeded: it checked the philosopher's will at a given moment and prevented him from acting rather than prescribing what he should do. It seems to me that intuition often behaves in speculative matters like the demon of Socrates in practical life; it is at least in this form that it begins, in this form also that it continues to give the most clear-cut manifestations: it forbids. Faced with currently-accepted ideas, theses which seemed evident, affirmations which had up to that time passed as scientific, it whispers into the philosopher's ear the word: Impossible! Impossible, even though the facts and the reasons appeared to invite you to think it possible and real and certain. Impossible, because a certain experience, confused perhaps but decisive, speaks to you through my voice, because it is incompatible with the facts cited and the reasons given, and because hence these facts must have been badly observed, these reasonings false. What a strange force this intuitive power of negation is! How is it that the historians of philosophy have not been more greatly struck by it? Is it not obvious that the first step the philosopher takes, when his thought is still faltering and there is nothing definite in his doctrine, is to reject certain things definitively? Later he will be able to make changes in what he affirms; he will vary only slightly what he denies. And if he varies in his affirmations, it will still be in virtue of the power of negation immanent in intuition or in its image. He will have allowed himself lazily to deduce consequences according to the rules of a rectilinear logic; and then suddenly, in the face of his own affirmation he has the same feeling of impossibility that he had in the first place in considering the affirmations of others. Having in fact left the curve of his thought, to follow straight along a tangent, he has become exterior to himself. He returns to himself when he gets back to intuition. Of these departures toward an affirmation and these returns to the primary intuition are constituted the zigzaggings of a doctrine which "develops," that is to say which loses itself, finds itself again, and endlessly corrects itself. Let us get rid of this complication and get back to the simple intuition, or at least to the image which translates it: in so doing we see the doctrine freed of those conditions of time and place upon which it seemed to depend. Doubtless the problems which the philosopher worked upon were the problems which presented themselves in his day; the science he used or criticized was the science of his time; in the theories he expounds one might even find, by looking for them, the ideas of his contemporaries and his predecessors. How could it be otherwise? Iii order to have the new understood, it must be expressed in terms of the old; and the problems already stated, the solutions provided, the philosophy and science of the times in which he lived, all these have been for each great thinker the material he was obliged to use to give a concrete form to his thought. Not to mention that it has been traditional, from ancient times, to present all philosophy as a complete system, which includes everything one knows. But it would be a strange mistake to take for a constitutive element of doctrine what was only the means of expressing it. Such is the first error to which we are exposed, as I was just saying, when we undertake the study of a system. So many partial resemblances strike us, so many parallels seem to be indicated, so many pressing appeals to our ingenuity and erudition are sent out from all directions, that we are tempted to recompose the philosopher's thought with fragments of ideas gathered here and there, praising him afterwards, of course, for having been able -- as we have just shown ourselves to be - to execute a pretty piece of mosaic. But the illusion does not last long, for we soon perceive that in the very places where the philosopher seems to be repeating things already said, he is thinking them in his own way. We then abandon the idea of recomposing; but in so doing we tumble more often than not into another illusion, less serious perhaps but more tenacious than the first. We are inclined to imagine the doctrine - even though it be that of a master--as growing out of earlier philosophies and representing "a moment of an evolution." This time, to be sure, we are not completely wrong, for a philosophy resembles an organism rather than an assemblage, and it is still better to speak of evolution in this case than of composition. But this new comparison, in addition to the fact that it attributes more continuity to the history of thought than is really in it, has the disadvantage of keeping our attention fixed upon the external complication of the system and upon what its superficial form allows us to foresee, instead of inviting us to put our finger on the novelty and simplicity of the inner content. A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said. And he has said only one thing because he has seen only one point: and at that it was not so much a vision as a contact: this contact has furnished an impulse, this impulse a movement, and if this movement, which is as it were a kind of swirling of dust taking a particular form, becomes visible to our eyes only through what it has collected along its way, it is no less true that other bits of dust might as well have been raised and that it would still have been the same whirlwind. Thus a thought which brings something new into the world is of course obliged to manifest itself through the ready-made ideas it comes across and draws into its movement; it seems thus, as it were, relative to the epoch in which the philosopher lived; but that is frequently merely an appearance. The philosopher might have come several centuries earlier; he would have had to deal with another philosophy and another science; he would have given himself other problems; he would have expressed himself by other formulas; not one chapter perhaps of the books he wrote would have been what it is; and nevertheless he would have said the same thing. Let me take an example. I have appealed to your professional memories: with your permission I am going to recall some of my own. As professor in the Collège de France I devote one of my courses each year to the history of philosophy. In that way I have been able, during several consecutive years, to practice at length upon Berkeley and Spinoza the experiment I have just described. I shall not discuss Spinoza; he would take us too far afield. Nevertheless I know of nothing more instructive than the contrast between the form and the matter of a book like the Ethics: on the one hand those tremendous things called Substance, Attribute and Mode, and the formidable array of theorems with the close network of definitions, corollaries and scholia, and that complication of machinery, that power to crush which causes the beginner, in the presence of the Ethics, to be struck with admiration and terror as though he were before a battleship of the Dreadnaught class;- on the other hand, something subtle, very light and almost airy, which flees at one's approach, but which one cannot look at, even from afar, without becoming incapable of attaching oneself to any part whatever of the remainder, even to what is considered essential, even to the distinction between Substance and Attribute, even to the duality of Thought and Extension. What we have behind the heavy mass of concepts of Cartesian and Aristotelian parentage, is that intuition which was Spinoza's, an intuition which no formula, no matter how simple, can be simple enough to express. Let us say, to be content with an approximation, that it is the feeling of a coincidence between the act by which our mind knows truth perfectly, and the operation by which God engenders it; the idea that the "conversion" of the Alexandrians, when it becomes complete, is indistinguishable from their "procession," that when man, sprung from divinity, succeeds in returning to it, he perceives that what he had at first taken to be two opposed movements of coming and going are in fact a single movement - moral experience in this case undertaking to resolve a logical contradiction and to fuse, by an abrupt suppression of Time, the movement of coming with that of going. The closer we get to this original intuition the better we understand that if Spinoza had lived before Descartes he would doubtless have written something other than what he wrote, but that given Spinoza living and writing, we were certain to have Spinozism in any case. I come to Berkeley, and since it is he whom I take as example you will not think it amiss that I analyze him in detail: brevity here could only be at the expense of a strict examination of the subject. A mere glance over the work of Berkeley is enough to see that, as if of itself, it resolves into four fundamental theses. The first, which defines a certain idealism and to which is linked up the new theory of vision (although the philosopher had judged it wise to present the latter as independent) the first, I say, would be formulated thus: "Matter is a cluster of ideas." The second consists in the claim that abstract and general ideas are merely words: that is nominalism. The third thesis affirms the reality of minds and characterizes them by the will: let us say that it is spiritualism and voluntarism. The last, which we might call theism, posits the existence of God, basing itself principally on the consideration of matter. Now, nothing would be easier than to find these four theses, formulated in practically the same terms, among the contemporaries or predecessors of Berkeley. The fourth is found among the theologians. The third was in Duns Scotus; Descartes said somewhat the same thing. The second fed the controversies of the Middle Ages before becoming an integral part of the philosophy of Hobbes. As to the first, it greatly resembles the "occasionalism" of Malebranche, the idea and even the formula of which we should already discover in certain texts of Descartes; nor, for that matter had Descartes been the first to point out that dreams have every appearance of reality and that there is nothing in any of our perceptions taken separately which guarantees us the existence of a thing outside us. Thus, with the philosophers of already distant times or even, if we do not care to go back too far, with Descartes and Hobbes to whom Locke might be added, we shall have the elements necessary for the external reconstitution of Berkeley's philosophy: we shall at most leave him his theory of vision, which would then constitute his own individual work and whose originality, reflected through the rest, would give to the doctrine as a whole its original aspect. Let us then take these slices of ancient and modern philosophy, put them in the same bowl, add by way of vinegar and oil a certain aggressive impatience with regard to mathematical dogmatism and the desire, natural in a philosopher bishop, to reconcile reason with faith, mix well and turn it over and over conscientiously, and sprinkle over the whole, like so many savoury herbs, a certain number of aphorisms culled from among the NeoPlatonists: we shall have - if I may be pardoned the expression - a salad which, at a distance, will have certain resemblance to what Berkeley accomplished. Well, anyone who went about it in this way would be incapable of penetrating Berkeley's thought. I am not speaking of the difficulties and impossibilities which he would come up against in explaining the details: a strange sort of "nominalism" that was, which ended by raising a number of general ideas to the dignity of eternal essences, immanent in the divine Intelligence! a strange negation of the reality of bodies that which is expressed by a positive theory of the nature of matter, a fertile theory, as far removed as possible from the sterile idealism which tries to assimilate perception to dreaming! What I mean to say is that it is impossible for us to examine Berkeley's philosophy carefully without seeing the four theses we have discovered in it first approach, then penetrate one another, in such a way that each of them seems to become pregnant with the other three, to take on breadth and depth, and become radically distinguished from the earlier or contemporary theories with which one could superficially identify it. Perhaps this second point of view from which the doctrine appears as an organism and not as a mere assemblage, is still not the definitive point of view. It is at least closer to the truth. I cannot go into all the details; but nevertheless I must indicate for at least one or two of the four theses, how any of the others could be extracted from them. Let us take idealism. It does not consist merely in saying that bodies are ideas. What good would that do? We should indeed be obliged to continue to affirm everything about these ideas that experience has led us to affirm about bodies, and we should simply have substituted one word for another; for Berkeley surely does not think that matter will cease to exist when he has stopped living. What Berkeley's idealism signifies is that matter is coextensive with our representation of it; that it has no interior, no underneath; that it hides nothing, contains nothing; that it possesses neither power nor virtuality of any kind; that it is spread out as mere surface and that it is no more than what it presents to us at any given moment. The word "idea" ordinarily indicates an existence of this kind, I mean to say a completely realized existence, whose being is indistinguishable from its seeming, while the word "thing" makes us think of a reality which would be at the same time a reservoir of possibilities; that is why Berkeley prefers to call bodies ideas rather than things. But if we look upon his "idealism" in that light, we see that it coincides with his nominalism"; for the more clearly this second thesis takes shape in the philosopher's mind, the more evidently it is restricted to the, negation of general abstract ideas,abstracted, that is, extracted from matter: it is clear in fact that one cannot extract something from what contains nothing, nor consequently make a perception yield something other than the perception itself. Color being but color, resistance being only resistance, you will never find anything in common between resistance and color, you will never discover in visual data any element shared by the data of touch. If you claim to abstract from the data of either something which will be common to all, you will perceive in examining that something that you are dealing with a word: therein lies the nominalism of Berkeley; but there also, at the same time, is the "new theory of vision." If an extension which would be at once visual and tactile is only a word, it is all the more so with an extension which would involve all the senses at once: there again is nominalism, but there too is the refutation of the Cartesian theory of matter. Let us not even talk any more about extension; let us simply note that in view of the structure of language the two expressions "I have this perception" and "this perception exists" are synonymous, but that the second, introducing the same word "existence" into the description of totally different perceptions, invites us to believe that they have something in common between them and to imagine that their diversity conceals a fundamental unity, the unity of a "substance" which is, in reality, only the word existence hypostasized: there you have the whole idealism of Berkely; and this idealism, as I was saying, is identical with his nominalism.--Let us go on now, with your permission, to the theory of God and the theory of minds. If a body is made of "ideas" or, in other words, if it is entirely passive and determinate, having neither power nor virtuality, it cannot act on other bodies; and consequently the movements of bodies must be the effect of an active power, which has produced these bodies themselves and which, because of the order which the universe reveals, can only be an intelligent cause. If we are mistaken when under the name of general ideas we set up as realities the names that we have given to groups of objects or perceptions more or less artificially constituted by us on the plane of matter, such is not the case when we think we discover, behind this plane, the divine intentions: the general idea which exists only on the surface and which links body to body is no doubt only a word, but the general idea which exists in depth, relating bodies to God or rather descending from God to bodies, is a reality; and thus the nominalism of Berkeley quite naturally calls for this development of the doctrine as found in the Siris, and which has wrongly been considered a Neo-Platonic fantasy; in other words, the idealism of Berkeley is only one aspect of the theory which places God behind all the manifestations of matter. Finally, if God imprints in each one of us perceptions, or as Berkeley says, "ideas," the being which gathers up these perceptions, or rather which goes to meet them, is quite the reverse of an idea: it is a will, though one which is constantly limited by divine will. The meeting-place of these two wills is precisely what we call matter. If the percipi is pure passivity the percipere is pure activity. Human mind, matter, divine mind therefore become terms which we can express only in terms of one another. And the spiritualism of Berkeley is itself found to be only an aspect of any one of the other three theses. Thus the various parts of the system interpenetrate, as in a living being. But, as I was saying at the beginning, the spectacle of this reciprocal penetration doubtless gives us a more precise idea of the body of the doctrine; it still does not enable us to reach the soul. We shall get closer to it, if we can reach the mediating image referred to above,- an image which is almost matter in that it still allows itself to be seen, and almost mind in that it no longer allows itself to be touched,- a phantom which haunts us while we turn about the doctrine and to which we must go in order to obtain the decisive signal, the indication of the attitude to take and of the point from which to look. Did the mediating image which takes shape in the mind of the interpreter, as he progresses in his study of the work, exist originally in the same form in the master's thought? If it was not that particular one, it was another, which could belong to a different order of perceptions and have no material resemblance whatsoever to it, but which nevertheless would equal it in value as two translations of the same work in different languages equal one another. Perhaps these two images, perhaps even other images, still equivalent, were present all at once, following the philosopher step by step in procession through the evolutions of his thought. Or perhaps he did not perceive any one of them clearly, being content only at rare intervals to make contact directly with that still more subtle thing, intuition itself; but then we are indeed forced, as interpreters, to re-establish the intermediary image, unless we are prepared to speak of the "original intuition" as a vague thought and of the "spirit of the doctrine" as an abstraction, whereas this spirit is as concrete and this intuition as precise as anything in the system. In Berkeley's case, I think I see two different images and the one which strikes me most is not the one whose complete indication we find in Berkeley himself. It seems to me that Berkeley perceives matter as a thin transparent film situated between man and God. It remains transparent as long as the philosophers leave it alone, and in that case God reveals Himself through it. But let the metaphysicians meddle with it, or even common sense in so far as it deals in metaphysics: immediately the film becomes dull, thick and opaque, and forms a screen because such words as Substance, Force, abstract Extension, etc. slip behind it, settle there like a layer of dust, and hinder us from seeing God through the transparency. The image is scarcely indicated by Berkeley himself though he has said in so many words "that we first raise a dust and then complain we cannot see." But there is another comparison, often evoked by the philosopher, which is only the auditory transposition of the visual image I have just described: according to this, matter is a language which God speaks to us. That being so, the metaphysics of matter thickening each one of the syllables, marking it off, setting it up as an independent entity, turns our attention away from the meaning to the sound and hinders us from following the divine word. But, whether we attach ourselves to the one or to the other, in either case we are dealing with a simple image that we must keep in view, because if it is not the intuition generating the doctrine, it is immediately derived from it, and approximates it more than any of the theses taken individually, more even than the combination of all of them. Henri Bergson/The Creative Mind/Philosophical intuition Translated by Mabelle L. Andison 1946 Philosophical Library New York The hypothesis of objective reality exerts such a hold on our minds only because it is by far the easiest solution. Lichtenberg: 'That a false hypothesis is sometimes preferable to an exact one is proven in the doctrine of human freedom. Man is, without a doubt, unfree. But it takes profound philosophical study for a man not to be led astray by such an insight. Barely one in a thousand has the necessary time and patience for such study, and of these hundreds, barely one has the necessary intelligence. This is why freedom is the most convenient conception and will, in the future, remain the most common, so much do appearances favour it.' The exact hypothesis is that man is born unfree, that the world is born untrue, non-objective, non-rational. But this radical hypothesis is definitively beyond proof, unverifiable and, in a sense, unbearable. Hence the success of the opposite hypo thesis, of the easiest hypothesis. Subjective illusion: that of freedom. Objective illusion: that of reality. Just as belief in freedom is merely the illusion of being the cause of one's own acts, so the belief in objective reality is the illusion of finding an original cause for phenomena and hence of inserting the world into the order of truth and reason. Despairing of confronting otherness, seduction, the dual relation and destiny, we invent the easiest solution: freedom. First, the ideal concept of a subject wrestling with his own freedom. Then, de facto liberation, unconditional liberation - the highest stage of freedom. We pass from the right to freedom to the categorical imperative of liberation. But to this stage, too, there is the same violent abreaction: we rid ourselves of freedom in every way possible, even going so far as to invent new servitudes. Despairing of confronting uncertainty and radical illusion, we invent the easiest solution: reality. First, objective reality, then Integral Reality - the highest stage of reality. To this highest stage there corresponds the equally radical disavowal of that same reality. Violent abreaction to Integral Reality - negative counter-transference. Despairing of an aim, salvation or an ideal, we invent for ourselves the easiest solution: happiness. Here again we begin with utopia - the ideal of happiness - and end in achieved happiness, the highest stage of happiness. The same abreaction to integral happiness as to integral reality or freedom: these are all unbearable. In the end, it is the opposite form of misfortune, the victim ideology, that triumphs. Being incapable of accepting thought (the idea that the world thinks us, the intelligence of evil), we invent the easiest solution, the technical solution: Artificial Intelligence. The highest stage of intelligence: integral knowledge. This time the rejection will arise perhaps from a resistance on the part of things themselves to their digital transparency or from a failure of the system in the form of a major accident. Against all the sovereign hypotheses are ranged the easiest solutions. And all the easiest solutions lead to catastrophe. Against the hypothesis of uncertainty: the illusion of truth and reality. Against the hypothesis of destiny: the illusion of freedom. Against the hypothesis of evil [Mal]: the illusion of misfortune [malheur]. Against the hypothesis of thought, the illusion of Artificial Intelligence. Against the hypothesis of the event: the illusion of information. Against the hypothesis of becoming: the illusion of change. Every easy solution, pushed to its extreme - Integral Reality, integral freedom, integral happiness, integral information (the highest stage of intelligence, the highest stage of reality, the highest stage of freedom, the highest stage of happiness) - finds a response in a violent abreaction: disavowal of reality, disavowal of freedom, disavowal of happiness, viruses and dysfunctions, spectrality of real time, mental resistance; all the forms of secret repulsion in respect of this ideal normalization of existence. Which proves that there still exists everywhere, in each of us, resisting the universal beatification, an intelligence of evil. Do You Want to be Free ?Freedom? A dream! Everyone aspires to it, or at least gives the impression of aspiring fervently to it. If it is an illusion, it has become a vital illusion. In morality, mores and mentalities, this movement, which seems to well up from the depths of history, is towards irrevocable emancipation. And if some aspects may seem excessive or contradictory, we still experience the dizzying thrill of this emancipation. Better: the whole of our system turns this liberation into a duty, a moral obligation - to the point where it is difficult to distinguish this liberation compulsion from a 'natural' aspiration towards, a 'natural' demand for, freedom. Now, it is clear that, where all forms of servitude are concerned, everyone wants to throw them off; where all forms of constraint are concerned - physical constraints or constraints of law - everyone wishes to be free of them. This is such a vital reaction that there is barely, in the end, any need of an idea of freedom to express it. Things become problematic when the prospect arises for the subject of being answerable solely for him/herself in an undifferentiated universe. For this symbolic disobligation is accompanied by a general deregulation. And it is in this universe of free electrons - free to become anything whatever in a system of generalized exchange - that we see growing, simultaneously, a contrary impulse, a resistance to this availability of everyone and everything that is every bit as deep as the desire for freedom. A passion for rules of whatever kind that is equal to the passion for deregulation. In the anthropological depths of the species, the demand for rules is as fundamental as the demand to be free of them. No one can say which is the more basic. What we can see, after a long period of ascendancy for the process of liberation, is the resurrection of all those movements that are more and more steadfastly resistant to boundless emancipation and total immunity. A desire for rules that has nothing to do with submission to the law. It might even be said to run directly counter to it, since, whereas the law is abstract and universal, the rule, for its part, is a two-way obligation. And it is neither of the order of law, nor of duty, nor of moral and psychological law. Regarded everywhere as an absolute advance of the human race, and with the seal set on it by human rights, liberation starts out from the idea of a natural predestination to be free: being 'liberated' absolves the human being of an original evil, restores a happy purpose and a natural vocation to him. It is our salvation, the true baptismal sacrament of modern, democratic man. Now, this is a utopia. This impulse to resolve the ambivalence of good and evil and jump over one's shadow into absolute positivity is a utopia. The ambivalence is definitive, and the things liberated are liberated in total ambivalence. You cannot liberate good without liberating evil. Sometimes evil even quicker than good, as part of the same movement. At any rate, what we have here is a deregulation of both. Liberation opens up a limitless growth and acceleration. It is once this critical threshold has been crossed (this phase transition, much as in the physical world) that things begin to float - time, money, sex, production - in a vertiginous raising of the stakes, such as we are experiencing today, which brings an uncontrollable eruption of all autonomies, all differences, in a movement that is at once uncertain, fluctuating and exponential. At this poin t freedom is already far behind, overtaken and outdistanced by liberation. What is forming before us is a freedom of circulation of each autonomized human particle under the banner of total information and integration. Each one realizing itself fully in the technical extension of all its possibilities: all stakeholders and partners in a general interaction. Only the God of the Market will recognize his own, and the 'Invisible Hand' is now the weightless ascendancy of software and networks in the name of Universal Free Exchange - the highest stage of deregulation. A logical, fateful consquence of a dynamic that seems to be at work from the origin of historical societies - the dynamic of a progressive, universal deregulation of all human relations. From feudalism to capital and beyond, what we see is, above all, an immense advance in the freedom of exchange, in the free circulation of goods, flows, persons and capital. The movement is irreversible, not in terms of human progress but in terms of the market, of the progressive advance of an inescapable globalization. This is the last stage liberalism passes through in its unremitting advance towards generalized exchange, a process of which capital, with its conflicts, contradictions, violent history - simply with its 'history' - is ultimately just the prehistory. However, we see resistance to this second 'revolution' springing up on all sides - forms of resistance even more intense than those aroused by the advent of the Enlightenment: all these movements of re-involution (the opposite of revolution), whether religious, sectarian or corporatist, new fundamentalisms or new feudalisms, which simply seem to be trying to rid themselves everywhere of this unconditional freedom and find new forms of oversight, protection and vassalage, to counter an unbearable disaffiliation with an archaic fidelity. To counter deregulation with a new set of rules. It may even be that the only refuge from the global, from a total exposure to the laws of the market, will once again be the condition of wage -earner, the 'social' with its institutional protection. In other words, a defence of the good old 'alienated' condition, though protected by its very alienation, as it were, from overexposure to the laws of flows and networks alone. With this 'voluntary' alienation possibly extending as far as an even more archaic regression to any kind of protective transcendence that offers preservation from this scattering about the networks, this dispersion and dissemination into the void. Only now do we realize we shall never be done with this paradox of freedom. For this irreversible movement of emancipation can be seen either as progress on the part of the species (it is, at any rate, this emancipation that ensures the superiority of the human species over all others) or, in a quite opposite way, as an anthropological catastrophe, an unbinding, a dizzying deregulation, whose ultimate goal we cannot grasp but which seems to be developing towards an unforeseeable extreme that may either be the highest stage of universal intelligence or of total entropy. We pass the buck on freedom in every possible way. In a continual transference, we devolve our own desires, our own lives, our own wills, to any other agency whatever. If the people puts itself in the hands of the political class, it does so more to be rid of power than out of any desire for representation. We may interpret this as a sign of passivity and irresponsibility, but why not venture a subtler hypothesis: namely, that this passing of the buck proceeds from an unwittingly lucid intuition of an absence of desire and will of their own - in short, a secret awareness of the illusoriness of freedom? 'Voluntary servitude'? The notion is doubly illusory, since it encapsulates in itself the double mystification of the two concepts of freedom and will. And the idea of a will, understood as autonomous determination of the individual being, is no less false when it turns round against freedom. The illusion does not necessarily lie where one thinks it does, and if a few only (Lichtenberg) are able to know that they are 'unfree' and to accept that destiny, the great bulk of the others ultimately have fewer illusions about their free will than those who created the concept. This does not stop 'voluntary servitude' having its rules and strategies. It is by the absence of a desire of one's own that the other's will to dominate is thwarted: these are the ruses of seduction. It is by transferring the responsibility of power on to the other that a form of equal deterrent power is exercised: these are the ruses of the accursed share. Having said this, the present form of servitude is no longer the - voluntary or involuntary - form of the absence of freedom. It is, rather, that of an excess of freedom in which man, liberated at any price, no longer knows what he is free from, nor why he is free, nor what identity to commit himself to; in which, having all that is around him available for his use, he no longer knows how to make use of himself. In this sense, the immersion in screens, networks and the technologies of Virtual Reality, with its immense possibilities, has spelled a great stride forward for liberation and has, at the same time, put an end to the question of freedom. This resiling, in digital manipulation, from care of the self and responsibility - from that portion of freedom and subjectivity to which we lay claim so noisily and which we seek by all possible means to be rid of - is today the easiest solution. To the point where it is the essential task of government forcibly to redistribute responsibility, enjoining everyone to take responsibility for themselves 'freely and fully''. The political authorities themselves strive constantly to assume an air of responsibility while passing the buck in every possible way (it is, in fact, better to be guilty than responsible, as guilt can always be imputed to some obscure force, whereas, with responsibility, the onus is on you). Fortunately, there are other, more poetic ways of ridding oneself of freedom - that of gaming, for example, where what is at stake is not a freedom subject to the law, but a sovereignty subject to rules. A more subtle and paradoxical freedom which consists in a rigorous observance, an enchanted form of voluntary servitude that is, as it were, the miraculous combination of master and slave: in gaming no one is free, everyone is both the master and the slave of the game. Do You Want to be Anyone Else?Individuality is a recent phenomenon. It is only over the last two centuries that the populations of the civilized countries have demanded the democratic privilege of being individuals. Before that, they were what they were: slaves, peasants, artisans, men or women, fathers or children -not 'individuals' or 'fully-fledged subjects'. Only with our modern civilization did we find ourselves forcibly inducted into this individual existence. Of course, we fight to retain this 'inalienable' right, and we are naturally driven to win it and defend it at all costs. We demand this freedom, this autonomy, as a fundamental human right and, at the same time, we are crippled by the responsibility that ends up making us detest ourselves as such. This is what resounds in the complaint of Job. God asks too much: ''What is a man, that thou shouldest magnify him? And that thou shouldest set thy heart upon him? And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every moment? How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle?" This leaves us subject to a contradictory twofold requirement: to seek an identity by all possible means - by hounding the identities of others or by exploring the networks - and to slough off identity in every possible way, as though it were a burden or a disguise. It is as though liberty and individuality, from having been a 'natural' state in which one may act freely, had become artificial states, a kind of moral imperative, whose implacable decree makes us hostages to our identities and our own wills. This is a very particular case of Stockholm Syndrome, since we are here both the terrorist and the hostage. Now, the hostage is by definition the unexchangeable, accursed object you cannot be rid of because you don't know what to do with it. The situation is the same for the subject: as a hostage to himself, he doesn't know how to exchange himself or be rid of himself. Being unable to conceive that identity has never existed and that it is merely something we play-act, we fuel this subjective illusion to the point of exhaustion. We wear ourselves out feeding this ghost of a representation of ourselves. We are overwhelmed by this pretension, this obstinate determination to carry around an identity which it is impossible to exchange (it can be exchanged only for the parallel illusion of an objective reality, in the same metaphysical cycle into which we are locked). All the grand narratives of our individual consciousness of freedom, will, identity and responsibility - merely add a useless, even contradictory, over-determination to our actions as they 'occur' To the effect that we are the cause of them, that they are the doing of our will, that our decisions are the product of our free will, etc. But our actions do not need this: we can decide and act without there being any need to involve the will and the idea of the will. There is no need to involve the idea of free will to make choices in one's life. Above all, there is no need to involve the idea of subject and its identity in order to exist (it is better, in any case, to involve that of alterity). These are all useless, like the belief that is superadded to the existence of God (if he exists, he doesn't need it). And so we believe in a free, willed determination of our actions and it gives them a meaning, at the same time as it gives meaning to us - the sense of being the authors of those actions. But this is all a reconstruction, like the reconstruction of the dream narrative. 'A person's actions are commonly continuations of his own inner constitution the way the magnet bestows form and order on iron filings' (Lichtenberg). This is the problem Luke Rhinehart sets himself in his novel The Dice Man: how are we to slough off this freedom, this ego which is captive to its free will? The solution he finds is that of chance. Among all the possibilities for shattering the mirror of identity, for freeing beings from the terrorism of the ego, there is the option of surrendering oneself to chance, to the dice, for all one's actions and decisions. No free will any longer, no responsible subject, but merely the play of a random dispersal, an artificial diaspora of the ego. At bottom, the ego is itself a form of superego: it is the ego we must rid ourselves of, above all. We must live without reference to a model of identity or a general equivalent. But the trap with these plural identities, these multiple existences, this devolution on to 'intelligent machines' - dice machines as well as the machines of the networks - is that once the general equivalent has disappeared, all the new possibilities are equivalent to one another and hence cancel each other out in a general indifference. Equivalence is still there, but it is no longer the equivalence of an agency at the top (the ego); it is the equivalence of all the little egos 'liberated' by its disappearance. The erosion of destinies occurs by the very excess of possibilities - as the erosion of knowledge occurs by the very excess of information or sexual erosion by the removal of prohibitions, etc. When, under the banner of identity, existence is so individualized, so atomized (' atomon' is the literal equivalent of individual) that its exchange is impossible, the multiplication of existences leads only to a simulacrum of alterity. To be able to exchange itself for anything or anyone is merely an extreme, desperate form of impossible exchange. Multiplying identities never produces anything more than all the illusory strategies for decentralizing power: it is pure illusion, pure stratagem. A fine metaphor of this fractal, proliferating identity is the storyline of the film Being John Malkovich (by Spike Jonze) or, more precisely, the moment when Malkovich, by means of a virtual apparatus, goes back into his own skin - until then it was the others who wanted to become Malkovich, this time it is Malkovich who wants to re-enter himself, to become himself at one remove, a meta-Malkovich as it were. It is at this point that he diffracts into countless metastases: by a kind of fantastic image feedback, everyone around him becomes Malkovich. He becomes the universal projection of himself. This is the paroxystic form of identity (here treated with humour). So it is that everywhere redoubled identity ends in a pure extrapolation of itself. It becomes a special effect which, with the coming of electronic and genetic manipulation, veers towards cloning pure and simple. It is in the entire machinery of the Virtual and the mental diaspora of the networks today that the fate of Homo fractalis is played out: the definitive abdication of his identity and freedom, of his ego and his superego. In these games of free will and identity, one novel variant is that of the double life. This is what happens with Romand, who, in order to escape the banality of everyday, provincial life, invents a parallel life for himself and, covering his tracks (to the point where he wipes out his whole family to hide the traces of his 'real' existence), becomes, in his own life, his own stand-in or shadow. It is by doubling and not in any sense by recourse to dissimulation that Romand imparts a fatal twist to his life. To transfigure insignificance and banality, all that is needed is to turn them into a parallel universe. There is no simulation in all this. All the psychological and sociological explanations of this duplicity and all the categories - lying, cowardice, egoism - to which it is assigned are mere fabrications. It is not even a question of schizophrenia. The phantom existence into which Romand settles has no meaning, but his home life, his 'normal' life, has no greater meaning. And so, as it were, he substitutes for the insignificance of his real life the even greater insignificance of his double life - transfiguring it in this way by an original form of counter-transference. And it is this that gave him his energy, the force of inertia that saw him able to bear this clandestine life so long. For, greatly deficient as it may have been, and deadly boring at times, there were extraordinary benefits to be had from it. There was the possibility of becoming someone else, of existing incognito somewhere else. Of seeing without being seen, of preserving a secret side to oneself, even - indeed, most importantly - preserving it from one's nearest and dearest. If Romand was able to survive in this (not even heroic) clandestine state, it was by dint of this secrecy, by dint of something the others had not even an inkling of -real 'insider trading' This was the price paid for the privilege of playing a game whose rules he alone laid down. There is the mystery of the invisibility that gave him the strength to spend hours in carparks. The remarkable enjoyment of that monotony that did not even have the charm of solitude. But there is another mystery: namely, that the others should come, in time, to connive in the illusion. For, unless we assume his wife, parents and children remained silent out of resignation, then their lack of awareness, their ignorance, become as inexplicable as his lingering in the car parks and cafeterias. Except when we see all this as a dual operation, not something got up by a single individual. Lying, illusion and simulation are always operations in which there is complicity. The mystified party is always a participant. This is true, indeed, of any relationship: there is no active or passive; there is no individual, there is only the dual. One cannot therefore test anyone's individual truthfulness or sincerity. One can no more explain the silence of those around him than Romand's own silence. The deeper he gets into his stratagem, the deeper the others retreat into their absence of curiosity. It is genuinely a conspiracy. There is no hidden truth. This is what gives the impostor his power. If there were a hidden truth, he could be unmasked, or he could unmask himself. But we can clearly see throughout the whole story that he cannot, since the imposture is shared. To the point where the fact of wiping out his entire family in the end can, paradoxically, be regarded as a variant of suicide. For the crime to be perfect, there must be no witnesses for the prosecution, but there must also be no defense witnesses, none who attempt at all costs to explain his act and to unravel this singular conspiracy. To find a moral or social reason is always to betray the secret, but Romand's crime is not so much the murder of his nearest and dearest as the thwarting of any moral and social justification. In Elia Kazan's film The Arrangement, Eddie becomes sick of his own persona in the family and in his work. He therefore resolves to 'suicide' this official Eddie, this conformist version, to find out what his buried double is like, that double of which this 'real' Eddie is merely the empty outer shell. Gradually, then, he strips out all the elements of his conventional life: his job, his wife, his status, his sexuality, and even his father, of whom he rids himself in the end, and the house, which he burns down. Once all the marks of identity are swept away, all the terms of the ordered 'arrangement', what is left? Nothing. He returns to a meaningless conformism, into which he settles like his own shadow - or like the man who has lost his shadow. The dream of identity ends in indifference. What can be read between the lines of these stories is that chance and destiny are not to be found elsewhere, in some imaginary decree. Chance is already present in the unpredictability of ordinary life. There is nothing more unpredictable than any moment of daily life. All one needs to do is to acknowledge immediately the non-existence of this individual structure, and to recognize that the ego exists only in the showing-through [transparition] of the world and all its most insignificant possibilities. It is no use wondering where freedom or identity lies and what is to be done with them. Human beings are the coming to-pass of what they are and what they do. Therein lies the movement of becoming, and what they wanted to be is not an issue; their ideals or free will are not an issue: these are merely retrospective justifications. At bottom, says Barthes, we are faced with an alternative: either we suppose a real that is entirely permeable to history (to meaning, to the idea, to interpretation, to decision) and we ideologize or, by contrast, we suppose a real that is ultimately impenetrable and irreducible and in that case we poetize. This would, at any rate, explain the coexistence in every one of the best and the worst or, in 'criminals' of an absolutely normal behaviour and an unintelligible violence which is itself a thing divided, as though alien to itself, as we see in so much crime reporting. 'He was so gentle, so kind ... ' All this is inexplicable in terms of identity and individual will. This simultaneity of contradictory behaviors merely reflects the entanglement of reality and its disavowal that is our collective horizon today. Jean Baudrillard/The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact / The Easiest Solutions First published in France, 2004 by Editions Galilee © Galilee, 2004, Le Pact de lucidite ou l'intelligence du Mal Typeset by JS Typesetting, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the United Kingdom by BiddIes Ltd, King's Lynn www.bergpublishers.com Videos, interactive screens, multimedia, the Internet, Virtual Reality: interactivity threatens us on all sides. What was once separated is everywhere merged. Distance is everywhere abolished: between the sexes, between opposite poles, between the stage and the auditorium, between the protagonists of the action, between the subject and the object, between the real and its double. And this confusion of terms, this collision of poles, means that nowhere is value judgement now possible anywhere any longer: either in art, or in morality or in politics. By the abolition of distance, of the 'pathos' of distance, everything becomes undecidable. When an event and the broadcasting of that event in real time are too close together, the event is rendered undecidable and virtual; it is stripped of its historical dimension and removed from memory. We are in a generalized feedback effect. Wherever a mingling of this kind - a collision of poles occurs, then the vital tension is discharged. Even in 'reality TV' where, in the live telling of the story, the immediate televisual acting, we see the confusion of existence and its double. There is no separation any longer, no emptiness, no absence: you enter the screen and the visual image unimpeded. You enter life itself as though walking on to a screen. You slip on your own life like a data suit. Unlike photography, cinema and painting, where there is a scene and a gaze, the video image, like the computer screen, induces a kind of immersion, a sort of umbilical relation, of 'tactile' interaction, as McLuhan used to say. You enter the fluid substance of the image, possibly to modify it, in the same way as science infiltrates itself into the genome and into the genetic code to transform the body itself. It is the same with text, with any 'virtual' text (the Internet, word-processing): you work on it like a computer-generated image, which no longer bears any relation to the transcendence of the gaze or of writing. At any rate, as soon as you are in front of the screen, you no longer see the text as a text, but as an image. Now, it is in the strict separation of text and screen, of text and image, that writing is an activity in its own right, never an interaction. Similarly, it is only with the strict separation of stage and auditorium that the spectator is an actor in his/her own right. Everything today conspires to abolish that separation: the immersion of the spectator in the spectacle, 'living theatre', 'happenings'. The spectacle becomes user-friendly, interactive. The apogee of spectacle or its end? When everyone is an actor, there is no action any longer, no scene. It's the death of the spectator as such. The end of the aesthetic illusion. In fact, everything that was so much trouble to separate, to sex, to transcend, to sublimate and to metamorphose by distance is today being constantly melded together. All that has been wrested from reality we are in the process of realizing by force - there will always be a technique for laying hold of it and making it operational. 'You dreamed it, we made it.' Everything that was so much trouble to destroy, we are today hell-bent on restoring. What we have here, in fact, is an immense reductionism, an immense revisionism. In the sphere of the Virtual-of the digital, the computer, integral calculus -nothing is representable. It is not a 'scene', and there is neither distance nor a critical or aesthetic gaze: there is total immersion and the countless images that come to us from this media sphere are not of the order of representation, but of decoding and visual consumption. They do not educate us, they inform us. And it is impossible to work back from them to some tangible reality - even a political reality. Even war in this sense is no longer representable, and to the ordeal of war is now added that of the impossibility of representation - in spite of, or because of, the hypervisualization of the event. The war in Iraq and the Gulf War were vivid illustrations of this. For there to be critical perception and genuine information, the images would have to be different from the war. But they are not (or not any longer): to the routinized violence of war is added the equally routine violence of the images. To the technical virtuality of the war is added the digital virtuality of the images. If we understand war for what it is today (beyond its political stakes), namely the instrument of a violent acculturation to the world order, then the media and images are part of the Integral Reality of war. They are the subtler instrument of the same homogenization by force. In this impossibility of re-apprehending the world through images and of moving from information to a collective action and will, in this absence of sensibility and mobilization, it isn't apathy or general indifference that's at issue; it is quite simply that the umbilical cord of representation is severed. The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind a two-way mirror: you see the world, but it doesn't see you, it doesn't look at you. Now, you only see things if they are looking at you. The screen screens out any dual relation (any possibility of 'response'). It is this failure of representation which, together with a failure of action, underlies the impossibility of developing an ethics of information, an ethics of images, an ethics of the Virtual and the networks. All attempts in that direction inevitably fail. All that remains is the mental diaspora of images and the extravagant performance of the medium. Susan Sontag tells a good story about this pre-eminence of the medium and of images: as she is sitting in front of the television watching the moon landing, the people she is watching with tell her they don't believe it at all. 'But what are you watching, then?' she asks. 'Oh, we're watching television!' Fantastic: they do not see the moon; they see only the screen showing the moon. They do not see the message; they see only the image. Ultimately, contrary to what Susan Sontag thinks, only intellectuals believe in the ascendancy of meaning; 'people' believe only in the ascendancy of signs. They long ago said goodbye to reality. They have gone over, body and soul, to the spectacular. What are we to do with an interactive world in which the demarcation line between subject and object is virtually abolished? That world can no longer either be reflected or represented; it can only be refracted or diffracted now by operations that are, without distinction, operations of brain and screen - the mental operations of a brain that has itself become a screen. The other side of this Integral Reality is that everything operates in an integrated circuit. In the information media - and in our heads too - the image-feedback dominates, the insistent presence of the monitors - this convolution of things that operate in a loop, that connect back round to themselves like a Klein bottle, that fold back into themselves. The perfect reality, in the sense that everything is verified by adherence to, by confusion with, its own image. This process assumes its full magnitude in the visual and media world, but also in everyday, individual life, in our acts and thoughts. Such an automatic refraction affects even our perception of the world, sealing everything, as it were, by a focusing on itself. It is a phenomenon that is particularly marked in the photographic world, where everything is immediately decked out with a context, a culture, a meaning, an idea, disarming any vision and creating a form of blindness condemned by Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio: 'There exists a terrible form of blindness which very few people notice: the blindness that allows you to look and see, but not to see at a stroke without looking. That is how things were before: you didn't look at them, you were happy simply to see them. Everything today is poisoned with duplicity; there is no pure, direct impulse. So, for example, the countryside has become "landscape" or, in other words, a representation of itself ... ' In this sense, it is our very perception, our immediate sensibility, that has become aesthetic. Sight, hearing, touch - all our senses have become aesthetic in the worst sense of the term. Any new vision of things can only be the product, then, of a deconstruction of this image-feedback, of a resolution of this counter-transference that blocks our vision, in order to restore the world to its sensory illusoriness (with no feedback and no image feedback). In the mirror we differentiate ourselves from our image, we enter upon an open form of alienation and of play with it. The mirror, the image, the gaze, the scene - all these things open on to a culture of metaphor. Whereas in the operation of the Virtual, at a certain level of immersion in the visual machinery, the man/machine distinction no longer holds: the machine is on both sides of the interface. Perhaps you are indeed merely the machine's space now - the human being having become the virtual reality of the machine, its mirror operator. This has to do with the very essence of the screen. There is no 'through' the screen the way there is a 'through' the looking-glass or mirror. The dimensions of time itself merge there in 'real time' And, the characteristic of any virtual surface being first of all to be there, to be empty and thus capable of being filled with anything whatever, it is left to you to enter, in real time, into interactivity with the void. Machines produce only machines. The texts, images, films, speech and programmes which come out of the computer are machine products, and they bear the marks of such products: they are artificially padded-out, face-lifted by the machine; the films are stuffed with special effects, the texts full of longueurs and repetitions due to the machine's malicious will to function at all costs (that is its passion), and to the operator's fascination with this limitless possibility of functioning. Hence the wearisome character in films of all this violence and pornographied sexuality, which are merely special effects of violence and sex, no longer even fantasized by humans, but pure machinic violence. And this explains all these texts that resemble the work of 'intelligent' virtual agents, whose only act is the act of programming. This has nothing to do with automatic writing, which played on the magical telescoping of words and concepts, whereas all we have here is the automatism of programming, an automatic run-through of all the possibilities. It is this phantasm of the ideal performance of the text or image, the possibility of correcting endlessly, which produce in the 'creative artist' this vertige of interactivity with his own object, alongside the anxious vertige at not having reached the technological limits of his possibilities. In fact, it is the (virtual) machine which is speaking you, the machine which is thinking you. And is there really any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet merely simulates a free mental space, a space of freedom and discovery. In fact, it merely offers a multiple but conventional space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes. Nothing exists beyond its search parameters. Every question has an anticipated response assigned to it. You are the questioner and, at the same time, the automatic answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoder - you are, in fact, your own terminal. That is the ecstasy of communication. There is no 'Other' out there and no final destination. It's any old destination - and any old interactor will do. And so the system goes on, without end and without finality, and its only possibility is that of infinite involution. Hence the comfortable vertige of this electronic, computer interaction, which acts like a drug. You can spend your whole life at this, without a break. Drugs themselves are only ever the perfect example of a crazed, closed-circuit interactivity. People tell you the computer is just a handier, more complex kind of typewriter. But that isn't true. The typewriter is an entirely external object. The page floats free, and so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank or written page with my eyes - something I cannot do with the screen. The computer is a prosthesis. I have a tactile, intersensory relation to it. I become myself, an ectoplasm of the screen. And this, no doubt, explains, in this incubation of the virtual image and the brain, the malfunctions which afflict computers, and which are like the failings of one's own body. On the other hand, the fact that priority belongs to the network and not to individuals implies the possibility of hiding, of disappearing into the intangible space of the Virtual, so that you cannot be pinned down anywhere, which resolves all problems of identity, not to mention those of alterity. So, the attraction of all these virtual machines no doubt derives not so much from the thirst for information and knowledge as from the desire to disappear, and the possibility of dissolving oneself into a phantom conviviality. A kind of 'high' that takes the place of happiness. But virtuality comes close to happiness only because it surreptitiously removes all reference from it. It gives you everything, but it subtly deprives you of everything at the same time. The subject is, in a sense, realized to perfection, but when realized to perfection, it automatically becomes object, and panic sets in. However, we must not look on this domination of the Virtual as something inevitable. Above all, we must not take the Virtual for a 'reality' (definitely going too far!) and apply the categories of the real and the rational to it. That is the same misconception as reinterpreting science in the terms of theology, as has been done for centuries, not seeing that science put an end to theology. Or interpreting the media in the Marxist terms of alienation, in socio-political terms from ancient history, not seeing that the course of history came to an end with the entry on the scene of the news media and, more generally, that it was all over with reality once the Virtual came on the scene. However, with the Virtual we find ourselves up against a strange paradox. This is because the Virtual can deny its own reality only at the same time as it denies the reality of all the rest. It is caught up in a game whose rules it does not control (no one controls them!) The Virtual is not, then, the 'last word'; it is merely the virtual illusion, the illusion of the Virtual. There is no highest stage of intelligence - and Artificial Intelligence is certainly no such stage. We have already seen the media revolution being misunderstood when the medium was reduced to a mere instrumental technique. We see here the same misunderstanding of the meaning of the Virtual when it is reduced to an applied technology. People did not see that the irruption of both overturned the very principle of reality. So they speak of the proper use of the Virtual, of an ethics of the Virtual, of virtual 'democracy', without changing anything of the traditional categories. Now, the specificity of the Virtual is that it constitutes an event in the real against the real and throws into question all these categories of the real, the social, the political and history - such that the only emergence of any of these things now is virtual. This is to say that there is no longer any politics now but the virtual (and not a politics of the Virtual), no longer any history but the virtual (and not a history of the Virtual), no longer any technology but the virtual (and not a technology o f the Virtual). Not to mention the 'arts of the Virtual' - as though art remained art while playing with the digital and the numeric. Or the economy, which has itself passed over into virtuality, that is to say, into pure speculation. This upping of the stakes shows that the rationale for the Virtual does not lie within itself, any more than is the case with the economy, and that it constructs itself by headlong flight forward, as a simulation effect, as substitution for the impossible exchange of the world. Conclusion: from the moment the economic is there for something else, there is no point making endless critiques of it or analysing its transformations. As soon as the Virtual is there for something else, there is no point enquiring into its principles or purposes, no point being for it or against it. For the destiny of these things lies elsewhere. And the destiny of the analysis too: everything changes depending on whether you analyse a system by its own logic or in terms of the idea that it is there for something else. We must have a sense of this illusion of the Virtual somewhere, since, at the same time as we plunge into this machinery and its superficial abysses, it is as though we viewed it as theatre. Just as we view news coverage as theatre. Of news coverage we are the hostages, but we also treat it as spectacle, consume it as spectacle, without regard for its credibility. A latent incredulity and derision prevent us from being totally in the grip of the information media. It isn't critical consciousness that causes us to distance ourselves from it in this way, but the reflex of no longer wanting to play the game. Somewhere in us lies a profound desire not to have information and transparency (nor perhaps freedom and democracy - all this needs looking at again). Towards all these ideals of modernity there is something like a collective form of mental reserve, of innate immunity. It would be best, then, to pose all these problems in terms other than those of alienation and the unhappy destiny of the subject (which is where all critical analysis ends Up). The unlimited extension of the Virtual itself pushes us towards something like pataphysics, as the science of all that exceeds its own limits, of all that exceeds the laws of physics and metaphysics. The pre-eminently ironic science, corresponding to a state in which things reach a pitch that is simultaneously paroxystic and parodic. Can we advance the hypothesis that, beyond the critical stage, the heroic stage (which is still that of metaphysics), there is an ironic stage of technology, an ironic stage of history, an ironic stage of value, etc.? This would free us from the Heideggerian view of technology as the effectuation, and the last stage, of metaphysics; it would free us from all retrospective nostalgia for being, giving us, rather, a gigantic objective irony, a superior intuition of the illusoriness of all this process - which would not be far from the radical post-historical snobbery Alexandre Kojeve spoke of. At the heart of this artificial reality, this Virtual Reality, this irony is perhaps all we have left of the original illusion, which at least preserves us from any temptation one day to possess the truth. excerpt from the book: 'The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact /'The Mental Diaspora of the Networks' by Jean Baudrillard
Let us listen to what is said in these fantastic fragments. Imagination is not madness. Even if in the arbitrariness of hallucination, alienation finds the first access to its vain liberty, madness begins only beyond this point, when the mind binds itself to this arbitrariness and becomes a prisoner of this apparent liberty. At the moment he wakes from a dream, a man can indeed observe: "I am imagining that I am dead": he thereby denounces and measures the arbitrariness of the imagination—he is not mad. He is mad when he posits as an affirmation of his death—when he suggests as having some value as truth—the still-neutral content of the image "I am dead." And just as the consciousness of truth is not carried away by the mere presence of the image, but in the act which limits, confronts, unifies, or dissociates the image, so madness will begin only in the act which gives the value of truth to the image. There is an original innocence of the imagination: "The imagination itself does not err, since it neither denies nor affirms but is fixed to so great a degree on the simple contemplation of an image"; and only the mind can turn what is given in the image into abusive truth, in other words, into error, or acknowledged error, that is, into truth: "A drunk man thinks he sees two candles where there is but one; a man who has a strabismus and whose mind is cultivated immediately acknowledges his error and accustoms himself to see but one." Madness is thus beyond imagination, and yet it is profoundly rooted in it; for it consists merely in allowing the image a spontaneous value, total and absolute truth. The act of the reasonable man who, rightly or wrongly, judges an image to be true or false, is beyond this image, transcends and measures it by what is not itself; the act of the madman never oversteps the image presented, but surrenders to its immediacy, and affirms it only insofar is it is enveloped by it: "Many persons, not to say all, succumb to madness only from being too concerned about an object." Inside the image, confiscated by it, and incapable of escaping from it, madness is nonetheless more than imagination, forming an act of undetermined content.
What is this act? An act of faith, an act of affirmation and of negation—a discourse which sustains and at the same time erodes the image, undermines it, distends it in the course of a reasoning, and organizes it around a segment of language. The man who imagines he is made of glass is not mad, for any sleeper can have this image in a dream; but he is mad if, believing he is made of glass, he thereby concludes that he is fragile, that he is in danger of breaking, that he must touch no object which might be too resistant, that he must in fact remain motionless, and so on. Such reasonings are those of a madman; but again we must note that in themselves they are neither absurd nor illogical. On the contrary, they apply correctly the most rigorous figures of logic. And Paul Zacchias has no difficulty finding them, in all their rigor, among the insane. Syllogism, in a man letting himself starve to death: "The dead do not eat; I am dead; hence I do not eat." Induction extended to infinity, in a man suffering from persecution delusions: "A, B, and C are my enemies; all of them are men; therefore all men are my enemies." Enthymeme, in another sufferer: "Most of those who have lived in this house are dead, hence I, who have lived in this house, am dead." The marvelous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language. "From these things," Zacchias concludes, "you truly see how best to discuss the intellect." The ultimate language of madness is that of reason, but the language of reason enveloped in the prestige of the image, limited to the locus of appearance which the image defines. It forms, outside the totality of images and the universality of discourse, an abusive, singular organization whose insistent quality constitutes madness. Madness, then, is not altogether in the image, which of itself is neither true nor false, neither reasonable nor mad; nor is it, further, in the reasoning which is mere form, revealing nothing but the indubitable figures of logic. And yet madness is in one and in the other: in a special version or figure of their relationship.
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Let us consider an example borrowed from Diemerbroek. A man was suffering from a profound melancholia. As with all melancholies, his mind was attached to a fixed idea, and this idea was for him the occasion of a constantly renewed sadness. He accused himself of having killed his son, and in the excess of his remorse, declared that God, for his punishment, had assigned a demon to tempt him, like the demon which had tempted the Lord. This demon he saw, spoke to, heard, and answered. He did not understand why those around him refused to acknowledge such a presence. Such then is madness: this remorse, this belief, this hallucination, these speeches; in short, this complex of convictions and images which constitutes a delirium. Now Diemerbroek tries to find out what are the "causes" of this madness, how it can have originated. And this is what he learns: this man had taken his son bathing and the boy had drowned. Hence the father considered himself responsible for his son's death. We can therefore reconstitute in the following manner the development of this madness: judging himself guilty, the man decides that homicide is execrable in the sight of God on High; whence it occurs to his imagination that he is eternally damned; and since he knows that the chief torment of damnation consists in being delivered into Satan's hands, he tells himself "that a horrible demon is assigned to him." This demon he does not as yet see, but since "he does not cease thinking of it," and "regards this notion as necessarily true," he imposes on his brain a certain image of this demon; this image is presented to his soul by the action of the brain and of the spirits with such insistence that he believes he continually sees the demon itself."
Hence madness, as analyzed by Diemerbroek, has two levels; one is manifest to all eyes: an unwarranted melancholia in a man who wrongly accuses himself of having killed his son; a depraved imagination which pictures demons; a dismantled reason which converses with a phantom. But at a deeper level, we find a rigorous organization dependent on the faultless armature of a discourse. This discourse, in its logic, commands the firmest belief in itself, it advances by judgments and reasonings which connect together; it is a kind of reason in action. In short, under the chaotic and manifest delirium reigns the order of a secret delirium. In this second delirium, which is, in a sense, pure reason, reason delivered of all the external tinsel of dementia, is located the paradoxical truth of madness. And this in a double sense, since we find here both what makes madness true (irrefutable logic, perfectly organized discourse, faultless connection in the transparency of a virtual language) and what makes it truly madness (its own nature, the special style of all its manifestations, and the internal structure of delirium).
But still more profoundly, this delirious language is the ultimate truth of madness insofar as it is madness's organizing form, the determining principle of all its manifestations, whether of the body or of the soul. For if Diemerbroek's melancholic converses with his demon, it is because the demon's image has been profoundly impressed by the movement of spirits on the still-ductile substance of the brain. But in its turn, this organic figure is merely the other side of a preoccupation which has obsessed the patient's mind; it represents what might be called the sedimentation in the body of an infinitely repeated discourse apropos of the punishment God must reserve for sinners guilty of homicide. The body and the traces it conceals, the soul and the images it perceives, are here no more than stages in the syntax of delirious language.
And lest we be criticized for elaborating this entire analysis around a single observation from a single author (a privileged observation, since it concerns melancholic delirium), we shall also seek confirmation of the fundamental role of delirious discourse in the classical conception of madness in another author, of another period, and apropos of a very different disease. This is a case of "nymphomania" observed by Bienville. The imagination of a young girl, "Julie," had been inflamed by precocious reading and aroused by the remarks of a servant girl "initiated into the secrets of Venus, ... a virtuous handmaiden in the mother's eyes" but "a dear and voluptuous stewardess of the daughter's pleasures." Yet Julie combats these—to tier-new desires with all the impressions she has received in the course of her education; to the seductive language of novels, she opposes the lessons of religion and virtue; and despite the vivacity of her imagination, she does not succumb to disease so long as she possesses "the strength to reason thus with herself: it is neither lawful nor virtuous to obey so shameful a passion." But the wicked remarks, the dangerous readings increase; at every moment, they render more intense the agitation of the weakening fibers; then the fundamental language by which she had hitherto resisted gradually gives way: "Nature alone had spoken hitherto; but soon illusion, chimera, and extravagance played their part; at length she acquired the unhappy strength to approve in herself this horrible maxim: nothing is so beautiful nor so sweet as to obey the desires of love." This fundamental discourse opens the gates of madness: the imagination is freed, the appetites continually increase, the fibers reach the final degree of irritation. Delirium, in its lapidary form of a moral principle, leads straight to the convulsions which can endanger life itself.
At the end of this last cycle which had begun with the liberty of the hallucination and which closes now with the rigor of delirious language, we can conclude:
1. In madness, for the classical age, there exist two forms of delirium. A special, symptomatic form, proper to some of the diseases of the mind and especially to melancholia; in this sense we can say that there are diseases with or without delirium. In any case, such delirium is always manifest; it forms an integral part of the signs of madness; it is immanent to madness's truth and constitutes only a sector of it. But there exists another delirium which is not always manifest, which is not formulated by the sufferer himself in the course of the disease, but which cannot fail to exist in the eyes of anyone who, seeking to trace the disease from its origins, attempts to formulate its riddle and its truth.
2. This implicit delirium exists in all the alterations of the mind, even where we would expect it least. In cases of no more than silent gestures, wordless violence, oddities of conduct, classical thought has no doubt that madness is continually subjacent, relating each of these particular signs to the general essence of madness. James's Dictionary expressly urges us to consider as delirious "the sufferers who sin by fault or excess in any of various voluntary actions, in a manner contrary to reason and to propriety; as when they use their hand, for example, to tear out tufts of wool or in an action similar to that which serves to catch flies; or when a patient acts against his custom and without cause, or when he speaks too much or too little against his normal habits; if he abounds in obscene remarks, being, when in health, of measured speech and decent in his discourse, and if he utters words that have no consequence, if he breathes more faintly than he must, or uncovers his private parts in the presence of those who are near him. We also regard as being in a state of delirium those whose minds are affected by some derangement in the organs of sense, or who use them in a fashion not customary to them, as when, for example, a sufferer is deprived of some voluntary action or acts inhabitually."
3. Thus understood, discourse covers the entire range of madness. Madness, in the classical sense, does not designate so much a specific change in the mind or in the body, as the existence, under the body's alterations, under the oddity of conduct and conversation, of a delirious discourse. The simplest and most general definition we can give of classical madness is indeed delirium: "This word is derived from lira, a furrow; so that deliro actually means to move out of the furrow, away from the proper path of reason." Hence it is not surprising to find the eighteenth-century nosographers often classifying vertigo as a madness, and more rarely hysterical convulsions; this is because it is often impossible to find in hysterical convulsions the unity of a language, while vertigo affords the delirious affirmation that the world is really "turning around." Such delirium is a necessary and sufficient reason for a disease to be called madness.
4. Language is the first and last structure of madness, its constituent form; on language are based all the cycles in which madness articulates its nature. That the essence of madness can be ultimately defined in the simple structure of a discourse does not reduce it to a purely psychological nature, but gives it a hold over the totality of soul and body; such discourse is both the silent language by which the mind speaks to itself in the truth proper to it, and the visible articulation in the movements of the body. Parallelisms, complements, all the forms of immediate communication which we have seen manifested, in madness are suspended between soul and body in this single language and in its powers. The movement of passion which persists until it breaks and turns against itself, the sudden appearance of the image, and the agitations of the body which were its visible concomitants—all this, even as we were trying to reconstruct it, was already secretly animated by this language. If the determinism of passion is transcended and released in the hallucination of the image, if the image, in return, has swept away the whole world of beliefs and desires, it is because the delirious language was already present—a discourse which liberated passion from all its limits, and adhered with all the constraining weight of its affirmation to the image which was liberating itself.
It is in this delirium, which is of both body and soul, of both language and image, of both grammar and physiology, that all the cycles of madness conclude and begin. It is this delirium whose rigorous meaning organized them from the start. It is madness itself, and also, beyond each of its phenomena, its silent transcendence, which constitute the truth of madness.
A last question remains: In the name of what can this fundamental language be regarded as a delirium? Granting that it is the truth of madness, what makes it true madness and the originating form of insanity? Why should it be in this discourse, whose forms we have seen to be so faithful to the rules of reason, that we find all those signs which will most manifestly declare the very absence of reason?
A central question, but one to which the classical age has not formulated a direct answer. We must approach it obliquely, interrogating the experiences which are to be found in the immediate neighborhood of this essential language of madness: that is, the dream and the delusion.
The quasi-oneiric character of madness is one of the constant themes in the classical period. A theme which doubtless derives from a very old tradition, to which Andre du Laurens, at the end of the sixteenth century, still testifies; for him melancholia and dreams have the same origin and bear, in relation to truth, the same value. There are "natural dreams" which represent what, during the preceding day, has passed through the senses or the understanding but happens to be modified by the specific temperament of the subject. In the same way, there is a melancholia which has a merely physical origin in the disposition of the sufferer and alters, for his mind, the importance, the value, and so to speak the coloration of real events. But there is also a melancholia which permits the sufferer to predict the future, to speak in an unknown language, to see beings ordinarily invisible; this melancholia originates in a supernatural intervention, the same which brings to the sleeper's mind those dreams which foresee the future, announce events to come, and cause him to see "strange things."
But in fact the seventeenth century preserves this tradition of the resemblance between madness and dreams only to break it all the more completely and to generate new, more essential relations. Relations in which madness and dreams are not only understood in their remote origin or in their imminent value as signs, but are confronted as phenomena, in their development, in their very nature.
Dreams and madness then appeared to be of the same substance. Their mechanism was the same; thus Zacchias could identify in sleepwalking the movements which cause dreams, but which in a waking state can also provoke madness.
In the first moments when one falls asleep, the vapors which rise in the body and ascend to the head are many, turbulent, and dense. They are so dark that they waken no image in the brain; they merely agitate, in their chaotic dance, the nerves and the muscles. The same is true in the frenzied, in maniacs: they suffer few hallucinations, no false beliefs, but an intense agitation which they cannot manage to control. Let us continue the evolution of sleep: after the first period of turbulence, the vapors which rise to the brain are clarified, their movement organized; this is the moment when fantastic dreams are born; one sees miracles, a thousand impossible things. To this stage corresponds that of dementia, in which one is convinced of many things "which are not in real life." Then at last the agitation of the vapors is calmed altogether; the sleeper begins to see things still more clearly; in the transparency of the henceforth limpid vapors, recollections of the day before reappear in accordance with reality; such images are at most transposed, on one point or another—as occurs in melancholies, who recognize all things as they are, "in particular those who are not merely distracted." Between the gradual developments of sleep—with what they contribute at each stage to the quality of the imagination—and the forms of madness, the analogy is constant, because the mechanisms are the same: the same movement of vapors and spirits, the same liberation of images, the same correspondence between the physical qualities of phenomena and the psychological or moral values of sentiments. "To emerge from the insane no differently than from the sleeping."
The important thing, in Zacchias's analysis, is that madness is not associated with dreams in their positive phenomena, but rather to the totality formed by sleep and dreams together: that is, to a complex which includes—besides the image—hallucination, memory, or prediction, the great void of sleep, the night of the senses, and all that negativity which wrests man from the waking state and its apparent truths. Whereas tradition compared the delirium of the madman to the vivacity of the dream images, the classical period identified delirium only with the complex of the image and the night of the mind, against which background it assumed its liberty. And this complex, transposed entire into the clarity of the waking state, constituted madness. This is how we must understand the definitions of madness which insistently recur throughout the classical period. The dream, as a complex figure of image and sleep, is almost always present in that definition. Either in a negative fashion—the notion of the waking state then being the only one that distinguishes madmen from sleepers; or in a positive fashion, delirium being defined as a modality of the dream, with the waking state as the specific difference:
"Delirium is the dream of waking persons." The ancients' notion of the dream as a transitory form of madness is inverted; it is no longer the dream which borrows its disturbing powers from alienation—showing thereby how fragile or limited reason is; it is madness which takes its original nature from the dream and reveals in this kinship that it is a liberation of the image in the dark night of reality.
The dream deceives; it leads to confusions; it is illusory. But it is not erroneous. And that is why madness is not exhausted in the waking modality of the dream, and why it overflows into error. It is true that in the dream, the imagination forges "impossible things and miracles," or that it assembles lifelike figures "by an irrational method"; but, Zacchias remarks, "there is no error in these things, and consequently nothing insane." Madness occurs when the images, which are so close to the dream, receive the affirmation or negation that constitutes error. It is in this sense that the Encyclopedic proposed its famous definition of madness: to depart from reason "with confidence and in the firm conviction that one is following it— that, it seems to me, is what is called being mad." Error is the other element always present with the dream, in the classical definition of insanity. The madman, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is not so much the victim of an illusion, of a hallucination of his senses, or of a movement of his mind. He is not abused; he deceives himself. If it is true that on one hand the madman's mind is led on by the oneiric arbitrariness of images, on the other, and at the same time, he imprisons himself in the circle of an erroneous consciousness: "We call madmen," Sauvages was to say, "those who are actually deprived of reason or who persist in some notable error; it is this constant error of the soul manifest in its imagination, in its judgments, and in its desires, which constitutes the characteristic of this category."
Madness begins where the relation of man to truth is disturbed and darkened. It is in this relation, at the same time as in the destruction of this relation, that madness assumes its general meaning and its particular forms. Dementia, Zacchias says, using the term here in the most general sense of madness, "lay in this, that the intellect did not distinguish true from false." But this breakdown, if we can understand it only as negation, has positive structures which give it singular forms. According to the different forms of access to the truth, there will be different types of madness. It is in this sense that Chrichton, for example, distinguishes in the order of vesanias, first the class deliria, which alter that relation to the truth which takes shape in perception ("general delirium of the mental faculties, in which the diseased perceptions are taken for realities"); then the class hallucinations, which alter representation ("error of the mind in which imaginary objects are taken for realities, or else real objects are falsely represented"); and last, the class dementias, which without abolishing or altering the faculties that afford access to truth, weaken them and diminish their powers.
But we can also analyze madness starting with truth itself and with the forms proper to it. It is in this manner that the Encyclopedic distinguishes "physical truth" from "moral truth." "Physical truth consists in the accurate relation of our sensations with physical objects"; there will be a form of madness determined by the impossibility of acceding to this form of truth; a kind of madness of the physical world which includes illusions, hallucinations, all perceptual disturbances; "it is a madness to hear choirs of angels, as certain enthusiasts do." "Moral truth," on the other hand, "consists in the exactitude of the relations we discern either between moral objects, or between those objects and ourselves." There will be a form of madness consisting of the loss of these relations; such is the madness of character, of conduct, and of the passions. "Veritable madnesses, then, are all the derangements of our mind, all the illusions of self-love, and all our passions when they are carried to the point of blindness; for blindness is the distinctive characteristic of madness."
Blindness: one of the words which comes closest to the essence of classical madness. It refers to that night of quasi-sleep which surrounds the images of madness, giving them, in their solitude, an invisible sovereignty; but it refers also to ill-founded beliefs, mistaken judgments, to that whole background of errors inseparable from madness. The fundamental discourse of delirium, in its constitutive powers, thus reveals to what extent, despite analogies of form, despite the rigor of its meaning, it was not a discourse of reason. It spoke, but in the night of blindness; it was more than the loose and disordered text of a dream, since it deceived itself; but it was more than an erroneous proposition, since it was plunged into that total obscurity which is that of sleep. Delirium, as the principle of madness, is a system of false propositions in the general syntax of the dream.
Madness is precisely at the point of contact between the oneiric and the erroneous; it traverses, in its variations, the surface on which they meet, the surface which both joins and separates them. With error, madness shares non-truth, and arbitrariness in affirmation or negation; from the dream, madness borrows the flow of images and the colorful presence of hallucinations. But while error is merely non-truth, while the dream neither affirms nor judges, madness fills the void of error with images, and links hallucinations by affirmation of the false. In a sense, it is thus plenitude, joining to the figures of night the powers of day, to the forms of fantasy the activity of the waking mind; it links the dark content with the forms of light. But is not such plenitude actually the culmination of the void? The presence of images offers no more than night-ringed hallucinations, figures inscribed at the comers of sleep, hence detached from any sensuous reality; however vivid they are, however rigorously established in the body, these images are nothingness, since they represent nothing; as for erroneous judgment, it judges only in appearance: affirming nothing true or real, it does not affirm at all; it is ensnared in the non-being of error.
Joining vision and blindness, image and judgment, hallucination and language, sleep and waking, day and night, madness is ultimately nothing, for it unites in them all that is negative. But the paradox of this nothing is to manifest itself, to explode in signs, in words, in gestures. Inextricable unity of order and disorder, of the reasonable being of things and this nothingness of madness! For madness, if it is nothing, can manifest itself only by departing from itself, by assuming an appearance in the order of reason and thus becoming the contrary of itself. Which illuminates the paradoxes of the classical experience: madness is always absent, in a perpetual retreat where it is inaccessible, without phenomenal or positive character; and yet it is present and perfectly visible in the singular evidence of the madman. Meaningless disorder as madness is, it reveals, when we examine it, only ordered classifications, rigorous mechanisms in soul and body, language articulated according to a visible logic. All that madness can say of itself is merely reason, though it is itself the negation of reason. In short, a rational hold over madness is always possible and necessary, to the very degree that madness is non-reason.
There is only one word which summarizes this experience, Unreason: all that, for reason, is closest and most remote, emptiest and most complete; all that presents itself to reason in familiar structures—authorizing a knowledge, and then a science, which seeks to be positive—and all that is constantly in retreat from reason, in the inaccessible domain of nothingness.
And if, now, we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations with the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.
Dazzlement is night in broad daylight, the darkness that rules at the very heart of what is excessive in light's radiance. Dazzled reason opens its eyes upon the sun and sees nothing, that is, does not see; in dazzlement, the recession of objects toward the depths of night has as an immediate correlative the suppression of vision itself; at the moment when it sees objects disappear into the secret night of light, sight sees itself in the moment of its disappearance.
To say that madness is dazzlement is to say that the madman sees the daylight, the same daylight as the man of reason (both live in the same brightness); but seeing this same daylight, and nothing but this daylight and nothing in it, he sees it as void, as night, as nothing; for him the shadows are the way to perceive daylight. Which means that, seeing the night and the nothingness of the night, he does not see at all. And believing he sees, he admits as realities the hallucinations of his imagination and all the multitudinous population of night. That is why delirium and dazzlement are in a relation which constitutes the essence of madness, exactly as truth and light, in their fundamental relation, constitute classical reason.
In this sense, the Cartesian formula of doubt is certainly the great exorcism of madness. Descartes closes his eyes and plugs up his ears the better to see the true brightness of essential daylight; thus he is secured against the dazzlement of the madman who, opening his eyes, sees only night, and not seeing at all, believes he sees when he imagines. In the uniform lucidity of his closed senses, Descartes has broken with all possible fascination, and if he sees, he is certain of seeing that which he sees. While before the eyes of the madman, drunk on a light which is darkness, rise and multiply images incapable of criticizing themselves (since the madman sees them), but irreparably separated from being (since the madman sees nothing).
Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself. And this is not a metaphor. We are at the center of the great cosmology which animates all classical culture. The "cosmos" of the Renaissance, so rich in internal communications and symbolisms, entirely dominated by the interacting presence of the stars, has now disappeared, without "nature" having yet assumed its status of universality, without its having received man's lyrical recognition, subjecting him to the rhythm of its seasons. What the classical thinkers retain of the "world," what they already anticipate in "nature," is an extremely abstract law, which nonetheless forms the most vivid and concrete opposition, that of day and night. This is no longer the fatal time of the planets, it is not yet the lyrical time of the seasons; it is the universal but absolutely divided time of brightness and darkness. A form which thought entirely masters in a mathematical science— Cartesian physics is a kind of mathesis of light—but which at the same time traces the great tragic caesura in human existence: one that dominates the theatrical time of Racine and the space of Georges de la Tour in the same imperious fashion. The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most reduced but the most demanding of the world's necessities, the most inevitable but the simplest of nature's legalities.
A law which excludes all dialectic and all reconciliation; which establishes, consequently, both the flawless unity of knowledge and the uncompromising division of tragic existence; it rules over a world without twilight, which knows no effusion, nor the attenuated cares of lyricism; everything must be either waking or dream, truth or darkness, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow. Such a law prescribes an inevitable order, a serene division which makes truth possible and confirms it forever.
And yet on either side of this order, two symmetrical, inverse figures bear witness that there are extremities where it can be transgressed, showing at the same time to what degree it is essential not to transgress it. On one side, tragedy. The rule of the theatrical day has a positive content; it forces tragic duration to be poised upon the singular but universal alternation of day and night; the whole of the tragedy must be accomplished in this unity of time, for tragedy is ultimately nothing but the confrontation of two realms, linked to each other by time itself, in the irreconcilable. Every day, in Racine's theater, is overhung by a night, which it brings, so to speak, to light: the night of Troy and its massacres, the night of Nero's desires, Titus's Roman night, Athalie's night. These are the great stretches of night, realms of darkness which haunt the day without yielding an hour, and disappear only in the new night of death. And these fantastic nights, in their turn, are haunted by a light which forms a kind of infernal reflection of the day: the burning of Troy, the torches of the Praetorians, the pale light of the dream. In classical tragedy, day and night are arranged like a pair of mirrors, endlessly reflect each other, and afford that simple couple a sudden profundity which envelops in a single movement all of man's life and his death. In the same fashion, in De la Tour's Madeleine au miroir, light and shadow confront each other, divide and at the same time unite a face and its reflection, a skull and its image, a vigil and a silence; and in the Image Saint-Alexis, the page holding the torch reveals under the shadow of the vault the man who was his master—a grave and luminous boy encounters all of human misery; a child brings death to light.
On the other side, facing tragedy and its hieratic language, is the confused murmur of madness. Here, too, the great law of the division has been violated; shadow and light mingle in the fury of madness, as in the tragic disorder. But in another mode. In night, the tragic character found a somber truth of day; the night of Troy remained Andromache's truth, as Athalie's night presaged the truth of the already advancing day; night, paradoxically, revealed; it was the profoundest day of being. The madman, conversely, finds in daylight only the inconsistency of the night's figures; he lets the light be darkened by all the illusions of the dream; his day is only the most superficial night of appearance. It is to this degree that tragic man, more than any other, is engaged in being, is the bearer of his truth, since, like Phedre, he flings in the face of the pitiless sun all the secrets of the night; while the madman is entirely excluded from being. And how could he not be, lending as he does the day's illusory reflection to the night's non-being?
We understand that the tragic hero—in contrast to the baroque character of the preceding period—can never be mad; and that conversely madness cannot bear within itself those values of tragedy, which we have known since Nietzsche and Artaud. In the classical period, the man of tragedy and the man of madness confront each other, without a possible dialogue, without a common language; for the former can utter only the decisive words of being, uniting in a flash the truth of light and the depth of darkness; the latter endlessly drones out the indifferent murmur which cancels out both the day's chatter and the lying dark.
Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.
And this much, which the archaeology of knowledge has been able to teach us bit by bit, was already offered to us in a simple tragic fulguration, in the last words of Andromaque.
As if, at the moment when madness was vanishing from the tragic act, at the moment when tragic man was to separate himself for over two centuries from the man of unreason—as if, at this very moment, an ultimate figuration were demanded of madness. The curtain which falls on the last scene of Andromaque also falls on the last of the great tragic incarnations of madness. But in this presence on the threshold of its own disappearance, in this madness incarcerating itself for good, is articulated what it is and will be for the entire classical age. Is it not precisely at the moment of its disappearance that it can best present its truth, its truth of absence, its truth which is that of day at the limits of night? This had to be the last scene of the first great classical tragedy; or if one prefers, the first time in which the classical truth of madness is expressed in a tragic movement which is the last of the preclassical theater. A truth, in any case, that is instantaneous, since its appearance can only be its disappearance; the lightning-flash is seen only in the already advancing night.
Orestes, in his frenzy, passes through a triple circle of night: three concentric figurations of dazzlement. Day has just dawned over Pyrrhus's palace; night is still there, edging this light with shadow, and peremptorily indicating its limit. On this morning which is a festival morning, the crime has been committed, and Pyrrhus has closed his eyes on the dawning day: a fragment of shadow cast here on the steps of the altar, on the threshold of brightness and of darkness. The two great cosmic themes of madness are thus present in various forms, as omen, decor, and counterpoint of Orestes' frenzy. It can then begin: in a pitiless clarity which denounces the murder of Pyrrhus and the treachery of Hermione, in that dawn where everything finally explodes in a truth so old and at the same rime so young, a first circle of shadow: a dark cloud into which, all around Orestes, the world begins to withdraw; the truth appears in this paradoxical twilight, in this matinal night where the cruelty of truth will be transformed into the fury of hallucination:
Mais quelle epaisse nuit, tout a coup, m'environne?
(But what thick night suddenly surrounds me?)
It is the empty night of error; but against the background of this first obscurity, a brilliance, a false light will appear: that of images. The nightmare rises, not in the bright light of morning, but in a somber scintillation: the light of storm and of murder.
Dieux! quels ruisseaux de sang content autour de moi!
(O Gods! What streams of blood flow around me!)
And then appears the dynasty of the dream. In this night the hallucinations are set free; the Erinnyes appear and take over. What makes them precarious also makes them sovereign; they triumph easily in the solitude where they succeed one another; nothing challenges them; images and language intersect, in apostrophes which are invocations, presences affirmed and repulsed, solicited and feared. But all these images converge toward night, toward a second night which is that of punishment, of eternal vengeance, of death within death. The Erinnyes are recalled to that darkness which is their own—their birthplace and their truth, i.e., their own nothingness.
Venez-vous m'enlever dans Fetemelle nuit?
(Do you come to bear me off into eternal night?)
This is the moment when it is revealed that the images of madness are only dream and error, and if the sufferer who is blinded by them appeals to them, it is only to disappear with them in the annihilation to which they are fated.
A second time, then, we pass through a circle of night. But we are not thereby restored to the daylight reality of the world. We accede, beyond what is manifested in madness, to delirium, to that essential and constitutive structure which had secretly sustained madness from the first. This delirium has a name, Hermione; Hermione who no longer reappears as a hallucinatory vision, but as the ultimate truth of madness. It is significant that Hermione intervenes at this very moment of the frenzy: not among the Eumenides, nor ahead of them—to guide them; but behind and separated from them by the night into which they have dragged Orestes and in which they themselves are now scattered. Hermione intervenes as a figure of delirium, as the truth which secretly reigned from the start, and of which the Eumenides were ultimately only the servants. Here we are at the opposite of Greek tragedy, where the Erinnyes were the final destiny and truth which, in the night of time, had awaited the hero; his passion was merely their instrument. Here the Eumenides are merely figures in the service of delirium, the primary and ultimate truth, which was already appearing in passion, and now declares itself in its nakedness. This truth rules alone, thrusting images away:
Mais non, retirez-vous, laissez faire Hermione.
(But no, begone, let Hermione do her work.)
Hermione, who has always been present from the beginning, Hermione who has always lacerated Orestes, destroying his reason bit by bit, Hermione for whom he has become "parricide, assassin, sacrilege," reveals herself finally as the truth and culmination of his madness. And delirium, in its rigor, no longer has anything to say except to articulate as imminent decision a truth long since commonplace and laughable:
Et je lui porte enfin mon coeur a devorer.
(And I bring her at last my heart to devour.)
Days and years ago Orestes had offered up this savage sacrifice. But now he expresses this principle of his madness as an end. For madness cannot go any farther. Having uttered its truth in its essential delirium, it can do no more than collapse in a third night, that night from which there is no return, the night of an incessant devouring. Unreason can appear only for a moment, the instant when language enters silence, when delirium itself is stilled, when the heart is at last devoured.
In the tragedies of the early seventeenth century, madness, too, released drama; but it did so by liberating truth; madness still had access to language, to a renewed language of explanation and of reality reconquered. It could be at most only the penultimate moment of the tragedy. Not the last, as in Andromaque, in which no truth is uttered except the truth, in delirium, of a passion which has found with madness the perfection of its fulfillment.
The movement proper to unreason, which classical learning followed and pursued, had already accomplished the whole of its trajectory in the concision of tragic language. After which, silence could reign, and madness disappear in the—always withdrawn— presence of unreason.
What we now know of unreason affords us a better understanding of what confinement was.
This gesture, which banished madness to a neutral and uniform world of exclusion, did not mark a halt in the evolution of medical techniques, nor in the progress of humanitarian ideas. It assumed its precise meaning in this fact: that madness in the classical period ceased to be the sign of another world, and that it became the paradoxical manifestation of non-being. Ultimately, confinement did seek to suppress madness, to eliminate from the social order a figure which did not find its place within it; the essence of confinement was not the exorcism of a danger. Confinement merely manifested what madness, in its essence, was: a manifestation of non-being; and by providing this man ifestation, confinement thereby suppressed it, since it restored it to its truth as nothingness. Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing. That is, on one hand madness is immediately perceived as difference: whence the forms of spontaneous and collective judgment sought, not from physicians, but from men of good sense, to determine the confinement of a madman; and on the other hand, confinement cannot have any other goal than a correction (that is, the suppression of the difference, or the fulfillment of this nothingness in death); whence those options for death so often to be found in the registers of confinement, written by the attendants, and which are not the sign of confinement's savagery, its inhumanity or perversion, but the strict expression of its meaning: an operation to annihilate nothingness. Confinement sketches, on the surface of phenomena and in a hasty moral synthesis, the secret and distinct structure of madness.
Then did confinement establish its practices in this profound intuition? Was it because madness under the effect of confinement had really vanished from the classical horizon that it was ultimately stigmatized as non-being? Questions whose answers refer to each other in a perfect circularity. It is futile, no doubt, to lose oneself in the endless cycle of these forms of interrogation. Better to let classical culture formulate, in its general structure, the experience it had of madness, an experience which crops up with the same meanings, in the identical order of its inner logic, in both the order of speculation and the order of institutions, in both discourse and decree, in both word and watchword—wherever, in fact, a signifying element can assume for us the value of a language.
MICHEL FOUCAULT, MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION (A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason )
Translated from the French by RICHARD HOWARD Vintage Books, A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, New York
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