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"Myriad Little Connections": Minoritarian Movements in the
Postmodernism Debate
Pelagia Goulimari
General Editor
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
goulimari@angelaki1.demon.co.uk
(c) 2004 Pelagia Goulimari.
All rights reserved.
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1. The vast postmodernism debate, whose expansive and canonical phase
spanned from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s but which has yet to
reach a point of settlement or closure, engages with a
multiplicity of questions, among which "what is postmodernism?" is
not necessarily the most important. A more urgent question in the
debate is that of minoritarian movements. In many of the most
influential interrogations of postmodernism, one can discern the
promise of unprecedented participation for everyone on a global
terrain without frontiers. It is a promise, however, on which the
canonical texts of the debate ultimately fail to deliver. An
analysis of these texts shows them following a binary scheme of
political analysis that is still with us today and which it is our
challenge now to leave behind: fragmentation versus unification.
Minoritarian movements are seen as non-communicating fragments in
need of unification by an avant-garde hegemonic force. In our
post-hegemonic world, this model locks minoritarian movements into
a false dilemma and fails to acknowledge their fertile
interaction. In search of a "new" model that acknowledges both the
distinctness and unceasing interaction of minoritarian movements,
I propose a return to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. Here
unfolds a world of "myriad connections, disjunctions, and
conjunctions" (315) across fields (such as Marxism, feminism,
postcolonial theory, and queer theory): small collectivities,
here, which neither have "anything in common, nor do they cease
communicating."
2. Central to my account of the postmodernism debate will be Fredric
Jameson's canonical essay, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism" (1984).[1 <#foot1>] In The Success and Failure
of Fredric Jameson (2001), based on a series of articles published
in this journal between 1995 and 2000, Steven Helmling describes
"Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" as
Jameson's most accomplished attempt to date at success-as-failure:
a dialectical model of writing full of contradictions, full of
movement and agitation and vertiginous slippage of meaning (14-16,
110-11). Further, Helmling argues that between 1982 and
1984--between Jameson's earliest piece on postmodernism,
"Postmodernism and Consumer Society" and his definitive
"Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"--Jameson
"augment[s] polysemy" (16, 169-70).[2 <#foot2>] In fact, however,
when one reads these successive writings /in relation to the
question of minoritarian movements/, one finds a reverse movement
toward monosemy, accompanied by an increasingly insistent
rejection of minoritarian movements.[3 <#foot3>]
3. In the first part of this essay, and in order to show this double
movement, I will briefly review Jameson's work on postmodernism
between 1982 and 1984. In particular, I want to show how this work
slowly crystallized a truth-claim about postmodernism as part of a
triangle. First, postmodernism = minoritarian movements = sheer
heterogeneity, radical difference, dispersal of non-communicating
fragments. Second, late capitalism is a spectre of dissolution in
that it is a total or global system paradoxically generating sheer
heterogeneity, that is, generating minoritarian movements that are
nothing but non-communicating islands of late capitalism. Third,
the Left will overcome this spectre of dissolution and bring about
a total systemic transformation by hegemonizing and thus unifying
minoritarian movements. This hegemony is necessary rather than a
matter of contingent, political articulation. The main theoretical
element here is Lacan's structuralist reading of schizophrenia as
a breakdown of the signifying chain. Its main political element is
that minoritarian movements are those disconnected signifiers and
that the Left is the Lacanian "despotic signifier" or hegemonic
force that will reunite them.
4. In the second part of this essay, I look at the effective adoption
of the Jamesonian triangle of fragmentation, total system,
unification as total systemic transformation--in its formal
outline rather than its particular contents--in three major works
on postmodernism: David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity:
An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989), Steven
Connor's Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the
Contemporary (1989), and Linda Hutcheon's The Politics of
Postmodernism (1989), the latter of which simultaneously adopts
and rejects this triangle. I follow the mutations of the
Jamesonian triangle in these works, in relation to minoritarian
movements. I also look at the effective rejection of the
Jamesonian triangle in Ernesto Laclau's "Politics and the Limits
of Modernity" (1987), again in relation to minoritarian movements.
5. In the third and final part of the essay, I turn to Deleuze and
Guattari's Anti-Oedipus for an alternative conception of
minoritarian movements and their interaction, in order to escape
what I see as the double bind between fragmentation and
unification. Deleuze and Guattari developed a distinction /between
two types of relation/: that of schizophrenia or
"deterritorialization" and that of paranoia or
"territorialization." I try to show that the Jamesonian triangle
initiated a powerful and persistent "territorializing" tendency in
the postmodernism debate. Finally, I argue that the Jamesonian
triangle leads /perhaps for the first time/ to the fragmentation
it purports to overcome.
"Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"
6. In this section I will examine the movement from Jameson's
"Postmodernism and Consumer Society" (1982), "Cognitive Mapping"
(1983), "Periodizing the 60s" (1984), and his Foreword to
Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1984), to the
definitive "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism" (1984). The section is divided into three parts named
for the Jamesonian triangle of late capitalism, the Left, and
minoritarian movements.
Late Capitalism
7. In the first paragraph of his Foreword to The Postmodern
Condition, Jameson introduces his main thesis on postmodernism:
postmodernism "involves [...] a new social and economic moment"
(vii).
8. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" already has recourse to a
"new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism" but
understands its link to postmodernism as only partially
determining (125). Yes, postmodernism is "/closely related/" to
consumer capitalism, and its "formal features in many ways [not in
every way] /express/ the deeper logic" of consumer capitalism; yet
it remains distinct from consumer capitalism, so that Jameson can
conclude: "there is a way in which postmodernism /replicates/
[...] the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant
question is whether there is also a way in which it /resists/ that
logic" (125, emphasis added). In "Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism," with expressions such as "postmodern
/period/" (62, emphasis added), no distance remains between
postmodernism and the new economic moment; Jameson assimilates
postmodernism to its logic.
9. But what is this new "social and economic moment"? In
"Postmodernism and Consumer Society" Jameson looks at two features
of postmodernism--pastiche and schizophrenia--in order to deduce
the nature of consumer capitalism. Through both pastiche and
schizophrenia, as I will now explain, he detects social
fragmentation. (Jameson seems to assume that social fragmentation
expresses rather than resists consumer capitalism.)
10. In "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," postmodernism is still a
phenomenon in the arts--later, poststructuralist theory will be
included. Jameson briefly relates pastiche to "each group coming
to speak a curious private language of its own," at the expense
and to the detriment of "normal language [...] of the linguistic
norm," as well as at the expense of "a unique personality and
individuality, which can be expected [unlike groups] to generate
its own unique vision of the world" (114). This is the first
instance--a mere suggestion--of a link between the proliferation
of new micropolitical groups and consumer capitalism. Jameson's
discussion of schizophrenic art continues the problematic of, and
the lack of enthusiasm for, new micropolitical groups--initiated
in the last quotation--in that schizophrenic art involves
"isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which
fail to link up into a coherent whole" (119).
11. A quick comparison with Baudrillard's La société de consommation
(1970), to which Jameson's "consumer society" refers, will show
Jameson's originality. Baudrillard's "consumer society" has no
dispersive or fragmentary effects. On the contrary, it is an
expanded system of social reproduction, regulation, and control:
"consumption is a system which assures the regulation of signs and
the integration of the group [...] a system of meaning"
("Consumer" 46). Further, consumer society is but a reaction to
"the rise of new productive forces" (49). Baudrillard's example of
new productive forces, that of Puerto Rican workers in the U.S.,
might be seen to refer to all minoritarian groups. "Postmodernism
and Consumer Society" seems to reverse this order, so that the
proliferation of such new productive forces expresses consumer
society.
12. After "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," the term "late
capitalism" quickly becomes dominant. This is part of a broader
shift. Here poststructuralism is still considered both to be
"radical" ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society" 115) and to have
cognitive value comparable to that of Mandel's Late Capitalism
(1975). By the time of "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism," Jameson has placed them on opposite sides of a
distinction between the symptomatic and the cognitive.
Poststructuralism is relegated to the symptomatic, while Mandel's
"late capitalism" represents the cognitive. "Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" quickly slips from the initial
statement that postructuralism is "a very significant symptom of
[...] postmodernist culture" to the equation, "poststructural or
postmodern period" (61, 62); on the other hand "Marxian 'science'
provides [...] a way of knowing and conceptualizing the world
abstractly, in the sense in which, e.g., Mandel's great book
offers a rich and elaborated /knowledge/ of that global world
system" (91).
13. Jameson first develops his use of Mandel's "late capitalism" in
"Periodizing the 60s." He adopts two main ideas. The first is that
late capitalism is the purest and most extended form of capitalism
so far. As Baudrillard and others wouldn't disagree with this (see
"Consumer Society" 50), the second idea is the crucial one: late
capitalism is a spent force after the worldwide economic crisis of
1973-74.[4 <#foot4>] "Periodizing the 60s" quickly turns this
"hypothesis" into a quasi-scientific prediction of the political
fate of minoritarian movements (206): they were "produced" by late
capitalism's energy--now that this energy is exhausted, so are
they (208). "Periodizing the 60s" continues to diagnose
contemporary reality as fragmented--as "a now absolutely
fragmented and anarchic social reality" (201)--but this reality is
the work of a new subject of history, late capitalism.
14. "Periodizing the 60s" opens with the proposition that "history is
necessity" (178). It concludes accordingly: now that late
capitalism has lost its dynamism, the "prodigious release of
untheorized new forces" is over and is "(from the hindsight of the
80s) a historical illusion," "inflationary," a matter of "devalued
signifiers" caused by an unwise "universal abandonment of the
referential gold standard" (208). (The U.S. and then the IMF
abandoned the actual gold standard in 1970s. Jameson's argument
seems to be that micropolitics abandoned "the referential gold
standard" of the category of class.) Jameson predicts:
the 80s will be characterized by an effort, on a world scale,
to proletarianize all those unbound social forces[;] [...] by
an extension of class struggle, in other words, into the
farthest reaches of the globe [...] The unifying force here is
the new vocation of a henceforth global capitalism, which may
also be expected to unify the unequal, fragmented, or local
resistances [...]. (208-09)
This is how Marxism "must necessarily become true again" (209).
"And this is finally also the solution to the so-called 'crisis'
of Marxism" (209). It seems to me that capitalism plays the role
of a /deus ex machina/ here.
15. What makes "Periodizing the 60s" fascinating is the fleeting
presence, in this piece alone, of a second theoretical
position--history as contingency--and a second affective
position--an openness to minoritarian movements. The result is
pure, unresolved contradiction. For example, Jameson's genealogy
of the 1960s incorporates political events: "a fundamental
'condition of possibility'" for the unleashing of the new forces
was McCarthyism and the merger of the AFL and the CIO in 1955, in
that it led to "the expulsion of the Communists from the American
labor movement" (181); or Jameson considers that "such newly
released forces do not only not seem to compute in the dichotomous
class model of traditional Marxism; they also seem to offer a
realm of freedom and voluntarist possibility beyond the classical
constraints of the economic infrastructure" (208).
16. Similarly, as examples of a different affective tone toward
minoritarian movements, Jameson speaks of feminism as "stunning
and unforeseeable [...] a Yenan of a new and unpredictable kind
which is still impregnable" (189), and he salutes "the challenge
of the women's movement whose unique new strategies and concerns
cut across (or in some cases undermine and discredit altogether)
many classical inherited forms of [...] political action" (192).[5
<#foot5>]
17. "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" leaves
contingency and openness behind: minoritarian movements are but
"symptoms" of late capitalism. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
make the reverse and, in my view, more convincing argument in
Empire: capital is parasitic and reactive and simply borrows the
inventions of the struggles of the proletariat to survive. They
reject all "objective" theories of the dynamics of capital and all
theories of cycles, in that such theories devalue the proletariat.
The crux of their analysis lies in identifying the 1960s
movements--in their indexes of "mobility, flexibility, knowledge,
communication, cooperation, the affective"--as the new figure of
the proletariat or the "multitude" (275).[6 <#foot6>]
18. While "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" is
central to the postmodernism debate, while we still return to it,
Jameson himself has moved on and has since said: "I have mainly
singled out intellectual and social phenomena like
'poststructuralism' and the 'new social movements,' thus giving
the impression, against my own deepest political convictions, that
all the 'enemies' were on the left" ("Conclusion" 408).
The /New/ New Left
19. "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" upholds
a modern model of genuine political expression, of a "great
collective project," comprising three interrelated elements: the
individual, the norm and, crucially, the avant-garde (always in
the singular) (65).[7 <#foot7>] Here Jameson postulates, first,
that the "collective ideals of [...] political [...] /avant-garde/
[...] stand or fall along with [...] the so-called centred
subject" or that political "expression requires the category of
the individual monad" (63); second, that the "fragmentation of
social life [...] to the point where the norm itself is eclipsed"
goes hand in hand with "the absence of any great collective
project" (65); third, that minoritarian movements are part of this
new fragmentation brought about by late capitalism.[8 <#foot8>]
Minoritarian movements are, therefore, an impediment to collective
projects, rather than their embodiment. Now that capitalism works
by "heterogeneity without a norm," minoritarian movements play
into the hands of "faceless masters [who] continue to inflect the
economic strategies which constrain our existence"--minoritarian
movements are, in effect, the enemy (65). What is implicitly at
work here is a distinction within collective projects, parallel to
the distinction between cognitive and symptomatic theory discussed
above. This is a distinction between authentic and inauthentic
collective projects on grounds that are purely formal and /a
priori/: an authentic collective project is necessarily
"avant-garde," in the sense of confronting a total system or norm.
In other words, an authentic collective project aims at the total
transformation of a total system.
20. What is at stake here is much more than the validity of a modern
triangle (the individual, the norm, the avant-garde). The
important point, as I will now try to show, is that Jameson renews
this triangle as part of the attempt to draw a clear line between
minoritarian movements and what can be called the /new/ New Left.
This project is initiated in "Cognitive Mapping" and reaches its
definitive formulation in the final pages of "Postmodernism, or
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism."
21. In "Cognitive Mapping," Jameson defines cognitive mapping as that
which "span[s] or coordinate[s] [...] a gap between
/phenomenological perception/ and a reality that transcends all
/individual thinking or experience/" (353, emphasis added). Here
we have Jameson's first attempt to revamp this modern triangle:
cognitive mapping is defined in relation to the individual, on the
one hand, and a global reality, a new norm, on the other, so that
it occupies the position of the avant-garde. This new norm, to
which the new avant-garde will respond, is minoritarian movements
as fragmentation and as the new face of a now-global capitalism;
this new norm is "a multidimensional set of discontinuous
realities," the "post-Marxian Nietzschean world of micropolitics,"
"the random and undecidable world of microgroups" (351, 355, 356).
Where there is global fragmentation and dissolution, cognitive
mapping aspires to bring its opposite. As Jameson specifies,
cognitive mapping attempts to map "the totality of class relations
on a global [...] scale" and is "an integral part of any socialist
political project," because "without a conception of the social
totality (and the possibility of transforming a whole social
system), no properly socialist politics is possible" (353, 355).
22. In a moment augmenting polysemy, Jameson comments that cognitive
mapping is "a kind of blind"--"little more than a pretext" for
debating the issue of the relation of the American Left to
minoritarian movements (347). "Our essential function for the
moment [...] involves the conquest of legitimacy in this country
for socialist discourse" (358). This "conquest of legitimacy"
seems to require for the Left to reap the surplus value of the
cultural, artistic, and political output of minoritarian
movements: "the question is how to think those local struggles,
involving specific and often quite different groups, within some
common project that is called, for want of a better word,
socialism" (360). The task is international rather than national:
the new New Left is to articulate local struggles everywhere,
thereby transforming them from an epiphenomena of global
capitalism to elements in the reconstructed chain, in the
avant-garde project, of international socialism.
23. Here, a couple of loose ends remain, which Jameson will attempt to
tie up in "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism." First, if, as Jameson writes in "Cognitive Mapping,"
socialism stands for "transforming a whole social system," what
about the claims of those minoritarian movements which also have
recourse to a whole social system and its transformation (certain
strains of "difference" feminism, for example, with their radical
address to patriarchy and its transformation) (347)?[9 <#foot9>]
In a passage already quoted above, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism" strengthens the link between Marxism and
the cognitive: Mandel's "hypothesis" (in "Periodizing the 60s")
now becomes "a rich and elaborated /knowledge/ of that global
world system" (91).
24. Second, if the individual stood for the centered subject in the
modern triangle, what exactly does it stand for here--what are we
to understand by "phenomenological perception" and "individual
thinking or experience" (above)? In the final pages of
"Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Jameson
revises his account of cognitive mapping and now speaks of
"individual /and collective/ subjects" unable to grasp the
totality and in need of cognitive mapping (92, emphasis added). It
seems then that the individual is now another name for what
Jameson sees as the isolated and fragmented perspective of
minoritarian movements. So the three elements of Jameson's new
triangle are first, in the position of the individual, any
minoritarian movement, understood as an isolated, spatialized,
inert element; second, in the position of the norm, late
capitalism as a field of minoritarian movements as isolated
islands; and third, in the position of the avant-garde,
international socialism as unification of minoritarian movements
by the new New Left.
25. A brief contrast with Raymond Williams's The Country and the City
(1973) would be instructive. In speaking of (and for) the rural
laborer, Williams bumps against the fixation of the Left on the
male metropolitan proletarian, at the expense of other kinds of
work and exploitation, which become invisible. Williams links the
Left's fixation on this figure with three additional
tendencies--tendencies which, I believe, may be discerned in
"Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." These
tendencies are the famous "simultaneous damnation and idealisation
of capitalism"; the Left's identification with "mastery?power";
and, finally, a specific dream of socialism as the first-born son
of capitalism that will inherit all upon its demise:
What they say is damn this, praise this; and the intellectual
formula for this emotional confusion is, hopefully, the
dialectic. All that needs to be added, as the climax to the
muddle, is [...] the saving qualification, that at a certain
stage [...] capitalism begins to lose this progressive
character and [...] must be replaced, superseded, by
socialism. (Williams 37)
27. Throughout The Country and the City, Williams opens up, to the
point of reversal, the distinction between the rural and the
metropolitan. On the side of the rural he includes vagrant
laborers (83-86), families without fathers--since even "in the
villages what was most wanted was the abstract producer, the
single able-bodied man" (85)--and Third-World laborers (279-88).
On the side of the metropolitan he includes land enclosures, the
laws restricting mobility, and, as we have seen, even a certain
version of socialism.
28. In an analysis resonant with that of Deleuze and Guattari's in
Anti-Oedipus, Williams discusses the sedentary ethic inextricably
linked with the rise of capitalism, whose target and enemy is
migrant and "unproductive" labor: poor labor. As a result, he
recasts and expands the definition of labor--we can say that he
recognizes the labor of many others besides that of the male
metropolitan proletariat. We have seen Jameson, on the other hand,
putting his faith in capitalism to "proletarianize" those others.
We will now see him "dissolving [...] the lives and work of others
into an image" (Williams 77).
Minoritarian Movements
29. A good metaphor for Jameson's perspective on minoritarian
movements in "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism" is that they are "scattered television screens
positioned at intervals" (like the exemplary artwork by Nam June
Paik he describes here); they force us to choose between two
distinct ways of viewing them: either we "decide to concentrate on
a single screen"--as for him, presumably, minorities do--or we
attempt "to see all the screens at once, in their radical and
random difference" (76). Needless to say, it is only the second,
panoptic position that will "hold to the truth of postmodernism"
and "do it justice" (92). Clearly, given Jameson's choice of
metaphor, the panoptic spectator he invokes is faced with a
formidable challenge; indeed, that figure is "called upon to do
the impossible" (76). But we are still a little taken aback when
Jameson announces that our success in this undertaking involves
"an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our
body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately
impossible, dimensions" (80). Expanding our bodies to impossible
dimensions? Is this a radical political enterprise, a cognitive
enterprise, or some kind of a monstrous assimilation? How are we
even to begin such a project of bodily transformation?
30. As we have seen, from his earliest work on postmodernism, Jameson
consistently understands minoritarian movements as isolated and
non-communicating. At the same time, something like a common
ground gradually emerges--the new economic system--to the point
where, in "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism," minoritarian movements are "symptoms" on the body of
late capitalism. Like TV screens, symptoms manifest a latent
reality that is outside and beyond them--treating minoritarian
movements as symptoms /derealizes/ them, transfers their reality,
vitality, and life onto something else. And yet, it seems to me
that when the new economic system is described--as a world of
micropolitics, micromultiplicities, and discontinuous
realities--/it is itself a figure for/ a world where the cultural,
artistic, and political initiative has passed to minoritarian
movements. In this state of affairs, Deleuze and Guattari, among
others, look at /lateral connections/ between movements. Jameson,
on the other hand, adopts a conceptual framework that denies /a
priori/ the ability of minoritarian movements to enter into
lateral connections or to confront and change oppressive /doxas/
directly and without intermediaries.
31. Key to Jameson's ghettoization of minorities is his particular
scheme or mode of spatialization, and his understanding of space
and historical time in the works examined. In "Postmodernism and
Consumer Society," Jameson argues that postmodernism is marked by
a "historical amnesia" that expresses the new economic system
(125). To demonstrate this, he briefly analyzes an extract from
Marguerite Séchehaye's Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl
(120). The extract is a first-person narration of a past
"schizophrenic" incident. It opens with the words "I remember very
well" and closes with the "schizophrenic" girl going back "home to
our garden and beg[inning] to play," as a return to reality. What
is the incident? A girl is walking in the countryside when,
"suddenly," as she is passing a school, she hears a German song
sung by the schoolchildren and she stops to listen. A double
transformation then occurs. The school and the children become
barracks with prisoners compelled to sing, a vision imbued with a
"sense of unreality." At the same time and "bound up with" this
disorienting double vision, a field of wheat becomes "dazzling"
and seemingly infinite, with "limits I could not see," and this
further intensification of the hallucinatory moment brings with it
a profound "anxiety" (120).
32. My understanding of this incident, indebted to Walter Benjamin's
"Theses on the Philosophy of History," is that, instead of being
immersed in a pleasant walk in the countryside or enjoying nature
as an idyllic spectacle as is customary, and instead of playing in
the garden, this girl has a genuine historical experience. As
Benjamin tells us, "to articulate the past historically does not
mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' [...]. The true
picture of the past flits by [...] flashes up at the instant when
it can be recognized and is never seen again" (247). The girl's
stroll is "suddenly" interrupted by the unexpected sound of a
German song sung by children inside the school--perhaps this is
holiday time, hence the surprise. This slight event sends her back
into a time of war and concentration camps, "barracks" and
"prisoners" (Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl was originally
published in French in 1950). As a result, the familiar and
timeless scenery of country fields is transfigured; "bound up
with" barracks and prisoners, it is traversed by an added
dimension, that of history, and becomes unlimited and dazzling.
33. The historical time recalled here is not that of public history.
This, Benjamin tells us, is the form (continuous and present) of
the history of the victors. The "tradition of the oppressed," on
the other hand, a genuine experience, comes to us from the corner
of the eye, the ear, as involuntary and irrepressible as "a
tiger's leap" (248, 253). "Tiger's leap" because for Benjamin, far
from being passive or idle, the genuine historical experience--in
this instance, the "schizophrenic" arrest that is pregnant with
the girl's own unknown predicament--is vitally connected to a
revolutionary moment, a moment of praxis. If this is not the case
here, this might be because the girl returned to reality too
quickly; because the girl is not "schizophrenic" enough, so to
speak. As I have already indicated, the narrative where the
incident belongs is exemplary in the incident's overcoming--the
narrative itself is anything but "schizophrenic." The incident is
firmly lodged in a sequence initiated by "I remember very well"
and completed by "I ran home to our garden and began to play 'to
make things seem as they usually were,' that is to return to
reality."
34. Jameson, in his own interpretation, omits--I feel tempted to say
symptomatically--the song, the children/prisoners, the
school/barracks, and has eyes only for the unlimited wheat field
now unbound from its connections and standing in sublime
isolation. He therefore sees the incident as demonstrating that
"the schizophrenic is thus given over to an undifferentiated
vision of the world in the present"; "an experience of isolated,
disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link
up into a coherent sequence" ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society"
120, 119). If, for Jameson, this is the definition of historical
amnesia, a radical historical project would, by contrast, involve
the unification of the disconnected.
35. This becomes clear in "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism." Discussing E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime (which
Jameson argues is symptomatically ahistorical), Jameson claims
that a radical historical project requires an intentional and
active monadic subject grasping firmly the "historical referent"
(71), that it requires a clear distinction between subject and
object.[10 <#foot10>] He then argues that the postmodern version
of this project would entail the active grasping of spatial
fragments. He therefore repeats his analysis of the schizophrenic
girl from "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" and adds the
analysis of the exemplary TV screens discussed earlier and the two
alternatives, contemporary and relevant, they offer. The first
alternative, comparable to Jameson's reading of the schizophrenic
girl, is exemplary of minoritarian movements: impotent and
symptomatic absorption in a TV screen. The second alternative,
actively grasping all screens at once--that is, continuing the
clear distinction between subject and object by new means--is
exemplary of the Left as Jameson envisages it: it rises above
ahistorical postmodernism toward a new historicity in the form of
a "new mode of relationship" (75).
36. Since the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s civil rights
movement, the simultaneous explosion in the reinvention of group
traditions, histories, and agendas for the future appears to
Jameson as ahistorical.[12 <#foot12>] Linda Hutcheon, in The
Politics of Postmodernism, contradicts Jameson directly on this
point. Not only is postmodernism (understood as contemporary
culture, including theory) historical, but it derives "its
historical consciousness (and conscience) from the inscription
into history of women and ethnic/racial minorities" during the
1960s (10). If postmodernism is "typically denounced as
dehistoricized" by Marxist and right-wing critics alike, this is
because "the problematized histories of postmodernism have little
to do with the single totalizing History" in which both parties
take refuge (57).[13 <#foot13>]
The Adoption of Jameson's Triangle
37. I have tried to show that Jameson's "Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" crystallizes the following
triangle: late capitalism as system generating fragmentation,
minoritarian movements as fragments symptomatic of late
capitalism, international socialism as unification promising total
systemic transformation. In this section, I look at two of the
first major adoptions of the Jamesonian triangle, David Harvey's
The Condition of Postmodernity and Steven Connor's Postmodernist
Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary; Linda
Hutcheon's simultaneous rejection and adoption of the triangle in
The Politics of Postmodernism; and Ernesto Laclau's rejection of
the triangle in "Politics and the Limits of Modernity." My
argument will be that Jameson's triangle initiated--provided the
toolkit for--a "territorializing" tendency in the postmodernism
debate. Then, in a final section, I will elucidate the
Deleuzo-Guattarian distinction between "territorialization" and
"deterritorialization."
The Condition of Postmodernity
38. David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity is a post-Jamesonian
work in many ways. What is tentative in Jameson is asserted in
Harvey. For example, even in the hardest version of
"Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Jameson
is able to undermine the reality effect he is creating--of
minoritarian movements as fragments symptomatic of late
capitalism--when he says that we need to "project some conception
of a new systemic cultural norm [...] in order to reflect [...] on
the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today"
(57). For Harvey, on the other hand, the links between
minoritarian movements, fragmentation, and late capitalism are
self-evident. For example: "the reproduction of the social and
symbolic order through the exploration of difference and
'otherness' is all too evident in the climate of postmodernism";
and "racial minorities, colonized peoples, women, etc. [...]
become a part of the very fragmentation which a mobile capitalism
and flexible accumulation can feed upon" (345, 303).
39. Most notably, The Condition of Postmodernity is a post-Jamesonian
work in that "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism" is here codified into a set of terms of participation
in the postmodernism debate:
* One cannot participate except as a representative and on
behalf of a particular territoriality with avant-garde
pretensions and promising total systemic transformation (in
Jameson's case, international socialism; in Harvey's case
the Anglo-American New Left).
* Participants should invoke a global spectre of dissolution
that their territoriality will confront and overcome (in
both Jameson's and Harvey's case, capitalism; in, for
example, Hutcheon's case, patriarchy).
* Participants project this global spectre of dissolution onto
those threatening their territoriality (in Jameson's case,
both minoritarian movements and those Marxists or
post-Marxists who do not subscribe to his versions of proper
Marxism and proper socialism; in Harvey's case, both
minoritarian movements and those Marxists or post-Marxists
who do not subscribe to historical materialism). On their
own those others are at one with the spectre of dissolution,
once within the territoriality in question they contribute
to the spectre's defeat.
40. Harvey participates in the postmodernism debate explicitly as a
representative of the New Left, on behalf of the New Left. He
argues that a return to historical materialism will reverse the
centrifugal tendencies within the New Left, as well as helping the
New Left to expand its territoriality by incorporating gender,
race, and the like. In relation to his title, Harvey asserts that
"postmodernism does not reflect any fundamental /change/ of social
condition," and he outlines two interpretative options (111).
Postmodernism can be understood either as "a departure [...] in
ways of thinking about /what could or should be done/," or as "a
shift in /the way capitalism is working/ these days" (111, 112,
emphasis added). Harvey opts for the latter.[14 <#foot14>] In
relation to his subtitle (An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change), Harvey first argues that while "embrac[ing] the new
social movements," the New Left "tended to abandon [...]
historical materialism as a mode of analysis" and was left bereft
of its traditional claim to understand the "social processes of
transformation that underlay" such epiphenomena. Secondly, Harvey
argues that the New Left tended to treat the "new social
movements" as "something that should be omni-present /from the
very beginning/ in any attempt to grasp the dialectics of social
change" (emphasis added). As a result, the New Left reduced itself
to "compet[ing] on the same terrain," politically and
theoretically unarmed, with the "new social movements" and the
poststructuralists. Harvey proposes that this dip into the
phenomenal world, this misadventure, be viewed as necessary, in
the sense of /mediating/ the New Left's rise from the "shackles of
old left politics" toward "recuperating such aspects of social
organization as race, gender, religion, within the overall frame
of historical materialist inquiry" (353-55).
Postmodernist Culture
41. With Postmodernist Culture, Steven Connor participates in the
postmodernism debate on behalf of the Anglo-American theoretical
humanities. He presents the Anglo-American humanities as "the most
significant and central determinant" of contemporary global
culture (201). Their world-historical political mission is to
bring about "an important, indeed, probably epochal stage in the
development of ethical awareness" (244). Their political task is
the "creation of a common frame of assent which alone can
guarantee the continuation of a global diversity of voices"; the
creation of a "horizon of universal value" (244, 243).
42. Together with postcolonial studies, Connor views feminism not as
part of the Anglo-American humanities but as a threat to it.
Feminism leads to a "disastrous decompression" and "dissipat[ion]"
of politics (226). Having devoted one and a half pages to this, by
now, vast and illustrious critical field, he reproaches feminism
for its "stance" of marginality, for "this strange tendency of
authoritative marginality to flip over into its own dark side" and
for the "irrationalist embrace of the agonistics of opposition"
(231, 243).
43. While elevating Anglo-American criticism to a new avant-garde
defined by the /recognition/ of diversity, Connor withdraws any
actual recognition from the /forces/ of diversity themselves.The
world seems to be diverse for the sole purpose of giving the
ethical consciousness occasion to show itself by recognizing
diversity. Otherwise, for Connor the world in itself, diversity in
itself, is unethical--as, for Jameson, the world of
micromultiplicities is a fallen world redeemed only when it comes
under the wing of international socialism.
The Politics of Postmodernism
44. Whereas Connor participates in the postmodernism debate on behalf
of Anglo-American criticism, Hutcheon, in The Politics of
Postmodernism, participates on behalf of feminism.[15 <#foot15>]
We have already seen her arguing against Jameson's monolithic view
of history and in favor of a pluralized view of history: "we now
get the histories (in the plural) of the losers as well as the
winners, of the regional (and colonial) as well as the centrist,
of the unsung many as well as of the sung few, and I might add, of
women as well as men" (66). A pluralized view of history--a view
that, instead of separating time and space, posits the existence
of a multiplicity of time-spaces--enables the positive appraisal
of minoritarian movements, and allows Hutcheon to undermine
Jameson's (and Harvey's) calls for a new alliance under the wing
of the Left.
45. However, Hutcheon wants to go further: she wants to assign
feminism an avant-garde role in the new postmodern world and,
within feminism, she wants to assign an avant-garde role to
"difference" feminism. Her argument is as follows: postmodernism
and feminism share a common "problematizing of the body and its
sexuality" (142). If "feminism is a politics [...] [while]
postmodernism is not," if postmodernism is "complicit[ous] with
power and domination" while feminism is "the single most powerful
force in changing the direction in which (male) postmodernism was
heading," this is because feminism "radicalized the postmodern
sense of difference" (4, 142). Feminism "/made/ postmodernism
think, not just about the body, but about the female body; not
just about the female body, but about its desires" (143). So
Hutcheon argues that there is a global status quo, patriarchy,
which can be radically transformed only by "sexual difference"
feminism; only within the context of "sexual difference" feminism
can other minoritarian movements and other feminisms hope to end
their complicity with a global system of oppression and work to
overcome it.[16 <#foot16>] Hutcheon now finds herself using a
conceptual schema formally indistinguishable from that of Jameson.
The result is a pure contradiction at the heart of The Politics of
Postmodernism. On the one hand, she rejects Jameson's Big History
and embraces "the lessons taught [...] of the importance of
context, of discursive situation"; at the same time she advocates
a return to Big History, to a single global context and its single
global transformation (67).
"Politics and the Limits of Modernity"
46. The immediate context for Ernesto Laclau's "Politics and the
Limits of Modernity" was the hostile reception of his and Chantal
Mouffe's new theory of hegemony among some Anglo-American
Marxists.[17 <#foot17>] In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985),
Laclau and Mouffe outline a theory of hegemony as the articulation
of signifiers by means of a "hegemonic force" comparable to the
Lacanian "despotic signifier." The crucial and controversial
aspect of their theory is that no element in a political
alliance--no political group--can claim to be necessarily and /a
priori/ hegemonic. Alliances have to be articulated in practice,
the identity of the hegemonic force in a particular articulation
is purely contingent (and always transient) and cannot be
determined /a priori/ by recourse to a foundation (be it
capitalism, patriarchy, etc.). This, on the one hand, requires a
weakening of the aspirations of radical collective actors, but, on
the other hand, enables a huge amplification of possibilities for
their interaction.
47. In "Politics and the Limits of Modernity," Laclau draws from his
theory of hegemony a new position for the Left--a position, in
some respects, diametrically opposed to Jameson's and Harvey's. As
we have seen, Harvey presents us with two pairs of interpretative
options. First, postmodernism can be understood /either/ as "a
shift in the way capitalism is working these days" /or/ as "a
departure in ways of thinking about what could or should be done."
Second, the task of the New Left is /either/ to "recuperat[e]
[...] race, gender," etc. within a Marxist territoriality based on
historical materialism and class politics /or/ to assume that they
"should be omnipresent from the very beginning in any attempt to
grasp the dialectics of social change." Harvey chose the first
options, Laclau chooses the second.
48. First, Laclau argues that "there has been a radical change in the
thought and culture of the past few decades" ("Politics" 329).
This radical change in emancipatory political thought is an
ongoing reconstruction of the radical moments in the various
traditions of modernity, conducted from within these traditions.
In the case of the Marxist tradition, its genealogical
reconstruction--"a living dialogue with that tradition, to endow
it with a certain contemporaneity against the /timelessness/ that
its orthodox defenders attribute to it"--involves a recognition of
its multiple fissures (from Lenin, to Luxemburg, to Sorel, to
Gramsci), against "its myth of origins" and "the myth of its
coherence and unity" (339).
49. Second, the anti-foundationalist reconstruction of radical
tradition requires the recognition not just of Marxism's
plurality, but of the plurality of the radical tradition itself.
If we are to /reconstruct/ radical tradition (because this is
precisely what this is about), not as a necessary departure
from a point of origin, but as a genealogy of the present, it
is clear that Marxism cannot be its only point of reference.
The plurality of current social struggles [...] entails the
necessity of breaking with the provincial myth of the
"universal class." If one can talk about universality, it is
only in the sense of the relative centralities constructed
hegemonically and pragmatically. The struggles of the working
class, of women, gays, marginal populations, Third World
masses, must result in the construction of their own
reappropriations of tradition through their specific
genealogical efforts. This means, of course, that there is no
/a priori/ centrality determined at the level of structure,
simply because there is no rational foundation of History. The
only "rationality" that History might possess is the relative
rationality given to it by the struggles and the concrete
pragmatic-hegemonic constructions. (340)
In other words, as Laclau put it in "Building a New Left," Marxism
has to be reinscribed "as a historical, partial and limited moment
within a wider historical line, that of the radical tradition of
the West" (179). Laclau closes "Politics and the Limits of
Modernity" with a proposition with far-reaching consequences: that
the combination of anti-foundationalism and "metaphysical
contingency," contingency as a transcendental /a priori/, can in
itself serve as the emancipatory metanarrative of our time (343).
50. By contrast, Jameson's "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism" provides the tools for what Laclau calls a
"homeland" Marxism as well as for a "homeland" feminism, etc.[18
<#foot18>] It provides the tools, as I will now go on to argue,
for the construction of "artificial territorialities" which in
their mutually exclusive avant-garde aspirations now /lead to the
feared fragmentation and dissolution./
Anti-Oedipus
51. Schematizing and simplifying greatly, whereas Jameson and Laclau
propose two different models of hegemony--with Jameson the
identity of the hegemonic force can be determined /a priori/, with
Laclau the identity of the hegemonic force is contingent--Deleuze
and Guattari propose a posthegemonic world. Laclau shares
Jameson's distinction between unification and fragmentation or
dispersion, as well as his rejection of dispersive politics. In
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe write that "the
role of theory is not to elaborate intellectually the observable
tendencies of fragmentation and dispersion, but to ensure that
such tendencies have a transitory character" (14). On the other
hand, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari propose "couplings and
connections" and "transverse communications," /by virtue of
dispersion/ (1, 319). They describe "schizorevolutionary"
processes constituting collectivities as /pure multiplicities/,
and distinguish them from "paranoiac fascisizing" processes
constituting collectivities caught in a double bind between
fragmentation and unification (277).
52. A pure multiplicity is "irreducible to any sort of unity" (42).[19
<#foot19>] Deleuze and Guattari borrow Melanie Klein's concept of
"partial objects" to describe the elements of a pure multiplicity.
Partial objects are not "parts of even a fragmented whole"; they
"are recognized by their mutual independence" and are "different
or really-distinct [...] disparate" (323). This dispersion goes
hand in hand with "myriad" connections:[20 <#foot20>] "partial
objects [...] all have their positive determinations, and enter
into aberrant communication following a transversal"; "neither is
there anything in common [between them], nor do they cease
communicating" (69, 60). This connection of the disparate, where
each partial object can be connected to a number of other partial
objects, Deleuze and Guattari call the "first synthesis" or
"connective synthesis" or "production of production" (38).
53. Then, in a moment of stasis, partial objects and their myriad
connections--partial object coupled to partial object--turn into
"a third term [...] an enormous undifferentiated object" (7).
Deleuze and Guattari, borrowing from Antonin Artaud, call this new
part the "body without organs": "The body without organs is
produced as a whole [...] alongside the [other] parts that it
neither unifies nor totalizes. And [...] it brings about [new]
transverse communications" between them (43). That is, instead of
the parts (the partial objects) being parts of the whole, the
whole (the body without organs) is itself one of the parts of a
pure multiplicity.[21 <#foot21>] The body without organs is
"antiproduction" in the midst of production, but only in order to
multiply the connections: "the body without organs [...] reinjects
producing into the product, extends the connections"; it is
"perpetually reinserted into production" (72, 8).[22 <#foot22>]
How? The body without organs is followed by a "/distribution/ in
relation to" itself; the coupled partial objects now /appear/ as
separate, as "co-ordinates" or as "points of disjunction [on the
body without organs,] between which an entire network of new
syntheses is now woven" (12).
54. The second synthesis or disjunctive synthesis or "production of
recording" works through "inclusive disjunction"--"either [...] or
[...] or [...]"--on the immanent field of the body without organs.
The "paranoiac fascisizing" use of the second synthesis has two
aspects. Firstly, it turns this immanent, produced field into a
transcendent, producing, common field that (like capital and
workers in Marx) appropriates the work--/the connections/--of
partial objects while appearing as their mysterious "quasi cause"
(10-11, 72-74).[23 <#foot23>] Deleuze and Guattari call this
pseudo-transcendent, pseudo-producing, pseudo-common field an
"artificial territoriality." Secondly, the "paranoiac fascisizing"
use of the second synthesis introduces differentiation by means of
binary opposition--what Deleuze and Guattari call "exclusive
disjunction" and "either/or"--including the binary opposition
between binary opposition and a fearful chaos of
undifferentiation, where "disjunctions are subjected to the
alternative of the undifferentiated or exclusion" (120). While
inclusive disjunctions on an immanent field multiply connections,
exclusive disjunctions on a transcendent field halt connections,
disallowing them in advance: what possible connection can there be
between the two sides of an exclusive disjunction? Similarly,
whereas, as we have seen, partial objects are both distinct and
connected, a chaos of undifferentiation is comprised of elements
as indistinct as they are incapable of connection to each
other--once again connection is disallowed.
55. Corresponding to inclusive disjunctions are "intense feeling[s] of
transition" (18), "experience[s] of death" that are also
"passage[s] or becoming[s]" (330). The third synthesis or
conjunctive synthesis or "production of consumption/consummation"
passes through the becomings toward a kind of subject: not a
transcending subject, nor an agent, but something that follows
events within the immanent field of the body without organs. This
is a "faceless and transpositional subject," "an apparent residual
and nomadic subject," "a transpositional subject [...] collecting
everywhere the fraudulent premium of its avatars" (77, 330, 88).
After the partial objects and the body without organs, this is the
third and last part of the pure multiplicity that Deleuze and
Guattari call the "desiring-machine": the "adjacent part" (330,
338).[24 <#foot24>] Deleuze and Guattari call this connective,
inclusively disjunctive, nomadic, polyvocal, transversal,
nonhierarchical, mortal, collective subject in transition a
"subject-group" and distinguish it from the "subjugated group":
"[Our] [...] final thesis [...] is therefore the distinction
between [...] the paranoiac, reactionary, and fascisizing pole,
and the schizoid revolutionary pole [...] /the one/ is defined by
subjugated groups, /the other/ by subject-groups" (348-49, 366-67).
56. Subjugated groups could very well have revolutionary aims. What
distinguish them are not their aims but their processes of
constitution. Emerging from exclusive disjunction in relation to a
transcendent field, they have two aspects. First, they are
segregated and segregative: incapable of connection, they are
constituted as isolated islands of a superior people surrounded by
inferior enemies (103, 269). Second, in the meeting of a
segregative group and a transcendent field, the polyvocality of
subject-groups gives way to what Deleuze and Guattari call
"biunivocalization." The subjugated group expresses a meaning
residing in a transcendent field: biunivocalization is "the
flattening of the polyvocal real in favor of a symbolic
relationship between two articulations: so /that/ is what /this/
meant" (101).
57. Subject-groups, on the other hand, are always "at grips with, and
directly coupled to, the [other] elements of the political and
historical situation" which "they express all the less" (97, 100).
In spite of their names--Deleuze and Guattari also call them
"active groups" (94)--they bypass distinctions between subject and
object, active and passive; they neither express nor are
expressed, they neither cause nor are causing.[25 <#foot25>]
Subject-groups are not those groups striving for self-realization,
but those capable of being affected by others, those capable of
interaction, impurity, and inauthenticity. Instead of constituting
itself as an island whose superior self-identity (a=a) is
threatened by enemies, a subject group is constituted as a, b, c...
58. To summarize so far, Deleuze and Guattari outline three
syntheses--connection, disjunction, conjunction--and three
parts--partial objects, the body without organs, and the adjacent
part--of a pure multiplicity, the desiring machine. They
distinguish between two uses of these syntheses and parts: a
schizorevolutionary and a paranoiac use. The schizorevolutionary
use, associated with subject groups, involves partial and
non-specific connections: connections are partial in that they do
not refer to a global entity, but by the same token they are each
complete and lacking in nothing; there can be several connections
between two partial objects. The schizorevolutionary use, as we
have seen, also involves inclusive and non-restrictive
disjunctions, as well as polyvocal and nomadic conjunctions. The
paranoiac use, associated with subjugated groups, involves global
and specific connections: partial objects are now seen as parts of
a pre-existing global entity to which they refer, in relation to
which they are lacking, and which alone completes them;
connections are seen as taking place between these pre-existing
parts, so that a connection is always secondary and incomplete.
The paranoiac use, as we have seen, also involves exclusive and
restrictive disjunctions, as well as biunivocal and segregative
conjunctions.[26 <#foot26>] Why? Deleuze and Guattari's
distinction between the paranoiac and the schizorevolutionary is
indissociable from their analysis of capitalism.
59. In brief, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between three
societies--primitive territorial, despotic, and capitalist--in
their "history of contingencies, and not the history of necessity"
(140). Starting from the postulate that "society is not first of
all a milieu for exchange [...] but rather a socius of
inscription", they name the three socii as the body of the earth,
the body of the despot, and the body of capital (142). Whereas the
immanent body of the earth codes population and other flows (into,
for example, tribes) and whereas the transcendent body of the
despot recodes them (into, for example, castes), capital decodes:
as Marx and Engels said, all that is solid melts into air. Whereas
precapitalist socii code flows, capitalism is based on a
conjunction of decoded flows--for example, conjunction of decoded
flows of population and decoded flows of money--that Deleuze and
Guattari call an "axiomatic" (139). In order to survive,
capitalism needs to regulate the axiomatic with a resurrection of
the transcendent despotic state "under other guises" and "in
unexpected forms" (220, 223). These instances of fake
transcendence /immanent/ to capitalism are "artificial
territorialities" and the processes of their constitution are
"(artificial) reterritorializations."[27 <#foot27>]
60. Capitalism oscillates between two poles--reterritorialization,
which preserves it, and deterritorialization, an unfettered
decoding threatening it with extinction.[28 <#foot28>] "Capitalism
is inseparable from the movement of deterritorialization, but this
movement is exorcised through factitious and artificial
reterritorializations"; "capitalism is continually
reterritorializing with one hand what it was deterritorializing
with the other" (303, 259).[29 <#foot29>] What exactly do
deterritorialization and artificial reterritorialization consist
of and how exactly do they work? We have now gone full circle.
Deterritorialization involves the schizorevolutionary connections,
disjunctions, and conjunctions, while artificial
reterritorialization involves paranoiac-fascisizing connections,
disjunctions, and conjunctions, as outlined above. In some sense,
the schizorevolutionary--desiring-machines and their
desiring-production--"functions at the end," "under the conditions
determined by an apparently victorious capitalism" (130, 139). For
Anti-Oedipus the fight against capitalism is defined as careful
and patient invention of deterritorialization in relation to a
singular situation opening onto an immanent cosmopolitan field
(319-20, 380). (As we have seen, Anti-Oedipus bypasses the
opposition of part versus whole with the alliance of singularity
and multiplicity.)
61. If we use this quick sketch of the conceptual apparatus of
Anti-Oedipus to look back on Jameson's diagnosis of late
capitalism and his prescription of a way out through international
socialism, what strikes us is this: our enslavement
(fragmentation) and our liberation (unification) are
indistinguishable, in that they are both reterritorializing. In
spite of their apparent opposition, they stand together in their
common exclusion of deterritorialization--of the
schizorevolutionary processes outlined in Anti-Oedipus. As we have
seen, Jameson diagnoses minoritarian movements in their enslaved
(so to speak) state as disconnected and, in their
disconnectedness, as symptoms of late capitalism, while he
announces minoritarian movements in their liberated state to come
as parts of international socialism. The former (fragmentation)
and the latter (unification) are in a relation of exclusive
disjunction. This analysis is reterritorializing in different
respects. The exclusive disjunction between late capitalism
(fragmentation) versus international socialism (unification) is
itself reterritorializing. Also, in spite of their apparent
opposition, both late capitalism and international socialism are
transcendent fields: Jameson "biunivocalizes" minoritarian
movements in that he sees them as expressing a transcendent field
that is late capitalism; he sees international socialism not as a
pure multiplicity but as a whole unifying the parts. From the
point of view of Anti-Oedipus, all instances of transcendence are
now fake, so that both late capitalism and international socialism
extract a surplus value from minoritarian movements while keeping
them unconnected to each other--in the latter case, minoritarian
movements are unified by their common participation in
international socialism but remain laterally unconnected. As
between them late capitalism and international socialism appear to
exhaust the realm of the possible, the lateral, unmediated
connections between minoritarian movements become a constitutive
impossibility.
62. With Jameson's international socialism, as with Harvey's American
New Left, as with Connor's Anglo-American humanities, as with
Hutcheon's sexual difference feminism, one of the elements of an
unimaginably multidimensional and interconnected political
situation aspires to play an avant-garde role by lifting itself
above the immanent field. But in doing so, it behaves as a
segregative and segregated territoriality (we are a superior
people surrounded by an inferior world), now creating the
fragmentation it purports to overcome. (It seems that
avant-gardism and segregative territorialities are not in
exclusive disjunction, either.) As participants representing
minoritarian movements imported Jameson's triangle, and as they
matched his avant-garde aspirations with their own, the
postmodernism debate, promising unprecedented participation for
everyone, risked generating unprecedented reterritorialization.
Deterritorialization and schizorevolutionary processes, on the
other hand, could bring to the postmodernism debate the other,
double life of minoritarian movements: a vibrant life of partial,
inclusive, polyvocal, and nomadic political encounters, an already
emerging post-hegemonic world.
63. Anti-Oedipus moves through a dizzying array of concepts,
conceptual distinctions, and registers. In this brief account I
have concentrated on the concepts, distinctions, and registers I
deemed pertinent in understanding the situation of minoritarian
movements within the postmodernism debate, thereby perhaps giving
the misleading impression that Anti-Oedipus offers a closed
system. What it does do, though, is explicitly leave behind
established oppositions, exclusive disjunctions, such as
unification/fragmentation and undifferentiation/exclusive
differentiation (a full list would be very long), replacing them
with a proliferating array of new inclusive disjunctions. From
register to register and from distinction to distinction,
Anti-Oedipus stresses the "simultaneity," "coexistence" (117, 278,
375), and inseparability (318) of the two terms of its
distinctions; between the two terms, there are oscillations (260,
278, 315, 376), perpetual, subtle and uncertain shiftings, "border
or frontier phenomena ready to cross over to one side or the
other" (126), "underground passages" (278), the possibility of
"going from one side [...] to this other side" (380); the two
terms "interpenetrate" (378), are "contained in [...] one another"
(324), "continually deriving from" each other (349). In short, "
it is clear how everything can coexist and intermix" (377).[31
<#foot31>] [32 <#foot32>] [33 <#foot33>] When Anti-Oedipus
declares that "we live today in the age of partial objects," it
brings into focus not a world of fragmentation in need of
unification, but a "world of transverse communications," with its
"myriad little connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions,"
threatening late capitalism with extinction (42, 319, 315).
64. This world finally enters the postmodernism debate in 2000, with
Hardt and Negri's Empire. Profoundly influenced by Deleuze and
Guattari, Empire continues, updates, and renews their work. It
announces the end of a postmodernism debate dominated by the
"alternatives" of unification versus fragmentation; instead it
views both "alternatives" as part of "corruption," the Empire's
ontological nullification of Deleuzo-Guattarian "pure
multiplicity," or what Empire calls "multitude" (both names for
the creativity interaction of minoritarian movements). Corruption
is the "substance and totality of Empire"--of the new societies of
control (391). "At the base of all these forms of corruption there
is an operation of ontological nullification": "/the multitude
must be unified or segmented into different unities: this is how
the multitude has to be corrupted/" (391, emphasis added).
65. To elaborate further the possibilities and challenges of this
"deterritorializing" and "schizorevolutionary" turn in the
postmodernism debate would require us to consider Deleuze and
Guattari's notion of "becoming minoritarian" as it is developed in
Kafka, their sequel to Anti-Oedipus; in A Thousand Plateaus,
(especially in reference to Deleuze's quick sketch there of the
new "societies of control"); and, finally, in Hardt and Negri's
Empire.[34 <#foot34>] We can only say here that such a turn offers
our best hope of an escape from both fragmentation and unification
toward "myriad little" minoritarian interconnections. While the
contribution of minoritarian movements to academic scholarship in
the humanities is now undeniable, their very institutional success
is presenting us with a new challenge: as we jettison the
canonical treatises on postmodernism which would relegate these
movements to the status of troubling symptoms, will the movements
themselves prove better able to tolerate the seeming loss or chaos
of intermixing, better able to produce a new kind of thinking that
takes place across, between, and together?
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
goulimari@angelaki1.demon.co.uk
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Notes
A version of this essay was delivered at the "Effects of Reading"
seminar at Merton College, Oxford University, on 9 November 2001.
I would like to thank the organizers, Clare Connors, Lydia
Rainford, and Sarah Wood, and the participants for their helpful
comments. Thank you to Gerard Greenway for his many criticisms. I
would also like to thank Postmodern Culture's reader and editors
for their helpful suggestions for revision--I am especially
grateful to Jim English for his generous help.
1 <#ref1>. The case for the centrality, in the postmodernism
debate, of "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism" and its earlier version, "Postmodernism and Consumer
Society" (1982), is strongly made by Anderson. I agree with the
general point but understand this centrality differently.
2 <#ref2>. A note informs us that "this essay was originally a
talk, portions of which were presented as a Whitney Museum Lecture
in fall, 1982; it is published here essentially unrevised" (111).
3 <#ref3>. I am indebted to Kellner.
4 <#ref4>. "What is decisive in the present context is his
[Mandel's] notion that, with the worldwide recession of 1973-74,
the dynamics of this latest 'long wave' are spent" ("Periodizing"
206).
5 <#ref5>. In the texts by Jameson I examine, there is only one
other such instance, one moment of "juncture" between Marxism and
feminism: see "Cognitive Mapping" 355.
6 <#ref6>. See, for example, Hardt and Negri 234-39, 268-69,
272-76, 402-03. What they call the "multitude" is a
Deleuzo-Guattarian "pure multiplicity" (see final part of this
essay).
7 <#ref7>. We have already seen above an early version of this
argument in "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," including two of
the three elements of genuine political expression, the individual
and the norm: Jameson argues that "each group com[es] to speak a
curious private language of its own," at the expense and to the
detriment of "normal language [...] of the linguistic norm," as
well as at the expense of "a unique personality and individuality,
which can be expected [unlike groups] to generate its own unique
vision of the world" (114).
8 <#ref8>. This fragmentation is "also a political phenomenon,
[as] the problem of micropolitics sufficiently demonstrates"
("Postmodernism, or the Cultural" 65).
9 <#ref9>. Throughout the pieces I examine, the only content
Jameson ever gives socialism is in a sentence in "Cognitive
Mapping": socialism is "a society without hierarchy, a society of
free people" (355); at the same time, the road to socialism seems
to require a rigid hierarchical distinction between the unifier
(the Left) and those in need of unification (minoritarian movements).
10 <#ref10>. The "disappearance of the American radical past"
involves the loss of the "activities and the intentionalities"
that focus the present and anchor the past so that it neither
drifts away nor suddenly and unintentionally invades the present
(as in the schizophrenic incident discussed above which Jameson
considers ahistorical); it also involves "some degraded collective
'objective spirit'" rather than "the old monadic subject"
("Postmodernism, or the Cultural" 70, 73, 71).
The voice that speaks is that of a degraded collective spirit
rather than that of an individual; grasping the "historical
referent" with a firm hand is replaced by sudden invasions of the
past into the present--Toni Morrison's Beloved seems a good
example of what Jameson would call ahistorical.
12 <#ref12>. See, for example, Arendt.
13 <#ref13>. In this context, Hutcheon reverses Jameson's argument
in relation to Doctorow's Ragtime (see n11): "it could be argued
that a relatively unproblematized view of historical continuity
and the context of representation offers a stable plot structure
to Dos Passos's USA trilogy. But this very stability is called
into question in Doctorow's [...] Ragtime" (95).
14 <#ref14>. See also The Condition of Postmodernity 98.
15 <#ref15>. Hutcheon had already published A Poetics of
Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988).
16 <#ref16>. Intriguingly, Hutcheon doesn't even mention the name
of Luce Irigaray, the feminist philosopher most closely associated
with "sexual difference."
17 <#ref17>.The hostile reception to Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy crystallized in Geras.
18 <#ref18>. See "Building a New Left": "I have never been a
'total' Marxist, someone who sought in Marxism a 'homeland'[...]
The 'language games' I played with Marxism were always more
complicated, and they always tried to articulate Marxism to
something else" (178).
19 <#ref19>. This is "a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity,
without unity or totality, and whose elements are welded, pasted
together by the real distinction or the very absence of a link"
(324).
20 <#ref20>. "Myriad break-flows [...] determine the positive
dispersion in a molecular multiplicity" (342).
21 <#ref21>. The body without organs and the partial objects can
be described in terms of Spinoza's substance and attributes, in
that the body without organs is immanent while the partial objects
are "distinct and cannot [...] exclude or oppose one another"
(327, see also 309).
22 <#ref22>. That the body without organs allows a permanent
revolution--breaking and remaking--of connections which might
otherwise become fixed is an important point stressed by. Holland,
throughout his articles and books on Deleuze and Guattari. See,
for example, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus 28, 35-36, 96-97.
However, as we will see, the body without organs also lends itself
to a "paranoiac fascisizing" use, hence what Holland calls its
"constitutive /ambivalence/" (38).
23 <#ref23>. In the so-called "sixth chapter" of Capital, Marx
shows how capital comes to appear as "a quite mysterious being"
(516).
24 <#ref24>. The body without organs and the partial objects are
"two kinds of desiring-machine parts, in the dispersion of the
machine itself" (329); the desiring-machine "brings
together--without unifying or uniting them--the body without
organs and the partial objects" (327); then comes "the last part
of the desiring-machine, the adjacent part" (330). "Here are the
desiring-machines, with their three parts: the working parts, the
immobile motor, the adjacent part" (338).
25 <#ref25>. The segregative use of the conjunctive synthesis
"brings about the feeling of 'indeed being one of us,' of being
part of a superior race threatened by enemies from outside" (103).
When God is dead, and when modernity has destroyed all that is
solid, the segregative use involves "an enormous archaism," a
spiritual, transcendent, eternal entity (104). The "segregative
use [...] does not coincide with divisions between classes,
although it is an incomparable weapon in the service of a
dominating class" (103). While there are obvious examples which
turn this argument into a truism--such as the Jewish conspiracy
against the spirit of the German people in the eyes of the
Nazi--the edge of this argument becomes more clear with less
obvious examples. To give one, in relation to the agonizing debate
in feminism as to whether or not feminism needs a strategic
essentialism, that is, recourse to an essence of women as a common
ground, the answer here would be: no, strategic essentialism is
neither necessary nor helpful.
26 <#ref26>. For example, see: "objective or subjective [...] That
is not the distinction: the distinction to be made" is between
paranoiac and schizorevolutionary investments (345); or "desire
and its object are one and the same thing [...] Desire is a
machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to
it" (26). "Subject-groups [...] have as their sole cause a rupture
with causality" (377).
27 <#ref27>. See Anti-Oedipus 68-106.
28 <#ref28>. Artificial territorialities--as pseudo-transcendent
objects "borrowed" from the despotic state and as "feeble
archaisms bearing the greatest burden of current functions"--are
immanent to capitalism yet "more and more spiritualised" (236,
268, 177). They are diffuse, so that "no one escapes"--not even
groups with revolutionary aims (236).
29 <#ref29>. Deterritorialization, the axiomatic and
reterritorialization are the three "surface elements" of
capitalism (262).
30 <#ref30>. Jameson calls this latter passage "remarkable" (see
"Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze" 19, 35 n.6) and describes
Anti-Oedipus's analysis of capitalism as "surely one of the most
interesting and promising lines of investigation opened up by the
'Marxism' of L'Anti-Oedipe" (20). See also Anti-Oedipus 257-58, 261.
31 <#ref31>. I agree with Paul Patton's conclusion that "the
concept of deterritorialisation [understood as connection of
deterritorialisations] lies at the heart of Deleuzian ethics and
politics, to the extent that Deleuze and Guattari's mature
political philosophy might be regarded as a politics of
deterritorialisation" (136).
32 <#ref32>. See the "simultaneity of the two movements of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization" (260).
33 <#ref33>. Subject-groups and subjugated groups "are perpetually
shifting"; between the "paranoiac-segregative and schizonomadic
[...] [there are] ever so many subtle, uncertain shiftings" (64,
105).
34 <#ref34>. In a subtle and nuanced account of Anti-Oedipus and
its sequel, A Thousand Plateaus, Jameson's starting point is that
Deleuze and Guattari use "great mythic dualisms such as the
Schizophrenic and the molar or Paranoid" ("Marxism" 15) but he
moves to the position that Anti-Oedipus "complexifies" some
oppositions, though it retains "the great opposition between the
molecular and the moral" (29). He concludes with the suggestion
that such great mythic oppositions be grasped as
reterritorializations carrying "the call of utopian
transfiguration" (34). Anti-Oedipus makes clear on two occasions
that reterritorializations are "ambiguous"--they can have a
positive role when they are part of a movement of
deterritorialization (258, 260). It also states that "everywhere
there exist the molecular /and/ the molar: their disjunction is a
relation of included disjunction" (340).
35 <#ref35>. See Deleuze, "Control and Becoming" and "Postscript
on the Societies of Control."
36 <#ref36>. Corruption is the "substance and totality of
Empire"--of the new societies of control (Hardt and Negri 391).
"At the base of all these forms of corruption there is an
operation of ontological nullification": "The multitude has to be
unified or segmented into different unities: this is how the
multitude has to be corrupted" (391).
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