Spurious

The Thought From Outside

(More paraphrastic notes on Deleuze's Foucault, following this post and that one. My general aim is to explore Deleuze's relationship to the linguistic turn and to understand his account of literature.)

Power and Force

The chapter, 'Strategies or the Non-stratified: the Thought of the Outside (Power)' begins with a simple question, 'What is Power?'

Foucault's great theses on power [...] develop under three headings: power is not essentially repressive (since it 'incites, it induces, it seduces'); it is practised before it is possessed (since it is possessed only in a determinable form, that of class, and a determined form, that of State); it passes through the hands of the mastered no less than through the hands of the masters (since it passes through every related force). A profound Nietzscheanism.

What is power?, Deleuze asks, and gives us an answer that recalls his own study of Nietzsche: it is a relation between forces, 'or rather every relation between forces is a "power relation"'. Forces are always found in the plural, Deleuze says; each force exists in relation to other forces.

Here, we must distinguish force from violence, which acts on specific bodies whose form it destroys or changes. Force, by contrast, takes as its 'object' only other forces, and does not exist apart from the relation. As Foucault puts it, force is 'an action upon an action, on existing actions, or on those which may arise in the present or future'; it is 'a set of actions upon other actions'. The relation between forces can be expressed, Deleuze suggests, by infinitives such as to incite, to induce, to seduce, to make easy or difficult, to enlarge or limit, to make more or less probable, and so on. In each case, it is a power relation that is at issue, as it names the effect of actions upon actions.

Power has to be understood, Deleuze says, in terms of affectivity. Force is to be understood in terms of its power to affect other forces to which it is related, and to be affected by other forces in turn. Inciting, provoking, producing etc. are examples of active affects; a reactive affect is given in terms of the capacity to be incited or provoked, or in being induced to produce.

This does not mean, Deleuze emphasises, that reactive affects are merely the passive side of active forces; they are to be understood in terms of an encounter between active and reactive forces that cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy. Nevertheless, Deleuze does allow that spontaneity and receptivity, those Kantian terms he drew upon in his previous chapter, can be used to understand how every field of forces distributes those forces in terms of their relations, respectively to affect and to be affected.

For Deleuze, 'the power to be affected is like a matter of force, and the power to affect is like a function of force'. This function is not formalised, and can be described as 'pure' insofar as it remains independent of the particular forms into which it is organised, as well as the aims it might be made to serve or the means upon which it would draw.

The Diagram

How should we understand the distribution of the power to affect and to be affected within a particular context?

This is best understood by way of an example. Deleuze explains that the role of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish exists as a 'pure function', that of 'imposing a particular taste or conduct on a multiplicity of particular individuals, provided simply that the multiplicity is small in number and the space limited and confined'.

Foucault is not focused upon the forms that determine the ends and means of this function, e.g. education, care, punishment, production. Nor is he interested in particular by the formed substances who are acted upon by the function, e.g, schoolchildren, the sick, prisoners, workers. Rather, Foucault points to the way in which the Panopticon 'traverses all these forms and is applied to all these substances: it is this sense that a category of power exists, as a pure, disciplinary function'.

Foucault calls this the diagram - a function that must be understood in terms of its specific use, and as it is exercised over a specified substance. The diagram names the distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected, understood as the function of force as it is found 'beneath', so to speak, a particular historical formation. It concerns the pure or abstract physics of action that operates in the context of a disciplinary function as it mixes with the 'unformed pure matter' that it acts upon. In each case, purity must be understood as a determination unique to a particular diagram (in this case, the panopticon) and the medium in which it operates.

Strategies

What is the relationship between knowledge and power as we find it in Foucault?, Deleuze asks. Power concerns forces, and knowledge forms - those formed matters (substances) and formalised functions that are given in terms of the more general formal functions of seeing and speaking. Power is given in a diagram as it mixes pure functions and pure matter; it is flexible. Knowledge is stratified and allows itself to be fixed in an archive; it is given a rigid segmentarity.

Power can be understood to pass though particular forces - as Deleuze presents it, through the particular points which on each occasion mark the application of a force, the action or reaction of a force in relation to others. As such, the diagram can therefore be understood to transmit or distribute particular features; power relations move from one point to another rather than emanating from a single central point.

These relations are always local, even if they are not localisable at a given moment; they are always mobile, shifting from point to point, darting suddenly within a complex field of forces. Marking inflections and resistances, power relations twist and turn without reference to a unitary sovereignty.

It is as such, for Deleuze, they can be understood in terms of what he calls a strategy (an anonymous cluster of strategies). Since power differs from knowledge as outlined, strategies must be understood to differ from stratifications, evading the stabilised forms of the seeable and the sayable; they are not known.

Then the practice of power cannot be reduced to knowledge. Power relations involve a different type of relations, to which we can attend only by that microphysics that can explore them in their irreducibility. Here, the prefix 'micro-' must be understood as it refers to this specific domain - to what Deleuze calls 'mobile and nonlocalisable connections', rather than to a microscopic view of seeable and sayable forms.

At the same time, power and knowledge are not simply external to one another; they are also co-implicated in relations of presuppostion and capture. The human sciences are inseparable, as Foucault has shown on many occasions, from the power relations that are their condition of possiblity; the form of knowledge they propose depend upon a diagram of forces. In the case of prison in a disciplinary society, what matters is the diagram of the Panopticon that reveals itself in the prison, as it does in other institutions.

Institutions and Integration

As such, we must not understand power monolithically. The features in question are not integrated in a single seamless whole; there is, Deleuze writes, 'a multiplicity of local and partial integrations', each of which must be understood in terms of its 'affinity' with relations or points. Institutions themselves - Deleuze gives as examples the State, but also the Family, Religion, Production, the Marketplace - and even, Art and Morality each depend upon integrating factors, upon 'agents of stratification'.

Lacking essence or interiority, institutions are practices that locally 'fix' power, presupposing its relations. As such, the source of power does not lie in the State or in Morality; power merely lends itself to a local and specific determination, which may reproduce itself across the social field. As Deleuze succinctly puts it, 'There is no State, only state control, and the same holds for all other cases'. Granted, there are State-forms in particular historical formations that have captured power relations, but this is only because something analogous to 'continual state control' was already produced in the realms of education, law, the economy, the family and in sexual domains.

The State, in this case, implies the power relations whose source it appears it is. The function of governmentality precedes the State, so long as government is understood as 'the power to affect in all its aspects' - the govenment of children, criminals, the sick, families, etc. Molecular or microphysical relations precede and give rise to particular molar agencies - the sovereign or the law; the father; money, gold or the dollar; God; sex and so on.

Thus in The History of Sexuality, Foucault explores Law and Sex, showing how desire is normalised by the hystericisation of sexuality. But beneath these molar agencies, there is that molecular sexuality, those thousand tiny sexes that precede and outstrip the integration of particular sexes. Forms of knowledge [savoir] are found at the level of molar agencies, e.g., the 'scientia sexualis' Foucault details. 

How, though, does an institution effect integration?

Foucault claims an institution has two poles or elements - apparatuses and rules. Deleuze paraphrases this remark by reintroducing his distinction between seeing and saying - an institution, he says, organises visibilities and systems of statements. The integration effected by a system operates by actualising these elements in their divergency.

It operates as, in his words, 'a system of formal differentiation', distributing a form of receptivity that constitutes the visible element, and a form of spontaneity that constitutes the articulable element. The forms in question are derived from the two basic aspects of affect or force - the receptivity of the ability to be affected and the spontaneity of power's ability to affect, but do not coincide with them.

The power relation, says Deleuze,

establishes contact between unformed matter (receptivity) and unformalised functions (spontaneity). On the other hand relations of knowledge, on each side, deal with formed substances and formalised functions by using the receptive kind of visible element, or the spontaneous kind of articulable element.

This recalls discussion in the previous chapter. Visibilities reveal formed substances, and the statement reveals formalised or finalised functions. This is why we can distinguish the affective categories of power - inciting, provoking, etc. from the formal categories of knowledge - educating, punishing, etc. Formal categories pass through saying and speaking in order to actualise affective categories; knowledge actualises particular constellations of power.

In this way, a particular institution can integrate power-relations as it constitutes particular forms of knowledge. Each time, the power relations are actualised, modified and redistributed as part of the production (or reproduction, considered from the perspective of the social field) of visibilities and statements that allow them to appear as political, legalistic, economic, educational etc.

The mechanism of integration and actualisation must be understood precisely. In The Archeaology of Knowledge, Foucault discusses the 'regularity' of a statement as a curve that joins, as on a graph, individual points, producing a rule. These points were produced by particular relations between forces; the curve that connects them is different to them, since the points were outside the statement. Granted, the statement may resemble them - the statement QWERTY resembles the keys on the typewriter, but there is a vital difference between them.

In the case of visibilities, however, there is a difference - they are external to the statement, but are not its outside. Visibilities do have a relationship to the outside which they actualise, but they do so in a different way to statements.

Statements, then integrate into language the intensity of affects, understood as the relations between forces. As curves, they organise particular features of power, potentiailities. Visibilities organise the same features, the same differential relations between forces, into light. Visiblities fix relations between forces, regularising particular points, and, to use a favourite term of Foucault, constitute scenes that, Deleuze explains, 'are to the visible element what a statement is to the sayable or readable'.

In summary, the scene (or the description-scene, as Deleuze will call it) is the regulation that belongs to visibilities, and the statement that which belongs to sayabilities. The diagram of forces gives itself in description scenes and in statement-curves. The seeable and the sayable are thus thoroughly intertwined. Visibilities entail statements and vice versa, even as they cannot be confused with one another.

An Aside on Literature

This is what reveals itself, Deleuze says, in literature. '[S]trictly literary analysis, even as its very heart, is likely to rediscover the difference between scenes and curves: descriptions may be verbal, but they are none the less different from statements'. He then writes a brief, dazzling passage on Faulkner, describing the 'fantastic curves' statements trace in his work as they pass through 'discursive objects' and 'mobile subject-positions'; at the same time, says Deleuze, these descriptions

conjure up a host of scenes which create reflections, flashes, shimmerings, visibilities varying according to the time and the season, which distribute the descriptions in a light-being, a reunion of all the light to which Faulkner holds the secret (Faulkner, literature's greatest 'luminist').

How should we understand these lines? It is best to look elsewhere in Deleuze's oeuvre, to his collection Critique and Clinic, where Deleuze raises the question of the outside of language. Here, he refers to the limit of language, the outside, in a useful analogy from Bogue, being analogous to the outer surface of a sphere.

The outside is in contact with the non-linguistic, allowing them to communicate along the sphere's surface. As such, the limit can be considered as a kind of membrane, as a 'permeable limit common to inside and outside'. In Deleuze's own writings on literature, notably his essays on T.E. Lawrence and Beckett, the limit of language is presented in terms of nonlinguistic visions and auditions, which are rendered possible through language. I will return to this account in much more detail on another occasion.

The Outside, the Emergence of Forces

What is the relationship between the seeable and the sayable, between scenes and curves?

The seeable and the sayable constitute two forms of knowledge that are then integrated and thereby enter into an indirect relation with one another. There remains a divide between them that is analogous to the Kantian schematism - spontaneity and receptivity remain forms irreducible to one another with respect to the forces they organise. Deleuze expresses this by borrowing from Blanchot the idea of a relation without relation - a 'non-relation' that exists between statements and visibilities, curves and scenes.

(Note that the 'relation without relation', which Blanchot develops in conversation with Levinas, is put to an entirely different use by Deleuze.)

The two forms, the visible and the articulable, as strata or historical formations, are different to the microphysics of power, which operates outside of strata. Note, however, this is not a transcendence or a beyond of the strata - Foucault is not pointing us to what lies outside strata, transcending their sphere so to speak, but to what forms the outside of strata, the permeable surface of the sphere, as it brings into contact inside and outside. As such, relations between forces remain historical; their aprioricity does not place them outside history, but as the outside of history. Each historical formation refers back to the temporary set of relations of the diagram of forces that is its outside.

Diagrams are in a perpetual state of turbulence even as must also be considered as a priori elements. Famously, Foucault will attempt to lay bare the diagrams that underlie particular historical forms of society through the account of the operation of particular categories of power as they are marshalled to produce particular effects - controlling the body, say, or the population in our time. Older, sovereign socieities saw those categories working in a different sense - as bestowing life or death, rather than administering it, and applying levying in actions and products.

But diagrams are less stable than this suggest; they can also be understood as communicating above, below or between particular strata. Deleuze gives the example of a Napoleonic diagram between sovereign society and disciplinary society. Doubling history - the official account of history - Deleuze says, 'there is an emergence of forces'. Fixed and stabilised by a stratified formation, the diagram is nevertheless outside of the strata, and therefore grants the chance of mutation.

The Thought From Outside

The outside, as it is temporarily localised in a diagram, and then fixed in particular strata, directly concerns force. As Deleuze writes, 'It is always from the outside that a force confers on others or receives from others the variable position to be found only a particular distance or in a particular relation'. Distinct from the history of forms is the emergence of forces as they operate as the outside.

Here, Deleuze takes us back to the theme of Foucault's essay on Blanchot. Seeing and speaking are forms of exteriority, for Foucault, says Deleuze, and can be said to constitute forms of thinking. However, they are to be distinguished from the thought of or from the outside, which occurs in the interstice between them, in the disjunction, the 'non-relation' between seeing and speaking.

Thought pertains to the set of relations of forces that is the diagram. It is an attempt to reach that outside which comprises a diagram, and hence the possibility of mutation. Thinking in this way is difficult, since it is not merely the exercise of an innate faculty. Rather, thinking must become thought as it attends to the intrusion of the outside into the interval between the visible and the articulable.

What does it mean to think the outside? Take Foucault's famous claim that man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides. Deleuze explains this claim as follows: the human being is a composition, a compound, that appears with the collapse of the classical past, and the future, already here, in which what has been called man enters into new compositions - perhaps with information technology, with silicon-based man-machine systems.

But the thought from outside has repercussions which are not simply theoretical. It also brings with it the possibility of resistance, to the extent that it is in contact with what is always broader in possibilities that the strata in which the human being is caught. It is in these terms that we might, Deleuze suggests, understand Foucault's own political activism.

As such, the thought from outside bears witness to Spinoza's famous claim that there is no telling what a human being might become. At the end of the chapter, Deleuze invokes Nietzsche's superman, commenting that it is no more than the affirmation that 'it is in man himself that we must liberate life, since man himself is a form of imprisonment for man'.

Saying and Seeing

Deleuze is insistent in his book on Foucault: despite appearances, despite the fact his recently deceased friend placed emphasis on discourse, he was a thinker of what Deleuze calls visibilities (and we should not be too quick to look for a definition of this word).

The elegant, but complex argument of Deleuze's Foucault shows us how saying and seeing, 'discursive practices and forms of self'evidence' are divided - how the articulable and the visible, the forms of expression and the forms of content never quite coincide even as they combine to make possible particular behaviours, mentalities or sets of ideas that belong to particular historical formations (strata).

And not only that. Deleuze wants, too, to show how Foucault thinks their interrelationship as it draws upon a 'non-relating relation' such as Blanchot formulated it (albeit in a different context), which will require a unique ontology made up of folds and foldings, of the single plane of the outside that lends itself to particular interiorisations, but periodically shakes them out like a tablecloth, only to allow new crumplings, mutations by way of which new behaviours, mentalities and sets of ideas are distributed.

One Speaks, One Sees

Foucault's archeological endeavour, Deleuze notes, 'is firstly to discover a true form of expression which cannot be confused with any linguistic study, be it signifier, word, phrase, proposition, or linguistic act'. His particular target is the Signifier, where (Deleuze quoting Foucault) "'discourse is annihilated in its reality by entering into the order of the signifier'".

True, Deleuze grants, in The Archaeology of Knowledge and elsewhere, discourse is granted primacy, but this does not mean the visibilities can be reduced to discourse; Foucault comes to believe, Deleuze notes, that his early books do not show this primacy forcefully enough - 'this is his reaction against phenomenology'; nevertheless, the visible remains irreducible; it has its own laws and its own autonomy.

Against phenomenology: Foucault sets himself against the idea of the primacy of the subject to whom the world is visible. For the phenomenologist, what matters is not consciousness in itself, or the world in its natural reality, but the network of relations that reveals itself in the specific combination of the empirical and the transcendental that characterises intentionality.

What, then, of Foucault's visibilities? Saying and seeing, discusivity and visibility are comprised of practicies, or positivities, says Deleuze. They make possible the behaviour, mentality and sets of ideas that belong to particular historical formations (Foucault calls them strata). The articulable and the visible become, with Foucault, the two elements of stratification. Together, considered as 'a "mechanism" of statements and visibilities', they constitute knowledge, understood as 'a practical assemblage' as it combines both discursive and non-discursive practices.

Does this mean Foucault seeks to relativise the findings of phenomenology to a particular historical formation? More than that. For what matters with Foucault's archaeology is to open up words, phrases and propositions to retrieve statements on the one hand, and to open up qualities things and objects to retrieve visibilities on the other. Statements, they become readable in relation to the conditions that make them so, says Deleuze, and visibilities visible likewise.

This implies the displacement of the subject in Foucault's archaeology. The subject, Deleuze comments, is merely a 'variable, or rather a set of variables of the statement' - it is a function that is derived from the statement, and its author is merely a position with respect to the statement. What comes first, for Foucault, is 'an anonymous murmur in which positions are laid out for possible subjects' - the 'ONE SPEAKS', understood as the drone of discourse that precedes and withdraws from speakers and listeners, writers and readers, always threatening to return.

What matters, as I have tried to clarify in a previous post, is the 'it speaks' rather than the 'I speak'; the 'there is language' or 'the being of language', the great murmur that varies in each historical formation. In the classical age, the being of language is confined by the regime of representation. By the nineteenth century, it has begun to escape these limits, losing its unifying function and rediscovering it in a new sense in literature. Henceforward, a certain literature presents language as the outside - as its historical being fails to be encompassable by an inner consciousness.

Roughly the same can be said of the visible. Visibilities, says Deleuze,

are not to be confused with elements that are visible or more generally perceptible, such as qualities, things, objects, compounds of objects[....] Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms that would show up under light, but rather forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer.

Then with the notion of visibilities, Foucault has created a function that doubles that of the statement. What matters is not simply to see, to attend to what has been delivered us by way of intuition, but to 'break things open'. This is what happens with the figure of the panopticon of Discipline and Punish, where we find, Deleuze remarks,

a luminous form that bathes the peripheral cells in light but leaves the central tower opaque, distributing prisoners who are seen without being able to see, and the observer who sees everything without being seen.

Foucault does not begin, like the phenomenologist, from a particular perspective, but from the light that belongs to a particular 'mechanism' or 'machine' (Deleuze's words), just as statements belong to particular systems.

Likewise with Foucault's famous reading of Velasquez's Las Meninas in terms of its distribution of 'what is seen and who sees, the exchanges and reflections, right up to the place of the king who can only be inferred as existing outside the painting ...' What matters once again is that luminosity from which the position of participants in the scene can be observed (or deduced).

Thus we can speak of a 'there is' of light, of a being of light. As in the case of discourse, this light-being is historical insofar as it cannot be separated from the way it falls into a formation, the way it gives itself up to be experienced, but also absolute as it outstrips that formation, just as the 'there is' of language, language-being outstrips any particular system of discourse.  And just as the being of discourse cannot be thought from the intention to speak of an individual speaker or writer, visibilities are not defined by sight.

Is the phenomenologist to be understood as a function of discourse, the 'I' of the investigator giving way to the 'one' of 'one writes' or 'one speaks', and likewise the 'I' who sees and to whom being is revealed (the transcendental ego) to the 'one' of 'one sees'?

Literature and Seeing

(When Deleuze reads literature, it is always to emphasise what is made visible by this 'one sees', even as it does so by way of the 'one speaks' of the written. This is what he writes very beautifully, in his book on Foucault, of Faulkner:

statements trace fantastic curves which pass through discursive objects and mobile subject-positions (the one name for several persons, two names for the one person) and which are inscribed within a language-being, in a reunion of all the language unique to Faulkner. But the descriptions conjure up a host of scenes which create reflections, flashes, shimmerings, visibilities varying according to the time and the season, which distribute the descriptions in a light-being, a reunion of all the light to which Faulkner holds the secret (Faulkner, literature's greatest 'luminist').

This reading sets Deleuze, I think, against Blanchot, an important figure in the Foucault book. For Blanchot, speaking, writing, have a primacy with respect to the visible. As Deleuze puts it, '... while Blanchot insisted on the primacy of speaking as a determining element, Foucault, contrary to what we might think at first glance, upholds the specificity of seeing, the irreducibility of the visible as a determinable element'. This seems to me exactly right, and can be understood in terms of the importance of Levinas to Blanchot, and to a whole tradition in Rosenszweig and others that places emphasis on speaking and listening (on call and response) rather than seeing.)

Extractive Conditions

What is the role of archaeology with respect to the sayable and the seeable?

The statement is not a simple given, but has to be broken open from words, phrases and propositions. Likewise with the 'content' that is expressed - Deleuze emphasises for Foucault it is not to be understood as a signified, nor indeed as a referent. Visibilities are not simply visible or perceptible; they are not given in the forms of objects, since it is objects they reveal. Rather, they are forms of luminosity in relation to which things, objects exist 'only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer'.

Archaeology opens up words, phrases and propositions and open up qualities, things and objects, says Deleuze; 'It must extract from words and language the statements corresponding to each stratum and its thresholds, but equally extract from things ans sight the visibilities and "self-evidences" unique to each stratum'. The archaeologist must discover the extractive conditions that allow the uncovery of what is said.

This uncovery reveals, certainly, what was previous hidden. But it does so all at once: the archaeologist opens everything that is seen and said in a particular stratum; everything, that is, that is known. This is 'Foucault's greatest historical principle', says Deleuze: there is nothing hidden behind the curtain; but this makes it all the more important to describe the curtain. He gives the example of politics:

politics hides nothing, in diplomacy, legislation, control or government, even though each cluster of statements assumes a certain method for intertwining words, phrases and propositions. We need only know how to read, however difficult that may prove to be. The secret exists only in order to be betrayed, or to betray itself. Each age articulates perfectly the most cynical elements of its politics, or the rawest element of its sexuality, to the point where transgression has little merit. Each age says everything it can according to the conditions laid down for its statements.

Nothing is hidden: and the same is the case for visibilities; 'Each strata sees and reveals everything it can according to the conditions for visibility', Deleuze writes, just as everything it says is so in terms of the conditions for statements.

Neo-Kantianism?

It is also crucial that we understand these conditions as they escape the interiority of consciousness: if they are to be understood, as Deleuze recommends, as a priori conditions, this must not be understood as a neo-Kantianism. Conditions, here, are to be thought in terms of real experience - they belong on the side of the 'object' rather than the universal subject; the a priori is itself historical. Nevertheless, Deleuze notes,

... if there is any neo-Kantianism, it is because visibilities together with their conditions form a Receptivity, and statements together with their conditions form a Spontaneity. The spontaneity of language and the receptivity of light.

How should we understand this? On the one hand, for Kant, space and time exist as forms of intuition - as products of the subject. The concrete matter of the intution is given in terms of its prior form, which is not found in the things themselves, but in the mind of the subject. Intution is receptive.

On the other hand, we have the abstract categories of the understanding, which, although likewise belonging to the mind, are of a different kind than intuited matter or the forms of intuition (space and time). Understanding, on Kant's account, is spontaneous.

Deleuze comments,

In Foucault, the spontaneity of understanding, the Cogito, gives way to the spontaneity of language (the 'there is' of language), while the receptivity of intuition gives way to that of light (a new form of space-time).

Of course the parallel can only go so far; but it is useful in terms of presenting the next step Deleuze wants to take.

The Primacy of Discourse

Deleuze, as we have seen, wants to highlight the importance of the visible for Foucault, but he also has to account for what is, for Foucault, the primacy of discourse. The visible and the articulable differ in the manner of the form of content and the form of expression even as they continually overlap to form particular strata or forms of knowledge. But between the two, Deleuze emphasise, 'there is no isomorphism or conformity, in spite of a mutual presupposition and the primacy of the statement'.

But how, then, is the primacy of the statement to be thought? This question is bound up with others in a tangled network:

In Foucault, the spontaneity of the understanding, the Cogito, gives way to the spontaneity of language (the 'there is' of language), while the receptivity of intuition gives way to that of light (a new form of space-time). Henceforth it is easy to understand why the statement has a primacy over the visible: The Archaeology of Knowledge can claim a determining role for statements as discursive formations. But visibilities are no less irreducible, because they refer to a form of the determinable, which refuses to be reduced to the form of determination. This marked the point of Kant's decisive break with Descartes: the form of determination I think does not rest on an undetermined element (I am) but rather on the form of a pure determinable element (space-time). The problem is that of the coadaption of the two forms or two sorts of conditions, which differ in nature.

Why does Deleuze find it necessary to reflect on Kant's break with Descartes? Deleuze's text becomes particularly dense at this point; I turned to his lecture course on Kant, translated online, to the passages where he comments on the transition from Descartes.

In the Mediations, Descartes moves from 'I think, I am' to 'I am a thing which thinks'. 'The 'I think' determines the 'I am' as a thing that thinks', comments Deleuze. But Kant, for Deleuze, while agreeing that in order to think it is necessary to be, shows that determination also implies something indeterminate which is to be determined by the determination. The determination of the 'I am' as a thinking thing points beyond itself ...

Kant asks under what form the indeterminate, that is, in this case, the 'I think', is determinable by the determination. Under what form is the 'I am' determinate by the determination 'I think'? For Kant, explains Deleuze in the lectures, it is the form of time. This produces what for Deleuze is the paradox of inner sense:

the active determination 'I think' determines my existence [...] but it can only determine my existence under the form of the determinable, which is to say under the form of a passive being in space and in time. So 'I' is indeed an act, but an act that I can only represent to myself insofar as I am a passive being. [...] it's the same subject which has taken on two forms, the form of time and the form of thought, and the form of thought can only determine the existence of the subject as the existence of a passive being.

The determination of my existence occurs via the 'I think', but this depends in turn upon the determinable. I should note there is no mention of time in the Foucault book outside the complex space-time that comprises what Deleuze calls light (the visible). It is as space-time that light refuses to be reduced to the form of determination that is the statement.

I can only present this space-time to myself in terms of receptivity, a prior passivity, but as Deleuze emphasises, this is too simple: space-time is not a simple grid, set up a priori, but can be rearticulated (is this the word?) anew according to various kinds of action. Nevertheless, a difference remainds between the seeable and the sayable, which means the paradox Kant confronts as Deleuze presents it - a subject that has taken on two forms - remains, roughly speaking, in the work of Foucault.

But of course these two forms do not concern a subject, since it is, for Foucault, for Deleuze, the conditions under which the subject is produced that is at issue, the subject being only a function of the seeable and the sayable.  The apparent dualism that Kant confronts arises from the difficulty of joining together concepts, as they pertain to understanding, and intuitions. It is no surprise that Deleuze refers to the role of the schematism for Kant when discussing Foucault's claim as to the 'enigma' of the relationship between the seeable and the sayable.

Deleuze, to run ahead of myself considerably, will propose, drawing on Foucault an ontology of folds, of the outside to overcome this problem. But for the moment (I am commenting, rather casually, and without understanding most of what I read, on chapter 3), Deleuze brings us to the brink of the Foucault's version of the schematism (albeit as it is articulated in a very different context). In doing so, he still has the question of the primacy of discourse in Foucault's work before him. His reflection on Kant (and upon Kant's relationship to Descartes) is not intended as a work of comparative philosophy, but as an attempt to foreground the problem Foucault faces

Let us return to what Deleuze says on the relationship between the sayable and the seeable: 'the form of determination I think does not rest on an undetermined element (I am) but rather on the form of a pure determinable element (space-time)'. Space-time, as we have seen, is rethought by Deleuze (by his Foucault) as light, as the visible. The visible, the seeable, is what is as yet undetermined. The primacy of statements as discursive formations must be understood in terms of the activity of determining; visibilities, however, are not the determined; they do not allow themselves to be reduced to discourse. Light is leftover; the visible remains on its own terms.

The Duel

One more quotation to underline Deleuze's point.

The statement has primacy by virtue of the spontaneity of its conditions (language) which give it a determining form, while the visible element, by virtue of the receptivity of its conditions (light), merely has the form of the determinable. Therefore, we can assume that determination always comes from the statement, although the two forms differ in nature.

There remains, then, an irresolvable tension between the seeable and the sayable - a 'duel', Deleuze says, between two forms of exteriority. The next question to consider is how they can be thought together - for Deleuze, this is what Foucault addresses with his notion of power.

(Note for Sinthome: the chapter of Foucault on which I am commenting begins with an illuminating reference to Hjelmslev:

Stata are historical formations, positivities or empiricities. As 'sedimentary beds' they are made from things and words, from seeing and speaking, from the visible and the sayable, from bands of visibility and fields of readibility, from contents and expressions. We borrow these last terms from Hjelmslev, and apply them to Foucault in a completely different way, since content is not to be confused here with a signified, not expression with a signifier.)

The Thought of the Outside

The word 'I' is not a concept, that would grasp this particular tree in terms of a universal. Nor does it refer to that particular in its singularity, since the 'I' is wholly taken over by anyone who speaks. But here, it is not as if there first exists a subject who then expresses himself using language. The 'I' is a position afforded by language that gives birth to the subject.

Benveniste (via): 'In some way language puts forth "empty" forms which each speaker, in the exercise of their discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his "person"'. But note the capacity of the speaker to relate such forms to himself depends upon his birth as a speaker. He does not take up the empty form of the 'I', since he, as a subject, does not pre-exist the personal pronoun. Then language is not first of all personal, but the condition of the subject who can then use pronouns. Somehow - strange miracle - the subject takes up a position with respect to the impersonal streaming, the 'empty forms' of language. It appears as a subject.

The subject does not pre-exist language. And yet now there is a self that can speak. 'Can speak' - but from where does this power come? Is the self (is it yet a self?) fated to language? Can it not not speak? Either way, as subject, it has the power to speak: the ability, with respect to language (and not just over language), to be able. Somehow, it is given that power. The power comes from that movement that catches up the not-yet-self, the pre-subject, and makes of it a subject.

Fated to speak, then, and to have power over speech. But only by taking over and animating the empty forms of language. Forms, concepts, that pre-exist the subject and will outlive it. Language that streams without it - without you or I - but to which we owe what we can be. The murmuring of language that streams behind us like the tail of a comet, and streams after us, the tail of other comets, speakers, who come to themselves as you came, and so did I.

But is there a way in which the subject might also disappear, losing the place it seems to have achieved - and even its own subjectivity? Or rather, alongside the subject, might one not think of another locus of experience, this time as it belongs to a streaming of the empty forms of language over which the 'I' has no power? Such is what Foucault asks us to think in his essay, 'The Thought Fom Outside'.

2. Foucault reflects on the Cretan Epimenides' statement 'all Cretans are liars'. Is Epimenides speaking the truth? This question generates what logicians have called the self-referential paradox, which can be solved, says Foucault, if we understand how a distinction is made in this statement 'between two propositions, the first of which is the object of the second'. The sincerity of the Cretan is called in question by the content of what he says; he may be lying about lying.

But this depends upon the idea that the speaking subject is simply the speaker about which it speaks - to speak is also to say that you speak. And yet, the position of the 'I speak' is not assured. Foucault finds in this simple statement also 'an absolute opening through which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject - the "I" who speaks - fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space'. Language cannot be tied to the form of the 'I', and as such, Epimenides' statement is not longer part of any system of representation.

In short, it is no longer discourse and the communication of meaning, but a spreading forth of language in its raw state, an unfolding of pure exteriority. And the subject that speaks is less the responsible agent of a discourse (what holds it, what uses it to assert and judge, what sometimes represents itself in it by means of a grammatical form designed to have that effect) than a nonexistence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues.

How do we access this exteriority of language? How does it reveal itself, language as the outside?

Foucault's essay concerns literature, and specifically the work of Blanchot. It is Blanchot who would have revealed to us, in his fiction and criticism, the play of the outside. And of course it is from Blanchot the word outside comes, but to name what? A simple answer would be to say what revealed itself to him as he wrote literature, and as early as his first fictions. This, I think would be the answer of those for whom his relationship to philosophy followed his own experience and was secondary to it. But as Steve quotes him,

To write in ignorance of the philosophical horizon, - or refusing to acknowledge the punctuation, the groupings and separations determined by the words that mark this horizon - is necessarily to write with facile complacency (the literature of elegance and good taste).

The philosophical horizon was formed, for Blanchot, by Heidegger, by Hegel (Kojeve's Hegel); there was also the encounter with Bataille and Levinas ... Whenever I think of the notion of the outside, it is with reference to the notion of interiority that we continue to find in Heidegger, which is thought in terms of 'mineness' - upon the hollow of the 'I', albeit an 'I' stretched into the future, distended - an 'I' that is given in terms of the possibilities that lie open before it, and the projection, the temporal transcendence against which things unfold.

For the early Levinas, the relation to being is impersonal; it does not allow mineness to be hollowed out, but, when it is encountered directly, undoes the form of the 'I' that Heidegger's being elects it to be. Dense formulations! A paragraph where there should be a book! But the 'I' for Levinas emerges out of a prior field - emerges, but can also fall back there, into the pell-mell that precedes the subject and that always threatens to return.

This is why, for Levinas, being is a threat, and is to be thought of in terms of possession, of impersonal participation; existence is not a leap into the future, a projection on the basis of the prior leap of transcendence, but the result of a struggle, ever active and ongoing, whose achievement is the sense of a future we as human beings hold before us precariously and, too often, in delusion.

Something similar holds for Blanchot, but the tone is different - being, existence without existents, is encountered not only in horror, but in a kind of melting delight - there is joy (as Bataille might say) in the little deaths that deliver each of us over to possession, to dispossession. Which is, perhaps, only to say that Blanchot revives the ancient sense of inspiration as it implies another, stronger force with which the artist must be in contact: an alien power, masked by figures of gods or Muses, that asks of the would be-creator that he or she must first undergo a loss of self, an exposure.

It is only by returning from this initial detour that creation can begin; the stamp of the artist upon the work depends first of all on that contact - possessing, dispossessing - with what Blanchot also calls (confusingly, provocatively) the work, meaning by this (paradoxically) being as it draws the creator from existence, as it interrupts that projection, that plan, according to which the finished artwork is to be made.

Contacting being, touching it, hearing it, pressed against it - which is to say nothing at all, for there is no 'it', only chaos, only a pell mell, only that turning over and over of what has no final shape or form - there is, for a moment at least (a moment that does not endure in the time of possibility, of the ability to be able, but turns it aside) no ec-stasis of the subject, no future ...

Sometimes, Blanchot will call this désoeuvrement. The artist's plan, the strength of his or her powers gives way to worklessness, to unworking. What Blanchot calls the work is exactly this: worklessness, the inability to work. That is his version of Levinas's account of the horror of being, just as Levinas's account is his version of the experience Blanchot places at the heart of writing, of artistic creation. Levinas and Blanchot, thinking together, suffering apart but in another way together, formulated these thoughts together, and each in his own way.

Yes that is what I think of with the notion of the outside: an account of an experience that falls outside of the form of the self and that requires an ontology, a metaphysics, than Heidegger's (and which I have not begun to sketch here, pointing lazily and shorthandedly to its results).

3. It is this experience that lies at the heart of Blanchot's fiction and his criticism, which, it should be remembered, broadens to encompass the plastic arts as well as the written ones (and even touches upon music). I think it is this criticism Foucault remembers when he sketches a genealogy of literary experience as the outside.

Sade and Hölderlin, for him, introduce an experience of the outside, 'the former by laying desire bare in the infinite murmur of discourse, the latter by discovering that the gods had wandered off through a rift in language as it was in the process of losing its bearings' that would be uncovered in its implications only subsequently. These contemporaries of Kant and Hegel wanted other than to interiorise the world, humanising nature and naturalising the human being, or to overcome alienation: they belonged outside the history of humanism.

The same in Nietzsche and Mallarmé at the end of the nineteenth century, respectively in the discovery, respectively, that metaphysics is tied to its grammar, and with the idea that poetry demands the speaker's disappearance. And it reappears in the twentieth century with Artaud, for whom the cry and the body rends discursive language, in Bataille, who performs the rupture of subjectivity, and in Klossowski, in whose work the double, the simulacra, multiply the 'Me' into dispersal.

But Blanchot, Foucault writes,

is perhaps more than just another witness to this thought. So far has he withdrawn into the manifestation of his work, so completely is he, not hidden by his texts, but absent from their existence and absent by virtue of the marvellous force of their existence, that for us he is that thought itself - its real, absolute distant, shimmering, invisible presence, its necessary destiny, its inevitable law, its calm, infinite, measured strength.

4. Foucault's text is published in Critique in 1966, a special volume dedicated to Blanchot. Paul de Man recalled that contributors to the journal were told to hurry: Blanchot, gravely ill, was going to die at any moment; of course Blanchot survived de Man and Foucault, dying only in 2003.

Blanchot himself, it has been said, offered to meet Foucault (he had been instrumental in getting Madness and Civilisation published); but his younger admirer, who said he once wanted to be Blanchot refused, wanting to maintain the mystery. Whether it is true or not, it reflects what Foucault observes in the paragraph above: Blanchot absent in such a way that his work was allowed to stand in his place, and this not by accident.

True, Blanchot made several important political interventions in the late 50s and early 60s, as he would again during the events of May 1968 (where he would meet Foucault, but without telling him who he was, since this would be to go against the implicit rule of the Events: that each was to act anonymously, refusing (Sartre was frustrated by this) to draw on fame and prestige), but he was removed from the intellectual circles of which other intellectuals were a part.

He'd spent most of the previous decade in isolation in a small town on the south coast of France, writing the works for which he was now renowned; soon enough (after May), he would retreat into near total reclusion (though he still saw some friends). And this is not by chance. In his refusal of publicity, interviews, providing photographs, Blanchot lived in consistency with his theory of literature, which insisted on the priority of depersonalisation - not of the ecstasis of the human being, but of the other ecstasis revealed in art (but not only in art).

Blanchot's retreat is an attempt to live in consistency with the implications of this other ecstasis - with this outbreak of being in the raw, without existents, to which the author owes his or her existence. How could Blanchot lay claim, in his own name, to what his fictions and criticism revealed, when it was his own name that had to be lost for them to be realised, his own name, and ours, too, as readers, if we are able to be touched by the outside, if it rises to the surface of those pages to meet us.

This is why Blanchot above all is not just another witness to the thought of the outside. But what kind of thought is this? Not, it is clear, the thought 'I exist' - to experience language as the outside with Blanchot is to be unable to say with Descartes, 'I am, I exist' - to write, or voice the Cogito. That it is written, or spoken, means it also slips away from the form of the 'I' as it seems to come to itself in language. The knot is untied - language is experienced in its dispersal there where the 'I' once was. Or rather, the 'I' is the gap, the silence, that lets the echo of another experience of language resound - that murmur without determination, that rustling that does not resolve itself into words.

Language itself - but as it has retreated from anything that can be uttered by a determinate subject. Language itself - but what, then, is it? Observe Foucault's distinction here:

Language, its every word, is indeed directed at contents that preexist it; but in its own being, provided that it holds as close to its being as possible, it only unfolds in the pureness of the wait. Waiting is directed at nothing: any object that could gratify it would only efface it.

In its own being: Foucault allows what is said by language to be separated by its own saying, its own happening. Contentful language, language as it refers, as it points to the world, is distinguished from language itself, language in its being, which is said to wait, but for nothing in particular. To wait - to remain beneath, behind, but also present in what is said by way of language.

What would it mean to refer to the being of language? Perhaps something similar to what is named by being - by impersonal being, by being as horror or being as dispossessing. It is the being of language that is experienced by Blanchot, according to Foucault. Language, then, as it forbids that ecstasis that would animate it and allow it to say what the 'I' would want. Language that pushes back, that reaches towards us by way of its own ecstasis, allowing us to read, but only insofar as we too are read; allowing us to express ourselves, but only as it expresses itself, reaching great pseudopodia into our mouth and lungs, and up through our typing fingers. Language like a sleeping giant whose dream is that world in which we can speak and hear, read and write. Yes, that is what Foucault points to when he writes of the being of writing, and thinks language as the outside.

5. But what does Foucault mean by the thought of the outside, the very title of his essay? To think is to grasp, is it not? To think is to subsume the singular to the particular, and the particular to the universal. It is a matter of the concept, of the general, of abstracting from the concrete and the specific. And thinking involves the unfolding of a human capacity: it is something of which we are capable, that opens from our innate capacity as homo sapiens: we, alone among animals, are able to truly think; thought lies within our power, and it is thus we conquered the world and flew to the moon.

But is there another thought and another thinking? Is there a way in which we might be dispossessed by thought, that the being of thinking has hatched its eggs in our brains? Can it be said that another thinks in us, in our place, usurping the place of the 'I' - our place?

Inspired thinking is older than philosophy, and returns to haunt it. What else was Socrates doing when he stood rapt on the porch of Agathon? Communing with his diamon. Perhaps there is a kind of thought that is likewise diamonic - not, now, as it names contact with the gods, but with what the gods had always hidden. For Foucault's Holderlin, the gods disappear through a rift in language, and it is this rift that the diamonic might also name.

The power to think is not always ours. Or rather, thinking implies another thinker in us but away from us, a double who thinks in our place. Is this what is meant by the thought from outside? Is it this exposed double who thinks in our place, displacing us? Are we thought as well as thinkers; is thinking passive and not only active, and all the way to the depths of the unconscious? Strange the name of Freud is absent, here, from Foucault's meditation - for what else is the unconscious but lost thoughts, dissevered from their affects?

To Blanchot, for Foucault belongs to another kind of thinking. 'It is extremely difficult to find a language faithful to this thought', notes Foucault. Theoretical reflection will tend to incorporate the outside in the interiority of the thinker'. Thinking is measured by the thinking 'I'; the 'I think' linked to the 'I am' of the thinker. How, then, to speak of another kind of thinking, that attests not to the 'I am' but to another locus of thought - to the bearer of the fact of thinking, of the that-there-is-thinking? How to invoke the passion of thought?

Literature, the language of inspiration is an alternative. But literature is all too ready to fall back into readymade images 'that stitch the old fabric of interiority back together in the form of an imagined outside': the outside is imagined by not experienced; the prose of a tale is not affected by what it would represent. Might one dream of a prose that is at one with what is experienced?

Foucault goes on to write incomparably about Blanchot's fictions and his criticisms. Like many of the essays in this great period of philosophy, it is almost too dazzling to read ... searing the reader, reducing him or her to silence. And like those essays, it exhibits a dizzying density, as though awaiting a calmer, darker age in which its meanings will be unfolded. Ah the style of the école normale - if that's what it is! Casual brilliance, luminous density and - style: so much more beautiful than what is possible today (at least in my imagination). Who wrote these works? Who published them?

Let me leap impatiently to the pages where Foucault reads Blanchot under two headings - attraction and the companion. What does this mean?

The song of the Sirens, in Blanchot's famous retelling of the story from the Iliad, is, Foucault says, 'but the attraction of song' - it is nothing in itself, but a kind of promise. But what does it offer Ulysses? 'nothing other than a duplicate of what he has lived through, known, and suffered, precisely what he himself is'. The song is a name for language, which must mean and refer. It seduces - but it draws you towards destruction - to that death, that work of negativity upon which language depends, in which the immediate is taken up into language, and that blooming tree before you is no longer, in discourse, that tree.

The singular becomes a particular, and, as such, a participant in those universal forms that lift themselves from the here and now of sensuous immediacy. An operation that depends on what Hegel has called negation or death. But for the artist, of whom Ulysses as hero is a figure, it is the power of negation that itself fascinates, and the sailor would have himself lashed to the mast of his ship in order to hear what has summoned others to their deaths.

To hear the song of the Sirens as the work of negativity, to seize it as what it is, as pure power, pure possibility, allowing the artist to seize upon a Language more essential than language - lifting the poetic word from the crude currency of everyday speech. But language must nevertheless mean; it must refer - negativity, the inverse of the world of stable and enduring meanings, asks as its price the death of the artist as hero.

Then Ulysses' boat is wrecked as others were before it; he drowns - even as, at the same time, he survives. Time divides in two - or rather, we must speak of time and its other, and of the other time that speaks of itself in the language that Ulysses, becoming, as Blanchot images, Homer, and sitting down to write his memoirs, cannot help but use to speak of his trials.

Beyond everything he narrates, beyond his personal history, language speaks of itself, and therefore of his drowning. Language speaks and subtracts author and narrator from the tale. Language speaks and who speaks - no longer Ulysses, no longer the hero, but the narrative voice that conceals itself as a récit in the telling of literary works. It is this voice that attracts the writer, and that attracts readers, too.

Attraction, then, is what draws the author to realise a work, and holds sway over the reader. For Blanchot, creation depends upon a dispossession; the work has a double sense, naming the completed artefact, and the relation to language as the outside upon which the literary work depends (there is also a sense in which the outside can be used with reference to plastic art).

What, then, of the figure of the companion? Ulysses is lured from himself as hero, as the writer in the first person ... and the 'il' endures in his place (endures the vacancy of his place, as it waits eternally for the 'I' to return. Waits as the lapping of the 'I', like the 'subject' of Klosswski's eternal return, reborn eternally as no one ...)

The companion names the double, the other, drowned Ulysses, the other who takes my place, being close to me, attracting me, fatal but also alluring. But repelling me in the same movement, pushing me back so I can preserve myself as 'I' - both at once, once and the same and neither one nor the other (ne uter).

Foucault:

The movement of attraction and the withdrawal of the companion lay bare what precedes all speech, what underlies all silence: the continuous streaming of language. A language spoken by no one: any subject it may have is no more than a grammatical fold. A language not resolved by any silence: any interruption is only a white stain on its seamless sheet. It opens a neutral space in which no existence can take root.

A neutral space, the space of the ne uter - the alternation between 'I' and 'il' where existence can never be sure of itself, of its own power: this is what resounds in the language of the récit and makes of the narrative voice no more than 'a grammatical fold'. A fold, a pleat of a single surface - interiority is only that pocket hollowed out in a prior, seamless field, and that, as hollow can also be turned outside, its crease ironed away. Interiority as the alveoli of the lung, a glove finger that can be unfolded and smoothed out ...

Pitted Against Everything

One Speaks

'In the beginning was the Word'. The Word, Logos. But what if there were no beginning, and no Logos, only logoi in the plural? Speech, says Sinthome, does not simply instantiate the transcendental structure of language, as though language as such and in general exists before and after its speakers. The structure itself is in the individuals who speak, even as it cannot be reduced to any one individual speaker. As an emergent pattern, it has a kind of agency of its own, depending upon the relations of feedback that give it a ever-provisional substance, letting it quiver above a particular community of speakers like a rainbow over a waterfall.

That is what a language is, or an idiom, and as it quivers, it changes, too; its life does not depend upon an act of History [Geschichte], as it does for Heidegger. True, a language can come close to death, to routine, to ruts well worn; but language can also be reborn, it gives itself to other uses as it is nothing other than this giving, abandoning itself to those uses that flicker between speakers. Between them, and not in them - language is not an interior affair, but belongs to our interrelation. Between us, and floating among the assemblage of which we are a part - the network of practices, of institutions that mean our utterances are collective and never simply individual, that we must be thought together with others, as part of a whole that we speak when we speak.

Not 'I speak', the linguistic cogito then, but 'we speak'. But not that, either, for it is not that a collective subject replaces the individual one. An assemblage is not a 'we', a collection of individuals; when I speak it is to enage the 'one speaks' of language - to engage, speaking in the first person, but also to be engaged, so that it is language that speaks of itself. Of itself: but as that structure that cannot be reduced to the individuals that speak it, which has a consistency, a patterning confirmed and deepened by those movements of feedback between us.

One speaks - the collective, the quivering rainbow, rooted in nothing and spanning through nothing. Language like a swarm of midges over a river. Or like the flashing light on the river's surface. But in Deleuze's ontology, there is no river, or there is only flashing, only clouds and clouds of midges. Language nothing yet, nothing in itself, but that floats through an assemblage and cannot be thought in its absence. Nothing in itself, but still more than the individuals who speak it. Nothing - and much less than the enunciation of the Word, the Logos that stands at the beginning of everything.

Trust

No logos, as Sinthome says, but only local and emergent logoi. Logoi at different levels of scale and temporality, converging and diverging in different waves. And language as only one way in which these logoi can be thought.

The early Heidegger allows logos to translate Rede, discourse, using these words to indicate the common, shared world of which we are part and that lends itself to particular articulations. Rede is to be rigorously distinguished from Gerede, chatter; we will lose the things themselves by our idle talk. But if talk is never idle, if the logos is constituted by what we say such that language is not understood merely to articulate but to act? If the shared world is also what is made by particular uses of language (particular logoi in which language is engaged and engages us)?

Then perhaps there is a way of reclaiming for ourselves the efficacy of language, of speaking in a new way, not in a new language, but letting the old one resound differently. To disarticulate language, to discover the breaks at the level of syntax, to discover (to let there be discovered) a new style (a language within language, a rainbow that leaps up from the streaming of language) ...

Acts of reading and writing, says Sinthome, are not the acts of a disembodied spirit who would judge, select, reject, dismiss ... If the mind is the brain, reading leaves a physical trace; texts enter and interpenetrate me; I cannot have done with them even when I think I've had done with them. And so we've all been all the names in history; discourses by a million writers have coursed through us.

So too with writers, who have so many other writers in them, part of them. For a long time, I suppose a writer felt part of the tradition of these predecessors; the aim was to renew existing idioms, to give life to existing forms. With modernity, the burden on the artist changes: is it sufficient to trust the judgement of others with respect to his work? his own instinct? The latter seems more authorative than the former - and yet a modern artist like Kafka, as Josipovici has said, 'seem to have been able to develop and grow through an innate trust in the act of writing itself, in their willingness to embrace confusion and uncertainty and to find a new voice in the process'.

A new voice: the young Miles Davis tells his father he's dropping out of Julliard to play in jazz clubs. That's okay so long as you find your own style, says his father, or at least this is what's recounted in the autobiography. Your own style, your voice: then is style to be conceived in terms of individuality, as the mark of an original artist? Is it the result of deliberate effort, to be worked at or improved?

For Deleuze, style is to be thought as a way an idiom (language, music, painting ...) might be inhabited, and not in terms of the activity of a particular person. As Lecercle puts it in his account of Deleuze's thought, 'the subject is not the origin, but the effect of her style: the author does not have style, it is style that has an author, that is inscribed, and in a way embodied, in an author's name'. The subject can be understood as an individual, to be sure - as this author, this musician - but it is also a collective, an assemblage that speaks through her. 'If there is a subject, it is a subject without identity', Deleuze writes.

Then what, in this context, does it mean to place one's trust in writing, as opposed to the authoritative judgements of others? What of the significance of being found by style (of letting a new voice float through an assemblage), and affirming it in turn? In the beginning was the Word, the Logos - but what of the logoi that are born with style?

Leaning Against the Wind

An example. The 8 year old Thomas Bernhard is cycling, and cycling as far and as fast as he can. His bicycle belongs to his guardian, but he has reclaimed it as his own, painting it silver and cycling around the countryside. Today he has resolved to visit his Aunt in Salzburg, 22 miles away. It's a long trip; how can a child cycle this far, and on his own? But as little Bernhard does so, it is with the dream of joining the cycling elite, even though he's too small to reach the pedals while he is sitting on the saddle.

The 8 year old knows his trip is forbidden, that he might be punished, but he thinks his audacity will be so admired it will annul his offence. One of his stockings is torn and covered with oil; he grows weary, and the road seems to become ever longer. Then - disaster - his bicycle chain breaks, and he tumbles into a ditch. It's dark, and there are 7 or 8 miles to go, his bike is ruined and his clothes are torn ...

Reading, rereading Gathering Evidence, I imagine the mature Bernhard as an action painter, spilling great loops of paint on a canvas laid flat. Great iterative loops, again and again, but each time growing wilder, more hyperbolic, stretching the sentence. Bernhard has his eye like Pollock on the whole of the composition, but if there is structural cohesion, exemplary control, it is cohesion in collapse, and into which every detail is caught up. The book turns like a whirlwind, gathering in its massive sentences all and everything such that there is never a distinct compositional focus, and no detail matters more than any other; there's only the whole, the all-at-once that is reaffirmed on the canvas of each of his books.

So with Bernhard's narration of his cycling trip. The trip is the prose; to cycle like Kafka's Red Indian, leaning into the wind is also to write against the good sense of writing. The effort of the 8 year old to climb upon on his silver-painted bike is the same as the 50 year old who writes the last volume of his memoirs ...

The maelstrom of the prose is the maelstrom of language; Bernhard writes against the wind, against style in the effort of the prose, its forward movement as it gathers everything up in its momentum. How did he arrive at it, his style? By working at it, improving it - by mastering a literary skill? But its controlled madness, held together at the brink of falling apart, the great loops of the sentences rolling spastically forward is not the result of a deliberate organisation of language. Discord, disequilibrium: style strains language all the way to the point of breaking (but it does not break).

Standard language stammers, trembles and cries ... but Bernhard's inimitable style cannot be reduced to the brutality of his experiences. The events his autobiography reports are co-constituted by the manner of their telling; one feeds the other; his life is what his style permits, as it no longer represents the world, but enacts the forces that comprise it. Bernhard who writes as Van Gogh paints stars buried in the wells of night, or Pollock paints looping spirals - it is affect and intensity that dictates the content of his work, even his autobiography. Affect, intensity, as they lead Bernhard to select those events that enact what occurs when he begins to write.

Pitted Against Everything

In An Indication of the Cause, the second part of the English edition of the autobiography (though the first one Bernhard wrote), the 13 year old Bernhard takes up a scholarship in a school in Salzburg, even as the city is bring bombed from the air. Misery sweeps over him; he tries to hang himself. Bernhard's prose is delirious with horror. In the third part, The Cellar, the 15 year old Bernhard drops out of school and takes up a position as a grocer's apprentice in a grim housing project where he would contract tuberculosis.

'I was pitting myself against everything', he writes. Against the school and its teachers, against Salzburg, even against the dreams his beloved grandfather held for his protégé. Yes, against everything and leaning against the wind. The fourth volume, A Breath, does not tell of the first story Bernhard published in 1950, nor of his encounter with his lifeperson, with whom he travelled and as he later recalls, received terse encouragement for his writing.

By the time he published Frost, Bernhard discovers his style, or it finds him, such that as author, as writer, he is pitted against everything- against Salzburg, against Austria, against the Nazi past, against Austrian Catholicism: everything, and these selected, these drawn into the maelstrom of his narratives because of the style that found him and to the level of which he raised himself to be able to write. Ah, that style, that streaming that survives Bernhard and reaches us even in English translation.

In the Cold, the fifth volume, relates Bernhard's mother's painful death from cancer, and his own return from the sanatorium. His grandfather dies too, and he finds the death of his forebear, who laid claim to the tradition of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, liberates his own early attempts to write. Bernhard reads his own poems to his dying mother, and it begins, that leap that takes him past the tradition of his grandfather, past philosophy and the whole of literature. A leap that braces him against the whole of what has become his past. He is the last of his line, he's been picked out. There'll be no other; his style is inimitable, but he is only a vortex in the whorl of his writing. Bernhard is a name for us of a plughole around which all of culture seems to swirl. But how did he pull out the plug?

The Hatred of Writing

It is not that Bernhard confirms, by his writing, the bygone world of which he was once a part and his own place within it. It is that this world is also born from his style: that a kind of hatred arises from the activity of writing. And this more than the hatred for Austria, the Nazis or the Catholic church. Or that swept up that hatred as part of its movement, its perpetual agitation.

Rereading, reflecting, I wonder if it is a surprise that the object of hatred was more fitting for an Austrian postwar writer than for others. The total compromise of authority, of state and church, and perhaps of the German language ... And I think that with Bernhard the hatred that is part of style (the hatred of authority, of cultural models, or of an inherited model of literary style) met with what legitimately called forth hatred in an infinite spiral, rising up into a whirlwind of loathing, and that this was the motor of the storm of his work, that let it swirl into the stormclouds of European modernity.

How did Bernhard come to trust in his style (the style that lent itself to him, and from which as a writer he was born)? Was it through his lifeperson, who supported and encouraged his writing (but discouraged it, too, when necessary - causing him to throw whole manuscripts in the fire)? Was it the memory of his grandfather, who wrote, he said, for the unborn? Or was it as he found the correlate of its perfect storm in the horror that was perpetually reborn in Bernhard's Austria, that fed back into the vast and looping sentences, and looping repetition of his books? But those same sentences were in search of the hatred that could justify them, and how could Bernhard, born of his style live but as he was pitted against everything?

In the beginning was the Word - is that it? Or is it that literature (modern literature, our eternally new modernity) writes against the Word as the good sense of language? In the end (modern literature always belongs to the end, to the last gasp) was the Word and the tearing down of the Word. And at the end, where writing was impossible (for modern literature begins with the impossibility of writing) is also the beginning, the logoi, the thousand styles of those writers who are born from the style they discovered and that discovered them.

Words of Disorder

Things and Their Words

Are we being duped by language, by the circulation it permits of words and things? Perhaps words and things might be other than they are, and we might dream not, perhaps of a new logos, of a way of naming everything anew all at once, but (following Sinthome) of logoi of different levels and different conjunctions with which language (different languages, different idioms) might intersect.

Think, as an example, of the narrator of Handke's Repetition, rereading the study books of his disappeared brother. The brother had grown up speaking German, but learned to write in Slovenian at agricultural school. Until he came across his brother's notebooks, the narrator had been repelled by Slovenian, since it sounded to him menacing and associated with authority, sounding like an ungainly hybrid, full of borrowed words.

But the words in the Slovenian-German dictionary the narrator consults tell the narrator of a tender and peaceable people who still have names for the humblest of things - for the space under the windowsill, or the shiny trace of a braked wagon wheel on a stone flagstone. A people who had names for the intimate and small, for places of hiding and places of safety. And the narrator finds himself weeping for 'things and their words' - for can be named in Slovenian and seem to call in him to look towards a similar kind of naming, a new circulation of words and things in his German.

He finds the word Kindschaft, literally childscape, but which also has the meaning of filiation of adoption. For what is the narrator looking? To rediscover a relation with a people through the notebooks left by his brother, to be sure. But also - since the novel is narrated twenty years after the narrator started reading those notebooks, and has begun his only journey into Slovenia and into Slovenian - to rediscover his relation to German, his filiation.

It is by placing one sentence after another the narrator says at one point that he discovers his forebears (he is named after a Slovenian hero). One German sentence after another, as Slovenian - his brother's Slovenian - awakens in him a new logoi within language, not simply an idiom, but a way of drawing things into that new baptism he discovers in the wind blowing over the Karst region on his remembered journey.

A New Circulation

But how might a new circulation occur for us? Not simply through the agency of particular individuals, by individual agency. In another post, Sinthome argues that the individual must be thought in the context of more complex networks, through whom local connections harden themselves into what is taken for granted in the social world through those feedback loops that reinforce and replicate particular forms of social relation. Does this mean what the individual agent does does not matter? Rather that to think the individual without the structure is to forget the interdependency, the relation of inter-determination between these terms; the same, of course, if one privileges structure, treating it as invariable and eternal, forgetting thereby the fluid dynamism of social relations.

Neither structure nor individual exist in their own right; in the case of language, it cannot be thought either in terms of the exclusivity of the structure - of language in itself, considered at the level of a linguistic structure, that is, as a set of differential oppositions that define phonemic relations, as opposed to speech, in which a particular subset of relations are selected from the system. This means language is never entirely in possession of the individual; it is not 'in' the agent at all. We might say the agent is in language, and that language is a trans-subjective phenomenon.

For Deleuze and Guattari, to whom Sinthome directs us when thinking of structures and individuals, language is not representational, whether this is understood literally, that is, in terms of its exactitude or truth, or figuratively, that is, indirectly (and without the hierarchy between the literal and the figural) ... Language, rather, is in the world acting within it and mixing with it; as such, it does not simply facilitate communication by means of referring to the shared world of a given society, but is itself a structuring process that constructs that world.

Yes, language lends itself to the production of a stable plane of meaning and subjects who communicate that meaning that gives rise to the account of the representational theory of language, but there is also the chance that it introduces an instability into that plane, distributing the relationship between word and world anew. For this relationship is one of circulation rather than representation, according to Lecercle's formulation; words do not signify things, but are themselves things. But how is this circulation to be thought?

Deleuze and Guattari do not take interlocution as it involves a sender, who uses language to convey what is to be said, and a receiver, who listens and might therefore understand as the paradigm case of language. Meaning is not only what is meant; speaker and listener are part of an unstable relation of forces that means the relation between the represented and what would be represented is never simply given.

Language does not represent, but enacts - this is familiar from speech-act theory. But Deleuze and Guattari are reaching beyond the individualism with which, traditionally, this theory has been associated, focusing on the formation of order words or slogans [mots d'ordre] as part of what they call 'a collective assemblage of enunciation' - 'that mixture of bodies, instruments, institutions and utterances, which speaks the speaker'.

As such, their concern is not with meaning, intention or interpretation but with those relations of power [rapports de force] that are ascribed and inscribed by utterances. The origin of language is neither author nor speaker; it is not 'je parle' that matters, but 'on parle', or 'il y a du langage'. It is from the anonymous position of the 'on' that language must be thought.

Indirect Style

This is what they mean by claiming that all language is spoken first of all in an indirect style, which brings us to the section of A Thousand Plateaus quoted by Sinthome:

If language always seems to presuppose itself, if we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic point of departure, it is because language does not operate between something seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to saying.

The point of departure is not the individual who attempts to represent the world, but other narrative, as it forms part of a more complex assemblage. The utterance [énonce], for Deleuze and Guattari the basic unit of their analysis is a social act; it is not first of all declarative, an assertion about a state of affairs, but an order word as it is produced in that mixture that speaks the speaker.

We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to you. Hearsay[....] The 'first' language, or rather the first determination of language, is not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse[....] Language is not content to go from a first party to a second part, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen.

On this model, communication is not the transmission of sign as information about the world, but the 'transmission of the word as order-word'; 'language is a map, not a tracing'. A map - then at issue is a philosophy of language that does without the grammatical subject [sujet de l'énoncé] or even the utterer [sujet de l'énonciation]; it is outside the subject that we find the utterance as it circulates in an assemblage. And likewise, Deleuze and Guattari think the psyche not as enclosed domain, an interiority, but as an exteriority; likewise, the unconscious is not to be found inside but outside us.

Then language is not simply that system of signs that would facilitate communication through reference to a shared world, but is itself a structuring process that constructs a world. A process that can be frozen into the representative conception of language, as it depends upon a stable plane of speaker and spoken, word and world, but that can also take an axe to break up the frozen sea inside us, as Kafka said.

Kindschaft

For what kind of utterance is the narrator of Handke's novel searching? For a people, perhaps - a people in whose rough-hewn features he might discover kinship and beauty. 'Each man of us the next man's hero', he dreams; each alive 'in an immanent word obedient to the laws of weather, of sowing, repeating, and animal diseases, a world apart from, before or alongside history'. For a people - no: for another distribution of words and things in his own language.

And as it occurs, I think, in the story he narrates, even as he speaks of the things and words that call out from him in Slovenian from the heart of his childhood. And this is what makes the narrator (and Handke, too) more than a nostalgist, and the people (the Slovenes) more than those who might be celebrated in a simpleminded nationalism. The people of the Karst through which the narrator travelled became insurrectionaries (the Tolmin uprising); but in the brother's time, they dispersed (taking the brother with them). And in their withdrawal the narrative, the act of narrating (Repetition itself) opens his German to another kind of Kindschaft.

'My purpose had not been to find my brother but to tell a story about him'. To repeat the journey of his brother, retracing it, does not necessitate a literal reduplication. For it is the journey into a language that is being repeated, and the Bildungsroman of his brother's treatise on husbandry. Living this repetition as an encounter with things and their language, letting them dance in that roundplay in which the world us held back for a moment before being baptised anew.

The narrator calls his brother his forebear. It is this forebear who still watches in kindness over him, and over his own starting-out into Slovenia to strengthen his peace and the peace of writing. 'The only effective forebear, this much I know, is the sentence preceding the one I am writing now'.

Who speaks in Handke's novel? What speaks? A Slovenia to come, followers of the one who said 'that the Emperor was a mere servant and that people had better take matters into their own hands'? A Slovenian, giving words to things anew? Or this language as a gap within the narrator's German, between language as it represents and as it acts, and as the novel Repetition is an act, letting words mix with the world? And finally, perhaps, it is writing that speaks as it lets resound the outside of language as it belongs to no one. Who speaks? It speaks; on, one.

I think that this is how the assemblage of which Deleuze and Guattari write quivers into being. Writing is the path that follows itself, and that does so through the books of the world, of which Handke's novel is one. And that writes of itself and sings of itself by way of what is told, and springs up above them like a rainbow. As Mark comments, 'all writing is writing about writing even if it doesn't refer to itself as such' ... About writing, which is to say, itself, its own act, as words become things, as language ranges out into the world, acts ...

And now I imagine writing as the river that has cut itself a valley through that mixture of bodies, instruments, institutions and utterances that form, for Deleuze and Guattari, the collective assemblage of enunciation. Or, better, it is writing that turns each component of this mixture into a line, a river in each and a river as whole. One speaks; language speaks: so speaks the unconscious, outside. So it speaks as writing.

The Writing on the Walls

Can an order word become a word of disorder? Perhaps that is what flashed up on the walls during the Events of May 1968. We might remember the handbills and pamphlets distributed in those weeks from the Committee of Writers which were subsequently published as 'mots de désordre' and identified as the work of Blanchot. As his work - but Blanchot was not alone - there were the other members of the Committee, who worked together to formulate ideas to which they could all sign their names, and of course the participants of the Events themselves.

Tracts, posters, bulletins; street words, infinite words; it is not some concern for effectiveness that makes them necessary. Whether effective or not, they belong to the decision of the moment. They appear, they disappear. They do not say everything, on the contrary they ruin everything, they are outside everything.

There will still be books, and worse still, fine books. But the writing on the walls, a mode that is neither inscriptional not elocutionary, the tracts hastily distributed in the street that are a manifestation of the haste of the street, the posters that do not need to be read but are there as a challenge to all law, the disorderly words, the words, free of discourse, that accompany the rhythm of our steps, the political shouts - and bulletins by the dozen like this bulletin, everything that unsettles, appeals, threatens and finally questions without waiting for a reply, without coming to rest in certainty, will never be confined by us in a book, for a book, even when open, tends towards closure, which is a refined form of repression.

A complex assemblage: the man Blanchot, 'pale but real' as Hollier remembers, the writer part of the Committee (with Duras and others); the stop [arrêt] put to the book, of the liberal-capitalist world with which the Events were a break; what Blanchot calls Communism, intolerable, intractable, as it is excluded from any already constituted community - that foreign party [le parti de l'étranger] that points the way outside - 'out from religion, the family and the State', as Marx said when he called for the end of alienation (of what constitutes the human being as interiority, comments the author of these lines ('Blanchot', an effect of this fragmentary discourse, of language outside ...). 

And isn't this what Deleuze and Guattari seek with their philosophy of language: not only to show that language is already outside, but to point a way that we might live in accordance with what falls outside us?

A community is not a people, says Blanchot. Communism leads us outside all interiorities. Is it possible to read the narrator's Slovenia (and perhaps Handke's) as more than a nationalism, as a celebration of a people (this is something Steve has been discussing for a long time)? And Repetition as being more than a book (what Blanchot names as a book)?

The Tenacity of Speech

Waiting For ...

Two old men are waiting by a leafless tree. Meanwhile, there's time to occupy - but how? Old jokes and pratfalls, comic banter and more sombre set pieces; cross-talk from the music hall, with a straight man and a funny one;  pratfalls and horseplay from the circus. Then there is Pozzo's phonily academic speech with its quaquaquas, its pathos, grandiloquent but also windily empty.

It is as though we are left with Shakespeare's mechanicals but without the action they parody. Endless, issueless, like all comedy, Godot returns ceaselessly to that moment after the banter and horsing about: the shared, same milieu, the same scrap of a world, or of a world worn away to reveal a country road and a tree that on the second day of the action has unaccountably sprouted leaves.

A shared fragment of the world, fateful, inevitable as the waiting place to which the speakers must return: this is what remains in the drama of the piece like a fact. Sooner or later, speech stops and it is the country road, the tree, in leaf or not, that reveals itself, fateful and omnipresent.

Unless it is the other way round, and it is speech to which the two men return - idle speech, empty speech in which there's no topic that cannot be pulverised into material for banter, and it is the dust of words that matter. It is this same inevitability that returns to its place even as one day seems very much like another (but leaves have appeared on the tree), one day like any other spent in waiting (although when Lucky and Pozzo return, the former is on a shorter rope, and the latter has gone blind).

Unless that fatefulness is thought from the banter of Vladmir and Estragon, that is also a kind of waiting, of language as it babbles and murmurs before it becomes firm and decided speech. Of the fact that there is language and that it alters even a milieu as barren as the one Beckett places before us.

Those who look to his play for high seriousness, for the theatre of the absurd, for the absence of God might be unwilling to rest in puerility, but it is in the puerile that it finds its truth and precisely in the absence of its object, the impossibility of that adequation that would let the speakers speak of the thing itself. For the thing itself is that speech and not as it merely reflects a world, but changes it.

Rhubarb, Rhubarb

Beckett's bowler hatted old men fall far short of listening and being silent, which Heidegger commends as the way in which we might become attentive to what is being spoken about, the matters themselves. Idle chatter, he says, forgets that experience of uncovering to which language might attend, as long as it is spoken in one's own name. Gerede, idle chatter, can be returned to Rede, discourse, logos; one might speak as the they-self as it is involved and absorbed in Das Man, anyone, the 'they' or by laying claim to that existence that is always mine.

Then one must move from speaking idly to others, passing the word along to that solicitous speech that exhibits an appropritate considerateness and forebearance, assisting others to lay claim to that potentiality-to-be that permits them to take over their own possibilities. But authenticity, for Heidegger, is only a modification of inauthenticity; there is the risk of falling back into aimless chatter, and therefore of falling away from the things themselves, and therefore from thinking.

In Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno refocuses our attention on idle speech as part of his more general attempt to rethink political praxis. For him, the Fordist conception of production is defunct, but not the Marxian analysis of labour-power which, indeed, completes itself in our world. Why so? Labour power, says Marx, is 'the aggregate of those mental and physical capacities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being'. As such, it is more suitable than ever as a name for the changed conditions of production, which now refers to the most generic aptitudes or capacities that have been mobilised in contemporary capitalism.

As the aggregate of these 'the most generic aptitudes of the mind' - 'the faculty of language, the inclination to learn, memory, the ability to abstract and to correlate, the inclination toward self-reflection', this 'labour as subjectivity' - the potential of the living body can be bought and sold like any other commodity. Life is the productive potential that money as the measure of exchangability can capture - but now as it is understood in terms of 'the totality of poietic, "political", cognitive, emotional forces'.

So it is that the post-Fordist model of production is now projected 'into every aspect of experience, subsuming linguistic competencies, ethical propensities, and the nuances of subjectivity'. Sociability and intelligence are not specialised duties, but dispersed everywhere. Cooperation is the mode of work; we speak and think in the same way, depending upon logical-linguistic constructs, upon linguistic and cognitive habits in potentia.

Virno's broader aim is to indicate the possibility of a retrieval of the recapture of human potential. Why, then, his appeal to idle speech? Precisely because it is without foundation, without a secured correspondence to what Heidegger might think as the things themselves, idle talk points to the chance of the invention and experimentation, to a kind of communication that does not merely reflect the world as it is, but acts to transform it.

Considered for itself, idle talk 'resembles background noise', Virno says; it is quite insignificant, and yet it is also that repository for 'significant variances, unusual modulations, sudden articulations ...'; a noise that is no longer linked to anything specific, as a drill is to drilling, the roar of an engine to a motorbike, but to the aimlessness of chatter.

Think of the 'rhubarb, rhubarb' of the extras who speak behind the main actors. It is the background from which speech emerges and that speech carries with it that is important.

The Virtuoso

Reading Sinthome, we can understood how this background is found between language and the agent as each term is precipitated out of their interaction as that space of engagement in which each term is altered. It is a question neither of agent nor world by themselves, but their interaction, understood as an emergence in which we cannot distinguish the active from the passive as, for example, Kant does in the distinction between the spontaneity of the understanding and the passive receptivity of the aesthetic of intuition.

How to think that receptivity that involves both an aesthesis, understood etymologically as a sensing and the production of form that might be thought in terms of an aesthetic making? Sinthome gives us the example of the artist who gives form to the medium which in turn gives form to the artist, joining both aesthesis and what we know as aesthetics. In a sense, we produce ourselves as a product and as that changing locus of production we also are. But that also means we are produced - and that production sets itself back from a particular faculty that might be exercised through an act of will.

As such, it is unsurprising to see Virno appeal to the figure of virtuosity to think the 'between' of speaker and language, as a generic faculty of the human being that is part of the armory of labour power, of what Marx called the 'general intellect' as it operates without script, being improvisational and open ended. But it is, Virno explains, precisely in its capacity to improvise that virtuosity becomes servile, handing over the generic potentials of life to labour power.

How might one engage the performativity of language? What remains of it as a capacity to transform the world. Perhaps idle speech provides a clue. The idle speaker is the dunce of language - one might think of Shakespeare's mechanicals, of Hardy's peasants, or of the figure of the idiots, who always come in pairs, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wandering the halls of Elsinore castle, or Vladmir and Estragon by the side of the country road. The dunce is also the philosopher's double, the buffoon always returning, as in Nietzsche's Zarathustra, to trump seriousness, supplanting the affirmative 'yes' to the lightness and laughter of singing and dancing by an ass's yee-haw. And the idiot is also the repository of prejudice - the lynch mob, the basest manifestation of the commons that Hobbes so fears.

As such, Virno's multitude may appear to be the idiotic double of the lumpenproletariat Marx compares to the sober and reader working class - Napoleon's army in rags, those thieves and scoundrels who are the botched double of those ready for revolution. But Virno's working class do not stand opposed to the multitude he attempts to think; it is just that with the broadening of the notion of production, the nature of engagement, too, must change.

Until language, one of the faculties of labour power is understood no longer to simply facilitate the transmission of relevant information between sender and addressee on the basis the common understanding of the world, but as it grants the chance of a new sense of what is held is common.

The Tenacity of Speech

Language, for Virno, does not describe the world or represent it, but changes it, selecting and making salient that slice of chaos to which it gives consistency. Virtuosity, then, is not rendered servile; it escapes that absolute interweaving of the pre-individual with the individual - the complete fit between potential and execution where all the powers of the human being are bent towards productivity. But how does it do so? In what way does it manifest itself? As what is rejected, excluded, idle ...

A clarificatory point from Sinthome: 'To ask what someone's research or philosophy is, is to ask them to simultaneously formulate a proposition and state the sense of that proposition. Yet I can say what I mean or mean what I say, but I cannot say what I mean and mean what I say.' Then I only know what I'm working on once I've finished work; the preface to a book, making sense of the project as a whole, comes after the fact, after the book is complete. But how do I make sense of the commonplace, without which there would be no sense? How to render the murmuring of language explicit?

I can only know the pro-ject as a re-ject, as what will have already have happened for speech to get underway. But can I ever say the sense of what I say - of what is said by means of speech, and by means of those commonplaces that permit speech? This is the importance of idle speech: it is set back into the invisible commons that unites us before and beneath what is grasped as labour power.

In the end, the tenacity of speech is positionless, ungrounded, the play of shadows on the walls of the cave. It appears only after the fact, doubling up what is said by way of moving away from the background of the hubbub of speech, bubbling and fermenting without issue.

(Sense, for Heidegger, depends upon that which we project - our understanding of something which grants our entry into what is possible for us, for each of us. Is the re-ject, here, a name for what he calls thrownness, for the fact that we always find ourselves in a given situation, and ultimately that we exist at all? For the thrownness into language that cannot be taken up in what leaps ahead of us? As project we are still in the throw, as it draws us back into what is impossible to grasp and mobilise. And in the throw of what is named as idle speech, that Cratylean river which undoes the being-there of the speaker. Dasein given to the Dasein of language, as it cannot be spoken in the first person. And this being-there of language given between us, in that space named by the tenacity of speaking ...)

(Sense, for Hegel, perhaps, that is given at those moments when what has happened assembles itself into a thesis - when it comes together to reveal itself as a position. Sense looks for itself, pro-jecting itself ahead. But there is the threat of what remains as non-position which is never simply antithetical. The return of the re-ject, of the blindness of unformed matter, of worklessness and not work ... the Egypt of Absolute Spirit, of blocky architecture in art, of the murk of language lacking form, and this spoken between us, shared, as it delimits the possibil