The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, & at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet & of the Devil’s party without knowing it. (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell)
Theory begins in action, in a direct engagement!
If, as von Moltke once said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy, it is precisely at such a point of contact – between ideology & literature – that theory is born. This is not to attribute any kind of privileged situation to theory, rather the contrary: the encounter that appears to take place here is the mark of a hegemonic regime asserting its “right” against an other from which every positive status has been stripped. Theory begins in humiliation. Yet the assertions of power give rise, despite themselves, to perturbatory effects: either power, in order to “totalise itself,” puts its very meaning at stake, in a “proof of arms,” or risks being a sham. Belonging to the theatre of ideology costumed as “action,” such assertions are a sham in any case. Power is always a matter of fact; of a prevalence of a system of meaning. Stripped of the possibility to mean, its other ought not to exist: a contradiction, a paradox. Yet this encounter with the enemy is not an encounter with a mere “antithesis,” one among others, to be sublimated within an irresistible dialectic, but an encounter with the antithetical as such. To take von Moltke’s maxim further: if the masterplan falters at first contact, this is because its principal raison d’être is to represent what it already knows, since it alone affirms the sovereign domain of meaning & retains its unique prestige only so far as the true “enemy” remains excluded from the field. The task of all hegemonic regimes is thus, in effect, to become the enemy, to – as it were – usurp the enemy’s place, or rather non-place: to re-inscribe the “figure” of the antithetical within its own dialectical schema – such that the faltering-on-first-contact is recast as nothing more than an etiquette of the ritual of sublimation. Such etiquettes are the very foundation of ideological “truth,” inevitably eliding with an ideology of truth. That a political “fiction” supported by force should demand a monopoly over the field of meaning is perhaps trivial. That it should do so by the suppression of “fiction as such,” is worthy of consideration. This, of course, has been the fundamental alignment of reason in western thought since at least Plato, polarised between ideologies of truth, on the one side, & literature on the other. Theory, of more recent provenance, emerges from a deconstruction of this classical schema & the entire edifice of reason built upon it. It begins with questions about the “point of (non) contact” between ideology & its other. It begins with a question about the “literariness” of this discourse of reason & the “rhetorical” nature of its self-address. We have every reason to suppose, then, that this particular constellation of terms – literature, theory, ideology – is of an order other than the purely “arbitrary.” In constellation, these terms point to something like a critical condition of thought: an emergence, a crisis. This constellation resembles something like a Borromean knot. Just as the Platonic schema describes, not an ideological symptom (one among others), but a universal symptomatology, so the Lacanian triad comprising the Borromean knot – real, symbolic, imaginary – is topologically arranged in such a fashion that, while none directly intersect, nor can any one be separated without the others also separating.[1] This knot comprises the (w)hole of the subject, just as the constellation literature-theory-ideology might be said to comprise the (w)hole of the semantic field in all its paradox. To paraphrase Foucault, perhaps one day this constellation will be seen as decisive for meaning in general as the experience of contradiction was for dialectical thought: but in spite of so many auguries to this effect, the language in which this constellation will find its space & the illumination of its being lies almost entirely in the future.[2]
“Why then does literature think more than philosophy?”[3]
An immediately combative tone, the beginning of a polemic: Why literature more than philosophy? Why thinking? To whom, literature or philosophy, does the greater burden of thought – of the work & science of thinking – in fact belong? Why should this assertion be in any way controversial, scandalous, newsworthy? Stated as fact, how are we supposed to think about this sentence, in which certain proprietary claims over thought are at the very least implied, while self-consciously bearing the weight of the impropriety of doing so? Consider this proposition: that the name of this impropriety is theory. In Marges de la philosophie, Derrida raises the question of the proximity of writing & literatureto the solicitations of a certain theoria in the deconstruction of western metaphysics (a synonymous expression for the ideology of mimēsis). Mimēsis is more than merely the shadow under the Platonic lamp, the duplicitous companion to the history of philosophy’s self-privileging as discourse-of-reason. (The preceding sentence is pleonastic only if we accept the self-evidence of the equation between philosophy & reason “in the first place,” an equation whose derivation post-hoc prompter-hoc depends upon a détournement of its own mimetic foundation.) Yet this deconstruction is not a simple inversion of terms & their relations, producing a general negation, as in Rancière: “The collapse of the representational paradigm means not only the collapse of a hierarchical system of address; it means the collapse of the whole regime of meaning.”[4] To do so would fold “theory” back into a representational hierarchy & establish a new “regime of meaning” in the form, e.g., of a negative dialectics. Derrida: “Everything in talk about metaphor which comes through the sign eidos, with the whole system attached to this word, is articulated on the analogy between our looking & sensible looking, between the intelligible & the visible sun. The truth of the being that is present is fixed by passing through a detour of tropes in this system… Philosophy, as a theory of metaphor, will first have been a metaphor of theory.”[5] Theory’s impropriety is thus, in Greg Ulmer’s phrasing, to set “Plato’s audacity against Platonism.”[6] For Derrida, this then entails the demand that “one must simultaneously, by means of rigorous conceptual analyses, philosophically intractable, &by the inscription of marks which no longer belong to philosophic space, not even to the neighbourhood of its other, displace the framing, by philosophy, of its own type. Write in another way.”[7]
Ideology is (any) system of meaning
The assumption has always been that a system, definitionally, must operate & that in operating must therefore be coherent: that functionality equates to rationality. Yet there is nothing to guarantee this assumption, nothing that underwrites the synonymous relation between “system” & “reason,” let alone “system of meaning” & “the meaning of reason.” What if the truth of such a relation, however, were vested not in its coherence but in the paradox immanent to its terms? If a system can be described algorithmically, as a series of ramifications, where is the line to be drawn between the apparent self-evidence of its meaning & the self-assertion of its structural dogma? If the Platonic dialectic describes the rudiments of a hermeneutic system, what function does irony serve within it? (The irony, for example, of a philosophical treatise written in the form of a dramatic dialogue – crammed with a veritable odyssey of digressions, allusions, analogies, myths, parables, proxies, fables, symbolism, affect, stylistic flourish, sleight of hand, verbal seduction – essaying a thesis on the priority of interrogative speech to truth & a denunciation of the mimetic arts in general & writing in particular?) What “resemblance” ought to be found between Plato’s philosophical system & the algorithmic irrationalism of Marcel Duchamp’s desiring machine (“La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même”), or Gustav Metzger & Jean Tingueley’s autodestructive machines? These questions tend in a particular direction: what if all the literary embellishments of Plato’s theatrical prose demonstrate the contrary of what is conventionally assumed to be the major distinction between the ideology of mimēsis as articulated in the Dialogues & that propounded by Aristotle in the Poetics? A mimēsis bound not to the meaning of truth, but to the production of affect through its supposed apprehension: the truth in pointing, as Derrida puns, being nothing but a performance of the truth in painting (& is the persona of “Socrates” not the greatest painter who never lifted a brush?).[8] In other words, what if a certain irony is not the exception to the Platonic system but its general register, not a vehicle employed for rhetorical effect but the foundation of its thought? If the discourse of philosophy no longer represents here the disciplining of the rhetorical figure per se but only a simulation of such – a theatrics of reason’s dominion over poiēsis – then is theory not already implied in the apprehension (theoria) of such apparently self-subverting operations? That is to say, as something like a “literary” consciousness sublimated within the assertions of philosophical truth & in fact inscribing them – an inscription whose evidence appears nowhere more insistently than in the oft’ repeated claim of reason’s power over writing.
The question of writing puts at stake the meaning of humanity
Insofar as it is a question posed to a certain ideology of reason, of homo sapiens. In other words, of a humanism which lays claim to the narrative of truth’s unveiling. In other words, of history. Yet it is only by virtue of this “putting at stake” that the inscription of a history of reason, or history as reason, is brought into a relation of truth in the first place (or, as Karl Popper would have it, of falsifiability). This apparent paradox is not given a chance to evolve in Plato, who is content to pose reason in opposition to myth, augury, poetics & the essential non-being of writing simply in order to assert its priority.[9] How then is the address of this non-being to reason one that is able to put humanity at stake? When Sartre suggests that “one of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relation to the world”[10] – that humanity is essentially a relation to the world (which is not itself transcendental but whose being, in effect, is produced by a certain consciousness of writing) – it is with the question in mindof “whether it is not in the name of this very choice of writing that the self-commitment of writers must be required”?[11] This turn towards writing implies a responsibility that speaks in its own name: the arbitrary is remotivated in the dream of essence, to signify more than itself. But it isn’t that Sartreanism is merely inverse Platonism, in which a committed consciousness assumes the place of eidos, whose actions the world is given to reflect. Where for Plato every other is effectively a mirror held up to dialectic, for Sartre it is the other that inscribes the possibility of dialectical thought – which is to say, of a true choice. To choose truth is to be “committed,” an action whose agency is nevertheless writing: the writer is committed by virtue of the choice that writing (re)presents. In the Phaedrus, it might just as easily be said that Socrates (he who does not write), machinates against the speechwriting of Lysias because – in order to seduce his comely interlocutor (Phaedrus) away from Lysias’ influence – Socrates himself must usurp the position of writing. This subsumption of the furtively desired object mirrors the anecdote Socrates relates about the Egyptian scribe-god, in which the case for writing is presented & judged in the absence of testimony on its own behalf by powers to whom it is (in light of a de facto illiteracy) unknowable. While the dialogue appears to concern itself with a reasoned assessment of writing’s various deficiencies, it is in fact characterised by hysteria: an hysteria arising from the threat represented to power by any form of self-sufficiency & the mirroring desire for its total (re)possession.
“There is no art except for & by others”[12]
If, as Sartre argues, “the work of art does not have an end,”[13] this is not because it is an end (Kant), or that in it the affordances of technē become dialectically entangled with a poiēses by which this species of work (ergon) is opened to infinitudes. Nor does it simply imply an “autonomous” detachment from teleology, a non-purposiveness or non-subjection to a predetermined design. Rather, it is an assertion that the “work of art” (writing) always already belongs to the future – if by “future” what is meant is a particular otherness to the ideology of presence & of history as reason. Sartre may be correct in his belief that the “work of art is a value because it is an appeal”[14] – that is to say, a callor even a calling, in the suspension of any addressee or else to the abstraction of a yet to come. (It is precisely this that, in the figure of writing, Plato finds so alarming: not the implied patricide by the logos capable of autonomous action, but the suspension of reason as universal teleology.) This appeal evokes what Derrida terms destinerrance[15] – both a suspension of address & its generalisation – wherein the signifier is “no longer” bound to respond to or for its supposed signified, etc., but to & for a generalised field of différance. There remains the suspicion, however, that this will have been the case all along & that only mimetic ideology ever caused it to have the appearance of being otherwise. What would it mean, then, under such conditions, to state, as Sartre does, that “to write is to disclose the world,”[16] unless by “disclosure” what is connoted is the bringing into view of a certain impossibility – that is to say, a rupture in the very system of reason? It may be that it was never really a question of who, or even what, writes – rather, & despite Foucault’s apparent objections,[17] the question of radical intransitivity,[18] onethat stems equally from a subjectlessness. While the implications of Sartre’s argument introduce a contradiction between the egoic notion of the committed artist, on the one hand, & an autopoetic inscription of world-consciousness, on the other, this contradiction is not resolved simply by asserting, as Foucault does, “the ‘ideological’ status of the author.”[19] Between ideological agency & its other(s), there is no simple relation: the question – what is non-ideological agency? – cannot, within such an epistemology, yield a meaningful response. Likewise, just as the myth of Homer is not the antagonist of reason that Plato more than implies in his polemic on the ideal polis, but rather a foil, an “ideological construct,” so too the myth of the author, which, even as it is supposedly abolished, is here re-valorised in a somewhat panoptical relation to all those terms constellated around it (from work to text, etc.). This authorial Götterdämmerung is nothing if not ambivalent. While it isn’t enough, as Foucault says, “to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared,”[20] nor is it sufficient to observe that “the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes & chooses; in short by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition & recomposition of fiction.”[21] Apart from its neoliberal overtones, this argument remains centred around a paranoiac conception of a deus ex machina secretly operating behind the mask of an ideological construct in order to impede the freedom of a significatory system that exists because it is a fiction (a fiction within a fiction). What is this “one” if not ideology, given the status of a distributed panoptical agency? Is it the case that ideology as such could ever be susceptible in this way to an inverted representation, even if only as the spectre of a fear (whose?) of “the proliferation of meaning?”[22] If, when Sartre says that “the world is my task,” he means the task of writing, it is also to writing that Foucault implicitly assigns responsibility for that ideological figure of the author who, in this cryptomimetic melodrama, is concocted to guard against “the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world.”[23] But where for Sartre “the world appears as the horizon of our situation”[24] (which is to say, “as the infinite space that separates humanity from itself, as the synthetic totality of the given, as the undifferentiated whole of obstacles & impediments, but never as a demand addressed to our freedoms”), for Foucault the problem begins with an inverse phenomenology, as a consciousness devolving from situatedness (i.e. the figure of the author mirrors a subject). A consciousness produced not as dialectic, but (though it is never named as such) as autopoiēsis. The problem remains one of figuration, the reduction of an autonomous field of inscriptive potential to a humanist metaphorics of authoritarianism, on the one hand, & freedom on the other; from a general signifying condition to a conspiracy.
The portrait of a Mona Lisa smile
A hegemonic conception of history (is there any other?) reduces to the view that there is only ever one “universal” narrative: that of domination & its attendant consciousness. The fact remains that, for Plato, mimēsis isn’t primarily a regime for the valorisation of “truth,” but of authority over the distribution of meaning. That is to say, the valorisation of power. In Plato, the author is not committed, since the responsibility born by the author is a priori that of authority itself: dialectic is not critique; the work of art is never conceived as either aesthetically or politically autonomous, yet neither is the author, who remains subject to (contracted to) the judgement of ”truth.” In this way, the locus of every “dialogue” is effectively fixed in advance, irrespective of its form. But this locus is barely more than an assertion of power, one that demands (pre-empts) at every moment the assent of discourse. The motto of this regime of philosophic authoritarianism might just as well be, then: vérité et mon droit. Beneath the dialectical subtleties of its various manoeuvres of recuperation, the philosophical project inaugurated by Plato ultimately amounts to a confidence game. Just as the analogy of the cave presented in The Republic is grounded in little more than the assertions of its narrator (the mimetic prison, the light of truth), so too its general hermeneutic devolves upon the insertion of metanarratological devices by which the action of having arrived at a given of truth is insisted upon (the conclusion of The Sophist is perhaps the most conspicuous occurrences). This reliance upon a literary deus ex machina not only exposes certain limits to (or contradictions within) the philosophical project as discourse-of-truth, but situates these very limits (which it actively sublimates) as in fact its principal consideration. Philosophy’s authority over these limits henceforth equates to a substantiation of its truth. In this respect Ulmer contends that “philosophy is that discourse which has taken as its object its own limit. It appropriates the concept of the limit & believes that it can dominate its own margin & think its other.”[25] Here, philosophy, like capital in Marx’s critique, is marked equally by “internal contradictions” & a magical ability to incorporate all “external” forms of negation. Nothing about this should be surprising, since what is at stake is a recursive system, a dialectics of dialectics. The “truth” to which this recursive system refers is always already an operation of metaphor, of proxification as discourse-of-truth, which is to say, “philosophy.” The two do not simply elide: they produce one another, by a circuit of constant ramification, a feedback loop, a “universal” algorithm. Not only does this predetermine the unique access Platonism is able to lay claim to with regard to this truth, but it establishes the basis for the entire future of that project referred to as Western metaphysics. That it does so by affirming its own historical dimension is in no way paradoxical (even if, as Rancière argues, it is literature that has the power to convert things into signs of history, since philosophy, here, already is literature). In this way, truth, as Ulmer observes, is not simply narrated by philosophy; it itself is attributed “a history,” & this history affords it the privilege of incorporating all of the contradictory meanings signed in its name, just as science, too, is afforded the means to “appropriate all of its revolutions because of the transcendental, idealising function of dialectical thinking.”[26] (The subsequent institutionalisation of the concept of “universal revolution” – which Harvey Wheeler identified with the cyberneticisation of Western systems of politico-economic communication & controlafter WW2 – affirms this key element of Platonic ideology.[27]) This twofold historical placement – truth as both subject of history & its teleology –has the ironic consequence of entangling truth in the very mythos from which Plato had apparently redeemed it by exiling poetics from the ideal philosophical polis. Such a truth, like literature – being thus revealed to be “a rationale equal to history”[28] – describes a hermeneutic circle of which it is the supposed object, while the exclusory regime affected in its name becomes the most conspicuous sign of the fact that there are others (other “rationales”) that do not correspond to the Platonic phantasm of “the other in a hierarchically organised relationship.”[29]
Philosophy begins from the position of being on the side of history
Philosophy (reason) is that sign placed upon the “amorphous body” of myth & which thereafter regulates its poetic under the law of genre. This is the narrative Plato assigns to what he casts as the principal antagonists of philosophy: writing & poetry, hereafter bound in a dialectics of subjection. The scenario is well known: poetry, writing, on the side of untruth, are exiled from the polis, yet given leave to plead in their defence before the tribunal of reason, but only in the authorised language of philosophic prose (poetry itself, writing itself, must not “speak”).[30] Picture a regime of Kafkaesque gatekeepers, principle among them a frustrated playwright passing off his manuscripts as philosophical treatises, ventriloquised in the name of a notorious enemy of the state. These ironies run deep, fuelling an attitude of “legitimate concerns” that ought to appear as self-satire & yet inaugurate what may be described as an hysterical contagion, propagated in reaction to the plague of mimēsis, fiction, untruth, myth & other “imaginary” infections of the rational mind. Are poetry, writing, here merely the scapegoats of an unrestrained paranoia or a cynical powerplay? But already this question has us chasing shadows. It seems a cliché readymade: Plato, failed dramatic poet, resentful of the universal acclaim of Homer inverted in the figure of Socrates, while opportunistically exploiting the dead man’s legacy – perhaps. (It’s tempting to consider the entire Platonic oeuvre as a desire to write Socrates in advance, to script His Master’s Voice as a movement of Oedipal jouissance open to perpetual repetition, each “dialogue” re-inscribing, with variations, this primal scene).[31] Internecine warfare is often the most ruthless, the most brutal. What else would it look like were one idea of literature to wage war against its other(s), elevated in degrees of consequence to a drama of the state & even, say, the founding precepts of “civilisation,” if not of the species as a whole? Hardly preposterous when we consider that the first known systems of graphic signs (including knots, constellations, architectures, burial arrangements) correspond to the abstraction of ritual, the emergence of bureaucracies, denominations of exchange, the extension of power over remote territories & the formalisation of “objective,” “universal” history. Nor when we consider that many of the oldest examples of writing represent the codification of laws, themselves often composed in poetic form. Ought we not consider Platonism, then, as precisely a repetition-rehearsal of this primal scene – the dialectical “mirror stage” of a primordial literacy henceforth bound in perpetual, quasi-evolutionary struggle between its institutional & fugitive forms – its Babelisation?
Is truth a situation “ceded,” like a poisoned pawn, to reason by its other(s)?
“Literature,” Deleuze writes, “is delirium,” & “all delirium is world historical.”[32] Alluding to Goya, Derrida evokes the expression “slumber of reason,” which is a “slumber that engenders monsters & then puts them to sleep… this slumber must be effectively traversed so that awakening will not be a ruse of dream.” Literature (writing) is delirious only insofar as it is doubled by a ruse of reason. “The slumber of reason is not, perhaps, reason put to sleep,” Derrida argues, “but slumber in the form of reason.”[33] When Barthes proposes that “literature is a mathēsis, an order, a system, a structured field of knowledge,”[34] it is worth considering that these terms are likewise subjected to a détournement: firstly, that the “ruse of reason” is orientated by the claim that it is the opposite of literature. The totalising movement of its discourse thus falls into contingency: that philosophy is contingent upon literature; that reason is the monster engendered by an insurrectionary dream of writing (at least as Plato imagines it in the Phaedrus). Literature is not an eruption on the margins of reason, but the entire terrain reason seeks to occupy (while retaining for itself, here & there, reserves of domesticated poignancy: lyric reveries that may recall Socrates’ monologue on love, which is really just philosophy serenading itself in drag). When Barthes speaks, apropos of Severo Sarduy’s Cobra & Maitreya,[35] of the pleasure of the text he is not exclusively referring to those exotic language effects of socalled avantgarde anti-literature, but to the convulsions of that same discourse of reason against which avantgardism is conventionally opposed: a discourse that, obsessed as it is with policing its categories, still cannot imagine its own finitude, even as it claims to establish, each time, the meaning of its truth as if once & for all. Reason continuously invents (fictionalises) other futures for itself, through the pleasure of contradiction, the eroticism of dialectics. It is forever transgendering itself even as it professes the one true “phalogocentric” faith. (Not for nothing does Derrida deconstruct Hegel via a montage of Genet.[36]) Such ambiguities are not the exception: divergence, duplicity, ambivalence – none of the terms under discussion here belongs to a singular genealogy, gender or genre.
The field of “literature” isn’t a fait accompli
If literature assumes the form of something that announces itself in advance, it does so by presenting the indeterminacy of its own limits. Rancière, following Foucault, insists on the modernity of the concept of literature: a modo nevertheless immanent to its antiquity (its “nascent state”[37]). It isn’t enough for the institution of literature to be bound to a certain (restricted) history of writing, it must define the very discontinuity of that history, itself a history of discontinuities (including the socalled tradition of the new?[38]). Literature’s “modernity,” then, like the attendant phenomenon of avant-gardism, would amount to both a prefiguring of literature’s institutional closure, which nevertheless remains provisional (orientated by the movement of institutionalisation: that is to say, openness to expropriation of its other[s]) & an eruptive negation. In Plato’s system of exclusions & judicial co-option (show trials, in effect), this movement always appears as one that supervenes[39]in history & in this respect authors it. What then comes to present itself as a counter-discourse, in the revolutionary form of an avant-garde, is likewise immanent to this movement of history: its autonomous appearance being effectively bound – in advance – within a dialectics that affects the sole claim to self-sufficiency (as such). Several conflicting provenances of literature emerge from this schema to foreshadow the problem of a certain return of history as writing & of writing as theory, yet the problem lies not in reconciling these differing genealogies, but in drawing out the system of differences that mimes their production “in the first place.” This generalised dialectic is a genre machine. But its genres, its categories, are themselves tropic, discursive effects; its operations construe a techno-poetics. To speak of the situation of “literature” here is, therefore, to speak both of autonomy & of the relation (or non-relation) between politics & ideology. That is to say, of the double-bind of “writing power.”[40] Under the guise of a genre of genres, the dialectical theatre inscribes itself & is inscribed by the mechanical genius of a power that is nothing if not ambivalent. Its teleology is a perpetuum mobile. It bears the inscrutable mark of automatic revolution. Like a resultant infinity it presents both as trivial & as threatening to the entire edifice of the system of meaning.[41] If, as Aurelius insists, actions are the only facts, then this power is ultimately indecisive, yet it is absolutely determinate.
“What is democracy if not the equal ability to be democrat, anti-democrat or indifferent to both democracy & anti-democracy?”[42]
There is a moment in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929) when André Breton declares that the “simplest surrealist act” would be to go down into the street, pistol in hand, & fire randomly into the crowd.[43] This statement is many things & has provoked many responses, yet the outrage it sometimes occasioned often elides the contemporary patriotic mythos that continued to enshroud WW1 & obscure its horrors (symptomatic of a more general tendency that, even after the revelation of Nazi deathcamps in WW2, was barely disrupted until the Vietnam War & the radicalisation of the socalled counterculture, though likewise with reactionary effect). Taken as a metaphor of the avantgarde in general, in what contrast does this “simplest surrealist act” present the revolt of art, or socalled anti-art, to the apparatus of the corporate-state? By most estimates, WW1 produced some 40 million casualties. Its senseless terror & destruction bore unprecedented social consequences. The institutional culture of the time was entirely inadequate to articulate any of this, beyond restatements of existing aesthetic forms in the service of pathos. But the outrage of Breton’s pronouncement has nothing to do with mathematics or pathos & everything to do with that void concealed within a certain attitude of ambivalence, an effect the surrealists recognised in Gide’s celebration of l’acte gratuit.[44] To speak literally of 40 million senselesscasualties, is to evoke a cataclysm of random acts, the operations of a mechanical universe revealed to be naked of a humanly-meaningful teleology. To be one individual firing, however randomly, into a crowd is, on the contrary, to present what is in effect an insurmountable moral problem: here, the gesture bears responsibilities, even if its authorship, & the consequences it in turn authors, are said to be arbitrary, the apparently perverse (unconscious, reflexive) impulses of an indiscriminate agent of the will-to-power. It is not simply that a belief in certain causalities is disturbed more by the one than the other. The question, vested as it is in a highly ambiguous metaphor (surrealism itself), has to do with the relation between a regime of power that is globally manifest in the very unironic disposal of mass violence, & a power whose “forms” are not attempts at a mimēsis but the contrary: “forms” of sabotage, parody, critique – the grotesquerie of an ideo-political world denied the solace of aestheticisation (“We have nothing to do with literature… We are specialists in Revolt”[45]). And what, then, of an aesthetics that comes armed against precisely such a solace? The “violence” not of an avantgardist provocation, but of the systemic ambivalence it arises from: an ambivalence from within the very logic & discourse of meaning, & its subjection in the figure of writing?
The inhuman is only the “other side” of humanism
“If art is to be art, it must be politics; if it is to be politics, the monument must speak twice-over: as a résumé of human effort & as a résumé of the power of the inhuman separating the human from itself.”[46] Not to be distracted by the terms of this formulation, what Rancière draws attention to here is that the first principle is always the exception. This isn’t a paradox but the foundation of its identity. In the Platonic narrative, poetry is placed before the tribunal of reason under duress: we are to believe that the imposition of prose as the language of appeal will lock poetry in a double-bind, just as writing is bound in the advocacy of speech. Yet this logos is presented from the outset in the form of a rebus (speech, as metaphor of a communicable eidos, always already implies its detachable “other”; poetics inscribes, in advance as it were, all the rhetorical devices of intellectual persuasion, of the communicability of “truth,” etc.). Writing, as Derrida says, comes before speech, as the very possibility of an inscription of difference & so on. Is this duress, then, a fiction? At precisely that point in the system of mimēsis where paternal authority over the logos is itself placed under duress by the threat posed in writing, an inversion takes place. But what does it signify when power declares itself to be in danger? When a certain humanity is called upon in defence of what is, in effect, the apotheosis of the inhuman? (Reason, in Plato, is always on the side of the transcendental.) If we are to speak of the “resistance” of writing, then, this cannot be in reaction: the entire Platonic universe comes into view only as a consequence of the fact of writing; its consciousness is born, as it were, of a missed inscription, in which it becomes aware – like the Freudian polymorphous perverse – of not coinciding with totality. (Nothing is brought so clearly into focus in the Dialogues than the sense of philosophy’s belatedness, of its need to demonstrate itself adequate to the task of imitating reason, such that it can even claim to be reason, while simultaneously announcing an obligation to defend that claim against “competitors” who, despite its aspiration to omnipotence, it feels compelled to relentlessly defame.) This theatre of infantile authoritarianism, whose acme is The Republic’s micromanaged vision of an “ideal polis,” represents the antithesis of a politics: its appeal to reason exceeds the realm of contestable social relations, all of which are to be subject to its rationale. It isn’t a matter of imposing one ideology or another, since in the figure of reason what we are purportedly given is the figure of the non-ideological, of self-evident Truth, etc. Which is to say, as Althusser was right to insist, of ideology as such. This handydandy gaslit dialecticism is the entire Platonic method. Look, he says in “The Cave,” everything you thought was real is a fake. And like Hamlet, he parades a troop of players in front of his audience to show the truth of the matter. “What? Frighted by false fire?” The question is rhetorical, of course: Plato’s antagonists are always rendered mute, we’re only offered straightmen he can bat Socrates’ gags off. As if acquiescing to Plato’s terms, Rancière (attributing this thought to Deleuze) discovers the principal role of art, literature, writing, politics to be one of resistance: “The resistance of the work,” he ventriloquises, “isn’t art’s way of rescuing politics; it is not art’s way of imitating or anticipating politics – it is properly speaking their identity. Art is politics.”[47] Between these two metaphors – philosophy as reason; art as politics – what is assumed to be taking place?
The judgement of praxis
Historically, the emergence of the avantgarde in the mid-19th century corresponds with a particular constellation of ideas about revolutionary theory, social praxis, autonomy of action & the construction of political consciousness. Into each of these formulations the terms “art” or “aesthetics” entered into a direct correspondence: either by sublimation (the incorporation of revolutionary discourse as a subject of institutional art history) or solicitation (a systematic destabilising of this history). Adopting the function of a vanguard party, the new art affected two parallel tasks: 1. a critique of everything that had come to define the field of culture & its specific relation to power; 2. a self-critical permanent revolution directed at its own status & procedures within that relation. Since the 1970s a tragic view of avantgardism has determined this project (of working the socalled gap between “art” & “everyday life”) to have failed. Peter Bürger, extending a selective line of reasoning from Adorno’s Culture Industry, has suggested that “the systemic self-criticism of art”[48] not only aligns with what, increasingly after 1968, is an implicitly institutional mechanism of co-option (versus those forms of institutional inertia that had formerly “evolved” only at the height of crisis), but that it fails precisely because it pretends to stand in opposition to institutionalisation as such. Bürger’s version of the tragic view of the avantgarde is often framed as a simple distinction between an historical avantgarde (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism) that performed a Destruktion of the social contract between art & morality (the relation of power to the “good”) & a post-war neoavantgarde in which these same gestures were merely re-enacted within & for the institutions of culture, thus serving to reaffirm that contract (even if under varied terms). Some critics of Bürger have argued that this schema is not simply reductive (naïve dialecticism), but that it depends on “exclusively emphasising that the autonomy of art is an ideological value which is a function of the commodity-form,” while appealing to a belief in “non-commodity social forms & relations” in order to sustain an alternative.[49] While the case of Bürger may simply be one of nostalgia for certain fixed dualisms, a more important consideration arises here. While Marx had already recognised the revolutionary consequences of commodification for what, until the mid-19th century (that is to say, coincident with the emergence of avantgardism), was understood by the terms “capital” & “capitalism,” there remained a persistent belief that the “commodity-form” could be understood simply as an instrument of capital, even if one capable of affecting its (capitalism’s) “internal” transformation beyond any kind of fixed political meaning. It would only be the advent of a theoretical tendency vested in the semiological studies of Ferdinand de Saussure & others (largely bypassing the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School to which Bürger was indebted) that would bring into view the deep relation between the arbitrary character of sign systems in general & the universal characteristics of the commodity-form, giving rise to a radical understanding of ideology founded not in a critique of hierarchies of value but in the ambivalence of meaning that makes them possible.
The deferral of ends & the fantasy of self-supersession
“Politics,” Rancière writes, “is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible & the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them & speak about them.”[50] It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing & ways of speaking. Politics belongs, in other words, to the domain of logistics – it is always, “first of all,” technē politikē. What permits this political technology to operate is the inscription avant la lettre of a radical commodity-form which Rancière, via the writings of Balzac & Flaubert, characterises by indifference. The world of sensory data is presented, by way of a literary framing device, in Balzac’s analogy of a bric-a-brac shop, whose jumble of expired commodities has been reduced to stuff – the “it” to which the term commodity originally attached – like Roquentin’s pebble on the beach at Bouville. This stuff resembles, insofar as it resembles anything, a “system” of pure entropy, a circulatory dead-end of “mute letters,” as Rancière says, that signify only the fact of their indifference (to any given system of value). Yet it is precisely this signifying minimum that permits these mute letters – this lumpenproletariat of debased commodities – to be revalorised as signifiers of political possibility. But only insofar as it reveals the basis of all symbolic exchange upon a certain indifference (& a certain différance)“first of all.” Not unlike Sartre, the motive force of this revalorisation for Rancière remains the assumption of a subject: a figure in which the “partition of the sensible” (its re-differentiation)acquires a cognitive architecture – a political consciousness– amounting to an “idea” of structure. This thought would thus assume the appearance of an autonomous action, in which politics (“a way of framing”) thinks itself as political subject. It is this reflexivity that Rancière equates to literature, as the distinction between subjective fantasy & the phantasmal world (the “partition of the sensible”): “The politics of literature thus means that literature as literature is involved in this partition of the visible & sayable, in this intertwining of being, doing & saying that frames a polemical common world.”[51] This ontological dream is, for Rancière, the proper domain of an “autonomous” literature that, by virtue of its autonomy, is properly political. (Breton & Trotsky will have formulated a comparable line of argument in their joint 1938 manifesto “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art.”) And this autonomy stems from a radical indifference: “the ‘indifference’ of a way of writing & the opposite statements it allows for.”[52] This polysemy gives allowance not only of a certain “free play” of signification but of the idea of opposition as such. In advance of any political system stands this polemical precondition – such that what Rancière calls the political isn’t an enunciation of the world so much as its a priori alienation by way of its “essential” otherness (its “democratic” character of equivalence). The question is not, however, to situate a politics of literature, but the political as a mode of inscription, of the indifference/différance of a writing that opens the possibility of a “polemical common world” in the first place. Rancière attempts to resolve this by an appeal to a certain modernity of literature “as such,” as “the modern regime of the art of writing,” beyond the “opposition between the servitude of mimēsis & the autonomy of self-referentiality.”[53] Such a literature is marked by “the democratic availability of the ‘dead letter’” – or “mute letter” – “the letter that anybody can receive.”[54] The possibility of being in receipt of such a letter is, in effect, to be a political subject. Is not the entire discourse of politics, asks Rancière, not “a plot invented by literature itself?”[55]
Louis Armand | Prague, May 2022
*Festins de Desmando, tradução de Jorge Pereirinha Pires; colagens de Siegmar Fricke; paginação e grafismo de Paulo da Costa Domingos (Lisboa: Barco Bêbado, 2023)
[1] See Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXII: RSI, 1974-5: nosubject.com/Seminar_XXII
[2] Cf Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Brouchard & Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) 33.
[3] Philippe Sollers, interviewed by Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, “What is the Meaning of the Avant-Garde’s Death?” Diaphanes 6/7 (11 June 2019), rpr: my-blackout.com/2019/12/20/mehdi-belhaj-kacem-philippe-sollers-what-is-the-meaning-of-the-avant-gardes-death/
[4] Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Literature” (2003), trans. Steven Corcoran, Dissensus (London: Continuum, 2010) 159.
[5] Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 55-6.
[6] Gregory L. Ulmer, “Theoria,” Applied Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) 33.
[7] Derrida, “Tympan,” Margins of Philosophy, xx.
[8] See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Ian McLeod (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987).
[9] “Memory & truth cannot be separated. The movement of alētheia is a deployment of mnēmē through & through. […] The power of lēthē simultaneously increases the domain of death, of nontruth, of nonknowledge. This is why writing, at least insofar as it sows “forgetfulness in the soul,” turns us towards the inanimate & towards nonknowledge. But it cannot be said that its essence simply & presently confounds it with death or nontruth. For writing has no essence or value of its own, whether positive or negative. It plays within the simulacrum. It is in its type the mime of memory, of knowledge, of truth, etc.” Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) 105.
[10] Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is Literature?” [1948], What is Literature & Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1950) 27 – emphasis added.
[11] Sartre, “What is Literature?” 26.
[12] Sartre, “What is Literature?” 29.
[13] Sartre, “What is Literature?” 32.
[14] Sartre, “What is Literature?” 34.
[15] Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” trans Catherine Porter & Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 29-30.
[16] Sartre, “What is Literature?” 37.
[17] See Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” [1963], The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow(London: Penguin, 1984).
[18] See Roland Barthes, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1986) 11-21.
[19] Foucault, “What is an Author?” 113.
[20] Foucault, “What is an Author?” 103.
[21] Foucault, “What is an Author?” 113.
[22] Foucault, “What is an Author?” 120.
[23] Foucault, “What is an Author?” 115.
[24] Sartre, “What is Literature?” 36.
[25] Ulmer, “Theoria,” 30-31.
[26] Ulmer, “Theoria,” 33.
[27] Harvey Wheeler, Democracy in a Revolutionary Era (Santa Barbara: The Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1968) 14.
[28] Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” The Newly Born Woman, trans. B. Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 66.
[29] Cixous, “Sorties,” 70.
[30] Just as theory will be repeatedly subjected to the judgement of a certain academic style, one that will simultaneously attempt to recuperate it as an exemplary form of quasi-literary artefact while erecting a discipline around it.
[31] What is Socrates but a textual figure, composed of irony, catachresis, transgression? The peripatetic philosopher in whom truth is always centred. He who drinks but remains sober. He who does not write, etc. A tireless busybody, corrupter of the youth, who “permits himself” to stray outside the walls of the polis, into areas hostile to the discourse of reason, in order to seduce the impressionable, overly-credulous, (or merely bored?) Phaedrus away from the false arts. Socrates: the logos that disguises itself & goes abroad in order to arrive at (return to) its true destination, the destination of truth (the republic of reason). Socrates: the logos of reason? Whose itinerary, guided by an avowed pursuit of truth, resembles nothing so much as a literary occasion, at worst an alibi, for his puppet-master to put reason on stage & (quelle idée!) put words in its mouth.
[32] Gilles Deleuze, “Literature & Life,” Essays Critical & Clinical, trans. D.W. Smith & M.A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 2.
[33] Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: An Hegelianism without Reserve,” Writing & Difference, trans Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978) 252.
[34] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) 118.
[35] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975).
[36] See Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. J.P. Leavey & Richard Rand (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
[37] See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991) 81.
[38] See Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: DaCapo, 1960).
[39] Strategically or tactically.
[40] See Jacques Derrida, “Scribble (writing-power”), trans. Cary Plotkin, Yale French Studies 58 (1979): 117-147.
[41] A “writing degree zero” also implies infinities.
[42] Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 155.
[43] André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
[44] See André Gide, Les Caves du Vatican (Paris: NRF, 1914).
[45] Bureau of Surrealist Research, “Declaration of 27 January 1925,” Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts & Declarations, eds. Michael Richardson & Krzysztof Fijalkowski (London: Pluto, 2001) 24.
[46] Jacques Rancière, “The Monument & its Confidences; or Deleuze & Art’s Capacity for ‘Resistance’” (2003), trans. Steven Corcoran, Dissensus, 172.
[47] Rancière, “The Monument & its Confidences,” 172.
[48] Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 20.
[49] Gavin Grindon, “Surrealism, Dada & the Refusal of Work: Autonomy, Activism & Social Participation in the Radical Avant-Garde,” Oxford Art Journal 34.1 (2011): 82.
[50] Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 153.
[51] Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 153.
[52] Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 153.
[53] Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 155-56.
[54] Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 158.
[55] Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 164.
ALIENIST MANIFESTO 