THE savage danger of madness is related to the danger of the passions and to their fatal concatenation.
Savages had sketched the fundamental role of passion, citing it as a more constant, more persistent, and somehow more deserved cause of madness: "The distraction of our mind is the result of our blind surrender to our desires, our incapacity to control or to moderate our passions. Whence these amorous frenzies, these antipathies, these depraved tastes, this melancholy which is caused by grief, these transports wrought in us by denial, these excesses in eating, in drinking, these indispositions, these corporeal vices which cause madness, the worst of all maladies." But as yet, what was involved was only passion's moral precedence, its responsibility, in a vague way; the real target of this denunciation was the radical relation of the phenomena of madness to the very possibility of passion.
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Before Descartes, and long after his influence as philosopher and physiologist had diminished, passion continued to be the meeting ground of body and soul; the point where the latter's activity makes contact with the former's passivity, each being a limit imposed upon the other and the locus of their communication.
The medicine of humor sees this unity primarily as a reciprocal interaction: " The passions necessarily cause certain movements in the humor; anger agitates the bile, sadness excites melancholy (black bile), and the movements of the humor are on occasion so violent that they disrupt the entire economy of the body, even causing death; further, the passions augment the quantity of the humor; anger multiplies the bile as sadness increases melancholy. The humour which is customarily agitated by certain passions dispose those in whom they bound to the same passions, and to thinking of the objects which ordinarily excite them; bile disposes to anger and to thinking of those we hate. Melancholy (black bile) disposes to sadness and to thinking of untoward things; well-tempered blood disposes to joy."
The medicine of spirits substitutes for this vague idea of "disposition" the rigor of a physical, mechanical transmission of movements. If the passions are possible only in a being which has a body, and a body not entirely subject to the light of its mind and to the immediate transparence of its will, this is true insofar as, in ourselves and without ourselves, and generally in spite of ourselves, the mind's movements obey a mechanical structure which is that of the movement of spirits. "Before the sight of the object of passion, the animal spirits were spread throughout the entire body in order to preserve all the parts in general; but at the presence of the new object, this entire economy is disrupted. The majority of spirits are impelled into the muscles of the arms, the legs, the face, and all the exterior parts of the body in order to afford it a disposition proper to the prevailing passion and to give it the countenance and movement necessary for the acquisition of the good or the escape from the evil which presents itself." Passion thus disperses the spirits, which are disposed to passion: that is, under the effect of passion and in the presence of its object, the spirits circulate, disperse, and concentrate according to a spatial design which licenses the trace of the object in the brain and its image in the soul, thus forming in the body a kind of geometric figure of passion which is merely its expressive transposition; but which also constitutes passion's essential causal basis, for when all the spirits are grouped around this object of passion, or at least around its image, the mind in its turn can no longer ignore it and will consequently be subject to passion.
One more step, and the entire system becomes a unity in which body and soul communicate immediately in the symbolic values of common qualities. This is what happens in the medicine of solids and fluids, which dominates eighteenth-century practice. Tension and release, hardness and softness, rigidity and relaxation, congestion and dryness— these qualitative states characterize the soul as much as the body, and ultimately refer to a kind of indistinct and composite passional situation, one which imposes itself on the concatenation of ideas, on the course of feelings, on the state of fibers, on the circulation of fluids. The theme of causality here appears as too discursive, the elements it groups too disjunct for its schemas to be applicable. Are the "active passions, such as anger, joy, lust," causes or consequences "of the excessive strength, the excessive tension, and the excessive elasticity of the nervous fibers, and of the excessive activity of the nervous fluid"? Conversely, cannot the "inert passions, such as fear, depression, ennui, lack of appetite, the coldness that accompanies homesickness, bizarre appetites, stupidity, lack of memory" be as readily followed as they are preceded by "weakness of the brain marrow and of the nervous fibers distributed in the organs, by impoverishment and inertia of the fluids"? Indeed, we must no longer try to situate passion in a causal succession, or halfway between the corporeal and the spiritual; passion indicates, at a new, deeper level, that the soul and the body are in a perpetual metaphorical relation in which qualities have no need to be communicated because they are already common to both; and in which phenomena of expression are not causes, quite simply because soul and body are always each other's immediate expression. Passion is no longer exactly at the geometrical center of the body-and-soul complex; it is, a little short of that, at the point where their opposition is not yet given, in that region where both their unity and their distinction are established.
But at this level, passion is no longer simply one of the causes— however powerful—of madness; rather it forms the basis for its very possibility. If it is true that there exists a realm, in the relations of soul and body, where cause and effect, determinism and expression still intersect in a web so dense that they actually form only one and the same movement which cannot be dissociated except after the fact; if it is true that prior to the violence of the body and the vivacity of the soul, prior to the softening of the fibers and the relaxation of the mind, there are qualitative, as yet unshared kinds of a priori which subsequently impose the same values on the organic and on the spiritual, then we see that there can be diseases such as madness which are from the start diseases of the body and of the soul, maladies in which the affection of the brain is of the same quality, of the same origin, of the same nature, finally, as the affection of the soul.
The possibility of madness is therefore implicit in the very phenomenon of passion.
It is true that long before the eighteenth century, and for a long series of centuries from which we have doubtless not emerged, passion and madness were kept in close relation to one another. But let us allow the classical period its originality. The moralists of the Greco-Latin tradition had found it just that madness be passion's chastisement; and to be more certain that this was the case, they chose to define passion as a temporary and attenuated madness. But classical thought could define a relation between passion and madness which was not on the order of a pious hope, a pedagogic threat, or a moral synthesis; it even broke with the tradition by inverting the terms of the concatenation; it based the chimeras of madness on the nature of passion; it saw that the determinism of the passions was nothing but a chance for madness to penetrate the world of reason; and that if the unquestioned union of body and soul manifested man's finitude in passion, it laid this same man open, at the same time, to the infinite movement that destroyed him.
Madness, then, was not merely one of the possibilities afforded by the union of soul and body; it was not just one of the consequences of passion. Instituted by the unity of soul and body, madness turned against that unity and once again put it in question. Madness, made possible by passion, threatened by a movement proper to itself what had made passion itself possible. Madness was one of those unities in which laws were compromised, perverted, distorted—thereby manifesting such unity as evident and established, but also as fragile and already doomed to destruction.
There comes a moment in the course of passion when laws are suspended as though of their own accord, when movement either abruptly stops, without collision or absorption of any kind of active force, or is propagated, the action ceasing only at the climax of the paroxysm. Whytt admits that an intense emotion can provoke madness exactly as impact can provoke movement, for the sole reason that emotion is both impact in the soul and agitation of the nervous fiber: "It is thus that sad narratives or those capable of moving the heart, a horrible and unexpected sight, great grief, rage, terror, and the other passions which make a great impression frequently occasion the most sudden and violent nervous symptoms." But—it is here that madness, strictly speaking, begins—it happens that this movement immediately cancels itself out by its own excess and abruptly provokes an immobility which may reach the point of death itself. As if in the mechanics of madness, repose were not necessarily a quiescent thing but could also be a movement in violent opposition to itself, a movement which under the effect of its own violence abruptly achieves contradiction and the impossibility of continuance. "It is not unheard of that the passions, being very violent, generate a kind of tetanus or catalepsy such that the person then resembles a statue more than a living being. Further, fear, affliction, joy, and shame carried to their excess have more than once been followed by sudden death."
Conversely, it happens that movement, passing from soul to body and from body to soul, propagates itself indefinitely in a locus of anxiety certainly closer to that space where Malebranche placed souls than to that in which Descartes situated bodies. Imperceptible movements, often provoked by a slight external impact, accumulate, are amplified, and end by exploding in violent convulsions. Giovanni Maria Lancisi had already explained that the noble Romans were often subject to the vapors—hysterical attacks, hypochondriacal fits—because in their court life "their minds, continually agitated between fear and hope, never knew a moment's repose." According to many physicians, city life, the life of the court, of the salons, led to madness by this multiplicity of excitations constantly accumulated, prolonged, and echoed without ever being attenuated. But there is in this image, in its more intense forms, and in the events constituting its organic version, a certain force which, increasing, can lead to delirium, as if movement, instead of losing its strength in communicating itself, could involve other forces in its wake, and from them derive an additional vigor. This was how Sauvages explained the origin of madness: a certain impression of fear is linked to the congestion or the pressure of a certain medullary fiber; this fear is limited to an object, as this congestion is strictly localized. In proportion as this fear persists, the soul grants it more attention, increasingly isolating and detaching it from all else. But such isolation reinforces the fear, and the soul, having accorded it too special a condition, gradually tends to attach to it a whole series of more or less remote ideas: "It joins to this simple idea all those which are likely to nourish and augment it. For example, a man who supposes in his sleep that he is being accused of a crime, immediately associates this idea with that of its satellites-judges, executioners, the gibbet." And from being thus burdened with all these new elements, involving them in its course, the idea assumes a kind of additional power which ultimately renders it irresistible even to the most concerted efforts of the will.
Madness, which finds its first possibility in the phenomenon of passion, and in the deployment of that double causality which, starring from passion itself, radiates both toward the body and toward the soul, is at the same time suspension of passion, breach of causality, dissolution of the elements of this unity. Madness participates both in the necessity of passion and in the anarchy of what, released by this very passion, transcends it and ultimately contests all it implies. Madness ends by being a movement of the nerves and muscles so violent that nothing in the course of images, ideas, or wills seems to correspond to it: this is the case of mania when it is suddenly intensified into convulsions, or when it degenerates into continuous frenzy. Conversely, madness can, in the body's repose or inertia, generate and then maintain an agitation of the soul, without pause or pacification, as is the case in melancholia, where external objects do not produce the same impression on the sufferer's mind as on that of a healthy man; "his impressions are weak and he rarely pays attention to them; his mind is almost totally absorbed by the vivacity of certain ideas."
Indeed this dissociation between the external movements of the body and the course of ideas does not mean that the unity of body and soul is necessarily dissolved, nor that each recovers its autonomy in madness. Doubtless the unity is compromised in its rigor and in its totality; but it is fissured, it turns out, along lines which do not abolish it, but divide it into arbitrary sectors. For when melancholia fixes upon an aberrant idea, it is not only the soul which is involved; it is the soul with the brain, the soul with the nerves, their origin and their fibers: a whole segment of the unity of soul and body is thus detached from the aggregate and especially from the organs by which reality is perceived. The same thing occurs in convulsions and agitation: the soul is not excluded from the body, but is swept along so rapidly by it that it cannot retain all its conceptions; it is separated from its memories, its intentions, its firmest ideas, and thus isolated from itself and from all that remains stable in the body, it surrenders itself to the most mobile fibers; nothing in its behavior is henceforth adapted to reality, to truth, or to prudence; though the fibers in their vibration may imitate what is happening in the perceptions, the sufferer cannot tell the difference: "The rapid and chaotic pulsations of the arteries, or whatever other derangement occurs, imprints this same movement on the fibers (as in perception); they will represent as present objects which are not so, as true those which are chimerical."
In madness, the totality of soul and body is parceled out: not according to the elements which constitute that totality metaphysically; but according to figures, images which envelop segments of the body and ideas of the soul in a kind of absurd unity. Fragments which isolate man from himself, but above all from reality; fragments which, by detaching themselves, have formed the unreal unity of a hallucination, and by very virtue of this autonomy impose it upon truth. "Madness is no more than the derangement of the imagination." In other words, beginning with passion, madness is still only an intense movement in the rational unity of soul and body; this is the level of unreason; but this intense movement quickly escapes the reason of the mechanism and becomes, in its violences, its stupors, its senseless propagations, an irrational movement; and it is then that, escaping truth and its constraints, the Unreal appears.
And thereby we find the suggestion of the third cycle we must now trace: that of chimeras, of hallucinations, and of error—the cycle of non-being.
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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by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Whenever there is transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State in the sky or on earth, there is religion; and there is Philosophy whenever there is immanence, even if it functions as arena for the agon and rivalry. - Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari The plane is surrounded by illusions. These are not abstract misinterpretations or just external pressures but rather thought's mirages. Can they be explained by the sluggishness of our brain, by the ready made facilitating paths [frayage] of dominant opinions, and by our not being able to tolerate infinite movements or master the infinite speeds that crush us (so that we have to stop the movement and make ourselves prisoners of the relative horizon once more)? Yet it is we ourselves who approach the plane of immanence, who are on the absolute horizon. It is indeed necessary, in part at least, that illusions arise from the plane itself, like vapors from a pond, like pre-Socratic exhalations given off hy transformations of the elements that are always at work on the plane. Artaud said that "the plane of consciousness" or limitless plane of immanences-what the Indians called Ciguri-also engenders hallucinations, erroneous perceptions, bad feelings. We must draw up a list of these illusions and take their measure, just as Nietzsche, following Spinoza, listed the "four great errors." But the list is infinite. First of all there is the illusion of transcendence, which, perhaps, comes before all the others (in its double aspect of making immanence immanent to something and of rediscovering a transcendence within immanence itself); then the illusion ofuniversals when concepts are confused with the plane. But this confusion arises as soon as immanence is posited as being immanent to something, since this something is necessarily a concept. We think the universal explains, whereas it is what must be explained, and we fall into a triple illusion-one of contemplation or reflection or communication. Then there is the illusion ofthe eternal when it is forgotten that concepts must be created, and then the illusion of discursiveness when propositions are confused with concepts. It would be wrong to think that all these illusions logically entail one another like propositions, but they resonate or reverberate and form a thick fog around the plane. From chaos the plane of immanence takes the determinations with which it makes its infinite movements or its diagrammatic features. Consequently, we can and must presuppose a multiplicity of planes, since no one plane could encompass all of chaos without collapsing back into it; and each retains only movements which can be folded together. The history of philosophy exhibits so many quite distinct planes not just as a result of illusions, of the variety of illusions, and not merely because each plane has its own, constantly renewed, way of restoring transcendence. More profoundly, it is because each plane has its own way of constructing immanence. Each plane carries out a selection of that which is due to thought by right, but this selection varies from one plane to another. Every plane of immanence is a One-All: it is not partial like a scientific system, or fragmentary like concepts, but distributive-it is an "each." The plane of immanence is interleaved. When comparing particular cases it is no doubt difficult to judge whether there is a single plane or several different ones: do the pre-Socratics have the same image of thought, despite the differences between Heraclitus and Parmenides? Can we speak of a plane of immanence or image of so-called classical thought that continues from Plato to Descartes? It is not just the planes that vary but the way in which they are distributed. Are there more-or-less close or distant points of view that would make it possible to group different layers over a fairly long period or, on the contrary, to separate layers on what seemed to be a common plane? Where, apart from the absolute horizon, would these points of view come from? Can we be satisfied here with a historicism, or with a generalized relativism? In all these respects, the question of the one or the multiple once again becomes the most important one, introducing itself into the plane. In the end, does not every great philosopher layout a new plane of immanence, introduce a new substance of being and draw up a new image of thought, so that there could not be two great philosophers on the same plane? It is true that we cannot imagine a great philosopher of whom it could not be said that he has changed what it means to think; he has "thought differently" (as Foucault put it). When we find several philosophies in the same author, is it not because they have changed plane and once more found a new image? We cannot be unaware of Biran's complaint when he was near to death: "I feel a little too old to start the construction again." On the other hand, those who do not renew the image of thought are not philosophers but functionaries who, enjoying a ready-made thought, are not even conscious of the problem and are unaware even of the efforts of those they claim to take as their models. But how, then, can we proceed in philosophy if there are all these layers that sometimes knit together and sometimes separate? Are we not condemned to attempt to lay out our own plane, without knowing which planes it will cut across? Is this not to reconstitute a sort of chaos? That is why every plane is not only interleaved but holed, letting through the fogs that surround it, and in which the philosopher who laid it out is in danger of being the first to lose himself. That so many fogs arise is explained in two ways. Firstly, because thought cannot stop itself from interpreting immanence as immanent to something, the great Object of contemplation, the Subject of reflection, or the Other subject of communication: then transcendence is inevitably reintroduced. And if this cannot be avoided it is because it seems that each plane of immanence can only claim to be unique, to be the plane, by reconstituting the chaos it had to ward off: the choice is between transcendence and chaos. EXAMPLE4 When the plane selects what is by right due to thought, in order to make its features, intuitions, directions, or diagrammatic movements, it relegates other determinations to the status of mere facts, characteristics of states of affairs,or lived contents. And, of course, philosophy will be able to draw out concepts from these states of affairs inasmuch as it extracts the event from them. That which belongs to thought by right, that which is retained as diagrammatic feature in itself, represses other rival determinations (even if these latter are called upon to receive a concept). Thus Descartes makes error the feature or direction that expresses what is in principle negative in thought. He was not the first to do this, and "error" might be seen as one of the principal features of the classical image of thought. We know that there are many other things in this image that threaten thinking: stupidity, forgetfulness, aphasia, delirium, madness; but all these determinations will be considered as facts that in principle have only a single effect immanent in thought-error, always error. Error is the infinite movement that gathers together the whole of the negative. Can this feature be traced back to Socrates, for whom the person who is wicked (in fact) is someone who is by right "mistaken"? But, if it is true that the Thaetctus is a foundation of error, does not Plato hold in reserve the rights of other rival determinations, like the delirium of the Phaedrus, so that it seems to us that the image of thought in Plato plots many other tracks ? A major change occurs, not only in concepts but in the image of thought, when ignorance and superstition replace error and prejudice in expressing what by right is the negative of thought: Fontenelle plays a major role here, and what changes at the same time is the infinite movements in which thought is lost and gained. There is an even greater change when Kant shows that thought is threatened less by error than by inevitable illusions that come from within reason, as if from an internal arctic zone where the needle of every compas goes mad. A re-orientation of the whole thought becomes necessary at the same time as it is in principle penetrated by a certain delirium. It is no longer threatened on the plane of immanence by the holes or ruts of a path that it follows but by Nordic fogs that cover everything. The meaning of the question of "finding one's bearings in , thought" itself changes. A feature cannot be isolated. In fact, the movement given a negative sign is itself folded within other movements with positive or ambiguous signs. In the classical image, error does not express what is by right the worst that can happen to thought, without thought being presented as "willing" truth, as orientated toward truth, as turned toward truth. It is this confidence, which is not without humor, which animates the classical image-a relationship to truth that constitutes the infinite movement of knowledge as diagrammatic feature. In contrast, in the eighteenth century, what manifests the mutation of light from "natural light" to the "Enlightened" is the substitution of belief for knowledge-that is, a new infinite movement implying another image of thought: it is no longer a matter of turning toward but rather one of following tracks, of inferring rather than grasping or being grasped. Under what conditions is inference legitimate? Under what conditions can belief be legitimate when it has become secular? This question will be answered only with the creation of the great empiricist concepts (association, relation, habit, probability, convention). But conversely, these concepts, including the concept of belief itself, presuppose diagrammatic features that make beliefan infinite movement independent of religion and traversing the new plane of immanence (religious belief, on the other hand, will become a conceptualizable case, the legitimacy or illegitimacy ofwhich can be measured in accordance with the order of the infinite). Of course, we find in Kant many of these features inherited from Hume, but again at the price of a profound mutation, on a new plane or according to another image. Each time there are great acts of daring. When the distribution of what is due to thought by right changes, what changes from one plane of immanence to another are not only the positive or negative features but also the ambiguous features that may become increasingly numerous and that are no longer restricted to folding in accordance with a vectorial opposition of movements. If we attempt to set out the features of a modern image of thought in such a summary fashion, this is not in a triumphalist way, or even in horror. No image of thought can be limited to a selection of calm determinations, and all of them encounter something that is abominable in principle, whether this be the error into which thought continually falls, or the illusion within which it continually turns, or the stupidity in which it continually wallows, or the delirium in which it continually turns away from itself or from a god. The Greek image of thought already invoked the madness of the double turning-away, which launched thought into infinite wandering rather than into error. The relationship of thought to truth in the ambiguities of infinite movement has never been a simple, let alone constant, matter. That is why it is pointless to rely on such a relationship to define philosophy. The first characteristic of the modern image of thought is, perhaps, the complete renunciation of this relationship so as to regard truth as solely the creation of thought, taking into account the plane of immanence that it takes as its presupposition, and all this plane's features, negative as well as positive having become indiscernible. As Nietzsche succeeded in making us understand, thought is creation, not will to truth. But if, contrary to what seemed to be the case in the classical image, there is no will to truth, this is because thought constitutes a simple "possibility" of thinking with out yet ddining" a thinker "capable" of it and able to say "I": what violence must be exerted on thought for us to become capable of thinking; what violence of an infinite movement that, at the same time, takes from us our power to say "I"? Famous texts of Heidegger and Blanchot deal with this second characteristic. But, as a third characteristic, if there is in this wayan "Incapacity" of thought, which remains at its core even after it has acquired the capacity determinable as creation, then a set of ambiguous signs arise, which become diagrammatic features or infinite movements and which take on a value by right, whereas in the other images of thought they were simple, derisory facts excluded from selection: as Kleist or Artaud suggests, thought as such begins to exhibit snarls, squeals, stammers; it talks in tongues and screams, which leads it to create, or to try to. 13 Ifthought searches, it is less in the manner of someone who possesses a method than that of a dog that seems to be making uncoordinated leaps. We have no reason to take pride in this image of thought, which involves much suffering without glory and indicates the degree to which thinking has become increasingly difficult: immanence. The history of philosophy is comparable to the art of the portrait. It is not a matter of "making lifelike," that is, of repeating what a philosopher said but rather of producing resemblance by separating out both the plane of immanence he instituted and the new concepts he created. These are mental, noetic, and machinic portraits. Although they are usually created with philosophical tools, they can also be produced aesthetically. Thus Tinguely recently presented some monumental machinic portraits of philosophers, working with powerful, linked or alternating, infinite movements that can be folded over or spread out, with sounds, lightning flashes, substances of being, and images of thought according to complex curved planes. However, if it is permissible to criticize such a great artist, the attempt does not quite seem to hit the mark. Nothing dances in the Nietzsche, although elsewhere Tinguely has been quite able to make machines dance. The Schopenhauer gives us nothing decisive, whereas the four Roots and the veil ofMaya seem ready to occupy the bifaceted plane of the World as will and representation. The Heidegger does not retain any veiling-unveiling on the plane of a thought that does not yet think. Perhaps more attention should be given to the plane of immanence laid out as abstract machine and to created concepts as parts of the machine. In this sense we could imagine a machinic portrait of Kant, illusions included . The componenets of the schema are as follows: 1) the "I think" as an ox head wired for sound, which constantly repeats Self = Self; 2) the categories as universal concepts (four great headings): shafts that are extensive and retractile according to the movement of 3); 3) the moving wheel of the schemata; 4) the shallow stream of Time as form of interiority, in and out of which the wheel of the schemata plunges; 5) space as form of exteriority: the stream's banks and bed; 6) the passive selfat the bottom ofthe stream and as junction of the two forms; 7) the principles of synthetic judgments that run across space-time; 8) the transcendental field of possible experience, immanent to the "I" (plane of immanence); and 9) the three Ideas or illusions of transcendence (circles turning on the absolute horizon: Soul, World and God). This account gives rise to many problems that concern philosophy and the history of philosophy equally. Sometimes the layers of the plane of immanence separate to the point of being opposed to one another, each one suiting this or that philosopher. Sometimes, on the contrary, they join together at least to cover fairly long periods. Moreover, the relationships between the instituting of a prephilosophical plane and the creation of philosophical concepts are themselves complex. Over a long period philosophers can create new concepts while remaining on the same plane and presupposing the same image as an earlier philosopher whom they invoke as their master: Plato and the neo-Platonists, Kant and the neo-Kantians (or even the way in which Kant himself reactivates certain parts of Platonism). However, in every case, this involves extending the original plane by giving it new curves, until a doubt arises: is this not a different plane that is woven in the mesh of the first one? Thus, the question of knowing when and to what extent philosophers are "disciples" of another philosopher and, on the contrary, when they are carrying out a critique of another philosopher by changing the plane and drawing up another image involves all the more complex and relative assessments, because the concepts that come to occupy a plane can never be simply deduced. Concepts that happen to populate a single plane, albeit at quite different times and with special connections, will be called concepts of the same group. Those concepts that refer back to different planes will not belong to the same group. There is a strict correspondence between the created concepts and the instituted plane, but this comes about through indirect relationships that are still to be determined. Can we say that one plane is "better" than another or, at least, that it does or does not answer to the requirements ofthe age? What does answering to the requirements ofthe age mean, and what relationship is there between the movements or diagrammatic features ofan image of thought and the movements or sociohistorical features of an age? We can only make headway with these questions if we give up the narrowly historical point of view of before and after in order to consider the time rather than the history of philosophy. This is a stratigraphic time where "before" and "after" indicate only an order of superimpositions. Certain paths (movements) take on sense and direction only as the shortcuts or detours of faded paths; a variable curvature can appear only as the transformation of one or more others; a stratum or layer of the plane of immanence will necessarily be above or below in relation to another, and images of thought cannot arise in any order whatever because they involve changes of orientation that can be directly located only on the earlier image (and even the point of condensation that determines the concept sometimes presupposes the breaking-up of a point Or the conglomeration of earlier points). Mental landscapes do not change haphazardly through the ages: a mountain had to rise here or a river to flow by there again recently for the ground, now dry and flat, to have a particular appearance and texture. It is true that very old strata can rise to the surface again, can cut a path through the formations that covered them and surface directly on the current stratum to which they impart a new curvature. Furthermore, depending on the regions considered, superimpositions are not necessarily the same and do not have the same order. Philosophical time is thus a grandiose time of coexistence that does not exclude the before and after but superimposes them in a stratigraphic order. It is an infinite becoming of philosophy that crosscuts its history without being confused with it. The life of philosophers, and what is most external to their work, conforms to the ordinary laws of succession; but their proper names coexist and shine either as luminous points that take us through the components of a concept once more or as the cardinal points of a stratum or layer that continually come back to us, like dead stars whose light is brighter than ever. Philosophy is becoming, not history; it is the coexistence of planes, not the succession of systems. That becoming, that coexistence is why planes may sometimes separate and sometimes join together-this is true for both the best and the worst. They have in common the restoration of transcendence and illusion (they cannot prevent it) but also the relentless struggle against transcendence and illusion; and each also has its particular way of doing both one and the other. Is there a "best" plane that would not hand over immanence to Something x and that would no longer mimic anything transcendent? We will say that THE plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within thought. It is the base of all planes, immanent to every thinkable plane that does not succeed in thinking it. Itis the most intimate within thought and yet the absolute outside-an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper that any internal world: it is immanence, "intimacy as the Outside, the exterior become the intrusion that stifles, and the reversal of both the one and the other" the incessant to-ing and fro-ing of the plane, infinite movement. Perhaps this is the supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not-internal inside-that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought, which was thought once, as Christ was incarnated once, in order to show, that one time, the possibility ofthe impossible. Thus Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers, and the greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves from or draw near to this mystery. Spinoza, the infinite becoming-philosopher: he showed, drew up, and thought the "best" plane of immanence-that is, the purest, the one that does not hand itself over to the transcendent or restore any transcendent, the one that inspires the fewest illusions, bad feelings, and erroneous perceptions. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari / What Is Philosophy?/ The Plane Of Immanence Qu'est-ce que la philosophic? © 1991 by Les Editions de Minuit. Translation © 1994 Columbia University Press by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Whenever there is transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State in the sky or on earth, there is religion; and there is Philosophy whenever there is immanence, even if it functions as arena for the agon and rivalry. - Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Philosophical concepts are fragmentary wholes that are not aligned with one another so that they fit together, because their edges do not match up. They are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but rather the outcome of throws of the dice. They resonate nonetheless, and the philosophy that creates them always introduces a powerful Whole that, while remaining open, is not fragmented: an unlimited One-All, an "Omnitudo" that includes all the concepts on one and the same plane. It is a table, a plateau, or a slice; it is a plane of consistency or, more accurately, the plane of immanence of concepts, the phenomenon. Concepts and plane are strictly correlative, but nevertheless, the two should not be confused. The plane of immanence is neither a concept nor the concept of all concepts. If one were to be confused with the other there would be nothing to stop concepts from forming a single one or becoming universals and losing their singularity, and the plane would also lose its open ness. Philosophy is a constructivism and constructivism has two qualitatively different complementary aspects: the creation of concepts and the laying out of a plane. Concepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them. The plane envelops infinite movements that pass back and forth through it, but concepts are the infinite speeds offinite movements that, in each case, pass only through their own components. From Epicurus to Spinoza (the incredible book 5) and from Spinoza to Michaux the problem of thought is infinite speed. But this speed requires a milieu that moves infinitely in itself-the plane, the void, the horizon. Both elasticity of the concept and fluidity ofthe milieu are needed. Both are needed to make up "the slow beings" that we are. Concepts are the archipelago or skeletal frame, a spinal column rather than a skull, whereas the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts. Concepts are absolute surfaces or volumes, formless and fragmentary, whereas the plane is the formless, unlimited absolute, neither surface nor volume but always fractaL Concepts are concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine, but the plane is the abstract machine of which these assemblages are the working parts. Concepts are events, but the plane is the horizon of events, the reservoir or reserve of purely conceptual events: not the relative horizon that functions as a limit, which changes with an observer and encloses observable states of affairs, but the absolute horizon, independent of any observer, which makes the event as concept independent of a visible state of affairs in which it is brought ahout.? Concepts pave, occupy, or populate the plane bit by bit, whereas the plane itself is the indivisible milieu in which concepts are distributed without breaking up its continuity or integrity: they occupy it without measuring it out (the concept's combination is not a number) or are distributed without splitting it up. The plane is like a desert that concepts populate without dividing up. The only regions of the plane are concepts themselves, but the plane is all that holds them together. The plane has no other regions than the tribes populating linkages with ever increasing connections, and it is concepts that secure the populating and moving around it. It is the plane that secures conceptual linkages with ever increasing connections, and it is concepts that secure the populating of the plane on an always renewed and variable curve. The plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one's bearings in thought. It is not a method, since every method is concerned with concepts and presupposes such an image. Neither is it a state of knowledge on the brain and its functioning, since thought here is not related to the slow brain as to the scientifically determinable state of affairs in which, whatever its use and orientation, thought is only brought about. Nor is it opinions held about thought, about its forms, ends, and means, at a particular moment. The image of thought implies a strict division between fact and right: what pertains to thought as such must be distinguished from contingent features of the brain or historical opinions. Quidjuris?-can, for example, losing one's memory or being mad belong to thought as such, or are they only contingent features of the brain that should be considered as simple facts? Are contemplating, reflecting, or communicating anything more than opinions held about thought at a particular time and in a particular civilization? The image of thought retains only what thought can claim by right. Thought demands "only" movement that can be carried to infinity. What thought claims by right, what it selects, is infinite movement or the movement of the infinite. It is this that constitutes the image of thought. Movement of the infinite does not refer to spatiotemporal coordinates that define the successive positions of a moving object and the fixed reference points in relation to which these positions vary. "To orientate oneself in thought" implies neither objective reference point nor moving object that experiences itself as a subject and that, as such, strives for or needs the infinite. Movement takes in everything, and there is no place for a subject and an object that can only be concepts. It is the horizon itself that is in movement: the relative horizon recedes when the subject advances, but on the plane of immanence we are always and already on the absolute horizon. Infinite movement is defined by a coming and going, because it does not advance toward a destination without already turning back on itself, the needle also being the pole. If "turning toward" is the movement of thought toward trnth, how could truth not also turn toward thought? And how could truth itself not turn away from thought when thought turns away from it? However, this is not a fusion but a reversibility, an immediate, perpetual, instantaneous exchange-a lightning Hash. Infinite movement is double, and there is only a fold from one to the other. It is in this sense that thinking and being are said to be one and the same. Or rather, movement is not the image of thought without being also the substance of being. When Thales's thought leaps out, it comes back as water. When Heraclitus's thought becomes polemos, it is fire that retorts. It is a single speed on both sides: "The atom will traverse space with the speed of thought? "The plane of immanence has two facets as Thought and as Nature, as Nous and as Phusis. That is why there are always many infinite movements caught within each other, each folded in the others, so that the return of one instantaneously relaunches another in such a way that the plane of immanence is ceaselessly being woven, like a gigantic shuttle. To turn toward does not imply merely to turn away but to confront, to lose one's way, to move aside." Even the negative produces infinite movements: falling into error as much as avoiding the false, allowing oneself to be dominated by passions as much as overcoming them. Diverse movements of the infinite are so mixed in with each other that, far from breaking up the One-All of the plane of immanence, they constitute its variable curvature, its concavities and convexities, its fractal nature as it were. It is this fractal nature that makes the planomenon an infinite that is always different from any surface or volume determinable as a concept. Every movement passes through the whole of the plane by immediately turning back on and also by folding ilself or allowing itself to be folded by them; giving rise to retroactions, connections, and proliferations in the fractalization of this infinitely folded up infinity (variable curvature of the plane). But if it is true that the plane of immanence is always single, being itself pure variation, then it is all the more necessary to explain why there are varied and distinct planes of immanence that, depending upon which infinite movements are retained and selected, succeed and contest each other in history. The plane is certainly not the same in the time of the Greeks, in the seventeenth century, and today (and these are still vague and general terms): there is neither the same image of thought nor the same substance of being. The plane is, therefore, the object of an infinite specification so that it seems to be a One-All only in cases specified by the selection of movement. This difficulty concerning the ultimate nature of the plane of immanence can only be resolved step by step. It is essential not to confuse the plane of immanence and the concepts that occupy it. Although the same elements may appear twice over, on the plane and in the concept, it will not be in the same guise, even when they are expressed in the same verbs and words. We have seen this for being, thought, and one: they enter into the concept's components and are themselves concepts, but they belong to the plane quite differently as image or substance. Conversely, truth can only be defined on the plane by a "turning toward" or by "that toward which thought turns"; but this does not provide us with a concept of truth. If error itself is an element that by right forms part of the plane, then it consists simply in taking the false for the true (falling); but it only receives a concept if we determine its components (according to Descartes, for example, the two components of a finite understanding and an infinite will). Movements or elements of the plane, therefore, will seem to be only nominal definitions in relation to concepts so long as we disregard the difference in nature between plane and concepts. But in reality, elements of the plane are diagrammatic features, whereas concepts are intensive features. The former movements of the infinite, whereas the latter are intensive ordinates of these movements, like original sections or differential positions: finite movements in which the infinite is now only speed and each of which constitutes a surface or a volume, an irregular contour marking a halt in the degree of proliferation. The former are directions that are fractal in nature, whereas the latter are absolute dimensions, intensively defined, always fragmentary surfaces or volumes. The former are intuitions, and the latter intensions. The grandiose Leibnizian or Bergsonian perspective that every philosophy depends upon an intuition that its concepts constantly develop through slight differences of intensity is justified if intuition is thought of as the envelopment of infinite movements of thought that constantly pass through a plane of immanence. Of course, we should not conclude from this that concepts are deduced from the plane: concepts require a special construction distinct from that of the plane, which is why concepts must be created just as the plane must be set up. Intensive features are never the consequence of diagrammatic features, and intensive ordinates are not deduced from movements or directions. Their correspondence goes beyond even simple resonances and introduces instances adjunct to the creation of concepts, namely, conceptual personae. If philosophy begins with the creation of concepts, then the plane of immanence must be regarded as prephilosophical. It is presupposed not in the way that one concept may refer to others but in the way that concepts themselves refer to a nonconceptual understanding. Once again, this intuitive understanding varies according to the way in which the plane is laid out. In Descartes it is a matter of a subjective understanding implicitly presupposed by the "I think" as first concept; in Plato it is the virtual image of an already-thought that doubles every actual concept. Heidegger invokes a "preontological understanding of Being," a "preconceptual" understanding that seems to imply the grasp of a substance of being in relationship with a predisposition of thought. In any event, philosophy posits as prephilosophical, or even as nouphilosophical, the power of a One-All like a moving desert that concepts come to populate. Prephilosophical does not mean something preexistent but rather something that does not exist outside philosophy, although philosophy presupposes it. These are its internal conditions. The nonphilosophical is perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself, and this means that philosophy cannot be content to be understood only philosophically or conceptually, but is addressed essentially to nonphilosophers as well. We will see that this constant relationship with nonphilosophy has various features. According to this first feature, philosophy defined as the creation of concepts implies a distinct but inseparable presupposition. Philosophy is at once concept creation and instituting of the plane. The concept is the beginning of philosophy, but the plane is its instituting." The plane is clearly not a program, design, end, or means: it is a plane of immanence that constitutes the absolute ground of philosophy, its earth or deterritorialization, the foundation on which it creates its concepts. Both the creation of concepts and the instituting of the plane are required, like two wings or fins. Thinking provokes general indifference. It is a dangerous exercise nevertheless. Indeed, it is only when the dangers become obvious that indifference ceases, but they often remain hidden and barely perceptible, inherent in the enterprise. Precisely because the plane of immanence is prephilosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind. Even Descartes had his dream. To think is always to follow the witch's flight. Take Michaux's plane of immanence, for example, with its infinite, wild movements and speeds. Usually these measures do not appear in the result, which must be grasped solely in itself and calmly. But then "danger" takes on another meaning: it becomes a case ofobvious consequences when pure immanence provokes a strong, instinctive disapproval in public opinion, and the nature of the created concepts strengthens this disapproval. This is because one does not think without becoming something else, something that does not thinkan animal, a molecule, a particle-and that comes back to thought and revives it. The plane of immanence is like a section of chaos and acts like a sieve. In fact, chaos is characterized less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish. This is not a movement from one determination to the other but, on the contrary, the impossibility of a connection between them, since one does not appear without the other having already disappeared, and one appears as disappearance when the other disappears as outline. Chaos is not an inert or stationary state, nor is it a chance mixture. Chaos makes chaotic and undoes every consistency in the infinite. The problem of philosophy is to acquire a consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges (in this respect chaos has as much a mental as a physical existence). To give consistency without losing anything ofthe infinite is very different from the problem of which seeks to provide chaos with reference points, on condition of renouncing infinite movements and speeds and of carrying out a limitation of speed first of all. Light, or the relative horizon, is primary in science. Philosophy, on the other hand, proceeds by presupposing or by instituting the plane of immanence: it is the plane's variable curves that retain the infinite movements that turn back on themselves in incessant exchange, but which also continually free other movements which are retained. The concepts can then mark out the intensive ordinates of these infinite movements, as movements which are themselves finite which form, at infinite speed, variable contours inscribed on the plane. By making a section of chaos, the plane of immanence requires a creation of concepts. To the question "Can or must philosophy be regarded as Greek?" a first answer seemed to be that the Greek city actually appears as the new society of "friends," with all the ambiguities of that word. Jean Pierre Vernant adds a second answer: the Greeks were the first to conceive of a strict immanence of Order to a cosmic milieu that sections chaos in the form of a plane. If we call such a plane-sieve Logos, the logos is far from being like simple "reason" (as when one says the world is rational). Reason is only a concept, and a very impoverished concept for defining the plane and the movements that pass through it. In short, the first philosophers are those who institute a plane of immanence like a sieve stretched over the chaos. In this sense they contrast with sages, who are religious personae, priests, because they conceive of the institution ofan always transcendent order imposed from outside by a great despot or by one god higher than the others, inspired by Eris,"pursuing wars that go beyond any agon and hatreds that object in advance to the trials of rivalry." Whenever there is transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State in the sky or on earth, there is religion; and there is Philosophy whenever there is immanence, even if it functions as arena for the agon and rivalry (the Greek tyrants do not constitute an objection to this, because they are wholeheartedly on the side of the society of friends such as it appears in their wildest, most violent rivalries). Perhaps these two possible determinations of philosophy as Greek are profoundly linked. Only friends can set out a plane of immanence as a ground from which idols have been cleared. In Empedocles, Love lays out the plane, even if she does not return to the self without enfolding hatred as movement that has become negative showing a subtranscendence of chaos (the volcano) and a supertranscendence of a god. It may be that the first philosophers still look like priests, or even kings. They borrow the sage's mask-and, as Nietzsche says, how could philosophy not disguise itself in its early stages? Will it ever stop having to disguise itself? If the instituting of philosophy merges with the presupposition of a prephilosophical plane, how could philosophy not profit from this by donning a mask? It remains the case that the first philosophers layout a plane through which unlimited movements pass continually on two sides, one determinable as Physis in as much as it endows Being with a substance, and the other as Nous in as much as it gives an image to thought. It is Anaximander who distinguishes between the two sides most rigorously by combining the movement of qualities with the power of an absolute horizon, the Apeiron or the Boundless, but always on the same plane. Philosophers carry out a vast diversion of wisdom; they place it at the service of pure immanence. They replace genealogy with a geology. EXAMPLE 3 Can the entire history of philosophy be presented from the viewpoint of the instituting of a plane of immanence? Physicalists, who insist on the substance of Being, would then be distinguished from noologists, who insist on the image of thought. But a risk of confusion soon arises: rather than this substance of Being or this image of thought being constituted by the plane of immanence itself, immanence will be related to something like a "dative," Matter or Mind. This becomes clear with Plato and his successors. Instead of the plane of immanence constituting the One-All, immanence is immanent "to" the One, so that another One, this time transcendent, is superimposed on the one in which immanence is extended or to which it is attributed: the neo-Platonists' formula will always be a One beyond the One. Whenever immanence is interpreted as immanent "to" something a confusion of plane and concept results, so that the concept becomes a transcendent universal and the plane becomes an attribute in the concept. When misunderstood in this way, the plane of immanence revives the transcendent again: it is a simple field of phenomena that now only possesses in a secondary way that which first of all is attributed to the transcendent unity. It gets worse with Christian philosophy. The positing of immanence remains pure philosophical instituting, but at the same time it is tolerated only in very small doses; it is strictly controlled and enframed by the demands of an emanative and, above all, creative transcendence. Putting their work and sometimes their lives at risk, all philosophers must prove that the dose of immanence they inject into world and mind does not compromise the transcendence of a God to which immanence must be attributed only secondarily (Nicholas of Cusa, Eckhart, Bruno). Religious authority wants immanence to be tolerated only locally or at an intermediary level, a little like a terraced fountain where water can briefly imrnanate on each level but on condition that it comes from a higher source and falls lower down (transascendence and transdescendence, as Wahl said). Immanence can be said to be the burning issue of all philosophy because it takes on all the dangers that philosophy must confront, all the condemnations, persecutions, and repudiations that it undergoes. This at least persuades us that the problem of immanence is not abstract or merely theoretical. It is not immediately clear why immanence is so dangerous, but it is. It engulfs sages and gods. What singles out the philosopher is the part played by immanence or fire. Immanence is immanent only to itself and consequently captures everything, absorbs All-One, and leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent. In any case, whenever immanence is interpreted as immanent to Something, we can be sure that this Something reintroduces the transcendent. Beginning with Descartes, and then with Kant and Husserl, the cogito makes it possible to treat the plane of immanence as a field of consciousness. Immanence is supposed to be immanent to a pure consciousness, to a thinking subject. Kant will call this subject transcendental rather than transcendent, precisely because it is the subject of the field of immanence of all possible experience from which nothing, the external as well as the internal, escapes. Kant objects to any transcendent use of the synthesis, but he ascribes immanence to the subject of the synthesis as new, subjective unity. He may even allow himself the luxury of denouncing transcendent Ideas, so as to make them the "horizon" of the field immanent to the subject." But, in so doing, Kant discovers the modern way of saving transcendence: this is no longer the transcendence of a Something, or of a One higher than everything (contemplation), but that of a Subject to which the field of immanence is only attributed by belonging to a self that necessarily represents such a subject to itself (reflection). The Greek world that belonged to no one increasingly becomes the property ofa Christian consciousness. Yet one more step: when immanence becomes immanent "to" a transcendental subjectivity, it is at the heart of its own field that the hallmark or figure [chiffre] of a transcendence must appear as action now referring to another self, to another consciousness (communication). This is what happens in Husserl and many of his successors who discover in the Other or in the Flesh, the mole of the transcendent within immanence itself. Husserl conceives of immanence as that of the flux lived by subjectivity. But since all this pure and even untamed lived does not belong completely to the self that represents it to itself, something transcendent is reestablished on the horizon, in the regions of nonbelonging: first, in the form of an "immanent or primordial transcendence" of a world populated by intentional objects; second, as the priviIeged transcendence of an intersubjective world populated by other selves; and third, as objective transcendence of an ideal world populated by cultural formations and the human community. In this modern moment we are no longer satisfied with thinking immanence as immanent to a transcendent; we want to think transcendence within the immanent, and it is from immanence that a breach is expected. Thus, in Jaspers, the plane of immanence is given the most profound determination as "Encompassing" [Englobant], but this encompassing is no more than a reservoir for eruptions of transcendence. The Judeo-Christian word replaces the Greek logos: no longer satisfied with ascribing immanence to something, immanence itself is made to disgorge the transcendent everywhere. No longer content with handing over immanence to the transcendent, we want it to discharge it, reproduce it, and fabricate it itself. In fact this is not difficult-all that is necessary is for movement to be stopped. Transcendence enters as soon as movement of the infinite is stopped. It takes advantage ofthe interruption to reemerge, revive, and spring forth again. The three sorts of Universals-contemplation, reflection, and communication-are like three philosophical eras-e-Eidetic, Critical, and Phenomenological-inseparable from the long history of an illusion. The reversal of values hadto go so far-making us think that immanence is a prison (solipsism) from which the Transcendent will save us. Sartre's presupposition of an impersonal transcendental field restores the rights of immanence. When immanence is no longer immanent to something other than itself it is possible to speak of a plane of immanence. Such a plane is, perhaps, a radical empiricism: it does not present a flux of the lived that is immanent to a subject and individualized in that which belongs to a self. It presents only events, that is,possible worlds as concepts, and other people as expressions of possible worlds or conceptual personae. The event does not relate the lived to a transcendent subject = Self but, on the contrary, is related to the immanent survey of a field without subject; the Other Person does not restore transcendence to an other self but returns every other self to the immanence of the field surveyed. Empiricism knows only events and other people and is therefore a great creator of concepts. Its force begins from the moment it defines the subject: a habitus, a habit, nothing but a habit in a field of immanence, the habit of saying I. Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince ofphilosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere. In the last book of the Ethics he produced the movement of the infinite and gave infinite to thought in the third kind of knowledge. There he attains incredible speeds, with such lightning compressions that one can only speak of music, of tornadoes, of wind and strings. He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition. Immanence does not refer back to the Spinozist substance and modes but, on the contrary, the Spinozist concepts of substance and modes refer back to the plane of immanence as their presupposition. This plane presents two sides to us, extension and thought, or rather its two powers, power of being and power ofthinking. Spinoza is the vertigo of immanence from which so many philosopliers try in vain to escape. Will we ever tw mature enough for a Spinozist inspiration? It happened once with Bergson: the beginning of Mater and Memory marks out a plane that slices through the chaos-both the infinite movement of a substance that continually propagates itself, and the image of thought that everywhere continually spreads a pure consciousness by right (immanence is not immanent "to" consciousness but the other way around). Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari / What Is Philosophy?/ The Plane Of Immanence Qu'est-ce que la philosophic? © 1991 by Les Editions de Minuit. Translation © 1994 Columbia University Press
When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene.
It betrays, at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for in decency and criminal debauchery. For that reason I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scandal and that my passions are only expressed by the Jesuve.
The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus.
Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails. These contents shoot out with a racket, and fall back, streaming down.
The Solar Anus
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I. Scientific Anthropology and Mythical Anthropology
To the extent that a description of human life that goes back to the origins tries to represent what the formless universe has accomplished in producing man rather than something else, how it has been led to this useless production and by what means it made this creature something different from all the rest-to this extent it is necessary to abandon scientific anthropology, which is reduced to a babbling even more senile than puerile, reduced to giving answers that tend to make the questions put to it seem ludicrous, whereas these answers alone are miserably so when confronted with the inevitable and demanding brutality of an interrogation taking upon itself the very meaning of the life that this anthropology supposedly aims to describe.
But in the first phase, at least, philosophical speculation is rejected with no less impatience than the impotent theories of prehistory when this speculation, obeying the dictates of a guilty conscience, almost always kills itself or timidly prostrates itself before science. For even if this inhuman prostration can still be denounced, even if it is still possible for man to contrast his own cruelty and madness with a necessity that is crushing him, nothing of what is known of the means proper to philosophical investigation can inspire in him any confidence; philosophy has been, up to this point, as much as science, an expression of human subordination, and when man seeks to represent himself, no longer as a moment of a homogeneous process-of a necessary and pitiful process-but as a new laceration within a lacerated nature, it is no longer the leveling phraseology coming to him from the understanding that can help him: he can no longer recognize himself in the degrading chains of logic, but he recognizes himself, instead-not only with rage but in an ecstatic torment-in the virulence of his own phantasms.
Nevertheless, the introduction of a lawless intellectual series into the world of legitimate thought defines itself at the outset as the most arduous and audacious operation. And it is evident that if it were not practiced without equivocation, with a resolution and a rigor rarely attained in other cases, it would be the most vain operation.
Outside of a certain inaccessibility to fear-it is a question here essentially of undergoing, without being overwhelmed, the attraction of the most repulsive objects-two conditions thrust themselves on anyone whose object is to invest understanding with a content that will remain foreign to it, and they do so not only in a clear and distinct way, but as imperative prescriptions.
II. Conditions of Mythological Representation
In the first place, methodical knowledge can only be brushed aside to the extent that it has become an acquired faculty, since, at least in the present circumstances, without close contact with the homogeneous world of practical life, the free play of intelligible images would lose itself and would dissolve fatally in a region where no thought and no word would have the slightest consequence.
It is thus necessary to start by reducing science to a state that must be defined by the term subordination, in such a way that one uses it freely, like a beast of burden, to accomplish ends which are not its own. Left to itself, free in the poorest sense of the word (where liberty is only impotence), inasmuch as its legacy as the first condition of existence was the task of dissipating and annihilating mythological phantasms, nothing could keep science from blindly emptying the universe of its human content. But it is possible to use it to limit its own movement and to situate beyond its own limits what it will never attain, that before which it becomes an unsuccessful effort and a vague, sterile being. It is true that, posed in this way by science, these elements are still only empty terms and impotent paralogisms. It is only after having passed from these exterior limits of another existence to their mythologically lived content that it becomes possible to treat science with the indifference demanded by its specific nature, but this takes place only on condition that one has first enslaved science through the use of weapons borrowed from it, by making it itself produce the paralogisms that limit it.
The second condition is, first of all, only one of the forms of the first; here too science is utilized for a contrary end. The exclusion of mythology by reason is necessarily a rigorous one, on which there is no going back, and which, when required, must be made still more trenchant. But at the same time, it is necessary to overturn the values created by means of this exclusion; in other words, the fact that reason denies any valid content in a mythological series is the condition ofits most significant value. For if the affective violence of human intelligence is projected like a specter across the deserted night of the absolute or of science, it does not follow that this specter has anything in common with the night in which its brilliance becomes glacial. On the contrary, a spectral content only truly exists as such from the moment when the milieu that contains it defines itself through its intolerance toward that which appears in it as a crime. The strongest repulsion by science that can be represented is necessary for the characterization of the excluded part. Such a characterization must be compared to the affective charge of an obscene element whose obscenity derives only from the prohibition leveled against it. So long as the formal exclusion has not taken place, a mythical statement can still be assimilated to a rational statement; the mythical can be described as real and can be methodically explained. But at the same time it loses its spectral characterization, its free falseness. It enters, as in the case of revealed imperative religions, into various mystical groupings that have as a goal the narrow enslavement of impoverished men to an economic necessity: in other words, in the last analysis, to an authority that exploits them.
It is true that such an operation would be inconceivable at the present time, due to the fact that the possibilities have been limited by the very development of science.
Science, proceeding on the basis of a mystical conception of the universe, has separated the constituent elements of the universe into two profoundly distinct classes: it has elaborated, through assimilation, the necessary and practical parts, transforming a mental activity, which previously was only an instrument of exploitation, into an activity useful for man's material life. At the same time, it has had to brush aside the delirious parts of the old religious constructions, in order to destroy them. But this act of destruction becomes, at the final point of development, an act of liberation: delirium escapes from necessity, casts off its heavy mantel of mystical servitude, and it is finally only then that, nude and lubricious, it plays with the universe and its laws as if they were toys.
In. The Pineal Eye
Starting from these two principles, and supposing that the first condition, which requires a scientific knowledge of the objects considered, has at least to a large extent been met, nothing stands in the way of a phantomlike and adventurous description of the universe. What remains to be said about the ways in which this description proceeds-and about the relations of the finished description with the object it describes-can only be a reflection on the realized experience.
The eye, at the summit of the skull, opening on the incandescent sun in order to contemplate it in a sinister solitude, is not a product of the understanding, but is instead an immediate existence; it opens and blinds itself like a conflagration, or like a fever that eats the being, or more exactly, the head. And thus it plays the role of a fire in a house; the head, instead of locking up life as money is locked in a safe, spends it without counting, for, at the end of this erotic metamorphosis, the head has received the electric power of points. This great burning head is the image and the disagreeable light of the notion of expenditure, beyond the still empty notion as it is elaborated on the basis of methodical analysis
From the first, myth is identified not only with life but with the loss of life with degradation and death. Starting from the being who bore it, it is not at all an external product, but the form that this being takes in his lubricious avatars, in the ecstatic gift he makes of himself as obscene and nude victim-and a victim not before an obscure and immaterial force, but before great howls of prostitutes' laughter.
Existence no longer resembles a neatly defined itinerary from one practical sign to another, but a sickly incandescence, a durable orgasm. IV. The Two Axes of Terrestrial Life
No matter how blinding the mythical form, insofar as it is not a simple representation, but the exhausting consumption of being, it is possible, at its first indistinct appearance, to pass from a content to a container, to a circumstantial form that, although it is probably unacceptable from the point of view ofscience, does not seem different from the habitual constructs of the intellect.
The distribution of organic existence on the surface of the earth takes place on two axes: the first, vertical, prolongs the radius of the terrestrial sphere; the second, horizontal, is perpendicular to the first. Vegetation develops more or less exclusively on the vertical axis (which is also the axis of the fall of bodies); on the other hand, the development of animal life is situated, or tends to be situated, on the horizontal axis. But although, generally speaking, their movements are only slippages parallel to the lines described by the rotation of the terrestrial globe, animals are never completely foreign to the axis of vegetal life. Thus existence makes them raise themselves above the ground when they come into the world and, in a relatively stable way, when they exit from sleep or love (on the other hand, sleep and death abandon bodies to a force directed from high to low). Their skeleton, even in the most regular cases, is not perfectly adjusted to a horizontal trajectory: the skull and thus the orifice of the eyes are situated above the level of the anal vertebra. However, even if one refers to the position of the male in coitus, and to the structures of some birds, a complete verticality is never attained.
V. The Position of the Human Body and Eyes on the Surface of the Terrestrial Globe
Only human beings, tearing themselves away from peaceful animal horizontality, at the cost of the ignoble and painful efforts that can be seen in the faces of the great apes, have succeeded in appropriating the vegetal erection and in letting themselves be polarized, in a certain sense, by the sky.
It is thus that the Earth-whose immense regions are covered with plants that everywhere flee it in order to offer and destroy themselves endlessly, in order to project themselves into an alternately light and dark celestial void-releases to the disappointing immensity ofspace the totality of laughing or lacerated men. But, in this liberation of man, which leads to a suffocating absence of limits on the surface ofthe globe, human nature is far from surrendering without resistance. For if it is true that his blood, bones, and arms, that the shuddering of his pleasure (or still more the silence of true dread)-if it is true that his senile laughter and his insipid hate are endlessly lost and rise toward a sky as beautiful as death, as pale and implausible as death, his eyes continue to fetter him tightly to vulgar things, in the midst of which necessity has determined his steps. The horizontal axis of vision, to which the human structure has remained strictly subjected, in the course of man's wrenching rejection of animal nature, is the expression of a misery all the more oppressive in that it is apparently confused with serenity. VI. The Vertigo-Tree
For the anthropologist who can only observe it, this contradiction of axes of the human structure is devoid of meaning. And if, without even being able to explain itself, anthropology underscored the importance of the axes, it would only betray an unjustIfiable tendency toward mysticism. The description of the perpendicular axes only takes on its value once it becomes possible to construct on these axes the puerile play of a mythological existence, answering no longer to observation or deduction but to a free development of the relations between the immediate and varied consciousness of human life and the supposedly unconscious givens that constitute this life.
Thus the pineal eye, detaching itself from the horizontal system of normal ocular vision, appears in a kind of nimbus of tears, like the eye of a tree or, perhaps like a human tree. At the same time this ocular tree is only a giant (ignoble) pink penis, drunk with the sun and suggesting or soliciting a nauseous malaise, the sickening despair of vertigo. In this transfiguration of nature, during which vision itself, attracted by nausea, is torn out and torn apart by the sunbursts into which it stares, the erection ceases to be a painful upheaval on the surface of the earth and, in a vomiting of flavorless blood, it transforms itself into a vertiginous fall in celestial space, accompanied by a horrible cry.
VII. The Sun
The sun, situated at the bottom of the sky like a cadaver at the bottom of a pit, answers this inhuman cry with the spectral attraction of decomposition. Immense nature breaks its chains and collapses into the limitless void. A severed penis, soft and bloody, is substituted for the habitual order of things. In its folds, where painful jaws still bite, pus, spittle, and larva accumulate, deposited by enormous flies: fecal like the eye painted at the bottom of a vase, this Sun, now borrowing its brilliance from death, has buried existence in the stench of the night.
VIII. The Jesuve
The terrestrial globe has retained its enormity like a bald head, in the middle of which the eye that opens on the void is both volcanic and lacustrine. It extends its disastrous countryside into the deep folds of hairy flesh, and the hairs that form its bush are inundated with tears. But the troubled feelings of a degradation e.ven stranger than death do not have their source in a typical brain: heavy intestmes alone press under this nude flesh, as charged with obscenity as a rear en.d-one that is just as satanic as the equally nude bottom a young sorceress raIses to the black sky at the moment her fundament opens, to admit a flaming torch.
The love-cry tom from this comic crater is a feverish sob and a rattling blast of thunder.
The fecal eye of the sun has also torn itself from these volcanic entrails, and the pain of a man who tears out his own eyes with his fingers is no more absurd than this anal maternity of the sun.
IX. The Sacrifice of the Gibbon
The intolerable cry of cocks has a solar significance because of the pride and feeling of triumph of the man perceiving his own dejecta under the open sky. In the same way, during the night, an immense, troubled love, sweet as a young girl's spasm, abandons and throws itself into a giant universe, with the intimate feeling of having urinated the stars.
In order to renew this tender pact between belly and nature, a rotting forest offers its deceptive latrines, swarming with animals, colored or venomous insects, worms, and little birds. Solar light decomposes in the high branches. An Englishwoman, transfigured by a halo of blond hair, abandons her splendid body to the lubricity and the imagination (driven to the point of ecstasy by the stunning odor of decay) of a number of nude men. Her humid lips open to kisses like a sweet swamp, like a noiseless flowing river, and her eyes, drowned in pleasure, are as immensely lost as her mouth. Above the entwined human beasts who embrace and handle her, she raises her marvelous head, so heavy with dazzlement, and her eyes open on a scene of madness.
Near a round pit, freshly dug in the midst of exuberant vegetation, a giant female gibbon struggles with three men, who tie her with long cords: her face is even more stupid than it is ignoble, and she lets out unbelievable screams of fear, screams answered by the various cries of small monkeys in the high branches. Once she is trussed up like a chicken-with her legs folded back against her body-the three men tie her upside down to a stake planted in the middle of the pit. Attached in this way, her bestially howling mouth swallows dirt while, on the other end, her huge screaming pink anal protrusion stares at the sky like a flower (the end of the stake runs between her belly and her bound paws): only the part whose obscenity stupefies emerges above the top level of the pit.
Once these preparations are finished, all the men and women present (there are, in fact, several other women, no less taken with debauchery) surround the pit: at this moment they are all equally nude, all equally deranged by the avidity of pleasure (exhausted by voluptuousness), breathless, at wits' end ...
They are all armed with shovels, except the Englishwoman: the earth destined to fill the pit is spread evenly around it. The ignoble gibbon, in an ignoble posture, continues her terrifying howl, but, on a signal from the Englishwoman, everyone busies himself shoveling dirt into the pit, and then quickly stamps it down: thus, in the blink of an eye, the horrible beast is buried alive.
A relative silence settles: all the stupefied glances are fixed on the filthy, beautifully blood-colored solar prominence, sticking out of the earth and ridiculously shuddering with convulsions of agony. Then the Englishwoman with her charming rear end stretches her long nude body on the filled pit: the mucousflesh of this bald false skull, a little soiled with shit at the radiate flower of its summit, is even more upsetting to see when touched by pretty white fingers. All' those around hold back their cries and wipe their sweat; teeth bite lips; a light. foam even flows from overly agitated mouths: contracted by strangulation, and even by death, the beautiful boil of red flesh is set ablaze with stinking brown flames.
Like a storm that erupts and, after several minutes of intolerable delay, ravishes in semidarkness an entire countryside with insane cataracts of water and blasts of thunder, in the same disturbed and profoundly overwhelming way (albeit with signs infinitely more difficult to perceive), existence itself shudders and attains a level where there is nothing more than a hallucinatory void, an odor of death that sticks in the throat.
In reality, when this puerile little vomiting took place, it was not on a mere. carcass that the mouth of the Englishwoman crushed her most burning, her' sweetest kisses, but on the nauseating JESUVE: the bizarre noise of kisses, prolonged on flesh, clattered across the disgusting noise of bowels. But these unheard-of events had set off orgasms, each more suffocating and spasmodic than its predecessor, in the circle of unfortunate observers; all throats were choked by raucous sighs, by impossible cries, and, from all sides, eyes were moist with the brilliant tears of vertigo. . .
The sun vomited like a sick drunk above the mouths full of comic screams, in the void of an absurd sky . . . And thus an unparalleled heat and stupor formed an alliance-as excessive as torture: like a severed nose, like a torn-out tongue-and celebrated a wedding (celebrated it with the blade of a razor on pretty, insolent rear ends), the little copulation of the stinking hole with the sun ...
x. The Bronze Eye
The little girls who surround the animal cages in zoos cannot help but be stunned by the ever-so lubricious rear ends of apes. To their puerile understanding, these creatures-who seem to exist only for the purpose of coupling with men-mouth to mouth, belly to belly-with the most doubtful parts of nature-propose enigmas whose perversity is barely burlesque. Girls cannot avoid thinking of their own little rear ends, of their own dejecta against which crushing interdictions have been leveled: but the image of their personal indecency, conveyed to them by the parti-colored, red, or mauve anal baldness of some apes, reaches, on the other side of the bars of the cage, a comic splendor and a suffocating atrocity. When the mythological deliria dissipate, after having fatigued the spirit through a lack of connections and through a disproportion to the real needs of life, the phantoms banished from all sides, abandoning the sun itself to the vulgarity of a nice day, make room for forms without mystery, through which one can easily make one's way, with no other goal than defined objects. But all it takes is an idiotic ape in his cage and a little girl (who blushes at seeing him take a crap), to rediscover suddenly the fleeing troop of phantoms, whose obscene sniggers have just charged a rear end as shocking as a sun.
What science cannot do-which is to establish the exceptional signification, the expressive value of an excremental orifice emerging from a hairy body like a live coal, as when, in a lavatory, a human rear end comes out of a pair of pants-the little girl achieves in such a way that there will be nothing left to do but stifle a scream. She drifts away, pressed on by a need; she trots in an alley where her steps make the gravel screech and where she passes her friends without seeing their multicolored balls, which are nevertheless well designed to attract eyes dazzled by any riot of color. Thus she runs to the foul-smelling place and locks herself in with surprise, like a young queen who, out of curiosity, locks herself in the throne room: obscurely, but in ecstasy, she has learned to recognize the face, the comic breath of death; she is unaware only of her own sobs of voluptuousness that will join, much later, this miraculous, sweet discovery ...
In the course of the progressive erection that goes from the quadruped to Homo erectus, the ignominy of animal appearance grows to the point of attaining horrifying proportions, from the pretty and almost baroque lemur, who still moves on the horizontal plane, up to the gorilla. However, when the line of terminal evolution is directed toward the human being, the series of forms is produced, on the contrary, in the direction of a more and more noble or correct regularity. Thus at the present stage of development the automatic rectitude of a soldier in uniform, maneuvering according to orders, emerges from the immense confusion of the animal world and proposes itself to the universe of astronomy as its highest achievement. If, on the other hand, this mathematical military truth is contrasted with the excremental orifice of the ape, which seems to be its inevitable compensation, the universe that seemed menaced by human splendor in a pitifully imperative form receives no other response than the unintelligible discharge of a burst of laughter . . .
When the arboreal life of apes, moving in jerks from branch to branch, provoked the rupture of the equilibrium that resulted from rectilinear locomotion everything that obscurely but ceaselessly sought to throw itself outside the animal organism was freely discharged into the region of the inferior orifice. This part, which had never been developed, and was hidden under the tails 0f other animals, sent out shoots and flowered in the ape; it turned into a bald protuberance and the most beautiful colors of nature made it dazzling. The tail, for a long time incapable of hiding this immense hernia of flesh, disappeared from the most evolved apes, those that carried on the genius of their species, in such a way that the hernia was able to blossom, at the end of the process, with the' most hideous obscenity.
Thus the disappearance of the free caudal appendage with which, more than anything else, human pride is commonly associated, in no way signifies a regression of original bestiality, but rather a liberation oflubricious and absolutely disgusting anal forces, of which man is only the contradictory expression.
The earth, shaken to its foundations, answered this doubtful colic of nature discharged, in the gluey penumbra of forests, through numberless flowers of flesh-with the noisy joy of entrails, with the vomiting of unbelievable volcanoes. In the same way that a burst of laughter provokes others, or a yawn provokes the yawns of a crowd, a burlesque fecal spasm had unleashed, under a black sky ravaged with thunder, a spasm of fire. In this wonderland, a wind, heavy with bloody smoke, broke down from time to time immense glowing. trees, while tortuous rivers of red incandescent lava streamed from everywhere, as if from the sky. Victims of an insane terror, the giant apes fled, their flesh broiled, their mouths distorted by puerile screams.
Many of them were felled by fiery tree trunks, which laid them down, screaming, on their stomachs or backs; they soon caught fire and burned like wood. Occasionally, however, a few arrived on a treeless beach, spared by the fire, protected from the smoke by an opposing wind: they were nothing more than breathless lacerations, shapeless silhouettes, half eaten by fire, getting up or moaning on the ground, staggered by intolerable pain. Before a spectacle of red lava - as dazzling as a nightmare - of an apocalyptic lava that seemed to come bloody out of their own anuses (just as, originally, their own hairy bodies had thrust out and sadistically exhibited these vile anuses-as if all the more to insult and soil that which exists) these unfortunate creatures became like the wombs of women who give birth, something horrible ...
It is easy, starting with the worm, to consider ironically an animal, a fish, a monkey, a man, as a tube with two orifices, anal and buccal: the nostrils, the eyes, the ears, the brain represent the complications of the buccal orifice; the penis, the testicles, or the female organs that correspond to them, are the complication of the anal. In these conditions, the violent thrusts that come from the interior of the body can be indifferently rejected to one extremity or the other, and they are discharged, in fact, where they meet the weakest resistance. All the ornaments of the head, of whatever type, mean the generalized privilege of the oral extremity; one can only contrast them with the decorative riches of the excremental extremity of apes.
But when the great anthropoid carcass found itself standing on the ground, no longer swinging from one tree to another, itself now perfectly straight and parallel to a tree, all the impulses that had up to that time found their point of free expulsion in the anal region ran up against a new barrier. Because of the erect posture, the anal region ceased to form a protuberance, and it lost the "privileged power of points": the erection could only be maintained on condi- tion that a barrier of contracted muscles be regularly substituted for this' 'power of points." Thus the obscure vital thrusts were suddenly thrown back in the direction of the face and the cervical region: they were discharged in the human voice and in more and more fragile intellectual constructions (these new modes of discharge were not only adapted to the principle of the new structure, to the erection, but they even contributed to its rigidity and strength).
Beyond this, in order to consume an excess, the facial extremity assumed a part-relatively weak, but significant-of the excretory functions that up to that time had been routed in the opposite direction: men spit, cough, yawn, belch, blow their noses, sneeze, and cry much more than the other animals, but above all they have acquired the strange faculty of sobbing and bursting into laughter.
Alone, even though it may be substituted at the end of evolution for the mouth as the extreme point of the upper edifice, the pineal gland remains only in a virtual state and can only attain its meaning (without which a man spontaneously enslaves himself and reduces himself to the status of an employee) with the help of mythical confusion, as if better to make human nature a value foreign to its own reality, and thus to tie it to a spectral existence.
It is in relation to this last fact that the metamorphosis of the great ape must be seen as an inversion, having as its object not only the direction of the discharges thrust back through the head-transforming the head into something completely different from a mouth, making it a kind of flower blossoming with the most delirious richness of forms-but also the access of living nature (up to that point tied to the ground) to the unreality of solar space.
It is the inversion of the anal orifice itself, resulting from the shift from a squatting posture to a standing one, that is responsible for the decisive reversal of animal existence.
The bald summit of the anus has become the center, blackened with bushes, of the narrow ravine cleaving the buttocks.
The spectral image of this change of sign is represented by a strange human nudity-now obscene-that is substituted for the hairy body of animals, and in particular by the pubescent hairs that appear exactly where the ape was glabrous' surrounded by a halo of death, a creature who is too pale and too large stands up, a creature who, under a sick sun, is nothing other than the celestial eye it; lacks.
Georges Bataille/ Visions of Excess/ Selected Writings (1927-1939)/The Pineal Eye/ University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
by Davis Schneiderman In the second decade of the nineteenth century, a now famous progenitor of American letters wrote (in mockery of the naturalist Buffon) that ‘all animals degenerated in America, and man among the number’ (Irving 1819:809). While readers of the time might have been surprised to learn that the author of this statement, one Geoffrey Crayon, was also that famous New York historian Diedrich Knickerbocker, those who know the ‘real’ identity of both writers as Washington Irving recognize Irving’s position in the American canon as that of a literary imitator. Irving’s pseudonymous Crayon completely transformed the original German locations of ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’ into terrain seemingly indigenous to the new world. I deliberately use the term ‘real’ to describe this author’s identity— not to question the existence of the man known as Washington Irving, but to dramatize (in conjunction with American ‘degeneration’) that the position of the author is bound inextricably with the transformation of his subject matter, so that the resulting amalgamation might respond to the question: ‘Wouldn’t it be booful if we should juth run together into one gweat big blob’ (Q 100). Such is also the case with the American transient William S. Burroughs, who jigged about the map in his effort to produce a corpus that exists never in only one place and time, but rather, finds itself moving toward what he calls a ‘final ecological jump’ (Zivancevic 1981:525) into space. ‘Space’ has at least two meanings when applied to Burroughs’s work; first, he encourages the evolution of humans into a form best suited for cosmic nether-realms via a spirit body (see Russell 2001:155–87); second, ‘space’ can also signify a postmodern dissolution of Enlightenment-imposed limits in a world no longer bound by the flat logic of hegemonic ‘reason’. This latter value acts as a continual hedge against the more fantastic elements of the Burroughsian cosmology, but also finds connection with the political struggles characterizing the emerging global economic order, where ‘all of nature has become capital, or at least has become subject to capital’ (Hardt and Negri 2000:272). Accordingly, Burroughs’s entreaties for humans to evolve from ‘time’ into ‘space’ can be productively analyzed in terms of the material vagaries of global politics that are contemporaneous with his movement, not away from writing, but into a creative space (in the second sense of the term) populated with a variety of multimedia projects. As noted by a number of critics (Miles 1992; Sobieszek 1996; Murphy 1997), Burroughs has a long engagement with aesthetics beyond the written form, and this engagement can be traced back to at least the late 1950s in his work with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville. Significantly, such supplementary activity quickly assumed a prominent theoretical position in Burroughs’s work, which became increasingly fixated on conceits of media as both resistance and control. This ambivalence is crucial, both deployed and circumscribed by the language of its articulation, so that Burroughs’s work—offering a symbolic language of media production—always searches for opportunities to exploit formal processes as a means of scuttling the forces of commodification: Burroughs not only argued for the efficacy of cut-ups, but also used them as a production tool; he not only wrote about films and recordings, but also made them throughout his career. His reflexive empiricism thus carries the significance of his work beyond that of a simply innovative writer, providing it with a ‘double resonance’—an awareness of its structural limits in terms of both content and production. Robert A. Sobieszek notes that Burroughs’s film and recorder projects ‘startlingly anticipate MTV rock videos of the 1980s and 1990s as well as the devices of “scratching” and “sampling” in punk, industrial, and rap music of the same decades’ (1996:20–1). Still, it is important not simply to perceive the sound manipulation techniques that we consider contemporary, including ‘inching’— represented on Break Through in Grey Room (a 1986 collection of early Burroughs sound experiments)—as the progenitors of today’s ubiquitous rap and DJ culture; worse yet, to consider this culture from the banal academic perspective that would label those techniques as still effectively ‘resistant’ ignores the mass culture’s ability to absorb innovation. In both cases, such plaudits run the risk of paradoxically diluting the work into the neutralized extensions of Madison Avenue. Rather, we must examine subversive possibilities that remain ever wary of the media, while simultaneously exploiting the field’s incessant desire to cover. Accordingly, media literacy campaigns dedicated to reversing a default one-way information flow (as per the ‘Senders’ of Naked Lunch and their ‘biocontrol apparatus’ [NL 148]) have found some success in recent years. Image-savvy groups such as the indigenous rights-oriented Zapatistas in Mexico, as well as the coalition of activists involved in the ‘Battle of Seattle’ protest at the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization and the similarly motivated 2000 protests against the World Economic Forum’s Asia Pacific meeting in Melbourne, Australia, demonstrate that the anti-globalization movement not only ‘manifests viscerally in local spaces but it also depends upon broad non-geographical media spaces’ (Luckman and Redden 2001:32). Significantly, the clutch of struggles affiliated with the antiglobalization movement is always locked into a split-level effort: on the one hand, such movements must attempt to prevent the pandemic erosion of public space and public resources (air, water, wilderness, and so on); at the same time they must battle against the co-optation and dissolution of their public voices into the droning mass of the culture industry—any middle-American mall-rat with a pocket full of allowance can purchase a Che Guevara T-shirt. Burroughs’s sound collaborations, while always in danger of becoming just this sort of empty prattle, are nonetheless ideally positioned: not to overthrow the control machine by ‘storming the reality studio’—a goal too idealistic to combat a control machine that routinely deploys the techniques of media-savvy dissent—but to map, onto the material effects of its own delivery systems, strategies of guerilla resistance imbued with enough reflexive potential to hold the grey room after the oft-envisaged ‘break through’. As Tom Hayden comments (on a poster at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago): ‘[T]hose administering the regressive apparatus […] cannot distinguish “straight” radicals from newspapermen or observers from delegates to the convention. They cannot distinguish rumors about demonstrations from the real thing’ (cited by Walker 1968:36–7). Hayden’s statement seems to imply the opportunity for guerilla intervention, but for Burroughs, there is no such ‘resistance’ that can avoid the possibility of being spun from a reverse angle. Thus, the ‘double resonance’ of his sound production has as much to do with the undesirability of supposedly ‘transformative’ technological identity cast in the illusion of hybridity, as it does with the possibility of producing aesthetic artifacts capable of exploding the limits of conventional discourse. THE HIPSTER BE-BOP JUNKIE?Regarding Burroughs’s first official sound release, Call Me Burroughs (1965), Barry Alfonso remarks (on the reissue liner notes) on the ‘antique metallic resonance’ of Burroughs’s voice—linked to the resounding ‘echoes of older America’—which, with its metanarrative pronouncements from texts such as Nova Express, assumes meanings not possible on the page. On the same track, ‘Where You Belong’, the straight-ahead voice tells us: ‘We pull writers of all time in together and record radio programs, movie soundtrack, TV and jukebox songs […] all the words of the world stirring around in a cement mixer, and pour in the resistance message’ (CMB). Still, the Englishlanguage portion of the original 1965 liner notes, written by Emmett Williams, oversimplifies the connection between Burroughs’s voice and the cut-up ‘message’, misattributing interpretative clairvoyance to Burroughs’s already prophetic reputation. For Williams, Burroughs reading Burroughs might be taken as ‘an indispensable key to the arcana of The Naked Lunch and Nova Express’ (CMB liner notes). Is this the ‘real’ Burroughs then—the producer and interpreter of text through its own articulation? According to Williams’s playful and perhaps hasty summation, we can envision Burroughs feeding himself media on the subliminal level, processing himself through performance, and thus producing a hyperbolic carnival version of his own narrative fête. Such jouissance might point to the ‘real’ Burroughs in the same way that Crayon or Knickerbocker were at various times associated with the early American ‘degenerate’ called Washington Irving. Any correlation beyond simple identification or attribution remains only local, no more emblematic of the essential Burroughs than the $25 T-shirt is representative of the South American revolutionary. Despite Williams’s desire to ‘discover’ in Burroughs’s voice some vital essence, what may be most significant about Burroughs’s early forays into visual and sound culture is that the work itself never surrendered to the ‘countercultural myth’ that characterized much avant-garde output of the time—as Thomas Frank calls the myth that resistance operated in binary opposition to the ‘muted, uniform gray’ of the business world (1997:6). Frank, for instance, notes PepsiCola’s early 1960s invention of a completely commodified populace who could be set against the apparently rigid mores of old America (in this case represented by Coca-Cola) for mercantile purposes: ‘[I]n 1961 [Pepsi] invented a fictional youth movement, a more wholesome version of Mailer’s hipsters but still in rebellion against the oppressive demands of mass society’ (1997:170). Such easy binaries are not to be found in Burroughs’s arsenal; marked by the ‘double resonance’ of his content and production, the ambivalence of addiction along with its complete hold on the subject assures Burroughs’s readers that they would be wise to remain continually suspicious of the standard counterculture line: ‘The prolonged use of LSD may give rise in some cases to a crazed unwholesome benevolence—the old tripster smiling into your face sees all your thoughts loving and accepting you inside out’ (Job 137). Accordingly, we might investigate Burroughs’s later sound production as a project evolving from his early tape recorder and film pieces, because once the mass media entered its current period of rampant self-reflective narcissism, Burroughs’s rise as a pop-culture figure was on one level assured by the fact that he was still alive and producing. Popular constructions of Burroughs as junkie-murdererScientologist-Nike shill-painter-homosexual-et al. might be read as reminders of the control machine’s adaptability; no doubt, these ‘ports of entry’ will each remain enticing gateways for the Burroughs mythology, but Burroughs’s continued suspicion of language’s ‘ability’ to offer a clear message can also countermand the accreted meaning and interpretation of his popular persona: ‘If they write an article attacking the Olympia Press as sexualizing congruent accessibility to its heart of pulp fecundate with orifices perspectives in the name of human privacy they have placed their thesis beyond the realm of fact […] The words used refer to nothing’ (Job 107). Language betrays any attempt to hang Burroughs onto a particular commercial hook, but also compromises—‘informs’—on his retorts. Even so, Burroughs’s multimedia collaborations might still be interpreted as ‘lines of flight’ from the structures of advanced capital. The ‘double resonance’ of Burroughs’s work and cultural appropriation attempts to perform key reversals, what Saul Alinsky calls ‘mass political jujitsu’ (cited by Klein 2002:281), so that while the forces of commodification try to assimilate the viral seed of Burroughs’s language, they remain unable to force the words into their desired meaning. INVERSION I: WORKING WITH THE POPULAR FORCESIn his classic treatise Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali articulates our first inversion—that recorded music and sound have become representative of a fundamental shift in the relationship between performance and recording. Whereas the original purpose of recording was to preserve the live concert experience, Attali argues that the evolution of mass reproducibility and the concomitant rise of the ‘recording star’ changed the live performance into a repetition of the recorded situation. The authority of original production and that of the recording industry are both called into question (1985:85–6), guaranteeing that even in its popular manifestation of apparent countercultural forms (for example, the Beatles), the recording industry ‘assured that young people were very effectively socialized, in a world of pettiness constructed by adults’ (110). Burroughs and Gysin, aware of the deep structural ambivalence of the linguistic medium, argued that ‘[t]he word was and is flesh […] The word was and is sound and image’ (3M 159), and thus focused their recording energies on pieces that would somehow cultivate a reproduction of ‘aura’ that could grow throughreplication, while at the same time questioning the efficacy of their own involvement in the control mechanisms of the pre-recordings. In the liner notes for Apocalypse Across the Sky by the Master Musicians of Jajouka featuring Bachir Attar (produced by Bill Laswell), Burroughs and Gysin position the special caste of musicians (‘the 4000-year-old rock ‘n’ roll band’) in an era pre-dating the traps of language and technological recording: ‘Musicians are magicians in Morocco […] They are evokers of djenoun forces, spirits of the hills and the flocks and above all the spirits of music’ (Apocalypse liner notes). Yet, Burroughs and Gysin also admonish the consumers of the music to ‘let the music penetrate you and move you, and you will connect with the oldest music on earth’ (Apocalypse liner notes). In order to account not only for the apparent contradiction of discovering such ‘auratic’ magic in the technological medium, but also for Attali’s sense that recording sound and music becomes subordinate to the replicated long-player of capital, we must determine how Burroughs uses such an inversion to his advantage. ‘Burroughs Break’, the first track from the Burroughs and Gus Van Sant collaboration The Elvis of Letters (1985), offers the line, ‘Whatever you feed into the machine on a subliminal level, the machine will process’, and this sample is seemingly copied straight from the Call Me Burroughs record (as are other portions of Elvis). Van Sant’s twangy guitar backs up the majority of Elvis, most effectively perhaps on the second track, ‘Word is Virus’, which repeats the ideological mantra of Nova Express: ‘Word begets image and image is virus’ (48). While such exercises, which mix Burroughs’s spoken word recording with musical accompaniment, are notable advances from the deadpan delivery on Call Me Burroughs, the potential of Van Sant’s project to overcome the limiting interplay of sound and text, while always relying more heavily on spoken word material, remains in question. The privileging of the Burroughs text on this record is evident in the resonance of such sound recordings to the events of global theater. Stash Luczkiw, writing in Italy Weekly of the beleaguered Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, attributes a connection between Burroughs’s line, ‘Word begets image, and image is virus’ (Luczkiw 2003), and the co-opting power of image politics to the Italian media elite. Luczkiw cites a rumor concerning the outlawed Masonic Lodge, Propaganda 2 (P2), and a supposed 1976 document, the ‘Plan for Democratic Renewal’, detailing an objective ‘to gain influence and, ultimately, control over the mass media by infiltrating various newspapers, publishing houses and TV stations’. Significantly, Luczkiw names Berlusconi as a ‘former member of P2’ (2003), but his essay represents more than the political application of Burroughs’s paranoiac cosmic-opera ideas. Applying Burroughs’s work to theoretical materials that attempt to explain the metaphorical implications of his prose is certainly a viable critical tactic, yet even casually drawing such conclusions (as Luczkiw does) from a text used in The Elvis of Letters does not specifically address the recorded nature of the disk. For it is the material of the recording, to return to Attali, that puts a unique spin on the replicating inversion of the original/recording relationship within the space of global capital. In order to circumnavigate the trap of ‘double resonant’ production applied only along its single written dimension, we must more precisely trace the relationship between recording and original. INVERSION II: BURROUGHS CALLED THE LAW CALLED BURROUGHS Expanding on Roland Barthes’s ‘death of the author’ in the lateStructuralist moment, Michel Foucault offers a salient conception of the ‘author function’ that characterizes our second inversion. Foucault traces the history of the ‘author function’ as born from an alteration of the common cultural notion of the ‘author’ preceding the text that she constructs from the genius of her creative faculty. After demonstrating how the author has indeed become subject to the legal vagaries of advanced capital, including ‘ownership’ necessitated by the rise of copyright law, Foucault shows how this ‘author function’ does not precede the text in the same way as the humanist notion of ‘Author’, but how it assumes a limiting function for the text(s) that it accompanies. The ‘author function’ becomes a projection of the ‘operations that we force texts to undergo’ (1969:551)— a chimera made real by its own culturally sanctioned image and its ability to reinforce epistemological discursive limits. As one embodiment of this ‘author function’ that is complicit with control, Burroughs, the author-cum-counterculture-icon, must somehow intervene directly into the milieu of control in order to alter the discursive practices that are ‘natural’ to the capitalist environment of his production as an ‘Author’. This task is not unlike his oft-used comparison for the limits of the space program (‘Yes sir, the fish said, I’m just going to shove a little aquarium up onto land there, got everything I need in it’ [PDR 41]); language, understood as a virus, precipitates its own dissemination in a way that forces a certain limited meaning at every juncture. If the solution to this poststructural quandary, as offered in such texts as the ‘Academy 23’ section of The Job, is recourse to pictorial associative systems, how can we reconcile Burroughs’s work with image/sound as being any more successful than his already circumscribed-by-capital textual production? The key to this ‘solution’ lies in the second reversal mixed with the first: if recording has become a means to replicate the live act that is now constructed as a facsimile of the recording (Attali), and if the ‘author function’ is in part an illusory product of copyright-inspired capital transactions of ownership (Foucault), then any disruption must occur in a way that scuttles the efficacy of the signifying chain separating ‘original’ from ‘copy’ while at the same time destroying the relational mechanisms that authorize such compartmentalization through the function of the ‘genius’ author or intellect. EL HOMBRE INVISIBLEJesse Bernstein: How do you see the relationship between your public image—there’s a William S. Burroughs archetype—your body of work, and yourself, the actual man? William Burroughs: There is no actual man. —Jesse Bernstein, ‘Criminal Mind’ One of the more interesting sound works of Burroughs’s later period is the 1997 remix release version of the classic Material album Seven Souls (1989), a sort of unofficial soundtrack to Burroughs’s last major novel, The Western Lands (1987). Significant to this discussion is the way that the music, along with Burroughs’s readings, creates an interplay that moves beyond the reliance on written text; as Murphy notes about the track ‘The Western Lands’, excerpts from different sections of Burroughs’s novel have come together in the song (1997:225), creating an orchestrated cut-up at the altar of the mixing table. The final track of both the original and the remix record, ‘The End of Words’, returns the listener to that assumed connection between the text and its performance, which features ‘Middle Eastern scales and overdubbed chants’ (Murphy 1997:225), before Burroughs drones through the final passages of The Western Lands, including, significantly: ‘The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. And then?’ (WL 258) Expressed as both text and sound versions, this passage is ostensibly the ‘same’ in each instance, yet the difference between the ‘original’ written iteration of this passage and its re-articulation on the remix record becomes more than just a refraction of the ‘real’ world of the text into a sound medium. Such movement between mediums is not simply, as the Critical Art Ensemble laments, ‘trying to eat soup with soup’ (1994:86). Rather, the context has been altered to locate this new articulation, as a new expression of the ‘double resonance’ that exploits Attali’s retroversion. In Attali’s conception, the artist originally recorded her work as a way of preserving the live performance. In this case, at first analysis, the live performance of Burroughs’s reading would comport, in the straight-ahead style of Call Me Burroughs, to the reverse structure that Attali attributes to the pattern of replication typified by advanced capital: Burroughs reads and records the text during a live performance, in order to preserve (as per the reversal), through voice, the ‘original’ written text and any ‘original’ live performances that presumably preceded its recorded articulation. Significantly, this live performance is recorded. Yet, with Laswell’s band not so much performing a cut-up on the text as radically recontextualizing it, the situation undergoes a subsequent and crucial re-inversion: the recording of the spoken word reading, which Laswell uses on his 1989 record, becomes the original performance of the aural material (or the articulation that serves as such within the new regime), and the Laswell-produced track ‘The End of Words’—a new recording—works in Attali’s formula as a way of not merely limiting the new original by reproducing it again, but changing the new original—which is not, of course, the ‘real’ original—through the détournement of its first and only temporary position in a tenuous chain of signification (as an aural copy of the written text, which has been elided from the sound process completely). For Burroughs’s work, the context has now shifted, and his ‘end of words’ proclamation becomes a prophecy that plays itself out in the inability of that language to fix the ‘meaning’ of its articulation. Just as Magritte’s picture of a pipe is no longer a pipe itself, Burroughs’s text about the ‘end of words’ is no longer a fixed written text that attempts to signify an insoluble concept through appreciable limits, because its recording and subsequent re-situation plays upon Burroughs’s own narrative critiques of the insolubility of originality. The recording and mixing process redirects the specter of repetition, so that any relation to the ‘original’ is not one of only preservation and repetition (as per Attali’s reversal), but, potentially, one of evolution. Still, it may be clear from such an example that Laswell’s work, while certainly innovative, is little more than a clever crossapplication of the cut-up method to a sound medium, and thus, the new articulation quickly exhausts its apparent insight into the system of replicated reproduction. While manipulations of spoken word texts are by no means legion in the popular arena, enough of this type of activity has been performed that the reader might see the re-signification of Attali’s reversal (complicated by Burroughs’s own production techniques, discussed earlier) as subject to Frank’s cogent analysis of the countercultural myth, or Foucault’s notions of the complete penetration of the power apparatus in a society of control. Without discounting these critiques, let us lay down the ‘second reversal’, that of the ‘author function’, onto this track. EL HOMBRE DI-VISIBLERecall that Foucault expresses that the ‘author function’ is born contemporaneously with the text, and is, in fact, the limiting agent to which the text is attributed, a sort of phenomenological enforcer of Burroughs’s ‘Board Books’. Burroughs’s solution, offered throughout his career, might be cited as: ‘Equipped now with sound and image track of the control machine […] I had only to mix the order of recordings and the order of images’ (SM 92). This possibility is developed in works such as the CD Break Through in Grey Room (due to the fact that a text that has as its subject ‘recording’ is then manipulated as a recording itself), but let us consider the remix of Seven Souls for a later iteration of this methodology as a musical concept once removed from the ‘originating’ consciousness of the idea as already developed by Burroughs. The original 1989 ‘Soul Killer’ track, also a collection of passages from The Western Lands, expands upon ‘Total Death. Soul Death’, the consolidation of energy that occurs in that mummycontrolled ‘space’ of the Western hegemonic afterlife. From the track: ‘Governments fall from sheer indifference. Authority figures, deprived of the vampiric energy they suck off their constituents are seen for what they are: dead, empty masks manipulated by computers. And what is behind the computers? Remote control of course’ (WL 116). On the most provocative remix from the 1997 record, DJ Terre Thaemlitz’s ‘Remote Control Mix’ of ‘Soul Killer’, Burroughs’s famous dictum that there is ‘nothing here now but the recordings’ (which also ends the 1989 Laswell version) closes with the same warning about the ‘recordings’: ‘[T]hey are as radioactive as an old joke’ (WL 116). The familiar metallic timbre of Burroughs’s voice gives way to the distorted soundscape that one reviewer notes ‘evok[es] imagery of Morocco or somewhere equally as exotic’ (Stoeve 2002). The sonic wasteland is ethereal enough to situate the few remaining and audible Burroughs sounds, no more than quick glitches in time, in a way that implies that the ‘author’—the absent Burroughs—has been drowned by the same ‘remote control technology’ that he conducted an excursus upon in the 1989 recording. From the time of 6:30 to 7:00 on the remix, we hear almost inaudible and certainly defamiliarized fragments of what sounds like Burroughs’s voice buried beneath the sands of the engineer’s table: ‘originally’ words in the pages of The Western Lands (assuming erroneously but deliberately that typing/scripting is the origination point of language), these words are no longer ‘words’ at all. Here we enter the realm that lies submersed beneath the ambient waves of the postmodern musical era, served under the imprimatur of direct noise that one might find on the records Greg Hainge cites in his essay, ‘Come on Feel the Noise: Technology and its Dysfunctions in the Music of Sensation’, including Reynol’s Blank Tapes or Francis Lopez’s Paris Hiss (2002:42–58). In the postindustrial wilderness that closes Thaemlitz’s mix, the warning about the ‘radioactivity’ of the pre-recordings becomes the last completely audible (although manipulated) portion of the track, so that this final desert of the red night not only plays upon the radioactive nature of the ‘old jokes’—the old America that contributes to the degeneration of its inhabitants—but also continues the ‘double resonance’ that infuses the best of Burroughs’s spoken word material: remixed almost beyond aural recognition, the spoken word ‘text’, a mélange of the textual and sonic, a distorted re-recording of a previously manipulated recording of a live performance of a written ‘original’ (with multiple variations across a history of Burroughs’s work) hopelessly spins the Attali equation on its head, but also pushes toward Foucault’s vision of the text as no longer constrained by the author function (although Foucault always envisions some form of constraint). We need no longer lament the replication of a recorded text or performance in its live iteration, because all of these categories are problematized by the conflation of the original and the recording. The identity of the ‘real’ originator Burroughs (while still ‘present’ on the remix) finds his flickering persona fed into the recording machine in so many iterations, both through his own instrumentation and that of other like-minded collaborators, that it is cut backward and chopped apart until the computer sample of ‘his’ voice, the recording of a recording, implodes. Burroughs’s ‘double resonance’ provides a limit, a glass ceiling for him to vibrate toward in an attempt to ‘rub out the word’, so that it is only with a soul death, a total death effectuated—through the use of the recording process that seeks to eliminate his voice from his own descriptive passages—that we can see our way forward to Foucault’s vision of a future without the ‘author function’. Foucault’s future is founded not upon a reversal that allows the ‘author’ to again precede the ‘text’, but with an acknowledgement of the signifying limits of the author that accelerate the evolutionary changes, suggesting, like Burroughs’s buried and distorted clicks at the end of the ‘Soul Killer’ remix, that: ‘All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur’ (Foucault 1969:558). Listen as closely as you like to the Thaemlitz track’s final minutes, between 6:30 and 6:50; rewind and replay as often as you can; wear noisecanceling headphones to better preserve the snippets of deconstructed Burroughs that pass through your ears—and you will still hear only the murmur of standard narrative intelligibility. (IN)FLEXIBLE AUTHORITYThis murmur is an apt metaphor in its ethereality—in its ambivalence between presence and absence—to bring us toward closure. N. Katherine Hayles, upon listening to Nothing Here Now But the Recordings, expresses the disjunction between the ‘explanatory’ prose segments on sound manipulation and the practical application of the method: ‘I found the recording less forceful as a demonstration of Burroughs’s theories than his writing. For me, the aurality of his prose elicits a greater response than the machine productions it describes and instantiates’ (Hayles 1999:216). Significantly, Hayles’s analysis also identifies the danger of Burroughs’s sound experiments to ‘constitute a parasitic monologue’ if not ‘self-disrupted’ (215) by manipulations that might counteract the trap of language—so that sound can be expanded to not only echo the sounds of the body (an internal engine), but in its self-deconstruction, become an external mechanism that produces ‘a new kind of subjectivity that strikes at the deepest levels of awareness’ (220). Elsewhere is this collection, Anthony Enns attends to Hayles’s critique through the primacy of Burroughs’s use of the typewriter, yet we must also consider her hesitancy to embrace Burroughs’s sound recordings as a reminder of the difficulty in escaping the parasitism of the control machine that feeds on the iconic image. This brief reading of Burroughs’s sound-related projects cannot possibly approach an exhaustive study, nor can it imply that such current sound production will actually produce Hayles’s new subjectivity, because in many ways the works of contemporary musicians/ sound performers, no matter how seemingly ‘revolutionary’, exist in a different cultural location than once-‘obscene’ texts such as Naked Lunch. Great gains have been made for provocative aesthetics; while I never read Burroughs as a student, his work routinely finds a place on my syllabus as a professor, representing a local manifestation of Kathy Acker’s statement that ‘we are living in the world of Burroughs’s novels’ (1997:3). Even though we might now simply view a picture of Burroughs holding court with Kim Gordon and Michael Stipe, or hear socially conscious rock band Radiohead sample lead singer Thom Yorke’s live voice for immediate playback during performances of ‘Everything in the Right Place’ (an application of ‘Burroughsian’ principles), we must still force ourselves to reconcile the overwhelming persona of the speaker against the cult of the image that dilutes its message, while simultaneously applying the same concerns to the medium. Perhaps, as both Attali and Hainge suggest, the solution can be found in the productive power of noise, because ‘in its limited appeal […] the Noise genre subverts the relationship between product and demand in the age or repetition and mass consumerism’ (Hainge 2002:56). The inherent problem of such pronouncements is that the control machine also listens to its own noises—and it never hesitates to engage in playback. During the ‘psyops’ (psychological operations) phase of the 2003 Iraq war, the US military followed Burroughs’s admonition in ‘Electronic Revolution’ to use sound as ‘a front line weapon to produce and escalate riots’ (now in Job 175): ‘The military also uses the recordings during tank assaults as “force multipliers”, sound effects to make the enemy think the forces are larger than they actually are’ (Leinwand 2003). Burroughs would advocate fighting fire with a recording of fire, and while even the recent rise of file sharing protocols might create conditions (in the separation of recording from corporate ownership) to cut the association lines of the mass media, the fact that we cannot eat soup with soup also argues for constant vigilance against the corporate and commercial forces. If the cop not only needs the criminal, but also is the criminal, we must also see the dominant culture’s ability to absorb the ideologically ‘resistant’ as the key to the ‘double resonance’ of Burroughs’s sound projects. Senator Orrin Hatch, himself a musician of the patriotic/religious variety, recently advocated integrating viruses into Internet downloads to damage file sharing culprits, which, in Hatch’s words, ‘may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights’ (Bridis 2003:2B). If the corporate body can literally consume everything it tastes, there is no sense in hiding the food. Instead, Burroughs’s position must be fed into the machine in so many ways, from so many coordinate points, that not only will that position overwhelm the machine on the subliminal level, but the machine will be fundamentally changed so that it no longer recognizes a source for the recordings at all. The best way to put Burroughs’s concepts to use may be to get rid of ‘Burroughs’ altogether. And at the same time, we must make of ourselves a meal. Retaking the Universe (William S.Burroughs in the Age of Globalization) Part2: Writing, Sign, Instrument: Language and Technology/Nothing Hear Now but the Recordings : Burroughs’s ‘Double Resonance’/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 Well after the Sun King stung Colbert into action with his dictum: 'Let there be Light and Security!', well before the Nazi theorist Rosenberg delivered his extravagant aphorism: 'When you know everything you are afraid of nothing', the French Revolution had turned the elucidation of details into a means of governing. Omnivoyance, Western Europe's totalitarian ambition, may here appear as the formation of a whole image by repressing the invisible. And since all that appears, appears in light — the visible being merely the reality-effect of the response of a light emission - we could say that the formation of a total image is the result of illumination. Through the speed of its own laws, this illumination will progressively quash the laws originally dispensed by the universe: laws not only governing things, as we have seen, but bodies as well. At the end of 'Day One' of the 1848 Revolution, appropriately, witnesses testified that in different parts of Paris, independently of each other, people shot up public clocks, as though instinctively determined to stop time just as darkness was about to fall naturally. Obeying the law is suspect', asserts Louis de Saint-Just, one of the leading promulgators of the terror-effect. With the perfectly French invention of revolutionary terror - domestic as well as ideological the scientific and philosophical genius of the land of the Enlightenment and supreme rationality topples over the edge into a sociological Phenomenon of pure panic. It was at this moment that the revolutionary police chose an eye as its emblem; that the invisible police, the police spy, replaced the evident, dissuasive police force; that Fouche, the orator and former monk, confessor to the sinner, set up a camera obscura of a different kind, the famous cell in which the correspondence of citizens under suspicion was deciphered and exposed. A police investigation that aimed to illuminate the private sphere just as the theatres, streets and avenues of the public sphere had previously been illuminated, and to obtain a total image of society by dispersing its dark secrets. A permanent investigation within the very bosom of the family, such that anything communicated, the tiniest shred of information, might prove dangerous, might become a personal weapon, paralysing each individual in mortal terror of all the rest, of their spirit of inquiry. Remember that in September 1791, on the eve of the Terror, the Constituent Assembly, which was to disappear the following month, had instituted the Criminal Jury as an agent of justice whereby citizens, as members of the jury, acquired sovereign authority with the power to sentence a person to death without appeal. (In legal parlance, this is a double-degree move.) The people and their representatives were thus granted the same infallibility as the monarch by divine right they were supposed to replace. It would not be long before common justice showed the flaws Montaigne had described two centuries earlier: 'A heaving sea of opinions ... forever whipped up ... and driven on by customs that change with the wind. ...' Curiously, the terror-effect's atavistic twin nature - its obsession with the un-said going hand in glove with a totalitarian desire for clarification - is to be found at work endlessly and excessively in Fouche or Talleyrand. But also, later, much later, in the terrorising and terrorised knowledge of the Lacan of Je ne vous le fais pas dire!, in the Michel Foucault of Naissance de la clinique and Surveiller et punir, in the Roland Barthes of La Chambre claire and the Barthes inspired exhibition 'Cartes et figures de la Terre' at the Pompidou Centre. Barthes would write in conclusion to a life of illness and anguish: 'Fear turns out to have been my ruling passion'. One could discourse endlessly about 'The declaration of the rights of man and the citizen' and the conquest of power by the middle-class military democracy. But it is just as important not to detach the people's revolution from its means, from its everyday materials and depredations. The Revolution as social disease speaks of a banal, sometimes ignominious death. But beyond this, on the internal battlefront, with the supremely warrior-like scorn for the living and the Other that we find in both opposing camps, the Revolution will spread the new materialist vision in the wake of its victorious armies. And this vision will overthrow the entire set of systems of representation and communication in the course of the nineteenth century. The real significance of the 1789 revolution lay here, in the invention of a public gaze that aspired to a spontaneous science, to a sort of knowledge in its raw state, each person becoming for everyone else, in the manner of the sans culotte, a benevolent inquisitor. Or, better still, a deadly Gorgon. Benjamin was later to rejoice that 'cinemagoers have become examiners, but examiners having fun'. If we turn the phrase around, things look a bit less promising: what we are now dealing with is an audience for whom the investigation, the test, has become fun. Actions spring from terror, events that embody the new passion, like stringing people up from lampposts, brandishing freshly lopped heads on spikes, storming palaces and hotels, seeing that residents' names are posted on the door of apartment blocks, reducing the Bastille to rubble, desecrating convents and places of worship, digging up the dead. ... Nothing is sacred any more because nothing is now meant to be inviolable. This is the tracking down of darkness, the tragedy brought about by an exaggerated love of light. What about the little quirks of David, the painter and member of the Convention; his penchant for the bodies of victims of the scaffold; the sordid sequel to the execution of Charlotte Corday; the dark side of his celebrated painting 'The Death of Marat'. Remember it was Marat, 'the people's friend' and an absolute maniac for denunciation, who, in March 1779, presented a paper to the Academie des Sciences entitled 'Monsieur Marat's discoveries concerning fire, electricity and light' in which he singled out Newton's theories in particular for attack. The French Revolution was preoccupied with lighting, notes Colonel Herlaut. The general public, we know, craved artificial lighting. They wanted lights, city lights, which had no further truck with Nature or the Creator, which just involved man illuminating himself. This coincided with the precise moment when man's being was becoming his own object of study, the subject of a positive knowledge (Foucault). The rise of the fourth estate occurs here, within the shimmering urban mirage that is merely the illusion of what is up for grabs. Better to be an eye', as Flaubert would say, taking up the slogan of the revolutionary police. In fact, the Revolution ushered in that collusion between the man of letters, the artist and the man of the press, the investigative journalist-informer. Whether Marat or the Hebertiste 'Pere Duchesne', the trick is to hold the attention of the greatest number through anecdote, the fait divers, the political or social-crime story. Despite its wild excesses, revolutionary journalism aims to enlighten public opinion, to make revelations, to delve behind deceptive appearances, to provide slowly but surely a convincing explanation for every mystery, in keeping with the demands of a public full examiners. In 1836 a new partner emerged and a decisive cartel was formed. Thanks to Emile Girardin the press finally achieved mass circulation by rationally exploiting advertising revenue, thereby succeeding in lowering subscription rates. And in 1848, as the romantic revolution is winding down, the serial novel takes off. That same year, Baudelaire discusses the great writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Diderot, Jean Paul, Laclos and Balzac, in terms of their preoccupation with an eternal supernaturalism having to do with the primitive nature of their probe, with the new inquisitorial spirit, the spirit of an examining judge. Following spiritual ancestors like Voltaire, who conducted his own investigations into a number of criminal cases (advocating the rehabilitation of Jean Calas, for example, or Sirven, or defending Count Lally-ToUendal in the Lally-ToUendal Affair), Stendhal published Le Rouge et le noir in 1830, unsuccessfully, only two years after the Berthet Affair had been splashed across the Grenoble newspapers. Though the claim that The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) was the first modern detective story is a bit excessive, Edgar Allan Poe, who was perfectly familiar with Balzac's works, felt the ideal investigator had to be French, like Descartes. Although he never once set foot in Paris, the author of The Purloined Letter kept very much abreast of what was happening there. His Charles-August Dupin, the model for all future fictional detectives, was probably none other than the Paris Polytechnique graduate and research scientist, CharlesHenri Dupin. As for the mandatory example of Descartes, we know that the author of Discours de la methode once solved a crime in which one of his neighbours was implicated by assiduously disentangling the psychology involved. (He alludes to the episode in a letter to Huygens dated January 1646). Flaubert took the innovation of the novel's conversion into case study to new heights. In his essay on Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant writes: 'First of all he imagines types, then, proceeding by deduction, he makes these beings perform actions typical of them and which they are doomed to carry out absolutely logically according to temperament.' The instrumentalisation of the photographic image is not unrelated to this literary mutation. Before establishing a photographic encyclopaedia of his contemporaries, Nadar (who once worked for the French secret service), with his brother, became interested in the work of the celebrated neurologist Guillaume Duchenne whose major study, complete with supporting photographic documentation, was eventually published as The mechanics of human physiognomy, or an electro-physiological analysis of the expression of the passions. This was in 1853. Madame Bovary was to appear four years later. In it Flaubert dismantles the passions mechanically a la Duchenne and leaves no doubt whatever about his own methods: before working up what he calls scenarios of novels 'analysing psychological cases', and 'since everything one invents is true', he conducts intricate investigations and cross-examinations, going as far as extorting embarrassing confessions as in the Louise Pradier case. In the same spirit, he thought it was only fair to claim the sum of 4,000 francs from his publisher Michel Levy for the costs of investigations relating to Salammbo. But apart from what it owes to the documentary and the lampoon, Flaubert's real art has to do with the light spectrum. For Flaubert, the organisation of mental images is a subtractive synthesis that ends in a coloured unity: golden for the exotic Salammbo, mildewy for Madame Bovary, the colour of small country towns and the dull sheen of romantic thought active in France after the 1848 Revolution. What we might call the conceptual framework of the novel is thus deliberately reduced to the encoding of a dominant, quasi-unconditional stimulus, the target attribute destined to act beyond the bounds of literature itself and designed to lead the reader to a kind of 'optical retrieval' of the meaning of the work. This brings us dangerously close to impressionism, and the succes de scandale enjoyed by Madame Bovary anticipates that of the exposition des refuses held at Nadar's. Meanwhile Gustave Courbet cites Gericault (along with Prud'hon and Gros) as one of the great precursors of the new art vivant, largely due to his having chosen to paint contemporary subjects. In 1853 Gustave Planche, in his Portraits d'artists, also paid homage to the forgotten works of the painter of 'The Raft of the Medusa'. 'No-one', Klaus Berger remarks, 'was interested in making what he had to say known after his death in 1824, least of all the Romantics, like Delacroix, who owed his beginnings to the young Gericault So Gericault emerges from oblivion at the precise moment that the photographers are dreaming of absolute instantaneity, that Dr duchenne of Boulogne, sending an electric current through the facial muscles of his subjects, claimed to seize photographically the mechanism involved in their movement. The painter suddenly found himself a precursor, since, well before Daguerre's process was unveiled before the general public, the compression of time that visual instantaneity represents had become the undying passion of his short life. Well before the impressionists, Gericault considered immediate vision an end in itself, the very substance of the work and not merely a possible starting point for a 'more or less fossilised' academic painting. Gericault's art vivant was already an art that evolves by summing itself up such as Degas would later describe: an art of reiteration, like everything else that communicated and conveyed itself at constantly increasing speed from the nineteenth century on. In 1817 Gericault got to know the doctors and nurses at Beaujon Hospital next to his studio. They supplied him with corpses and sawn-off limbs and let him stay in the hospital wards to follow every phase of the suffering, and death pangs of the terminally ill. We also know of his relationship with Dr Georget, the founder of social psychiatry and a court expert to boot. It was at the instigation of this celebrated specialist in mental health that he completed his 'portraits of mad people' in the winter of 1822, which were to serve as visual aids for the doctor's students and assistants. 'A transmutation of science into eloquent portraits' was how they were described at the time. It is perhaps more apt to call them the artist's conversion of the clinical sign to enhance the painted work which then becomes a documentary, an image loaded with information: the conversation of a perception of the special detachment that enables the doctor or surgeon to make a diagnosis simply by using his senses and repressing any emotion due to the effects of terror, pity or repulsion. Some time before this, driven as always by his passion for the immediate, Gericault had conceived the project of painting a recent news story. For a while he toyed with the Fualdes Affair, popularised in the press and cheap prints. Why did he finally opt for the tragedy of the Medusa} I personally think it is incredible that the name of the ship that went down was precisely the same as in the Gorgon myth. 'To behold the Gorgon,' writes Jean-Pierre Vernant, 'you must look into her eyes and when your eyes meet, you cease being yourself, cease living and become, like her, a power of death.' The Medusa is a kind of integrated circuit of vision that would seem to bode a future of awesome communication. And just to round off this case for permeation, there was Gericault's passion for the horse-as-speed. This would be one of the agents of his death; with Pegasus, it furthermore constitutes an essential element of the ancient Gorgon imagery (at once the face of terror, the incarnation of fright and the source of poetic inspiration). For his painting 'The Raft of the Medusa' Gericault began preparatory work and research in 1818, less than two years after the tragedy occurred, starting with the way the catastrophe was related in the press and in a book which went into several editions, all eagerly snapped up by the public. Gericault met survivors of the shipwreck, notably Dr Savigny; he had a model of the raft made up and did numerous studies using dying patients in the hospitals next door as models along with corpses in the morgue. But apart from all that, which we know about, the monumental dimensions of the picture — thirty-five square metres - tell us something about Gericault's intentions. He clearly wanted to capture the attention of the general public, not so much in his capacity as an artist, but in the manner of a journalist or advertising executive. Before hitting on the solution of giganticism, he first thought of doing a painting series, a 'painting in episodes' that would evolve over time (bit like Poussin's sketches based on the figures of Trajan's Column). In the end he decided he could overcome pictorial representation's media handicap by enlarging the spectator's visual field, the size of the work begging the question, by reversing it, of the space in which the image could be shown. This crowd painting obviously could not, through its sheer size, be hung anywhere other than in some vast public place (a museum?). Unlike an easel painting, which could adapt to domestic intimacy, unlike the frescoes and monumental paintings commissioned in the Renaissance, which then spread out after the fact over the walls of the various palaces and churches, Gericault's painting was a work looking for a place to hang As soon as it was unveiled, in all its internal contradictions, it met with hostility from painters of all persuasions, critics and art lovers alike. On the other hand, it was a sensation with the general public who saw it not so much as a work of art as a pamphlet designed to discredit the government of Louis XV111. The royal administration, accused by the opposition of being indirectly responsible for the tragedy, had in any event made the first move by banning the use of the name Meduse in the exhibition leaflet. But as Rosenthal writes: 'the public was able to work out the original name without too much trouble and political passions ran riot'. In such a climate there was no question of the State's buying it or of its being hung in some official space or museum. Rolled up in Paris and shipped to England, the outsize painting was finally shown from town to town as far as Scotland, for the price of a ticket. Organised by one Bullock, the venture was to earn Gericault the enormous sum of 17,000 gold sovereigns, a fortune in keeping with its popular success. But well before the symbolic Medusa, pictorial art in Great Britain had been veering towards the mercantilism of the sideshow. Panorama: The term sounds as though it should belong exclusively to the language of painting, for it combines two Greek words to signify complete view. This is obtained by means of a circular background on which a series of aspects are drawn and then rendered, uniquely, by a series of separate paintings. 'Now it is precisely this condition, which is indispensable to this genre of representation, which makes an architectural work of the painter's field of activity. The name panorama, in fact, refers both to the edifice on which the painting is hung and to the painting itself.' Quatremere describes the building as a rotunda with daylight entering from above, the rest of the building remaining dark. Viewers were led into the centre along long, dark corridors so their eyes would adjust to the dark and register the light on the painting as natural. Coming on to a raised amphitheatre in the middle of the rotunda in the dark, viewers had no idea where the light was coming from. They could not see either the top or the bottom of the painting which revolved around the circumference of the building, offering no beginning or end, in fact no boundary whatever. It was like being on a mountain with the view obstructed only by the horizon. In 1792 Robert Barker showed 'The English Fleet at Portsmouth' in his Leicester Square rotunda. The American Robert Fulton, who was responsible for the first submarine and the industrialisation of steamship propulsion, bought the rights for the commercial use of the patent in France. Fulton gave Paris its first rotunda in the boulevard Montmartre. After that similar constructions sprang up all over Paris offering pictorial spectacles: battle scenes, historic events, exotic urban sites like Constantinople, Athens, Jerusalem, and painted in lavishly minute detail. 'In Paris I saw panoramas of Jerusalem and Athens', Chateaubriand writes in the preface to his Complete Works. 'I recognised all the monuments immediately, every building, right down to the tiny room I stayed in in Saint-Sauveur Convent. No traveller has ever endured a rougher ordeal: how was I to know they were going to bring Jerusalem and Athens to Paris?' The new inertia of the traveller-voyeur was to be further attenuated by Daguerre when he turned his Diorama construction in the rue Samson, behind the boulevard Saint-Martin, into a veritable sight travel machine. In this structure, which was built in 1822, The viewers' room was mobile and spun round like a one-man-operated merry-go-round. Everyone found themselves carried around past all the paintings on show without apparently having to move a muscle. Panoramas and dioramas were enormously successful, the profits fabulous. Deeply admiring, the painter David took his students to a panorama on the boulevard Montmarte. In 1810 Napoleon slipped into a rotunda on the boulevard des Capucines and came out dreaming of using the hit show as an instrument of propaganda. 'Napoleon engaged the architect Celerier to draw up plans for eight rotundas to be erected in the great square on the Champs-Elysees; in each, one of the great battles of the Revolution or Empire was to be shown. ... The events of 1812 prevented the project from being carried out.' 'You must first of all speak to the eyes.' Abel Gance liked to quote the Emperor's phrase. An expert in matters of propaganda fide, Napoleon knew immediately that he was dealing with a perfectly staggering new generation of media. When you stare at the Gorgon, the sparkle in her eye dispossesses you, makes you lose your own sight, condemns you to immobility. With the panorama and the diorama's play of colour and lighting, both fated to vanish at the beginning of the twentieth century only to be replaced by photography, the Medusa Syndrome comes into its own. We are not interested here in Daguerre the scenery-painter, doing sets for the Paris Opera or the Ambigu Comique, but Daguerre the lighting engineer, the master technician, whose application of the image to an architectural construct used absolutely realistic and totally illusory time and movement. In his Description of the Techniques of Diorama Painting and Lighting, Daguerre writes: 'Only two effects were actually painted on - day on the front of the canvas, night on the back, and one could only shift from one to the other by means of a series of complicated combinations of media the light had to pass through. But these produced an infinite number of additional effects similar to those Nature offers in its course from morning to night and vice versa.' Elsewhere, Benezit writes: 'Daguerre made constant use of the dark room in his studies of lighting and the living image... which took shape on the screen drove him wild with excitement. Here was his dream come true; it now only remained to fix it.' Niepce had fixed his first negatives in 1818. Daguerre wrote to him for the first time in 1826. In 1829, Niepce became interested in the diorama and joined forces with Daguerre. In 1839 Daguerre was practically wiped out but this did not stop the daguerreotype from being unveiled solemnly that same year before the public of Paris. The perception of appearances determinedly stopped having anything to do with some kind of spiritual approach (in Leibniz's sense, if you like, accepting the existence of mind as a substantial reality). The artist now had a double, a being led astray by representational techniques and their reproductive power, not to mention the circumstances surrounding their occurrence, they very phenomenology. As we have seen, the multi-dimensional approach to reality of investigative techniques has had a decisive influence on the instrumentalisation of the public image (propaganda, advertising, etc) as well as on the birth of modern art and the emergence of the documentary. ... The adjective documentary (having the character of a document) was actually admitted by Littre in 1879, the same year as the term impressionism. 'To see without being seen' is one of the adages of police incommunicability. Well before anthropologists or sociologists came along, the eye the investigator cast over society was eminently external to it. As Commissioner Fred Prase said in a recent interview: 'You wind up living in a world that no longer has any connection with the normal world and when you want to talk about what you're going through, no one knows what you are talking about.' It is only natural that the colonial model and its methods have had a bit input on the means and kinds of scientific and technical analyses adopted by the metropolitan police. It was, for example, a British civil servant. Sir William Hershel, who decreed that all papers pertaining to indigenous people be ] signed with their thumb prints from 1858. Some thirty years later, Sir Edward Henry devised a fingerprint-classification system which was adopted by the British government in 1897. The use of fingerprints as identification marks was already well established in the Far East; the Japanese, among others, had been using fingerprints as signatures from the beginning of the eighth century. In Europe fingerprints were to be employed in quite a different way. Photographic printing and its possibilities here assuming their ] full significance, the print would come to be perceived as a latent image. Fingerprints, followed by skin prints (pore printing), of any individual alive or dead, would come to be viewed as immutable, I realities. 'One fingerprint taken at the scene of the crime is worth even more than the criminal's confession', writes legal officer Goddefroy in his Manuel de police technique. The celebrated Alphonse Bertillon, who had invented a system of criminal anthropometry-anthropology, finally succeeded on 24 October 1902, the first person to do so in the I history of the police, in identifying a criminal by his fingerprints, I photographed and enlarged to more than four times normal size, as I he was keen to point out in his report. The introduction of fingerprints as proof of criminal law marks the decline of the story, of the eye-witness account and the descriptive model, once the basis of every investigation and crucial to writers of previous centuries. Bertillon also, in a well-known phrase, denounced the deficiency of the human eye and the aberrations of subjectivity: You only see what you look at and you only look at what you want to see. The former chief of the Criminal Records Office thereby sums up in his own words the demonstration offered by Poe's Dupin in The Purloined Letter, that letter no one can see for looking, like 'the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street [which] escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious'. No one can see Poe's letter because everyone is already convinced it must be hidden. They say you only ask yourself a question when you already know the answer. Dupin, as objective a witness as any camera, is not subject to this ordinary human failing, a failing which makes the scene of the crime almost invisible for the average person who is distracted trying to take note of a welter of details. Metric photographs of the spot, by contrast, record all its particularities regardless, right down to the most insignificant, or which would seem to be so at the time to the eye-witness, whereas, in retrospect, in the course of the investigation, they may turn out to be vital. The police viewpoint shows just how worthless the story of the person who was there is. In spite of the usefulness of witnesses and the elaborate reports of inspectors, the human eye no longer gives signs of recognition, it no longer organises the search for truth, it no longer presides over the construction of truth's image, in this mad rush to identify individuals whom the police do not know and have never seen. The outward manifestation of a thought, its symptom in the literal sense of sumptoma (coincidence), is once again to be rejected as far as possible. It is no longer in synch, no longer integrated into the time of the investigation. What counts is what is already there, remaining in a state of latent immediacy in the huge junk heap of stuff of memory, waiting to reappear, inexorably, when the time comes. Empirically acknowledged as tragic, the photographic print was really just that when, at the turn of the century, it became the instrument of the three great authorities over life and death (the law, the army, medicine). This is when it demonstrated its power to reveal the unfolding of a destiny from the word go. As deus ex machina, it was to become just as ruthless for the criminal, the soldier or the invalid, the conjunction between the immediate and the fatal only becoming more solid, inevitably, with the technical progress of representation. In 1967 the examining judge Philippe Chausserie Lapree presented a three-minute film re-enactment of the murder of a Normandy farmer to the jury of the Court of Assizes in Caen. Lapree, who describes himself as 'an investigation fiend', turns the cases he hears into veritable synopses: using school exercise books, he pastes photographs on the left-hand side and records of cross-examinations in the form of dialogue on the right. Within his video re-enactment he introduced, for the first time in France, a 'legal documentary' in addition to the usual photos of victims and scenes of crimes. Note that he used two ex-army film-makers as assistants on the film rather than his own staff. Allowed soon after this by the Code of Criminal Law Procedure, video proof would be used to convict criminals on the basis of documents supplied by cameras installed in banks, shops, at traffic lights and so on. After video refereeing was introduced into sports stadiums, the Belgian officers in charge of the investigation into the Heysel tragedy would have to sit through sixty hours of non-stop video to be able to identify the perpetrators of the violence with any degree of certainty. In France, lagging well behind England and Germany, law courts such as the district court of Creteil - which has a central projection room and scientific police laboratory fully equipped with video-imaging machines (the ultrasound machine used in medicine for taking ectographs or ecocardiographs) have little by little taken on the trappings of television studios. In 1988 the police department even decided to deploy crime-scene technicians, who are public servants trained to pick up the clues using ultramodern scientific equipment. What we are witnessing here is the birth of hyper-realism in legal and police representation. As one technician put it: 'Now, with ultrasound, we can bring up the image of a person who's just a tiny speck the size of a pinhead on a video tape, even if they're at the back of a dark room.' Eyewitness accounts having been devalued, it is now possible to do away with their body too, for we now have something more than their image: we have their real-time telepresence. Instituted in Great Britain and Canada, the telepresence of witnesses who are either in poor health, in danger or too young to appear, poses the whole question of habe as corpus all over again. Where the body of the person in custody is still produced before the court (that is, if they agree), they are encircled by electronic microscopes, mass spectrometers and laser videographs in an implacable electronic circuit. Now that the court arena has become first a movie projection room, then a video chamber, legal representatives of all stripes have lost any hope of creating within it, with the means at their disposal, a reality-effect capable of captivating the jury and audience for whom video recorders, networking systems like Minitel, television and sundry computers have become a virtually exclusive way of gathering information, communicating and understanding reality and moving about in it. How can we hope to pull off the old scenic effects, the coups de theatre that were the pride and joy of our former ring masters? How can we hope to scandalise, surprise, move to tears under the gaze of electronic magistrates that can fast forward or reverse in time and space at will, before a judicial system that is now no more than the distant technological outcome of that merciless more light of revolutionary terror, which is, in fact, its very perfection? excerpt from the book: The Vision Machine/ Chapter 3: Public Image by Paul Virilio Elisabeth Judas-ForsterThe Jew Judas betrayed Jesus for a small sum of money-after that he hanged himself. The betrayal carried out by those close to Nietzsche does not have the brutal consequences of Judas's, but it sums up and makes intolerable all the betrayals that deform the teachings of Nietzsche (betrayals that put him on the level of the most shortsighted of current enthusiasms). The anti-Semitic falsifications of Frau Forster, Nietzsche's sister, and of Herr Richard Oehler, his cousin, are in some ways even more vulgar than Judas's deal-beyond all reckoning, they give the force of a whiplash to the maxim in which Nietzsche expressed his horror of anti-Semitism: DO NOT BEFRIEND ANYONE INVOLVED IN THIS IMPUDENT HOAX, RACISM!! The name of Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who died on November 8, 1935, after living a life devoted to a very narrow and degrading form of family-worship, has not yet become an object of aversion . . . On November 2, 1933 Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche had not forgotten the difficulties that came up between her and her brother over her marriage, in 1885, to the anti-Semite Bernhard Forster. A letter in which Nietzsche reminds her of his "repulsion"- "as pronounced as possible" for her husband's party-which he specifically mentions with bitterness-was published through her own efforts. 3 On November 2, 1933, receiving Adolf Hitler at Weimar, in the Nietzsche-Archiv, Elisabeth Forster testified to Nietzsche's anti-Semitism by reading a text by Bernhard Forster. Before leaving Weimar to go to Essen [reports the Times of November 4, 1933], Chancellor Hitler went to visit Frau Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, the sister of the famous philosopher. The aged gave him a sword cane that had belonged to her brother. She led him on a tour of the Nietzsche archives. Herr Hitler listened to a reading of a statement, addressed to Bismarck, written in 1879 by Dr. Forster, an anti-Semitic agitator, which protests against the "Jewish spirit's invasion of Germany:" Holding Nietzsche's cane, Herr Hitler walked through the cheering crowd and got back into his car in order to go to Erfurt, and from there to Essen. Nietzsche, writing in 1887 a scorning letter to the anti-Semite Theodor Fritsch,4 ends it with these words: BUT FINALLY, WHAT DO YOU THINK I FEEL WHEN ZARATHUSTRA'S NAME COMES OUT OF THE MOUTH OF AN ANTI-SEMITE! The Second Judas of the Nietzsche-ArchivAdolf Hitler, in Weimar, had himself photographed before a bust of Nietzsche. Herr Richard Oehler, Nietzsche's cousin and a collaborator of Elisabeth Forster at the archives, had the photograph reproduced as the frontispiece of his book Nietzsche and the Future of Germany. In this work, he tried to show the profound kinship of Nietzsche's teachings and those of Mein Kampf. He recognizes, it is true, the existence of passages in Nietzsche that are not hostile to the Jews, but he concludes: Most important for us is this warning: "Admit no more Jews! And especially close the doors to the east!" . . . "That Germany has amply enough Jews, that the German stomach the German blood has trouble (and will still have trouble for a long time) digesting even this quantum of 'Jew' - as the Italians, French, and English have done, having a stronger digestive system:- that is the clear testimony and language of a general instinct to which one must listen, in accordance with which one must act. 'Admit no more Jews! And especially close the doors to the east to. Austria!' thus commands the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and indefinite, so it could easily be blurred or extinguished by a stronger race." It is not only a case here of an "impudent hoax," but of a crudely and consciously fabricated falsehood. This text appears, in fact, in Beyond Good and Evil (section 251), but the opinion it expresses is not that of Nietzsche, but that of the anti-Semites, taken up by Nietzsche in order to mock it. I have not met a German yet who was weIl disposed toward the Jews; and however unconditionally all the cautious and politicaIly minded repudiated real anti-Semitism, even this caution and policy are not directed against the species of this feeling itself but only against its dangerous immoderation, especiaIly against the inspired and shameful expression of this immoderate feeling-about this, one should not deceive oneself. That Germany has amply enough Jews, etc. After this comes the passage attributed by the fascist forger to Nietzsche! A little further on a practical conclusion is, moreover, given to these considerations: "it might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semite screamers from the country." This time Nietzsche speaks in his own name. The aphorism as a whole favors the assimilation of the Jews by the Germans. Do Not Kill: Reduce to Slavery DOES MY LIFE MAKE IT LIKELY THAT I COULD ALLOW ANYONE AT ALL TO "CLIP MY WINGS"? The tone Nietzsche used during his lifetime to answer obnoxious anti-Semites excludes the possibility of treating the question lightly, and of considering the Weimar Judases' treason to be venial: he appears there with "clipped wings." Nietzsche's relatives have attempted nothing less base than the reduction to degrading slavery of the one who intended to disprove servile morality. Is it possible that there is no gnashing of teeth in the world, and doesn't this absence become so obvious that, in the ever-growing confusion, it makes one silent and violent? How, when one is in a rage, could this not be blindingly clear: when all of humanity is rushing toward slavery, there exists something that must not be enslaved, that cannot be enslaved? NIETZSCHE'S DOCTRINE CANNOT BE ENSLAVED It can only be followed. To place it behind or in the service of anything else is a betrayal deserving the kind of contempt that wolves have for dogs. DOES NIETZSCHE'S LIFE MAKE IT SEEM LIKELY THAT HE CAN HAVE HIS "WINGS CLIPPED" BY ANYONE AT ALL? Whether it be anti-Semitism, fascism-or socialism-there is only use. Nietzsche addressed free spirits, incapable of letting themselves be used. The Nietzschean Left and RightThe very movement of Nietzsche's thought implies a destruction of the different possible foundations of current political positions. Groups of the right base their action on an emotional attachment to the past. Groups of the left on rational principles. Now attachment to the past and to rational principles (justice, social equality) are both rejected by Nietzsche. Thus it would have to be impossible to use his teachings in any given orientation. But his teachings represent an incomparable seductive force, and consequently quite simple a "force," that politicians are tempted to enslave, or at the very least to agree with, in order to benefit their enterprises. The teachings of Nietzsche "mobilize" the will and the aggressive instincts; it was inevitable that existing activities would try to draw into their movement these now mobile and still unemployed wills and instincts. The absence of all possible adaptation to one or the other of these political orientations has had, under these conditions, only one result. Since Nietzschean exaltation can be solicited only because of a misunderstanding of its nature, it has been solicited in both directions at once. To a certain extent, a Nietzschean left and right have appeared, just as, in the past, a Hegelian left and right appeared. But Hegel located himself in the political sphere, and his dialectical conceptions explain the formation of the two opposed tendencies of his doctrine that developed after his death. It is a question in one case of logical and well thought-out developments, in the other of irrationality, of frivolity, or of betrayal. On the whole, the demands put forward by Nietzsche, far from being understood, have been treated like everything else in a world in which a servile attitude and use value alone appear admissible. On a global scale, the transvaluation of values, even if it has been the object of real attempts at understanding, has remained so generally unintelligible that the treasonous and platitudinous interpretations of which it has been the object very nearly pass unnoticed. "Remarks for Asses" Nietzsche himself said that he felt only repugnance for the political parties of his day, but ambiguity remains on the subject of fascism, which only developed long after his death and which, in addition, is the only political movement that has consciously and systematically used Nietzschean criticism. According to the Hungarian Georg Lukacs (one of the few, it seems, among current Marxist theorists to have a profound awareness of the essence of Marxism-but ever since he has had to take refuge in Moscow he has been morally broken; he is now nothing more than a shadow of his former self)-according to Lukacs "the very clear difference between the ideological level of Nietzsche and that of his fascist successors cannot hide the fundamental historical fact that makes Nietzsche one of the principle ancestors of fascism" (Litterature lntemationale 9, 1935, p. 79). The analysis on which Lukacs bases this conclusion is sometimes perhaps refined and clever, but it is only an analysis that dispenses with a consideration of the whole, in other words, of what alone is "existence." Fascism and Nietzscheanism are mutually exclusive, and are even violently mutually exclusive, as soon as each of them is considered in its totality: on one side life is tied down and stabilized in an endless servitude, on the other there is not only a circulation of free air, but the wind of a tempest; on one side the charm of human culture is broken in order to make room for vulgar force, on the other force and violence are tragically dedicated to this charm. How can one not see the abyss that separates a Cesare Borgia, a Malatesta, from a Mussolini? The former were insolent scorners of tradition and of all morality, making use of bloody and complex events to benefit a greed for life that exceeded them; the latter has been slowly enslaved by everything he was able to set in motion only by paralyzing, little by little, his earliest impulses. Already, in Nietzsche's eyes, Napoleon appeared "corrupted by the means he had to employ"; Napoleon "lost noblesse of character." An infinitely more burdensome constraint no doubt weighs on modem dictators, reduced to finding their force by identifying themselves with all the impulses that Nietzsche scorned in the masses, in particular, "mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency." There is a corrosive derision in imagining a possible agreement between Nietzschean demands and a political organization which impoverishes existence at its summit, which imprisons, exiles, or kills everything that could constitute an aristocracy of "free spirits." As if it were not blindingly obvious that when Nietzsche demands a love corresponding to the sacrifice of life, it is for the "faith" that he communicates, for the values that his own existence makes real, and obviously not for a fatherland . . . "Remarks for asses" wrote Nietzsche himself, already fearing a confusion of the same type, and one just as wretched. The Nietzschean Mussolini Insofar as fascism values a philosophical source, it is attached to Hegel and not to Nietzsche. One should read the article, in the Enciclopedia Italiana, that Mussolini himself devoted to the movement he created; the vocabulary, and even more than the vocabulary the spirit, are Hegelian and not Nietzschean. Mussolini twice is able to use the expression' 'will to power," but it is no coincidence that this will is only an attribute of the idea that unifies the crowd ... The red agitator underwent the influence of Nietzsche; the unitarist dictator has remained aloof. The regime itself has spoken on the question. In an article in Fascismo, July 1933, Cimmino denies any ideological filiation linking Nietzsche and Mussolini. Only the will to power would connect their doctrines. But Mussolini's will to power "is not selfish"; it is preached to all Italians, whom Il Duce "wants to make supermen." For, affirms the author, "even if we were all supermen, we would still only be men.... There is nothing more natural than the fact that, in other respects, Nietzsche pleases Mussolini: Nietzsche will always belong to all men of action and will ... The profound difference between Nietzsche and Mussolini lies in the fact that power, insofar as it is will, force, and action, is the product of instinct-I would say almost of physical nature. It can belong to the most incompatible people: one can use it for the most varied ends. On the other hand, ideology is a spiritual factor: It is ideology that really unites men. . . . " It is not useful to insist on the overt idealism of this text, which has the merit of being honest, if one compares it to the German writings. It is more remarkable to see Il Duce cleared of a possible accusation of Nietzschean selfishness. The ruling circles of Fascism seem to have stopped at the Stirnerian interpretation of Nietzsche, expressed around 1908 by Mussolini himself. For Stirner, for Nietzsche [the revolutionary wrote at the time], and for all those whom Turk, in his Geniale Mensch, calls the antisophs of selfishness, the State is oppression organized to the detriment of the individual. But nevertheless, even for animals of prey there exists a principle of solidarity. . . . The instinct of according to Darwin, is inherent in man's very nature. It is impossible to imaginee a human being living outside the infinite chain of his men. . Nietzsche felt profoundly the "fatality" of this law of universal solidarity. The Nietzschean superman tries to escape the contradiction: he lets loose his will to power and directs it against the mob outside, and the tragic grandeur of his labours furnishes the poet-for yet a little while-with a subject worthy of being sung. One can see, then, why Mussolini, stressing the non-Italian influences that helped form early Fascism, speaks of Sorel, Peggy, and Lagardelle, and not of Nietzsche. Official Fascism has been able to use invigorating Nietzschean maxims, displaying them on walls; its brutal simplifications must nevertheless be sheltered from the too free, too complex, and a too-rending Nietzschean world. This prudence seems to be based, it is true, on an outmoded interpretation of Nietzsche's attitude, but this interpretation has been carried out, and it has been because the movement of Nietzsche's thought constitutes, without any hope of appeal, a labyrinth, in other words, the very opposite of the directives that current political systems demand from their sources of inspiration. Alfred Rosenberg Nevertheless, the Hitlerian affirmation is opposed to the prudence of Italian Fascism. It is true that Nietzsche, in the racist pantheon, does not occupy an official place. Chamberlain, Paul de Lagarde, or Wagner are more solidly satisfying to the profound "admiration of oneself' practised by the Germany of the Third Reich. But whatever the dangers of this operation, this new Germany had to recognise Nietzsche and use him. He represented too many mobile instincts, available for virtually any violent action and the falsification was still too easy. The first fully developed ideology of National Socialism, as it has sprung out of Alfred Rosenberg's brain, accommodates Nietzsche. Before anything else, the German chauvinists had to get rid ofthe individualistic Stirnerian interpretation. Alfred Rosenberg, making short work of leftwing Nietzscheanism, seems, with rage, bent on tearing Nietzsche out of the clutches of the young Mussolini and his comrades: Friedrich Nietzsche he says in his Myth of the Twentieth Century represents the desperate cry of millions of oppressed people, his savage prediction of the superman was a powerful amplification of individual life, subjugated and annihilated by the material pressure of the epoch.... But an epoch gagged for generations grasps, through its Impotence, only the subjective side of Nietzsche's great will and vital experience. Nietzsche demanded, with passion, a strong personality; his falsified demand becomes an appeal, a letting loose of all the instincts. Around his banner rally the red battalions and the nomadic prophets of Marxism, the sort of men whose senseless doctrine has never been more ironically denounced than by Nietzsche. In his name, the contamination of the race by blacks and Syrians progressed, whereas he himself strictly submitted to the characteristic discipline of our race. Nietzsche fell into the dreams of colored gigolos, which is worse than falling into the hands of a gang of thieves. From this point on the German people only heard talk of the suppression of constraints, of subjectivism, of "personality," but it was no longer a question of discipline and of inner construction. Nietzsche's most beautiful expression-"From the future come winds with the strange beating of wings, and the good news resounds in his ears"-was nothing more than a nostalgic intuition in the midst of an insane world in which he was, along with Lagarde and Wagner, almost the only seer. "If you knew how I laughed last spring while reading the works of this vain and sentimental, pigheaded character named Paul de Lagarde"-that is what Nietzsche said about the famous Pan-Germanist. 17 Nietzsche's laugh could obviously be carried over from Lagarde to Rosenberg, the laughter of a man equally nauseated by the Social Democrats and by the racists. The attitude of a Rosenberg must not, moreover, be simply seen as a vulgar Nietzscheanism (as is sometimes supposed, for example, by Edmond Vermeil). The disciple is not only vulgar, but prudent: the very fact that a Rosenberg speaks of Nietzsche suffices to "clip his wings" but it seems to a man of this type that the wings are never clipped back far enough. According to Rosenberg, everything that is not Nordic must be rigorously pruned. But only the gods of the heavens are Nordic! Whereas the Greek gods [he writes]were the heroes of light and of the heavens, the gods of non-Aryan Asia Minor assumed all the characteristics of the Earth. . . . Dionysos (at least his non-Aryan side) is the god of ecstasy, of luxury, of the unfettered bacchanal. . . . For two centuries, the interpretation of Greece has continued. From Winckelmann through the German classics to Voss, there was an insistence on light, the gaze turned to the world, the intelligible.... The other-romantic-current was fed by the secondary movements indicated at the end of the Iliad by the feast of the dead, or in Aeschylus by the actions of the Erinyes. It was fortified by the chthonian gods, established against the Olympian Zeus. Speaking of death and its enigmas, it venerated the mother-goddesses, and first among them Demeter, and it finally blossomed in the god of the dead-Dionysos. It is in this sense that Welcker, Rohde, and Nietzsche made the Earth-mother a creator of life who, herself unformed, perpetually returns through the death in her womb. High German romanticism shuddered with adoration and, as always darker veils were placed before the sky-god's radiant face, it plunged ever more deeply into the instinctive, the unformed, the demonical, the sexual, the ecstatic, the chthonian-into the cult of the Mother. There is good reason to recall here, first of all, that Rosenberg is not the official philosopher of the Third Reich, and that his anti-Christian stance has not been ratified. But when he expresses repulsion for the gods of the Earth and for the romantic tendencies that do not have as their immediate goal a constitution of force, he expresses beyond the shadow of a doubt the repulsion of National Socialism itself. National Socialism is less romantic and more Maurrassian than is sometimes imagined, and one must not forget that Rosenberg is its ideological expression closest to Nietzsche; the jurist Carl Schmidt, who incarnates it just as much as does Rosenberg, is very close to Charles Maurras and, with a Catholic background, has always been alien to the influence of Nietzsche. A "Hygienic and Pedagogical Religion": German NeopaganismIt is German "neopaganism" that has introduced the legend of a poetic National Socialism. It is only insofar as racism leads to this eccentric religious form that it expresses a certain vitalist and anti-Christian current of German thought. It is a fact that a somewhat chaotic but organized belief freely represents today in Germany the mystical current that first started during the period of high romanticism, and is expressed in writings such as those by Bachofen, Nietzsche, and more recently, Klages. 2o Such a current has never had the slightest unity, but it is characterized by the valuing of life over reason and by the opposition of primitive religious forms to Christianity. Within National Socialism, Rosenberg today represents its most moderate tendency. Much more adventurous theoreticians (Hauer, Bergmann), following Count Reventlow, have set themselves the task of establishing a cultural organization analogous to a Church. This endeavor is not new in Germany, where a "Community of the German Faith" existed in 1908, and where General Ludendorff himself wanted to become, after 1923, the head of a German Church. After Hitler took power the various existing organizations recognized, in a congress, the community of their goals, and were unified in order to form the "Movement of the German Faith." But if it is true that the proselytes of the new religion do not confine romantic exaltation within Rosenberg's narrow and totally military limits, they are no less in agreement on the point that, once anti-Christianity is proclaimed and life is divinized, the only religion will be race, in other words, Germany. The former Protestant missionary Hauer screams: "There is only one virtue-to be German!" And the extravagant Bergmann, enamored of psychoanalysis and of the "hygienic religion," affirms that "if Jesus of Nazareth, doctor and benefactor of the people, came back today, he would come down from the cross on which a deceptive knowledge has kept him nailed; he would live again as the doctor of the people, as the authority on racial hygiene." National Socialism only escapes traditional and pietistic narrowness in order better to assure its mental poverty! The fact that adepts of the new faith have ' ceremonies in the course of which passages from Zarathustra are read definitively situates this comedy far from Nietzschean rigor; indeed it is nothing more than the commonest phraseology of buffoons, who assert themselves everywhere amid general weariness. It is finally necessary to add that the leaders of the Reich do not appear inclined-appear less and less inclined-to support this unusual movement; the account of the role played in Hitler's Germany by a free, anti-Christian enthusiasm, which gives itself a Nietzschean appearance, thus ends on a note of shame. More Professorial ...There remains-perhaps the most serious-the well-thought-out endeavor of Herr Alfred Baumler, who uses real knowledge and a certain theoretical rigor to construct a political Nietzscheanism. Baumler's little book, Nietzsche, the Philosopher and Politician,published by Reclam and widely disseminated, draws out of the labyrinth of Nietzschean contradictions the doctrine of a people united by a common will to power. Such a labor is in fact possible, and it was inevitable that someone would do it. It sets forth, on the whole, a precise, new, and remarkably artificial and logical figure. Imagine Nietzsche asking himself just once: "To what can my experiences and my perceptions be of use?" That is in fact what Herr Baumler has not failed to ask in Nietzsche's place. And as it is impossible to be of use to that which does not exist, Herr Baumler necessarily invokes the existence that has thrust itself on him, that should have thrust itself on Nietzsche, that of the community to which both of them were destined by birth. Such considerations would be correct on the condition that the hypothesis formulated were capable of having a meaning in the spirit of Nietzsche. Another supposition remains possible: Nietzsche could not see his experiences and perceptions as useful; instead, he saw them as an end. Just as Hegel expected the Prussian state to realize Spirit, Nietzsche could have been able-after vituperating it-to wait obscurely for Germany to give a body and a real voice to Zarathustra . . . But it seems that the intellect of Herr Baumler, more exacting than that of a Bergmann or an Oehler, eliminates overly comical representations. He has thought it expedient to neglect those things that Nietzsche incontestably experienced as an end and not as a means, and he has neglected them overtly, through positive remarks. Nietzsche, speaking of the death of God, used a disordered language that manifested the most excessive inner experience. Baumler writes: To understand exactly Nietzsche's attitude in regard to Christianity, one must never forget that the decisive expression "God is dead" has the meaning of a historical fact. Describing what he experienced the first time the vision of the eternal return came to him, Nietzsche wrote: "The intensity of my feelings makes me both tremble and laugh . . . these were not tears of tenderness, but tears of jubilation. . . . " In reality [states Baumler], the idea of the eternal return is without importance from the point of view of Nietzsche's system. We must consider it the expression of a highly personal experience. It has no connection with the fundamental idea of the will to power and even, taken seriously, this idea would shatter the coherence of the will to power. Of all the dramatic representations that have given Nietzsche's life the character of a laceration and of the breathless combat of human existence, the idea of the eternal return is certainly the most inaccessible. But to go from the inability to attain it to the resolution not to take it seriously is to follow the traitor's path. Mussolini recognized a long time ago that Nietzsche's doctrine could not be reduced to the idea of the will to power. In his way Herr Baumler, on the path of the traitor, recognizes this with an incomparable eclat-emasculating in broad daylight . . . The "Land of My Children"The pressing into service of Nietzsche requires, first of all, that all of his pathosladen experience be opposed by the system, and give way to the system. But its requirements go much further than this. Baumler opposes the comprehension of Revolution with the comprehension of myth; the first, according to him, would be linked to the awareness of the future, the second to an intense feeling for the past. 22 It goes without saying that nationalism implies an enslavement to the past. In an article in Esprit (November 1, 1934, ppo 199-208), Emmanuel Levinas has provided, on this point, a philosophical exposition of racism in particular that is more profound than that of its partisans. If we cite the essential part of the article here, the profound difference between the teachings of Nietzsche and their bondage will perhaps appear, this time in a fairly brutal way: The importance [writes Levinas] accorded to this feeling for the body, with which the Western spirit has never been content, is at the basis of a new biological conception of man. The biological, with all the fatality that it implies, becomes more than an object of spiritual life-it becomes its heart. The mysterious urgings of the blood, the call of heredity and of the past for which the body serves as an enigmatic vehicle, lose their status as problems submitted for solution to a Self that is free in a sovereign way. The Self brings to their resolution only the very unknowns of this problem. It is constituted by them. Man's essence is no longer in liberty, but in a kind of bondage. . . . From that point on, any social structure that announces a liberation in regard to the body and that does not tie it down becomes suspect, as a denial or a betrayal. . . . An inbred society immediately follows from this solidification of the spirit. ..Any rational assimilation or mystical communion between minds that is not based on a blood community is suspect. Nevertheless, the new type of truth cannot be capable of renouncing the formal nature of truth and of ceasing to be universal. The truth can very well be my truth in the strangest sense of this possessive-it must still tend toward the creation of a new world. Zarathustra is not content with his own transfiguration; he comes down from his mountain and carries a gospel. How can universality be compatible with racism? There will be a fundamental modification of the very idea of universality, It must give way to the idea of expansion, for the expansion of a force presents a structure completely different from that of the propagation of an idea.... Nietzsche's will to power, which modern Germany has rediscovered and glorified, is not only a new ideal, it is an ideal that brings, at the same time, its own form of universalization: war and conquest. Levinas, who introduces (without attempting to justify it) the identification of the Nietzschean attitude with the racist attitude, in fact, limits himself to providing(without having attempted it) a striking demonstration of their incompatibility and even of their nature as opposites. The blood-community and the enslavement to the past are, in their connection, as distant as possible from the outlook of a man who demanded with great pride to be known as the "stateless one." And the understanding of Nietzsche must be seen as closed to those who do not completely take into account the profound paradox of another name that he claimed with no less pride, that of the CHILD OF THE FUTURE. The understanding of myth linked by Baumler to an intense feeling for the past is countered by the Nietzschean myth of the future. The future, the marvelous unknown of the future, is the only object of the Nietzschean celebration. "Humanity [in the thought of Nietzsche] still has much more time before it than behind it-how, in a general way, could the ideal be found in the past?"28 It is only the aggressive and gratuitous gift of oneself to the future-in opposition to reactionary avarice, bound to the past-that enables the figure of Zarathustra, who demanded to be disowned, to present such a strong image of Nietzsche. The "stateless ones," those who live today, those who have unchained themselves from the past, how can they relax and see chained to this patriotic misery the one who, among them, through his hatred of this misery, devoted himself to the LAND OF HIS CHILDREN? Zarathustra-when the gaze of others was fixed on the land of their fathers, on their fatherland-Zarathustra saw the LAND OF HIS CHILDREN. Against this world covered with the past, covered with fatherlands like a man is covered with wounds, there is no greater, more paradoxical, more passionate expression. "We Who Are Homeless"There is something tragic in the simple fact that Levinas's error is possible (for it is no doubt a question in this case of an error, not of a prejudice) 0 The contradictions that are killing men suddenly appear strangely insoluble. For if opposed parties, adopting opposed solutions, have in appearance resolved these contradictions, it is only through gross simplifications-and these apparent solutions only distance the possibility of escaping death. Those freed from the past are chained to reason; those who do not enslave reason are the slaves of the past. In order to constitute itself, the game of politics demands such false positions, and it seems impossible to change them. Transgressing with one's life the laws of reason, answering even against reason the demands of life, is in practice, in politics, to give oneself, bound hand and foot, to the past. Nevertheless, life demands to be freed no less from the past than from a system of rational and administrative measurements. The passionate and tumultuous movement that forms life, that responds to its demand for the strange, the new, the lost, sometimes appears to be carried along by political action-but that is only a matter of a brief illusion. Life's movement can only be merged with the limited movements of political formations in clearly defined conditions; in other conditions, it goes far beyond them, precisely into the region to which Nietzsche's attention was drawn. Far beyond, where the simplifications adopted for a little while and for a limited goal lose their meaning, existence and the universe that carries it again appear to be a labyrinth. Toward this labyrinth, which alone encompasses the numerous possibilities of life, and not toward immediate banalities, the contradictory thought of Nietzsche is headed, at the mercy of a skittish liberty. Alone, In the world as it now exists, it even seems to escape the pressing worries that make us refuse to open our eyes wide enough. Those who already see the void in the solutions proposed by parties, who even see nothing more in the hope aroused by these parties than an occasion for wars lacking any fragrance but that of death, seek a faith that corresponds to the convulsions they undergo: the possibility of man's finding not a flag and the senseless butchery before which this flag advances, but everything in the universe that can be an object of laughter, of ecstasy, or of sacrifice . . . Our ancestors [wrote Nietzsche] were Christians who in their Christ were uncompromisingly upright: for their faith, they willingly sacrificed possessions and position, blood and fatherland. We do the same. For what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, friends! The hidden Yes in you is stronger all the Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and when you have to embark on the sea, you emigrants, you too are compelled to this by a faith! Nietzsche's teachings elaborate the faith of the sect or the "order" whose dominating will create a free human destiny, tearing it away from the rational enslavement of production, as well as from the irrational enslavement to the past. The revalued values must not be reduced to use value-this is a principle of such burning, vital importance that it rouses all that life provides of a stormy will to conquer. Outside of this well-defined resolution, these teachings only give rise to inconsequential things or to the betrayals of those who pretend to take them into account. Enslavement tends to spread throughout human existence, and it is the destiny of this free existence that is at stake. Georges Bataille/ Visions of Excess/ Selected Writings (1927-1939)/Nietzsche and the Fascists/ University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Negativity, in other words, the integrity of determination. - Hegel I. The Insufficiency of BeingsMEN ACT IN ORDER TO BE. This must not be understood in the negative sense of conservation (conserving in order not to be thrown out of existence by death), but in the positive sense of a tragic and incessant combat for a satisfaction that is almost beyond reach. From incoherent agitation to crushing sleep, from chatter to turning inward, from overwhelming love to hardening hate, existence sometimes weakens and sometimes accomplishes "being." And not only do states have a variable intensity, but different beings "are" unequally. A dog that runs and barks seems "to be" more than a mute and clinging sponge, the sponge more than the water in which it lives, an influential man more than a vacant passerby. In the first movement, where the force that the master has at his disposal puts the slave at his mercy, the master deprives the slave of a part of his being. Much later, in return, the "existence" of the master is impoverished to the extent that it distances itself from the material elements of life. The slave enriches his being to the extent that he enslaves these elements by the work to which his impotence condemns him. The contradictory movements of degradation and growth attain, in the diffuse development of human existence, a bewildering complexity. The fundamental separation of men into masters and slaves is only the crossed threshold, the entry into the world of specialized functions where personal "existence" empties itself of its contents; a man is no longer anything but a part of being, and his life, engaged in the game of creation and destruction that goes beyond it, appears as a degraded particle lacking reality. The very fact of assuming that knowledge is a function throws the philosopher back into the world of petty inconsistencies and dissections of lifeless organs. Isolated as much from action as from the dreams that turn action away and echo it in the strange depths of animated life, he led astray the very being that he chose as the object of his uneasy comprehension. "Being" increases in the tumultuous agitation of a life that knows no limits; it wastes away and disappears if he who is at the same time "being" and knowledge mutilates himself by reducing himself to knowledge. This deficiency can grow even greater if the object of knowledge is no longer being in general but a narrow domain, such as an organ, a mathematical question, a juridical form. Action and dreams do not escape this poverty (each time they are confused with the totality of being), and, in the multicolored immensity of human lives, a limitless insufficiency is revealed; life, finding its endpoint in the happiness of a bugle blower or the snickering of a village chair-renter, is no longer the fulfillment of itself, but is its own ludicrous degradation-its fall is comparable to that of a king onto the floor. At the basis of human life there exists a principle ofinsufficiency. In isolation, each man sees the majority of others as incapable or unworthy of "being." There is found, in all free and slanderous conversation, as an animating theme, the awareness of the vanity and the emptiness of our fellowmen; an apparently stagnant conversation betrays the blind and impotent flight of all life toward an indefinable summit. The sufficiency of each being is endlessly contested by every other. Even the look that expresses love and admiration comes to me as a doubt concerning my reality. A burst of laughter or the expression of repugnance greets each gesture, each sentence or each oversight through which my profound insufficiency is betrayed-just as sobs would be the response to my sudden death, to a total and irremediable omission. This uneasiness on the part of everyone grows and reverberates, since at each detour, with a kind of nausea, men discover their solitude in empty night. The universal night in which everything finds itself-and soon loses itself-would appear to be existence for nothing, without influence, equivalent to the absence of being, were it not for human nature that emerges within it to give a dramatic importance to being and life. But this absurd night manages to empty itself of "being" and meaning each time a man discovers within it human destiny, itself locked in turn in a comic impasse, like a hideous and discordant trumpet blast. That which, in me, demands that there be "being" in the world, "being" and not just the manifest insufficiency of human or nonhuman nature, necessarily projects (at one time or another and in reply to human chatter) divine sufficiency across space, like the reflection of an impotence, of a servilely accepted malady of being. II. The Composite Character of Beings and the Impossibility of Fixing Existence in Any Given IpseBeing in the world is so uncertain that I can project it where I want-outside of me. It is a clumsy man, still incapable of eluding the intrigues of nature, who locks being in the me. Being in fact is found NOWHERE and it was an easy game for a sickly malice to discover it to be divine, at the summit of a pyramid formed by the multitude of beings, which has at its base the immensity of the simplest matter. Being could be confined to the electron if ipseity were precisely not lacking in this simple element. The atom itself has a complexity that is too elementary to be determined ipsely.' The number of particles that make up a being intervene in a sufficiently heavy and clear way in the constitution of its ipseity; if a knife has its handle and blade indefinitely replaced, it loses even the shadow of ipseity; it is not the same for a machine which, after five or six years, loses each of the numerous elements that constituted it when new. But the ipseity that is finally apprehended with difficulty in the machine is still only shadowlike. Starting from an extreme complexity, being imposes on reflection more than the precariousness of a fugitive appearance, but this complexity-displaced little by little-becomes in turn the labyrinth where what had suddenly come forward strangely loses its way. A sponge is reduced by pounding to a dust of cells; this living dust is formed by a multitude of isolated beings, and is lost in the new sponge that it reconstitutes. A siphonophore fragment is by itself an autonomous being, yet the whole siphonophore, to which this fragment belongs, is itself hardly different from a being possessing unity. Only with linear animals (worms, insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals) do the living individual forms definitively lose the faculty of constituting aggregates bound together in a single body. But while societies of nonlinear animals do not exist, superior animals form aggregates without ever giving rise to corporeal links; men as well as beavers or ants form societies of individuals whose bodies are autonomous. But in regard to being, is this autonomy the final appearance, or is it simply error? In men, all existence is tied in particular to language, whose terms determine its modes of appearance within each person. Each person can only represent his total existence, if only in his own eyes, through the medium of words. Words spring forth in his head, laden with a host of human or superhuman lives in relation to which he privately exists. Being depends on the mediation of words,which cannot merely present it arbitrarily as "autonomous being," but which must present it profoundly as "being in relation." One need only follow, for a short time, the traces of the repeated circuits of words to discover, in a disconcerting vision, the labyrinthine structure ofthe human being. What is commonly called knowing-when a man knows his neighbor-is never anything but existence composed for an instant (in the sense that all existence composes itselfthus the atom composes its unity from variable electrons), which once made of these two beings a whole every bit as real as its parts. A limited number of exchanged phrases, no matter how conventional, sufficed to create the banal interpenetration of two existing juxtaposed regions. The fact that after this short exchange the man is aware of knowing his neighbor is opposed to a meeting without recognition in the street, as well as to the ignorance of the multitude of beings that one never meets, in the same way that life is opposed to death. The knowledge of human beings thus appears as a mode of biological connection, unstable but just as real as the connections between cells in tissue. The exchange between two human particles in fact possesses the faculty of surviving momentary separation. A man is only a particle inserted in unstable and entangled wholes. These wholes are composed in personal life in the form of multiple possibilities, starting with a knowledge that is crossed like a threshold-and the existence of the particle can in no way be isolated from this composition, which agitates it in the midst of a whirlwind of ephemerids. This extreme instability of connections alone permits one to introduce, as a puerile but convenient illusion, a representation of isolated existence turning in on itself. In the most general way, every isolable element of the universe always appears as a particle that can enter into composition with a whole that transcends it. Being is only found as a whole composed ofparticles whose relative autonomy is maintained. These two principles dominate the uncertain presence of an ipse being across a distance that never ceases to put everything in question. Emerging in universal playas unforeseeable chance, with extreme dread imperatively becoming the demand for universality, carried away to vertigo by the movement that composes it, the ipse being that presents itself as a universal is only a challenge to the diffuse immensity that escapes its precarious violence, the tragic negation of all that is not its own bewildered phantom's chance. But, as a man, this being falls into the meanders of the knowledge of his fellowmen, which absorbs his substance in order to reduce it to a component of what goes beyond the virulent madness of his autonomy in the total night of the world. Abdication and inevitable fatigue-due to the fact that "being" is, par excellence, that which, desired to the point of dread, cannot be endured-plunge human beings into a foggy labyrinth formed by the multitude of "acquaintances" with which signs of life and phrases can be exchanged. But when he escapes the dread of "being" through this tlight-a "being" that is autonomous and isolated in night-a man is thrown back into insufficiency, at least if he cannot find outside of himself the blinding flash that he had been unable to endure within himself, without whose intensity his life is but an impoverishment, of which he feels obscurely ashamed. III. The Structure of the LabyrinthEmerging out of an inconceivable void into the play of beings, as a lost satellite of two phantoms (one with a bristly beard, the other softer, her head decorated with a bun), it is in the father and mother who transcend him that the minuscule human being first encountered the illusion of sufficiency. In the complexity and entanglement of wholes, to which the human particle belongs, this satellite-like mode of existence never entirely disappears. A particular being not only acts as an element of a shapeless and structureless whole (a part of the world of unimportant "acquaintances" and chatter), but also as a peripheral element orbiting around a nucleus where being hardens. What the lost child had found in the selfassured existence of the all-powerful beings who took care of him is now sought by the abandoned man wherever knots and concentrations are formed throughout a vast incoherence. Each particular being delegates to the group of those situated at the center of the multitudes the task of realizing the inherent totality of "being." He is content to be a part of a total existence, which even in the simplest cases retains a diffuse character. Thus relatively stable wholes are produced, whose center is a city, in its early form a corolla that encloses a double pistil of sovereign and god. In the case where many cities abdicate their central function in favor of a single city, an empire forms around a capital where sovereignty and the gods are concentrated; the gravitation around a center then degrades the existence of peripheral cities, where the organs that constituted the totality of being wilt. By degrees, a more and more complex movement of group composition raises to the point of universality the human race, but it seems that universality, at the summit, causes all existence to explode and decomposes it with violence. The universal god destroys rather than supports the human aggregates that raise his ghost. He himself is only dead, whether a mythical delirium set him up to be adored as a cadaver covered with wounds, or whether through his very universality he becomes, more than any other, incapable of stopping the loss of being with the cracked partitions of ipseity. IV. The Modalities of Composition and Decomposition of BeingThe city that little by little empties itself of life, in favor of a more brilliant and attractive city, is the expressive image of the play of existence engaged in composition. Because of the composing attraction, composition empties elements of the greatest part of their being, and this benefits the center-in other words, it benefits composite being. There is the added fact that, in a given domain, ifthe attraction ofa certain center is stronger than that ofa neighboring center, the second center then goes into decline. The action of powerful poles of attraction across the human world thus reduces, depending on their force of resistance, a multitude of personal beings to the state of empty shadows, especially when the pole of attraction on which they depend itself declines, due to the action of another more powerful pole. Thus if one imagines the effects of an influential current of attraction on a more or less arbitrarily isolated form of activity, a style of clothing created in a certain city devalues the clothes worn up to that time and, consequently, it devalues those who wear them within the limits of the influence of this city. This devaluation is stronger if, in a neighboring country, the fashions of a more brilliant city have already outclassed those of the first city. The objective character of these relations is registered in reality when the contempt and laughter manifested in a given center are not compensated for by anything elsewhere, and when they exert an effective fascination. The effort made on the periphery to "keep up with fashion" demonstrates the inability of the peripheral particles to exist by themselves. Laughter intervenes in these value determinations of being as the expression of the circuit of movements of attraction across a human field. It manifests itself each time a change in level suddenly occurs: it characterizes all vacant lives as ridiculous. A kind of incandescent joy-the explosive and sudden revelation of the presence of being-is liberated each time a striking appearance is contrasted with its absence, with the human void. Laughter casts a glance, charged with the mortal violence of being, into the void of life. But laughter is not only the composition of those it assembles into a unique convulsion; it most often decomposes without consequence, and sometimes with a virulence that is so pernicious that it even puts in question composition itself, and the wholes across which it functions. Laughter attains not only the peripheral regions of existence, and its object is not only the existence of fools and children (of those who remain vacant); through a necessary reversal, it is sent back from the child to its father and from the periphery to the center, each time the father or the center in turn reveals an insufficiency comparable to that of the particles that orbit around it. Such a central insufficiency can be ritually revealed (in saturnalia or in a festival of the ass as well as in the puerile grimaces of the father amusing his child). It can be revealed by the very action of children or the "poor" each time exhaustion withers and weakens authority, allowing its precarious character to be seen. In both cases, a dominant necessity manifests itself, and the profound nature of being is disclosed. Being can complete itself and attain the menacing gradeur of imperative totality; this accomplishment only serves to project it with a greater violence into the vacant night. The relative insufficiency of peripheral existences is absolute insufficiency in total existence. Above knowable existences, laughter traverses the human pyramid like a network of endless waves that renew themselves in all directions. This reverberated convulsion chokes, from one end to the other, the innumerable being of manopened at the summit by the agony of God in a black night. V. The Monster in the Night of the LabyrinthBeing attains the blinding flash in tragic annihilation. Laughter only assumes its fullest impact on being at the moment when, in the fall that it unleashes, a representation of death is cynically recognized. It is not only the composition of elements that constitutes the incandescence of being, but its decomposition in its mortal form. The difference in levels that provokes common laughter-which opposes the lack of an absurd life to the plenitude of successful being-can be replaced by that which opposes the summit of imperative elevation to the dark abyss that obliterates all existence. Laughter is thus assumed by the totality of being. Renouncing the avaricious malice of the scapegoat, being itself, to the extent that it is the sum of existences at the limits of the night, is spasmodically shaken by the idea ofthe ground giving way beneath its feet. It is in universality (where, due to solitude, the possibility of facing death through war disappears) that the necessity of engaging in a struggle, no longer with an equal group but with nothingness, becomes clear. THE UNIVERSAL resembles a bull, sometimes absorbed in the nonchalance of animality and abandoned to the secret paleness of death, and sometimes hurled by the rage of ruin into the void ceaselessly opened before it by a skeletal torero. But the void it meets is also the nudity it espouses TO THE EXTENT THAT IT IS A MONSTER lightly assuming many crimes, and it is no longer, like the bull, the plaything of nothingness, because nothingness itself is its plaything; it only throws itself into nothingness in order to tear it apart and to illuminate the night for an instant, with an immense laugh-a laugh it never would have attained if this nothingness had not totally opened beneath its feet. Note I. See Paul Langevin, La Notion de corpuscules et d'atomes (Paris: Hermann, 1934), p. 35. Georges Bataille/ Visions of Excess/ Selected Writings (1927-1939)/The Labyrinth/ University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
by Georges Bataille
Having affirmed that the infrastructure of a society ultimately determines or conditions the superstructure, Marxism did not undertake any general elucidation ofthe modalities peculiar to the formation of religious and political society. While Marxism did acknowledge possible responses by the superstructure, it has not gone from mere assertion to scientific analysis. This essay attempts a rigorous (if not comprehensive) representation of the social superstructure and its relations to the economic infrastructure in the light of fascism. The fact that this is but a fragment of a relatively substantial whole explains a great number of lacunae, notably the absence of any methodological considerations; I it was even necessary to forego justifying the novelty of my point of view and to limit myself to the presentation of my basic position. However, the simple presentation of the structure of fascism had to be preceded by a description of the social structure as a whole. It goes without saying that a study of the superstructure presupposes the development of a Marxist analysis of the infrastructure.
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I. The Homogeneous Part of Society
A psychological description of society must begin with that segment which is most accessible to understanding-and apparently the most fundamental segment-whose significant trait is tendential homogeneity. Homogeneity signifies here the commensurability of elements and the awareness of this commensurability: human relations are sustained by a reduction to fixed rules based on the consciousness of the possible identity of delineable persons and situations; in principle, all violence is excluded from this course of existence.
Production is the basis of a social homogeneity. Homogeneous society is productive society, namely, useful society. Every useless element is excluded, not from all of society, but from its homogeneous part. In this part, each element must be useful to another without the homogeneous activity ever being able to attain the form of activity valid in itself. A useful activity has a common denominator with another useful activity, but not with activity for itself.
The common denominator, the foundation of social homogeneity and of the activity arising from it, is money, namely, the calculable equivalent of the different products of collective activity. Money serves to measure all work and makes man a function of measurable products. According to the judgment of homogeneous society, each man is worth what he produces; in other words, he stops being an existence for itself he is no more than a function, arranged within measurable limits, of collective production (which makes him an existence for something other than itself).
But the homogeneous individual is truly a function of his personal products only in artisan production, where the means of production are relatively inexpensive and can be owned by the artisan. In industrial civilization, the producer is distinguished from the owner of the means of production, and it is the latter who appropriates the products for himself: consequently, it is he who, in modern society, is the function of the products; it is he-and not the producer-who founds social homogeneity.
Thus in the present order of things, the homogeneous part of society is made up of those men who own the means of production or the money destined for their upkeep or purchase. It is exactly in the middle segment of the so-called capitalist or bourgeois class that the tendential reduction of human character takes place, making it an abstract and interchangeable entity: a reflection of the homogeneous things the individual owns.
This reduction is then extended as much as possible to the so-called middle classes that variously benefit from realized profit. But the industrial proletariat remains for the most part irreducible. It maintains a double relation to homogeneous activity: the latter excludes it-not from work but from profit. As agents of production, the workers fall within the framework of the social organization, but the homogeneous reduction as a rule only affects their wage-earning activity; they are integrated into the psychological homogeneity in terms of their behavior on the job, but not generally as men. Outside of the factory, and even beyond its technical operations, a laborer is, with regard to a homogeneous person (boss, bureaucrat, etc.), a stranger, a man of another nature, of a nonreduced, nonsubjugated nature.
II. The State
In the contemporary period, social homogeneity is linked to the bourgeois class by essential ties: thus the Marxist conception is justified whenever the State is shown to be at the service of a threatened homogeneity.
As a rule, social homogeneity is a precarious form, at the mercy of violence and even of internal dissent. It forms spontaneously in the play of productive organization, but must constantly be protected from the various unruly elements that do not benefit from production, or not enough to suit them, or simply, that can not tolerate the checks that homogeneity imposes on unrest. In such conditions, the protection of homogeneity lies in its recourse to imperative elements that are capable of obliterating the various unruly forces or bringing them under the control of order.
The State is not itself one of these imperative elements; it is distinct from kings, heads of the army, or of nations, but it is the result of the modifications undergone by a part of homogeneous society as it comes into contact with such elements. This part is an intermediary formation between the homogeneous classes and the sovereign agencies from which it must borrow its obligatory character, but whose exercise of sovereignty must rely upon it as an intermediary. It is only with reference to these sovereign agencies that it will be possible to envision the way in which this obligatory character is transferred to a formation that nevertheless does not constitute an existence valid in itself (heterogeneous), but simply an activity whose usefulness with regard to another part is manifest.
In practical terms, the function of the State consists of an interplay of authority and adaptation. The reduction of differences through compromise in parliamentary practice indicates all the possible complexity of the internal activity of adaptation required by homogeneity. But against forces that cannot be assimilated, the State cuts matters short with strict authority.
Depending on whether the State is democratic or despotic, the prevailing tendency will be either adaptation or authority. In a democracy, the State most of its strength from spontaneous homogeneity, which it fixes and constitutes as the rule. The principle of its sovereignty-the nation-providing both its end and its strength, is thus diminished by the fact that isolated individuals increasingly consider themselves as ends with regard to the State, which thus exist for them before existing for the nation. And, in this case, personal life distinguishes itself from homogeneous existence as a value that presents itself as incomparable.
III. Dissociations, Critiques of Social Homogeneity and the State
Even in difficult circumstances, the State is able to neutralize those heterogeneous forces that will yield only to its constraints. But it can succumb to the internal dissociation of that segment of society of which it is but the constrictive form.
Social homogeneity fundamentally depends upon the homogeneity (in the general sense of the word) of the productive system. Every contradiction arising from the development of economic life thus entails a tendential dissociation of homogeneous social existence. This tendency towards dissociation exerts itself in the most complex manner, on all levels and in every direction. But it only reaches acute and dangerous forms to the extent that an appreciable segment of the mass of homogeneous individuals ceases to have an interest in the conservation of the existing form of homogeneity (not because it is homogeneous, but on the contrary, because it is in the process of losing that character). This part of society then spontaneously affiliates itself with the previously constituted heterogeneous forces and becomes indistinguishable from them.
Thus, economic circumstances act directly upon homogeneous elements and promote their disintegration. But this disintegration only represents the negative form of social effervescence: the dissociated elements do not act before having undergone the complete alteration that characterizes the positive form of this effervescence. From the moment that they rejoin the heterogeneous formations that already exist in either a diffuse or an organized state, they acquire from the latter a new character: the general positive character of heterogeneity. Furthermore, social heterogeneity does not exist in a formless and disoriented state: on the contrary, it constantly tends to a split-off structure; and when social elements pass over to the heterogeneous side, their action still finds itself determined by the actual structure of that side.
Thus, the mode of resolving acute economic contradictions depends upon both the historical state and the general laws of the heterogeneous social region in which the effervescence acquires its positive form; it depends in particular upon the relations established between the various formations of this region when homogeneous society finds itself materially dissociated.
The study of homogeneity and of the conditions of its existence thus necessarily leads to the essential study of heterogeneity. In fact, it constitutes the first phase of such study in the sense that the primary determination of heterogeneity defined as non-homogeneous supposes a knowledge of the homogeneity that delineates it by exclusion. IV. Heterogeneous Social Existence
The entire problem of social psychology rests precisely upon that fact that it must be brought to bear on a form that is not only difficult to study, but whose existence has not yet been the object of a precise definition.
The very tenn heterogeneous indicates that it concerns elements that are impossible to assimilate; this impossibility, which has a fundamental impact on social assimilation, likewise has an impact on scientific assimilation. These two types of assimilation have a single structure: the object of science is to establish the homogeneity of phenomena; that is, in a sense, one of the eminent functions of homogeneity. Thus, the heterogeneous elements excluded from the latter are excluded as well from the field of scientific considerations: as a rule, science cannot know heterogeneous elements as such. Compelled to note the existence of irreducible facts-of a nature as incompatible with its own homogeneity as are, for example, born criminals with the social order-science finds itself deprived of any functional satisfaction (exploited in the same manner as a laborer in a capitalist factory, used without sharing in the profits). Indeed, science is not an abstract entity: it is constantly reducible to a group of men living the aspirations inherent to the scientific process.
In such conditions, the heterogeneous elements, at least as such, find themselves subjected to a de facto censorship: each time that they could be the object of a methodical observation, the functional satisfaction is lacking; and without some exceptional circumstances-like the intrusion of a satisfaction with a completely different origin-they cannot be kept within the field of consideration.
The exclusion of heterogeneous elements from the homogeneous realm of consciousness formally recalls the exclusion of the elements, described (by psychoanalysis) as unconscious, which censorship excludes from the conscious ego. The difficulties opposing the revelation of unconscious forms of existence are of the same order as those opposing the knowledge of heterogeneous forms. As will subsequently be made clear, these two kinds of forms have certain properties in common and, without being able to elaborate immediately upon this point, it would seem that the unconscious must be considered as one of the aspects of the heterogeneous. If this conception is granted, given what we know about repression, it is that much easier to understand that the incursions occasionally made into the heterogeneous realm have not been sufficiently coordinated to yield even the simple revelation of its positive and clearly separate existence.
It is of secondary importance to indicate here that, in order to avoid the internal difficulties that have just been foreseen, it is necessary to posit the limits of science's inherent tendencies and to constitute a knowledge of the nonexplainable difference, which supposes the immediate access of the intellect to a body of material prior to any intellectual reduction. Tentatively, it is enough to present the facts according to their nature and, with a view to defining the term heterogeneous, to introduce the following considerations:
1. Just as, in religious sociology, mana and taboo designate forms restricted to the particular applications of a more general form, the sacred, so may the sacred itself be considered as a restricted form of the heterogeneous.
Mana designates the mysterious and impersonal force possessed by individuals such as kings and witch doctors. Taboo indicates the social prohibition of contact pertaining, for example, to cadavers and menstruating women. Given the precise and limited facts to which they refer, these aspects of heterogeneous life are easy to define. However, an explicit understanding of the sacred, whose field of application is relatively vast, presents considerable difficulties. Durkheim faced the impossibility of providing it with a positive scientific definition: he settled for characterizing the sacred world negatively as being absolutely heterogeneous compared to the profane. It is nevertheless possible to admit that the sacred is known positively, at least implicitly (since the word is commonly used in every language, that usage supposes a signification perceived by the whole of mankind). This implicit knowledge of a heterogeneous value permits a vague but positive character to be communicated to its description. Yet it can be said that the heterogeneous world is largely comprised of the sacred world, and that reactions analogous to those generated by sacred things are provoked by heterogeneous things that are not, strictly speaking, considered to be sacred. These reactions are such that the heterogeneous thing is assumed to be charged with an unknown and dangerous force (recalling the Polynesian mana) and that a certain social prohibition of contact (taboo) separates it from the homogeneous or ordinary world (which corresponds to the profane world in the strictly religious opposition);
2. Beyond the properly sacred things that constitute the common realm of religion or magic, the heterogeneous world includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditures (sacred things themselves form part of this whole). This consists of everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste or as superior transcendent value. Included are the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body; persons, words, or acts having a suggestive erotic value; the various unconscious processes such as dreams or neuroses; the numerous elements or social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate: mobs, the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different types of violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule (madmen, leaders, poets, etc.);
3. Depending upon the person heterogeneous elements will provoke affective reactions of varying intensity, and it is possible to assume that the object of any affective reaction is necessarily heterogeneous (if not generally, at least with regard to the subject). There is sometimes attraction, sometimes repulsion, and in cerain circumstances, any object of repulsion can become an object of attraction and vice versa; 4. Violence, excess, delirium, madness characterize heterogeneous elements to varying degrees: active, as persons or mobs, they result from breaking the laws of social homogeneity. This characteristic does not appropriately apply to inert objects, yet the latter do present a certain conformity with extreme emotions (if it is possible to speak of the violent and excessive nature of a decomposing body);
5. The reality of heterogeneous elements is not of the same order as that of homogeneous elements. Homogeneous reality presents itself with the abstract and neutral aspect of strictly defined and identified objects (basically, it is the specific reality of solid objects). Heterogeneous reality is that of a force or shock. It presents itself as a charge, as a value, passing from one object to another in a more or less abstract fashion, almost as if the change were taking place not in the world of objects but only in the judgments of the subject. The preceding aspect nevertheless does not signify that the observed facts are to be considered as subjective: thus, the action of the objects of erotic activity is manifestly rooted in their objective nature. Nonetheless, in a disconcerting way, the subject does have the capacity to displace the exciting value of one element onto an analogous or neighboring one. In heterogeneous reality, the symbols charged with affective value thus have the same importance as the fundamental elements, and the part can have the same value as the whole. It is easy to note that, since the structure of knowledge for a homogeneous reality is that of science, the knowledge of a heterogeneous reality as such is to be found in the mystical thinking of primitives and in dreams: it is identical to the structure of the unconscious;'
6. In summary, compared to everyday life, heterogeneous existence can be represented as something other, as incommensurate, by charging these words with the positive value they have in affective experience.
Examples of Heterogeneous Elements
If these suggestions are now brought to bear upon actual elements, the fascist leaders are incontestably part of heterogeneous existence. Opposed to democratic politicians, who represent in different countries the platitude inherent to homogeneous society, Mussolini and Hitler immediately stand out as something other. Whatever emotions their actual existence as political agents of evolution provokes, it is impossible to ignore the force that situates them above men, parties, and even laws: a force that disrupts the regular course of things, the peaceful but fastidious homogeneity powerless to maintain itself (the fact that laws are broken is only the most obvious sign of the transcendent, heterogeneous nature of fascist action). Considered not with regard to its external action but with regard to its source, the force of a leader is analogous to that exerted in hypnosis. The affective flow that unites him with his followers-which takes the form of a moral identification of the latter with the one they follow (and reciprocally) - is a function of the common consciousness of increasingly violent and excessive energies and powers that accumulate in the person of the leader and through him become widely available. (But this concentration in a single person intervenes as an element that sets the fascist formation apart within the heterogeneous realm: by the very fact that the affective effervescence leads to unity, it constitutes, as authority, an agency directed against men; this agency is an existence for itself before being useful; an existence for itself distinct from that of a formless uprising where for itself signifies "for the men in revolt.") This monarchy, this absence of all democracy, of all fraternity in the exercise of power-forms that do not exist only in Italy or Germany-indicates that the immediate natural needs of men must be renounced, under constraint, in favor of a transcendent principle that cannot be the object of an exact explanation.
In a quite different sense, the lowest strata of society can equally be described as heterogeneous, those who generally provoke repulsion and can in no case be assimilated by the whole of mankind. In India, these impoverished classes are considered untouchable, meaning that they are characterized by the prohibition of contact analogous to that applied to sacred things. It is true that the custom of countries in advanced civilizations is less ritualistic and that the quality of being untouchable is not necessarily hereditary; nevertheless, being destitute is all it takes in these countries to create between the self and others-who consider themselves the expression of normal man-a nearly insuperable gap. The nauseating forms of dejection provoke a feeling of disgust so unbearable that it is improper to express or even to make allusion to it. By all indications, in the psychological order of disfiguration, the material poverty of man has excessive consequences. And, in the event that fortunate men have not undergone homogeneous reduction (which opposes a legal justification to poverty), if we except those shameless attempts at evasion such as charitable pity, the hopeless violence of the reactions immediately takes on the form of a challenge to reason. v. The Fundamental Dualism of the Heterogeneous World
The two preceding examples, taken from the broader domain of heterogeneity, and not from the sacred domain proper, nevertheless do present the specific traits of the latter. This is readily apparent with reference to the leaders who are manifestly treated by their followers as sacred persons. It is much less evident with reference to forms of poverty that are not the object of any cult.
But the revelation that such vile forms are compatible with the sacred character precisely marks the decisive headway made in the knowledge of the sacred as well as in that ofthe heterogeneous realm. The notion of the duality of sacred forms is one of the conclusive findings of social anthropology: these forms must be distributed among two opposing classes: pure and impure (in primitive religions certain impure things-menstrual blood, for example-are no less sacred than the divine nature; the awareness of this fundamental duality has persisted until relatively recent times: in the Middle Ages, the word sacred was used to designate a shameful illness-syphilis-and the deeper meaning of this usage was still intelligible.) The theme of sacred poverty-impure and untouchable constitutes precisely the negative pole of a region characterized by the opposition of two extreme forms: in a certain sense, there is an identity of opposites between glory and dejection, between exalted and imperative (higher) forms and impoverished (lower) forms. This opposition splits the whole of the heterogeneous world and joins the already defined characteristics of heterogeneity as a fundamental element. (Undifferentiated heterogeneous forms are, in fact, relatively rare-at least in developed societies-and the analysis of the internal heterogeneous social structure is almost entirely reduced to that of the opposition between two contrary terms.) VI. The Imperative Form of Heterogeneous Existence: Sovereignty
Heterogeneous fascist action belongs to the entire set of higher forms. It makes an appeal to sentiments traditionally defined as exalted and noble and tends to constitute authority as an unconditional principle, situated above any utilitarian judgment.
Obviously, the use of the words higher, noble, exalted does not imply endorsement. Here these qualities simply designate that something belongs to a category historically defined as higher, noble, or exalted: such particularized or novel conceptions can only be considered in relation to the traditional conceptions from which they derive; they are, furthermore, necessarily hybrid, without any far-reaching effect, and it is doubtless preferable, if possible, to abandon any representation of this order (for what admissible reasons would a man want to be noble, similar to a representative of the medieval, military caste and absolutely not ignoble, that is to say similar, in accordance with the judgment of history, to a man whose material destitution would have altered his human character, made him something other?).
Having formulated this reservation, the meaning of higher values must be clarified with the help of traditional qualifiers. Superiority (imperative sovereignty)10 designates the entire set of striking aspects-affectively determining attraction or repulsion-characteristic of different human situations in which it is possible to dominate and even to oppress one's fellows by reason of their age, physical weakness, legal status, or simply of their necessity to place themselves under the control of one person: specific situations correspond to diverse circumstances, that of the father with regard to his children, that of the military leader with regard to the army and the civilian population, that of the master with regard to the slave, that of the king with regard to his subjects. To these real situations must be added mythological situations whose exclusively fictitious nature facilitates a condensation of the aspects characteristic of superiority.
The simple fact of dominating one's fellows implies the heterogeneity of the master, insofar as he is the master: to the extent that he refers to his nature, to his personal quality, as the justification of his authority, he designates his nature as something other, without being able to account for it rationally. But not only as something other with regard to the rational domain of the common denominator and the equivalent: the heterogeneity of the master is no less opposed to that of the slave. If the heterogeneous nature of the slave is akin to that of the filth in which his material situation condemns him to live, that ofthe master is formed by an act excluding all filth: an act pure in direction but sadistic in form.
In human terms, the ultimate imperative value presents itself in the form of royal or imperial authority in which cruel tendencies and the need, characteristic of all domination, to realize and idealize order are manifest in the highest degree. This double character is no less present in fascist authority, but it is only one of the numerous forms of royal authority, the description of which constitutes the foundation of any coherent description of fascism.
In opposition to the impoverished existence ofthe oppressed, political sovereignty initially presents itself as a clearly differentiated sadistic activity. In individual psychology, it is rare for the sadistic tendency not to be associated with a more or less manifest masochistic tendency. But as each tendency is normally represented in society by a distinct agency, the sadistic attitude can be manifested by an imperative person to the exclusion of any corresponding masochistic attitudes. In this case, the exclusion of the filthy forms that serve as the object of the cruel act is not accompanied by the positioning of these forms as a value and, consequently, no erotic activity can be associated with the cruelty. The erotic elements themselves are rejected at the same time as every filthy object and, as in a great number of religious attitudes, sadism attains a brilliant purity. The differentiation can be more or less complete-individually, sovereigns have been able to live power in part as an orgy of blood-but, on the whole, within the heterogeneous domain, the imperative royal form has historically effected an exclusion of impoverished and filthy forms sufficient to permit a connection with homogeneous forms at a certain level. In fact, as a rule, homogeneous society excludes every heterogeneous element, whether filthy or noble; the modalities of the operation vary as much as the nature of each excluded element. For homogeneous society, only the rejection of impoverished forms has a constant fundamental value (such that the least recourse to the reserves of energy represented by these forms requires an operation as dangerous as subversion); but, given that the act of excluding impoverished forms necessarily associates homogeneous forms with imperative forms, the latter can no longer be purely and simply rejected. To combat the elements most incompatible with it, homogeneous society uses free-floating imperative forces; and, when it must choose the very object of its activity (the existence for itself in the service of which it must necessarily place itself) from the domain that it has excluded, the choice inevitably falls on those forces that have already proved most effective.
The inability of homogeneous society to find in itself a reason for being and acting is what makes it dependent upon imperative forces, just as the sadistic hostility of sovereigns toward the impoverished population is what allies them with any formation seeking to maintain the latter in a state of oppression.
A complex situation results from the royal person's modalities of exclusion: since the king is the object in which homogeneous society has found its reason for being, maintaining this relationship demands that he conduct himself in such a way that the homogeneous society can exist for him. In the first place, this requirement bears upon the fundamental heterogeneity of the king, guaranteed by numerous prohibitions of contract (taboos); this heterogeneity, however, is impossible to keep in a free state. In no case may heterogeneity receive its law from without, but its spontaneous movement can be fixed, at least tendentially, once and for all. Thus, the destructive passion (sadism) of the imperative agency is as a rule exclusively directed either toward foreign societies or toward the impoverished classes, toward all those external or internal elements hostile to homogeneity.
Historically, royal power is the form that results from such a situation. As for its positive function, a determining role is reserved for the very principle of unification, actually carried out in a group of individuals whose affective choice bears upon a single heterogeneous object. A shared orientation has, in itself, a constitutive value: it presupposes-vaguely, it is true-the imperative character of the object. Unification, the principle of homogeneity, is only a tendential fact, incapable of finding in itself a motive for requiring and imposing its existence; and, in most circumstances, the recourse to an external requirement has the value of a primary necessity. Yet, the pure having to be, the moral imperative, requires being for itself, namely, the specific mode of heterogeneous existence. But this existence precisely escapes the principle of having to be and can in no case be subordinated to it: it immediately accedes to Being (in other words it produces itself as the value being or not being and never as a value that has to be). The complex form in which the resolution of this incompatibility culminates poses the having to be of homogeneous existence in heterogeneous existences. Thus, imperative heterogeneity not only represents a differentiated form with regard to vague heterogeneity: it additionally supposes the structural modification of the two parts, homogeneous and heterogeneous, in contact with one another. On the one hand, the homogeneous formation akin to the royal agency, the State, derives its imperative character from this agency and seems to attain existence for itself by bringing about the barren and cold having to be of the whole of homogeneous society. But the State is in reality only the abstract, degraded form of the living having to be required, at the top, as an affective attraction and royal agency: it is simply vague homogeneity become a constraint. On the other hand, this mode of intermediary formation that characterizes the State penetrates imperative existence through reaction; but, in the course of this introjection, the proper form of homogeneity becomes-this time for real existence for itself by denying itself: it becomes absorbed by heterogeneity and destroys itself as strictly homogeneous from the fact that, having become the negation of the principle of utility, it refuses all subordination. Although profoundly penetrated by the reason of State, the king nevertheless does not identify with the latter: he wholly maintains the separate character of divine supremacy. He is exempt from the specific principle of homogeneity, the compensation of rights and duties constituting the formal law of the State: the king's rights are unconditional.
There is hardly any need to suggest at this point that the possibility of such affective formations has brought about the infinite subjugation that degrades most forms of human life (much more so than abuses of power which, furthermore, are themselves reducible-insofar as the force in play is necessarily social-to imperative formations). If sovereignty is now considered in its tendentiaI form-such as it has been lived historically by the subject to whom it owes its attractive value-yet independently of any particular reality, its nature appears, in human terms, to be the noblest-exalted to majesty-, pure in the midst of the orgy, beyond the reach of human infirmities. It constitutes the region formally exempt from self-interested intrigues to which the oppressed subject refers as to an empty but pure satisfaction. (In this sense the constitution of royal nature above an inadmissible reality recalls the fictions justifying eternal life.) As a tendential form, it fulfills the ideal of society and the course of things (in the subject's mind, this function is expressed naively: if the king only knew . . . ). At the same time it is strict authority. Situated above homogeneous society, as well as above the impoverished populace or the aristocratic hierarchy that emanates from it, it requires the bloody repression of what is contrary to it and becomes synonymous in its split-off form with the heterogeneous foundations of the law: it is thus both the possibility of and the requirement for collective unity; it is in the royal orbit that the State and its functions of coercion and adaption are elaborated; the homogeneous reduction develops, both as destruction and foundation, to the benefit of royal greatness.
Posing itself as the principle for the association of innumerable elements, royal power develops spontaneously as an imperative and destructive force against every other imperative form that could be opposed to it. It thereby manifests, at the top, the fundamental tendency and principle of all authority: the reduction to a personal entity, the individualization of power. While impoverished existence is necessarily produced as a multitude and homogeneous society as a reduction to the common denominator, the imperative agency-the foundation of oppression-necessarily develops along the lines of a reduction to a unit in the form of a human being excluding the very possibility of a peer, in other words, as a radical form of exclusion requiring avidity. VII. Tendential Concentration
This tendency toward concentration appears to be in contradiction, it is true, with the coexistence of distinct domains of power: the domain of royal sovereignty is different from military power and from the domain of authority. But taking note of this coexistence is precisely what draws attentIon: composite character of royal power, in which it is easy to find the constItutive elements of the other two powers, the religious and the military.
It thus becomes apparent that royal sovereignty should not be considered as a simple element having its own autonomous source, as the army or the religious organization: it is exactly (and furthermore uniquely) the actuahzed concentration of these two elements formed in two different directions. The constant rebirth of military and religious powers in a pure state has never modified the principle of their tendential concentration in the form of a single sovereignty: even the formal refusal of Christianity has not prevented-to use vulgar symbolic terminology-the cross from lying on the steps of the throne with the saber.
Considered historically, this concentration can be achieved spontaneously: the head of the army succeeds in having himself crowned king through the use of force or the established king takes hold of military power (in Japan, the emperor'recently actualized this form, without, it is true, his own initiative having played a determining role). But each time, even in the case royalty is usurped, the possibility of the uniting of powers depended upon their fundamental affinities and especially upon their tendential concentratIon.
The consideration of the principles governing these facts obviously becomes crucial from the moment that fascism renews their historical existence, that is, once again unites military and religious authority to effect. (In this regard, it can be stated-without prejudicing any other polItical that any unlimited actualization of imperative forms amounts to a. of humanity as a value that depends upon the play of internal Bonapartism, fascism (which etymologically signifies uniting, concetration) is no more than an acute reactivation of the latent sovereign agency, but with a character in a sense purified by the fact that paramilitary groups for the army in the constitution of power immediately have that power as an object. VIII. The Army and the Heads of the Army
As a rule, the army exists functionally because of war, and its structure is entirely reducible to the exercise of that function. Thus, imperative character does not directly result from the social importance linked to the material power of controlling weapons: its internal organization - discipline and hierarchy - are what make it preeminently a noble society.
Obviously, the nobility of arms initially supposes an intense heterogeneity: discipline and hierarchy are themselves but forms and not the foundations of heterogeneity; bloodshed, carnage, and death alone are commensurate with the fundamental nature of weapons. But the ambiguous horror of war still has only a base heterogeneity (at best undifferentiated). The exalted, exalting control of weapons supposes the affective unification necessary to their cohesion, that is, to their effective value.
The affective character of this unification is manifest in the form of the soldier's attachment to the head of the army: it implies that each soldier equates the latter's glory with his own. This process is the intermediary through which disgusting slaughter is radically transformed into its opposite, glory-namely, into a pure and intense attraction. The glory of the chief essentially constitutes a sort of affective pole opposed to the nature of the soldiers. Even independently of their horrible occupation, the soldiers belong as a rule to a vile segment of the population; divested of its uniforms and wearing ordinary clothing, a professional army of the eighteenth century would have looked like a wretched populace. But even the elimination of enlistments from the lower classes would fail to change the deeper structure ofthe army; this structure would continue to base affective organization upon the social infamy of the soldiers. Human beings incorporated into the army are but negated elements, negated with a kind of rage (a sadism) manifest in the tone of each command, negated by the parade, by the uniform, and by the geometric regularity of cadenced movements. The chief, insofar as he is imperative, is the incarnation of this violent negation. His intimate nature, the nature of his glory, is constituted by an imperative act that annuls the wretched populace (which constitutes the army) as such (in the same way that the slaughter is annulled as such). In social psychology, this imperative negation generally appears as the characteristic of action; in other words, every affirmed social action necessarily takes the unified psychological form of sovereignty; every lower form, every ignominy, being by definition passive, is transformed into its opposite by the simple fact of a transition to action. Slaughter, as an inert result, is ignoble; but, shifted onto the social action that caused it, the ignoble heterogeneous value thus established becomes noble (the action of killing and nobility are association by indefectible historical ties): all it takes is for the action to affirm itself effectively as such, to assume freely the imperative form that constitutes it.
This operation - the fact of assuming in complete freedom the imperative character of action-is precisely what characterizes the chief. It becomes possible to grasp here in an explicit form the role played by unification (individualization) in the structural modifications that characterize superior heterogeneity. Starting with formless and impoverished elements, the army, under the imperative impulse, becomes organized and internally achieves a homogeneous form on account of the negation directed at the disordered character of its elements: in fact, the mass that constitutes the army passes from a depleted and ruined existence to a purified geometric order, from formlessness to aggressive rigidity. In actuality, this negated mass has ceased to be itself in order to become affectively ("affectively" refers here to simple psychological behaviors, such as standing at attention or marching double time) the chiefs thing and like a part ofthe chief himself. A troop at attention is in a sense absorbed by the existence of the command and, thus, absorbed by the negation of itself. Standing at attention can be analogically considered as a tropic movement (a kind of negative geotropism) elevating not only the chief but all who follow his orders to the (geometrically) . regular form of imperative sovereignty. Thus the implied infamy of the soldiers is only a basic infamy which, in uniform, is transformed into its opposite: order and glamour. The mode of heterogeneity explicitly undergoes a thorough alteration, completing the realization ofintense homogeneity without a decrease of the fundamental heterogeneity. In the midst of the population, the army retains the distinction of being wholly other, but with a sovereignty linked to domination, to the imperative and separate character that the chief transmits to his soldiers.
Thus the dominant direction of the army, detached from its affective foundations (infamy and slaughter), depends upon the contrary heterogeneity of honor and duty incarnated in the person of the chief. (If the chief is not subordinate to a real agency or to an idea, duty is incarnated in his person in the same way as in that of the king.) Honor and duty, symbolically expressed by the geometry of the parades, are the tendential forms that situate military existence above homogeneous existence as imperative and as a pure reason for being. Having a limited bearing on certain levels of action, these forms, in their properly military aspect, are compatible with infinitely craven crimes, but they suffice to affirm the exalted value of the army and to make the internal domination characterizing its structure one of the fundamental elements of a supreme psychological authority instituted above the subjugated society.
Nevertheless the immediate result of the power of the head of the army is only an internal independent of social homogeneity, whereas specific royal power exists only in relation to homogeneous society. The integration of military power into social power therefore supposes a structural change: it supposes the acquisition of modalities characteristic of royal power in relation to the administration of the State, as they were described in relation to this power.
IX. Religious Power
It is granted in an implicit and vague manner that holding military power has been sufficient to exert a general domination. Nevertheless, with the exception of colonizations, which extend a preestablished power, examples of longlasting, exclusively military dominations are hard to find. In fact, simple material armed force is incapable offounding any power: in the first place, such force depends on the internal attraction exerted by the chief (money is insufficient to constitute an army). And when the chief wants to use the force at his disposal to dominate society, he must further acquire the elements of an external attraction (of a religious attraction valid for the entire population).
It is true that the latter elements are sometimes at the disposal of force, yet, as the origin of royal power, military attraction probably has no primacy over religious attraction. To the extent that it is possible to formulate a valid judgment about the distant past of mankind, it seems fairly clear that religion-not the army-is the source of social authority. Furthermore, the introduction of heredity regularly marks the predominance of a religious form of power: it can rely upon its bloodlines, whereas military power depends first of all on personal' value.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to ascribe a specific meaning to that which, in the blood or in the aspects of royalty, is characteristically religious: here one essentially confronts the bare and unlimited form of undifferentiated heterogeneity, before any of its perceptible elements (ones that can be made explicit) have been fixed by a still vague direction. This direction does exist nonetheless, but, in every causal state, the structural modifications that it introduces leave the field to a free projection of general affective forms, such as dread or sacred attraction. Furthermore, structural modifications are not what are immediately transmitted through physiological contact in heredity or by sacred rites, but rather a fundamental heterogeneity. The (implicit) signification of the purely religious royal character can only be attained to the extent that its origin and structure appear to be shared with those of a divine nature. Though it is impossible, in such a cursory presentation, to present all of the affective movements involved in the establishment of 0 mythical authorities (culminating in the positioning of a fictitious supreme authority), a simple juxtaposition is amply revealing. Unequivocal facts (identifications with the divine, mythical genealogies, the Roman or Shintoist imperial cults, the Christian theory of divine right) correspond to the shared structure of the two formations. One the whole, the king is considered in one form or another to be an emanation of a divine nature, along with everything that the principle of emanation entails in the way of identity when dealing with heterogeneous elements.
The notable structural modifications that characterize the evolution of the representation of the divine-starting with free and irresponsible violence simply makes explicit those characterizing the formation of the royal nature. In both cases, the position of the sovereign is what directs the alteration of the heterogeneous structure. In both cases, we witness a concentration of attributes and forces; but, in the case of God, since the forces that he represents are only composed in a fictitious being (not subject to the limitation of having to be realized), it was possible to yield more perfect forms, more purely logical schemata.
The supreme being of theologians and philosophers represents the most profound introjection of the structure characteristic of homogeneity into heterogeneous existence: in his theological aspect, God preeminently fulfills the sovereign form. However, the counterpart to this possibility is implied by the fictitious character of divine existence, whose heterogeneous nature, lacking the limitative value of reality, can be overlooked in a philosophical conception (reduced to a formal affirmation that is in no way lived). In the order of free intellectual speculation, the idea can be substituted for God as supreme existence and power; this implies the admittedly partial revelation of a relative heterogeneity of the Idea (such as occurred when Hegel raised the Idea above the simple having to be). X. Fascism as the Sovereign Form of Sovereignty
Stirring up such apparently anachronistic phantoms would surely be senseless if fascism had not, before our very eyes, reappropriated and reconstituted from the bottom up-starting, as it were, with nothing-the very process described above for the establishment of power. Until our times, there had only been a single historical example of the sudden formation of a total power, namely, the Islamic Khalifat. While both military and religious, it was principally royal, relying upon no prior foundation. Islam, a form comparable to fascism in its meager human wealth, did not even have recourse to an established nation, much less a constituted State. But it must be recognized that, for fascist movements, the existing State has first been something to conquer, then a means or a frame, 12 and that the integration of the nation does not change the schema of their formation. Just like early Islam, fascism represents the constitution of a total heterogeneous power whose manifest origin is to be found in the prevailing effervescence.
In the first place, fascist power is characterized by a foundation that is both religious and military, in which these two habitually distinct elements cannot be separated: it thus presents itself from the outset as an accomplished concentration.
It is true, however, that the military aspect is the predominant one. The affective relations that closely associate (identify) the leader to the member of the party (as they have already been described) are generally analogous to those uniting a chief to his soldiers. The imperative presence of the leader amounts to a negation of the fundamental revolutionary effervescence that he taps; the revolution, which is affirmed as a foundation is, at the same time, fundamentally negated from the moment that internal domination is militarily exerted on the militia. But this internal domination is not directly subordinated to real or possible acts of war: it essentially poses itself as the middle term of an external domination of society and of the State, as the middle term of a total imperative value. Thus, qualities characteristic of the two dominations (internal and external, military and religious) are simultaneously implied: qualities derived from the introjected homogeneity, such as duty, discipline, and obedience; and qualities derived from the essential heterogeneity, imperative violence, and the positioning of the chief as the transcendent object of collective affectivity. But the religious value of the chief is really the fundamental (if not formal) value of fascism, giving the activity of the militiamen its characteristic affective tonality, distinct from that of the soldier in general. The chief as such is in fact only the emanation of a principle that is none other than that of the glorious existence of a nation raised to the value of a divine force (which, superseding every other conceivable consideration, demands not only passion but ecstasy from its participants). Incarnated in the person ofthe chief (in Germany, the properly religious term, prophet, has sometimes been used), the nation thus plays the same role that Allah, incarnated in the person of Mahomet or the Khalif, plays for Islam.
Fascism therefore appears first of all as a concentration and so to speak condensation of power (a meaning actually indicated in the etymological value of the term). This general signification must furthermore be accepted in several ways. The accomplished uniting of imperative forces takes place at the top, but the process leaves no social faction inactive. In fundamental opposition to socialism, fascism is characterized by the uniting of classes. Not that classes conscious of their unity have adhered to the regime, but because expressive elements of each class have been represented in the deep movements of adherence that led to the seizing of power. Here the specific type of unification is actually derived from properly military affectivity, which is to say that the representative elements of the exploited classes have been included in the affective process only through the negation of their own nature Gust as the social nature of a recruit is negated by means of uniforms and parades). This process, which blends the different social formations from the bottom up, must be understood as a fundamental process whose scheme is necessarily given in the very formation of the chief, who derives his profound meaning from the fact of having shared the dejected and impoverished life of the proletariat. But, as in the case of military organization, the affective value characteristic of impoverished existence is only displaced and transformed into its opposite; and it is its inordinate scope that gives the chief and the whole of the formation the accent of violence without which no army or fascism could be possible.
XI. The Fascist State
Fascism's close ties with the impoverished classes profoundly distinguish this formation from classical royal society, which is characterized by a more or less decisive loss of contact with the lower classes. But, forming in opposition to the established royal unification (the forms of which dominate society from too far above), the fascist unification is not simply a uniting of powers from different origins and a symbolic uniting of classes: it is also the accomplished uniting of the heterogeneous elements with the homogeneous elements, of sovereignty in the strictest sense with the State.
As a uniting, fascism is actually opposed as much to Islam as it is to traditional monarchy. In fact Islam was created from nothing, and that is why a form such as the State, which can only be the result of a long historical process, played no role in its immediate constitution; on the contrary, the existing State served from the outset as a frame for the entire fascist process of organic organization. This characteristic aspect of fascism permitted Mussolini to write that "everything is in the State," that "nothing human or spiritual exists nor a fortiori does it have any existence outside of the State."15 But this does not necessarily imply an identity of the State and the imperative force that dominates the whole of society. Mussolini himself, who leaned toward a kind of Hegelian divinization of the State, acknowledges in willfully obscure terms a distinct principle ofsovereignty that he alternatively designates as the people, the nation, and the superior personality, but that must be identified with the Fascist formation itself and its leader: "if the people ... signifies the idea ... that is incarnated in the people as the will of a few or even of a single person . . . It has to do," he writes, "neither with race nor with a determined geographical region, but with a grouping that is historically perpetuated, of a multitude unified by an idea that is a will to existence and to power: it is a self-consciousness, a personality. " The tenn personality must be understood as individualization, a process leading to Mussolini himself, and when he adds that "this superior personality is the nation as State. It is not the nation that creates the State . . . ," it must be understood that he has: 1) substituted the principle of the sovereignty of the individualized fascist formation for the old democratic principle of the sovereignty of the nation; 2) laid the groundwork for a conclusive interpretation of the sovereign agency and the State.
National Socialist Germany-which, unlike Italy (under the patronage of Gentile), has not officially adopted Hegelianism and the theory of the State as soul ofthe world-has not been afflicted with the theoretical difficulties resulting from the necessity of officially articulating a principle of authority: the mystical idea of race immediately affirmed itself as the imperative aim of the new fascist society; at the same time it appeared to be incarnated in the person ofthe Fiihrer and his followers. Even though the conception of race lacks an objective base, it is nonetheless subjectively grounded, and the necessity of maintaining the racial value above all others obviated the need for a theory that made the State the principle of all value. The example of Germany thus demonstrates that the identity established by Mussolini between the State and the sovereign form of value is not necessary to a theory of fascism.
The fact that Mussolini did not formally distinguish the heterogeneous agency, the action of which he caused to penetrate deeply into the State, can equally be interpreted as an absolute seizure ofthe State and as a strained adaptation of the sovereign agency to the necessities of a regime of homogeneous production. It is in the development of these two reciprocal processes that fascism and the reason of the State came to appear identical. Nevertheless, the forms of life rigorously conserve a fundamental opposition when they maintain a radical duality of principles in the very person of the one holding power: the president of the Italian council and the German chancellor represent forms of activity radically distinct from those of the Duce or the Führer. Further, these two figures derive their fundamental power not from their official function in the State like other prime ministers, but from the existence of a fascist party and their personal position at the head of that party. In conjunction with the duality of heterogeneous and homogeneous forms, this evidence of the deep roots of power precisely maintains the unconditional supremacy of the heterogeneous form from the standpoint of the principle of sovereignty.
XII. The Fundamental Conditions of Fascism
As has already been indicated, heterogeneous processes as a whole can only enter into play once the fundamental homogeneity of society (the apparatus of production) has become dissociated because of its internal contradictions. Further, it can be stated that, even though it generally occurs in the blindest fashion, the development of heterogeneous forces necessarily comes to signify a solution to the problem posed by the contradictions of homogeneity. Once in power, developed heterogeneous forces have at their disposal the means of coercion necessary to resolve the differences that had arisen between previously irreconcilable elements. But it goes without saying that, at the end of a movement that excludes all subversion, the thrust of these resolutions will have been consistent with the general direction of the existing homogeneity, namely, with the interests of the capitalists.
The change resides in the fact that, having had recourse to fascist heterogeneity, these interests, from the moment of crisis on, are those of a group opposed to privately owned enterprises. As a result, the very structure of capitalism-the principle of which had been that of a spontaneous homogeneity of production based on competition, a de facto coincidence ofthe interests ofthe group of producers with the absolute freedom of each enterprise-finds itself profoundly altered. The awareness, developed in some German capitalists, of the peril to which this freedom subjected them in a critical period, must naturally be placed at the origin of the effervescence and triumph of National-Socialism. However, it is evident that this awareness did not yet exist for Italian capitalists who, from the moment of the march on Rome, were exclusively preoccupied with the irresolvability of their conflicts with the workers. It thus appears that the unity of fascism is located in its actual psychological structure and not in the economic conditions that serve as its base. (This does not contradict the fact that a general logical development of the economy retroactively provides the different fascisms with a common economic signification that they share, to be sure, with the political activity-absolutely foreign to fascism in the strictest sense-of the current government of the United States.)
Whatever the economic danger to which fascism responded, the awareness of this danger and the need to avoid it actually represent an as yet empty desire, which could be propped up by money. The realization of the force able to respond to the desire and to utilize the available monies takes place only in the heterogeneous region, and its possibility depends upon the actual structure of that region: on the whole, it is possible to consider this structure as variable depending on whether the society is democratic or monarchical.
Truly monarchial societies (as distinct from the adapted or bastardized political forms represented by England today or prefascist Italy) are characterized by the fact that a sovereign agency, having an ancient origin and an absolute form, is connected to the existing homogeneity. The constant evolution of the constitutive elements of this homogeneity can necessitate fundamental changes, but the need for change can become represented internally only in an altered minority: the whole of the homogeneous elements and the immediate principle of homogeneity remain committed to upholding the juridical forms and the existing administrative framework guaranteed by the authority of the king; the authority of the king coincides reciprocally with the upholding of these forms and this framework. Thus the upper part ofthe heterogeneous region is both immobilized and immobilizing, and only the lower part formed by the impoverished and oppressed classes is capable of entering into movement. But, for the latter, passive and oppressed by definition, the fact of entering into movement represents a profound alteration of their nature: in order to take part in a struggle against the sovereign agency and the legal homogeneity oppressing them, the lower classes must pass from a passive and diffuse state to a form of conscious activity; in Marxist terms, these classes must become aware of themselves as a revolutionary proletariat. This proletariat cannot actually be limited to itself: it is in fact only a point of concentration for every dissociated social element that has been banished to heterogeneity. It is even possible to say that such a point of concentration exists in a sense prior to the formation of what must be called the "conscious proletariat": the general description of the heterogeneous region actually implies it be posited as a constitutive element of the structure of a whole that includes not only imperative forms and impoverished forms but also subversive forms. These subversive forms are none other than the lower forms transformed with a view to the struggle against the sovereign forms. The necessity inherent to subversive forms requires that what is low become high, that what is high become low; this is the requirement in which the nature of subversion is expressed. In the case where the sovereign forms of a society are immobilized and bound, the diverse elements that have been banished to heterogeneity as a result of social decomposition can only ally themselves with the formations that result when the oppressed class becomes active: they are necessarily dedicated to subversion. The faction of the bourgeoisie that has become aware of the incompatibility with established social frameworks becomes united against figures of authority and blends in with the effervescent masses in revolt; and even in the period immediately following the destruction of the monarchy, social movements continued to be governed by the initial anti-authoritarian character of the revolution.
But in a democratic society (at least when such a society is not galvanized by the necessity of going to war) the heterogeneous imperative agency (nation in republican forms, king in constitutional monarchies) is reduced to an atrophied existence, so that its destruction no longer appears to be a necessary condition of change. In such a situation, the imperative forms can even be considered as a free field, open to all possibilities of effervescence and movement, just as subversive forms are in a democracy. And when homogeneous society undergoes a critical disintegration, the dissociated elements no longer necessarily enter the orbit of subversive attraction: in addition there forms at the top an imperative attraction that no longer immobilizes those who are subject to it. As a rule, until just recently, this imperative attraction only exerted itself in the direction of restoration. It was thus limited beforehand by the prior nature of the disappeared sovereignty, which most often implied a prohibitive loss of contact between the sovereign agency and the lower classes (the only spontaneous historical restoration, that of Bonapartism, must be put into relation with the manifest popular sources of Bonapartist power). In France, it is true, some of the constitutive forms of fascism were able to be elaborated in the formation but especially in the difficulties of the formation-of an imperative attraction aimed at a dynastic restoration. The possibility of fascism nonetheless depended upon the fact that a reversion to vanished sovereign forms was out of the question in Italy, where the monarchy subsisted in a reduced state. Added to this subsistence, it was precisely the insufficiency of the royal formation that necessitated the formation of-and left the field open for-an entirely renewed imperative attraction with a popular base. Under these new conditions (with regard to the classical revolutionary dissociations in monarchical societies) the lower classes no longer exclusively experience the attraction represented by socialist subversion, and a military type of organization has in part begun to draw them into the orbit of sovereignty. Likewise, the dissociated elements (belonging to the middle or dominating classes) have found a new outlet for their effervescence, and it is not surprising that, given the choice between subversive or imperative solutions, the majority opted for the imperative.
An unprecedented situation results from the possibility of this dual effervescence. During the same period and in the same society, two competing revolutions, hostile to one another and to the established order, are being formed. There develop at the same time two segments that share a common opposition to the general dissociation of homogeneous society; this explains the numerous connections between them and even a kind of profound complicity. Furthermore, independently of their common origin, the success of one of the functions implies that of the opposing faction through a certain play of balance: it can cause it to occur (in particular, to the extent that fascism is an imperative response to the growing threat of a working class movement) and should be considered, in most cases, as the sign of that occurrence. But, unless it is possible to reestablish the disrupted homogeneity, it is evident that the simple formation of a situation of this order dictates its own outcome in advance: an increase in this effervescence is accompanied by a proportionate increase in the importance of the dissociated elements (bourgeois and petty bourgeois) as compared to that of the elements that had never been integrated (proletariat). Thus the chances for a working class revolution, a liberating subversion of society, disappear to the extent that revolutionary possibilities are affirmed.
As a rule, it seems therefore that revolutionary movements that develop in a democracy are hopeless, at least so long as the memory of the earlier struggles against the royal authority has been attenuated and no longer necessarily sets heterogeneous reactions in opposition to imperative forms. In fact, it is evident that the situation of the major democratic powers, where the fate of the Revolution is being played out, does not warrant the slightest confidence: it is only the very nearly indifferent attitude of the proletariat that has permitted these countries to avoid fascist formations. Yet it would be puerile to presume to enclose the world in such a neat construction: from the outset, the mere consideration of affective social formations reveals the immense resources, the inexhaustible wealth of the forms particular to affective life. Not only are the psychological situations of the democratic collectivities, like any human situation, transitory, but it remains possible to envision, at least as a yet imprecise representation, forms of attraction that differ from those already in existence, as different from present or even past communism as fascism is from dynastic claims. A system of knowledge that permits the anticipation of the affective social reactions that traverse the superstructure and perhaps even, to a certain extent, do away with it, must be developed from one of these possibilities. The fact of fascism, which has thrown the very existence of a workers' movement into question, clearly demonstrates what can be expected from a timely recourse to reawakened affective forces. Unlike the situation during the period of utopian socialism, morality and idealism are no more questions today than they are in fascist forms. Rather, an organized understanding of the movements in society, of attraction and repulsion, starkly presents itself as a weapon-at this moment when a vast convulsion opposes, not so much fascism to communism, but radical imperative forms to the deep subversion that continues to pursue the emancipation of human lives.
Notes
I. This is obviously the principal shortcoming of an essay that will not fail to astonish and shock those who are unfamiliar with French sociology, modern German philosophy (phenomenology), and psychoanalysis. As a piece of information, it can nevertheless be insisted upon that the following descriptions refer to actuaL experiences and that the psychological method used excludes any recourse to abstraction.
2. The words homogeneous, heterogeneous, and terms derived from them are stressed each time they are taken in a sense particular to this essay. 3. The most accomplished and expressive forms of social homogeneity are the sciences and the technologies. The laws founded by the sciences establish relations of identity between the different elements of an elaborated and measurable world. As for the technologies-which serve as a transition between production and science-, it is because of the very homogeneity of products and means that they are opposed, in underdeveloped civilizations, to religion and magic (cf. Hubert and Mauss, Esquisse d'une theorie generaLe de La magie, in Annee socioLogique 7, 1902-1903, p. 15). 4. Formes eLementaires de La vie reLigieuse, 1912, p. 53. [The ELementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain (London: Allen and Unwin, 1926), p. 38. Tr.] Following his analysis, Durkheim comes to identify the sacred and the sociaL, but this identification necessitates the introduction of an hypothesis and, whatever its scope, does not have the value of an immediately significant definition (it actually represents the tendency of science to posit a homogeneous representation in order to avoid the discernible presence of fundamentally heterogeneous elements). 5. Cf. G. Bataille, "La notion de depense," in La critique sociaLe 7, January 1933, p. 302. ["The Notion of Expenditure," above. Tr.] 6. It appears that the displacements are produced under the same conditions as are Pavlov's conditioned reflexes. 7. On the primitive mind, cf. Levy-Bruhl, La mentalite primitive; Cassirer, Das mythische Denken; on the unconscious, cf. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. 8. On the affective relations of the followers to the leader and on the analogy with hypnosis, cf. Freud, Group PsychoLogy and the AnaLysis ofthe "Ego" (reprinted in Essais de psychanaLyse, 1929). 9. Cf. W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the religion of the Semites, first series, The FundamentaL Institutions, Edinburgh, 1889. 10. The word sovereign comes from the lower Latin adjective superaneus meaning superior. 11. Freud, in Group PsychoLogy and the Analysis of the "Ego," studied precisely the two functions, military (army) and religious (church), in relation to the imperative form (unconscious) of individual psychology that he called the Ego IdeaL or the supergo. If one refers to the whole of the elements brought together in the present study, that work, published in German in 1921, appears as an essential introduction of the understanding of fascism. 12. The modern Italian state is to a great extent a creation of fascism. 13. Khalif etymologically signifies lieutenant (standing in for [tenant lieu]; the full title is "lieutenant of the emissary of God." 14. Condensation ofsuperiority, evidently related to a latent inferiority complex: such a complex has equally strong roots in both Italy and Germany; this is why, even if fascism develops subsequently in regions having attained a complete sovereignty and the awareness of the sovereignty, it is inconceivable that it could ever have been the autochthonous and specific product of such countries. 15. Mussolini, Enciclopedia italiana, article Fascismo. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid.
Georges Bataille/ Visions of Excess/ Selected Writings (1927-1939)/The Psychological Structure of Fascism/ University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
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Cannibal delicacyIt is known that civilized man is characterized by an often inexplicable acuity of horror. The fear of insects is no doubt one of the most singular and most developed of these horrors as is, one is surprised to note, the fear of the eye. It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror. In this respect, the eye could be related to the cutting edge, whose appearance provokes both bitter and contradictory reactions; this is what the makers of the Andalusian Dog' 1 must have hideously and obscurely experienced when, among the first images of the film, they determined the bloody loves of these two beings. That a razor would cut open the dazzling eye of a young and charming woman-this is precisely what a young man would have admired to the point of madness, a young man watched by a small cat, a young man who by chance holding in his hand a coffee spoon, suddenly wanted to take an eye in that spoon. Obviously a singular desire on the part of a white, from whom the eyes of the cows, sheep, and pigs that he eats have always been hidden. For the eye-as Stevenson exquisitely puts it, a cannibal delicacy-is, on our part, the object of such anxiety that we will never bite into it. The eye is even ranked high in horror, since it is, among other things, the eye of conscience. Victor Hugo's poem is sufficiently well known; the obsessive and lugubrious eye, the living eye, the eye that was hideously dreamed by Grandville in a nightmare he had shortly before his death2; the criminal "dreams that he has just struck down a man in a dark wood . . . Human blood has been spilled and, to use an expression that presents a ferocious image to the mind, he made an oak sweat 3. In fact, it is not a man, but a tree trunk . . , bloody , , . that thrashes and struggles , ' , under the murderous weapon. The hands of the victim are raised, pleading, but in vain. Blood continues to flow." At that point an enormous eye appears in the black sky, pursuing the criminal through space and to the bottom of the sea, where it devours him after taking the form of a fish. Innumerable eyes nevertheless multiply under the waves. On this subject, Grandville writes: "Are these the eyes of the crowd attracted by the imminent spectacle of torture?" But why would these absurd eyes be attracted, like a cloud of flies, by something so repugnant? Why as well, on the masthead of a perfectly sadistic illustrated weekly, published in Paris from 1907 to 1924, does an eye regularly appear against a red background, above a bloody spectacle? Why isn't the Eye of the Police-similar to the eye of human justice in the nightmare of Grandville-finally only the expression of a blind thirst for blood? Similar also to the eye of Crampon, condemned to death and approached by the chaplain an instant before the blade's fall: he dismissed the chaplain, but enucleated himself and gave him the happy gift of his torn-out eye, for this eye was made of glass. Notes I. This extraordinary film is the work of two young Catalans: the painter Salvador Dali, one of whose characteristic paintings we reproduce below (p. 25), and the director Luis Bunue!. See the excellent photographs published by the Cahiers d'art (July 1929, p. 230), by Bifur (August 1929, p. 105) and by Varietes (July 1929, p. 209). This film can be distinguished from banal avant-garde productions, with which one might be tempted to confuse it, in that the screenplay predominates. Several very explicit facts appear in successive order, without logical connection it is true, but penetrating so far into horror that the spectators are caught up as directly as they are in adventure films. Caught up and even precisely caught by the throat. and without artifice; do these spectators know, in fact, where they-the authors of this film, or people like them-will stop? If Bunuel himself, after the filming of the slit-open eye, remained sick for a week (he, moreover, had to film the scene of the asses' cadavers in a pestilential atmosphere), how then can one not see to what extent horror becomes fascinating, and how it alone is brutal enough to break everything that stines? 2. Victor Hugo. a reader of Le Magazin pittoresque, borrowed from the admirable written dream Crime and Expiation, and from the unprecedented drawing of Grandville, both published in 1847 (pp. 211-14), the story of the pursuit of a criminal by an obstinate eye; it is scarcely useful to observe. however, that only an obscure and sinister obsession, and not a cold memory, can explain this resemblance. We owe to Pierre d'Espezel's erudition and kindness our awareness of this curious document, probably the most beautiful of Grandville's extravagant compositions. (The poem by Victor Hugo to which Bataille refers is "La Conscience" (in the collection La Ugende des sieeles (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1950), pp. 26-27). The poem in fact presents the eye of God following Cain. even into a (self-imposed) tomb. Tr.) 3. ["Faire suer un chene" (literally, "to make an oak sweat") is a slang expression that could be translated as "to exploit a guy" or "to rip off a guy." Tr.] excerpt from the book: Visions of Excess/Selected Writings (1927-1939)/Eye by Georges Bataille by Dennis McDaniel "The scion of a well-known banking family once told me a family secret. When a certain stage of responsibility and awareness has been reached by a young banker he is taken to a room lined with family portraits in the middle of which is an ornate gilded toilet. Here he comes every day to defecate surrounded by the family portraits until he realizes that money is shit. And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and above all it eats creativity." —William S. Burroughs (Job 73–4) This anecdote from The Job reveals the important role of the grotesque in the work of William S. Burroughs. For Burroughs, the grotesque reveals the residue of the control system that too few recognize and from which too few profit. As Burroughs suggests, one of the most salient aspects of economic globalization is the sacrifice of the imaginative impulse to the profit motive. Burroughs’s characterization of global control systems has proved to be prescient. Benjamin Barber, in his seminal analysis Jihad vs. McWorld, asserts that, as multinational conglomerates merge, cultural products are increasingly homogeneous and increasingly Americanized. ‘Music, video, theater, books, and theme parks’, Barber argues, ‘are all constructed as image exports creating a common world taste around common logos, advertising slogans, stars, songs, brand names, jingles and trademarks’ (2001:17). Reminiscent of Trak Services in The Soft Machine, the giants of the global economy preach free enterprise as they undermine variety and competition: The very idea of a genuinely competitive market in ideas or images disappears and the singular virtue that markets indisputably have over democratic command structures—the virtue of that cohort of values associated with pluralism and variety, contingency and accident, diversity and spontaneity—is vitiated. (Barber 2001:89) Burroughs attempts to fight these ‘command structures’ through the concept of the grotesque, understood as a satirical imagery that plays on the exaggeration of certain features of its object in order to demonize or otherwise undermine it. The concept is double-edged, and has been used against both minorities and majorities. Leonard Cassuto traces its origins within European culture to the inability of the majority to account for the differences that minorities embody: ‘both off-color humor and anomalous human bodies somehow threaten, in varying degrees and different ways, the shared beliefs about what constitutes the “human”’ (1997:7–8). By using the grotesque, majority cultures can represent minorities as ‘a constant intrusion on order, an anomalous agent of chaos’ (1997:9). Contemporary readers are well aware of how xenophobic propaganda caricatures, often produced to prepare citizens for war or racist legislation, depict the African-American as dark, big-lipped and bulgy-eyed, the Jew as big-nosed, the Arab as demonically bearded and swarthy, or the Asian as buck-toothed and grossly bespectacled. Modern power structures rely on the defective, deformed ‘Other’ as a means of justifying and maintaining their power. As Burroughs notes, ‘[t]he police have a vested interest in criminality. The Narcotics Department has a vested interest in addiction. Politicians have a vested interest in nations. Army officers have a vested interest in war’ (Job 61). The control addicts feed on the unruly. But the grotesque has also been used as a means to destabilize and subvert hegemonic powers, and it is in this sense that Burroughs deploys it. Burroughs’s work recognizes the power of the grotesque to combine, as John Ruskin describes it in his chapter ‘Grotesque Renaissance’ in volume 3 of The Stones of Venice (1853), the ‘fearful’ and the ‘ludicrous’ (1913:345). These elements, as Philip Thomson has more recently pointed out, exist together as an ‘unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response’ (1972:27). Wolfgang Kayser’s important study of the grotesque reveals its power in the context of the postmodern world. He argues that, as opposed to the glorification of the body in popular media, the grotesque body alienates, disturbs and unsettles, revealing ‘the estranged world’ in which items are loosened from their familiar meanings. Kayser finds that, as readers encounter the grotesque, they can no longer live in their customary world with the assurance that their known categories still apply (1968:184–5). This use of the grotesque as a dramatization of the absurd and nihilistic is especially characteristic of the late twentieth century. The grotesque destroys the old world or renders it ugly and revolting, while alleviating the nausea through humor. This sense of the grotesque appropriately follows the dropping of the atom bomb and the holocaust, which brought about what Jeffrey Nuttall calls ‘bomb culture’. Hiroshima, Belsen and Vietnam introduced us to horror, and their impact demanded that people grow callous (Nuttall 1968:118). To Nuttall, ‘morality, pain, and compassion—the whole business of identifying with other people and thus sharing and helping their discomfiture—had to be dissolved in [in many cases sick] humor’. The bomb, thereby, aggravates ‘sick’ humor, which in turn makes the presence of the bomb livable (Nuttall 1968:119). Finally, Tim Libretti argues that American proletarian literature of the 1930s used the grotesque because, as a means of subversion, the grotesque ‘challenges the fetishized consciousness of bourgeois life that comprehends the world as permanent, natural and unchanging by virtue of the operation of commodity relations’ (1995:176). Throughout his work, Burroughs challenges the cultural hegemony of the West by rendering its cultural products grotesque. The grotesque bodies and deformed and deconstructed sounds and images in Burroughs’s work represent the West’s failed experiments at colonizing and controlling the world through word and image. Like the escapees from Benway’s Reconditioning Center, Burroughs’s grotesque images and sounds run amok despite the efforts of censors and arbiters of taste. They mock those whose consciousness and identity are privileged due to money and power. This chapter will explore Burroughs’s use of the grotesque in his various artistic endeavors as part of his effort to resist the cultural homogenization imposed through the mechanisms of globalized capitalism. I situate Burroughs’s use of the grotesque in the context of late twentieth-century oppositional art and culture that uses the grotesque to challenge the standardized consciousness imposed by multinational corporate enterprise, and I connect the uses of the grotesque in Burroughs’s writings, shotgun art and tape experiments with grotesque contemporary art and British punk culture of the 1970s to reveal consistencies in their resistance to popular modes of thinking and feeling. Burroughs’s taste for the grotesque has been his legacy to the oppositional art movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These movements share Burroughs’s understanding of the subversive power of the grotesque; how it blends disgust and humor and thereby awakens and stimulates awareness and moral reproach; how it undermines both the ideal and the real, distorting both. That the grotesque has become a hallmark of avant-garde art and radical popular culture owes much to Burroughs’s writings and sensibility. Burroughs had often stated his admiration of the emancipating randomness of twentieth-century art, and, in collaboration with Brion Gysin and Ian Somerville, based his cut-up experiments on the montage style of modern art. In turn, contemporary artists, in their use of dissected, fractured and deformed bodies, reflect Burroughs’s influence. Similar lines of influence and sympathy can be drawn between Burroughs and punk. Burroughs’s satirical ‘Bugger the Queen’ anticipated The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’, a parodic commemoration of Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee. When The Sex Pistols were verbally and physically attacked for this song as it hit number one on the British charts, Burroughs wrote them a letter in support. Burroughs came to be known as the Godfather of Punk: ‘They were his children’, remarks the Burroughs insider Victor Bockris (1981:xii). Burroughs himself characterized punk as an ‘interesting and important phenomenon’ (Bockris 1981:128). The punk phenomenon grew out of the economic recession of 1970s Britain, and the punks’ characteristic deglamorization resisted the commodified images upon which the new economy drew. Reduced to irrelevancy through unemployment and despair, British punks of the 1970s played ‘with the only power at their disposal: the power to discomfit’ (Hebdige 1988:18). The impulses to deform, disconnect and destroy that characterize the grotesque in Burroughs, contemporary art and the punk scene bring about a new art and new forms of cognition, free from official control, radically unmarketable and hence fully liberated. THE GROTESQUE BODYBurroughs’s principal means of producing the grotesque is through an emphasis on the body, especially on what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘the material body lower stratum’, with its most unsavory functions and in its most humiliating positions. Bakhtin argues that the grotesque body challenges the liberal humanist’s concept of identity. The grotesque body is blubbery, hairy, odorous and obtrusive, exceeding healthy limits and expunging muscular definition. The grotesque body’s superfluousness mocks the gravity of classical statuary’s heroic poses. Bakhtin states that the grotesque stresses ‘those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world’ (1965:26). The nose, lips, tongue, fingers, breasts and nipples, penis, feet and toes, and the body’s solid, liquid and gaseous issues are the raw materials of the artist of the grotesque (26). As Bakhtin’s account suggests, the grotesque body is imperfect and out of control. Nauseating to behold, it defies attempts to transform it into a commodity. Likewise, the grotesque body challenges the capitalist vision of the free individual; Georges Bataille states: ‘Man willingly imagines himself to be like the god Neptune, stilling his own waves, with majesty; nevertheless, the bellowing waves of the viscera, in more or less incessant inflation and upheaval, brusquely put an end to his dignity’ (1929:22). Burroughs’s images of pained and distorted bodies are the source of much of the offense that his work has produced, and certainly much of its power. In the excerpts of the obscenity trial transcript, Norman Mailer finds that the humor in Naked Lunch has close affinities with the grotesque: ‘[I]t is the sort of humor which flourishes in prisons, in the Army, among junkies, race tracks and pool halls, a graffiti of cool, even livid wit, based on bodily functions and the frailties of the body, the slights, humiliations and tortures a body can undergo’ (NL xviii). Burroughs’s use of the body to effect horror and humor has its most direct precedent in the satirical style of Jonathan Swift. In A Modest Proposal (1729), Swift uses the grotesque to protest the mistreatment of the Irish poor. The implied author straightforwardly and benevolently argues the ease, inexpensiveness and effectiveness of ending poverty by having tenants breed infants to be sold as food to their landlords. In A Modest Proposal, the humor arises from the dissonance between the ghastly images of slaughtered children and the professed and felt kindness of the voice describing them. The ironic glee with which Swift’s voice describes a young child as ‘a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled’ or in a ‘Fricasie, or Ragoust’ (Swift 1729:504) still reads today as profoundly unsettling. In the ‘Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness’, Burroughs claims that he adopts Swift’s technique in Naked Lunch to ‘reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is’ (NL xli). Like Swift, Burroughs most offends the reader who refuses to accept the body stripped of its pretensions and contrivances. Only a Naked Lunch will wise up the marks: ‘[L]et them see what they actually eat and drink. Let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon’ (NL xlii). For both writers, savagely satirizing their readers’ sense of their moral selves by depicting bodies in the grotesque manner most effectively counteracts the forces of unjust social control. Naked Lunch portrays a number of grotesque characters, including Placenta Juan the Afterbirth Tycoon and the infamous ‘talking asshole’. However, the characterization of Pantopon Rose supplies, perhaps, the sharpest image of Burroughs’s depiction of the grotesque body. In the throes of her addiction, and without a vein to strike, Rose takes desperate measures: [Rose] seized a safety pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great hole in her leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged out of sight into the gaping wound. But her hideous galvanized need (hunger of insects in dry places) has broken the dropper off deep in the flesh of her ravaged thigh (looking rather like a poster on soil erosion). But what does she care? She does not even bother to remove the splintered glass, looking down at her bloody haunch with the cold blank eyes of a meat trader. (NL 10) Burroughs’s description of Rose’s body and her disregard of the harm she does to it evoke our horror and laughter. The description produces horror by depicting unsanitary instruments prodding diseased wounds, junk-sick flesh begging for satisfaction, self-mutilation, streaming gore and ghastly excrescence. Rose’s body, horrifying in its abused, scarred condition, is simultaneously human, insect and mere meat. However, the pitiless distance of the narrator simultaneously undercuts and accentuates the horror. This disinterest is shared by Rose, who ignores her ravaged body to feed her ‘insect’ hunger, losing the dropper into the recesses of her flesh and looking like a ‘poster on soil erosion’. Robin Lydenberg has noted that such bodily corruptions ultimately disgust the reader in order to provoke ‘an emetic purging of his cultural inheritance’ (1987:143). Contemporary British art shares with Burroughs’s work that irresolvable tension between the humorous and the horrible. The 2000 Sensations exhibition of the work of younger British artists shocked spectators through its frank, parodic renditions of dead, soiled and mutilated bodies in odd juxtapositions with bizarre combinations of media (perhaps most noticeably in Chris Ofili’s elephant-dung spattered Madonna, The Holy Virgin Mary, which incited thenmayor Rudy Giuliani to propose an end to all public funding to the Brooklyn Museum of Art). Like Burroughs’s images of the grotesque body, these works, especially those of Damien Hirst and Jake and Dinos Chapman, foreground wounding, disease and waste. Hirst’s most viscerally disturbing works are his bisections of livestock. In This Little Piggy Went to the Market, This Little Piggy Stayed Home, the nursery rhyme title mocks the condition of the piglet that has been split lengthwise with each half enclosed in its own formaldehydefilled encasement. The two encasements are placed side by side, with one side placed slightly ahead of the other to enable easy viewing of internal organs. As in Hirst’s other livestock works, this is no dummy, but a real pig with viscera revealed for public inspection. Similarly, Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided parodies the title of the Paul Simon song, ‘Mother and Child Reunion’, in that the art object so entitled includes a mother cow and her calf, both bisected with entrails exposed. On the one hand, by using (or abusing) farm animals as (damaged) spectacle, Hirst challenges the notion of farm animals as lovable creatures that have rights and deserve to be treated with dignity. On the other hand, by depriving these livestock of use value, Hirst’s artwork undermines the mission of the agricultural industry because this livestock, having been slaughtered by a sculptor, cannot be sold or consumed as food or clothing, but only as art. Conversely, Hirst’s presentation of packaged waste as art complicates modern art’s ‘ready-mades’. As in the livestock bisections, the titles of his ‘waste’ artworks balance the nauseating sight with snide humor. In I’ll Love You Forever, stacks of fluorescent yellow and orange infectious waste containers, labeled with appropriate warnings, are locked inside a bright blue cage, permitting viewing but not handling. The sight of biohazards disturbs the viewer, but the colorful display enchants and entertains. The title reflects the presence of the containers marked ‘Placenta’ and the sentimentality of preserving afterbirth as a parent would preserve an infant’s lock of hair. Hirst’s ‘waste’ artworks refuse commodification even after they have been made into art; if purchased, they must be kept out of the reach of children. Unlike Hirst’s use of actual carcasses and waste, Jake and Dinos Chapman use lifelike mannequins in their work, though the effect of their postures of torture is no less startling. In Great Deeds Against the Dead, arguably a parody of Goya’s work of the same name, two hyper-realistic, naked male mannequins are harshly tethered to a bomb-scorched tree, one male hanging from a branch by his arms, which are pulled impossibly behind his back. The other mannequin has been terribly dismembered, his headless, armless torso hanging upside down by his legs, his severed arms hanging next to the torso, and his head stuck onto another upright branch. Both mannequins have had their genitalia excised. The seemingly intentional artificiality of the mannequins complicates the horror that the image of tortured figures conveys. For example, the artists made no effort to use human-like hair; instead, hair, eyebrows and mustache have a doll-like quality, giving the figure the appearance of a mangled GI Joe. The viewer’s realization that these are toys, not people, and that those who simulate war rather than those who actually plan or fight are the satire’s targets, mocks the apparent intentions of Goya’s original—to evoke the horror and degradation of war or to elicit compassion for war’s victims. Jake and Dinos Chapman’s works that use mannequins and toy soldiers strongly connect with the dirtied and disfigured children’s toys of recently deceased American artist Mike Kelley, whose work spoils the homogenized prettiness of dolls with human excrement. Scarred, impaled and diseased bodies also mark the resistance of British punk rock of the 1970s to the global commerce that, to the punks, tamed rock ‘n’ roll and put British youth on the dole. Punk uses the body to elicit horror and humor. As with Burroughs, the grotesque gave British punks a material and mood by which they could dramatize the contempt with which the selfish, smug and corrupt Tory government of mid-1970s Britain had treated them. Cultural critic Greil Marcus describes this contrived ugliness of British punks of the 1970s: ‘they were fat, anorexic, pockmarked, acned, stuttering, crippled, scarred and damaged, and what their new decorations underlined was the failure already engraved in their faces’ (1989:74). Dick Hebdige suggests that through self-mutilation and body art, punks could embody a kiosk of revolutionary signs (1988:18). Degrading the body by cutting it, piercing it and making it bleed, as Sid Vicious often did on stage, celebrates the punk’s power over his or her body, a power that defies easy conversion into a commodity. As a declaration of independence, punks smeared shit upon themselves before others could. British punks also displayed the grotesque body in fashion and in their interaction with performers. In England especially, clothing style indicates social class and, in Hebdige’s term, one’s ‘spectacular subculture’. Punk clothing and jewelry, especially as Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren designed such accoutrement, determined the course of British punk rock style. Indeed, McLaren established The Sex Pistols to boost sales of bondage wear in his King’s Road boutique, SEX. Rival designers were no less daring. As Jon Savage has documented, BOY (another Chelsea clothier) sold T-shirts stained with dried animal blood, images of the death’s head of recently executed murderer Gary Gilmore, and jewelry made of contraceptive packets and hypodermic syringes, while also displaying forensic cultures that contained simulated severed body parts in its shop windows (1992:324). As the ultimate expression of worthlessness, some punks wore trash bags. In their interaction with performers, punk audiences developed the practice of ‘gobbing’, or spitting on the musicians. Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of The Sex Pistols, inadvertently began this practice when, having a terrible cold, he discharged upon the audience, who returned the gesture. At once expressing disgust and fellowship, gobbing showed appreciation through disdain—indeed, through expectoration and contamination. A direct challenge to propriety, health codes and personal privacy, gobbing transformed the expression of appreciation into the transmission of disease. Punk lyrics draw on the grotesque body as well. The lyrics of the song ‘Bodies’ by The Sex Pistols form a demonic dramatic monologue in which the singer confirms his bestiality in the very act of denying it, though the lyrics defy any definitive interpretation. Perhaps because ‘Pauline’ has had an abortion, the singer accuses her of being an ‘animal’ and a ‘bloody disgrace’. The chorus, however, suggests that the singer cannot distinguish his own identity. With the word ‘Body’ echoing in the background, the singer desperately asserts that he is ‘not an animal’, but the desperation of the statement and the continual repetition of the word ‘animal’ suggest otherwise. Perhaps because Pauline’s aborted fetus doesn’t appear to be human, or perhaps because it does, the singer describes it as a ‘screaming, fucking bloody mess’, a ‘throbbing squirm’, and most dismissively, a ‘discharge/Another loss of protein’. The baby is so deformed that the singer—could it be his child? Could it be the singer himself?—denies paternity. In his refusal of responsibility, he himself effectively becomes a ‘bloody disgrace’ like the mother. But his denial recognizes his own ‘bloody mess’. ‘I don’t want a baby who looks like that’, he claims, yet in the last words of the song, he becomes the baby, calling for his ‘Mummy’. By recognizing the grotesqueness of his own body, he substitutes for the aborted fetus, betrayed and lost. British punk musicians and their counterparts in painting and sculpture, recognizing that the image of the perfect body sells food, pornography, cars, exercise equipment and even bodies themselves, follow Burroughs by distorting, defacing and distending the body. Like Burroughs, by ruining the body’s mainstream commercial potential, these artists resist global capital’s effort to profit from the body. DISTORTING THE FAMILIAR Burroughs’s grotesque bodies challenge commodification with their unresolved tensions and paradoxes. Similarly, Burroughs distorts familiar sounds and images to evoke horror and humor. The audiotape experiments that Burroughs conducted with Ian Somerville in the early 1960s exemplify how Burroughs distorts by deforming and recontextualizing. Burroughs and Somerville’s experiments with splicing, inching and cutting in tapes grew out of Burroughs and Gysin’s use of textual cut-ups and fold-ins. The cutting and splicing of texts and audiotapes echo the method of cutting textual and audiotape records to break control mechanisms (see The Soft Machine and The Ticket that Exploded). The raw material for many of the audiotape experiments consists of radio broadcasts, mostly news and commercials. By distorting these found, manufactured sounds, Burroughs and Somerville release them from any claim to rational meaning or to any historical verification, yet create awesome, even frightening melodies and rhythms. In ‘The Silver Smoke of Dreams’ (early 1960s), for example, two vocal tracks are blended and ‘inched’ back and forth across the tape head, distorting what may be recognized as a human voice reading English sentences (BTGR). What emerges is a new, uncanny voice—a third voice synthesized from two—that resembles an actual voice, having its timbre and tone, but speaking in a new rhythm and with new sounds. It becomes a convergence of voices that has no single identity; rather, the effect is fluid and indefinable, alien and nonlexical. The terrible distortion strikes listeners, but its odd misshapenness amuses them, like seeing their images in a funhouse mirror. ‘Inching’ distorts the voice by suddenly speeding it up and then slowing it down, contorting its pitch and timbre. Similarly, in recordings like ‘The Total Taste is Here, News Cut-Ups’ (early 1965), various unrelated radio reports and jingles are spliced together, and the effect is at first discomfiting. After continual repetition, however, the voices merge and the stories begin to gel, not into a logical whole, but into a range of voices (Best). The clashing news reports suggest alternate meanings or, at least, the problem of stabilizing meaning in the electronic age. Punk rock also drew from this legacy of auditory and visual distortions of the familiar. In his book, England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage suggests that Burroughs’s audiotape experiments inspired punk’s effort to ‘play the media’s accelerated jumble of signals back at them’ (1992:231). The razor-sharp voice of Johnny Rotten, the poses that parodied the classic rock star look, the unexpected accessorizing of ties, jackets, torn shirts, vestigial safety pins and short hair, all combined to jam media signals. Jamie Reid’s Situationist International-inspired posters and record sleeves are emblematic of the confusion of signs that characterizes punk style. Reid’s design for a flyer promoting The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ defaces the smiling Silver Jubilee portrait of Elizabeth II by piercing her lips with a safety pin. The safety pin dishonors the Queen’s majesty by placing her in league with England’s ‘shame’, and simultaneously validates punk culture; it is an image both appalling and comical. Similarly, the graphic design of punk fanzines placed incompatible elements in conflict. The cover of the December 1976 issue of Sniffin’ Glue features a penciled caricature of sneering cover-boy Johnny Rotten, his jaw extended and broadened to grotesque size, glaring at the reader amid a background of drawings of conventional holly and tree ornaments (Perry 2000). DESTRUCTION AS CREATIONBurroughs also effects the grotesque by destroying already manufactured items and celebrating the debris as art. His description of this process testifies to its unlikely randomness: ‘I picked up a piece of wood and blasted it. Then I looked at the broken piece of plywood where the shots came out and in these striations I saw all sorts of things […] I said, “My God, this is a work of art”’ (PG 13). This method, like portraying the grotesque body and distorting the familiar, counters mainstream market forces that prize wholeness, physical integrity and traditional bourgeois notions of the creative process. Burroughs’s shotgun art best exemplifies his method of destroying to create. In these works, the shotgun blast literally deconstructs an intact, artificial object, in many cases plywood, stripping away the layers that compose it and bringing about several paradoxes. The ‘made’ shotgun ‘unmakes’ another ‘made’ item, putting everything out of context and rendering all indeterminate. A building material that has apparently lost its value has actually increased in value due to its destruction. Similarly, a shotgun, a ballistic instrument, now renders whole, though the wholeness is as an art object defined by its lack of wholeness (or by the fact that it is full of holes). A killing machine now gives life, albeit through an explosion. Though Burroughs claimed that he never would have pursued painting without shotguns, an essay that Burroughs published before the shotgun incident entitled ‘The Fall of Art’ suggests some foreshadowing of the idea. In this essay Burroughs foresees ‘exploding art…A self-destroying TV set, refrigerator, washing machine and electric stove going off, leaving a shambles of a gleaming modern apartment; the housewife’s dream goes up behind a barrier of shatterproof glass to shield the spectators’ (AM 61). In the future, Burroughs suggests, art will destroy the consumer’s paradise that post-World War II American industry promised to the suburban family and later to the world; ‘exploding art’ releases the creativity that the global consumer economy stifles. Individual works testify to the power to create by destroying and the horror and humor that arise from the effort (see Sobieszek 1996). Sore Shoulder, the first work of shotgun art created by accident, reveals that the networks of fiber that compose plywood can be beautiful in their decomposition. In subsequent pieces like Screaming Ghost and The Curse of Bast, paint cans were placed as targets before the plywood, rendering absurd, even malevolent, the process of painting—painting becomes target practice. In these works, the grotesque aspect of the shotgun art consists in the tension between the destruction of new plywood and its simultaneous rebirth as art. The effects of shotgun blasts can evoke terror, and the residue of the impact suggests the awesomeness and power that can render human flesh as vulnerable as the plywood here. The rent portrait of Nancy Reagan in Burroughs’s The Curse of Bast and the exploded image of the fashion model on the recto of Mink Mutiny emphasize the menacing element of shotgun art. In other cases, the word is rubbed out, so to speak, by affixing newspaper texts and images on the plywood, which the shotgun then explodes. However, the fanciful existence of the artwork itself and the shattered images of celebrities both balance and offset the terrifying power of the shotgun blast. A shotgun blast producing art that could be exhibited in a gallery or a museum seems odd, if not ludicrous to bourgeois culture. Yet Burroughs claims, ‘I want my painting to literally walk off the goddamned canvas, to become a creature and a very dangerous creature’ (PG 34–5). In Burroughs’s shotgun art as well as his other work, the grotesque resists being incorporated into market forces, as destruction by its nature removes that fetishized quality of commodities, revealing the guts of the completed products and thereby the process by which they have been created. Punk rock had been predicated on the impulse to destroy. Destruction and negation are hallmarks of the British punk ethos. ‘I wanna destroy passerby’, cries Johnny Rotten, taking the persona of the antichrist/anarchist. Marcus has interpreted the destructive impulse in punk as a reaction to global forces that left British youth with no future: ‘[T]he whole of received hegemonic propositions about the way the world was supposed to work comprised a fraud so complete and venal that it demanded to be destroyed beyond the powers of memory to recall its existence’ (1989:18). Punk negated all the lies that it could target: corporate rock, the celebrity system, hippies and the ‘love generation’, and Tory politics. Most importantly, the utter ugliness of punk negated its commercial potential, thereby freeing it to break images at will. From the debris of this destruction, anything was possible and everything was permitted. Though the British punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue was simple and intentionally sloppy anyway, publisher Mark Perry regularly defaced the magazine’s cover art with magic marker, defying consumers to purchase it. Working against the typewritten columns as well as the pictures, the magic marker traces blotted out words and made messages unintelligible. However, despite Perry’s efforts to destroy his own creation, sales increased rapidly after the first three issues. Chagrined at the prospect of popularity, Perry stopped publishing Sniffin’ Glue after the twelfth edition and in that issue’s editorial urged his readers to ‘STOP READING [Sniffin’ Glue] NOW AND BURN YOUR COPY’ (Perry 2000). Sniffin’ Glue, like British punk in general, in Marcus’s words, ‘was a moment in time that took shape as a language anticipating its own destruction’ (1989:82). To its many critics, economic and cultural globalization, and the standardized, homogenized commodities with which it gluts the marketplace and the mind, has wrought sufficient destruction through the inequality it creates, the international terrorism it breeds and the creativity it kills. Burroughs, as well as other artists of the grotesque, challenge globalization by reducing or eliminating the exchange value of its commodities. The ultimate effect is not the annihilation of the market, but its liberation from those hegemonic powers that seek not choice but compliance. Through his use of the grotesque in the form of disgusting bodies, distorted images and creative destruction, Burroughs smirks at efforts to make him cooperate. Shotgun cocked, Burroughs crouches in the golden toilet bowl on which the scion squats, ready to make art where the sun doesn’t shine. REFERENCESBakhtin, M. (1965) Rabelais and His World, Iswolsky, H. trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). Barber, B. (2001) Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine). Bataille, G. (1929) ‘The Big Toe’, IN Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, Stoekl, A. ed. and trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Bockris, V. (1981) With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, rev. edition (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996). Cassuto, L. (1997) The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press). Hebdige, D. (1988) Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London: Routledge). Kayser, W. (1968) The Grotesque in Art and Literature, Weisstein, U. trans. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith). Libretti, T. (1995) ‘“What a Dirty Way of Getting Clean”: The Grotesque in Proletarian Literature’, IN Literature and the Grotesque, Meyer, M. ed. (Amsterdam: Rodopi), pp. 171–93. Lydenberg, R. (1987) Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William Burroughs’ Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). Marcus, G. (1989) Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Nuttall, J. (1968) Bomb Culture (London: MacGibbon & Kee). Perry, M. (2000) Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory (London: Sanctuary). Ruskin, J. (1853) The Stones of Venice, vol. 3 (Boston: D. Estes, 1913). Savage, Jon (1992) England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s). Sobieszek, R. A. (1996) Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Thames and Hudson). Swift, J. (1729) ‘A Modest Proposal’, IN The Writings of Jonathan Swift, Greenberg, R. A. and Piper, W. B., eds (New York: Norton, 1973). Thomson, P. (1972) The Grotesque (London: Methuen). Retaking the Universe (William S.Burroughs in the Age of Globalization) Part 2: Writing, Sign, Instrument: Language and Technology/New World Ordure: Burroughs, Globalization and the Grotesque /Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh by Slavoj Žižek During a recent visit to California, I attended a party at a professor’s house with a Slovene friend, a heavy smoker. Late in the evening, my friend became desperate and politely asked the host if he could step out onto the veranda for a smoke. When the host (no less politely) said no, my friend proposed to step out onto the street, but even this was rejected by the host who claimed that such a public display of smoking might damage his reputation with his neighbors. But what really surprised me was that, after dinner, the host offered us soft drugs, and this kind of smoking went on without any problem— as if drugs were far less dangerous than cigarettes. The impasses of todays consumerism provide a clear case of the Lacanian distinction between pleasure and enjoyment: what Lacan calls “enjoyment” (jouissance) is a deadly excess rather than pleasure; its place is beyond the pleasure principle. In other words, the term plus-de-jouir (surplus- or excess-enjoyment) is a pleonasm, since enjoyment is in itself excessive, in contrast to pleasure, which is by definition moderate, regulated by a proper measure. We thus have two extremes: on the one hand, the enlightened hedonist who carefully calculates his pleasures to prolong his fun and avoid getting hurt; on the other hand, the jouisseur proper, ready to consummate his very existence in the deadly excess of enjoyment. Or, in terms of our society, on the one hand the consumerist calculating his pleasures, well protected from all kinds of harassment and threats to health; on the other, the drug addict (or smoker) bent on self-destruction. Enjoyment serves nothing, and the great effort of our contemporary hedonist-utilitarian “permissive” society is to incorporate this un(ac)countable excess into the field of (ac)counting. Along these lines, Lee Edelman has developed the notion of homosexuality as involving an ethics of “now” of unconditional fidelity to jouissance, of following the death drive by totally ignoring any reference to the future or engagement with the practical complex of worldly affairs. Homosexuality thus stands for the thorough acceptance of the negativity of the death drive, of withdrawal from reality into the Real of the “Night of the World.” Along these lines, Edelman opposes the radical ethics of homosexuality to the predominant obsession with posterity (that is, children): children are the “pathological” moment that binds us to pragmatic considerations and thus compels us to betray the radical ethics of jouissance. The first conclusion to be drawn from this is that we should reject the common-sense assumption according to which, in a hedonist- consumerist society, everyone has something to enjoy: the basic function of enlightened consumerist hedonism is, on the contrary, to deprive enjoyment of its excessive dimension, of its disturbing surplus, of the fact it serves nothing. Enjoyment is tolerated, solicited even, but on condition that it remains healthy, that it does not threaten our psychic or biological stability: chocolate yes, but fat-free; Coke yes, but diet; mayonnaise yes, but without cholesterol; sex yes, but safe sex. We are here in the domain of what Lacan calls the discourse of University, as opposed to the discourse of the Master: the Master goes to the end in his consumption, unconstrained by petty utilitarian considerations (which is why there is a certain formal homology between the traditional aristocratic master and a drug addict focused on his deadly enjoyment), while the consumerist’s pleasures are regulated by scientific knowledge propagated by the University discourse. The decaffeinated enjoyment we thus obtain is a semblance of enjoyment, not its Real, and it is in this sense that Lacan talks about the imitation of enjoyment in the discourse of the University. One prototype for this discourse is the multiplicity of articles in popular magazines advocating sex as good for our health: sexual activity works like jogging, strengthening the heart, relaxing our tensions—even kissing is good for our health. A similar celebration of desexualized vitality abounds in Stalinism. Although the total mobilization during the first five-year plan tended to oppose sexuality as the last domain of bourgeois resistance, this did not prevent it from trying to recuperate sexual energy in order to rein vigorate the struggle for socialism: in the early 1930s, a variety of tonics were widely advertised in the Soviet media, with names like “Spermin-pharmakon,” “Spermol,” and “Sekar fluid— Extractum testiculorum. ”Similarly, in todays Western societies, we see the proliferation of caffeine drinks supposed to give a powerful charge of “energy” (Red Bull, etcetera). Lacan gives us a precise insight into how the paternal prohibition functions: “In fact, the image of the ideal Father is a neurotics fantasy. Beyond the Mother ... stands out the image of a father who would turn a blind eye to desires. This marks—more than it reveals—the true function of the Father, which is fundamentally to unite (and not to oppose) a desire to the Law.” While prohibiting his son s escapades, the father discreetly not only ignores and tolerates them, but even solicits them—as with the Catholic Church, which today turns a blind eye to pedophilia. We should link this insight to Lacans critique of Hegel’s notion that it is the Master who enjoys, while the servant works, being compelled to renounce enjoyment: for Lacan, on the contrary, the only enjoyments are the little bits left to the servant by the Master when he turns a blind eye to the servant’s little transgressions: “Jouissance comes easy to the slave, and it leaves work in serfdom.” An anecdote about Catherine the Great illustrates the point. On being informed that her servants were stealing wine and food behind her back, even going so far as to mock her, she just smiled, aware that occasionally dropping crumbs of enjoyment for them kept them in their position as servants. The servant’s belief is that he only gets little crumbs of enjoyment, while the Master enjoys fully—in reality, however, the only enjoyment is the servant’s. It is in this sense that the Father as the agent of prohibition or the law sustains desire or pleasure: there is no direct access to enjoymerit since its very space is opened up by the blanks of the Father’s controlling gaze. A negative proof for this constitutive role of the Father in carving out the space for a viable enjoyment can be found in the deadlock of todays permissiveness, where the master or expert no longer prohibits enjoyment but enjoins it (“sex is healthy,” etcetera), thereby effectively sabotaging it. Indeed, as Freud once remarked to his close friend Otto Bauer, a key figure of Austrian Social Democracy (and the brother of Ida, the legendary “Dora”): “Do not try and make men happy, they do not wish happiness. What, then, is the status of the Real of jouissance? Is it just a presupposed virtual or fantasmatic point (like the Master’s jouissance presupposed by the servant) or a direct Real that threatens to overwhelm us, destroying the symbolic texture? We should maintain this “undecidability,” in no way reducing the Real of jouissance to a fantasmatic point of reference: the Real of jouissance effectively overwhelms the subject in psychosis. The only way to sustain the Real when it gets too close—that is, the only way to avoid psychosis—is to fictionalize it. Today, the threat of the over-proximity of the Real appears in the guise of two exceptions in the happy universe of healthy enjoyment: cigarettes and, up to a point, drugs. For different (mostly ideological) reasons, it proved impossible to “sublate” the pleasure of smoking into a healthy and useful pursuit: smoking remains a lethal addiction, a feature that obliterates all its other characteristics (it can help me relax, socialize more easily...). The strengthening of the prohibition on smoking is easily discernible in the gradual changes made to the obligatory warnings on cigarette packets: years ago, it was usually a neutral expert statement like the surgeon general’s warning: “Smoking may seriously damage your health.” More recently, the tone has become more and more aggressive, shifting from the University discourse to the Master’s direct injunction: “Smoking kills!”—a clear warning that excess enjoyment is lethal; furthermore, the warning is printed larger and larger on the packs and accompanied by graphic photos. The best indicator of this change in the status of smoking is, as usual, Hollywood. After the gradual dissolution of the Hays code from the late 1950s onwards, when all taboos (on homosexuality, explicit sex, drugs, and so on) were suspended, one taboo gradually imposed itself as a new prohibition, a kind of replacement for the multiple prohibitions of the old code: smoking. Back in the classic Hollywood films of the 1930s and ’40s, smoking on screen was not only totally normal, it even functioned as one of the great seduction techniques (recall, in To Have and Have Not, Lauren Bacall asking Humphrey Bogart for a light). Today, the only people who smoke on screen are Arab terrorists, and assorted other criminals or anti-heroes, and the possibility of digitally erasing cigarettes from classic movies has even been discussed. This new prohibition itself indicates a broader shift in the status of ethics: where the Hays code focused on ideology, enforcing sexual and social codes, the new ethics focuses on health: the bad is what threatens our health and well-being. Symptomatic here is the ambiguous role of the “electronic cigarette,” which functions like sugarless sugar: an electrical device that simulates tobacco smoking by producing an inhaled mist with the physical sensation, appearance, and often the flavor and nicotine content of inhaled tobacco smoke, though without its odor, and apparently without (most of) its health risks. Most e-cigarettes are self-contained cylindrical devices the size of a ballpoint pen, designed to resemble actual cigarettes or cigars. The e-cigarette is proving difficult to classify and to regulate. Is it itself a drug? A medical product? Some airlines, for instance, have banned them because they display “addictive behavior” that may upset other passengers; others will offer them for sale during the flight. But who is this Other whose addictive behavior—in short, whose display of excessive enjoyment—disturbs us so much? It is none other than what, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is called the Neighbor. A neighbor by definition harasses, and “harassment” is another of those words that, although it seems to refer to a clearly defined fact, functions in a deeply ambiguous way and perpetrates an ideological mystification. What is the inner logic of the standard discourse regarding sexual harassment? The very asymmetry of seduction—the imbalance between desire and its object—is rejected. At every stage in an erotic relationship, only contractual reciprocity with mutual agreement is allowed. In this way, sexual intercourse is desexualized and becomes a “deal,” in the sense of a market exchange of equivalents between equal and free partners, where the object of exchange is pleasure. The theoretical expression of this turn to pleasure is marked by the shift from Freud/Lacan to Foucault: from sexuality and desire to desexualized pleasures striving to reach the extreme of the raw Real. The explosive expansion of pornography in the digital media is exemplary of this de-sexualization of sex. The promise is “always more sex,” to show it all, more and more of the raw Real, from extreme fisting (a favorite of Foucault’s) to snuff movies, but all it delivers is an endlessly reproduced void and a pseudo-satisfaction. The only satisfaction one can get from this reduction of sexuality to a gynecological display of the interaction of sexual organs is an idiotic masturbatory jouissance. Within such a libidinal economy, the relationship to the Other is gradually replaced by what the late Lacan baptized with the neologism les lathouses—consumerist object-gadgets that captivate the libido with the promise of delivering excessive pleasure, but which actually reproduce only the lack itself. A couple of decades ago, a charming beer advertisement was shown on British TV. Its first part staged the well-known fairy-tale scene: a girl walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, kisses it, upon which, of course, the frog turns miraculously into a handsome young man. The story did not end there however: the young man then embraces and kisses the girl, who promptly turns into a bottle of beer, which the man holds triumphantly in his hand. For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signaled by the kiss) turns an ugly frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence; for the man, the point is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire (the objet petit a). The unexpected reversal here thus perfectly exemplifies the shift from neighbor to lathouse. Likewise, the rise of political correctness and the increase in interpersonal violence represent two sides of the same coin. Jean-Claude Milner has argued that insofar as the basic premise of political correctness is the reduction of sexuality to a contractual mutual consent, the gay rights movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts that stipulate extreme forms of sadomasochistic sex (treating a person like a dog on a lead, slave-trading, torture, even consensual killing). In such practices, the market freedom of the contract sublates itself: slave-trading becomes the ultimate assertion of freedom. It is as if the motif of “Kant with Sade” becomes reality in an unexpected way. Two things are thus clear. First, if Thomas de Quincey had to rewrite the opening lines of his famous essay Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts today, he would undoubtedly change the final word (procrastination): “If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and smoking in public.” Second, the underlying problem here is that of loving ones neighbor—as usual, G. K. Chesterton hit the nail on the head: “The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” So what happens when these problematic neighbors strike back? Although the UK riots of August 2011 were triggered by the suspicious death of Mark Duggan, it is generally accepted that they expressed a deeper unease—but of what kind? Similar to the riots in the Paris suburbs in 2005, the UK protesters had no message to deliver. The contrast with the massive student demonstrations of November 2010, which also turned violent, is clear. The students had a message—the rejection of the governments higher education reforms. This is why it is difficult to conceive of the 2011 riots in Marxist terms, as indicative of an emerging revolutionary subject; much more appropriate here is the Hegelian notion of the “rabble”—referring to those outside the organized social sphere, prevented from participating in social production, who are able to express their discontent only in the form of “irrational” outbursts of destructive violence, or what Hegel called “abstract negativity.” Perhaps this is the hidden truth of Hegel, of his political thought: the more a society conforms to a well-organized rational state, the more the abstract negativity of “irrational” violence returns. We were told that the events of 1989-91—the disintegration of the Communist regimes—signaled the end of ideology. The era of grand ideological projects that inevitably ended in totalitarian catastrophe was over, as we entered a new era of pragmatic rational politics, and so forth. However, if the commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era has any sense at all, it is here, in these ongoing outbursts of violence, that it becomes discernible. During the UK riots of 2011, no particular demands were made by the protestors: what we had was a zero-level protest, a violent act which demands nothing. There was an irony in watching the sociologists, intellectuals, and commentators trying to understand and to help. Trying desperately to translate the protests back into their familiar language, they only succeeded in obfuscating the key enigma the riots presented. The protesters, although effectively underprivileged and de facto excluded, were in no sense living on the edge of starvation or reduced to the level of bare survival. People in much more terrible material straits, even in conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organize themselves into political agents with clear agendas. The fact that the protests had no program is thus itself a fact to be interpreted, one that tells us a great deal about our ideologico- political predicament: what kind of universe do we inhabit that can celebrate itself as a society of choice, but in which the only alternative available to an enforced democratic consensus is a form of blind acting out? The sad fact that opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a coherent utopian project, but only takes the form of meaningless outburst, is a grave indictment of our epoch. What function does our celebrated freedom of choice serve when the only choice is effectively between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence? Alain Badiou has claimed that we live in a social space that is progressively experienced as “worldless”: within such a space, meaningless violence is the only form protest can take. Even Nazi anti-Semitism opened up a world, however ghastly: it described its situation by positing an enemy, the “Jewish conspiracy”; it named a goal and the means of achieving it. Nazism disclosed reality in a way that allowed its subjects to acquire a global cognitive map, which included a space for their meaningful engagement. Perhaps it is here that we should locate one of the main dangers of capitalism. Although capitalism is global,encompassing the whole world, it sustains a stricto sensu “worldless” ideological constellation, depriving the vast majority of people of any meaningful cognitive orientation. Capitalism is the first socioeconomic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning. There is, after all, no global “capitalist worldview,” no “capitalist civilization” proper. The fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism’s global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without- meaning, as the real of the global market mechanism. This is why both conservative and liberal reactions to the UK riots clearly missed the mark. The conservative reaction was predictable: there is no justification for such vandalism, all necessary means to restore order must be used, and what is needed to prevent further explosions of this kind is not more tolerance and social intervention but more discipline, hard work and a sense of responsibility. What is false in this account is not only that it neglects the desperate social situation that drives young people to such violent outbursts, but, perhaps more important, the way those outbursts echo the subterranean premises of conservative ideology itself. When, back in the 1990s, the British Conservative Party launched its infamous Back to Basics campaign, its obscene supplement was clearly indicated by Norman Tebbitt, “never shy about exposing the dirty secrets of the Conservative unconscious”: “man is not just a social but also a territorial animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.”10 This, then, is what Back to Basics was really about: the reassertion of the barbaric “basic instincts” lurking beneath the semblance of civilized bourgeois society. And do we not encounter in the recent violent outbursts these same basic instincts— not of the lower underprivileged strata, but of the hegemonic capitalist ideology itself? Even further back, in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of “repressive desublimation” to explain the “sexual revolution”: human drives can be desublimated, deprived of their civilized coating, and still retain their “repressive” character—is not this kind of “repressive desublimation” what we see on British streets today? Not men reduced to “natural beasts,” but the historically specific “natural beast” produced by capitalist ideology itself, the zero-level of the capitalist subject. In Seminar XVIII (Le savoir du psychanalyste, 1970-71, unpublished), Lacan plays with the idea of a specific capitalist discourse (or discourse of the capitalist) that is the same as the discourse of the Master, but with the first (left) couple exchanging places: $ occupies the place of the agent and the Master-Signifier the place of truth: $ S2 S1 a The connecting lines remain the same as in the Master’s discourse ($—a, S1—S2), but they run diagonally: while the agent is the same as in the discourse of the Hysteric, the (divided) subject, it does not address itself to the Master, but to the surplus-enjoyment, the “product” of capitalist circulation. As in the discourse of the Master, the “other” is here the Servant’s Knowledge (or, increasingly, scientific knowledge), dominated by the true Master, capital itself. The UK’s urban violence thus cannot be accounted for merely by poverty and a lack of horizons, or the dissolution of the family and other social links. As to the form of subjectivity that fits this constellation, we might begin with “The Stranger,” the famous prose poem by Baudelaire: Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father, Your mother, your sister, or your brother? I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother. Your friends? Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known. Your country? I do not know in what latitude it lies. Beauty? I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal. Gold? I hate it as you hate God. Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger? I love the clouds ... the clouds ... that pass ... up there ... up there ... the wonderful clouds! Does this “enigmatical man” not provide the portrait of an internet geek? Alone in front of the screen, he has neither father nor mother, neither country nor god—all he needs is a digital cloud to which his internet device is linked. The final outcome of such a position is, of course, that the subject itself turns into “a cloud in pants,” avoiding sexual contact as too intrusive. In 1915, Vladimir Mayakovsky entered a train carriage in which the only other occupant was a young woman; to put her at ease he introduced himself by saying, “I am not a man but a cloud in pants.” As the words left his lips he realized the phrase was perfect for a poem and went on to write his first masterpiece, “A Cloud in Pants”: No longer a man with a mission, something wet and tender — a cloud in pants How, then, does such a “cloud in pants” have sex? An ad in the United Airlines in-flight magazine begins with a suggestion: “Maybe its time to outsource ... your dating life.” It goes on: “People hire professionals to handle so many aspects of their lives, so why not use a professional to help you find someone special? We are matchmaking professionals—this is what we do day in and day out.” After outsourcing manual work (and much of the pollution) to Third World countries, after outsourcing (most) torture to dictatorships (whose torturers were probably trained by US or Chinese specialists), after outsourcing our political life to administrative experts (who are obviously less and less up to the task—see the morons who compete in Republican Party primaries)—why not take this process to its logical conclusion and consider outsourcing sex itself? Why burden ourselves with the effort of seduction with all its potential embarrassments? After a woman and I agree to have sex, each of us need only designate a younger stand-in, so that while they make love (or, more precisely, while the two of us make love through them), we can have a quiet drink and conversation and then retire to our own quarters to rest or to read a good book. After such disengagement, the only way to reconnect with reality is, of course, through raw violence. The left-liberal response to the riots, no less predictably, was to stick to their mantra about neglected social programs and integration efforts, the failure of which has deprived the younger generation of immigrants of any decent economic and social prospects. Instead of indulging in conservative revenge fantasies, we should make the effort to understand the deeper causes of their violent outbursts: can we even imagine what it means to be a young man living in a poor and racially mixed area, a priori suspected and harassed by the police, surrounded by destitution and broken families, not only unemployed but often unemployable, with no hope for the future? The moment we take all this into account, the reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear—supposedly. The problem with this account is that it merely lists the objective conditions for the riots, ignoring the subjective dimension: to riot is to make a subjective statement, implicitly to declare how one relates to ones objective conditions, how one subjectivizes them. We live in an era of cynicism in which we can easily imagine a protester who, having been caught looting and burning and pressed for the reasons for his violence, will suddenly start to talk like a social worker, sociologist or social psychologist, citing diminished social mobility, rising economic insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood. He knows what he is doing, but he does it nonetheless, as in the famous “Gee, Officer Krupke” song from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (lyrics by Stephen Sondheim), which contains the line “Juvenile delinquency is purely a social disease”: We never had the love That every child oughta get We ain’t no delinquents Were misunderstood Deep down inside us there is good ... My daddy beats my mommy My mommy clobbers me My grandpa is a commie My grandma pushes tea My sister wears a mustache My brother wears a dress Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess ... This boy don’t need a couch He needs a useful career Society’s played him a terrible trick And sociologically he’s sick ... They tell me get a job Like be a soda jerker Which means I’d be a slob It’s not I’m antisocial I’m only anti-work Such subjects do not simply represent a social disease, they declare themselves to be incarnations of one, ironically staging different accounts of their predicament (just how a social worker, a psychologist, a judge would describe it). Consequently, it is meaningless to ponder which of the two reactions to the riots, conservative or liberal, is worse: as Stalin would have put it, they are both worse, and this includes the warning voiced by both sides about the real danger of these outbursts residing in the easily predictable racist reaction of the “silent majority.” This reaction (which should absolutely not be dismissed as simply reactionary) already took place in the guise of a “tribal” activity of its own, as local communities (Turkish, Afro-Caribbean, Sikh...) quickly formed their own vigilante units to protect their hard-earned property. Here, too, we should reject the injunctions regarding which side to take in this conflict: are the small shop-keepers defending the petty bourgeoisie against a genuine if violent protest against the system, or are they representatives of the genuine working class resisting the forces of social disintegration? The protesters violence was almost exclusively directed against their own. The cars burned and the stores looted were not those of richer neighborhoods, they were the hard-won acquisitions of the very stratum from which the protesters originated. The sad truth of the situation lies in this conflict between two poles of the underprivileged: those who still succeed in functioning within the system and those who are too frustrated to go on doing so and are only able to strike out at the other pole of their own community. The conflict that sustains the riots is thus not simply a conflict between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, a conflict between non-society and society, between those who have nothing to lose and those who have everything to lose, between those without a stake in their community and those whose stakes are the greatest. But why were the protesters pushed towards this kind of violence? Zygmunt Bauman was on the right track here when he characterized the riots as acts of “defective and disqualified consumers.” More than anything else, the riots were a consumerist carnival of destruction, an expression of acquisitive desire violently enacted when unable to realize itself in the “proper” way (by shopping). As such, of course, the riots also contain a moment of genuine protest, a kind of ironic reply to the consumerist ideology by which we are bombarded in our daily lives: “You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the possibility of doing so properly—so here we are doing it the only way open to us!” The violence thus, in a sense, staged the truth of our “post-ideological society,” displaying in a painfully palpable way the material force of ideology. The problem with the riots was not their violence as such, but the fact that it was not truly self-assertive— in Nietzschean terms, it was reactive, not active, impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force, envy masked as a triumphant carnival. One danger is that religion will come to fill this void and restore meaning. That is to say, the riots need to be situated in the series they form with another type of violence perceived by the liberal majority as a threat to our way of life: terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. In both instances, violence and counter-violence are caught up in a deadly vicious circle, each generating the very forces it tries to combat. In both cases, we are dealing with blind passages à lacte, where the recourse to violence is an implicit admission of impotence. The difference is that, in contrast to the Paris or UK riots conceived as “zero-level” protests, violent outbursts that demanded nothing, terrorist attacks are carried out on behalf of the absolute Meaning provided by religion. But then there are the Arab uprisings. Do they not offer an example of a collective act of resistance that avoids this false alternative between self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism? Slavoj Žižek/THE YEAR OF DREAMING DANGEROUSLY/Welcome to the Desert of Post-Ideology by H. P. Lovecraft The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”, and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data. This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution. The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head. Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone. The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part. And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting. This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of mythmaker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it. On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more. So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tomtoms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through pale undergrowth beyond the endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before. The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that batwinged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before d’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents. Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror. In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire. It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition. Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse. Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than Negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith. They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him. Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China. Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them. These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals. Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return. In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and the high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.” Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb. The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox. That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man. Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America, I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting. Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the weird impressions. He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone— whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like, but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises. The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell. One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a Negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now. The Call of Cthulhu/H. P. Lovecraft/Chapter 2: The Tale of Inspector Legrasse by H. P. Lovecraft “Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival ... a survival of a hugely remote period when ... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity ... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds ...” — Algernon Blackwood The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things— in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him. My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking Negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder. As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind. The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations. Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background. The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretense to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed “CTHULHU CULT” in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed “1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.”, and the second, “Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A.A.S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb’s Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott Elliot’s Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer’s Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outr´ e mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925. The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself “psychically hypersensitive”, but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely “queer”. Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless. On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host’s archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon. It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox’s imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly out-of-place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters “Cthulhu” and “R’lyeh”. On March 23rd, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to be in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing “miles high” which walked or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object, but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young man’s subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but his whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder. On April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox’s malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions. Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes gave me much material for thought—so much, in fact, that only the ingrained scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his request seems to have been varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average people in society and business—New England’s traditional “salt of the earth”—gave an almost completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March 23rd and April 2nd—the period of young Wilcox’s delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal. It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor’s delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which the note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the objects of the professor’s questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach them. The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some “glorious fulfillment” which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome at this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22-23. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older matters mentioned by the professor. The Call of Cthulhu/H. P. Lovecraft/Chapter 1: The Horror in Clay by H. P. Lovecraft If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelfpaper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s research. I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend had wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp. Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows: MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow. One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea. Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of Strange Experience. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to Follow. The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N.Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34◦ 210, W. Longitude 152◦ 170 with one living and one dead man aboard. The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern. This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the twomasted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49◦ 510 W. Longitude 128◦ 340, encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting. Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto. This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle? March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line— the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23rd the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this— and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul. That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address. After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what Old Castro had told Legrasse about the Great Ones; “They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.” Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reembarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more. He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution. I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton. Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air. Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47◦ 90, W. Longitude 126◦ 430 come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough! I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description. Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality. Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity. Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away. It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable. Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset. The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness. Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight. Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and ˚Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water. Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously. But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squidhead with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam. That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus. Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories. That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives. Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye. The Call of Cthulhu/H. P. Lovecraft/Chapter 3: The Madness from the Sea Axiom I. The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus. Proposition I. This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama, and games. Georges Dumézil, in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology, has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the magician-king and the jurist-priest. Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer. Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposition term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violent and the calm, the quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated, the “bond” and the “pact,” etc. But their opposition is only relative; they function as a pair, in alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or constituted in themselves a sovereign unity. “At once antithetical and complementary, necessary to one another and consequently without hostility, lacking a mythology of conflict: a specification on any one level automatically calls forth a homologous specification on another. The two together exhaust the field of the function.” They are the principal elements of a State apparatus that proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions, and forms a milieu of interiority. It is a double articulation that makes the State apparatus into a stratum. It will be noted that war is not contained within this apparatus. Either the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war— either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, “seizes” and “binds,” preventing all combat—or, the State acquires an army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of a military function. As for the war machine in itself, it seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere. Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna no less than to Mitral. He can no more be reduced to one or the other than he can constitute a third of their kind. Rather, he is like a pure and immeasurable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis. He unties the bond just as he betrays the pact. He brings a furor to bear against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus. He bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incomprehensible cruelty at times, but at others of unequaled pity as well (because he unties bonds...). He bears witness, above all, to other relations with women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between “states”: a veritable becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies outside dualities of terms as well as correspondences between relations. In every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus. Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function. “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomas of Go against the State of chess, nomas against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere...). Another justice, another movement, another space-time. “They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext...” “In some way that is incomprehensible they have pushed right into the capital. At any rate, here they are; it seems that every morning there are more of them.” Luc de Heusch analyzes a Bantu myth that leads us to the same schema: Nkongolo, an indigenous emperor and administrator of public works, a man of the public and a man of the police, gives his half-sisters to the hunter Mbidi, who assists him and then leaves. Mbidi’s son, a man of secrecy, joins up with his father, only to return from the outside with that inconceivable thing, an army. He kills Nkongolo and proceeds to build a new State. “Between” the magical-despotic State and the juridical State containing a military institution, we see the flash of the war machine, arriving from without. From the standpoint of the State, the originality of the man of war, his eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity, deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin. Dumézil analyzes the three “sins” of the warrior in the Indo-European tradition: against the king, against the priest, against the laws originating in the State (for example, a sexual transgression that compromises the distribution of men and women, or even a betrayal of the laws of war as instituted by the State). The warrior is in the position of betraying everything, including the function of the military, or of understanding nothing. It happens that historians, both bourgeois and Soviet, will follow this negative tradition and explain how Genghis Khan understood nothing: he “didn’t understand” the phenomenon of the city. An easy thing to say. The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking. What complicates everything is that this extrinsic power of the war machine tends, under certain circumstances, to become confused with one of the two heads of the State apparatus. Sometimes it is confused with the magic violence of the State, at other times with the State’s military institution. For instance, the war machine invents speed and secrecy; but there is all the same a certain speed and a certain secrecy that pertain to the State, relatively, secondarily. So there is a great danger of identifying the structural relation between the two poles of political sovereignty, and the dynamic interrelation of these two poles, with the power of war. Dumézil cites the lineage of the Roman kings: there is a Romulus-Numa relation that recurs throughout a series, with variants and an alternation between these two types of equally legitimate rulers; but there is also a relation with an “evil king,” Tullus Hostilius, Tarquinius Superbus, an upsurge of the warrior as a disquieting and illegitimate character.8 Shakespeare’s kings could also be invoked: even violence, murders, and perversion do not prevent the State lineage from producing “good” kings; but a disturbing character like Richard III slips in, announcing from the outset his intention to reinvent a war machine and impose its line (deformed, treacherous and traitorous, he claims a “secret close intent” totally different from the conquest of State power, and another --an other—relation with women). In short, whenever the irruption of war power is confused with the line of State domination, everything gets muddled; the war machine can then be understood only through the categories of the negative, since nothing is left that remains outside the State. But, returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine is seen to be of another species, of another nature, of another origin. One would have to say that it is located between the two heads of the State, between the two articulations, and that it is necessary in order to pass from one to the other. But “between” the two, in that instant, even ephemeral, if only a flash, it proclaims its own irreducibility. The State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will continually cause it problems. This explains the mistrust States have toward their military institutions, in that the military institution inherits an extrinsic war machine. Karl von Clausewitz has a general sense of this situation when he treats the flow of absolute war as an Idea that States partially appropriate according to their political needs, and in relation to which they are more or less good “conductors.” Trapped between the two poles of political sovereignty, the man of war seems outmoded, condemned, without a future, reduced to his own fury, which he turns against himself. The descendants of Hercules, Achilles, then Ajax, have enough strength left to proclaim their independence from Agamemnon, a man of the old State. But they are powerless when it comes to Ulysses, a man of the nascent modern State, the first man of the modern State. And it is Ulysses who inherits Achilles’ arms, only to convert them to other uses, submitting them to the laws of the State— not Ajax, who is condemned by the goddess he defied and against whom he sinned. No one has portrayed the situation of the man of war, at once eccentric and condemned, better than Kleist. In Penthesilea, Achilles is already separated from his power: the war machine has passed over to the Amazons, a Stateless woman-people whose justice, religion, and loves are organized uniquely in a war mode. Descendants of the Scythians, the Amazons spring forth like lightning, “between” the two States, the Greek and the Trojan. They sweep away everything in their path. Achilles is brought before his double, Penthesilea. And in his ambiguous struggle, Achilles is unable to prevent himself from marrying the war machine, or from loving Penthesilea, and thus from betraying Agamemnon and Ulysses at the same time. Nevertheless, he already belongs enough to the Greek State that Penthesilea, for her part, cannot enter the passional relation of war with him without herself betraying the collective law of her people, the law of the pack that prohibits “choosing” the enemy and entering into one-to-one relationships or binary distinctions. Throughout his work, Kleist celebrates the war machine, setting it against the State apparatus in a struggle that is lost from the start. Doubtless Arminius heralds a Germanic war machine that breaks with the imperial order of alliances and armies, and stands forever opposed to the Roman State. But the Prince of Homburg lives only in a dream and stands condemned for having reached victory in disobedience of the law of the State. As for Kohlhaas, his war machine can no longer be anything more than banditry. Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State triumphs to be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disciplined, military organ of the State apparatus, or to turn against itself to become a double suicide machine for a solitary man and a solitary woman? Goethe and Hegel, State thinkers both, see Kleist as a monster, and Kleist has lost from the start. Why is it, then, that the most uncanny modernity lies with him? It is because the elements of his work are secrecy, speed and affect.” And in Kleist the secret is no longer a content held within a form of interiority; rather, it becomes a form, identified with the form of exteriority that is always external to itself. Similarly, feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a “subject,” to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects and these affects are so many instances of the becoming-woman, the becoming-animal of the warrior (the bear, she-dogs). Affects transpierce the body like arrows, they are weapons of war. The deterritorialization velocity of affect. Even dreams (Homburg’s, Pentheselea’s) are externalized, by a system of relays and plug-ins, extrinsic linkages belonging to the war machine. Broken rings. This element of exteriority—which dominates everything, which Kleist invents in literature, which he is the first to invent—will give time a new rhythm: an endless succession of catatonic episodes or fainting spells, and flashes or rushes. Catatonia is- “This affect is too strong for me,” and a flash is: “The power of this affect sweeps me away,” so that the Self (Moi) is now nothing more than a character whose actions and emotions are desubjectified, perhaps even to the point of death. Such is Kleist’s personal formula: a succession of nights of madness and catatonic freezes in which no subjective interiority remains There is much of the East in Kleist: the Japanese fighter, interminably still who then makes a move too quick to see. The Go player. Many things in modern art come from Kleist. Goethe and Hegel are old men next to Kleist. Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State? Is the war machine already overtaken, condemned, appropriated as part of the same process whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorphosis, affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself? whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorphosis, affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself? Originally appearing in A Thousand Plateaus Translated by Brian Massumi
by Anthony Enns
In January 1953, William S. Burroughs traveled to South America in search of yagé, a drug he hoped would allow him to establish a telepathic link with the native tribes. He documented this trip in a series of letters to Allen Ginsberg which he wrote on typewriters rented by the hour in Bogotà and Lima and which he eventually published as a book ten years later. Critics have interpreted this period as a seminal point in Burroughs’s career, largely due to the fact that the transcriptions of his drug experiences became the starting point for Naked Lunch. However, this experience also seems significant because it reveals Burroughs’s desire to achieve a primitive, pre-literate state—a goal which remained central to his work, but which later manifested in his manipulations of media technologies. Burroughs’s work thus offers a perfect illustration of Marshall McLuhan’s claim that the electric age would effect a return to tribal ways of thinking: ‘[S]ince the telegraph and the radio, the globe has contracted, spatially, into a single large village. Tribalism is our only resource since the electro-magnetic discovery’ (1962:219). And Burroughs’s rented typewriters seem to stand somewhere between these two worlds, as he used them to translate his primitive/mythic experiences into a printed book, a commodity more appropriate to Western culture and the civilized world of ‘typographic man’.
In this chapter, I argue that the representations of writing machines in Burroughs’s work, as well as his manipulations of writing machines in his working methods, demonstrate the effects of the electric media environment on subjectivity, as well as its broader impact on the national and global level. I further argue that McLuhan’s theories provide an ideal context for understanding the relationship between media, subjectivity, and globalization in Burroughs’s work, because they explain how the impact of the electric media environment on human consciousness is inherently linked to a wider array of social processes whose effects can be witnessed on both mental and geopolitical states. McLuhan and Burroughs were also contemporaries, and there is ample evidence that they drew ideas from one another’s work. McLuhan, for example, was the first critic to note that Burroughs’s novels effectively replicate the experience of the electric media environment (1964a:517), and he explicitly borrowed the term ‘mosaic’ from Naked Lunch to describe the format of television programming (1964b:204). In the original, unpublished version of The Third Mind, which Burroughs and Brion Gysin assembled from 1964 to 1965, Burroughs also included a paragraph from McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, which claimed that electric media technologies were producing new mental states by releasing the civilized world from the visual emphasis of print (McLuhan 1962:183). However, despite the fact that Burroughs was clearly influenced by McLuhan, he also distanced himself from the overt optimism of McLuhan’s ‘global village’, thus avoiding the problem of technological determinism. In other words, rather than claiming that the electric media environment would automatically improve the human condition by enabling a greater degree of involvement and democracy, Burroughs repeatedly emphasized that this possibility was dependent on our ability to take control of the media. Burroughs’s representations and manipulations of writing machines thus prefigure much of the contemporary work concerning the potential uses of the Internet and the worldwide web as either corporate environments or new tools of democracy.
WRITING MACHINES AND THE ELECTRIC MEDIA ENVIRONMENT
Although several critics have already discussed Burroughs’s work in terms of the impact of media on subjectivity, these discussions generally focus on electric media technologies such as sound and film recording, and they often overlook mechanical machines like the typewriter. In her book How We Became Posthuman, for example, N. Katherine Hayles examines the impact of media on subjectivity in The Ticket that Exploded through Burroughs’s use of sound recording technology. She argues that Burroughs’s novel represents the tape recorder as a metaphor for the human body, which has been programmed with linguistic ‘pre-recordings’ that ‘function as parasites ready to take over the organism’ (1999:211). She also points out that the tape recorder subverts the disciplinary control of language by externalizing the mind’s interior monologue, ‘recording it on tape and subjecting the recording to various manipulations’, or by producing new words ‘made by the machine itself’ (1999:211). These manipulations reveal the ways in which electric media are capable of generating texts without the mediation of consciousness, thus enabling ‘new kinds of subjectivities’ (1999:217). Hayles therefore suggests that information technologies, for Burroughs, represent the threat of language to control and mechanize the body; at the same time, they can be employed as potential tools for subverting those same disciplinary forces.
Hayles’s conclusions could be amplified, however, by also examining Burroughs’s use of writing machines, which play a larger role in his work and in his working method. Hayles notes, for example, that Burroughs performed some of the tape recorder experiments he describes in The Ticket that Exploded, such as his attempts to externalize his sub-vocal speech or his experiments with ‘inching tape’, which are collected in the album Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, but even she admits that ‘paradoxically, I found the recording less forceful as a demonstration of Burroughs’s theories than his writing’ because ‘the aurality of his prose elicits a greater response than the machine productions it describes and instantiates’ (1999:216). This paradox is resolved, however, if one considers the typewriter as Burroughs’s primary tool for manipulating and subverting the parasitical ‘word’, and thus as the essential prototype for many of his theoretical media interventions. Throughout his life, Burroughs repeatedly emphasized that he was dependent on the typewriter and was incapable of writing without one: ‘I can hardly [write] with the old hand’ (Bockris 1981:1). Burroughs once attempted to use a tape recorder for composition, but this experiment proved to be a failure: ‘In the first place, talking and writing are quite different. So far as writing goes I do need a typewriter. I have to write it down and see it rather than talk it’ (Bockris 1981:6). When giving advice to young writers, Burroughs was also fond of quoting Sinclair Lewis: ‘If you want to be a writer, learn to type’ (AM 36). James Grauerholz notes that in 1950, Burroughs himself wrote his first book, Junky, ‘longhand, on lined paper tablets’, which were then typed up by Alice Jeffreys, the wife of a friend; however, Burroughs was soon ‘disappointed with Jeffreys’ work on the manuscripts […] which he felt she had overcorrected, so he bought a typewriter and learned to type, with four fingers: the index and middle finger of each hand’ (Grauerholz 1998:40). From the very beginning of his career, therefore, Burroughs was aware of the influence of writing technologies on the act of writing itself, and all of his subsequent works were mediated by the typewriter. This machine thus became a privileged site where the effects of media technologies were both demonstrated and manipulated.
The notion that the typewriter is inherently linked to the electric media environment—and, by extension, the digital media environment—has also become a popular theme in contemporary media studies. Friedrich Kittler, for example, argues that there was a rupture at the end of the nineteenth century when writing was suddenly seen as deficient and was stripped of its ability to store acoustic and optical information, resulting in their separation into three different media technologies: gramophone, film and typewriter (1999:14). Kittler also claims that the typewriter ‘unlinks hand, eye, and letter’, thus replicating the disembodying effects of electric media technologies (1990:195), and that the ultimate impact of this separation is that ‘the act of writing stops being an act […] produced by the grace of a human subject’ (1999:203–4). Scott Bukatman similarly points out that ‘[w]hat first characterizes typing as an act of writing is an effect of disembodiment’ (1993:634), and he extends this argument to the digital realm by suggesting that the typewriter ‘produces an information space divorced from the body: a proto-cyberspace’ (1993:635).
Burroughs’s work repeatedly illustrates the notion that writing machines have an effect on subjectivity by mediating the act of writing, and writers are repeatedly described as disembodied agents, ‘recording instruments’, or even ‘soft typewriters’, who simply transcribe and store written information. While writing Naked Lunch, for example, Burroughs claimed that he was an agent from another planet attempting to decode messages from outer space, and within the novel itself he describes the act of writing as a form of spiritual ‘possession’ (NL 200). This notion is not simply a metaphor for creativity, but rather it reappears in descriptions of his own writing process: ‘While writing The Place of Dead Roads, I felt in spiritual contact with the late English writer Denton Welch […] Whole sections came to me as if dictated, like table-tapping’ (Q xviii). The writer is thus removed from the actual composition of the text, and the act of writing becomes the practice of taking dictation on a typewriter. In the essay ‘The Name Is Burroughs’, Burroughs also reports a recurring ‘writer’s dream’ in which he reads a book and attempts to remember it: ‘I can never bring back more than a few sentences; still, I know that one day the book itself will hover over the typewriter as I copy the words already written there’ (AM 9). In ‘The Retreat Diaries’, he claims that ‘[w]riters don’t write, they read and transcribe’ (BF 189), and he also describes dreams in which he finds his books already written: ‘In dreams I sometimes find the books where it is written and I may bring back a few phrases that unwind like a scroll. Then I write as fast as I can type, because I am reading, not writing’ (190). Burroughs even incorporates these dreams into the narrative of The Western Lands, where a writer lies in bed each morning watching ‘grids of typewritten words in front of his eyes that moved and shifted as he tried to read the words, but he never could. He thought if he could just copy these words down, which were not his own words, he might be able to put together another book’ (WL 1–2). The act of typing thus replaces the act of writing, because the words themselves have already been written and the writer’s job is simply to type them out.
By disembodying the user and creating a virtual information space, Burroughs’s writing machines also prefigure the globalizing impact of electric media technologies. John Tomlinson, for example, argues that contemporary information technologies have a ‘deterritorializing’ effect because ‘they lift us out of our cultural and indeed existential connection with our discrete localities and, in various senses, open up our lifeworlds to a larger world’ (1999:180). McLuhan also points out that the electric media environment not only fragments narrative and information, but also reconfigures geopolitical power. According to McLuhan, for example, the visual emphasis of typography led to both individualism and nationalism, because the printed book introduced the notion of point of view at the same time that it standardized languages: ‘Closely interrelated, then, by the operation and effects of typography are the outering or uttering of private inner experience and the massing of collective national awareness, as the vernacular is rendered visible, central, and unified by the new technology’ (1962:199). Electric media, on the other hand, represent a vast extension of the human nervous system, which emphasize the auditory over the visual and global awareness over individual experience: ‘[W]ith electricity and automation, the technology of fragmented processes suddenly fused with the human dialogue and the need for over-all consideration of human unity. Men are […] involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience’ (McLuhan 1964b:310–11). This leads to a greater degree of interdependence and a reduction in national divisions, because ‘[i]n an electrically configured society […] all the critical information necessary to manufacture and distribution, from automobiles to computers, would be available to everyone at the same time’, and thus culture ‘becomes organized like an electric circuit: each point in the net is as central as the next’ (McLuhan and Powers 1989:92). The absence of a ‘ruling center’, McLuhan continues, allows hierarchies to ‘constantly dissolve and reform’, and information technologies therefore carry the threat of ‘politically destabilizing entire nations through the wholesale transfer of uncensored information across national borders’ (McLuhan and Powers 1989:92). Rather than seeing this development as essentially negative, however, McLuhan adds that it will result in ‘a dense electronic symphony where all nations—if they still exist as separate entities—may live in a clutch of spontaneous synesthesia, painfully aware of the triumphs and wounds of one other’ (McLuhan and Powers 1989:95).
Burroughs also illustrates the deterritorializing effects of media technologies, and he frequently refers to the construction of national borders and identities as simply a function of global systems of control and manipulation. In his essay ‘The Bay of Pigs’, for example, Burroughs writes:
There are several basic formulas that have held this planet in ignorance and slavery. The first is the concept of a nation or country. Draw a line around a piece of land and call it a country. That means police, customs, barriers, armies and trouble with other stone-age tribes on the other side of the line. The concept of a country must be eliminated. (BF 144)
The process of nation-building, in other words, is nothing more than the exercise of control. In ‘The Limits of Control’, Burroughs also points out that ‘the mass media’ has the power to spread ‘cultural movements in all directions’, allowing for the cultural revolution in America to become ‘worldwide’ (AM 120). The mass media therefore presents the possibility of an ‘Electronic Revolution’, which would not only cross national borders but also eliminate them (Job 174–203). By creating a sprawling, virtual information space, Burroughs’s novels illustrate the ways in which media technologies could potentially fragment national identities and global borders; they also reveal the interconnections between information technologies and world markets, where cultural and economic exchanges gradually become inseparable.
THE ADDING MACHINE AND BUREAUCRATIC POWER
Bukatman’s claim that the virtual information space of the typewriter is linked to the modern development of cyberspace can be most clearly seen by tracing the history of the Burroughs Adding Machine, which was patented by Burroughs’s paternal grandfather in 1885. The Adding Machine was a device for both calculating and typing invoices, and thus it shared many common features with the typewriter, including a ribbon reverse that later became standard on all typewriters. Although the typewriter was often seen as a separate technology because it was designed for business correspondence rather than accounting, a brief look at the history of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company indicates that the divisions between calculating and typing machines were never that clearly defined. In the 1920s, for example, the company also marketed the MoonHopkins machine, which combined the functions of an electric typewriter and a calculating machine, and in 1931 it even began producing the Burroughs Standard Typewriter. This merging of calculating and typing machines reached its full realization with the development of business computers in the early 1950s, and the Burroughs Adding Machine Company was also involved in the earliest stages of this transition. In 1951, for example, it began work on the Burroughs Electronic Accounting Machine (BEAM), and in 1952 it built an electronic memory system for the ENIAC computer. In 1961 it also introduced the B5000 Series, the first dual-processor and virtual memory computer, and in 1986 it merged with Sperry to form the Unisys Corporation, which released the first desktop, single-chip mainframe computers in 1989. The Adding Machine and the typewriter thus both stand at the beginning of a historical trajectory, where the distinction between words and numbers became increasingly blurred and where typing gradually transformed into ‘word processing’.
Burroughs clearly shares the legacy of this joint development of calculating and typing machines, as well as the development of a powerful corporate elite in America. The adding machine makes frequent appearances in his work, where it often represents the manipulative and controlling power of information. In The Ticket that Exploded, for example, Burroughs defines ‘word’ itself as ‘an array of calculating machines’ (TE 146). The novel also employs the linear, sequential and standardizing functions of calculating and typing machines as a metaphor to describe the mechanization of the body, or ‘soft typewriter’. The narrator claims, for example, that the body ‘is composed of thin transparent sheets on which is written the action from birth to death—Written on “the soft typewriter” before birth’ (TE 159). Tony Tanner points out that the ‘ticket’ in the title of the novel also ‘incorporates the idea that we are all programmed by a prerecorded tape which is fed into the self like a virus punchcard so that the self is never free. We are simply the message typed onto the jelly of flesh by some biological typewriter referred to as the Soft Machine’ (1971:135). The ‘soft typewriter’ therefore represents the body as an information storage device, upon which the parasitical ‘word’ has been inscribed. The fact that the Burroughs Adding Machine Company also produced ticketeers and was an early innovator in computer punch card technology further emphasizes this notion of the parasitical ‘word’ as a machine or computer language—a merging of words and numbers into a system of pure coding designed to control the functions of the machine.
There are also moments in Burroughs’s work when writing machines appear synonymous with the exercise of bureaucratic power, as can be seen in his description of the nameless ‘Man at The Typewriter’ in Nova Express, who remains ‘[c]alm and grey with inflexible authority’ as he types out writs and boardroom reports (NE 130). This connection between machines and bureaucratic power is also illustrated in The Soft Machine, where Mayan priests establish an oppressive regime based on an information monopoly. They employ a regimented calendar in order to manipulate the bodies and minds of the population, and access to the sacred codices is strictly forbidden: ‘[T]he Mayan control system depends on the calendar and the codices which contain symbols representing all states of thought and feeling possible to human animals living under such limited circumstances—These are the instruments with which they rotate and control units of thought’ (SM 91). The narrator repeatedly refers to this system as a ‘control machine’ for the processing of information, which is emphasized by the fact that the priests operate it by pushing ‘buttons’ (SM 91), like a typewriter or a computer. This connection between writing machines and bureaucratic authority is extended even further when the narrator goes to work at the Trak News Agency, whose computers actually invent news rather than record it. The narrator quickly draws a parallel between the Mayan codices and the mass media: ‘I sus [sic] it is the Mayan Caper with an IBM machine’ (SM 148). In other words, like the Mayan priests, who exercise a monopoly over written information in order to control and manipulate the masses, the Trak News Agency similarly controls people’s perception of reality through the use of computers: ‘IBM machine controls thought feeling and apparent sensory impressions’ (SM 148–9).
The notion that the news industry manipulates and controls people’s perceptions of reality is a recurring theme throughout Burroughs’s work. In The Third Mind, for example, he writes:
‘Reality’ is apparent because you live and believe it. What you call ‘reality’ is a complex network of necessity formulae…association lines of word and image presenting a prerecorded word and image track. How do you know ‘real’ events are taking place right where you are sitting now? You will read it tomorrow in the windy morning ‘NEWS’…(3M 27)
He also cites two historical examples where fabricated news became real: ‘Remember the Russo-Finnish War covered from the Press Club in Helsinki? Remember Mr. Hearst’s false armistice closing World War I a day early?’ (3M 27). In the chapter ‘Inside the Control Machine’, Burroughs more explicitly argues that the world press, like the Mayan codices, functions as a ‘control machine’ through the same process of repetition and association:
By this time you will have gained some insight into the Control Machine and how it operates. You will hear the disembodied voice which speaks through any newspaper on lines of association and juxtaposition. The mechanism has no voice of its own and can talk indirectly only through the words of others…speaking through comic strips…news items…advertisements…talking, above all, through names and numbers. Numbers are repetition and repetition is what produces events. (3M 178)
Like the Mayan codices, therefore, the modern media also illustrates the merging of words and numbers in a machinic language of pure control. Burroughs adds, however, that the essential difference between these two systems is that the ‘Mayan control system required that ninety-nine percent of the population be illiterate’ while ‘the modern control machine of the world press can operate only on a literate population’ (3M 179). In other words, the modern control machine is an extension of the printing press because it uses literacy in order to maintain social hierarchies and keep readers in a passive state of detachment. In order to overthrow these hierarchies, it is therefore necessary not simply to develop the literacy skills the Mayans lacked, but also to subvert the control machine itself and the standards of literacy it enforces.
THE ‘FOLD-IN’ METHOD AND AUDITORY SPACE
The narrator of The Soft Machine quickly discovers that understanding the nature of the Trak News Agency’s control machine is the first step to defeating it: ‘Whatever you feed into the machine on subliminal level the machine will process—So we feed in “dismantle thyself” […] We fold writers of all time in together […] all the words of the world stirring around in a cement mixer and pour in the resistance message’ (SM 149). In other words, the narrator is able to dismantle the control system by manipulating the writing machine and disrupting its standard, linear sequence of information. This manipulation involves the use of a technique Burroughs referred to as the ‘cut-up’ or ‘foldin’ method: ‘A page of text—my own or someone else’s—is folded down the middle and placed on another page—The composite text is then read across half one text and half the other’ (3M 95–6). Burroughs frequently employed this method in his own work, and it is perhaps the clearest example of how the typewriter creates ‘new kinds of subjectivity’ by displacing the author as the controlling consciousness of the text. In a 1965 Paris Review interview, Burroughs explained the essential difference between this method and simply free associating at the typewriter: ‘Your mind simply could not manage it. It’s like trying to keep so many chess moves in mind, you just couldn’t do it. The mental mechanisms of repression and selection are also operating against you’ (Knickerbocker 1965:25). The ultimate goal of this technique, in other words, is to short-circuit the literate mind and use the typewriter to achieve a more primitive state of awareness, which McLuhan describes as precisely the effect of the electric media environment.
Burroughs’s justification for the ‘fold-in’ method also emphasizes the basic inadequacy of print in comparison to developments in other media: ‘[I]f writing is to have a future it must at least catch up with the past and learn to use techniques that have been used for some time past in painting, music and film’ (3M 95). Burroughs thus saw this method as enabling the typewriter to manifest the properties of other media, including sound recording. This connection between the typewriter and sound may appear confusing, as his novels remain essentially visual, but McLuhan points out that the distinction between visual and auditory space actually refers to the way in which media technologies structure information:
Television, radio and the newspaper […] deal in auditory space, by which I mean that sphere of simultaneous relations created by the act of hearing. We hear from all directions at once; this creates a unique, unvisualizable space. The all-at-once-ness of auditory space is the exact opposite of lineality, of taking one thing at a time. It is very confusing to learn that the mosaic of a newspaper page is ‘auditory’ in basic structure. This, however, is only to say that any pattern in which the components coexist without direct lineal hook-up or connection, creating a field of simultaneous relations, is auditory, even though some of its aspects can be seen. The items of news and advertising that exist under a newspaper dateline are interrelated only by that dateline. They have no interconnection of logic or statement. Yet they form a mosaic or corporate image whose parts are interpenetrating […] It is a kind of orchestral, resonating unity, not the unity of logical discourse. (McLuhan 1963:43)
Burroughs’s ‘fold-in’ method thus transforms standardized, linear texts into a ‘mosaic’ of information, which parallels the structure of television, radio, and newspapers. Even though Burroughs’s ‘cut-up’ novels remain essentially visual, they create an auditory space because they provide connections between texts that are not based on ‘logic or statement’, and they behave more like the ‘sphere of simultaneous relations created by the act of hearing’. Such an understanding of auditory space helps to explain Burroughs’s notion of the ‘fold-in’ method as manifesting the properties of music, or McLuhan’s paradoxical notion of the typewriter as both a tool that regulates spelling and grammar and ‘an oral and mimetic instrument’ that gives writers the ‘freedom of the world of jazz’ (1964b:230).
The function of this method can be most clearly seen in The Ticket that Exploded, where the narrator describes a ‘writing machine’ that
shifts one half one text and half the other through a page frame on conveyor belts […] Shakespeare, Rimbaud, etc. permutating through page frames in constantly changing juxtaposition the machine spits out books and plays and poems—The spectators are invited to feed into the machine any pages of their own text in fifty-fifty juxtaposition with any author of their choice any pages of their choice and provided with the result in a few minutes. (TE 65)
The machine thus performs the ‘fold-in’ method by fragmenting and rearranging texts, and it further disrupts the written word through the use of ‘calligraphs’: ‘The magnetic pencil caught in calligraphs of Brion Gysin wrote back into the brain metal patterns of silence and space’ (TE 63). The possibility of ‘silence and space’, therefore, is represented through a break with print technology. This is most clearly illustrated on the last page of the novel—an actual calligraph composed by Brion Gysin, in which English and Arabic words alternate in various permutations of the phrase ‘Silence to say good bye’ (TE 203). The function of the machine is thus mirrored in the construction of the book itself, which was also composed using the ‘fold-in’ method and contains passages spliced in from other authors, including lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Because the novel contains the formula for its own selfgenerating reproduction, Gérard-Georges Lemaire uses the term ‘writing machine’ interchangeably to refer to both the content and method of Burroughs’s work, and he points out that Burroughs’s machine not only ‘escapes from the control of its manipulator’, but ‘it does so in that it makes it possible to lay down a foundation of an unlimited number of books that end by reproducing themselves’ (3M 17). In other words, the parasitical ‘word’ is externalized from the writer’s own consciousness and reproduces itself in a series of endless permutations.
TYPESETTING EXPERIMENTS, THREE-COLUMN CUT-UPS AND THE GRID
Another method Burroughs employs to transform the printed word into an auditory space can be seen in his typesetting experiments, which were clearly inspired by the structure of newspapers and magazines. By presenting a series of unrelated texts in parallel columns, the newspaper suggests interconnections which are not based on logic or reason, and many of Burroughs’s stories from the 1960s and early 1970s reveal a growing interest in the effects of typesetting, one example being ‘The Coldspring News’. When this piece was originally published in White Subway, it was divided into two columns, and the sections contained bold titles, thus imitating newspaper headlines (WS 39, see BF for a reprint without the threecolumn format). The title of the story was also designed to resemble a masthead, with Burroughs listed as ‘Editor’ rather than author (WS 39). Subsequent editions removed this formatting, but Robert Sobieszek points out that Burroughs continued these experiments in his collages, many of which ‘were formatted in newspaper columns and often consisted of phrases rearranged from front pages of the New York Times along with photos or other illustrations’ (1996:55). Sobieszek also notes that in 1965 Burroughs created his own version of Time magazine, including
a Time cover of November 30, 1962, collaged over by Burroughs with a reproduction of a drawing, four drawings by Gysin, and twenty-six pages of typescripts comprised of cut-up texts and various photographs serving as news items. One of the pages is from an article on Red China from Time of September 13, 1963, and is collaged with a columnal typescript and an irrelevant illustration from the ‘Modern Living’ section of the magazine. A full-page advertisement for JohnsManville products is casually inserted amid all these texts; its title: ‘Filtering’. (1996:37)
These experiments therefore offer another illustration of the ways in which the press mediates or ‘filters’ our experience of reality, and because the typewriter enables such interventions, allowing writers to compose texts in a standardized font that is easily reproducible, these collages offer a perfect illustration of McLuhan’s claim that ‘[t]he typewriter fuses composition and publication’ (1964b:228).
A similar kind of typesetting experiment can be seen in Burroughs’s film scripts, such as The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1975), where he uses multiple columns to describe the sound and image tracks of a non-existent film about the gangster Dutch Schultz. By using Hollywood terminology, as well as employing various gangster film clichés, Burroughs effectively imitates the language and style of Hollywood films. The script also includes photographs from Hollywood films and press clippings concerning the actual Schultz, thus blurring the boundaries between fictional and documentary sources and exposing the ways in which the mass media, including both the film industry and the world press, effectively determines and controls people’s perceptions of reality. The script also performs a similar kind of intervention as his earlier typesetting experiments by employing separate columns for sounds and images. In other words, rather than following the strict format of traditional screenplays, Burroughs’s script simultaneously represents both an imitation and a subversion of yet another institutional form of textual production. The sound and image columns are also reminiscent of the ‘Exhibition’ in The Ticket that Exploded, which isolates and manipulates sound and image tracks in order to create random and striking juxtapositions that draw the spectator’s attention to the constructed nature of the media itself (TE 62–8).
The purpose of these interventions, therefore, is ultimately not to participate in the mass media but rather to subvert and dismantle its methods of presenting information. This is most apparent in Burroughs’s three-column cut-ups, in which three separate columns of text are combined on the same page. Although these cut-ups resemble Burroughs’s newspaper and magazine collages, the purpose of the juxtaposed columns is ultimately to subvert the newspaper format, not to replicate it. This method is clearly based on the theoretical tape recorder experiment Burroughs describes in The Ticket that Exploded, where he suggests recording various sides of an argument onto three tape recorders and allowing them to argue with each other (TE 163). The purpose of this experiment is to externalize language and remove it from the body, while at the same time deflating the power of words through their simultaneous and overlapping transmission in a nonsensical cacophony of sound. Like the three tape recorders, the three columns of text also produce multiple, competing voices simultaneously vying for the reader’s attention, and the reader has to choose whether to read the columns in sequence from beginning to end, to read the individual pages in sequence, jumping between columns at the bottom of each page, or to read across the page from left to right, jumping between columns on every line. These compositions thus represent a radically new kind of information space—a proto-hypertext—in which the role of the author is displaced and linear structure is disrupted. In some of these compositions, such as ‘Who Is the Third That Walks Beside You’, Burroughs even decenters his own authority by combining found documents with excerpts from his novels (BF 50–2). He effectively makes these already cut-up passages even more disorienting by removing them from their original context, resplicing them into new arrangements and setting them in juxtaposition to one another. As if to emphasize the purpose behind this procedure, he also includes a passage from The Ticket that Exploded, in which he encourages the reader to ‘disinterest yourself in my words. Disinterest yourself in anybody’s words, In the beginning was the word and the word was bullshit’ [sic] (BF 51).
Burroughs’s grids represent yet another method of manipulating written information. The grids follow the same logic as Burroughs’s three-column cut-ups, although the vertical columns are also divided horizontally into a series of boxes, thus multiplying the number of potential links the reader is able to make between the blocks of text. Burroughs employs this method in many of his collages, such as To Be Read Every Which Way, in which he divides four vertical columns of text into nine rows, thus creating 36 boxes of text which can be read in any order (Sobieszek 1996:27). Much of this work was compiled for the original edition of The Third Mind, which was never published; however, in his essay ‘Formats: The Grid’, Burroughs describes this method as ‘an experiment in machine writing that anyone can do on his own typewriter’ (Burroughs 1964:27), and he illustrates the process using material taken from reviews of Naked Lunch:
I selected mostly unfavorable criticism with a special attention to meaningless machine-turned phrases such as ‘irrelevant honesty of hysteria,’ ‘the pocked dishonored flesh,’ ‘ironically the format is banal,’ etc. Then ruled off a grid (Grid I) and wove the prose into it like start a sentence from J. Wain in square 1, continue in squares 3, 5 and 7. Now a sentence from Toynbee started in squares 2, 4 and 6. The reading of the grid back to straight prose can be done say one across and one down. Of course there are many numbers of ways in which the grid can be read off. (Burroughs 1964:27)
Like the ‘fold-in’ method, therefore, the grid illustrates the displacement of the author as the controlling consciousness of the text; other than choosing which texts to use, the author has little to no control over the ultimate arrangement. Burroughs adds, for example, that ‘I found the material fell into dialogue form and seemed to contain some quite remarkable prose which I can enthuse over without immodesty since it contains no words of my own other than such quotations from my work as the critics themselves had selected’ (1964:27). Burroughs also notes that these textual ‘units are square for convenience on the typewriter’, but that this grid represents ‘only one of many possible grids […] No doubt the mathematically inclined could progress from plane to solid geometry and put prose through spheres and cubes and hexagons’ (1964:27). Like his three-column cut-ups, therefore, the grids also represent a kind of proto-hypertext, where the number of possible pathways and links between blocks of text are multiplied even further and the potential number of mathematical permutations seems virtually limitless. The grids are thus a logical extension of the auditory space created by the ‘fold-in’ method, and they seem to resemble Oulipian writing experiments, such as Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Millard de Poemes, a sonnet containing 10 possible choices for each of the 14 lines, thus comprising 1014 potential poems.
WRITING MACHINES AND THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
Burroughs’s writing machines not only illustrate the manipulation and subversion of information as a way of dismantling hierarchies of control, but they also illustrate the impact of media technologies on national identities and global borders by revealing the ways in which the electric media environment also reconfigures space and time. The revolutionary potential of the ‘fold-in’ method is even more pronounced in The Soft Machine, for example, because the act of shifting between source texts is played out within the narrative as shifts across space and time. ‘The Mayan Caper’ chapter opens with an astounding claim: ‘I have just returned from a thousandyear time trip and I am here to tell you […] how such time trips are made’ (SM 81). The narrator then offers a description of the procedure, which begins ‘in the morgue with old newspapers, folding in today with yesterday and typing out composites’ (SM 81). In other words, the ‘fold-in’ method is itself a means of time travel, because ‘when I fold today’s paper in with yesterday’s paper and arrange the pictures to form a time section montage, I am literally moving back to yesterday’ (SM 82). The narrator is then able to overthrow the Mayan control machine by employing the ‘fold-in’ method on the sacred codices and calendars. By once again altering the time sequence, the priests’ ‘order to burn [the fields] came late, and a year’s crop was lost’ (SM 92). Soon after, the narrator leads the people in a rebellion against the priests: ‘Cut word lines […] Smash the control machine—Burn the books—Kill the priests—Kill! Kill! Kill!’ (SM 92–3). This scene is perhaps the clearest illustration of Burroughs’s notion that the electric media environment allows for the spread of cultural revolution worldwide, as media technologies like the newspaper enable information to be conveyed rapidly across space and time, regardless of national borders, thus emphasizing group awareness over individual experience and global interdependence over national divisions.
Because the borders between the blocks of text in Burroughs’s grids are so fluid, they also seem to function as a corollary to the spatial architecture of the transnational ‘Interzone’ in Naked Lunch. This ‘Composite City’ is described as a vast ‘hive’ of rooms populated by people of every conceivable nation and race (NL 96). Because these inhabitants have clearly been uprooted from their ‘discrete localities’ and placed in a labyrinthine space, which appears completely removed from space and time, Interzone would appear to be the most perfect illustration of Tomlinson’s notion of the deterritorializing effect of media technologies. Burroughs also describes Interzone as ‘a single, vast building’, whose ‘rooms are made of a plastic cement that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowd into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next house’ (NL 162). Interzone therefore represents a kind of virtual grid, in which people are converted into units of information that pass freely across barriers without resistance. The transfer of bodies through walls thus serves as a metaphor for the structure of the text itself, which contains rapid shifts and jumps that allow characters to travel inexplicably across space and time. These shifts are largely due to the method with which the book was originally written. Burroughs wrote the sections in no particular order, and the final version of the novel was ultimately determined by the order in which the pages were sent to the compositor. This process once again reflects the structure of hypertexts in that linearity is absent and the reader is free to choose multiple pathways: ‘You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point’ (NL 203). Burroughs also emphasizes that the beginning and the ending of the novel are artificial constructs and that the novel includes ‘many prefaces’ (NL 203). The fact that the virtual information space of the text is essentially a product of writing machines is made even more explicit when Burroughs describes these shifts as the effect of ‘a broken typewriter’ (NL 86).
This rapidly shifting and disorienting atmosphere also reflects the drug-induced state in which Burroughs began writing the novel. His description of the city, for example, quickly merges with his description of the effects of yagé, which is further reflected in his apparently random and disconnected prose style: ‘Images fall slow and silent like snow […] everything is free to enter or to go out […] Everything stirs with a writhing furtive life.…The room is Near East, Negro, South Pacific, in some familiar place I cannot locate.… Yage is space-time travel’ (NL 99). This passage would seem to support McLuhan’s claim that Burroughs’s drug use represents a ‘strategy of by-passing the new electric environment by becoming an environment oneself’ (1964a:517), an interpretation which Burroughs rejects in his 1965 Paris Reviewinterview: ‘No, junk narrows consciousness. The only benefit to me as a writer […] came to me after I went off it’ (Knickerbocker 1965:23). Subsequent critics, such as Eric Mottram, have attempted to reconcile this disagreement by turning the discussion away from the effects of media on mental states and arguing instead that the essential similarity between Burroughs and McLuhan is their mutual interest in the globalizing power of electric media: ‘Burroughs corrects McLuhan’s opinion that he meant that heroin was needed to turn the body into an environment […] But his books are global in the sense that they envisage a mobile environmental sense of the network of interconnecting power, with the purpose of understanding and then attacking it’ (Mottram 1971:100). This disagreement can be resolved, however, by considering the difference between heroin, which ‘narrows consciousness’, and yagé, which eliminates individualism and effects a return to tribal ways of thinking. At the same time that Burroughs rejects McLuhan’s claim, for example, he also adds that he wants ‘to see more of what’s out there, to look outside, to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings’ (Knickerbocker 1965:23). These are precisely the reasons why Burroughs sought yagé, and it is only under the influence of this drug that he effectively reproduces the conditions of the electric media environment within his own body.
The auditory space of the text therefore parallels the physical geography of Interzone, and any sense of the individual—including any sense of the author as the controlling consciousness of the text—dissolves in a larger awareness of human unity. Such a reading might imply that Interzone illustrates McLuhan’s notion of a ‘global village’, which enables a greater degree of equality between nations. The narrator adds, however, that Interzone is also ‘a vast silent market’, whose primary purpose is to conduct business transactions (NL 96). Interzone therefore not only represents a deterritorialized space marked by fluid borders and rapid transfers, but it also illustrates the essential link between cultural and economic exchange because it is impossible to separate the sharing of cultural ideas and differences from the exchange of goods and services. According to Fredric Jameson, for example, the term ‘globalization’ itself refers to the combined effect of both new information technologies and world markets, and it ‘affirms a gradual de-differentiation of these levels, the economic itself gradually becoming cultural, all the while the cultural gradually becomes economic’ (1998:70). McLuhan was also aware that the effects of electric media technologies would be far more devastating on the Third World than on Western culture: ‘In the case of the First World […] electronic information dims down nationalism and private identities, whereas in its encounter with the Third World of India, China, and Africa, the new electric information environment has the effect of depriving these people of their group identities’ (McLuhan and Powers 1989:165). Because Interzone illustrates both the economic and cultural effects of globalization, it is perhaps easy to understand why Interzone does not represent a more harmonious and egalitarian ‘global village’. The loss of group identities and economic stability, and the constant presence of European colonials, only seem to heighten the level of corruption and inefficiency already present in the city, such as the ‘drunken cop’ who registers new arrivals ‘in a vast public lavatory’, where the ‘data taken down is put on pegs to be used as toilet paper’ (NL 98). Business itself is also represented as an essentially hopeless process, in which useless products are endlessly waiting to be passed through customs, and embassies direct all inquiries to the ‘We Don’t Want To Hear About It Department’ (NL 163).
Like the ‘global village’, therefore, Interzone represents a virtual or deterritorialized space in which people of every imaginable nationality and race are able to meet and exchange information. But unlike the ‘global village’, Interzone is a labyrinth of both communication and economic exchange, which ultimately subdues and disempowers its inhabitants. The key to liberating the global space of the electric media environment, according to Burroughs, is to subvert and manipulate the media technologies themselves, thus drawing the hypnotized masses out of their waking dream and making them more aware of the degree to which media technologies condition their perceptions of reality. In Naked Lunch, for example, Burroughs states that the ultimate purpose of conventional narrative transitions is ‘to spare The Reader stress of sudden space shifts and keep him Gentle’ (NL 197). By manipulating the linear function of his own writing machines, Burroughs attempts to reject these conventions and transform the gentle reader into a potential revolutionary, who would no longer be passive and detached but rather aware and involved.
CONCLUSION
Burroughs most clearly represents the manipulation and subversion of electric media technologies through his own experimental methods of constructing texts. Burroughs also repeatedly represents writing machines within his work to illustrate the effects of information technologies on subjectivity, as well as their potential use for either positive or negative ends—as control machines or weapons of resistance. Burroughs similarly depicts the global impact of the electric media environment by illustrating the ways in which writing machines are capable of spreading either cultural revolution or cultural imperialism, depending on whether or not people are capable of appropriating and manipulating them. The texts which I have focused on in this chapter, which include examples of Burroughs’s work from the 1950s to the early 1970s, can therefore be seen as exposing and subverting the influence of writing machines on the material conditions of their own production in order to provide a model of technological reappropriation that could potentially be extended on a global scale. Burroughs’s work thus retains an empowering notion of human agency while also complicating the divisions between self and other.
REFERENCES
Bockris, V. (1981) With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, rev. edition (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996).
Bukatman, S. (1993) ‘Gibson’s Typewriter’, South Atlantic Quarterly 92(4), pp. 627–45. Burroughs, William S. (1964) ‘Formats: The Grid’, Insect Trust Gazette, 1, p. 27. —(1975) The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: A Fiction in the Form of a Film Script (New York: Viking), pp. 37–46. Grauerholz, J. (1998) ‘A Hard-Boiled Reporter’, IN WV pp. 37–46. Hayles, N. K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Jameson, F. (1998) ‘Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue’, IN Jameson, F., and Miyoshi, M. eds, The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp. 54–77. Kittler, F. (1990) Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Cullens, C., and Metteer, M. trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press). —(1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Winthrop-Young, G., and Wutz, M. trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Knickerbocker, C. (1965) ‘William Burroughs: An Interview’, Paris Review 35, pp. 13–49. McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). — (1963) ‘The Agenbite of Outwit’, Location 1(1), 41–4. — (1964a) ‘Notes on Burroughs’, The Nation 28 December 1964, pp. 517–19. — (1964b) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill) — (1963) ‘The Agenbite of Outwit’, Location 1(1), 41–4. —— (1964a) ‘Notes on Burroughs’, The Nation 28 December 1964, pp. 517–19. — (1964b) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill) Mottram, E. (1971) William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (Buffalo, NY: Intrepid). Sobieszek, R. (1996) Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Thames & Hudson). Tanner, T. (1971) City of Words: American Fiction 1950–70 (London: Jonathan Cape). Tomlinson, J. (1999) Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Retaking the Universe (William S.Burroughs in the Age of Globalization)
Part 2: Writing, Sign, Instrument: Language and Technology/Burroughs’s Writing Machines/Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com by Jason Morelyle I am not an addict. I am the addict. The addict I invented to keep this show on the junk road. I am all the addicts and all the junk in the world. I am junk and I am hooked forever. Now I am using junk as a basic illustration. Extend it. I am reality and I am hooked, on, reality. —William S. Burroughs, ‘The Beginning is Also the End’ (BF 62) Maybe the target is not to discover who we are but to refuse who we are. —Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’ Addiction and control: in the work of William S. Burroughs, the two issues are inextricably and irrevocably bound together. The concepts of ‘power’, ‘control’, ‘control machine’, and ‘control society’ are crucial aspects of Burroughs’s trajectory; as elements in the equation of his ‘lifelong preoccupation’ (Q xxiii), manifestations of control are treated with varying degrees of intensity throughout his work, and its drives and stratagems within such discursive formations as the mass media, organized religion, the government, the State, the nuclear family, science, institutionalized medicine, Western capitalist technocracies, instrumental reason, and, importantly, language (the Word) are represented in multifarious variations. Moreover, addiction, ‘the algebra of need’, functions as a kind of counterpoint, a sinister collaborator invested in the machinations of control: addiction to capital, addiction to materialism, addiction to the media, even addiction to the ego, subjectivity and notions of ‘self’. As Timothy S. Murphy proposes in his superb work, Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (1997), subjectivity in Burroughs’s work ‘itself is a form of addiction to language, to the “I” of self-consciousness and identity as an instrument of control, both of the phenomenal world by the “I” and of the “I” itself by the ideological structure of its socius’. When subjectivity is seen as a form of addiction in Burroughs’s work we can begin to chart how he uses addiction as a trope for subjectivity, attempting, in effect, to re-inscribe or rescript how subjectivity is formed in a society of control. In other words, Burroughs’s work contains resources not simply for theorizing, but also for resisting control, especially in his representations of the socalled drug addict, a figure that is often understood as a subject formed at the limits of ‘straight’ society. There are many examples throughout Burroughs’s work that suggest how the drama of resistance might unfold, and perhaps one of the more compelling means through which he approaches this problem is through the rescripting or rewriting of subjectivity to determine methods of thinking about and moving toward ‘freedom’ under a regime of control. As Michel Foucault noted some months before his death, it is imperative that we promote ‘new forms of subjectivity’ through the refusal of certain kinds of individualities and subjectivities that have been imposed on us (Foucault 1983:216). As a figure of subjectivity, Burroughs’s rendering of addiction provides a means of grasping how subjectivity is formed by power through the subjectivation (assujetissement) of a control society, where this term designates both the ‘becoming’ of the subject and the processes of subjection itself (Butler 1997:83). In order to understand the implications of what a society of control might be, we must come to terms with new forms of subjectivity that emerge from the new relations or ‘diagram’ of power that comprises such a society. Burroughs’s work not only offers us a way of beginning to grasp what form this new subjectivity might assume, but it also provides blueprints for how we can begin conceptualizing the possibility of a resistant subject. In other words, Burroughs’s rendering of ‘addiction’ can be read as a trope of subjectivity, but a subjectivity that is formulated specifically as strategically resistant to a control society: under the regime of control and junk, the addicted subject is a resistant, modulatory subject who realizes, like Mr Martin, ‘The Man of a Thousand Lies’ quoted in the epigraph, that there are ‘realities’ alternative to those imposed by control that can be generated by alternative subjectivities. Although in many respects the emergence of the concept of addiction and the taxonomy of the addict as we have come to know it today are largely symptoms and side-effects of the growing dominance of nineteenth-century Western politico-medical discourse, many commentators have persuasively argued that the concept of ‘drug’ (the ‘supplement’) and the ‘logic’ of addiction are deeply embedded in the historicity of Western culture as a whole, a ‘structure that is philosophically and metaphysically at the basis of our culture’ (Ronell 1992:13). The meaning of the term ‘addiction’ can be traced to the Latin verb addicere, which in Roman law referred to a formal ‘giving over’ or delivery by sentence of court and implied a surrender, or dedication, of the sentence to a master. To be both literally and figuratively ‘sentenced’—simultaneously condemned and bound by language—suggests, according to David Lenson, that the user has lost control of language and of consciousness itself, and that the user is, in a way, ‘spoken’ for by another: ‘Instead of saying, one is said’ (1995:35). It is telling that ‘addiction’ implies that one is acted upon or spoken for by an external-madeinternal entity. One facet of Burroughs’s approach to addiction falls very much along these lines, signaling an internalized possession, a kind of subjectivation of a user by some externalized force or entity usually figured as the ‘controllers’, the Nova Mob, and so on. Yet it is also interesting that the ‘addict’—as emerging from the disciplinary enclosure of institutionalized medicine and psychiatry—is traditionally viewed by these disciplines as being ‘possessed’, because it is just this definition that Burroughs tries to disassemble. In Burroughs, the subject-as-addict, the modulatory subject, attempts to release himself from the nightmare of possession, from the trap of being spoken for by an-other; the definition of addiction in the traditional sense is implicitly a definition of the control society itself, something that Burroughs spent his entire life describing and attempting to eradicate. POWER, DISCIPLINE, CONTROL Power, for Foucault, is a ‘multiplicity of force relations’, the name one attributes to a ‘complex strategical situation’ in society (Foucault 1976:92–3), and a heterogeneous network that circulates through the sociopolitical whole in a ‘capillary’ fashion. Because power cannot be ‘sought in the primary existence of a central point’, power should not be thought of as a ‘privilege’ that is possessed, or as an ‘institution’ or ‘structure’ that assumes the ‘sovereignty of the state [and] the form of law’ (Foucault 1975:26); power is not a strength one is endowed with (Foucault 1976:93), a material ‘thing’ that can be consciously transferred, exchanged, and directed at a given class or individual, and is not ‘a general system of domination exerted by one group over another’. Power, then, is not hierarchical, flowing from the top down, but ‘comes from below’—that is, it is a mobile and localized field of relations, ‘self-producing’, ‘everywhere’, and ‘exercised from innumerable points’ not because it can consolidate ‘everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next […] in every relation from one point to another’ (93–4). Power is decentralized and relational, a strategy performed through a variety of social and political practices in society. As such, power is not ‘external’ to or ‘outside’ of social relations, but constitutive of and coextensive with them. Importantly, Foucault conceives of power as positive and productive, and insists that it should not be thought of in negative terms, as dominating, repressive, or exclusionary: ‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it abstracts, it “masks”, it “conceals”. Power produces. It produces reality, produces knowledge, and produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (Foucault 1975:194). This, then, is where the analyst or, to use Foucault’s term, genealogist of power must focus her attention, on the interrelation between knowledge and power, because just as it is ‘not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge’ it is ‘impossible for knowledge not to engender power’ (Foucault 1977:52). For Foucault, discourses are self-referential ‘coherent’ bodies of statements that produce versions of reality by generating ‘knowledge’ about concepts or objects; hence, discourses ‘write the rules’ about what can be known and said about—for example, medical discourses, legal discourses, discourses about science, politics, and the insane. ‘Knowledge is that of which one can speak in a discursive practice, and which is specified by that fact: the domain constituted by the different objects that will or will not acquire a scientific status’ (Foucault 1969:201). The analysis of discourse must take place at the level of determining how and where subjects or objects of knowledge emerge, what new relations of power they might effect, and how regimes of ‘truth’ are produced. ‘Truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it into a “regime” of truth’ (Foucault 1980b:133). Foucault uses an analytics of power and discourse in an attempt to ‘create a history of the different modes […] [so that] human beings are made into subjects’ (Foucault 1983:208). Crucially, the subject is not only constituted in power, but constituted by it: power does not operate upon or outside relationships, but across and through them. Power produces, forms, and initiates the subject through the ‘primary submission’ of subjection, where ‘power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our very existence […] [what] initiates and sustains our agency’ (Butler 1997:2). In this way, we see how the focus is not so much on power per se, but on the subject and the formation of the subject through subjectivation. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Foucault contends, disciplinary power began to emerge in response to monarchicalbased juridical forms of power that understood power as repressive and negative; disciplinary power, on the other hand, is necessarily positive, a kind of ‘nonsovereign’ power (Foucault 2002:36) that produces docile bodies with maximum efficiency, a ‘unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a “political” force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force’ (Foucault 1975:221). Disciplinary power and its technologies, understood as one of ‘bourgeois society’s great inventions’, was instrumental in the formation of industrial capitalism and its corresponding culture (Foucault 2002:36; 1975:221) and materialized in a variety of forms: military barracks, schools, factories, hospitals, and prisons. The point was that such technologies extracted time, labor, and usefulness from consenting, docile bodies, rather than the commodities and wealth that the sovereign model demanded. Hence, since the emergence of disciplinary power, what we have in modern society is the shift from an administration of force (sovereign) to an administration by compliance (discipline). Taking Michel Foucault’s meditations on power and government as an implicit starting point, Gilles Deleuze captures the sense of what a control society may be when he contends that over the course of the twentieth century, our society has been confronted with a general crisis in relation to all ‘environments of enclosure’ and has registered a new formulation or ‘diagram’ of power; we have, he claims, been undergoing a transformation from a disciplinary society to a society of control or ‘modulation’ (Deleuze 1990:3). Although the society of control is defined very differently from the sovereign regimes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the ‘modern’ disciplinary regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this does not necessarily mean that these two regimes have completely disappeared. As Foucault contends, we must see such transitions not in terms of a ‘replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society’ or the replacement of a ‘disciplinary society by a society of government’; rather, we should see it ‘as a triangle, sovereignty–discipline–government’ (Foucault 1978:102). Just as some features of a sovereign regime remain in a disciplinary society, so do features of disciplinary society remain in a society of control. As Michael Hardt points out, power never leaves a vacuum. Instead, what we are seeing in a society of control is not so much a complete disintegration of environments of enclosure such as the prison, the family, or the factory, but rather the ‘generalization of the logics’ of disciplinary institutions ‘across the entire society, spreading like a virus’ (1998:30–1). Control societies will employ many strategies of disciplinary regimes, in that the authority of disciplinary regimes is no longer contained in particular institutions and environments of enclosure, but is spread out in a ‘continuous network’ (Deleuze 1990:5) in which the socius is not ‘emptied of the disciplinary institutions but completely filled with the modulations of control’ (Hardt 1998:31). In a society of control, all disciplinary institutions—education, policing, psychiatry, production—subsume every aspect of experience so that the object of these institutions is life itself. Just as discipline entails a discontinuous molding of the individual who is ‘always starting again’ and who ‘never ceases passing from one closed environment to the next’ (Deleuze 1990:4, 2), in a society of control ‘one is never finished with anything’ (4). The distinction between the two can be seen in the difference between a limited, segregated incarceration and the limitless postponements of continuous variation. Where disciplinary practice molded behavior and fashioned subjects, practices of control continuously modulate and integrate. As such, the connection between society and State is no longer seen in the ‘mediation and organization’ of disciplinary institutions, but rather in how the State is set ‘in motion directly through the perpetual circuitry of social production’ (Hardt 1998:31). Like a sovereign regime or a disciplinary society, however, the modus operandi of control society is power, and the ways in which power is integrated into social life; the difference is that this integration takes place in an increasingly synthesized, complete and total fashion. Thus, a society of control, like a society of sovereignty or disciplinarity, is still rooted in the ‘diagram’ (Deleuze 1986:70–93) of power. Although its strategies and relational formulae are modified, the power/knowledge equation still remains the concomitant force. Power may never leave a vacuum, but its strategies and relations do shift, especially when it comes to resistance to power itself. A society of control will not set out to contain or limit resistance as in a regime of sovereignty or discipline, but will instead seek to diffuse it. Burroughs’s understanding of control directly addresses this issue because he recognizes that the subject—the ‘agent’ Inspector Lee, for instance—resists control on a continuous basis while also being thoroughly dependent on it. Perhaps one of the more important ways that a society of control is formulated in Burroughs’s work is in the figure of junk, where the ‘theory’ of junk and junk addiction itself is troped into a ‘general’ theory of power, a ‘mold of monopoly and possession’ (NL xxxvi). Throughout Burroughs’s corpus of work, not only are subjectivity and language shaped, affected and infected by the overriding theme of control/junk, these mechanisms are manifestations of control/junk. However, Burroughs’s taxonomy of addiction can be profitably understood as other than being simply ‘addiction’ in the normative sense; junk and junk addiction can be seen, he writes, as a ‘cellular equation that teaches the user facts of general validity’ (J xvi). Burroughs is implicitly stating that the subject, formed within a control society, is dependent on the relations of power that comprise that society for its sense of self. ‘Facts’ of general validity here are read as structures of knowledge, regimes of truth, and systems of ‘word and image’—the very ‘facts’ that work in and through subjectivation. The challenge for both Burroughs and Foucault, however, lies in the fact that power does not simply suppress the subject; it produces the subject as well. The subject needs power like it needs junk because it is only through such a dependency that it can be recognized within the category of ‘subject’ itself. Subjectivity—what Burroughs sometimes refers to as the ‘human form’ (BF 64)—is thoroughly dependent on ‘word and image’ (see 64–5), and as such is both limited and created by the discursive mechanisms of word and image (see 45–6). ‘[I]mage is junk’ (NE 52) and ‘junk is image’ (9 [note]), Burroughs maintains, and addiction to junk constitutes normative subjectivity itself—that which must be subverted. This, of course, is one of the central problems facing Burroughs, because if subjectivity—addiction—is the system that we must all struggle against, then the only tool we have in this struggle is subjectivity itself. Coming to terms with this problem is a matter of formulating the ways in which power is organized, be it through the stratagems of disciplinarity or the maneuverings of a society of control. In this sense, the troping of junk and junk addiction into a ‘general’ theory of power is reminiscent of Foucault’s notion of power; junk, like power, is everywhere and nowhere, a modulated space without a circumference or a middle, and as such, one ‘becomes addicted’ to power-as-addiction, dependent on it not only for one’s understanding of the world, but for one’s sense of self as well: There is no true or real ‘reality’—’Reality’ is simply a more or less constant scanning pattern—The scanning pattern we accept as ‘reality’ has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet, a power primarily oriented towards total control. (NE 53) The ‘imposition’ of ‘reality’ by the ‘controlling power’ resonates with the ‘pyramid of junk’ outlined in the deposition-introduction to Naked Lunch, where ‘one level [eats] the level below […] right up to the top or tops since there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world and all built on principles of monopoly’ (NL xxxvi). Given the attributes of ‘monopoly’, ‘imposition’, and ‘controlling’, it would seem that Burroughs is portraying a hierarchical or transcendental model of power: sovereign, top-down, and utilitarian. However, those at the ‘top’ of the pyramid are just as implicated in the system as those at the ‘bottom’ because junk, the ‘evil virus’, like power, is a heterogeneous network and does not recognize or ‘need’ hierarchical systems to function: ‘[the] junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product’ (NL xxxvii). The ‘product’—in this case, in the form of junk and power that ‘constitutes’ reality—is not an ‘object’ to be passed around or imposed on another, but is in effect that which is doing the passing. Junk, like power, is not hierarchical, flowing from the top down, but ‘comes from below’, in a mobile field of relations that is everywhere, and ‘exercised from innumerable points’. Burroughs’s rendering of the control/power/junk formula as constituent of ‘reality’ allows for a highly innovative and radicalized understanding of the world and oneself because, as a figuration of power, addiction provides a means of understanding those relations of power that make ‘possible’ the range of ethics, knowledges, actions, and experiences that mold the field of relationships that circumscribes the process of subject formation, a procedure that points to the potential development of new forms of subjectivity. This figuring of junk advances an understanding of control and power alternative to that of a ‘top down’ structure. Burroughs is adamant that locating power in a sovereign entity such as the State, and resisting it based on that assumption, only results in replicating that oppressive system: ‘Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz writes: “He who opposes force alone forms that which he opposes and is formed by it” ’ (BF 106). RESISTANCE, RESCRIPTION, AND MODULATORY SUBJECTIVITYA society of control permeates the entirety of social life, submitting subjects to specific ways of acting, thinking, and existing beyond the confines of disciplinary enclosures where subjectivation takes place on a continuous and contiguous basis. In a control society, discourses are no longer limited to specific domains, but have spilled over and saturated the total field of relations. Recalling that truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power that produce and sustain it, in a society of control this circular relation is compressed, and truth and power become even more inextricably connected than they were in previous disciplinary regimes. When truth and power are coexistent, there is no need for disciplines, no need for institutions of policing, education, or medicine, because these institutions are everywhere. As Burroughs points out, in a society of complete control, ‘[n]o police force is necessary’ (AM 117). This is why, according to Burroughs, we must avoid reproducing certain forms of control when resisting a society of control; hence, we must move towards initiating new ways of thinking. Towards the end of his life, Foucault became more and more concerned with the notion of detaching power from truth towards the possibility of ‘constituting a new politics of truth’ (Foucault 1980b:133) and initiating new forms of subjectivity. In a society of control, this mode of thinking becomes more and more difficult: ‘“New concepts can only arise when one achieves a measure of disengagement from enemy conditions. On the other hand disengagement is difficult in a concentration camp is it not?” ’ (BF 106). The ‘altered self’ or a ‘new form’ of subjectivity is represented in the addict-as-subject and emerges as a modulatory subject directly engaged in the strategic games of power and control; such a modulatory subjectivity constantly moves towards, but never transcends, the limits not only of what constitutes a society of control itself, but of what, in effect, constitutes subjectivity. In other words, resistance in a control society emerges at the site of the subject. The addict is a modulatory or ‘undulatory’ subjectivity that reshapes and reforms itself in a continuously shifting movement that can be seen in Burroughs’s shape shifters, in the oscillating perspectives and floating ‘authorial I’, in the decentralized network of control and junk itself. In Nova Express, for example, Inspector Lee, in detailing how arrests are made, explains that Nova criminals are not ‘three-dimensional organisms […] but they need threedimensional human agents to operate’ (NE 56). The point at which Nova criminals ‘intersect’ with human agents are known as ‘coordinate points’, sites that the criminals—the controllers—can occupy in a limitless series. Yet, the ‘one thing that carries over from one human host to another and establishes identity of the controller […] is habit’ (NE 56). The transitory, modulatory subjectivity of the controllers is still limited in some ways by its addiction to identity. This is also underscored in the narrative point of view of Nova Express, especially at those points where the narrative suddenly breaks away from Inspector Lee’s ‘I’ and shifts into the removed third-person narrative of the ‘nameless’ narrator referred to as ‘Bill’, ‘I&I’ and ‘Bill&Iam’. These are instances of breaking away, or at least attempting to break away, from the normative confines of junkidentity. As such, Burroughs points to the modulatory-addict as existing at the extremes of control society, constantly testing and interrogating the limits of what constitutes subjectivity. Where or how might resistance to power, ‘freedom’ in the form of subjectivity, emerge in a society of control? Is there a way to resist strategies of power? This problem relates back to Foucault’s proposition that power is productive. When Burroughs writes that the ‘illusion of a separate inviolable identity limits your perceptions and confines you in time’ (AM 133), he is not advocating a destruction of the ‘self’, a thought that he admitted was ‘terrifying’ (133); rather, he is proposing a configuration that prompts the shift, alteration, or production of one’s notion of self. When power is conceived as functioning not ‘on’ or ‘outside’ its subjects, and does not act on them ‘from above’ but through, within, and ‘from below’, this indicates that power is not ‘despotic’ or limiting, but quite the opposite—that it is productive. Seen in this way, the antithesis of power is limitation and totalization. This is why Deleuze implies that power, in the guise of politics, is a potentially creative, even experimental force (Deleuze and Parnet 1977:137). Power, then, is productive, and must encompass resistance: ‘in relations of power, there is necessarily the possibility of resistance, for if there were no possibility of resistance […] there would be no relations of power’ (Foucault 1984:12). And just as power creates its own resistance, a society of control will create its own perforations and undermine its own aspirations to totality. In his essay ‘The Limits of Control’, Burroughs distinguishes between control and use, and points to the stagnancy of total control as the ‘basic impasse’ of all ‘control machines’: [C]ontrol also needs opposition or acquiescence; otherwise it ceases to be control […] I control a slave, a dog, a worker; but if I establish complete control somehow, as by implanting electrodes in the brain, then my subject is little more than a tape recorder, a camera, a robot. You don’t control a tape recorder—you use it […] All control systems try to make control as tight as possible, but at the same time, if they succeeded completely, there would be nothing left to control. (AM 117) Similarly, in the essay ‘Mind War’, Burroughs surmises that a society of ‘world control’ would look like an ‘elitist World State very much along the lines laid down by the Nazis’, controlled by a ‘theocracy trained in psychic control techniques implemented by computerized electronic devices that would render opposition psychologically impossible’ (AM 151). If there were no ‘points of insubordination’ (Foucault 1983:225) or possibilities of dissent within relations of power, there would be, simply, ‘complete control’ (AM 117) in the form of enslavement, submission, and pure use. Just as a ‘society without power relations’ is only an ‘abstraction’ (Foucault 1983:222), the ‘relationship between power and freedom’s refusal to submit’ cannot be separated (221). Foucault maintained that it is a mode of action that defines a relationship of power, a mode of action that does not act on others, but on their actions—‘a set of actions upon other actions’ (Foucault 1983:220). Burroughs echoes this sentiment in writing that this ‘is a game planet’ and that although there cannot be a final victory because that would ‘mean the end of the war game’, all the players must ‘believe in final victory’ in order for the game to function (AM 155). Yet when we see the relationship of power, the ‘game’, as a series—or as an array—of actions upon the actions of others, one must include a crucial element: freedom (Foucault 1983:221). It is the alteration of the self that ‘produces a modification of one’s activity in relation to others, and hence a modification in power relations, even if only at the micro-level to begin with’ (O’Farrell 1989:129). Hence, freedom, for Foucault as well as for Burroughs, constitutes the delimitation of domination in order to make space for the freedom of human relations, which is the space of possibility for the creation of new forms of subjectivity. Burroughs’s modulatory subject is a subject that experiences itself not only formed within relations of power, but also as having power, capable of relaying and redeploying the strategies of power themselves. Burroughs’s fascination with control and his rendering of the subject-as-addict—the modulatory subject—shores up not so much a ‘transcendence’ of the limits of cultural norms or a ‘moving outside’ the limits of the self, but more an exploration of discursive limits. Transgression, as Foucault insists, is not related to limits in the same way that the prohibited is related to the lawful, or the outside to the inside, but it ‘takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust’ (Foucault 1963:35). It is crucial to understand that Burroughs’s work in no way represents a literal moving ‘beyond’ or standing ‘beside’ oneself, but an interrogation of the limits of the self that points to the possibility of sociopolitical transformation within a society of control. What we tend to see in Burroughs is a ‘creation of the self’, the representation of the experience of self-formation in the face of the social and political forces that are incessantly affecting us on a daily basis. Through the lens of Burroughs’s radicalized perspective, the formulation of a modular subjectivity is a generative force, and signals the possibility of promoting new forms of subjectivity, of bringing one to experience oneself as an agent with and constituted by power; he underscores the necessity of distinguishing alternative modes of liberation and resistance to dominant, normalizing systems of thought exercised in a society of control. Burroughs’s representations of control and his re-signification of the subject as a modulatory subject is a gesture toward empowerment, a shift towards perceiving how we can interrupt the flow between power and truth. 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Retaking the Universe (William S.Burroughs in the Age of Globalization) Part1: Theoretical Depositions/'Speculating Freedom': Addiction, Control and Rescriptive Subjectivity in the Work of William S. Burroughs /Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com La Société du Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) is a black and white 1973 film by the Situationist Guy Debord based on his 1967 book of the same name. It was Debord's first feature-length film. It uses found footage and detournement in a radical Marxist critique of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society. The 88 minute film took a year to make and incorporates an apparent jumble of footage from feature films juxtaposed with still photographs, industrial films, early 1970s glossy 'lifestyle' TV ads, and news footage of unrest in the streets. The feature films include The Battleship Potemkin, October, Chapaev, The New Babylon, The Shanghai Gesture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rio Grande, They Died with Their Boots On, Johnny Guitar, and Mr. Arkadin, as well as other Soviet films. Throughout the film, there are intertitles consisting of quotations from The Society of the Spectacle, along with Debord (in voice-over) reading texts from Marx, Machiavelli, the 1968 Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne, Tocqueville, Émile Pouget, and Sergey Solovyov and others. Without citations, these quotes are hard to decipher, especially with the conflicting subtitles (which exist even in the French version): but that is part of Debord's goal to "problematize reception" (Greil and Sanborn) and force the viewer to be active. In addition, the words of some of the authors are detourned through deliberate misquoting. Footage of historical events is included, such as the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald (the assassin of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963), the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Paris riots in May 1968, along with clips of people such as Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon and the Spanish anarchist Durruti. In 1984, Debord withdrew his films from circulation because of the negative press and the assassination of his friend and patron Gerard Lebovici. Since Debord's suicide in 1994, Debord's wife Alice Becker-Ho has been promoting Debord's film. A DVD box set titled Guy Debord: Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes was released in 2005 and contains Debord's seven films. Directed by Guy Debord Written by Guy Debord Narrated by Guy Debord Music by Michel Corrette Release date: 1973 Running time: 88 min. Country: France Language: French Albert Camus What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by saying "no"? He means, for example, that "this has been going on too long," "up to this point yes, beyond it no," "you are going too far," or, again, "there is a limit beyond which you shall not go." In other words, his no affirms the existence of a borderline. The same concept is to be found in the rebel's feeling that the other person "is exaggerating," that he is exerting his authority beyond a limit where he begins to infringe on the rights of others. Thus the movement of rebellion is founded simultaneously on the categorical rejection of an intrusion that is considered intolerable and on the confused conviction of an absolute right which, in the rebel's mind, is more precisely the impression that he "has the right to . . ." Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right. It is in this way that the rebel slave says yes and no simultaneously. He affirms that there are limits and also that he suspects—and wishes to preserve—the existence of certain things on this side of the borderline. He demonstrates, with obstinacy, that there is something in him which "is worth while . . ." and which must be taken into consideration. In a certain way, he confronts an order of things which oppresses him with the insistence on a kind of right not to be oppressed beyond the limit that he can tolerate. In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringment of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself. Thus he implicitly brings into play a standard of values so far from being gratuitous that he is prepared to support it no matter what the risks. Up to this point he has at least remained silent and has abandoned himself to the form of despair in which a condition is accepted even though it is considered unjust. To remain silent is to give the impression that one has no opinions, that one wants nothing, and in certain cases it really amounts to wanting nothing. Despair, like the absurd, has opinions and desires about everything in general and nothing in particular. Silence expresses this attitude very well. But from the moment that the rebel finds his voice—even though he says nothing but "no"—he begins to desire and to judge. The rebel, in the etymological sense, does a complete turnabout. He acted under the lash of his master's whip. Suddenly he turns and faces him. He opposes what is preferable to what is not. Not every value entails rebellion, but every act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value. Or is it really a question of values? Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, even if only for a moment. Up to now this identification was never really experienced. Before he rebelled, the slave accepted all the demands made upon him. Very often he even took orders, without reacting against them, which were far more conducive to insurrection than the one at which he balks. He accepted them patiently, though he may have protested inwardly, but in that he remained silent he was more concerned with his own immediate interests than as yet aware of his own rights. But with loss of patience—with impatience—a reaction begins which can extend to everything that he previously accepted, and which is almost always retroactive. The very moment the slave refuses to obey the humiliating orders of his master, he simultaneously rejects the condition of slavery. The act of rebellion carries him far beyond the point he had reached by simply refusing. He exceeds the bounds that he fixed for his antagonist, and now demands to be treated as an equal. What was at first the man's obstinate resistance now becomes the whole man, who is identified with and summed up in this resistance. The part of himself that he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and proclaims it preferable to everything, even to life itself. It becomes for him the supreme good. Having up to now been willing to compromise, the slave suddenly adopts ("because this is how it must be . . .") an attitude of All or Nothing. With rebellion, awareness is born. But we can see that the knowledge gained is, at the same time, of an "all" that is still rather obscure and of a "nothing" that proclaims the possibility of sacrificing the rebel to this "All." The rebel himself wants to be "all"— to identify himself completely with this good of which he has suddenly become aware and by which he wants to be personally recognized and acknowledged—or "nothing"; in other words, to be completely destroyed by the force that dominates him. As a last resort, he is willing to accept the final defeat, which is death, rather than be deprived of the personal sacrament that he would call, for example, freedom. Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees. Values, according to good authorities, "most often represent a transition from facts to rights, from what is desired to what is desirable (usually through the intermediary of what is generally considered desirable)."The transition from facts to rights is manifest, as we have seen, in rebellion. So is the transition from "this must be" to "this is how I should like things to be," and even more so, perhaps, the idea of the sublimation of the individual in a henceforth universal good. The sudden appearance of the concept of "All or Nothing" demonstrates that rebellion, contrary to current opinion, and though it springs from everything that is most strictly individualistic in man, questions the very idea of the individual. If the individual, in fact, accepts death and happens to die as a consequence of his act of rebellion, he demonstrates by doing so that he is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of a common good which he considers more important than his own destiny. If he prefers the risk of death to the negation of the rights that he defends, it is because he considers these rights more important than himself. Therefore he is acting in the name of certain values which are still indeterminate but which he feels are common to himself and to all men. We see that the affirmation implicit in every act of rebellion is extended to something that transcends the individual in so far as it withdraws him from his supposed solitude and provides him with a reason to act. But it is already worth noting that this concept of values as pre-existant to any kind of action contradicts the purely historical philosophies, in which values are acquired (if they are ever acquired) after the action has been completed. Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? It is for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something in him which does not belong to him alone, but which is common ground where all men—even the man who insults and oppresses him—have a natural community. Two observations will support this argument. First, we can see that an act of rebellion is not, essentially, an egoistic act. Of course, it can have egoistic motives. But one can rebel equally well against lies as against oppression. Moreover, the rebel—once he has accepted the motives and at the moment of his greatest impetus—preserves nothing in that he risks everything. He demands respect for himself, of course, but only in so far as he identifies himself with a natural community. Then we note that rebellion does not arise only, and necessarily, among the oppressed, but that it can also be caused by the mere spectacle of oppression of which someone else is the victim. In such cases there is a feeling of identification with another individual. And it must be pointed out that this is not a question of psychological identification—a mere subterfuge by which the individual imagines that it is he himself who has been offended. On the contrary, it can often happen that we cannot bear to see offenses done to others which we ourselves have accepted without rebelling. The suicides of the Russian terrorists in Siberia as a protest against their comrades' being whipped is a case in point. Nor is it a question of the feeling of a community of interests. Injustices done to men whom we consider enemies can, actually, be profoundly repugnant to us. There is only identification of one's destiny with that of others and a choice of sides. Therefore the individual is not, in himself alone, the embodiment of the values he wishes to defend. It needs all humanity, at least, to comprise them. When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical. But for the moment we are only talking of the kind of solidarity that is born in chains. It would be possible for us to define the positive aspect of the values implicit in every act of rebellion by comparing them with a completely negative concept like that of resentment as defined by Scheler. Rebellion is, in fact, much more than pursuit of a claim, in the strongest sense of the word. Resentment is very well defined by Scheler as an autointoxication—the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence. Rebellion, on the contrary, breaks the seal and allows the whole being to come into play. It liberates stagnant waters and turns them into a raging torrent. Scheler himself emphasizes the passive aspect of resentment and remarks on the prominent place it occupies in the psychology of women who are dedicated to desire and possession. The fountain-head of rebellion, on the contrary, is the principle of superabundant activity and energy. Scheler is also right in saying that resentment is always highly colored by envy. But one envies what one does not have, while the rebel's aim is to defend what he is. He does not merely claim some good that he does not possess or of which he was deprived. His aim is to claim recognition for something which he has and which has already been recognized by him, in almost every case, as more important than anything of which he could be envious. Rebellion is not realistic. According to Scheler, resentment always turns into either unscrupulous ambition or bitterness, depending on whether it is implanted in a strong person or a weak one. But in both cases it is a question of wanting to be something other than what one is. Resentment is always resentment against oneself. The rebel, on the contrary, from his very first step, refuses to allow anyone to touch what he is. He is fighting for the integrity of one part of his being. He does not try, primarily, to conquer, but simply to impose. Finally, it would seem that resentment takes delight, in advance, in the pain that it would like the object of its envy to feel. Nietzsche and Scheler are right in seeing an excellent example of this in the passage where Ter-tullian informs his readers that one of the greatest sources of happiness among the blessed will be the spectacle of the Roman emperors consumed in the fires of hell. This kind of happiness is also experienced by the decent people who go to watch executions. The rebel, on the contrary, limits himself, as a matter of principle, to refusing to be humiliated without asking that others should be. He will even accept pain provided his integrity is respected. It is therefore hard to understand why Scheler completely identifies the spirit of rebellion with resentment. His criticism of the resentment to be found in humani-tarianism (which he treats as the non-Christian form of love for mankind) could perhaps be applied to certain indeterminate forms of humanitarian idealism, or to the techniques of terror. But it rings false in relation to man's rebellion against his condition—the movement that enlists the individual in the defense of a dignity common to all men. Scheler wants to demonstrate that humanitarian feelings are always accompanied by a hatred of the world. Humanity is loved in general in order to avoid having to love anybody in particular. This is correct, in some cases, and it is easier to understand Scheler when we realize that for him humanitarianism is represented by Bentham and Rousseau. But man's love for man can be born of other things than a mathematical calculation of the resultant rewards or a theoretical confidence in human nature. In face of the utilitarians, and of Emile's preceptor, there is, for example, the kind of logic, embodied by Dostoievsky in Ivan Karamazov, which progresses from an act of rebellion to metaphysical insurrection. Scheler is aware of this and sums up the concept in the following manner: "There is not enough love in the world to squander it on anything but human beings." Even if this proposition were true, the appalling despair that it implies would merit anything but contempt. In fact, it misunderstands the tortured character of Karamazov's rebellion. Ivan's drama, on the contrary, arises from the fact that there is too much love without an object. This love finding no outlet and God being denied, it is then decided to lavish it on human beings as a generous act of complicity. Nevertheless, in the act of rebellion as we have envisaged it up to now, an abstract ideal is not chosen through lack of feeling and in pursuit of a sterile demand. We insist that the part of man which cannot be reduced to mere ideas should be taken into consideration—the passionate side of his nature that serves no other purpose than to be part of the act of living. Does this imply that no rebellion is motivated by resentment? No, and we know it only too well in this age of malice. But we must consider the idea of rebellion in its widest sense on pain of betraying it; and in its widest sense rebellion goes far beyond resentment. When Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, says that he puts his love above God and would willingly go to hell in order to be reunited with the woman he loves, he is prompted not only by youth and humiliation but by the consuming experience of a whole lifetime. The same emotion causes Eckart, in a surprising fit of heresy, to say that he prefers hell with Jesus to heaven without Him. This is the very essence of love. Contrary to Scheler, it would therefore be impossible to overemphasize the passionate affirmation that underlies the act of rebellion and distinguishes it from resentment. Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended. But, to sum up, are not rebellion and the values that it implies relative? Reasons for rebellion do seem to change, in fact, with periods and civilizations. It is obvious that a Hindu pariah, an Inca warrior, a primitive native of central Africa, and a member of one of the first Christian communities had not at all the same ideas about rebellion. We could even assert, with considerable assurance, that the idea of rebellion has no meaning in these particular cases. However, a Greek slave, a serf, a condottiere of the Renaissance, a Parisian bourgeois during the Regency, a Russian intellectual at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a contemporary worker would undoubtedly agree that rebellion is legitimate, even if they differed about the reasons for it. In other words, the problem of rebellion seems to assume a precise meaning only within the confines of Western thought. It is possible to be even more explicit by remarking, like Scheler, that the spirit of rebellion finds few means of expression in societies where inequalities are very great (the Hindu caste system) or, again, in those where there is absolute equality (certain primitive societies). The spirit of rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society. One might be tempted to affirm that it is relative to the development of individualism if the preceding remarks had not put us on our guard against this conclusion. On the basis of the evidence, the only conclusion that can be drawn from Scheler's remark is that, thanks to the theory of political freedom, there is, in the very heart of our society, an increasing awareness in man of the idea of man and, thanks to the application of this theory of freedom, a corresponding dissatisfaction. Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man's awareness of it. We can only deduce from this observation that rebellion is the act of an educated man who is aware of his own rights. But there is nothing which justifies us in saying that it is only a question of individual rights. Because of the sense of solidarity we have already pointed out, it would rather seem that what is at stake is humanity's gradually increasing self-awareness as it pursues its course. In fact, for the Inca and the pariah the problem never arises, because for them it had been solved by a tradition, even before they had had time to raise it—the answer being that tradition is sacred. If in a world where things are held sacred the problem of rebellion does not arise, it is because no real problems are to be found in such a world, all the answers having been given simultaneously. Metaphysic is replaced by myth. There are no more questions, only eternal answers and commentaries, which may be metaphysical. But before man accepts the sacred world and in order that he should be able to accept it— or before he escapes from it and in order that he should be able to escape from it—there is always a period of soulsearching and rebellion. The rebel is a man who is on the point of accepting or rejecting the sacred and determined on laying claim to a human situation in which all the answers are human—in other words, formulated in reasonable terms. From this moment every question, every word, is an act of rebellion while in the sacred world every word is an act of grace. It would be possible to demonstrate in this manner that only two possible worlds can exist for the human mind: the sacred (or, to speak in Christian terms, the world of grace ) and the world of rebellion. The disappearance of one is equivalent to the appearance of the other, despite the fact that this appearance can take place in disconcerting forms. There again we rediscover the All or Nothing. The present interest of the problem of rebellion only springs from the fact that nowadays whole societies have wanted to discard the sacred. We live in an unsacrosanct moment in history. Insurrection is certainly not the sum total of human experience. But history today, with all its storm and strife, compels us to say that rebellion is one of the essential dimensions of man. It is our historic reality. Unless we choose to ignore reality, we must find our values in it. Is it possible to find a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion and its absolute values? That is the question raised by rebellion. We have already noted the confused values that are called into play by incipient rebellion. Now we must inquire if these values are to be found again in contemporary forms of rebellious thought and action, and if they are, we must specify their content. But, before going any farther, let us note that the basis of these values is rebellion itself. Man's solidarity is founded upon rebellion, and rebellion, in its turn, can only find its justification in this solidarity. We have, then, the right to say that any rebellion which claims the right to deny or destroy this solidarity loses simultaneously its right to be called rebellion and becomes in reality an acquiescence in murder. In the same way, this solidarity, except in so far as religion is concerned, comes to life only on the level of rebellion. And so the real drama of revolutionary thought is announced. In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limit it discovers in itself—a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist. Rebellious thought, therefore, cannot dispense with memory: it is a perpetual state of tension. In studying its actions and its results, we shall have to say, each time, whether it remains faithful to its first noble promise or if, through indolence or folly, it forgets its original purpose and plunges into a mire of tyranny or servitude. Meanwhile, we can sum up the initial progress that the spirit of rebellion provokes in a mind that is originally imbued with the absurdity and apparent sterility of the world. In absurdist experience, suffering is individual. But from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience. Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe. The malady experienced by a single man becomes a mass plague. In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the "cogito" in the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel—therefore we exist. Albert Camus/The Rebel/ Part One: The Rebel/FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, NOVEMBER 1991 Copyright © 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc 'The arts require witnesses,' Marmontel once said. A century later Auguste Rodin asserted that it is the visible world that demands to be revealed by means other than the latent images of the phototype. In the course of his famous conversations with the sculptor, Paul Gsell remarked, apropos Rodin's 'The Age of Bronze' and 'St John the Baptist', 'I am still left wondering how those great lumps of bronze or stone actually seem to move, how obviously immobile figures appear to act and even to be making pretty strenuous efforts. Rodin retorts, 'Have you ever looked closely at instantaneous photographs of men in motion? ... Well then, what have you noticed?' 'That they never seem to be making headway. Generally, they seem to be standing still on one leg, or hopping.' 'Exactly! Take my "St John", for example. I've shown him with both feet on the ground, whereas an instantaneous photograph taken of a model performing the same movement would most likely show the back foot already raised and moving forward. Or else the reverse — the front foot would not yet be on the ground if the back leg in the photograph were in the same position as in my statue. That is precisely why the model in the photograph would have the bizarre look of a man suddenly struck with paralysis. Which confirms what I was just saying about movement in art. People in photographs suddenly seem frozen in mid-air, despite being caught in full swing: this is because every part of their body is reproduced at exactly the same twentieth or fortieth of a second, so there is no gradual unfolding of a gesture, as there is in art.' Gsell objects, 'So, when art interprets movement and finds itself completely at loggerheads with photography, which is an unimpeachable mechanical witness, art obviously distorts the truth.' 'No', Rodin replies, 'It is art that tells the truth and photography that lies. For in reality time does not stand still, and if the artist manages to give the impression that a gesture is being executed over several seconds, their work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image in which time is abruptly suspended. ...' Rodin then goes on to discuss Gericault's horses, going flat out in the painting 'Race at Epsom', and the critics who claim that the photographic plate never gives the same impression. Rodin counters that the artist condenses several successive movements into a single image, so if the representation as a whole is false in showing these movements as simultaneous, it is true when the parts are observed in sequence, and it is only this truth that counts since it is what we see and what impresses us. Prompted by the artist to follow the progress of a character's action, the spectator, scanning it, has the illusion of seeing the movement performed. This illusion is thus not produced mechanically as it would later be with the snapshots of the chronophotographic apparatus, through retinal retention - photosensitivity to light stimuli — but naturally, through eye movement. The veracity of the work therefore depends, in part, on this solicitation of eye (and possibly body) movement in the witness who, in order to sense an object with maximum clarity, must accomplish an enormous number of tiny, rapid movements from one part of the object to another. Conversely, if the eye's motility is transformed into fixity by artificial lenses or bad habits, the sensory apparatus undergoes distortion and vision degenerates. ... In his greedy anxiety to achieve his end, which is to do the greatest possible amount of good seeing in the shortest possible time, the starer neglects the only means whereby this end can be achieved. Besides, Rodin insists, the veracity of the whole is only made possible through the lack of precision of details conceived merely as so many material props enabling either a falling short of or a going beyond immediate vision. The work of art requires witnesses because it sallies forth with its image into the depths of a material time which is also our own. This sharing of duration is automatically defeated by the innovation of photographic instantaneity, for if the instantaneous image pretends to scientific accuracy in its details, the snapshot's image-freeze or rather image-time-freeze invariably distorts the witness's felt temporality, that time that is the movement of something created? The plaster studies on show in Rodin's atelier at Meudon reveal a state of evident anatomical breakdown — huge, unruly hands and feet, dislocated, distended limbs, bodies in suspension — the representation of movement pushed to the limits of collapse or take-off. From here it is only a step to Clement Ader and the first aeroplane flight, the conquest of the air through mobilisation of something heavier than air which is followed, in 1895, by cinematography's mobilisation of the snapshot, retinal take-off, that moment when, with the achievement of metabolic speeds, 'all that we called art seems to have become paralytic, while the film-maker lights up the thousand candles of his projectors'. When Bergson asserts that mind is a thing that endures, one might add that it is our duration that thinks, feels, sees. The first creation of consciousness would then be its own speed in its time-distance, speed thereby becoming causal idea, idea before the idea.5 It is thus now common to think of our memories as multidimensional, of thought as transfer, transport (metaphora) in the literal sense. Already Cicero and the ancient memory-theorists believed you could consolidate natural memory with the right training. They invented a topographical system, the Method of Loci, an imagerymnemonics which consisted of selecting a sequence of places, locations, that could easily be ordered in time and space. For example, you might imagine wandering through the house, choosing as loci various tables, a chair seen through a doorway, a windowsill, a mark on a wall. Next, the material to be remembered is coded into discreet images and each of the images is inserted in the appropriate order into the various loci. To memorise a speech, you transform the main points into concrete images and mentally 'place' each of the points in order at each successive locus. When it is time to deliver the speech, all you have to do is recall the parts of the house in order. The same kind of training is still used today by stage actors and barristers at court. It was members of the theatre industry like Kammerspiel theorists Lupu Pick and the scenarist Carl Mayer who, at the beginning of the 1920s, took the whole thing to ludicrous lengths as a film technique, offering the audience a kind of cinematic huis clos occurring in a unique place and at the exact moment of projection. Their film sets were not expressionist but realist so that familiar objects, the minutiae of daily life, assume an obsessive symbolic importance. According to its creators, this was supposed to render all dialogue, all subtitles superfluous. The silent screen was to make the surroundings speak the same way practitioners of artificial memory made the room they lived in, the theatre boards they trod speak, in retrospect. Following Dreyer and a host of others, Alfred Hitchcock employed a somewhat similar coding system, bearing in mind that viewers do not manufacture mental images on the basis of what they are immediately given to see, but on the basis of their memories, by themselves filling in the blanks and their minds with images created retrospectively, as in childhood. For a traumatised population, in the aftermath of the First World war, the Kammerspiel cinema altered the conditions of invention of artificial memory, which was itself also born of the catastrophic disappearance of the scenery. The story goes that the lyrical poet Simonides of Chios, in the middle of reciting a poem at a banquet, was suddenly called away to another part of the house. As soon as he left the room, the roof caved in on the other guests and, as it was a particularly heavy roof, they were all crushed to a pulp. But with his sharpened memory, Simonides could recall the exact place occupied by each of the unfortunate guests and the bodies could thus be identified. It then really dawned on Simonides what an advantage this method of picking places and filling them in with images could be in practising the art of poetry. In May 1646 Descartes wrote to Elizabeth, 'There is such a strong connection between body and soul that thoughts that accompanied certain movements of our body at the beginning of our lives, go on accompanying them later.' Elsewhere he tells how he once as a child loved a little girl with a slight squint, and how the impression his brain received through sight whenever he looked at her wandering eyes remained so vividly present that he continued to be drawn to people with the same defect for the rest of his life. The moment they appeared on the scene, the first optical devices (Al-Hasan ibn al-Haitam aka Alhazen's camera obscura in the tenth century, Roger Bacon's instruments in the thirteenth, the increasing number of visual prostheses, lenses, astronomic telescopes and so on from the Renaissance on) profoundly altered the contexts in which mental images were topographically stored and retrieved, the imperative to re-present oneself, the imaging of the imagination which was such a great help in mathematics according to Descartes and which he considered a veritable part of the body, veram partem corporis. Just when we were apparently procuring the means to see further and better the unseen of the universe, we were about to lose what little power had of imagining it. The telescope, that epitome of the visual prosthesis, projected an image of a world beyond our reach and thus another way of moving about in the world, the logistics of perception inaugurating an unknown conveyance of sight that produced a telescoping of near and far, a phenomenon of acceleration obliterating our experience of distances and dimensions. More than a return to Antiquity, the Renaissance appears today as the advent of a period when all intervals were cleared, a sort of morphological 'breaking and entering' that immediately impacted on the reality-effect: once astronomic and chronometric apparatuses went commercial, geographical perception became dependent on anamorphic processes. Painters such as Holbein, who were contemporaries of Copernicus, practised a kind of iconography in which technology's first stab at leading the senses astray occupied centre stage thanks to singularly mechanistic optical devices. Apart from the displacement of the observer's point of view, complete perception of the painted work could only happen with the aid of instruments such as glass cylinders and tubes, the play of conical or spherical mirrors, magnifying glasses and other kinds of lenses. The reality-effect had become a dissociated system, a puzzle the observer was unable to solve without some traffic in light or the appropriate prostheses. Jurgis Baltrusaitis reports that the Jesuits of Beijing used anamorphic equipment as instruments of religious propaganda to impress the Chinese and to demonstrate to them 'mechanically' that man should experience the world as an illusion of the world. In a celebrated passage of / Saggiatore (1623), Galileo exposes the essential features of his method: 'Philosophy is written in the immense Book of Nature which is constantly before our very eyes and which cannot be (humanly) understood unless one has previously learned the language and alphabet in which it is written. It is written in mathematical characters... . We imagine it (mathematically) because it remains continually before our very eyes from the moment we first see the light of day. If, in this parabola, the duration of the visible seems simply to persist, geomorphology has disappeared or is at least reduced to an abstract language plotted on one of the first great industrial media (with all the artillery so vital to the disclosure of optical phenomena). The celebrated Gutenberg Bible had by then been in print for nearly two centuries and the book trade in Europe, with a printing works in every town and a great number of them in the capitals, had already disseminated its products in the millions. Significantly, the 'art of writing artificially' as it was then called, was also, from its inception, placed at the service of religious propaganda, the Catholic Church at first, then the Reformation. But it was also an instrument of diplomatic and military propaganda, a fact that would later earn it the name thought artillery, well before Marcel L'Herbier labelled his camera a rotary image press. A connoisseur of optical mirages, Galileo now no longer preferred to form images in the world directly in order to imagine it; he took up instead the much more limited oculomotor labour of reading. From Antiquity, a progressive simplification of written characters can t>e discerned, followed by a simplification of typographical composition which corresponded to an acceleration in the transmission of messages and led logically to the radical abbreviation of the contents information. The tendency to make reading time as intensive as speaking time stemmed from the tactical necessities of military conquest and more particularly of the battlefield, that occasional field of perception, privileged space of the vision of the trooper, of rapid stimuli, slogans and other logotypes of war. The battlefield is the place where social intercourse breaks off, where political rapprochement fails, making way for the inculcation of terror. The panoply of acts of war thus always tends to be organised at a distance, or rather, to organise distances. Orders, in fact speech of any kind, are transmitted by long-range instruments which, in any case, are often inaudible among combatants' screams, the clash of arms, and, later, the various explosions and detonations. Signal flags, multicoloured pennants, schematic emblems then replace faltering vocal signals and constitute a delocalised language which can now be grasped via brief and distant glances, inaugurating a vectorisation that will become concrete in 1794 with the first aerial telegraph line between Paris and Lille and the announcement, at the Convention, of the French troops' victory at Conde-sur-1'Escaut. That same year, Lazare Carnot, organiser of the Revolution's armies, recorded the speed of transmission of military information that was at the very heart of the nation's political and social structures. He commented that if terror was the order of the day, it could thereafter hold sway at the front just as well and at the same time as behind the lines. Some time later, at the moment when photography became instantaneous, messages and words, reduced to a few elementary signs, were themselves telescoped to the speed of light. On 6 January 1838 Samuel Morse, the American physicist and painter of battle-scenes, succeeded in sending the first electric-telegraph message from his workshop in New Jersey. (The term meaning to write at a distance was also used at the time to denote certain stagecoaches and other means of fast transport.) The race between the transtextual and the transvisual ran on until the emergence of the instantaneous ubiquity of the audiovisual mix. Simultaneously tele-diction and television, this ultimate transfer finally undermines the age-old problematic of the site where mental images are formed as well as that of the consolidation of natural memory. 'The boundaries between things are disappearing, the subject and the world are no longer separate, time seems to stand still', wrote the physicist Ernst Mach, known particularly for having established the role of the speed of sound in aerodynamics. In fact the teletopological phenomenon remains heavily marked by its remote beginnings in war, and does not bring the subject closer to the world. ... In the manner of the combatant of antiquity, it anticipates human movement, outstripping every displacement of the body and abolishing space. With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation. This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organisation, precede gesture and speech and their co-ordination in knowing, recognising, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never ever passive. Communicational experiments with newborn babies are particularly instructive. A small mammal condemned, unlike other mammals, to prolonged semi-immobility, the child, it seems, hangs on maternal smells (breast, neck ...), but also on eye movements. In the course of an eye-tracking exercise that consists of holding a child of about three months in one's arms, at eye level and face to face, and turning it gently from right to left, then from left to right, the child's eyes 'bulge' in the reverse direction, as makers of old porcelain dolls clearly saw, simply because the infant does not want to lose sight of the smiling face of the person holding it. The child experiences this exercise in the expansion of its field of vision as deeply gratifying; it laughs and wants to go on doing it. Something very fundamental is clearly going on here, since the infant is in the process of forming a lasting communicational image by mobilising its eyes. As Lacan said, communication makes you laugh and so the child is in an ideally human position. Everything I see is in principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, marked on the map of the 7 can'. In this important formulation, Merleau-Ponty pinpoints precisely what will eventually find itself ruined by the banalisation of a certain teletopology. The bulk of what I see is, in fact and in principle, no longer within my reach. And even if it lies within reach of my sight, it is no longer necessarily inscribed on the map of the 'I can'. The logistics of perception in fact destroy what earlier modes of representation preserved of this original, ideally human happiness, the 'I can' of sight, which kept art from being obscene. I have often been able to confirm this watching models who were perfectly happy to pose in the nude and submit to whatever painters and sculptors wanted them to do, but flatly refused to allow themselves to be photographed, feeling that that would amount to a pornographic act. There is a vast iconography evoking this prime communicational image. It has been one of the major themes in Christian art, presenting the person of Mary (named Mediator) as the initial map of the Infant-God's 7 can\ Conversely, the Reformation's rejection of consubstantiality and of such close physical proximity intervenes during the Renaissance, with the proliferation of optical devices. ... Romantic poetry is one of the last movements to employ this type of cartography. In Novalis, the body of the beloved (having become profane) is the universe in miniature and the universe is merely the extension of the beloved's body. So in spite of all this machinery of transfer, we get no closer to the productive unconscious of sight, something the surrealists once dreamed of in relation to photography and cinema. Instead, we only get as far as its unconsciousness, an annihilation of place and appearance the future amplitude of which is still hard to imagine. The death of art, heralded from the beginning of the nineteenth century, turns out to be merely an initial, disquieting symptom of this process, despite being unprecedented in the history of human societies. This is the emergence of the deregulated world that Hermann Rauschning, the author of The Revolution of Nihilism, spoke about in November 1939 in relation to Nazism's project: the universal collapse of all forms of established order, something never before seen in human memory. In this unprecedented crisis of representation (bearing absolutely no relation to some kind of classic decadence), the age-old act of seeing was to be replaced by a regressive perceptual state, a kind of syncretism, resembling a pitiful caricature of the semi-immobility of early infancy, the sensitive substratum now existing only as a fuzzy morass from which a few shapes, smells, sounds accidentally leap out ... more sharply perceived. Thanks to work like that of W. R. Russell and Nathan (1946), scientists have become aware of the relationship of post-perceptual visual processes to time. The storage of mental images is never instantaneous; it has to do with the processing of perception. Yet it is precisely this storage process that is rejected today. The young American film-maker Laurie Anderson, among others, is able to declare herself a mere voyeur interested only in details; as for the rest, she says, T use computers that are tragically unable to forget, like endless rubbish dumps.' Returning to Galileo's simile of deciphering the book of the real, it is not so much a question here of what Benjamin called the imageilliteracy of the photographers incapable of reading their own photographs. It is a question of visual dyslexia. Teachers have been saying for a long time now that the last few generations have great difficulty understanding what they read because they are incapable of re-presenting it to themselves.... For them, words have in the end lost their ability to come alive, since images, more rapidly perceived, were supposed to replace words according to the photographers, the silent film-makers, the propagandists and advertisers of the early twentieth century. Now there is no longer anything to replace, and the number of the visually illiterate and dyslexic keeps mutliplying. Here again, recent studies of dyslexia have established a direct connection between the subject's visual abilities, on the one hand, and language and reading on the other. They frequently record a weakening of central (foveal) vision, the site of the most acute sensation, along with subsequent enhancing of a more or less frantic peripheral vision - a dissociation of sight in which the heterogeneous swamps the homogeneous. This means that, as in narcotic states, the series of visual impressions become meaningless. They no longer seem to belong to us, they just exist, as though the speed of light had won out, this time, over the totality of the message. If we think about light, which has no image and yet creates images, we find that the use of light stimuli in crowd control goes back a long way. The inhabitant of the ancient city, for instance, was not the indoors type; he was out on the street, except at nightfall for obvious safety reasons. Commerce, craft, riots and daily brawls, traffic jams. ... Bossuet was worried about this chronic lightweight who could not keep still, did not stop to think where he was going, who no longer even knew where he was and would soon be mistaking night for day. At the end of the seventeenth century, police lieutenant La Reynie came up with 'Lighting Inspectors' to reassure the Parisian public and encourage them to go out at night. When he quit his post in 1697, having been promoted chief of police, there were 6,500 lanterns lighting up the capital which would soon be known by contemporaries as the city of light for 'the streets are ablaze all through winter and even of a full moon', as the Englishman Lister wrote, comparing Paris to London which enjoyed no such privilege. In the 18th century the by now rather shady population of Paris mushroomed and the capital became known as the New Babylon. The brightness of its lighting signalled not just a desire for security, but also individual and institutional economic prosperity, as well as the fact that 'brilliance is all the rage' among the new elites - bankers, gentlemen farmers and the nouveaux riches of dubious origins and careers. Whence the taste for garish lights which no lampshade could soften. On the contrary, they were amplified by the play of mirrors multiplying them to infinity. Mirrors turned into dazzling reflectors. A giorno lighting now spilled out of the buildings where it once helped turn reality into illusion — theatres, palaces, luxury hotels, princely gardens. Artificial light was in itself a spectacle soon to be made available to all, and street lighting, the democratisation of lighting, is designed to trick everyone's eyes. There is everything from old-fashioned fireworks to the light shows of the engineer Philippe Lebon, the inventor of the gaslight who, in the middle of a social revolution, opened the Seignelay Hotel to the public so they might appreciate the value of his discovery. The streets were packed at night with people gazing upon the works of lighting engineers and pyrotechnists known collectively as impressionists. But this constant straining after 'more light' was already leading to a sort of precocious disability, a blindness; the eye literally popped out of its socket. In this respect the delegation of sight to Niepce's artificial retinas, took on its full meaning. Faced with such a permanent regime of bedazzlement, the range of adaptability of the eye's crystalline lens was quickly lost. Madame de Genlis, then governess to the children of Louis-Philippe, pointed to the damage caused by the abuse of lighting: 'Since lamps have come into fashion, it is the young who are wearing glasses; good eyes are now only to be found among the old who have kept up the habit of reading and writing with a candle shaded by a candle guard. That perverted peasant and Paris pedestrian, Restif de la Bretonne, observing life with the rustic's sharp eye, soon gave way to a new, anonymous, ageless character who no longer took to the streets looking for a man, like Diogenes with his lantern burning in broad daylight. He now sought light itself, for where there is light there is the crowd. According to Edgar Allan Poe, our man no longer inhabited the big city strictly speaking (London, as it happens), but the dense throng. His only itinerary was that of the human stream wherever it was bound, wherever it was to be found. All was dark yet splendid, Poe wrote, and the man's only terror was the risk of losing the crowd thanks to the strange light effects, to the speed with which the world of light vanishes. ...' For this man, frowning furiously, shooting frantic looks here, there and everywhere towards all those swarming round him, drowning in the flood of images, one face constantly being gobbled up by another, the endless surging throng permitted only the briefest glance at any one face. When, having pursued him for hours, the exhausted author finally caught up and planted himself right in front of him, the man was pulled up short for a second, but looked straight through the author without even seeing him, then immediately flitted off on his merry manic way. In 1902 it was Jack London's turn to come to London and he too followed, step by step, the people of the abyss. Urban lighting had by then become a torture for the mass of social rejects of the capital of the world's most powerful Empire. The vast mob of the homeless represented more than 10 per cent of London's population of six million. They were not allowed to sleep at night anywhere, whether in parks, on benches or on the street; they had to keep walking till dawn, when they were finally allowed to lie down in places' where there was little danger of anyone seeing them. No doubt because contemporary architects and townplanners have no more than anyone else been able to escape such psychotropic disorders (the topographical amnesia described by neuropathologists as the Elpenor Syndrome or incomplete awakening), one can say, with Agnes Varda, that the most distinctive cities bear within them the capacity of being nowhere ... the dream decor of oblivion. So, in Vienna, in 1908, Adolf Loos delivered his celebrated discourse Ornament and Crime, a manifesto in which he preaches the standardisation of total functionalism and waxes lyrical about the fact that 'the greatness of our age lies in its inability to produce a new form of decoration'. For, he claims, 'in fashioning ornaments human labour, money and material are ruined'. Loos considered this a real crime 'which we cannot simply shrug off. This would be followed by Walter Gropius' 'industrial-building production standards', the ephemeral architecture of the Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero, the Berlin Licht-Burg, Moholy-Nagy's space-light modulators, Kurt Schwerdtfeger's reflektorische Farblichtspiel of 1922. ... In fact, the constructivist aesthetic would forever continue to hide behind the banalisation of form, the transparency of glass, the fluidity of vectors and the special effects of machines of transfer or transmission. When the Nazis came to power, busily persecuting 'degenerate artists' and architects and extolling the stability of materials and the durability of monuments, their resistance to time and to the obliviousness of history, they were actually putting the new psychotropic power to good use for propaganda purposes. Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, organised the Nazi Zeppelin Field festivities and advocated the value of ruins. For the party rally at Nuremberg in 1935, he used 150 anti-aircraft searchlights with their beams pointing upwards, making a rectangle of light in the night sky. ... He wrote: 'Within these luminous walls, the first of their kind, the rally took place with all its rituals. ... I now feel strangely moved by the idea that the most successful architectural creation of my life was a chimera, an immaterial mirage.'18 Doomed to disappear at first light, leaving no more material trace than a few films and the odd photograph, the 'crystal castle' was especially aimed at Nazi militants who, according to Goebbels, obey a law they are not even consciously aware of but which they could recite in their dreams. On the basis of 'scientific' analysis of the stenographic speed of his various speeches, Hitler's master of propaganda had invented, again in his own estimation, a new mass language which 'no longer has anything to do with archaic and allegedly popular forms of expression'. He added: 'This is the beginning of an original aesthetic style, a vivid and galvanising form of expression.' At least he was good at self-promotion. Such declarations recall those of Futurists such as the Portuguese Mario de Sa-Carneiro (d.1916) celebrating The Assumption of the Acoustic Waves: Aaagh! Aaagh!: The vibrating mass is pressing in. ... I can even feel myself being carried along by the air, like a ball of wool!' Or Marinetti who, as a war correspondent in Libya, was inspired by wireless telegraphy and all the other techniques of topographical amnesia besides - explosives, projectiles, planes, fast vehicles - to compose his poems. The Futurist movements of Europe did not last. They disappeared m a few short years, nudged along by a bit of repression. In Italy they were responsible for anarchist and fascist movements - Marinetti was a personal friend of II Duce - but all were quickly swept from the political stage. No doubt they had come a little too close to the bone in exposing the conjunction between communication technologies and the totalitarianism that was then taking shape before 'Newly annointed eyes Futurist, Cubist, intersectionist eyes, which never cease to quiver, to absorb, to radiate all that spectral, transferred, substitute beauty, all that unsupported beauty, dislocated, standing out. .. .' With topographical memory, one could speak of generations of vision and even of visual heredity from one generation to the next. The advent of the logistics of perception and its renewed vectors for delocalising geometrical optics, on the contrary, ushered in a eugenics of sight, a pre-emptive abortion of the diversity of mental images, of the swarm of image-beings doomed to remain unborn, no longer to see the light of day anywhere. This problematic was beyond scientists and researchers for a long time. The work of the Vienna School, such as that of Riegl and Wickhoff, addressed the implied relations between modes of perception and the periods when they were on the agenda. But for the most part research remained limited to the investigation, de rigeur at the time, of the socio-economics of the image. Throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth, studies of humanmemory processes were also largely functionalist, inspired in the main by the various learning processes and the conditioning of animals; here too, electrical stimuli played a part. The military supported such research and so, subsequently, did ideologues and politicians keen to obtain immediate practical social spin-offs. In Moscow, in 1920 a Russian committee was set up to promote collaboration between Germany and the Soviet Union in the area of racial biology. Among other things the work of the German neuropathologists sojourning in the Soviet capital was supposed to locate man's 'centre of genius' as well as the centre of mathematical learning. ... The committee came under the authority of Kalinin, who was to be president of the praesidium of the Supreme Soviet Council from 1937 to 1946. This was the real beginning, technically and scientifically speaking, of power based on hitherto unrecognised forms of postural oppression and, once again, the battlefield would ensure rapid deployment of the new physiological prohibitions. As early as 1916, during the first great mediatised conflict in history, Doctor Gustave Lebon had remarked: 'Old-fashioned psychology considered personality as something clearly defined, barely susceptible to variation.... This person endowed with a fixed personality now appears to be a figment of the imagination. With the relentless churning up of the war's landscapes, he noted that the personality's alleged fixity had depended to a large extent, till then, on the permanence of the natural environment. But what kind of permanence did he have in mind, and which environment? Is it the environment Clausewitz refers to, that battlefield where, beyond a certain threshold of danger, reason thinks of itself differently? Or, more precisely, is it the environment which is constantly targeted, intercepted by an optical arsenal going from the 'line of sight' of the firearm - cannons, rifles, machine guns, used on an unprecedented scale - to cameras, the high-speed equipment of aerial intelligence, projecting an image of a de-materialising world? The origin of the word propaganda is well known: propaganda fide, propagation of the faith. The year 1914 not only saw the physical deportation of millions of men to the battlefields. With the apocalypse created by the deregulation of perception came a different kind of diaspora, the moment of panic when the mass of Americans and Europeans could no longer believe their eyes, when their faith in perception became slave to the faith in the technical sightline [line of faith]: in other words, the visual field was reduced to the line of a sighting device. A little later the director Jacques Tourneur confirmed the truth of this: 'In Hollywood I soon learned that the camera never sees everything. I could see everything, but the camera only sees sections.' But what does one see when one's eyes, depending on sighting instruments, are reduced to a state of rigid and practically invariable structural immobility? One can only see instantaneous sections seized by the Cyclops eye of the lens. Vision, once substantial, becomes accidental. Despite the elaborate debate surrounding the problem of the objectivity of mental or instrumental images, this revolutionary change in the regime of vision was not clearly perceived and the fusion-confusion of eye and camera lens, the passage from vision to visualisation, settled easily into accepted norms. While the human gaze became more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary, became even faster. Today professional and amateur photographers alike are mostly happy to fire off shot after shot, trusting to the power of speed and the large number of shots taken. They rely slavishly on the contact sheet, preferring to observe their own photographs to observmg some kind of reality. Jacques-Henri Lartigue, who called his camera his memory's eye, abandoned focusing altogether, knowing without looking what his Leica would see, even when holding it at arm's length, the camera becoming a substitute for both eye and body movements at once. The reduction in mnesic choices which ensued from this dependence on the lens was to become the nodule in which the modelling of vision would develop and, with it, all possible standardisations of ways of seeing. Thanks to work on animal conditioning like that of Thorndike (1931) and McGeoch (1932), a new certainty was born. To retrieve a specific target attribute, it was no longer necessary to activate a whole array of attributes, any single one of them being able to act independently. This fact once again begged the frequently asked question of the trans-situational identity of mental images. From the beginning of the century the perceptual field in Europe was invaded by certain signs, representations and logotypes that were to proliferate over the next twenty, thirty, sixty years, outside any immediate explanatory context, like beak-nosed carp in the polluted ponds they depopulate. Geometric brand-images, initials, Hitler's swastika, Charlie Chaplin's silhouette, Magritte's blue bird or the red lips of Marilyn Monroe: parasitic persistence cannot be explained merely in terms of the power of technical reproducibility, so often discussed since the nineteenth century. We are in effect looking at the logical outcome of a system of message-intensification which has, for several centuries, assigned a primordial role to the techniques of visual and oral communication. On a more practical note, Ray Bradbury recently remarked: 'Filmmakers bombard with images instead of words and accentuate the details using special effects. ... You can get people to swallow anything by intensifying the details.' The phatic image — a targeted image that forces you to look and holds your attention - is not only a pure product of photographic and cinematic focusing. More importantly it is the result of an everbrighter illumination, of the intensity of its definition, singling out only specific areas, the context mostly disappearing into a blur. During the first half of the twentieth century this kind of image immediately spread like wildfire in the service of political or financial totalitarian powers in acculturated countries, like North America, as well as in destructured countries like the Soviet Union and Germany, which were carved up after revolution and military defeat. In other words, in nations morally and intellectually in a state of least resistance. There the key words of poster ads and other kinds of posters would often be printed on a background in just as strong a colour. The difference between what was in focus and its context, or between image and text, was nevertheless stressed here as well, since the viewer had to spend more time trying to decipher the written message or simply give up and just take in the image. Since the fifth century, Gerard Simon notes, the geometrical study of sight formed part of the pictorial techniques artists were bent on codifying. Thanks to the celebrated passage in Vitruvius, we also know that from Antiquity artists were at pains to give the illusion of depth, particularly in theatre sets.' But in the Middle Ages the background came to the surface in pictorial representation. All the characters, even the most minute details - the context, if you like - remain on the same plane of legibility, of visibility. Only their exaggerated size, the way they loom forward suggesting pride of place, draws the observer's attention to certain important personages. Here everything is seen in the same light, in a transparent atmosphere, a brightness further highlighted by golds and halos, by ornaments. These are holy pictures, establishing a theological parallel between vision and knowledge, for which there are no blurred areas. The latter make their first appearance with the Renaissance when religious and cosmogonical uncertainties begin to proliferate along with the proliferation of optical devices. Once you have smoke effects or distant mists, it is just a short step to the notion of the non finito, the unfinished vision of pictorial representation or statuary. In the eighteenth century, with the fashion in geological follies and the curling lines of the rococo and the baroque, architects like Claude Nicolas Ledoux at the Arc-et-Senans saltworks revelled in playing up the contrasts in the chaotic arrangement of matter, with untidy piles of stone blocks escaping the creator's grip on geometry. At the same time monumental ruins, real or fake, were very much in vogue. Some sixty years later, chaos had taken over the entire structure of the painted work. The composition decomposes. The Impressionists deserted their studios and wandered off to catch real life in the act, the way the photographers were doing but with the advantage, soon to be lost, of colour. With Edgar Degas, painter and amateur photographer, composition came close to framing, to positioning within the range of the viewfinder: the subjects seem decentred, segmented, viewed from above or below in an artificial, often harsh light, like the glare of the reflectors used by professional photographers at the time. 'We must free ourselves from nature's tyranny', Degas wrote of an art which, in his terms, sums itself up rather than extends itself ..., and which also becomes more intense. This goes to show how apt was the nickname given to the new school of painting when Monet's canvas 'Impression Sunrise' was shown: impressionist, like the pyrotechnists who created those eye-dazzling displays of flashing, flooding lights. From the disintegration of composition we move on to that of sight. With pointillism, Georges Seurat reproduced the visual effect of the 'pitting' of the first daguerreotypes as well as applying a system of analogous dots to colour. In order to be restored, the image had to be seen at a certain distance, the observers doing their own focusing, exactly as with an optical apparatus, the dots then dissolving in the effect of luminance and vibrating within emerging figures and forms. It was not long before these too disintegrated and soon only a visual message worthy of morse code will survive, like Duchamp's retinal stimulator, or aspects of Op Art from Mondrian. With the same implacable logic, publicity-seekers pop up on the art scene. Futurism is upon us, notably in the form of Depero's promotional architecture, followed by Dada in 1916 and then Surrealism. In Magritte's view, painting and the traditional arts from this moment on lose any sense of the sacred. An advertising executive by profession, Magritte wrote: 'What surrealism officially means is an advertising firm run with enough nous and conformism to be able to do as well as other businesses to which it is opposed only in certain details of pure form. Thus, "surrealist woman" was just as stupid an invention as the pinup girl who has now taken her place. ... I'm not much of a surrealist at all, then. To me, the term also signifies "propaganda" (a dirty word) and all the inanity essential to the success of any 'propaganda'. But the syncretism, the nihilism, of which the techniques of the pseudo-communications company are carriers, are also to be found in Magritte as anxiety-producing symptoms. For Magritte, words are 'slogans that oblige us to think in a certain preordained order ... contemplation is a banal feeling of no interest'. As for 'the perfect painting', this could only produce an intense effect for a very short time. With the industrial multiplication of optical equipment, the artist's human vision is no more than one process among many of obtaining images. The following generation would attack 'the very essence of art', thereby putting the finishing touches to their own suicide. In 1968 Daniel Buren explained to Georges Boudaille: it's funny when you realise that art was never a problem of depth but one of form. ... The only solution lies in the creation — if the word can still be used — of something totally unconnected with what has gone before, completely unburdened by the past. This thing would thereby express itself just for the sake of it. Artistic communication is then cut off, no longer exists... Well before this, Duchamp wrote: i have never stopped painting. Every painting must exist in your mind before it is painted on the canvas and it always loses something in the painting. I'd rather see my painting without the murk.' The painter takes his body with him, Valery said. Merleau-Ponty added: it's hard to see how a Mind could paint'. If art poses the enigma of the body, the enigma of technique poses the enigma of art. In fact devices for seeing dispense with the artist's body in so far as it is light that actually makes the image. We have all had enough of hearing about the death of God, of man, of art and so on since the nineteenth century. What in fact happened was simply the progressive disintegration of a faith in perception founded in the Middle Ages, after animism, on the basis of the unicity of divine creation, the absolute intimacy between the universe and the God-man of Augustinian Christianity, a material world which loved itself and contemplated itself in its one God. In the West, the death of God and the death of art are indissociable; the zero degree of representation merely fulfilled the prophecy voiced a thousand years earlier by Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, during the quarrel with the iconoclasts: if we remove the image, not only Christ but the whole universe disappears.' Notes 1. Paul Gsell, Auguste Rodin. L'Art: Entretiens reunis par Paul Gsell (Paris: Grasset/Fasquelle, 1911). The quotation from Marmontel is adapted from his Contes moraux: 'Music is the only talent that can be enjoyed by itself; all others require witnesses.' 2. Aldous Huxley, The Art of Seeing (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943). 3. Pascal, Reflexions sur la geometrie en general, vol. Vll no. 33. The studies of Marey and Muybridge fascinated Parisian artists of the period, particularly Kupka and Duchamp whose celebrated canvas 'Nude Descending a Staircase', was rejected in 1912 by the Salon des Independants. Already in 1911, when Gsell's interviews with Rodin appeared, Duchamp claimed to show static compositions using static directions for the various positions taken by a form in motion without trying to create cinematic effects through painting. If he too claimed that movement is in the eye of the beholder, he hoped to obtain it through formal decomposition. 4. Tristan Tzara, 'Le Photographe a l'envers Man Ray' in Sept Manifestes DADA (Paris, 1992) - modified. 5. Paul Virilio, Esthetique de la disparition (Paris: Balland, 1980). 6. The important work of Norman E. Spear, The Processing of Memories: Forgetting and Retention (Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1978). 7. ATX 414. Descartes does not completely spurn the imagination as is too often claimed. 8. Paul Virilio, L'Espace critique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984) and Guerre et cinema I: Logistique de la perception (Paris: Editions de l'Etoile Cahiers du cinema, 1984; London: War and Cinema, Verso, 1986). 9. Jean-Louis Ferrier, Holbein. Les ambassadeurs (Paris: Denoel, 1977). 10. Oculomotor activity: the co-ordination of eye and body movements, especially the hands. 11. Jules Romains, La Vision extra-retinienne et le sens paroptique (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). First published in 1920, this work was ahead of its time and was re-issued in 1964. 'Experiments on extra-retinal vision show that certain lesions of the eye (strabismic amblyopia for example) cause the subject to reject consciousness: the eye keeps its qualities, the image manages to form on it, but this is repelled more and more insistently by consciousness, sometimes to the point of complete blindness.' 12. W. R. Russell and Nathan, Traumatic Amnesia (Brain, 1946). Studies of forms of traumatism suffered by returned soldiers. 13. M.-J. Deribere, Prehistoire et histoire de la lumiere (Paris: France-Empire, 1979). 14. Correspondence with Claude Niepce, 1816. 15. Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd [First appeared in America in December 1840 in both The Casket and Gentleman's Magazine.} 16. Jack London, The People of the Abyss (London: Journeyman, 1977; originally published 1903). A report. 17. The Elpenor Syndrome, from the name of a hero of The Odyssey who fell off the roof of Circe's temple. Exercising normal automatic motor functions in waking up in an unfamiliar place, the subject was stricken with topographical amnesia. ... Because this often occurs on board fast transport, the General Secretary of the SNCF [French Rail], Vincent Bourrel, has called attention to the number of accidents resembling the historic one at the turn of the century when French President Deschanel fell from a train. 18. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld, 1970); Spandau: The Secret Diaries (London: Collins, 1976) [translation modified]. 19. 'Pessoa et le futurisme portuguais', Action poetique, 110, winter 1987. 20. Gustave Lebon, Enseignements psychologiques de la guerre europeenne (Paris: Flammarion, 1916). 21. As Jean Rouch was later to write about the Russian film-maker: 'The Kino Eye is Dziga Vertov's gaze ... left eyebrow down a little, nose tightly pinched so as not to get in the way of sight, pupils open at 3.5 or 2.9, but the focus on infinity, on vertigo ... way past the soldiers on the attack.' In a few millennia, we lost 'that obscure faith in perception which questions our mute life, that combination of the world and ourselves which precedes reflection1. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et I'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). 22. Watkins and Tulving, 'Episodic memory: when recognition fails', Psychological Bulletin, 1974. 23. Liberation, 24 November 1987. 24. Gerard Simon, Le Regard, I'etre et I'apparance (Paris: Le Seuil, 1988). 25. Quoted by Georges Roque in his essay on Magritte and advertising, Ceci nest pas un Magritte (Paris: Flammarion, 1983). 26. 'L'art n'est plus justifiable ou les points sur les i', interview with Daniel Buren recorded by Georges Boudaille in Les lettres franqaises, March 1968. 27. Merleau-Ponty, L'oeil et I'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Paul Virilio/The Vision Machine/ Chapter 1: A Topographical Amnesia INDIANA University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis HTTP://|UPRESS.INDIANA.EDU "For most of our lifetime civil war has been raging in the world of art and entertainment. . . . Moving pictures, gramophone records, radio, talking pictures. ..." This is the view of Donald McWhinnie, an analyst of the radio medium. Most of this civil war affects us in the depths of our psychic lives, as well, since the war is conducted by forces that are extensions and amplifications of our own beings. Indeed, the interplay among media is only another name for this civil war" that rages in our society and our psyches alike. "To the blind all things are sudden," it has been said. The crossings or hybridizations of the media release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion. There need be no blindness in these matters once we have been notified that there is anything to observe. It has now been explained that media, or the extensions of man, are "make happen" agents, but not "make aware" agents. The hybridising or compounding of these agents offers an especially favourable opportunity to notice their structural components and properties. "As the silent film cried out for sound so does the sound film cry out for colour," wrote Sergei Eisenstein in his Notes of a Film Director. This type of observation can be extended systematically to all media: "As the printing press cried out for nationalism, so did the radio cry out for tribalism" These media, being extensions of ourselves, also depend on us for their interplay and their evolution. The fact that they do interact and spawn new progeny has been a source of wonder over the ages. It need baffle us no longer if we trouble to scrutinise their action. We can, if we choose, think things out before we put them out. Plato, in all his striving to imagine an ideal training school, failed to notice that Athens was a greater school than any university even he could dream up. In other words, the greatest school had been put out for human use before it has been thought out. Now, this is especially true of our media. They are put out long before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought of at all. Everybody notices how coal and steel and cars affect the arrangements of daily existence. In our time, a study has finally turned to the medium of language itself as shaping the arrangements of daily life, so that society begins to look like a linguistic echo or repeat of language norms, a fact that has disturbed the Russian Communist party very deeply. Wedded as they are to nineteenth-century industrial technology as the basis of class liberation, nothing could be more subversive of the Marxian dialectic than the idea that linguistic media shape social development, as much as do the means of production. In fact, of all the great hybrid unions that breed furious release of energy and change, there is none to surpass the meeting of literate and oral cultures. The giving to man of an eye for an ear by phonetic literacy is, socially and politically, probably the most radical explosion mat can occur in any social structure. This explosion of the eye, frequently repeated in "backwards areas," we call Westernisation. With literacy now about to hybridise the cultures of the Chinese, the Indians, and the Africans, we are about to experience such a release of human power and aggressive violence as makes the previous history of phonetic alphabet technology seem quite tame. That is only the East side story, for the electric implosion now brings oral and tribal ear culture to the literate West. Not only does the visual, specialist, and fragmented Westerner has now to live in closest daily association with all the ancient oral cultures of the earth, but his own electric technology now begins to translate the visual or eye man back into the tribal and oral pattern with its seamless web of kinship and interdependence. We know from our own past the kind of energy that is released, as by fission, when literacy explodes the tribal or family unit. What do we know about the social and psychic energies that develop by electric fusion or implosion when literate individuals are suddenly gripped by an electromagnetic field, such as occurs in the new Common Market pressure in Europe? Make no mistake, the fusion of people who have known individualism and nationalism is not the same process as the fission of "backwards" and oral cultures that are just coming to individualism and nationalism. It is the difference between the "A" bomb and the "H" bomb. The latter is more violent, by far. Moreover, the products of electric fusion are immensely complex, while the products of fission are simple. Literacy creates very much simpler kinds of people than those that develop in the complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies. For the fragmented man creates the homogenised Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes. The oral man's inner world is a tangle of complex emotions and feelings that the Western practical man has long ago eroded or sup-pressed within himself in the interest of efficiency and practicality. The immediate prospect for literate, fragmented Western man encountering the electric implosion within his own culture is his steady and rapid transformation into a complex and depth-structured person emotionally aware of his total interdependence with the rest of human society. Representatives of the older Western individualism are even now assuming the appearance, for good or ill, of Al Capp's General Bull Moose or of the John Birchers, tribally dedicated to opposing the tribal. Fragmented, literate, and visual individualism is not possible in an electrically patterned and imploded society. So what is to be done? Do we dare to confront such facts at the conscious level, or is it best to becloud and repress such matters until some violence releases us from the entire burden? For the fate of implosion and interdependence is more terrible for a Western man than the fate of explosion and independence for tribal man. It may be merely temperament in my own case, but I find some easing of the burden in just understanding and clarifying the issues. On the other hand, since consciousness and awareness seem to be a human privilege, may it not be desirable to extend this condition to our hidden conflicts, both private and social? The present book, in seeking to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase of human autonomy. Let us now note a few of the effects of media hybrids, or of the interpenetration of one medium by another. Life at the Pentagon has been greatly complicated by jet travel or example. Every few minutes an assembly gong rings to summon many specialists from their desks to hear a personal report from an expert from some remote part of the world Meantime, the undone paperwork mounts on each desk. And each department daily dispatches personnel by jet to remote areas for more data and reports. Such is the speed of this process of the meeting of the jet plane, the oral report, and the typewriter that those going forth to the ends of the earth often arrive unable to spell the name of the spot to which they have been sent to experts. Lewis Carroll pointed out that as large-scale maps got more and more detailed and extensive, they would tend to blanket agriculture and rouse the protest of farmers. So why not use the actual earth as a map of itself? We have reached a similar point of data gathering when each stick of chewing gum we reach for is acutely noted by some computer that translates our least gesture into a new probability curve or some parameter of social science. Our private and corporate lives have become information processes just because we have put our central nervous systems outside us in electric technology. That is the key to Professor Boorstin's bewilderment in The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream. The electric light ended the regime of night and day, of indoors and out-of-doors. But it is when the light encounters already existing patterns of human organisation mat the hybrid energy is released. Cars can travel all night, ballplayers can play all night, and windows can be left out of buildings. In a word, the message of the electric light is a total change. It is pure information without any content to restrict its transforming and informing power. If the student of media will but meditate on the power of this medium of electric light to transform every structure of time and space and work and society that it penetrates or contacts, he will have the key to the form of the power that is in all media to reshape any lives that they touch. Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both. It is a peculiar bias of those who operate media for the owners that they are concerned about the program content of radio, or press, or film. The owners themselves are concerned more about the media as such and are not inclined to go beyond "what the public wants" or some vague formula. Owners are aware of the media as power, and they know that this power has little to do with "content" or the media within the media. When the press opened up the "human interest" keyboard after the telegraph had restructured the press medium, the newspaper killed the theatre, just as TV hit the movies and the night dubs very hard. George Bernard Shaw had the wit and imagination to fight back. He put the press into the theatre,! taking over the controversies and the human interest world of the press for the stage, as Dickens had done for the novel. The movie took over the novel and the newspaper and the stage, all at once. Then TV pervaded the movie and gave the theater-in-the-round back to the public. What I am saying is that media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses but among themselves, when they interact among themselves. Radio changed the form of the news story as much as it altered the film image in the talkies. TV caused drastic changes in radio programming, and in the form of the thing or documentary novel. It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. Radio and gramophone and tape recorder gave us back the poet's voice as an important dimension of the poetic experience. Words became a kind of painting with light, again. But TV, with its deep-participation mode, caused young poets suddenly to present their poems in cafes, in public parks, anywhere. After TV, they suddenly felt the need for personal contact with their public. (In print-oriented Toronto, poetry-reading in the public parks is a public offence. Religion Pities are permitted, but not poetry as many young poets recently discovered.) John O'Hara, the novelist, wrote in The New York Times Book Review of November 27, 1955. : "You get a great satisfaction from a book. You know your reader is captive inside those covers, but as a novelist, you have to imagine the satisfaction he's getting. Now, in the theaterٛ well, I used to drop in during both productions of Pal Joey and watch, not imagine, the people enjoy it. I'd willingly start my next novel-- about a small town--right now, but I need the diversion of a play. " In our age artists are able to mix their media diet as easily as their book diet. A poet like Yeats made the fullest use of oral peasant culture in creating his literary effects. Quite early, Eliot made a great impact on the careful use of jazz and film form. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock gets much of its power from an inter-penetration of film form and jazz idiom. But this mix reached its greatest power in The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes. Prufrock uses not only film form but the film theme of Charlie Chaplin, as did James Joyce in Ulysses. Joyce's Bloom is a deliberate takeover from Chaplin ("Chorney Choplain," as he called him in Finnegans Wake). And Chaplin, just as Chopin had adapted the pianoforte to the style of the ballet, hit upon the wondrous media mix of ballet and film in developing his Pavlova-like alternation of ecstasy and waddle. He adopted the classical steps of ballet to a movie mime that converged exactly the right blend of the lyric and the ironic that is found also in Prufrock and Ulysses. Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium to use or to release the power of another. In a simpler form, it is the technique employed by Charles Boyer in his kind of French-English blend of urbane, throaty delirium. The printed book had encouraged artists to reduce all forms of expression as much as possible to the single descriptive and narrative plane of the printed word. The advent of electric media released art from this straitjacket at once, creating the world of Paul Klee, Picasso, Braque, Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers, and James Joyce. A headline in The New York Times Book Review (September 16. 1962) trills: There's Nothing Like a Best Seller to Set Hollywood a - tingle. Of course, nowadays, movie stars can only be lured from the beaches or science-fiction or some self-improvement course by the cultural lure of a role in a famous book. That is the way that the interplay of media now affects many in the movie colony. They have no more understanding of their media problems than does Madison Avenue. But from the point of view of the owners of the film and related media, the best seller is a form of insurance that some massive new gestalt or pattern has been isolated in the public psyche. It is an oil strike or a gold mine that can be depended on to yield a fair amount of boodle to the careful and canny processer. Hollywood bankers, that is, are smarter than literary historians, for the latter despite popular taste except when it has been filtered down from lecture course to literary handbook. Lillian Ross in Picture wrote a snide account of the filming of The Red Bodge of Courage. She got a good deal of easy kudos for a foolish book about a great film by simply assuming the superiority of the literary medium to the film medium. Her book got much attention as a hybrid. Agatha Christie wrote far above her usual good level in a group of twelve short stories about Hercule Poirot, called The Labours of Hercules. By adjusting the classical themes to make reasonable modern parallels, she was able to lift the detective form to extraordinary intensity. Such was, also, the method of James Joyce in Dubliners and Ulysses, when the precise classical parallels created the true hybrid energy. Baudelaire said Mr Eliot, "taught us how to raise the imagery of common life to first intensity." It is done, not by any direct heave-ho of poetic strength, but by a simple adjustment of situations from one culture in hybrid form with those of mother. It is precisely in this way that during wars and migrations new cultural mix is the norm of ordinary daily life. Operations Research programs the hybrid principle as a technique of creative discovery. When the movie scenario or picture story was applied to the idea article, the magazine world had discovered a hybrid that ended the supremacy of the short story. When wheels were put in the tandem form, the wheel principle combined with the linear typographic principle to create aerodynamic balance. The wheel crossed with industrial, linear form released the new form of the aeroplane. The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses. Marshall McLuhan/ Understanding Media (The extensions of man)/ Hybrid Energy: Les Liaisons Dangereuses Conversation with Claire Parnet, 1986 What are you doing in this book? Is it a homage to Michel Foucault? Do you reckon his thought isn't properly understood? Are you analyzing the similarities and differences between his work and yours and what you reckon you owe to him? Or are you, rather, trying to present a mental portrait of Foucault ? I felt a real need to write this book. When someone that you like and admire dies, you sometimes need to draw their picture. Not to glorify them, still less to defend them, not to remember, but rather to produce a final likeness you can find only in death, that makes you realize "that's who they were." A mask, or what he himself called a double, an overlay. Different people will find different likenesses or overlays. But in the end he's most like himself in becoming so different from the rest of us. It's not a question of points I thought we had in common, or on which we differed. What we shared was bound to be rather indefinite, a sort of background that allowed me to talk with him. I still think he's the greatest thinker of our time. You can do the portrait of a thought just as you can do the portrait of a man. I've tried to do a portrait of his philosophy. The lines or touches are of course mine, but they succeed only if he himself comes to haunt the picture. You wrote in Dialogues: "I can talk about Foucault, say he told me this or that, explain how I see him. That's irrelevant, unless I've actually come to terms with the set of chiseled sounds, compelling gestures, ideas that are all tinder and fire, extreme concentration and abrupt conclusions, laughs and smiles that seem dangerous the very moment one feels their tenderness. . . "Is there something "dangerous" in Foucault's thought that also explains the passion it continues to arouse? Dangerous, yes, because there's a violence in Foucault. An intense violence, mastered, controlled, and turned into courage. He was trembling with violence on some demonstrations. He saw what was intolerable in things. This may be something he shared with Genet. He was a man of passion, and he himself gave the word "passion" a very precise sense. One can't but think of his death as a violent death that came and interrupted his work. And his style, at least up to the last books that attained a kind of serenity, is like a lash, it's a whip twisting and relaxing. Paul Veyne paints a portrait of Foucault as a warrior. Foucault always evokes the dust or murmur of battle, and he saw thought itself as a sort of war machine. Because once one steps outside what's been thought before, once one ventures outside what's familiar and reassuring, once one has to invent new concepts for unknown lands, then methods and moral systems break down and thinking becomes, as Foucault puts it, a "perilous act," a violence whose first victim is oneself. The objections people make, even the questions they pose, always come from safe ashore, and they're like lumps of mud flung at you to knock you down and stop you getting anywhere rather than any help: objections always come from lazy, mediocre people, as Foucault knew better than anyone. Melville said: "For the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool,-then had I rather be a fool than a wise man.-I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more. . . Thought-divers . . . have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began."2 People will readily agree that intense physical pursuits are dangerous, but thought too is an intense and wayward pursuit. Once you start thinking, you're bound to enter a line of thought where life and death, reason and madness, are at stake, and the line draws you on. You can think only on this witches' line, assuming you're not bound to lose, not bound to end up mad or dead. That's something that always fascinated Foucault, the switching, the constant juggling of what's close and distant in death or madness. Was everything already implicit in Madness and Civilization, or are there rather successive advances, crises, changes of direction? The question of madness runs right through Foucault's work. Though of course he criticized Madness and Civilization for still giving too much weight to an "experience of madness." He shifted from a phenomenology to an epistemology where madness is trapped in a "knowledge" varying from one historical formation to another. Foucault always used history like this, he saw it as a way of avoiding madness. But the experience of thinking cannot itself be detached from some broken line running through the different figures of knowledge. To think about madness is to experience not madness but thought: it becomes madness only when it breaks down. This said, does Madness and Civilization already contain in principle everything else, for example the conceptions Foucault came to form of discourse, knowledge, and power? Certainly not. There's something great writers often go through: they're congratulated on a book, the book's admired, but they aren't themselves happy with it, because they know how far they still are from what they're trying to do, what they're seeking, of which they still have only an obscure idea. That's why they've so little time to waste on polemics, objections, discussions. I think Foucault's thought is a thought that didn't evolve but went from one crisis to another. I don't believe thinkers can avoid crises, they're too seismic. There's a wonderful remark in Leibniz: "Having established these things, I thought I was coming into port, but when I started to meditate upon the union of the soul with the body, I was as it were thrown back onto the open sea." Indeed, this ability to break the line of thought, to change direction, to find themselves on the open sea, and so discover, invent, is what give thinkers a deeper coherence. Madness and Civilization was of course itself the result of a crisis. Out of it came a whole conception of knowledge, fully elaborated in the Archaeology of knowledge - that is, in his theory of utterance-but leading into a new crisis, that of '68. For Foucault it was a great period of energy and exhilaration, of creative gaiety: Discipline and Punish bears its mark, and that's where he moves from knowledge to power. He moves into this new area to which he'd earlier drawn attention, which he'd marked out but not explored. And of course it's a radicalization: '68 stripped bare all power relations wherever they were operating, that is, everywhere. Previously, Foucault had primarily analyzed forms, and now he moved on to the play of forces underpinning those forms. He leaps into something formless, into the element of what he himself calls "micro-physics." And this takes him right through to the first volume of The History of Sexuality. But after that book there's yet another, very different, crisis-more internal, perhaps more depressive, more secret, the feeling of facing an impasse? There were lots of interconnected reasons, and maybe we'll come back to this point, but I got the impression that Foucault wanted to be left alone, to be on his own with a few close friends, to take a distance without even moving away, to reach a point where relations broke down. That was my impression, anyway, maybe it was quite wrong. He seemed to still be working on the history of sexuality, but he was taking a completely different line, he was discovering long-term historical formations (down from the Greeks), whereas up to that point he'd restricted himself to short-term formations (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), he was reorienting all his research in terms of what he called modes of subjectification. It was nothing to do with returning to the subject, he was creating something new, breaking out along a new line, a new exploration no longer concerned with knowledge and power in the same way. Another radicalization, if you like. Even his style changed, no longer scintillating, with sudden flashes of brilliance, but taking on an ever more austere, ever purer linearity, almost calm. It wasn't all just theory, you see. Thinking's never just a theoretical matter. It was to do with vital problems. To do with life itself. It was Foucault's way of coming through this new crisis: he was tracing the line that would take him through, and into new relations with knowledge and power. Even if it killed him. That seems a silly thing to say: it wasn't the discovery of subjectification that killed him. And yet. . . "some opening, or I'll suffocate . . . " There's one key thing that runs right through Foucault's work: he was always dealing with historical formations (either short-term or, toward the end, long-term ones), but always in relation to us today. He didn't have to make this explicit in his books, it was quite obvious, and he left the business of making it still clearer to interviews in newspapers. That's why Foucault's interviews are an integral part of his work. Discipline and Punish deals with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but can in no way be divorced from today's prisons and the Information Group set up by Foucault and Defert after '68. Historical formations interest him only because they mark where we come from, what circumscribes us, what we're in the process of breaking out of to discover new relations in which to find expression. What he's really interested in is our present-day relation to madness, our relation to punishment, our relation to power, to sexuality. Not the Greeks, but our relation to subjectification, our ways of constituting ourselves as subjects. Thinking is always experiencing, experimenting,3 not interpreting but experimenting, and what we experience, experiment with, is always actuality,4 what's coming into being, what's new, what's taking shape. History isn't experimentation, it's only the set of conditions, negative conditions almost, that make it possible to experience, experiment with, something beyond history. Without history the experiments would remain indeterminate, divorced from any particular conditions, but the experimentation itself is philosophical rather than historical. Foucault's more thoroughly philosophical than anyone else in the twentieth century, probably the only philosopher: he's completely escaped from the nineteenth century, which is why he can talk about it so well. That's what it meant for Foucault to put his life into his thought: his relation to power, and then the relation to oneself, was a matter of life or death, of madness or a new sanity. Subjectification wasn't for Foucault a theoretical return to the subject but a practical search for another way of life, a new style. That's not something you do in your head: but then where, these days, are the seeds of a new way of existing, communally or individually, beginning to appear; and are there any of these seeds in me? We must, of course, examine the Greeks; but only because, according to Foucault, it was they who invented this notion, this practice, of a way of life. . . There was a Greek experience, Christian experiences, and so on, but it's not the Greeks or Christians who are going to experience things for us these days. Is it so very tragic, Foucault's thought? Isn't it shot through with humor too? In all great writers you find a humorous or comic level along with the other levels, not just seriousness, but something shocking even. There's a general outlandishness in Foucault: not only outlandish punishments, which produce the great comic passages in Discipline and Punish, but the outlandishness of things, and of words. There was a lot of laughter in Foucault, in his life as well as his books. He particularly liked Roussel and Brisset, who at the close of the nineteenth century invented strange "procedures" for manipulating words and phrases. And Foucault's book of 1963 on Roussel is already, so to speak, the poetic and comic version of the theory of utterance set out in the Archaeology of knowledge. Roussel takes two phrases that have very disparate senses but differ only minimally (/es bandes du vieux pillard and /es bandes du vieux billardI6) and proceeds to conjure up visual scenes, extraordinary spectacles to connect the two phrases, twist one into the other. Working along other lines, with a crazy etymology, Brisset conjures up scenes corresponding to the way he takes a word apart. Foucault finds here already a whole conception of the relations between the visible and the utterable. And the reader's struck by the way Foucault seems to come upon themes reminiscent of Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty: "A visibility beyond the gaze .. .The eye lets things be seen by grace of their being." It's as though, implicitly, he's taking Roussel as a precursor of Heidegger. And it's true that in Heidegger too there's a whole etymological procedure bordering on madness. I really liked Foucault's pages on Roussel, because I got a more vague sense of a certain similarity between Heidegger and another author rather like Roussel in some ways,Jarry. Jarry defines pataphysics etymologically as going beyond metaphysics, and explicitly bases it on the visible or the being of phenomena. But what do you get by transposing things from Heidegger to Roussel (or Jarry)? Foucault gets a complete transformation of the relations between the visible and utterable seen in the light of the "procedures" mentioned: rather than any agreement or homology (any consonance), you get an endless struggle between what we see and what we say, brief clutchings, tussles, captures, because we never saywhat we see and never see what we say. The visible bursts out between two propositions, and an utterance bursts out between two things. Intentionality gives way to a whole theater, an endless interplay between the visible and the utterable. Each breaks open the other. Foucault's criticism of phenomenology is there, unannounced, in Raymond Roussel. And then there's the emphasis on "one," in Foucault as in Blanchot: you have to begin by analyzing the third person. One speaks, one sees, one dies. There are still subjects, of course-but they're specks dancing in the dust of the visible and permutations in an anonymous babble. The subject's always something derivative. It comes into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says,what one sees. Foucault draws from this a very intriguing conception of "infamous men," a conception imbued with a quiet gaiety. It's the opposite of Bataille: the infamous man isn't defined by excessive evil but etymologically, as an ordinary man, anyone at all, suddenly drawn into the spotlight by some minor circumstance, neighbors complaining, a police summons, a trial . . . It's a man confronting Power, summoned to appear and speak. He's more like something out of Chekhov than Kafka. In Chekhov there's a story about a little maid who strangles a baby because she hasn't being able to get any sleep for nights and nights, and one about a peasant who's taken to court for unbolting railway lines to get weights for his fishing rod. The infamous man is Dasein. The infamous man's a particle caught in a shaft of light and a wave of sound. Maybe "fame" works the same way:being taken over by a power, an instance of power that makes us appear and speak. There was a point where Foucault got tired of been famous: whatever he said, people were just waiting to praise or criticize it, they didn't even attempt to understand it. How could he ever again produce something unexpected? You can't work without the unexpected. To be an infamous man was a sort of dream for Foucault, his comic dream, his way of laughing: am I infamous? His essay on The Life of Infamous Men is a masterpiece. Would you say that article also expresses a crisis? Absolutely, yes, the article has various levels. The fact is that Foucault, after the first volume of The History of Sexuality in 1976, didn't publish any books for eight years: he suspended work on the rest of The History of Sexuality, even though the contents had already been announced. It was fascinating material, "the children's crusade" and so on," which he must have completed most of the research. What happened at this point, and during those years? If there was really was a crisis, it must have involved many very different interacting factors: disappointment, perhaps, about the way things were going elsewhere, with the eventual failure of the prison movement; on another level, the collapse of more recent hopes, Iran, Poland; the way Foucault became ever more dissatisfied with French social and cultural life; in his work, the feeling of growing misunderstandings about the first volume of The History of Sexuality and of what he was trying to do in the History; and finally, the most personal element perhaps, a feeling that he had himself reached an impasse, that he needed solitude and strength to deal with something relating not only to his thought but also to his life. If he'd reached an impasse, what did it come down to? Foucault had up to that point analyzed formations of knowledge and apparatuses of power; he'd reached the composites of power and knowledge in which we live and speak. And that was still the viewpoint of the History's first volume: establishing the corpus of utterances relating to sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ascertaining around which foci of powers these utterances take shape, either normalizing or, conversely, challenging those powers. The first volume thus remains within the method Foucault had earlier managed to establish. But I think he must have come up against the question of whether there was anything "beyond" power-whether he was getting trapped in a sort of impasse within power relations. He was,you might say, mesmerized by and trapped in something he hated. And it was no use telling himself that coming up against power relations was the lot of modern (that is, infamous) man, that it's power that makes us speak and see, it wasn't enough, he needed "some opening"... He couldn't stay locked in what he'd discovered. The first volume did of course identify points of resistance to power; it's just that their character, their origin, their production were still vague. Perhaps Foucault had the feeling that he must at all costs cross that line, get to the other side, go still further than knowledge and power. Even if it meant reconsidering the whole project of The History of Sexuality. And that's just what he's telling himself in the very fine piece on infamous men: "Always the same inability to cross the line, to get to the other side. . . always the same choice, on the side of power, of what it say or has people say". "It's nothing to do with him repudiating his earlier work. It's all his earlier work, rather, that pushes him into this new confrontation. Only readers who've "accompanied" Foucault in his research can understand this. That's why it's so stupid to hear that "he saw he'd made a mistake, and had to reintroduce the subject." He never reintroduced the subject, and never had to do anything but what his work demanded: he left behind composites of knowledge and power and entered into a final line of research, like Leibniz "thrown back onto the open sea." There was no other option but to pursue this new discovery, or stop writing. What is this "line," or this relation that's no longer a power relation? Isn't it foreshadowed earlier on? It's difficult to talk about. It's a line that's not abstract, though it has no particular shape. It's no more in thought than in things, but it's everywhere thought confronts some thing like madness, and life some thing like death. Miller used to say you find it in any molecule, in nerve fibers, in the threads of a spider's web. It's the fearsome whaling line, which Melville says (in Moby-Dick) can carry us off or strangle us as it flies out. For Michaux it's the line of drugs, "headlong acceleration," the "whiplash of a frenzied coachman." It may be a painter's line, like Kandinsky's, or the one leading to Van Gogh's death. I think we ride such lines whenever we think bewilderingly enough or live forcefully enough. They're lines that go beyond knowledge (how could they be "known"?), and it's our relations to these lines that go beyond power relations (as Nietzsche says,who could call it "a will to control"?). Are you saying they're already there in all Foucault's work? That's true, it's the line Outside. The Outside, in Foucault as in Blanchot from whom he takes the word, is something more distant than any external world. But it's also something closer than any inner world. So you get an endless switching between closeness and distance. Thinking doesn't come from within, but nor is it something that happens in the external world. It comes from this Outside, and returns to it, it amounts to confronting it. The line outside is our double, with all the double's otherness. Foucault was always talking about it, in Raymond Rousell in a homage to Blanchot, in The Order of Things. In The Birth of the Clinic there's a whole passage on Bichat... to me a model of Foucault's method or procedure: he's analyzing Bichat's conception of death epistemologically, and it's the most thorough, the most brilliant analysis imaginable. But you get the feeling that there's something more to the text, that there's a passion there that goes beyond summarizing some long-dead author. The thing is, Bichat put forward what's probably the first general modern conception of death, presenting it as violent, plural, and coextensive with life. Instead of taking it, like classical thinkers, as a point, he takes it as a line that we're constantly confronting, and cross in either direction only at the point where it ends. That's what it means to confront the line Outside. Passionate men die like Captain Ahab, or like the Parsee rather, chasing their whale. They cross the line. There's something of that in Foucault's death. Beyond knowledge and power, there's a third side, the third element of the "system" ... An acceleration, one might almost say, that makes it impossible to distinguish death and suicide. This line, if it's so "fearsome," how can we make it endurable? Is this what the fold is all about: the need to fold the line? Yes, this line's deadly, too violent and fast, carrying us into breathless regions. It destroys all thinking, like the drugs Michaux had to stop using. It's nothing but délire and madness, like Captain Ahab's "monomania." We need both to cross the line, and make it endurable, workable, thinkable. To find in it as far as possible, and as long as possible, an art of living. How can we protect ourselves, survive, while still confronting this line? Here a frequent theme of Foucault's comes in: we have to manage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe-in short, think. Bending the line so we manage to live upon it, with it: a matter of life and death. The line itself is constantly unfolding at crazy speeds as we're trying to fold it to produce "the slow beings that we are," to get (as Michaux says) to "the eye of the hurricane": both things are happening at once. This idea of folding (and unfolding) always haunted Foucault: not only is his style, his syntax, shaped by folding and unfolding, so is the way language works in the book on Roussel ("folding words"), the way thought works in The Order of Things, and above all the way what Foucault discovers in his last books as an art of living (subjectification) works. The fold and unfolding is something familiar to readers of Heidegger. It's arguably the key to the whole of Heidegger's philosophy ("to approach Thought is to be on the way to the Fold of Being and beings"). In Heidegger we find the Open, the fold of Being and beings as the condition for any visibility of phenomena, and human reality as the being of distance. In Foucault we find the outside, the folding of the line Outside, and human reality as the being of the Outside. Maybe that's why Foucault in his last interviews compares his approach with Heidegger's. And yet taken as a whole, these two ways of thinking are so different, the problems addressed are so different, that the similarity remains very external: in Foucault there's no such thing as experience in the phenomenological sense, but there are always knowledges and powers already in place, which both reach their limit and vanish in the line Outside. Foucault seems to me closer to Michaux, sometimes even to Cocteau: he brings out the relation between them in terms of a problem of living, breathing (just as he transposed a Heideggerian theme into Roussel so as to transform it). The Cocteau who, in a posthumous book called precisely The Difficulty of Being, explains that dreaming works at amazing speeds, unfolding "the folding whose intervention makes eternity endurable," but that waking life has to fold the world so we can endure it, so that everything doesn't confront us at once. Or more specifically, the Michaux whose very titles and subtitles might have inspired Foucault: The Space Within, The Distant Interior, Life Among Folds, Locked In (subtitled Poetic Capacities, Slices of Knowledge. . . ). It's in The Space Within that Michaux writes: "Children are born with twenty-two folds. These have to be unfolded. Then a man's life is complete. And he dies. There are no more folds to undo. Men hardly ever die without still having a few more folds to undo. But it has happened." You can't get much closer to Foucault than that. Yougetjust the same sense of folding and unfolding. Only in Foucault there are four primary folds instead of twenty-two: the folding of our body (ifwe're Greeks, or our flesh, if we're Christians-so there are many possible variations for each fold), the folding of a force impinging on itself rather than other forces, truth enfolded in relation to us, and finally the ultimate folding of the line outside, to produce an "expectant interiority." But it's alwaysthe same question, running from Roussel through to Michaux, that produces this poetic philosophy: how far can we unfold the line without falling into a breathless void, into death, and how can we fold it, but without losing touch with it, to produce an inside copresent with the outside, corresponding to the outside? It's a matter of "practices." Rather than talking of a more or less hidden influence of Heidegger on Foucault, I think one should talk of a convergence of Holderlin-Heidegger on the one hand, and Roussel- or Michaux-Foucault on the other. But they're working along very different paths. Is this what "subjectification" is all about? Why that word? Yes, this folding of the line is precisely what Foucault eventually comes to call the "process of subjectification," when he begins to examine it directly. It's easier to understand when you see why, in his two last books, he attributes it to the Greeks. The tribute's more Nietzschean than Heideggerian and is, in particular, a very clear and original view of the Greeks: in politics (and elsewhere) the Greeks invented a power relation between free men, it's free men who govern free men. Given that, it's not enough for force to be exerted on other forces or to suffer the effects of other forces, it has to be exerted upon itself too: the man fit to govern others is the man who's completely mastered himself. By bending force back on itself, by setting force in a relation to itself, the Greeks invent subjectification. We're no longer in the domain of codified rules of knowledge (relations between forms), and constraining rules of power (the relation of force to other forces), but in one of rules that are in some sense optional (self relation): the best thing is to exert power over yourself. The Greeks invent an aesthetic way of existing. That's what subjectification is about: bringing a curve into the line, making it turn back on itself, or making force impinge on itself. So we get ways of living with what would otherwise be unendurable. What Foucault says is that we can only avoid death and madness if we make existing into a "way," an "art." It's idiotic to say Foucault discovers or reintroduces a hidden subject after having rejected it. There's no subject, but a production of subjectivity: subjectivity has to be produced, when its time arrives, precisely because there is no subject. The time comes once we've worked through knowledge and power; it's that work that forces us to frame the new question, it couldn't have been framed before. Subjectivity is in no sense a knowledge formation or power function that Foucault hadn't previously recognized; subjectification is an artistic activity distinct from, and lying outside, knowledge and power. In this respect Foucault's a Nietzschean, discovering an artistic will out on the final line. Subjectification, that's to say the process of folding the line outside, mustn't be seen as just a way of protecting oneself, taking shelter. It's rather the only way of confronting the line, riding it: you may be heading for death, suicide, but as Foucault says in a strange conversation with Schroeter, suicide then becomes an art it takes a lifetime to learn. Isn't that a return to the Greeks, though? And "subjectification," isn't it an equivocal word that does actually reintroduce a subject? No, there's definitely no return to the Greeks. Foucault hated returning anywhere. He only ever talked about what he himself was living through; and mastering oneself, or rather the production of self, speaks for itself in Foucault. What he says is that the Greeks "invented" subjectification, and did so because their social system, the rivalry between free men, made this possible (in games, oratory, love. . . and so on). But processes of subjectification are extraordinarily varied: Christian ways are altogether different from the Greek way, and not just after the Reformation, but from primitive Christianity onward, the production of individual or collective subjectivity takes all sorts of paths. We should remember the passages in Renan about the Christians' new aesthetics of existence: an aesthetic way of existing to which Nero, in his own way,contributes, and which goes on to find its highest expression in Francis of Assisi. A confrontation with death, with madness. The key thing, for Foucault, is that subjectification isn't to do with morality, with any moral code: it's ethical and aesthetic, as opposed to morality, which partakes of knowledge and power. So there's a Christian morality but also a Christian ethics/aesthetics, and all sorts of conflicts and compromises between the two. We might say the same these days: what is our ethics, how do we produce an artistic existence, what are our processes of subjectification, irreducible to our moral codes? Where and how are new subjectivities being produced? What can we look for in present-day communities? Foucault may well go right back to the Greeks, but what interests him in The Use of Pleasure, as in his other books, is what's happening, what we are and what we're doing, today: whether recent or distant, a historical formation is analyzed only as it differs from us, and in order to trace out that difference. How can anyone see a contradiction between the theme of "the death of man" and that of artistic subjectifications? Or between rejecting morality and discovering ethics? The problem changes, and something new is created. The simple fact that subjectivity is produced, that it's a ''way, ''should be enough to convince one the word should be treated very carefully. Foucault says "an art of oneself that's the exact opposite of oneself. . . " If there's a subject, it's a subject without any identity. Subjectification as a process is personal or collective individuation, individuation one by one or group by group. Now, there are many types of individuation. There are subject-type individuations ("that's you. . . ," "that's me. . . "), but there are also event type individuations where there's no subject: a wind, an atmosphere, a time of day,a battle. . . One can't assume that a life, or a work of art, is individuated as a subject; quite the reverse. Take Foucault himself: you weren't aware of him as a person exactly. Even in trivial situations, say when he came into a room, it was more like a changed atmosphere, a sort of event, an electric or magnetic field or something. That didn't in the least rule out warmth or make you feel uncomfortable, but it wasn't like a person. It was a set of intensities. It sometimes annoyed him to be like that, or to have that effect. But at the same time all his work fed upon it. The visible is for him mirrorings, scintillations, flashes, lighting effects. Language is a huge "there is," in the third person-as opposed to any particular person, that's to say an intensive language, which constitutes his style. In the conversation with Schroeter, once again, he develops an opposition between "love" and "passion," and presents himself as a creature of passion rather than love. It's an extraordinary text; since it's only an informal conversation, Foucault doesn't try to provide any philosophical basis for the distinction. He talks about it on an immediate, vital level. The distinction is nothing to do with constancy or inconstancy. Nor is it one between homosexuality and heterosexuality, though that's discussed in the text. It's a distinction between two kinds of individuation: one, love, through persons, and the other through intensity, as though passion dissolved persons not into something undifferentiated but into a field of various persisting and mutually interdependent intensities ("a constantly shifting state, but not tending toward any given point, with strong phases and weak phases, phases when it becomes incandescent and everything wavers for an unstable moment we cling to for obscure reasons, perhaps through inertia; it seeks, ultimately, to persist and to disappear. . . being oneself no longer makes any sense. . ."). Love's a state of, and a relation between, persons, subjects. But passion is a subpersonal event that may last as long as a lifetime ("I've been living for eighteen years in a state of passion about someone, for someone"), a field of intensities that individuates independently of any subject. Tristan and Isolde, that may be love. But someone, referring to this Foucault text, said to me: Catherine and Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, is passion, pure passion, not love. A fearsome kinship of souls, in fact, something not altogether human (who is he? A wolf. . . ). It's very difficult to express, to convey-a new distinction between affective states. Here we come up against the unfinished character of Foucault's work. He might perhaps have given this distinction a philosophical range as wide as life. It should teach us, at least, to be very careful about what he calls a "mode of subjectification." For such modes involve subjectless individuations. That may be their main feature. And perhaps passion, the state of passion, is actually what folding the line outside, making it endurable, knowing how to breathe, is about. All those who are so saddened by Foucault's death may perhaps rejoice in the way that such a monumental body of work breaks off with an appeal to passion. In Foucault as in Nietzsche we find a critique of truth. In each of them there's a world of captures, clutchings, struggles. But everything in Foucault seems colder, more metallic, like the great descriptive clinical tableaux. . . Foucault does draw on Nietzsche. To take one specific instance: Nietzsche prided himself on being the first to produce a psychology of priests and to analyze the nature of their power (priests treat the community as a "flock," which they control by infecting it with ressentiment and guilty conscience). Foucault rediscovers the theme of "pastoral" power, but his analysis takes a different direction: he defines this power as "individuative," that is, as an attempt to take over the mechanisms individuating members of the flock. In Discipline and Punish he'd shown how in the eighteenth century political power became individuative through "disciplines"; but he eventually discovered pastoral power at the root of that tendency. You're right, the fundamental link between Foucault and Nietzsche is a criticism of truth, framed by asking what "will" to truth is implied by a "true" discourse, a will the discourse can only conceal. Truth, in other words, doesn't imply some method for discovering it but procedures, proceedings, and processes for willing it. We always get the truths we deserve, depending on the procedures of knowledge (linguistic procedures in particular), the proceedings of power, and the processes of subjectification or individuation available to us. So to get at the will to truth directly, we have to consider untrue discourses, which become confused with the procedures that produce them, like those of Roussel or Brisset: their untruth can also be seen as truth in the wild state. Foucault and Nietzsche have three main things in common. The first is their conception of force. Power in Foucault, like power in Nietzsche, isn't just violence, isn't just the relation of a force to a being or an object, but corresponds to the relation of a force to the other forces it affects, or even to forces that affect it (inciting, exciting, inducing, seducing, and so on, are affects). Secondly, there's the relation between forces and form: any form is a combination of forces. This already comes out in Foucault's great descriptive tableaux. But more particularly in all the stuff about the death of man and the way it relates to Nietzsche's superman. The point is that human forces aren't on their own enough to establish a dominant form in which man can install himself. Human forces (having an understanding, a will, an imagination, and so on) have to combine with other forces: an overall form arises from this combination, but everything depends on the nature of the other forces with which the human forces become linked. So the resulting form won't necessarily be a human form, it might be an animal form of which man is only an avatar, a divine form he mirrors, the form of a single God of which man is just a limitation (thus, in the seventeenth century, human understanding appears as the limitation of an infinite understanding). A Man-form, then, appears only in very special and precarious conditions: that's what Foucault analyses in The Order of Things as the nineteenth century's project, in terms of the new forces with which man was then combining. Now, everyone says man's coming into relation these days with still other forces (the cosmos in space, the particles in matter, the silicon in machines. . . ): a new form is coming out of this, and it's already ceased to be human. . . Nothing excites so many stupid reactions as this simple, precise, and grand theme in Nietzsche and Foucault. The third common point, finally, has to do with processes of subjectification: once again, this is nothing to do with constituting a subject, it's about creating ways of existing, what Nietzsche called inventing new possibilities of life, already seeing its origin in the Greeks. Nietzsche saw this as the highest dimension of the will to power, artistic will. Foucault would eventually characterize this dimension by the way force impinges on or inflects itself, and would himself take up the history of the Greeks and Christians, orienting it along these lines. The key thing, as Nietzsche said, is that thinkers are always, so to speak, shooting arrows into the air, and other thinkers pick them up and shoot them in another direction. That's what happens with Foucault. Whatever he takes up he thoroughly transforms. He's always creating. You say he's more metallic than Nietzsche. Maybe he even changed what the arrow was made of. You have to compare them in musical terms, in terms of their respective instruments (procedures, proceedings, and processes): Nietzsche went through a Wagnerian phase but came out of it. Foucault went through Webern, but he's perhaps closest to Varese, yes, metallic and strident, calling for the instruments of our "actuality." excerpt from the book: Negotiations, 1972-1990/part three: Michel Foucault by Gilles Delleuze Why Study Power? The Question of the SubjectThe ideas which I would like to discuss here represent neither a theory nor a methodology. I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects. The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire generale, philology, and linguistics. Or again, in this first mode, the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labors, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or, a third example, the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology. In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call "dividing practices." The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectivizes him. Examples are the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the "good boys." Finally, I have sought to study-it is my current work-the way a human being turns himself into a subject. For example, I have chosen the domain of sexuality-how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of "sexuality." Thus, it is not power but the subject which is the general theme of my research. It is true that I became quite involved with the question of power. It soon appeared to me that, while the human subject is placed in relations of production and of signification, he is equally placed in power relations which are very complex. Now, it seemed to me that economic history and theory provided a good instrument for relations of production and that linguistics and semiotics offered instruments for studying relations of signification; but for power relations we had no tools of study. We had recourse only to ways of thinking about power based on legal models, that is: What legitimates power? Or, we had recourse to ways of thinking about power based on institutional models, that is: What is the state? It was therefore necessary to expand the dimensions of a definition of power if one wanted to use this definition in studying the objectivizing of the subject. Do we need a theory of power? Since a theory assumes a prior objectification, it cannot be asserted as a basis for analytical work. But this analytical work cannot proceed without an ongoing conceptualization. And this conceptualization implies critical thought-a constant checking. The first thing to check is what I shall call the "conceptual needs." I mean that the conceptualization should not be founded on a theory of the object-the conceptualized object is not the single criterion of a good conceptualization. We have to know the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualization. We need a historical awareness of our present circumstance. The second thing to check is the type of reality with which we are dealing. A writer in a well-known French newspaper once expressed his surprise: "Why is the notion of power raised by so many people today? Is it such an important subject? Is it so independent that it can be discussed without taking into account other problems?" This writer's surprise amazes me. I feel skeptical about the assumption that this question has been raised for the first time in the twentieth century. Anyway, for us it is not only a theoretical question but a part of our experience. I'd like to mention only two "pathological forms"-those two "diseases of power"-fascism and Stalinism. One of the numerous reasons why they are, for us, so puzzling is that in spite of their historical uniqueness they are not quite original. They used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies. More than that: in spite of their own internal madness, they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality. What we need is a new economy of power relations-the word "economy" being used in its theoretical and practical sense. To put it in other words: since Kant, the role of philosophy is to prevent reason from going beyond the limits of what is given in experience; but from the same moment-that is, since the development of the modern state and the political management of society-the role of philosophy is also to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality, which is a rather high expectation. Everybody is aware of such banal facts. But the fact that they're banal does not mean they don't exist. What we have to do with banal facts is to discover-or try to discover-which specific and perhaps original problem is connected with them. The relationship between rationalization and excesses of political power is evident. And we should not need to wait for bureaucracy or concentration camps to recognize the existence of such relations. But the problem is: What to do with such an evident fact? Shall we try reason? To my mind, nothing would be more sterile. First, because the field has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. Second, because it is senseless to refer to reason as the contrary entity to nonreason. Last, because such a trial would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the rationalist or the irrationalist. Shall we investigate this kind of rationalism which seems to be specific to our modern culture and which originates in Aufklirung? I think that was the approach of some of the members of the Frankfurt School. My purpose, however, is not to start a discussion of their works, although they are most important and valuable. Rather, I would suggest another way of investigating the links between rationalization and power. It may be wise not to take as a whole the rationalization of society or of culture but to analyze such a process in several fields, each with reference to a fundamental experience: madness, illness, death, crime, sexuality, and so forth. I think that the word "rationalization" is dangerous. What we have to do is analyze specific rationalities rather than always invoke the progress of rationalization in general. Even if the Aufkldrung has been a very important phase in our history and in the development of political technology, I think we have to refer to much more remote processes if we want to understand how we have been trapped in our own history. I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, it consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies. For example, to find out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the field of insanity. And what we mean by legality in the field of illegality. And, in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations. As a starting point, let us take a series of oppositions which have developed over the last few years: opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live. It is not enough to say that these are anti-authority struggles; we must try to define more precisely what they have in common. 1. They are "transversal" struggles; that is, they are not limited to one country. Of course, they develop more easily and to a greater extent in certain countries, but they are not confined to a particular political or economic form of government. 2. The aim of these struggles is the power effects as such. For example, the medical profession is not criticized primarily because it is a profit-making concern but because it exercises an uncontrolled power over people's bodies, their health, and their life and death. 3. These are "immediate" struggles for two reasons. In such struggles people criticize instances of power which are the closest to them, those which exercise their action on individuals. They do not look for the "chief enemy" but for the immediate enemy. Nor do they expect to find a solution to their problem at a future date (that is, liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle). In comparison with a theoretical scale of explanations or a revolutionary order which polarizes the historian, they are anarchistic struggles. But these are not their most original points. The following seem to me to be more specific. 4. They are struggles which question the status of the individual: on the one hand, they assert the right to be different, and they underline everything which makes individuals truly individual. On the other hand, they attack everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself, and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way. These struggles are not exactly for or against the "individual" but rather they are struggles against the "government of individualization." 5. They are an opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge, competence, and qualification: struggles against the privileges of knowledge. But they are also an opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations imposed on people. There is nothing "scientistic" in this (that is, a dogmatic belief in the value of scientific knowledge), but neither is it a skeptical or relativistic refusal of all verified truth. What is questioned is the way in which knowledge circulates and functions, its relations to power. In short, the regime du savoir. 6. Finally, all these present struggles revolve around the question: Who are we? They are a refusal of these abstractions, of economic and ideological state violence, which ignore who we are individually, and also a refusal of a scientific or administrative inquisition which determines who one is. To sum up, the main objective of these struggles is to attack not so much "such or such" an institution of power, or group, or elite, or class but rather a technique, a form of power. This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word "subject": subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to. Generally, it can be said that there are three types of struggles: either against forms of domination (ethnic, social, and religious); against forms of exploitation which separate individuals from what they produce; or against that which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others in this way (struggles against subjection, against forms of subjectivity and submission). I think that in history you can find a lot of examples of these three kinds of social struggles, either isolated from each other or mixed together. But even when they are mixed, one of them, most of the time, prevails. For instance, in the feudal societies, the struggles against the forms of ethnic or social domination were prevalent, even though economic exploitation could have been very important among the revolt's causes. In the nineteenth century, the struggle against exploitation came into the foreground. And nowadays, the struggle against the forms of subjectionagainst the submission of subjectivity-is becoming more and more important, even though the struggles against forms of domination and exploitation have not disappeared. Quite the contrary. I suspect that it is not the first time that our society has been confronted with this kind of struggle. All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book-all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity. I know what objections can be made. We can say that all types of subjection are derived phenomena, that they are merely the consequences of other economic and social processes: forces of production, class struggle, and ideological structures which determine the form of subjectivity. It is certain that the mechanisms of subjection cannot be studied outside their relation to the mechanisms of exploitation and domination. But they do not merely constitute the "terminal" of more fundamental mechanisms. They entertain complex and circular relations with other forms. The reason this kind of struggle tends to prevail in our society is due to the fact that, since the sixteenth century, a new political form of power has been continuously developing. This new political structure, as everybody knows, is the state. But most of the time, the state is envisioned as a kind of political power which ignores individuals, looking only at the interests of the totality or, I should say, of a class or a group among the citizens. That's quite true. But I'd like to underline the fact that the state's power (and that's one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power. Never, I think, in the history of human societies-even in the old Chinese society-has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques and of totalization procedures. This is due to the fact that the modern Western state has integrated in a new political shape an old power technique which originated in Christian institutions. We can call this power technique the pastoral power. First of all, a few words about this pastoral power. It has often been said that Christianity brought into being a code of ethics fundamentally different from that of the ancient world. Less emphasis is usually placed on the fact that it proposed and spread new power relations throughout the ancient world. Christianity is the only religion which has organized itself as a church. And as such, it postulates in principle that certain individuals can, by their religious quality, serve others not as princes, magistrates, prophets, fortune-tellers, benefactors, educationalists, and so on but as pastors. However, this word designates a very special form of power. 1. It is a form of power whose ultimate aim is to assure individual salvation in the next world. 2. Pastoral power is not merely a form of power which commands; it must also be prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of the flock. Therefore, it is different from royal power, which demands a sacrifice from its subjects to save the throne. 3. It is a form of power which does not look after just the whole community but each individual in particular, during his entire life. 4. Finally, this form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people's minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it. This form of power is salvation oriented (as opposed to political power). It is oblative (as opposed to the principle of sovereignty); it is individualizing (as opposed to legal power); it is coextensive and continuous with life; it is linked with a production of truth-the truth of the individual himself. But all this is part of history, you will say; the pastorate has, if not disappeared, at least lost the main part of its efficiency. This is true, but I think we should distinguish between two aspects of pastoral power-between the ecclesiastical institutionalization, which has ceased or at least lost its vitality since the eighteenth century, and its function, which has spread and multiplied outside the ecclesiastical institution. An important phenomenon took place around the eighteenth century-it was a new distribution, a new organization of this kind of individualizing power. I don't think that we should consider the "modern state" as an entity which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence, but, on the contrary, as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns. In a way, we can see the state as a modern matrix of individualization or a new form of pastoral power. A few more words about this new pastoral power. 1. We may observe a change in its objective. It was no longer a question of leading people to their salvation in the next world but rather ensuring it in this world. And in this context, the word "salvation" takes on different meanings: health, well-being (that is, sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, protection against accidents. A series of "worldly" aims took the place of the religious aims of the traditional pastorate, all the more easily because the latter, for various reasons, had followed in an accessory way a certain number of these aims; we only have to think of the role of medicine and its welfare function assured for a long time by the Catholic and Protestant churches. 2. Concurrently the officials of pastoral power increased. Sometimes this form of power was exerted by state apparatus or, in any case, by a public institution such as the police. (We should not forget that in the eighteenth century the police force was not invented only for maintaining law and order, nor for assisting governments in their struggle against their enemies, but for assuring urban supplies, hygiene, health, and standards considered necessary for handicrafts and commerce.) Sometimes the power was exercised by private ventures, welfare societies, benefactors, and generally by philanthropists. But ancient institutions, for example the family, were also mobilized at this time to take on pastoral functions. It was also exercised by complex structures such as medicine, which included private initiatives with the sale of services on market economy principles, but which also included public institutions such as hospitals. 3. Finally, the multiplication of the aims and agents of pastoral power focused the development of knowledge of man around two roles: one, globalizing and quantitative, concerning the population; the other, analytical, concerning the individual. And this implies that power of a pastoral type, which over centuries-for more than a millennium-had been linked to a defined religious institution, suddenly spread out into the whole social body; it found support in a multitude of institutions. And, instead of a pastoral power and a political power, more or less linked to each other, more or less rival, there was an individualizing "tactic" which characterized a series of powers: those of the family, medicine, psychiatry, education, and employers. At the end of the eighteenth century, Kant wrote, in a German newspaper-the Berliner Monatschrift-a short text. The title was "Was heisst Aufklarung?" It was for a long time, and it is still, considered a work of relatively small importance. But I can't help finding it very interesting and puzzling because it was the first time a philosopher proposed as a philosophical task to investigate not only the metaphysical system or the foundations of scientific knowledge but a historical event-a recent, even a contemporary event. When in 1784 Kant asked, Was heisst Aufklarung?, he meant, What's going on just now? What's happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living? Or in other words: What are we? as Aufkldrer, as part of the Enlightenment? Compare this with the Cartesian question: Who am I? I, as a unique but universal and unhistorical subject? I, for Descartes, is everyone, anywhere at any moment? But Kant asks something else: What are we? in a very precise moment of history. Kant's question appears as an analysis of both us and our present. I think that this aspect of philosophy took on more and more importance. Hegel, Nietzsche ... The other aspect of "universal philosophy" didn't disappear. But the task of philosophy as a critical analysis of our world is something which is more and more important. Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and of what we are in this very moment. Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political "double bind," which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state's institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. How Is Power Exercised?For some people, asking questions about the "how" of power would limit them to describing its effects without ever relating those effects either to causes or to a basic nature. It would make this power a mysterious substance which they might hesitate to interrogate in itself, no doubt because they would prefer not to call it into question. By proceeding this way, which is never explicitly justified, they seem to suspect the presence of a kind of fatalism. But does not their very distrust indicate a presupposition that power is something which exists with three distinct qualities: its origin, its basic nature, and its manifestations? If, for the time being, I grant a certain privileged position to the question of "how," it is not because I would wish to eliminate the questions of "what" and "why." Rather, it is that I wish to present these questions in a different way: better still, to know if it is legitimate to imagine a power which unites in itself a what, a why, and a how. To put it bluntly, I would say that to begin the analysis with a "how" is to suggest that power as such does not exist. At the very least it is to ask oneself what contents one has in mind when using this all-embracing and reifying term; it is to suspect that an extremely complex configuration of realities is allowed to escape when one treads endlessly in the double question: What is power? and Where does power come from? The little question, What happens?, although flat and empirical, once scrutinized is seen to avoid accusing a metaphysics or an ontology of power of being fraudulent; rather, it attempts a critical investigation into the thematics of power. "How," not in the sense of "How does it manifest itself?" but "By what means is it exercised?" and "What happens when individuals exert (as they say) power over others?" As far as this power is concerned, it is first necessary to distinguish that which is exerted over things and gives the ability to modify, use, consume, or destroy them-a power which stems from aptitudes directly inherent in the body or relayed by external instruments. Let us say that here it is a question of "capacity." On the other hand, what characterizes the power we are analyzing is that it brings into play relations between individuals (or between groups). For let us not deceive ourselves; if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others. The term "power" designates relationships between partners (and by that I am not thinking of a zero-sum game but simply, and for the moment staying in the most general terms, of an ensemble of actions which induce others and follow from one another). It is necessary also to distinguish power relations from relationships of communication which transmit information by means of a language, a system of signs, or any other symbolic medium. No doubt communicating is always a certain way of acting upon another person or persons. But the production and circulation of elements of meaning can have as their objective or as their consequence certain results in the realm of power; the latter are not simply an aspect of the former. Whether or not they pass through systems of communication, power relations have a specific nature. Power relations, relationships of communication, and objective capacities should not therefore be confused. This is not to say that there is a question of three separate domains. Nor that there is on one hand the field of things, of perfected technique, work, and the transformation of the real; on the other that of signs, communication, reciprocity, and the production of meaning; and finally, that of the domination of the means of constraint, of inequality, and the action of men upon other men.' It is a question of three types of relationships which in fact always overlap one another, support one another reciprocally, and use each other mutually as means to an end. The application of objective capacities in their most elementary forms implies relationships of communication (whether in the form of previously acquired information or of shared work); it is tied also to power relations (whether they consist of obligatory tasks, of gestures imposed by tradition or apprenticeship, of subdivisions and the more or less obligatory distribution of labor). Relationships of communication imply finalized activities (even if only the correct putting into operation of elements of meaning) and, by virtue of modifying the field of information between partners, produce effects of power. They can scarcely be dissociated from activities brought to their final term, be they those which permit the exercise of this power (such as training techniques, processes of domination, the means by which obedience is obtained) or those, which in order to develop their potential, call upon relations of power (the division of labor and the hierarchy of tasks). Of course, the coordination between these three types of relationships is neither uniform nor constant. In a given society there is no general type of equilibrium between finalized activities, systems of communication, and power relations. Rather, there are diverse forms, diverse places, diverse circumstances or occasions in which these interrelationships establish themselves according to a specific model. But there are also "blocks" in which the adjustment of abilities, the resources of communication, and power relations constitute regulated and concerted systems. Take, for example, an educational institution: the disposal of its space, the meticulous regulations which govern its internal life, the different activities which are organized there, the diverse persons who live there or meet one another, each with his own function, his well-defined character-all these things constitute a block of capacitycommunication-power. The activity which ensures apprenticeship and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behavior is developed there by means of a whole ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differentiation marks of the "value" of each person and of the levels of knowledge) and by the means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy). These blocks, in which the putting into operation of technical capacities, the game of communications, and the relationships of power are adjusted to one another according to considered formulae, constitute what one might call, enlarging a little the sense of the word, "disciplines." The empirical analysis of certain disciplines as they have been historically constituted presents for this very reason a certain interest. This is so because the disciplines show, first, according to artificially clear and decanted systems, the manner in which systems of objective finality and systems of communication and power can be welded together. They also display different models of articulation, sometimes giving preeminence to power relations and obedience (as in those disciplines of a monastic or penitential type), sometimes to finalize activities (as in the disciplines of workshops or hospitals), sometimes to relationships of communication (as in the disciplines of apprenticeship), sometimes also to a saturation of the three types of relationship (as perhaps in military discipline, where a plethora of signs indicates, to the point of redundancy, tightly knit power relations calculated with care to produce a certain number of technical effects). What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them become more and more obedient, nor that they set about assembling in barracks, schools, or prisons; rather, that an increasingly better invigilated process of adjustment has been sought after-more and more rational and economic-between productive activities, resources of communication, and the play of power relations. To approach the theme of power by an analysis of "how" is therefore to introduce several critical shifts in relation to the supposition of a fundamental power. It is to give oneself as the object of analysis power relations and not power itself-power relations which are distinct from objective abilities as well as from relations of communication. This is as much as saying that power relations can be grasped in the diversity of their logical sequence, their abilities, and their interrelationships. What constitutes the specific nature of power?The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action, even if, of course, it is integrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear upon permanent structures. This also means that power is not a function of consent. In itself it is not a renunciation of freedom, a transference of rights, the power of each and all delegated to a few (which does not prevent the possibility that consent may be a condition for the existence or the maintenance of power); the relationship of power can be the result of a prior or permanent consent, but it is not by nature the manifestation of a consensus. Is this to say that one must seek the character proper to power relations in the violence which must have been its primitive form, its permanent secret, and its last resource, that which in the final analysis appears as its real nature when it is forced to throw aside its mask and to show itself as it really is? In effect, what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks on the wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity, and if it comes up against any resistance, it has no other option but to try to minimize it. On the other hand, a power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that "the other" (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up. Obviously the bringing into play of power relations does not exclude the use of violence any more than it does the obtaining of consent; no doubt the exercise of power can never do without one or the other, often both at the same time. But even though consensus and violence are the instruments or the results, they do not constitute the principle or the basic nature of power. The exercise of power can produce as much acceptance as may be wished for: it can pile up the dead and shelter itself behind whatever threats it can imagine. In itself the exercise of power is not violence; nor is it a consent which, implicitly, is renewable. It is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions. Perhaps the equivocal nature of the term "conduct" is one of the best aids for coming to terms with the specificity of power relations. For to "conduct" is at the same time to "lead" others (according to mechanisms of coercion which are, to varying degrees, strict) and a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities.* The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome. Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. This word must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. "Government" did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather, it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not only cover the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but also modes of action, more or less considered or calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. The relationship proper to power would not, therefore, be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government. When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others, when one characterizes these actions by the government of men by other men-in the broadest sense of the term-one includes an important element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole, there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.) Consequently, there is no face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom, which are mutually exclusive (freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay. In this game freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical determination). The relationship between power and freedom's refusal to submit cannot, therefore, be separated. The crucial problem of power is not that of voluntary servitude (how could we seek to be slaves?). At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an "agonism"*-of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation. How is one to analyze the power relationship?One can analyze such relationships, or rather I should say that it is perfectly legitimate to do so, by focusing on carefully defined institutions. The latter constitute a privileged point of observation, diversified, concentrated, put in order, and carried through to the highest point of their efficacity. It is here that, as a first approximation, one might expect to see the appearance of the form and logic of their elementary mechanisms. However, the analysis of power relations as one finds them in certain circumscribed institutions presents a certain number of problems. First, the fact that an important part of the mechanisms put into operation by an institution are designed to ensure its own preservation brings with it the risk of deciphering functions which are essentially reproductive, especially in power relations between institutions. Second, in analyzing power relations from the standpoint of institutions, one lays oneself open to seeking the explanation and the origin of the former in the latter, that is to say, finally, to explain power to power. Finally, insofar as institutions act essentially by bringing into play two elements, explicit or tacit regulations and an apparatus, one risks giving to one or the other an exaggerated privilege in the relations of power and hence to see in the latter only modulations of the law and of coercion. This does not deny the importance of institutions on the establishment of power relations. Instead, I wish to suggest that one must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa, and that the fundamental point of anchorage of the relationships, even if they are embodied and crystallized in an institution, is to be found outside the institution. Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible-and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence. The analysis of power relations demands that a certain number of points be established concretely: 1. The system of differentiations which permits one to act upon the actions of others: differentiations determined by the law or by traditions of status and privilege; economic differences in the appropriation of riches and goods, shifts in the processes of production, linguistic or cultural differences, differences in know-how and competence, and so forth. Every relationship of power puts into operation differentiations which are at the same time its conditions and its results. 2. The types of objectives pursued by those who act upon the actions of others: the maintenance of privileges, the accumulation of profits, the bringing into operation of statutary authority, the exercise of a function or of a trade. 3. The means of bringing power relations into being: according to whether power is exercised by the threat of arms, by the effects of the word, by means of economic disparities, by more or less complex means of control, by systems of surveillance, with or without archives, according to rules which are or are not explicit, fixed or modifiable, with or without the technological means to put all these things into action. 4. Forms of institutionalization: these may mix traditional predispositions, legal structures, phenomena relating to custom or to fashion (such as one sees in the institution of the family); they can also take the form of an apparatus closed in upon itself, with its specific loci, its own regulations, its hierarchical structures which are carefully defined, a relative autonomy in its functioning (such as scholastic or military institutions); they can also form very complex systems endowed with multiple apparatuses, as in the case of the state, whose function is the taking of everything under its wing, the bringing into being of general surveillance, the principle of regulation, and, to a certain extent also, the distribution of all power relations in a given social ensemble. 5. The degrees of rationalization: the bringing into play of power relations as action in a field of possibilities may be more or less elaborate in relation to the effectiveness of the instruments and the certainty of the results (greater or lesser technological refinements employed in the exercise of power) or again in proportion to the possible cost (be it the economic cost of the means brought into operation or the cost in terms of reaction constituted by the resistance which is encountered). The exercise of power is not a naked fact, an institutional right, nor is it a structure which holds out or is smashed: it is elaborated, transformed, organized; it endows itself with processes which are more or less adjusted to the situation. One sees why the analysis of power relations within a society cannot be reduced to the study of a series of institutions, not even to the study of all those institutions which would merit the name "political." Power relations are rooted in the system of social networks. This is not to say, however, that there is a primary and fundamental principle of power which dominates society down to the smallest detail; but, taking as point of departure the possibility of action upon the action of others (which is coextensive with every social relationship), multiple forms of individual disparity, of objectives, of the given application of power over ourselves or others, of, in varying degrees, partial or universal institutionalization, of more or less deliberate organization, one can define different forms of power. The forms and the specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. It is certain that in contemporary societies the state is not simply one of the forms or specific situations of the exercise of power-even if it is the most important-but that in a certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to it. But this is not because they are derived from it; it is rather because power relations have come more and more under state control (although this state control has not taken the same form in pedagogical, judicial, economic, or family systems). In referring here to the restricted sense of the word "government," one could say that power relations have been progressively governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions. Relations of power and relations of strategy.The word "strategy" is currently employed in three ways. First, to (designate the means employed to attain a certain end; it is a question of rationality functioning to arrive at an objective. Second, to designate the manner in which a partner in a certain game acts with regard to what he thinks should be the action of the others and what he considers the others think to be his own; it is the way in which one seeks to have the advantage over others. Third, to designate the procedures used in a situation of confrontation to deprive the opponent of his means of combat and to reduce him to giving up the struggle; it is a question, therefore, of the means destined to obtain victory. These three meanings come together in situations of confrontation-war or games-where the objective is to act upon an adversary in such a manner as to render the struggle impossible for him. So strategy is defined by the choice of winning solutions. But it must be borne in mind that this is a very special type of situation and that there are others in which the distinctions between the different senses of the word "strategy" must be maintained. Referring to the first sense I have indicated, one may call power strategy the totality of the means put into operation to implement power effectively or to maintain it. One may also speak of a strategy proper to power relations insofar as they constitute modes of action upon possible action, the action of others. One can therefore interpret the mechanisms brought into play in power relations in terms of strategies. But most important is obviously the relationship between power relations and confrontation strategies. For, if it is true that at the heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom, then there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight. Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal. A relationship of confrontation reaches its term, its final moment (and the victory of one of the two adversaries), when stable mechanisms replace the free play of antagonistic reactions. Through such mechanisms one can direct, in a fairly constant manner and with reasonable certainty, the conduct of others. For a relationship of confrontation, from the moment it is not a struggle to the death, the fixing of a power relationship becomes a target-at one and the same time its fulfillment and its suspension. And in return, the strategy of struggle also constitutes a frontier for the relationship of power, the line at which, instead of manipulating and inducing actions in a calculated manner, one must be content with reacting to them after the event. It would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of insubordination which, by definition, are means of escape. Accordingly, every intensification, every extension of power relations to make the insubordinate submit can only result in the limits of power. The latter reaches its final term either in a type of action which reduces the other to total impotence (in which case victory over the adversary replaces the exercise of power) or by a confrontation with those whom one governs and their transformation into adversaries. Which is to say that every strategy of confrontation dreams of becoming a relationship of power, and every relationship of power leans toward the idea that, if it follows its own line of development and comes up against direct confrontation, it may become the winning strategy. In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric, and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings which make visible those fundamental phenomena of "domination" which are present in a large number of human societies. Domination is in fact a general structure of power whose ramifications and consequences can sometimes be found descending to the most recalcitrant fibers of society. But at the same time it is a strategic situation more or less taken for granted and consolidated by means of a long-term confrontation between adversaries. It can certainly happen that the fact of domination may only be the transcription of a mechanism of power resulting from confrontation and its consequences (a political structure stemming from invasion); it may also be that a relationship of struggle between two adversaries is the result of power relations with the conflicts and cleavages which ensue. But what makes the domination of a group, a caste, or a class, together with the resistance and revolts which that domination comes up against, a central phenomenon in the history of societies is that they manifest in a massive and universalizing form, at the level of the whole social body, the locking together of power relations with relations of strategy and the results proceeding from their interaction. The Subject and Power Author(s): Michel Foucault Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4, (Summer, 1982), pp. 777-795 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343197
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In the face of the discreet devaluation of territorial space which followed from the conquest of circumterrestrial space, geostrategy and geopolitics come on and do their number together as part of the stage show of a regime of perverted temporality, where TRUE and FALSE are no longer relevant. The actual and the virtual have gradually taken their place, to the great detriment of the international economy, as the Wall Street computer crash of 1987, moreover, clearly demonstrated.
Dissimulating the future in the ultra-short time of an on-line 'compunication' (computer communication), Intensive time will then replace the extensive time in which the future was still laid out in substantial periods of weeks, months, years to come. The age-old duel between arms and armour, offensive and defensive, then becomes irrelevant. Both terms now merge in a new 'high-tech mix', a paradoxical object in which decoys and countermeasures just go on developing, rapidly acquiring a predominantly defensive thrust, the image becoming more effective as ammunition than what it was supposed to represent!
Faced with this fusion of the object with its equivalent image, this confusion between presentation and televised representation, the processes of real-time deception will win out over the weapons systems of classic deterrence. East-West conflict in the way the reality of deterrence itself is interpreted will gradually be transformed with the first fruits of nuclear disarmament.
The traditional opposition between deterrence and self-defence will then be replaced by an alternative: deterrence, based on parading apocalyptic weapons, or self-defence, based on this uncertainty about reality, about the very credibility of means implemented. These include the famous American 'Strategic Defense Initiative', or 'Star Wars', whose plausibility is in no way assured.
Remember that there were, at this point, three main classes of weapons: weapons defined either by range or by function, and erratic weapons, the latter prefiguring the decoys and countermeasures mentioned above.
If first-generation nuclear deterrence led to a growing sophistication in weapons systems (enhanced range, precision, miniaturisation of warheads, intelligence ... ), this sophistication has itself indirectly led to an increased sophistication in decoys and other countermeasures, which is why rapid target discrimination is so important, not so much now between true and false missiles, as between true and false radar signatures, between plausible and implausible images, whether acoustic, optical or thermal ...
In the age of 'generalised simulation' of military missions (ground, navy or air) we thus land smack bang in the middle of the age of total dissimulation — a war of images and sounds, tending to take over from the missile war of the nuclear deterrence arsenal.
The Latin root of the word secret means to segregate, to remove from understanding. Today this segregation is no longer a matter of spatial distance but of time-distance. It has become more useful to deceive about duration, to make the image of the trajectory secret, than camouflaging explosives carriers (aircraft, rockets and so on). And so a new ballistics' discipline has emerged: tracking.
It is now more vital to trick the enemy about the virtuality of the missile's passage, about the very credibility of its presence, than to confuse them about the reality of its existence. This is where the spontaneous generation STEALTH aircraft come in, those 'discreet' weapons, 'furtive' carriers, virtually invisible to detection ...
At this juncture we enter a third weapons age, following the prehistoric age of weapons defined by range, and the historic age of 'functional' weapons. With erratic and random weapons we move into the post-historic age of the arsenal. ERW are discreet weapons whose functioning depends entirely on the definitive split between real and figurative. Objective lie, unidentified virtual object, they may be classic carriers, made invisible by radar by their smooth aerodynamic shape and special radar-absorbent paint; they may be kinetic kill vehicles (KKV), using only speed of impact; or kinetic-energy weapons, which are electronic decoys. 'Projective images', ammunition of a new order that dangerously fascinate and deceive the opponent in what is probably a forerunner of the enhanced radiation weapon, or neutron bomb, acting at the speed of light itself.
This equipment of deception, this arsenal of dissimulation, has way overshot deterrence. Deterrence can now only take effect by virtue of information, through the disclosure of destructive capabilities, since an unknown weapons system would hardly be in danger of deterring the other player/adversary in a strategic game that calls for announcement, for the advertising of means. Whence the usefulness of military shows and the famous 'spy satellites' that guarantee strategic balance.
'If I were to sum up in one sentence the current stance on smart bombs and saturation attack weapons', W. J. Perry, a former US State Under-Secretary of Defense explained, 'I'd say as soon as you can see a target you can hope to destroy it.'
This statement betrays the new situation as well as partly accounting for the disarmament currently under way. If what is perceived is already finished, what was previously invested exclusively in the deployment of forces must now be invested in dissimulation. So decoy research and development has come to play a leading role in the military-industrial complex, yet one that is itself discreet. Censorship regarding 'deception techniques' far exceeds what once surrounded the military secret of the invention of the atomic bomb.
That there has been a reversal in deterrence strategy is obvious. Unlike arms that need to be known to be genuinely dissuasive, 'furtive' weapons can only work if their existence is concealed. This reversal muddies the waters of East-West strategy considerably, since it undermines the very principle of nuclear deterrence in favour of a 'strategic-defense initiative' that no longer rests on the deployment of new arms in space, as President Reagan maintained, but on the uncertainty principle, the unknown quantity in a relative-weapons system whose credibility is no more beyond doubt than its visibility.
This makes the decisive new importance of the 'logistics of perception' clearer, as well as accounting for the secrecy that continues to surround it. It is a war of images and sounds, rather than objects and things, in which winning is simply a matter of not losing sight of the opposition. The will to see all, to know all, at every moment, everywhere, the will to universalised illumination: a scientific permutation on the eye of God which would forever rule out the surprise, the accident, the irruption of the unforeseen.
So, besides the industrial innovation of 'repeating weapons', followed by automatic weapons, we also have the innovation of repeating images provided by the photoframe. The video signal then takes over where the radio signal left off, with the videogram in its turn further extending this will to second sight and bringing with it the added possibility of real-time reciprocal telesurveillance - twentyfour hours a day. The last phase of the strategy will finally be ensured by the vision machine. The Perceptron, say, will use computer graphics and automatic recognition of shapes (not just contours and silhouettes) - as though the chronology of the invention of cinema were being relived in a mirror, the age of the magic lantern giving way once more to the age of the recording camera, in anticipation of digital holography.
In the face of such representational open slather, the philosophical questions of plausibility and implausibility override those concerning the true and the false. The shift of interest from the thing to its image, and especially from space to time, to the instant, leads to a shift in polarities from the old black-and-white real-figurative dichotomy to the more relative actual-virtual.
Unless .. . unless what we are seeing is the emergence of a mix, a fusion-confusion of the two terms, the paradoxical occurrence of a unisex reality, beyond good and evil, applying itself this time to the now crucial categories of space and time and their relative dimensions, as a number of discoveries in the areas of quantum indivisibility and superconductivity would already suggest.
If we look at recent developments in 'deception strategy', we find that currently when military staff talk about 'the electronic environment' and the need for a new meteorology in order to ascertain the exact position of countermeasures over enemy territory, they are clearly translating this mutation in the very concept of environment, as well as in the concept of the reality of events occurring within it. The unpredictability and rapid transformation of atmospheric phenomena become doubly uncertain and ephemeral, but this time in relation to the state of electromagnetic waves, those countermeasures that allow a territory to be defended.
If, as Admiral Gorchkov claims: 'The winner of the next war will be the side who made the most of the electromagnetic spectrum', then we must consider the real environment of military action from now on to be not the tangible, visible, audible environment, but the optoelectronic environment, certain operations already being carried out, according to military jargon, beyond optical range thanks to real-time radioelectric pictures.
To grasp this transmutation in the field of action properly we have to refer back to the principle of relative illumination once more. If the categories of space and time have become relative (critical), this is because the stamp of the absolute has shifted from matter to light and especially to light's finite speed. It follows that that which serves to see, to understand, to measure and therefore to conceive reality, is not so much light as its velocity. From now on, speed is less useful in terms of getting around easily than in terms of seeing and conceiving more or less clearly. The time frequency of light has become a determining factor in the apperception of phenomena, leaving the spatial frequency of matter for dead. Whence the unheard of possibility of real-time special effects, decoys that do not so much affect the nature of the object - a missile, say - as the image of its presence, in the infinitesimal instant in which the virtual and the real are one and the same thing for the sensor or the human observer.
Take the centroidal-effect decoy for example. The principle here consists, in the first instance, in superimposing on the radar-image that the missile 'sees' an image entirely created by the decoy. This image is more attractive than the real one of the ground target and just as credible for the enemy missile. When this preliminary phase of deception is successful, the missile's homing head locks on to the unit's centre of gravity - 'decoy-image', 'ground target-image'. The deceived missile then only has to be dragged beyond the ship, the entire operation taking no more than a few fractions of a second. As Henri Martre, the head of Aerospatiale, pointed out not long ago: 'Future materials will be conditioned by advances in components and miniaturisation. It is most likely electronics that will end up destroying a weapon's reliability'.
So after the nuclear disintegration of the space of matter, which led to the implementation of a global deterrence strategy, the disintegration of the time of light is finally upon us. This will most likely involve a new mutation of the war game, with deception finally defeating deterrence.
Today 'extensive' time, which worked at deepening the wholeness of infinitely great time, has given way to 'intensive' time. This deepens the infinitely small of duration, of microscopic time, the final figure of eternity rediscovered outside the imaginary of the extensive eternity of bygone centuries.
Intensive eternity, in which the instantaneity offered by the latest technologies contains the equivalent of what the infinitely small space of matter contains. The core of time, a temporal atom there in each present instant, an infinitesimal point of perception from where extent and duration are differently conceived, this relative difference between them reconstitutes a new real generation, a degenerate reality in which speed prevails over time and space, just as light already prevails over matter, or energy over the inanimate. If all that appears in light appears in its speed, which is a universal constant, if speed is no longer particularly useful, as we once thought, in displacement or transportation, if speed serves primarily to see, to conceive the reality of the facts, then duration, like extent, must absolutely be 'brought to light'. All durations, from the most minute to the most astronomical, will then help to expose the intimacy of the image and its object, of space and representations of time. Physics currently proposes to do this by tripling the once-binary concept of the interval: on top of the familiar intervals of the 'space' type (negative sign) and the 'tome' type (positive sign), we have the new interval of the 'light' type (zero sign). The interface of the live television screen or the computer monitor are perfect examples of this third type of interval.
Since the time-frequency of light has become the determining factor in relative apperception of phenomena and subsequently of the reality principle, the vision machine is well and truly an 'absolute-speed machine', further undermining traditional notions of geometric optics like observables and non-observables. Actually, if photo-cinematography is still inscribed in extensive time, promoting expectation and attention by means of suspense, real-time video computer graphics is already inscribed in intensive time, promoting the unexpected and a short concentration span by means of surprise machine'. The production of sightless vision is itself merely the reproduction of an intense blindness that will become the latest and last form of industrialisation: the industrialisation of the non-gaze.
Seeing and non-seeing have always enjoyed a relationship of reciprocity, light and dark combining in the passive optics of the camera leans. But with the active optics of the video computer, notions like toning light down or bringing it up change completely, privileging a more or less marked intensification of light. And this amplification is nothing other than the negative or positive change in the velocity of photons - the trace photons leave in the camera as they pass through it being itself linked to the variable speed of the calculations image digitalisation requires, the PERCEPTRON'S computer functioning like a sort of ELECTRONIC OCCIPITAL CORTEX.
Don't forget, though, that 'image' is just an empty word here since the machine's interpretation has nothing to do with normal vision (to put it mildly!). For the computer, the optically active electron image is merely a series of coded impulses whose configuration we cannot begin to imagine since, in this 'automation of perception', image feedback is no longer assured. That being, of course, the whole idea.
We should also note, though, that eyesight is itself merely a series of light and nerve impulses that our brain quickly decodes (at 20 milliseconds per image), the question of the 'observation energy' that enables us to observe phenomena remaining unanswered, even now, despite our progress in understanding psychological and physiological blindness.
Speed of light or light of speed? The question remains untouched, despite the above-mentioned possibility of a third form of energy: kinematic energy or image energy. This fusion of physical optics and relative kinematics would take its place alongside the two main officially recognised forms of energy - potential and kinetic (active) - thereby throwing light on the controversial scientific term: observed energy.
Observed energy or observation energy? That is still the question, and it is bound to become topical, with the profusion of countless prostheses of computer-enhanced perception of which the Perceptron would be the logical outcome; an outcome of paradoxical logic, though, since 'objective perception' - how machines might perceive things — will be forever beyond us.
Faced with this ultimate in automation, the usual categories of energetic reality are no longer much help. If real time prevails over real space, if the image prevails over the object present, to say nothing of the being, if the virtual prevails over the real, we need to try and analyse the fallout from this logic of 'intensive' time on different physical representations. While the age of 'extensive' time continued to justify dialectic logic by drawing a clear distinction between potential and real, the age of intensive time demands a better resolution of the reality principle, one in which the notion of virtuality would itself come in for a bit of tinkering.
This is why I propose we accept the logical paradox of a veritable 'observation energy' made possible by the Theory of Relativity. The latter sets up the speed of light as a new absolute and thereby introduces a third type of interval - light - alongside the classic intervals of space and time. If the path of light is absolute, as its zero sign indicates, this is because the principle of instantaneous emission and reception change-over has already superceded the principle of communication which still required a certain delay.
Taking into account the third type of energy would therefore help modify the very definition of the real and the figurative, since the question of REALITY would become a matter of the PATH of the light interval, rather than a matter of the OBJECT and space-time intervals. Surpassing 'objectivity' in this untimely manner, the light-type interval would spawn the being of the path, after the being of the subject and the being of the object. As the former would define the appearance or, more precisely, the trans-appearance of what is, the question for philosophy would stop being: 'At what space-time distance is observed reality?' It would become: 'At what power, in other words, at what speed, is the perceived object?' The third type of interval thereby necessarily adds to the third type of energy: the energy of the kinematic optics of relativity. Accordingly, if the finite speed of light is the absolute that takes over where Newton's now relativised space and time leave off, the path now steals the jump on the object. Once this happens, how can we possibly locate the 'real' or the 'figurative' except through some kind of 'clearance' which becomes indistinguishable from an 'illumination' or 'clarification', spatio-temporal spacing being, to the attentive observer, only a particular figure of light, or more precisely still, of the light of speed?
And if speed is not a phenomenon but, indeed, the relationship between phenomena (relativity itself), the question raised of the observation distance of phenomena comes down to the question of the power of perception (mental or instrumental). This is why we urgently need to evaluate light signals of perceptual reality in terms of intensity, that is 'speed', rather than in terms of 'light and dark' or reflection or any of the other now outdated shorthand.
When physicists still talk today about observed energy, they are definitely misusing the term, and this mistake affects scientific practice itself, since it is speed more than light which allows us to see, to measure and thereby conceive reality.
Some little time ago, the review Raison presente asked: 'Has contemporary physics done away with the real?' Done away with it? Not on your life! But it has resolved it, of course — only, in the sense in which we now speak of better 'image resolution'. Since Einstein, Niels Bohr and company, the temporal and spatial resolution of the real has been being brought off at an endlessly accelerating rate!
At this point we should remember that relativity would not exist without the relative optics (physical optics) of the observer. Einstein was accordingly tempted to call his theory the Theory of Viewpoint in reference to the 'point of view' which necessarily becomes identical with the relative fusion of optics and kinematics, and which is another name for the 'energy of the third kind' which I propose adding to the other two.
In fact if every image (visual, sound) is the manifestation of an energy, of an unrecognised power, the discovery of retinal retention is much more than insight into a time lag (the imprint of the image on the retina). It is the discovery of a freeze-frame effect which speaks to us of some kind of unscrolling, of Rodin's time that 'does not stand still'; in other words of the intensive time of human perceptiveness. If fixing does occur, at a given moment of sight, this is actually because there exists an energetics of optics, the 'kinematic energetic' finally being merely the manifestation of a third form of power, without which distance and the three-dimensional would not apparently exist, since the said 'distance' could not exist without 'delay', (outdistancing only appearing thanks to the illumination of perception. Much as the ancients, in their own way, understood to be the case.
But by way of conclusion, let us return to the crisis in perceptive faith, to the automation of perception that is threatening our understanding. Apart from video optics, the vision machine will also use digital imaging to facilitate recognition of shapes. Note, though, that the synthetic image, as the name implies, is in reality merely a 'statistical image' that can only emerge thanks to rapid calculation of the pixels a computer graphics system can display on a screen. In order to decode each individual pixel, the pixels immediately surrounding it must be analysed. The usual criticism of statistical thought, as generating rational illusions, thus necessarily comes down to what we might here call the visual thought of the computer, digital optics now being scarcely more than a statistical optics capable of generating a series of visual illusions, 'rational illusions', which affect our understanding as well as reasoning.
In acquiring a closed-circuit optics, statistical science - the art of providing information on objective future trends as well as, more recently, an art of persuasion - will probably see its power and power of conviction considerably enhanced, along with its discrimination capacities.
Bringing users a 'subjective' optical interpretation of observed phenomena and not just 'objective' information about proposed events, the vision machine is in real danger of accentuating the splitting of the reality principle, the synthetic image no longer having anything in common with the statistical inquiry as it is normally conducted. They are already talking about digital experiments that will dispense completely with classic 'analytical reflection'. And aren't they also talking about an artificial reality involving digital simulation that would oppose the 'natural reality' of classical experience?
'Intoxication is a number', according to Charles Baudelaire. Digital optics is indeed a rational metaphor for intoxication, statistical intoxication, that is: a blurring of perception that affects the real as much as the figurative, as though our society were sinking into the darkness of a voluntary blindness, its will to digital power finally contaminating the horizon of sight as well as knowledge.
As a mode of representation of statistical thought today dominant thanks to data banks, synthetic imagery should soon contribute to the development of this one last mode of reasoning.
Don't forget that the whole idea behind the Perceptron would be to encourage the emergence of fifth-generation 'expert systems', in other words an artificial intelligence that could be further enriched only by acquiring organs of perception. ... Let me end with a fable based on a very real invention this time, the calculator pen. It is very straightforward. All you have to do is write the computation on paper, as you would if you were doing the sum yourself. When you finish writing, the little screen built into the pen displays the result. Magic? No way. While you are writing, an optical system reads the numbers formed and the electronic component does the sum. So much for the facts. The fable concerns what my pen, a blind pen this time, will write down for you, the reader, as the final words of this book. Imagine for a moment that to write the book I have borrowed technology's state-of-the-art pen: the reader pen. What do you think will come up on the screen, abuse or praise? Only, have you ever heard of a writer who writes for his pen... ?
Paul Virilio/The Vision Machine/ Chapter 5: The Vision Machine
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