This is not my favorite translation, I prefer Paul Schmidt’s, but oh well….

The Parisian Orgy

O cowards, there she is! Pile out into the stations! The sun with its fiery lungs blew clear  The boulevards that one evening the Barbarians filled. Here is the holy City, seated in the West!    Come! we’ll stave off the return of the fires, Here are the quays, here are the boulevards, here Are the houses against the pale, Radiant blue-starred, one evening, by the red flashes of bombs!  Hide the dead palaces with forests of planks! Affrighted, the dying daylight freshens your looks. Look at the red-headed troop of the wrigglers of hips: Be mad, you’ll be comical, being haggard!  Pack of bitches on heat, eating poultices, The cry from the houses of gold calls you. Plunder! Eat! See the night of joy and deep twitchings Coming down on the street. O desolate drinkers,  Drink! When the light comes, intense and crazed, To ransack round you the rustling luxuries, You’re not going to dribble into your glasses, Without motion or sound, with your eyes lost in white distances?  Knock it back, to the Queen whose buttocks cascade in folds! Listen to the working of stupid tearing hiccups! Listen to them leaping in the fiery night The panting idiots, the aged, the nonentities, the lackeys!  O hearts of filth, appalling mouths, Work harder, mouths of foul stenches! Wine for these ignoble torpors, at these tables… Your bellies are melting with shame, O Conquerors!  Open your nostrils to these superb nauseas! Steep the tendons of your necks in strong poisons! Laying his crossed hands on the napes of your childish necks The Poet says to you: “O cowards! be mad!  Because you are ransacking the guts of Woman, You fear another convulsion from her, Crying out, and stifling your infamous perching On her breast with a horrible pressure.  Syphilitics, madmen, kings, puppets, ventriloquists, What can you matter to Paris the whore, Your souls or your bodies, your poisons or your rags? She’ll shake you off, you pox-rotten snarlers!  And when you are down, whimpering on your bellies, Your sides wrung, clamouring for your money back, distracted, The red harlot with her breasts swelling with battles Will clench her hard fists, far removed from your stupor!  When your feet, Paris, danced so hard in anger! When you had so many knife wounds; When you lay helpless, still retaining in your clear eyes A little of the goodness of the tawny spring,  O city in pain, O city almost dead, With your face and your two breasts pointing towards the Future Which opens to your pallor its thousand million gates, City whom the dark Past could bless:  Body galvanized back to life to suffer tremendous pains, You are drinking in dreadful life once more! You feel The ghastly pale worms flooding back in your veins, And the icy fingers prowling on your unclouded love!  And it does you no harm. The worms, the pale worms, Will obstruct your breath of Progress no more Than the Stryx could extinguish the eyes of the Caryatides From whose blue sills fell tears of sidereal gold.”  although it is frightful to see you again covered in this fashion; although no city was ever made into a more foul-smelling Ulcer on the face of green Nature, The Poet says to you:”Your Beauty is Marvellous!”  The tempest sealed you in supreme poetry; The huge stirring of strength comes to your aid; Your work comes to the boil, death groans, O chosen City! Hoard in your heart the stridors of the ominous trumpet.  The Poet will take the sobs of the Infamous, The hate of the Galley slaves, the clamour of the Damned; And the beams of his love will scourge Womankind. His verses will leap out: There’s for you! There! Villains!  - Society, and everything, is restored: – the orgies Are weeping with dry sobs in the old brothels: And on the reddened walls, the gaslights in frenzy, Flare balefully upwards to the wan blue skies!  May 1871

Jacques Ranciere
Misadventures of Universality

       Thank you to Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Joseph Backstein and to the Biennale foundation. I shall bring out my subject by focusing on some statements and spectacles from another art Biennale that I visited last week in Seville, in Spain. The curator of that biennale in Seville was also the curator of the last ‘Documenta’ in Kassel, Kozui Enwezor, gave to the gathering of the artists and works a far-ranging objective court: “to unmask those machineries that decimate and waste social economic and political interconnection looking for a return to a logics of totalisation .” So, the question which the Biennale should address was: “how could, how can art play an integral and not only peripheral role in relation to the global challenge that affects both the artistic production and reception, especially in light of the damaging effects of reactionary conservative and fundamentalist politics in all social structures of the world today.” So, such statements affirm a will to oppose postmodern scepticism and resume a certain form of “universalist” view of art and politics and of the connection and attempt to challenge the machineries of dissociation, to restore a sense of universality and intelligibility, of the interconnections that frame a global world.
       But this clear commitment to an enlightened view of the global world seemed to be questioned from the very beginning by the title chosen for that Biennale, this title was: ‘The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society’. It transpired as though the global view on the global world, advocated as a purpose of the exhibition, could not be but a matter of ghosts. It transpired as though the old Brechtian will to make the “homely” strange in order to provoke a fresh gaze on the contradictions of our world was overshadowed by the darkness of the Freudian “unhomelyness”. This wavering between two meanings of “unhomeliness” was strongly emphasized by the first works proposed to the visitors. They were series of photographs and installations focusing on the war in Iraq and the antiwar protests in Western countries. Close to the photographs of the horrors of the civil war made by the freelance Iraqui reporter Ghaith Abdul-Ahad we could see photographs of anti-war protests in New York and Washington made by the German born New York based artist Josephine Meckseper. On one of those photographs we could see some protesters holding banners in the background. As for the foreground, it shows us an overfilled dustbin, the content of which falls to the ground. The title of the photograph is “Untitled”. A title, which in such a context means: no title is needed because the image is more telling than any discourse. 
       This image clearly points to the ambivalence of the “unhomely”. On the one hand it belongs to the tradition of collage. It is not collage in the technical sense of the word but it belongs to the aesthetics of collage that chooses to play on the shock of heterogeneousness if not contradictory elements. But aesthetics was often implemented in the past as a means of producing political consciousness. Among the artists who used it in that way there was another New York based artist Martha Rosler who made in the 70’s her well-known series “Bringing war home” by pasting together photographs of the atrocities in Vietnam and advertising images of American petty-bourgeois interiors. Josephine Meckseper’s photograph may thus look as an ironic answer to Rosler’s series, as she pours the overflow of American consumerism into the way of the protesters that want to bring the Afghanistan or Iraqi war home. What is at issue is not the intention of the artist. What is at issue is a twist that has occurred in the practice of collage, which is also a twist in the meaning given to “unhomeliness”. Rosler’s collage, thirty years ago, was predicated on the heterogeneity of the opposite: the image conflated two opposite worlds, one of them was the hidden truth of the other, but also it conflated them in order to show that they could not go together. The image of the little nude Vietnamese girl shouting ahead of the soldiers on the roads of her wasted country could not go with the image of the American cosy interior without exploding it. The universality of the struggle for emancipation was supposed to break through the universality of the market. Meckseper’s “collage”, on the contrary, is predicated on homogeneity: the world of consumption is no more alien to the world of the struggle. The anti-war protest brings war home, in its way, but it brings it in a space where it is at home in a space of struggle that is itself a territory of consumption. Forty years ago Jean-Luc Godard already made fun of the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola”. But when they marched against the war in Vietnam, the children of Marx and Coca-Cola were fighting with the children of Marx. The little Vietnamese girl did not shout only for grief but also for struggle and victory. Now the protesters can no more identify with the fighters of the other side, no more march for their victory. The Iraqi victims turn out to be only victims of the empire of Coca-Cola, and the protesters are only fighting against that empire, or as a risk of perceiving and making us perceive that this empire ultimately turns out to be the empire of their own consumption. 

       So, the “phantom scenes of global power” show us the circularity of a worldwide complicity: the protest is organized against the terrorism of the “war on terror”, made by the empire of consumption that throws its shells on Mid-eastern towns. The shells are response to the terror of the attack of the towers. The attack itself had been displayed as the spectacle of the collapse of the empire. The protesters in turn have consumed the images of the collapse of the towers, the image of the bombing in Iraq and what they offer in the streets is a spectacle too, performed by consumers of spectacular horrors and diet coke. Ultimately terrorism and consumption, protest and spectacle are shown as part of the same process, a process governed by the law of the commodity which is the law of equivalence. 
       Needless to say, this process of homogenisation, this way of erasing any difference between the ways of domination and the ways of protest in the creation of a work which will be displayed and sold by Saatchi can be granted as a pervasive critique of our “global world” where the anti-commodity protests are marketed in the same way as commodity performances. And apparently it was the idea that made the curator decide to display Meckseper’s works as a kind of introduction to the ground thematic of the biennale. What interests me is not to suspect the intentions of the artist or the curator. What matters to me is this horizon of suspicion on the background of which the works of the former and the strategies of the latter are set up. It is the way in which the universality of the protest for human rights or people’s autonomy appears to be absorbed by another universality: the universality of the commodity, or rather a certain idea of the universality of the commodity. This is also a certain idea of the link between contingency and necessity. “Contingency” means what happens and might not have happened, what comes without necessity, comes to us, falls on us. But from this point on “contingency” can easily be identified with a certain idea of indifference: the indifference of what falls into the garbage can. What falls into the garbage in turn can be identified with the equivalence of the commodity, which in turn can be identified with the democratic equivalence of anybody with anybodies in the name of which shells are thrown against those who refuse it but set to work , in attacking it, another equivalence; the equivalence between war and spectacle. 
       This is apparently what has changed in the relation between Marx and Coca-Cola: the change is not that Marx has disappeared. He has not disappeared at all, he has shifted places. He is now located in the heart of the system, as its ventriloquist’s voice. Gramsci once said that the soviet revolution was revolution against Marx’s Capital, because Marx’s book had become the book of the Bourgeois scientists. The same thing occurred with the kind of Marxism with which the so-called “children of Marx and Coca-Cola” grew up: the Marxism of the denunciation of the mythologies of commodity, the fallacies of consumer’s society and of the empire of the spectacle. Forty years ago, it was supposed to “unmask” the machineries of domination, so as to provide the fighters with new weapons. It has turned to exactly the contrary: sort of nihilist wisdom that was the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, the equivalence of anything with anything, and of anything with its image and with the lie of its image. 
       But nihilist wisdom does not only give a phantasmagorical view of our world, featuring the entire mankind as a population of merry consumers overfilling all bins with the refuse of their frantic consumption. It also pictures the law of domination as a force that permeates any will to do anything against it. Any protest is a performance, any performance is a spectacle, any spectacle is a commodity, such is the ground thesis of this post-Marxist and post-Situationnist wisdom. But it is not only a matter of “vanity” , it is also a matter of culpability: ultimately the overwhelming empire of commodity is featured as the result of the sin of the individuals that live in it , and the worst sinners turn out to be those who want to rebel against its law. 
       I wish to substantiate this point by focusing on an apparently paradoxical phenomenon that has rocketed among western intelligentsia and most particularly French intelligentsias during the last ten years. I mean the development of more and more violent polemics against new disease that was said to threaten the future of civilisation. The name of that disease is said to be “democracy”. This is a strange case indeed. The intellectuals who herald this deadly danger live in countries that call themselves “democracy”, substantive that apparently implies the identity of a form of government based on public liberties and a way of individual life whose “freedom of choice” is based on the reign of the free market. As long as the Soviet Empire existed, it was commonplace to oppose that idea of democracy to the enemy called “totalitarianism”. And at the end of 89 the collapse of the soviet system was hailed in the Western World as the triumph of that idea of democracy, as the equivalence of public freedom, free market and the free choice by the individuals of their own way of life. But what happened after was exactly the contrary: the consensus on democracy as “human rights + free market+ free individual choice” vanished with the collapse of its enemy. In the years that followed, more and more furious intellectual campaigns trumpeted the disaster that was made to democracies by an enemy called democracy, more precisely by the disastrous connection between “human rights “ and “ free individual choice”. A number of sociologists, political philosophers and moralists began to explain us that the rights of Man, as Marx had proved it, actually were the rights of the egoistic bourgeois individual, and that, in our days, they meant the rights of the consumers to any kind of consumption – a right that pushed them to overstep and destroy all the limits to their thirst for consuming, thereby all the traditional institutions and forms of authority, imposing a limit to the power of the market. This is, they said, what democracy means in fact: the power of the individual consumer who cares for nothing but the satisfaction of his needs and desires. What the democratic individual wants is democratic equality. But what democratic equality means is equality between the seller and the buyer of any commodity. Therefore, they concluded , what the democratic individual wants is the triumph of the market in all the spheres of life and the more egalitarian it is, the more it is keen on providing that triumph. In such a way it was easy for those analysts to prove for instance that the students’ movements of the 60s and more specifically the movement of May 68 in France were aimed at the destruction of all those forms of authorities that hindered the invasion of the whole life by the law of Capital. By disparaging and impairing all those forms of authority the movement, they said, paved the way for a rekindled capitalism, it allowed our societies to become free aggregations of unbound molecules, whirling in the void, deprived of any affiliation, entirely available to the law of the market. 
       But that was not yet the whole picture: the consequence of the democratic thirst for equality, according to those new prophets, was not only the reign of the market. It was the complicity and ultimately the identity of democratic individualism and totalitarian terror, conspiring in common to destroy all the human bonds. When I was young, individualism was supposed to be the opposite of totalitarianism. According to the new intellectual fashion, it turned out that totalitarianism was the necessary outcome of individualism, which meant the fanaticism of free choice and unlimited consumption. When the twin towers were destroyed, a well-known French philosopher, psychoanalyst and professor of Roman Law, Pierre Legendre, explained in a French newspaper that it was something like the return of the western repressed, the castigation for the western overrule of the symbolic order an upsetting emblematised by gay marriage . Two years after, a French linguist and philosopher, Jean-Claude Milner gave a more radical turn to the thesis, as he published a book entitled The Criminal Tendencies of Democratic Europe. The crime that he imputed to “democratic Europe” was quite simply the extermination of the European Jews. As the Jewish people, he argued, is the people faithful to the law of affiliation and transmission, it stood up as the only obstacle to the democratic desire of unlimitedness. That’s why democracy had to exterminate the Jews and was the only beneficiary of their extermination. 
       More recently in the fall of 2005 when violent riots burst out in the poor northern suburbs of Paris, populated mostly by families coming from Moghreb and from Black Africa, the spokesperson of French Media intelligentsia, Alain Finkielkraut found it a perfect case of illustration of the democratic terrorism of consumption. This is how he explained it to an Israeli newspaper. “Those guys that are wrecking schools, what do they actually say? Their message is not a call for help or a demand for more schools or better schools, it is the will to eliminate all what stands between themselves and the objects of their desires. And what are the objects of their desires? It is quite simple: money, brands and sometimes girls. What they want is the ideal of the consumer society. It is what they see on TV”. As the same author also assumed that those youths had been pushed to rioting by Islamic fanatics, the demonstration ended up identifying democracy, consumerism, puerility, wide primitive violence and Islamic terrorism. Why focus on those discourses? I think it’s not only a matter of local paranoia. Those discourses thrive on wider transformation, wider process that I would identify as the “decomposition of the model of social critique” and more generally of the enlightened model of action empowered by knowledge. According to that model, it was the power of reason to unmask the fake “universal” and therefore discover the true one, for example the universal law of the social structure behind the former universality of juridical and political laws. As the true universal was more comprehensive, more powerful then the other, the disclosure was supposed to produce an effect of empowerment. The critical model, in fact, worked as long as the forms of consciousness and the social political movement that it was supposed to end, in fact, were already at work and stronger enough to pre-empt in fact its efficiency. But so long as they actually supported it, the idea of its efficiency still worked. Reason and power went hand in hand at least in the minds. 
       What is specific of the present configuration is their dissociation. At first sight the implications of the new prophets still obey the critical model, it is still a question of revealing the law of the nation, the law of the power of the commodity under its mask, but the explanation of the system now amounts to the explanation of the reason why the explanation of the reason is deprived of any power. This conjunction between reason and impotence is at the heart of the would-be-enlightened discourses of our time. They hung on to the universal but they hung on to it at the universal that doesn’t work, but is proved by the fact that it doesn’t work, so the universalist discourse becomes a pathological discourse about the disease of a world that doesn’t obey the law of the universal. Right-wing and left-wing discourses mostly bespeak the same syndrome of rational impotence, but they negotiate that impotence, according to different moods. First, the right-wing rage that I’d try to characterise very quickly and, on the other side, left-wing melancholy. 
       Left-wing melancholy, too, thrives on the evidence that the law of bio-power is extending its panoptical empire on individuals that are indulging in the new universal game available on the market: experimenting one’s life, which is, according to Peter Sloterdijk , the very dream of the modern individual. We are said to be in the belly of the monster where even the capacities of autonomous and disruptive practice and the networks of cooperative action that we could use against it, our virtuosity, as Paolo Virno names it, are exploited by the monster where they serve its new power, the power of immaterial production. Once we have accepted, you know, the premise that we are in the belly of the beast, the more logical deduction is the melancholic view of the omnipotence of the beast, which puts its grip on the desires and the capacity of its potential enemies as it offers them at the best price what is the most valuable commodity, the possibility of experimenting their life as a field of infinite possibilities. Therefore, it is said, the beast can offer anyone just what they want: reality shows on TV for the idiots and increased capacity of self-valorisation of their intellectual and relational capacities for the smart guys. So, in a sense, we are in the belly of the monster but on the other hand the monster appears to be so sweet. Some people sometimes object that the production of the commodities does not exactly identify with the development of the virtuosity of the high-tech workers. Some other people suggest that the shells and the jails of the beast are not that sweet. But they are answered that even if the beast sometimes strikes a bit too hard, it does it only to give way to the flood of universal liquidity. 
       This is how the master thinker of the post-modern sociology Sigmund Bauman put it, I quote: “the prime technique of power is now escape, slippage, elision and avoidance Blows delivered by stealthy fighter planes and smart self-guarded and target-seeking missiles replaced the territorial advances of the infantry troops. What is really at stake in the new type of war in the era of liquid modernity is not the conquest of a new territory, but crushing the walls which stopped the flow of new , fluid, global powers.” That diagnosis was published at the beginning of 2001. The events of the five years that followed do not exactly confirm it. But, the content of the melancholic prediction doesn’t matter. No matter that two Gulf Wars happened though Baudrillard had affirmed that none of them could ever happen. The message of the melancholic prediction is not about verifiable facts. It is just about the lie hidden in any truth. Melancholy thus turns to a kind of cynical wisdom. It only says: things are not what you think they are. A proposition that will never be refuted. So, cynical melancholy, like prophecy, thrives on its very impotence. It is enough that it can turn it into general impotence and secure the subjective position of the “smart one” who casts a disenchanted gaze on a world where power and reason don’t go hand in hand any more and where the critical interpretation of the system is part of the system itself. 
       As we know, this ambivalence is also at the heart of many artistic practices, that thrive on both the relevance and the irrelevance of the critical model. The struggle against the “society of the spectacle” and the practice of “détournement” are still put on many artistic and curatorial agendas and they are still supposed to be implemented in standard forms such as : parodies of promotional films, reprocessed disco sounds, media stars modelled in wax figures, Disney animals turned to polymorphous perverts, montages of “vernacular” photographs showing us standardized petty-bourgeois living-rooms, or overloaded supermarket trolleys , huge installations of pipes and machines representing the bowels of the social machine, swallowing everything and turning everything into shit. Those dispositifs keep occupying many of our galleries and museums, with a rhetoric assuming that they make us discover the power of the commodity, the reign of the spectacle or the pornography of power. But, as it will be hard to find anybody who would still ignore them, the mechanism ends up spinning around itself and playing on the very undecidability of its effect. 
       At the beginning of my talk I referred to Kozui Enwezor’s project for the biennale in Seville. The project of giving art an integral and no more peripheral role in the task of unmasking the machineries of the global world. It comes as no surprise that this enlightened project was dedicated to the production of ‘phantom scenes’. Unmasking the ghosts has turned to be an affair of ghosts. The ghost is a figure of the equivalence between the functioning of the machinery and the functioning of the unmasking the machinery. It has the power of “unmasking” turned to impotence, become itself a ghost, the voice of the ventriloquist. 
       This is probably why at the end of the space of the exhibition of the Biennale in Seville, there was an installation of a very different kind. In two rooms, the Austrian artist Oliver Ressler had set up a lot of monitors. On those monitors, there was no ghost. Nor collage. There were real persons, standing in front of us, speaking to us. One of them spoke about the Paris Commune, another about feminist perspectives, another one about zapatist movement, other one about alternative economy, alternative forms of production, exchange and life. So, it transpired as though the politics involved in the production of the “phantom scenes”, the politics of “unmasking” had to be supplemented by a politics of real scenes, where real people spoke about the state of the world, the sense of their struggle and the way to envision a new world – a supplement of “central” politics which precisely was “peripheral” in the space of exhibition. 

       What is at stake here in that spatial dissociation of the elements of the critical model is also the traditional view of the political empowerment of the Universal. It is the idea of the function of political Subjectivization. When the prophets bemoan the impending disaster or when the melancholic those denounce “anaesthesia” and thrive on its presupposition, they point to the same entropy of the historical model of political subjectivity as produced by both the dynamic of a global system and the denunciation of this global system. According to that model there was a two-fold relation between the dynamic of the system and the dynamic of its critique and of its destruction. On the one hand, the dynamic of the Universal was the dynamic of consciousness and of knowledge and consciousness, the unmasking of the machinery, the revolt against devastation, produced by the consciousness of the machinery and of its devastation. But, on the other hand, the dynamic of the Universal was supposed to be the dynamic of the system itself. Capitalism itself was supposed out of its own dynamism to produce the dissolution of its own particularity, it produced the universality of the class which is not a class, as Marx said. In the same way that he made everything solid, every solid thing melt into the air, become immarginal. On the one hand the force of rupture predicated on the historical assimilation of a critical knowledge of the system by the powerful material collectivity. On the other hand the force of rupture was predicated on the cumulating efforts of the melting effect. 
       What has been called the end of the “grand narrative” and of its “universal victim” is much more the entropy of that double logic of dissolution. Prophetic rage and cynical melancholy take advantage of this entropy to build the new “grand narratives”. Both make the same basic statement: everything becomes liquid , everything melts into the air. But it appears that this liquefaction turns to the contrary of what it was supposed to produce. It turns to the dissolution of any universalism the prophets say. All the human bonds, all the human institutions of social life are swallowed in the flood of consumption and communication, which mean the barbary of the individual beast. Everything becomes liquid, the cynical melancholic say. This means anything becomes equivalent to anything. There can be no subjectivity, but the subjectivity of the beast, which is a funny big monster. There can be no universality but the universality of the process, that makes everything melt into the air of universal equivalence and universal liquefaction. 
       As we know, some radicals still try to put the story the other way around, they still hang on to the promise of the becoming immaterial of the production of wealth. They tell us that what this becoming immaterial produces is the power of collective intelligence as Antonio Negri or Paolo Virno say, the power of the class that is really no class that needs no scientific head to lead its politenant body, no consciousness of the global system, since it is itself the enlightened, immaterial heart of the global system of the production of the common wealth. So it would be true that capitalism has produced its own grave diggers that we know how from this point on the whole idea that the machine produces its own negation has to be doubled by a very different idea, mostly voiced by Paolo Virno: the idea of exodus, that is to say the idea that we have to subtract the capacities of free individual and collective creation from the function of the machine. 
       From my point of view, the subtraction has to be both more modest and more radical. What we must leave first is the very idea of the Empire, the very idea of the global beast or the global machinery. It is the very idea of the necessity involved in the idea of the global logic. This way of staging the global system is still part of the logic of domination. The logic of domination is predicated now on the idea of the global necessity. As we know, the ruling oligarchies that govern our world today have appropriated for themselves the Marxist idea of the historical necessity. The only difference, you know, is that the historical necessity now leads to the triumph of the free market and not the triumph of the revolution. They tell us that there is a global necessity that imposes its laws, so that it is not in the power of anybody to oppose it. This is the principal of consensus. What “consensus” means is not only a specific form of government using expertise, arbitrage and agreement in order to avoid conflicts. What “consensus” means is the agreement between sense and sense: I mean it is the agreement on what we can perceive and of the meaning of what we can perceive. 

       As a way of government consensus says: there can be different interests, values and aspirations but there is only one reality that we can experience and there is only one sense that we can give to that reality. There is a clear evolution of the world according to a global logic. But you cannot deny whatever opinions you may have, or whether it is good or bad. Dissensus begins precisely with the contention that there is not one reality, that the given which offers such or such possibility or impossibility is controversial itself and this is what political Subjectivisation is about: reframing the very field of the given, of the sensible, the intelligible and, consequently, the possible. It is about putting in the unique common world of the consensual logics several worlds, conflicting worlds. To my mind, the first breakaway from the logic of consensus, the first exodus, is the breakaway from the configuration that urges us to think of dissensus only as “exodus”. It is the breakaway from the spectacular partition between the in and the out. The breakaway from the consensual logic of historical necessity and global necessity. There are no historical necessities, there are forces, conjunctions of forces that frame such and such logic of the global necessity. 
       When our governments decide to reform the so-called welfare system or the regulation of the job market in order to make employment more fluid or adapt our welfare systems to the necessities of the global market they set up the logics of a certain collective intelligence, a certain global logic. When strikers and protesters take the streets in order to thwart that logic of collective necessity, they construct overflows of ‘collective intelligence’. The concentral logic usually stigmatises their struggle by saying that they oppose local and particular interest to the general interest and to the thinking of the future. But precisely the first thing the struggle is about is the very question of the distribution of this kind of opposition, you know, about the competence, you know, what is first challenge is the logic that separates the few ones, the few expert ones who are able to care for the general and the future from the mass of those who are only able to care for the particular and the present. 
       What is first at stake is the configuration of the possible. This also means what is first at stake is the distribution of the capacities. The struggle is between opposing ways of understanding the relation between the particular and the universal, the relation between the present and the future. The same goes, you know, for instance when networks of mostly anonymous social actors oppose the rational policy of the immigration quotas decided by our governments, when they oppose it with another idea of who can be counted as a member of our national communities. The collective intelligence of emancipation is the collective capacity at work in those scenes of conflict. This collective intelligence has nothing to do with high-tech virtuosity. What it sets to work rather is the capacity which is common to that virtuosity and to the virtuosity that allows for instance the immigrant worker to cross all the geographical and legal boundaries, all the material and symbolical boundaries in order to prove that he is a French worker similar to any other French workers, if we take the example of France, and I think that this may prove a form of universalisation, a struggle for the universal, stronger, sometimes, then many discourses on universal values.
       So, what is at stake is the common capacity of those deferent virtuosity, their common capacity to shift places and identities to break through the distribution of places, identities and competences in order to reframe the given situation of the capacity of producing a new configuration of the visible, the intelligible and the possible by implementing the capacity of anybody. That is the kind of universality the politics is about: the capacity of anybody. The political subject is not a part of the social structure, an element of the process of production. It has to come as a supplement to the distribution of powers, places, functions, and identities that make up a society, a supplement to the distribution of the capacity. But what comes as supplement to the distribution of capacity is undistributed capacity, the capacity of anybody, or rather the capacity created by the collectivisation of the power inherent in the equality of anyone with any other one. I called it “the part of the uncounted” or “the part of those who have no part”. It was sometimes misinterpreted as the power of the excluded. But what it truly means is the power of anybody, no matter who, the qualification of those who have no specific qualification. I think that investigation of this power, maybe more fruitful for the sake of artistic and political invention today by the endless denunciation of the power of the beast. The endless unmasking of the ghost. Universality has been for long associated with the demonstration of the power of necessity. It might be time to explore its conjunction with the powers of contingency, with powers of indifference to difference that don’t amount to the equivalence of anything with anything, but with the empowerment of the capacity of no matter who. Thank you.

For thirty years now, the philosopher Paul Virilio analyses the
catastrophe as the unavoidable consequence of technological progress. He
sees in the current financial crisis the most accomplished example of
his theory, a catastrophe where the victims do not actually die, but
lose the roof above their heads by the thousands.

Gerard Courtois/Michel Guerrin:
In 2002 you have produced an exhibition at the Maison Cartier under the
title “Ce qui arrive” (‘that what occurs’); It was about the accident in
contemporary history: Tchernobyl, 9-11, the Tsunami… A statement by
Hannah Arendt was the marker of your demonstration: “progress and
catastrophe are the two faces of the same coin”. Is this where we have
come to with the ‘crash of the stock exchange’?

Paul Virilio:
Well, of course. In 1979, at the time of the mishap at the Three Mile
Island nuclear plant in the U.S., I did mention the occurence of an
“original accident” – the kind of accident we bring forth ourselves. I
said that our technical prowess was pregnant of catastrophic promises.
In the past, accidents were local affairs. With Tchernobyl, we have
entered the era of global accidents, whose consequences are in the realm
of the long term. the current crash represents the perfect ‘integral
accident’.Its effects ripple far and wide, and it incorporates the representation
of all other accidents.
For thirty years now, the phenomenon of History accelerating has been
negated, together with the fact that this acceleration has been the
prime cause of the proliferation of major accidents. Freud said it,
speaking of death: “accumulation snuffs out the perception of contingency”.
Contingency is the key word here. These accidents are not contingent
occurrences. For the time being, the prevalent opinion is that
researching the crash of the stock exchange as a political and economic
issue and in terms of its social consequences is adequate enough. But it
is impossible to understand what is going on if one does not implement a
(policy based on the) political economy of speed, the speed that
technological progress engenders, and if one does not link (this policy)
to the ‘accidental’ character of History.
Let’s take just one example: the dictum “time is money”. I add to this,
and the stock exchange testify to it: “speed is power”. We have moved
from the stage of the acceleration of History to that of the
acceleration of the Real. This is what ‘the progress’ is: a consensual
sacrifice.

GC/MG:
So accidents are too little researched?

PV:
The dominant form of writing about History limits itself to the study of
facts as seen in the light of the long term. Contrariwise, I advocate a
study of History based exclusively on ruptures.  (French) Historian
Francois Hartog calls the dominant paradigm “presentism”. We must go
further. Our paradigm should be “instantaneism”.
In order to study accidents, one of course must research them, but also
‘expose’ them. The accident is ‘invented’, it a work of creation. Who
could be more apt than artists to make feel the tragic dimension of
human development (‘progress’)? That was the intent behind the “ce qui
arrive” exhibition – where, by the way, I did mention a stock exchange
crash. It stood for the museum, or the observatory, of major accidents
that I’d like to see coming about some day. Not in order to instill
fear, but to make us face up.

GC/MG:
But then, how would you define the crash of the stock exchange, over and
beyond its surprise element?

PV:
Like with any contemporary event, it is essential to take into account
the integration in synchronous time of various issues at the
world-level. A synchronisation has taken place of customs, habits,
mores, ways to react to things, and also, of emotions. We have left the
era of class-based communitarism for that of instant and  simultaneous
globalisation of affects and fears – but not longer of opinions. It was
already the case with the attacks on the World Trade Center and with the
Tsunami. The same happens now with the financial crash. After a short
‘technical’ phase – bank collapses, shares fall-out – kicks in a phase
of ‘hystery-isation’ of responses. There is talk of “markets going mad”,
of “irrational” reactions, you’d almost call it ‘end of the world
craze’. Terrorists have very well understood this mechanism, and they
make use of it.

GC/MG
Do you, like some people do, believe that capitalism is nearing its end?

PV:
I rather believe that the end is nearing capitalism. My field is urban
studies. This crisis shows that the Earth is not large enough for
progress, for the speed of History (as we have it). Hence repetitive
accidents. We were living in the belief that we had both a past and a
future. But ‘the past does not pass’, it has become a monster, so much
so that we do not mention it anymore. And as far as the future is
concerned, it is severely questioned by the issue of the environment,
and the end of natural resources like oil. So the only place left for us
to inhabit is the present. But the writer Octavio Paz said it before:
“you cannot live in the present moment, just as you cannot live in the
future”. It is exactly what all of us are now going through, and that
includes the bankers.

GC/MG:
But did not the financial world bring about (invent) a virtual world?

PV:
Since speed earns money, the financial sphere has attempted to enforce
the value of time above the value of space. But the virtual is also part
and parcel of reality. And to be frank with you, this so-called virtual
world, in which one can also include tax-heavens,  is a form of
‘exotism’ which I tend to equate with colonialism. It is the (recurrent)
myth of another inhabitable planet.

GC/MG:
As opposed to other accidents, the crash of the stock exchange remains
something of an enigma to the public at large. Is this bad?

PV:
Well, one does not understand the fine points, but one can guess, and
that is enough. One must guess (about) what occurs. Not being able to
understand naturally reinforces fear. But, at the same time, we do not
longer have the time left to experience fear. What is really disturbing
is the rise of a ‘civil deterrence’ of sorts, which is individual and
intimate, and which permeates all aspects of life. We are being deterred
to do this or that as individuals. Ever since 9-11 we have been affected
by a ‘civil fear’, and the industrialisation of the accident is its root
cause. So, in order to study the impact of collisions, car makers stage
‘test crashes’. The crash of the stock exchange is such a test crash -
but at the real level. Even the break-up of relationships has been
industrialised. One could even introduce some mechanism of quotes for
divorces, risking hereby to show that the traditional couple and family
has become an illusion.

GC/MG:
Could one also speak of a morality of the stock exchange crash, in the
sense that also those who were making fortunes get blasted?

PV:
I am not a vigilante. I do empathise with critics who say that some
people have made obscene profits. I do not deny the damage caused by the
accumulation of riches in a few hands. But to merely criticize this
acceleration of profits and History, this ‘run-away avarice”, as Eugene
Sue called it, while remaining in the materialist framework of profit,
is a deficient, reductionist analysis.
What is happening is much more complex, and profoundly disturbing. We
have gone into something of a different nature. This economy of wealth
has become an economy of speed. By the way, this is the problem the Left
is currently facing. The Left is stuck in its old framework, states that
capitalism is dead, and now thinks that more social justice is to come
about. This is a bit hasty a deduction. We do really have a major
problem on our plates…
If the state does not take stock of this ‘futurism of the moment’, we
might well see instead a capitalism running riot without bounds whatsoever.

GC/MG:
You wrote once “By designing a 800 passengers plane, the firm Airbus has
simultaneously created 800 potential casualties”. But till now, the
crash of the stock exchange did not kill anyone…

PV:
The crash is not the Black Death, there haven’t been millions of
victims, and it’s not the 11th of September either. We are not talking
death here, save maybe a few suicides. The victims are somewhere else to
be found.
Where did the current crisis stem from? the answer is: subprime
mortgages; housing credit that proved unsustainable; land. The victims
are the hundred of thousands of people who are going to lose their
homes. The whole concept of sedentarism had already been challenged by
immigrants, exiles, deportations, refugees – and the delocalisation of
economic activities. This phenomenon is bound to increase. Till 2040,
one billion people will have to move out from their their residence.
Those are the victims. We are in the realm of “stop/eject”. People are
arrested, get expelled.

GC/MG:
You believe in chaos?

PV:
Having destabilised the financial system, the stock exchange crash might
well destabilise the state, which is the guarantor of last resort of
collective life. For the time being, the state tries to be reassuring.
But if the bourses keep on heading South, it will be state itself that
will go in receivership, and that will plunge nations into chaos. This
is not me embracing catastrophism. I do not believe that the worst is
unavoidable, I do not believe in chaos, that is an untenable position,
and it amounts to intellectual arrogance. But that does not mean that
one should be prevented from thinking about it. Faced with absolute
fear, I counter with hope absolute. Churchill said once that an optimist
is somebody who sees opportunity hiding behind every calamity.

translated by patrice riemens
with thanks to apo33 in Nantes for providing facilitation.

Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity 

Translated by Gregory Elliot 

This is the transcript of an interview conducted with Jacques Rancière by Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello from the University of Amsterdam and ASCA. A version of this interview was published in Dutch by Valiz (NL), in a volume of studies on Jacques Rancière that appeared in the Netherlands in late 2007. In this exchange, Ranciere discusses his position with regard to democracy, politics, film, literature, art and research. 

 I. Introduction 

 Q) How do you place yourself in the current French intellectual scene? 

 a) Le Magazine littéraire and Le Nouvel Observateur have recently  referred to you as a key figure in the contemporary French intellectual scene: how, briefly, would you characterise your ‘profile’ and your contribution to French thought? 

 I try to problematise the categories that structure diagnoses of our present and debates about it. Thus, I’ve attempted to rethink democracy by refusing both its official identification with the state forms and lifestyles of rich societies and denunciation of it as a form that masks the realities of domination.  Official apologists and Marxist critics basically concur in characterising democracy as a mode of government built on a society defined as a society of consumers.  In opposition to this dominant view I’ve reactivated the real scandal of democracy – which is that it reveals the ultimate absence of legitimacy of any government.  As the foundation of politics it asserts the equal capacity of anyone and everyone to be either governor or governed.  I’ve thus been led to conceive democracy as the deployment of forms of action that activate anyone’s equality with anyone else, and not as a form of state or a kind of society.

 As regards aesthetics, I’ve questioned the schemas of modernity and post-modernity shared by supporters of modernism, eulogists of the post-modern or high priests of the sublime.  All of them more or less agree in characterising the modern artistic revolution in terms of an autonomisation, conceived as a break with representation and as each art concentrating on the exigencies and possibilities of its own material: the transition to abstract painting, atonal music, ‘intransitive’ poetry whose heroes are Malevitch, Schönberg or Mallarmé.  On this basis, they conceive the transition from the modern to the contemporary as a break with such a vocation, as a melange of the arts, a mingling of art and popular and advertising imagery, a confusion of art and life.  They can either welcome this or deplore it, justify the confusion or demand an art of the sublime and the unrepresentable.  But in each instance they validate the schema.  For my part, I’ve tried to show that what is called artistic modernity has, from the outset, been shot through with a tension between two contradictory requirements: one of these makes art and aesthetic perception into a specific sphere of experience, disconnected from the rules that operate in other spheres; the other feeds on interchange between the arts and spheres of experience and converts art’s ways of making into collective ways of life.  In constructing the archaeology of this tension, I wanted to escape indulgent or doom-laden verdicts on the present state of art; to make it possible to perceive continual shifts in the topography of possibilities, as opposed to major breaks and grand schemas of progress or decline. 

So what distinguishes my position is that I put our intellectual objects and forms into historical perspective, rather than offering verdicts based on a priori positions, but also that I reject the schemas of historical necessity and make the archaeology of our present a topography of possibilities that retain their character as possibilities.  I say at one and the same time: this is how we came to see what we see and think what we think, but there is no historical necessity, nothing irremediable in this landscape of our intellectual objects and forms.  As regards revolutionary projects, I part company both with those who think they possess the correct formula for future revolutions and with those who say that any project for an egalitarian transformation of the world is doomed to totalitarian terror.  I don’t offer any formula for the future, but I strive to describe a world open to the possibilities and capacities of all: something like an archaeology more open to the event than Foucault’s, but without any Benjaminian messianism. 

b) Do you have any special affinities with certain of your philosophical contemporaries (Badiou, Nancy, Balibar)?  Or do you regard your work as an attempt at detachment from easily recognisable tendencies in French philosophy? 

Like those you cite, I’m an inheritor of the major philosophical renewal of the 1960s and 70s that challenged the academic philosophical tradition and its modernist form – phenomenology – by opening philosophy up to different domains and practices – literature, history, psychoanalysis, ethnology – which facilitated an expansion and decentring of the intellectual territory.  This common origin establishes a connection with Badiou, Balibar or Nancy, as does loyalty to the articulation between philosophical subversion and political emancipation which the intellectual reaction of the 1980s condemned as la pensée 68.  That said, thinkers like Badiou or Nancy are still linked to an idea of philosophy which I’d call ‘fundamentalist’, albeit in different ways.  Nancy passed through Derridean deconstruction, but he remains attached to the idea of a philosophy that endeavours to think, including in its impossibility, a primary experience of major shared signifiers: meaning, the world, the other, the common.  Badiou has taken up the Althusserian idea of a philosophy that does not have its own object but discloses  the ‘truths’ at work in the practices of science, politics or poetry.  But at the same time he conceives philosophy as a system in which the rationalities of these practices are dependent on an ontology that provides the general formula of Being and what supplements it.  For him this formula is prescriptive – that is, the duty of art or politics can be deduced from it.  And from his perspective what I do remains of the order of description and hence an empiricist submission to the order of the world.  In contrast, I think there’s no general formula of Being from which the practices of art and politics can be deduced; that the prescriptive and the descriptive are always intertwined in such a way as to constitute the landscapes of the possible (those who describe reconfigure the possibilities of a world; those who prescribe presuppose a certain state of the world that is itself made up of sedimented prescriptions); and that the configuration of these landscapes is always, in the last instance, a poem: an expression in ordinary language of the communal resources of thought.  So there is solidarity in the face of the reactionary counter-offensive that took ideological power in the 1980s, but at the same time profound differences in our perceptions and practices of philosophy. 

Q) Would it be right to suggest that your work is not so much inter-disciplinary as a-disciplinary?  

Neither. It is ‘indisciplinary’. It is not only a matter of going besides the disciplines but of breaking them. My problem has always been to escape the division between disciplines, because what interests me is the question of the distribution of territories, which is always a way of deciding who is qualified to speak about what.  The apportionment of disciplines refers to the more fundamental apportionment that separates those regarded as qualified to think from those regarded as unqualified; those who do the science and those who are regarded as its objects.  I began by moving outside of the boundaries of the discipline of ‘philosophy’, because the questions I was concerned with revolved around Marxist conceptions of ideology – the issue of why people found themselves in a particular place and what they could or couldn’t think in that place.  Following the events of 1968 and the vicissitudes of the far left, I thought that it was to be resolved not by continuing to immerse myself in Marx’s texts, but by entering into the flesh of working-class experience, into the thinking and practice of emancipation.  At the outset, this was a kind of excursion to collect historical material.  But the excursion led to a switch of perspectives.  I came to understand that the problem wasn’t to search on the terrain of social history for material with which to think through philosophical questions, because the primary philosophical and political question was precisely that of the separation between the intellectual world and a social world which was supposedly merely its object.  How does a question come to be considered philosophical or political or social or aesthetic? If emancipation had a meaning, it consisted in reclaiming thought as something belonging to everyone – the correlate being that there is no natural division between intellectual objects and that a discipline is always a provisional grouping, a provisional territorialisation of questions and objects that do not in and of themselves possess any specific localisation or domain. 

II. Politics and Philosophy 

Q) One of the major ideas that guides your work is the definition you give of ‘politics’, notably in La Mésentente: not as the interaction between government in power and opposition, for example; not even as  the principle of demands on the part of a group already identified as such (e.g. workers), but as the activity that will ‘make that which did not possess grounds to be seen seen, make a discourse heard where once there had been nothing but noise, make heard as a discourse that which had merely been heard as noise’.1   According to you, in France at the moment are there examples of ‘noise’ that are about to produce a political effect?  Or what do you think of the efforts of those who try to get ‘visible minorities’ recognised? 

We mustn’t think in terms of instances of noise that are growing louder, ready to be heard by us; or of new subjects that are about to emerge.  You don’t have noise biding its time, speech in gestation and awaiting the moment when it will finally be heard.  Instead, there is a combination of two relationships: there is the permanence of a conflictual relationship over what is noise, speech or silence; but there are also changes in the form of this division.  On the one hand, throughout our society there is speech that is heard merely as noise.  Thus, the speech of refusal uttered by people who are made unemployed because of relocation and restructuring is conceived simply as the noise made by a victim.  However well-argued, it is always interpreted by the rulers and their experts as the noise of suffering.  For them the world moves on and, in so doing, creates wounds and suffering that are to be construed as such.  If we take the case of immigration, the people who negotiate with illegal immigrants [sans-papiers] on hunger strike know full well that they are talking not with suffering bodies, but with people who argue, who have learnt in Africa the art of discussion, and for whom speech is an important element of social life.  This does not prevent the situation of the sans- papiers from generally being regarded as a phenomenon of suffering and treated as such.  So you don’t have noise which is going to become speech, but speech which is always an issue of interpretation.  Will it or won’t it be heard as speech?  Where is it going to be heard as noise or as speech? 

On the other hand, there are those redistributions of the landscape that lead people to refer, for example, to visible minorities.  The political issue is what is meant by this.  For me a political subject is a subject who employs the competence of the so-called incompetents or the part of those who have no part, and not an additional group to be recognised as part of society.  ‘Visible minorities’ means exceeding the system of represented groups, of constituted identities.  If we think of the quota system, as far as I’m concerned it can’t be conceived as a way of conferring importance on groups in accordance with their importance in society.   It’s a rupture that opens out into the recognition of the competence of anyone , not the addition of a unit. 

III. Literature and Politics 

Q) You’ve published several books on the relationship between literature and politics as you define it, in particular in La Parole muette and Politique de la littérature.  Interviewed about the latter, you recently told the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur that ‘whether a literary text is subversive or consensual essentially depends less on the will of the writer than on the political forces that seize upon a description of the world.  And that is also true for works which display a political commitment.’2  Could you develop this idea and explain what you mean here by ‘political force’ and how a political force can seize upon a vision of the world? 

 That formula about a ‘political force seizing upon a description’ is a bit too flashy.  It creates an image, with the result that one seeks to visualise the political force in person seizing upon a description.  In that sense I’d find it hard to justify.  What it means is that literature operates by reconfiguring the landscape of what can be seen and what can be said by constructing new individualities and a world for these individualities; and that this construction of a politics peculiar to literature follows its own logic.  There is no reason for it to open out by itself into a system of description available to some particular political cause.  That’s what I’m trying to say in Politique de la littérature: literature possesses its own democracy, which tends towards a dispersal of individualities, towards the construction of an impersonal stratum that is precisely opposed to the idea of an apportionment of subjective positions of enunciation like those proposed by politics. 

If you take the history of the novel since the nineteenth century, literature has significantly developed the space or field of what is of interest to it and hence the field of subjects worthy of interest, of subjects capable of thinking and feeling.  Basically, that’s what novelistic modernity is: a significant extension of what bodies are capable of feeling, experiencing, speaking, saying.  This is the sense in which I assign a central role to Madame Bovary.  For me, Madame Bovary is to some extent the literary equivalent of working-class emancipation.  It is the moment when various bodies supposedly destined for a particular place and, therewith, a way of thinking and speaking, a certain capacity for experiencing, defiantly claim a capacity to experience everything and to participate in any kind of enjoyment, be it material or mental.  Emancipated workers of the 1830s and 40s had themselves fashioned this capacity by seizing on the ‘indetermination’ that is the misfortune of novelistic heroes.  Now, obviously, such appropriations don’t correspond to the intention of the novelists.  They wanted workers to embody the nobility of labour and sing of the workshop and popular festivals, rather than transform the psychological problems of their characters into social problems.  That’s what ‘seize upon’ means.  In rather the same way, the writers of ‘negritude’ seized on the ‘negro’ of Une saison en enfer and Rimbaud’s idea of a language accessible to all the senses. 

So literature expands the world of possible experience accessible to anyone.  This permits the borrowings and appropriations whereby people excluded from public discourse declared and demonstrated themselves capable of intervening in it.  But this implies that there is no direct link between a description of the world and a political outcome.  Literature’s impact on the formation of new forms of political subjectivation operates through the effect of a blurring between domains to which I referred, which is also an effect of redistribution of ‘capacities’. 

Q) Your books on literature can’t be separated from your works on disagreement and the search for a common language.  They re-articulate the issue of the part of those who have no part and the intrusion of politics as the moment when the places that have been allocated to each and every one are called into question.  The role of the ‘literary critic’ as an expert possessed of specialist tools for reading literature is thus called into question.  Some literary critics have been rather taken aback by the impression of not being attended to as experts equipped with a method.  And you’ve made it clear to them that literature is for everyone.3  Would you go so far as to say that literature cannot be taught?  Or, at least, that it would be useful, not destructive, to abolish courses that take literature as an object of study? 

I’m not asking for the teaching of literature to be abolished.  But I’m interested in literature not as a discipline but as a principle of declassification of discourses.  Consequently, I don’t believe that there is a specific literary method or literary competence.  For me literature is not a wholly self- contained art or domain, requiring specialists to reveal its laws and get its works appreciated.  It is a historical regime of the art of writing, which is precisely characterised by the abolition of the rules of the poetic arts, by the fact that there is no longer any closure of the system, that there is no longer even any opposition between a fictional reason and a factual reason.  For me literature refers to an opening of the boundaries between discourses and there are no experts on this opening.  The important thing is to bring out the potential for expanding experience that it carries within it. This is not the object of any specific method.  Alternatively put, discourse on literature is always itself a literary discourse; discourse on fiction is itself the construction of a fiction.  

So I’ve never been interested in producing a theory of literature providing instruments that would make it possible to disclose rules, to explain literary works in general and transmit them.  I’ve tried to mark some points of emergence, some points of rupture, some forms of expansion of the meaning of experience, and then to situate their importance vis-à-vis different domains and to make them resonate.  For me, what is called literary criticism or film criticism is not a way of explaining or classifying things, but a way of extending them and making them resonate differently.  Explaining Flaubert or Balzac or Hugo is of no interest to me whatsoever.  What interests me is to make a character, some words or a piece of syntax resonate vis-à-vis other characters, words, pieces of syntax.  I first brought Flaubert into play not by writing about Madame Bovary but by constructing imaginary combinations between the workers whose texts I was reading in the archives and some of Flaubert’s characters.  If I’ve written about Madame Bovary, it is to make it resonate in connection with the issue of democracy and its interpretations.  Why was the text of an author with an aristocratic sensibility, cultivating art for art’s sake, immediately denounced as the literary embodiment of democracy?  Answering that question was an opportunity for me to make the clash between several senses of democracy heard:  political democracy as I understand it, literary democracy as practised by Flaubert, and sociological democracy à la Tocqueville, which is what Flaubert’s contemporaries read in his book and which is still advanced today by those who equate democracy with consumer society. 

Q) The examples you take in your books on literature pertain to what students of literature call the canon.  What’s the meaning of your approach here? 

 The question of the canon is not of much interest to me, since I don’t treat literature as an art charged with transmitting a certain cultural legitimacy, and hence with classifying claimants to that legitimacy.  I became interested in literature as a historical regime of the art of writing.  I’ve therefore prioritised texts that make it possible to bring out the birth of this regime and the political stakes associated with its emergence. 

For example, if I’ve taken Balzac, it is in connection with the issue I call the war of forms of writing or the issue of literariness.  Here literature intervenes in a question that goes beyond it, a philosophico-political question which is that of the circulation of the letter, which is going to be addressed to anyone and everyone.  Balzac signals the triumph of the novel, the democratic genre par excellence since it abolishes every hierarchy, any specific destination of speech.  At the same time he fictionalises the perils of this mode of circulation off which his book lives, counter-posing to errant speech the writing that can be read on things themselves.  The politics of the novel is then inscribed in a conflict between regimes of signification.  For me the issue of the democracy of literature is to be found here.  The problem is not doing justice to everyone, creating a balance between male literature and female literature, French literature from France or francophone literature from Canada, Africa, the Caribbean.  The important thing is, on the one hand, the democracy practised by literature itself and, on the other, the democracy that is going to be practised by those who appropriate it.  As I said a moment ago, the major reference-points for emancipated workers in 1830 or 1840 are not Eugène Sue, not the social novel or popular novels, but René, Werther and Oberman.  Why?  Because these are characters who have simply had the ‘misfortune to be born’ and who suffer from having no place in society.  But ‘simply to be born’ is the original definition of the proletarian – except that for him it implied a well-defined place in society, which excluded the question of seeking to discover what one has arrived to do in it.  The subversion of this subordinate place took the form then of the appropriation of the novelistic figure of the one who suffers from having ‘nothing to do’ in society. 

So for me democracy is not a matter of a programme assigning so-called minority groups their respective weight.  To rupture what is called the taught canon, to introduce African literature and Caribbean literature, is well and good.  But the significance does not consist in giving those who have long been oppressed their share of the cake.  It consists in sharing out  a certain battle with the dominant language – for example, the way in which writers like Césaire have activated the language of Rimbaud or the surrealists against the finely polished language of official French literature. 

IV. Cinema 

Q) In 2001 you devoted a whole work to film (La Fable cinématographique) and you had already written on film – for example, in Les Cahiers du cinéma, the journal Trafic, Arrêt sur histoire or Malaise dans l’esthétique.  How would you define the place of film in your work?  Is it a ‘indiscipline’ like the others (with its own tensions, forms and space)?  Or does film occupy a particular position that renders it distinct as a regime from art (at once representative and aesthetic) or any other aesthetic language (literature, for example)?

 Two layers are super-imposed in my interest in film.  The first is a love of cinema, which takes us back to the French passion for film at the end of the 1950s and start of the 1960s.  This was a way of blurring the dominant aesthetic legitimacy, for which beautiful films were those with images immediately identifiable as artistic, cinema based on a rich psychological plot, or posing metaphysical problems (Antonioni, Bergman and so on).  As a culture of autodidacts, this cinephilia was constructed around Hollywood film-makers, regarded as having lapsed from their German artistic dignity (Lang) or as representatives of the film industry of popular genres: the musical (Minneli), the western (Walsh, Hawks, Mann), melodrama (Sirk), the detective film (Hitchcock), etc.  The blurring of hierarchies was also a blurring of hitherto accepted evaluative criteria: plastic quality, psychological subtlety, metaphysical profundity, etc.  It was also a blurring of places, because cinephilia negotiated between the film theatre and small neighbourhood screens, which were the two places where you could see films that were looked down on.  So at first for me there was this culture of love of films and the blurring of forms of aesthetic legitimacy that it implied.  

This links up with a more general phenomenon: in ‘wild’ fashion, cinema realised the programme of uniting art and popular audience that theatre had dreamt about.  It was a popular art reclassified by its consumers, an art that allowed a pretty significant number of people to make their way into the domain of art and aesthetic judgement.  Even when we refer to mass, Hollywood, commercial films, it has to be said that this ‘commercial’ art yielded an outcome that was inconceivable in a certain era, bringing it about that millions of people could see David Lynch’s films, which are at least as far removed from traditional narrative rationality as the works of the nouveau roman closely confined to the world of art. 

The second layer is the more reflexive one, more bound up with my work on regimes of art.  On the one hand, in effect film is the art that ended up carrying out the programme of the aesthetic revolution.  For the theorists of the 1920s, film was the art that had arrived to see off old-style narrative and psychology, so as to convey instead the events of sensory matter – the shimmering of atoms of light on a screen.  It was the art of the machine which was supposed to rid us of the classical figure of the artist and make us abandon the classical figures and forms of narration and psychology.  It was the art of light and motion speaking for themselves.  As it turned out, cinema did something quite different, because it reintroduced forms of narration and psychology that were destroyed elsewhere and even the distribution into genres.  So my interest was focused on this contradiction, on the way in which two logics – an aesthetic logic and a narrative logic – were intermingled in film.  I’ve tried to mark the way in which a narrative logic of action is at once sustained and constantly suspended, interrupted by visual forms that are like stases of the visible.  This is true even in narrative films like Anthony Mann’s westerns, where there are moments of interruption, suspension, moments where nothing happens.  So my interest in film is structured around these two questions, connected firstly with the experience of a film-lover and secondly with an examination of the mixing of regimes. 

Q) Might it be said that La Fable does not offer a (new) theory of film, but is instead another way of reading film as an indiscipline differently? 

Yes, you could say that.  I don’t in any way believe in the need for a theory of film (any more than a theory of literature).  I’ve got nothing against the fact that other people claim to construct one.  But the idea that there is a filmic language, that you are going to distil the elements of this language, and that on this basis you are going to analyse films isn’t, in my view, of much interest.  This still pertains to the idea of disciplines and fields, whereas cinema intermingles different sensory regimes: those of the literary imagination, sensitive viewing of a painting, musical emotion, etc. Film is the standardised form of the ‘total art-work’.  I’ve spoken of the film fable, not of a theory of film, so as clearly to signal this heterogeneity of the object ‘cinema’.  There is a tension between two regimes: a regime of narrative sequence and a regime of aesthetic suspension that is at the heart of the film.  There is a mixture of sensory regimes.  There’s the fact that cinema is both the name of a place, a form of entertainment, an idea of art, etc.  There’s also the fact that cinema is something that has to be talked about.  It’s not a library where all the works are at our disposal.  It’s passing images, films that one has seen and essentially forgotten.  The images are transformed as soon as they are seen, then transformed in people’s heads by a whole process of selection, and then transformed by texts that talk about them.  That’s why I think that narratological theories and methods aren’t very interesting, because no one watches a film like that (shot by shot or unit by unit).  The very logic of cinema, that of the spectator, is precisely that the elements which occur are filtered; that people construct their own poem, their own film, with what is in front of them; and then they prolong it in words.  This means that film, like literature, is not simply an art but constructs a world.  About a world you don’t construct some theory but your own poem. 

V. Transmission of Forms of Knowledge: Pedagogy and Memory 

Q) In the last ten years, you’ve tackled the subject of the Shoah on several occasions and, in particular, given your opinion in the debate about the interdiction of representation (Arrêt sur histoire, Cahiers du cinéma, contribution to the volume edited by Jean-Luc Nancy, L’art et la mémoire des camps – reprinted in Le Destin des images).4  In these texts you seem to argue in favour of a necessary iconography of the Holocaust, stressing the idea that nothing is unrepresentable in itself but that, on the contrary, ‘in order to show Auschwitz, art alone is possible, because it is always the presence of an absence, because its labour consists in making something invisible visible to us, through the regulated power of words and images, whether connected or unconnected, because in this way it is the only thing capable of rendering the inhuman palpable’. 

a) Should we infer from this that the power and peculiarity of visual art are that they make seen what cannot be seen and that this is where the political and aesthetic vocation of catastrophic iconography is to be found? 

‘Making something invisible visible’ is still too religious a formula.  When people refer to the ‘invisibility’ of the extermination of European Jewry, they mix up two things.  In effect, they project an ethico-religious prescription onto what is in the first instance the factual datum characteristic of a process: specific to the process of the extermination is the fact that it unfolded silently and applied itself to destroying its own traces.  The artistic issue about the representation of extermination lies here: not in the question of whether one has the right to reconstruct a gas chamber and its victims, but in the fact that we possess almost exclusively the words of a small number of survivors to inform us about a process conducted in secret.  In the case of Lanzmann, there is a specifically artistic choice which is to activate absence – an absence of the things in the words, an absence of traces in the sites – so as to make the process of the double disappearance felt, by disconnecting it from any embodiment of external causality.  That is why the film begins in a place – Chelmno – where no concentration camp buildings survive.  But Lanzmann and his supporters have blurred things by foregrounding the issue of the idolatry of images.  For the problem precisely bears instead on what is to be represented and on the type of plot, the type of sequence to be employed to that end.  Let’s take a different example: Alfredo Jaar has created several installations on the Rwandan massacre without a single image of massacred bodies, but usually by picturing and presenting various words: the names of places and persons.  This is because the invisible thing to be made visible assumes a different meaning here.  What is not visible, what had to be made visible, was that the victims of this mass murder were all individuals. They had to be given their names, an inscription in the order of discourse and memorial, because indifference to all these deaths in fact prolongs a certain invisibility, the feeling that these lives are external to the world of discourse.  Another example: Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas have spoken about the war in Lebanon on the basis of material that attests to another form of invisibility: the films that there were no longer the resources to develop and print and which had become indecipherable when it was possible to do so.  So for me there isn’t any iconography or poetics of catastrophe in general, only poetic or political choices which on the one hand are bound up with particular cases, and on the other run into aesthetic divisions that are not specific to these processes. 

b) Do you support Godard’s idea that ‘the history of cinema is that of a missed rendezvous with the history of its century’?5  Do you therefore think, like Godard in Histoire(s) de cinéma, that cinema’s error was that it wasn’t capable of filming the camps? This kind of statement belongs to a Heideggerian type of dramaturgy, in which one defines theessence of an epoch and a technology as the expression of that essence.  There is no vocation of cinema to which it has been unfaithful, because ‘cinema’ is itself a heterogeneous object.  And the very idea of a century is always a construct among other constructs.  Godard effects a construct of this kind by constructing a cinema ‘forewarning’ of the extermination through various films (Faust, Nibelungen, La Règle du jeu, The Great Dictator, and so on), all of which might be entered into very different constructions.  That’s to say, he uses a poetics of montage which is in fact a certain ‘poetics of the twentieth century’, in order to legitimise a quite different idea of cinema and its relationship to the century.  But since this poetics ultimately goes back to a certain German Romanticism (that of Friedrich Schlegel and his ‘progressive universal poetry’ which fragments and recomposes the works of the past), this means that he uses a particular Romantic poetics in order to construct the image of a twentieth century determined by a different German Romanticism (that of Faust and the Nibelungen).  The ‘missed rendezvous’ is in fact the fictional object constructed by a confrontation between poetics and temporalities. 

c) Discussing the cinematic work of Chris Marker, you write: ‘memory is a work of fiction’.6  Today, couldn’t this idea be well-nigh systematically extended to any (artistic) attempt at fictionalisation appropriate to the imagery of catastrophes? 

Once again, I don’t in any way believe in an imagery or fictionalisation appropriate to the representation of catastrophes, because I do not believe that there is a general, homogeneous figure of catastrophe.  On the one hand, what I’m saying there applies to memory in general: it is always a selection, an articulation between fragments, a superimposition of non-synchronous temporal series. That is to say, it is always fiction, in the sense in which I intend it: the construction of a relationship between something visible and some meaning, between heterogeneous spaces and times.  On the other hand, insistence on fictional labour assumes its full significance when what’s involved are those destructive phenomena that transform their victims into pure objects of a documentary gaze.  

Godard used to say ironically that epic was for the Israelis and documentary for the Palestinians. The artistic work of memory is that which accords everyone the dignity of fiction. 

This publication is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as part of the 

Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London. 

www.frenchbooknews.com 

1 

 Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente, Paris: Galilée, 1995, p. 53. 

2 

 See ‘Sous les pavés, la page’, interview with Aude Lancelin, Le Nouvel Observateur, 8–14 

February 2007, pp. 98-100: here p. 100. 

3 

 See ‘Jacques Rancière: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement’, 

interview with Solange Guénoun and James H. Kavanagh, Substance, no. 92, 2000, pp. 3-24. 

4 

 See Jean-Louis Comolli and Jacques Rancière, Arrêt sur histoire, Paris: Centre Georges 

Pompidou, 1997; Jacques Rancière, ‘La sainte et l’heritière: à propos des “Histoire(s) du cinéma”’, 

Cahiers du cinéma, no. 537, July–August 1999, pp. 58-61; Jacques Rancière, ‘S’il y a de 

l’irreprésentable’, in Le Destin des images, Paris: La Fabrique, 2003, pp. 123-53. 

5 

 Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique, Paris: Seuil, 2001, p. 217. 

6 

 Ibid., p. 202.

Sarah Palin: Operation “Castration”
Jacques-Alain Miller
translated by Jake Bellone with James Curley-Egan

 

The choice of Sarah Palin is a sign of the times. In politics, the feminine enunciation is hence called to dominate. But be careful! It’s no longer about women who play elbows, modeling themselves on the men. We are entering an era of postfeminist women, women who, without bargaining, are ready to kill the political men. The transition was perfectly visible during Hillary’s campaign: she began playing the commander in chief and, since that didn’t work, what did she do? She sent a subliminal message, one that said something like: “Obama? He’s got nothing in the pants.” And she immediately took it back, but it was too late. Sarah Palin is not only picking up where she left off but, being younger by fifteen years, she is otherwise ferocious, slinging feminine sarcasm like a natural; she overtly castrates her male adversaries (and with such frank jubilation!) and their only recourse is to remain silent: they have no idea how to attack a woman who uses her femininity to ridicule them and reduce them to impotence. For the moment, a woman who plays the “castration” card is invincible.

In France, we were able to see Ségolène accomplish Operation “Castration” on Fabius and Strauss-Kahn, but, subsequently, she tried to give herself a motherly image and thus she neglected Sarkozy, who was able to paint her as a twit. And thus she joined the ranks of Martine Aubry or Michele Alliot-Marie, the standard models…

What is the precise difference between the women of these two generations? The first ones imitated man, respected the phallus, and performed as if they had one. The second wave knows that the phallus is only a semblance and, furthermore, one not to be taken seriously: it is the de-complexified femininity. A Sarah Palin puts forward no lack: she fears nothing, churns out children all while holding a shotgun, and presents herself as an unstoppable force, “a pitbull with lipstick”.

Has Obama already lost? By not choosing Hillary as his partner – in the instances of his spouse, who is quite a pitbull herself – he paved the way for McCain to drive right in. Thanks to Palin, McCain is back in the race. Sarah impassions America, she brings a new Eros to politics. If Obama wins, she has better chances to be his challenger in four years. If it’s McCain, Hillary will be his number one adversary. In any case, a new race of political women rise to power.

There are moments in one’s existence that stand out, as if of a more solid texture, drawn in stronger lines contrasting with the uzziness and fathomless ambiguity of the rest of life. And they really are charged with objective meaning, imparted by the movement of a sort of historic overdetermination. Often that special quality only reveals itself retrospectively, but sometimes, too, it is perceived immediately.

That is what I experienced on the day, in autumn 1959, when I first glanced through an issue – number 3, I think – of the SI [Situationist International]. At the time, I participated in the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, and in the journal of the same name, for which I wrote, as was the rule, under a pseudonym: P. Canjuers. That day, as a few of us were going through the weekly mail, my eye was attracted by that sleek, elegant publication, with its scintillating cover and incredible title. I took grabbed hold of it, and immediately began to explore what I gradually came to see as a new-found land of modernity, bizarre but fascinating.

Now we, at S. ou B., felt that we epitomized modernity, and I continue to think us completely justified in doing so. S. ou B. had broken with orthodox Marxism-Leninism, and gone on to radically criticize the Eastern European Communist regimes, but also to reformulate the criticism of capitalism, through the analysis both of its most sophisticated forms of domination, and of the most advanced experiences of the working class movement. Among these, the revolutionary workers’ councils in Hungary in particular fed our thinking about what, positively, might be the content of a truly revolutionary program.

How passionate were those years of searching, its fever further intensified by the position of quasi intellectual clandestinity to which the utter rejection of our ideas confined us. For, despite the Kruschev report and the uprisings in Poland and Hungary, the French political scene was still essentially paralysed by the intellectual blackmail of both Stalinists and the most cowardly “pentiti” of bourgeois ideology, such as Sartre. So we explored the deep waters Nautilus-like, almost unknown to the world on the surface, freely and audaciously, to a point that would perhaps not have been possible had we been obliged to battle foot by foot against dishonest opponents who, furthermore, had nothing of interest to say to us.

And now, looking through this perfectly singular booklet, I discovered a small group of unknown people who did have some terribly exciting things to say to us. Definitely strange things for us, with our eyes glued to the Marxist horizon, even though the point, for many of us, was to travel beyond it; totally inhabitual in regard to the messages sent out to us by other tiny groups intent on saving some vestiges of the revolutionary past from the Stalinist disaster. The strangeness was not uncanny, but rather, attractive, incredibly enticing. The criticism of art and culture led on to a utopian, liberated life, already experimented by these young adventurers in practical poetics such as “derives” around cities, or the illustrated description of a fantastic place called the “Yellow City.” And that utopia already haunted the people whose faces could be seen in a few dim photos, sitting around cafe tables engaged in ardent, infinite conversation that lofted them through the nights. With the frenzy of escaped prisoners, in the secret folds of the city, they too were struggling to elucidate the deepest roots of modern misery, and living, in fantasy, the upheaval that would overthrow it. And the journal was something of the tale of their efforts, in a sharp, tense style, almost stiffened in the same arrogant conceit with which we too affected to steel ourselves, both to reflect back on our opponents the scorn they inflicted on us, and to convince ourselves of how radical we really were.

As I read that issue of the SI, then, I realized that what was occurring was an objective encounter, so to speak, a criticism in action of “separation,” to use an expression in consonance with my emphatic feeling of the time: a meeting at the acme (no doubt hidden to everyone but us) of modernity. Over the following months, Debord and I checked out in detail just how necessary and fertile that encounter was, during long talks in bistros, and endless roamings through the city streets. In the project of self-management embracing every aspect of social life, as expressed by the workers’ movement at the heights of its spontaneous creativity – from the Paris Commune to 1956 in Hungary – resided the social and political underpinnings for the utopia of people constantly inventing their “use of life,” like a perpetual composing of music or poetry. And in turn, the subversion of the artistic and cultural institution, which the SI claimed to embody, came as an extension and a consecration, so to speak, in what was reputed to be the highest spheres, of the subversion of every agency of domination and exploitation. The text that we finally wrote jointly, and pompously entitled Preliminaires pour une definition de l’unite du programme revolutionnaire, definitely gives an idea of the ambition behind our exchanges, but tells hardly anything about how rich they were, and even less of the friendship that was built up through that conversation.

In a restaurant on rue Mouffetard, on July 20, 1960, we put the finishing touches on what we viewed as the guidelines of an agreement between the cultural vanguard and the vanguard of the proletarian revolution. We were very finicky about the title and its print, designed, according to Debord, so that the document would be referred to as the “Preliminaires” – and I smiled, indulgent and foolish, knowing nothing about communication at the time. After that, we parted for the summer, each with the task of circulating the paper among his comrades. In the fall, I had to leave France for 9 or 10 months, and during my absence I learned that Debord had formally become a member of S. ou B, was participating fully in its activities, especially during the group’s action within the major strikes that shook the Belgian Borinage in the winter of 1961. The news surprised me. His membership, I felt, exceeded the closeness we had actually achieved: and above all, it seemed useless, and in fact, in our discussions Debord had expressed the view that each group should continue, in practice, to follow its own path. The news of his resignation came as less of a surprise, since he had based it on his disagreement with the internal functioning of the group, and on the role played by some domineering individuals. Apparently, he had attempted to foment a revolt among the younger members, mostly students, but that had been no more than a Fronde.

I have stressed the episode of Debord’s relations with S. ou B. because it seems significant on several counts. First, the person I knew and loved at that time was, so to speak, a nascent Debord. Although he already had a brilliant career as an agitator in the cultural sphere behind him, the most singular traits of his personality as a revolutionary, as well as the most fertile and most perspicacious of his inventions still retained a vivaciousness and an accuracy that would subsequently be somewhat adulterated by his obsession with being public enemy number 1, and also by the structural stupidity of disciples, from whom he proved unable to take sufficient distance. At the time there were Khayati, Kotanyi, Jorn . . . friends, not disciples.

Above all there is a need, I think, to point up the importance, for the road Debord followed, of that involvement with S. ou B. – particularly so since he and most everyone who has had anything to say about his adventure have practically systematically ignored it. The point is obviously not to stake any claim either for S. ou B. and even less for myself, as having fathered the thinking of a man who went on to become a celebrity. To the contrary, it is the objective nature of our encounter that I would emphasize once again, and what it revealed about a particular moment in history. Debord did not succeed in wrenching himself from the curse that Stalinism and the bureaucratization of the working class organizations had laid on the revolutionary movement by dint of reading Hegel, the young Marx and Lukacs. It was the insurgent Hungarian workers and the Councils they created who lifted that curse, at least for those who were prepared to listen to what they had to say.

At this point in his itinerary, Debord was ready. He had broken with the Lettrists and with a criticism that remained complacently restricted to culture: in his opinion, the cultural vanguards did nothing but repeat ad nauseam the scene of the break-off with art, originally performed by the Dadaists after World War I. A clean break was called for, and a way of moving beyond art had to be found. Art conceived as play, as the freeing of desire, as subversion, as negation of the deathly, repressive social order, for this was the sense of modern art, as Debord saw it. The creation of “situations” was a response to that exigency: “The arts of the future will be upheavals of situations, or they will not be.” There was clearly a parallel between the revolution as the invention of society and those “upheavals of situations” as the invention of daily life.

Now, the link between so radical a demand and the concrete action of the proletariat turned out to be thinkable again. For anyone intent on seeing the true situation, the Budapest insurgents – about whom Debord had learned first hand from his friend Attila Kotanyi – had overthrown not only the colossal statue of Stalin, but also the terrifying image of a proletariat whose mission it was, as the sadistic agent of historic necessity, to force all of humanity, once and for all, to endorse industrial discipline, the cult of the leader, the annihilation of individuals, reduced to being the masses, etc. For artists and intellectuals, that proletariat was truly a bogy man, who so many had determined to serve nonetheless, out of fear, masochism or ambition.

In the West, by the same token, all those libertarian anarchists, anti-authoritarian Marxists, council communists, etc. who had never ceased to denounce the Stalinist imposture, began to gain some acknowledgement. And among them, S. ou B. and such sister groups as Solidarity in England, Correspondence in the USA, and Unita Proletaria in Italy, had undertaken a complete reinterpretation of the proletarian experience, highlighting the significance, for a liberatory movement, not only of the great moments of revolutionary creation, but of the everyday struggles around the work process and the creativity with which workers combat the disciplinary industrial organization. In doing so, S. ou B. revived the radicality characteristic of the anarchists, and of the very beginnings of the socialist movement, and geared thinking about the revolutionary utopia (“the contents of socialism”) to call every aspect of life into question, from the shape of cities to gender relations.

Clearly, then, there was nothing fortuitous in the arrival of an issue of the SI in the mailbox of S. ou B., any more than in the passionate interest it drew from a young member of that group, or the excited discussions that ensued. . . . And conversely, the reader will understand that when such themes as the criticism of daily life or all-encompassing self-management became the battle cries of the SI years later, I was not overwhelmed by their novelty, and I was surely not the only one.

How is it, then, that my excitement of some 30 years ago, when I first discovered the SI, is still tingling – not as some narcissistic pleasure in reliving the vanished past, but truly as the ongoing perception of an invaluable uniqueness? It is, I believe, because of the sense of form and the artistic quality that inhabited everything Debord undertook, and contributed enormously to making him effectively subversive.

I am of course not by any means contending that Debord should be embalmed in museums of modern art. It is true that he boasted of being the inventor of the major modern-day cinematographic innovations. . . . And one could also argue that as a virtuoso in the collage, photomontage and “detournement” of ads and comics, he was a great pop artist, – but the only sense in doing so would be for the (mediocre) pleasure of drawing screams from his devotees. Or again he may, as late sycophants would have it, be ranked among the great French writers of this century, thanks to his resolute style and the fine boldness of his assertions. And Sollers, who is one of Paris’ highest-paid literary clowns, and can therefore get away with anything, even took advantage of his position to subject Debord, alive and kicking, to the insult of claiming to be his spiritual heir; shortly thereafter he supported Balladur for President.

No, what I would like to demonstrate is quite the opposite: how the artistic treatment, so to speak, applied by Debord to revolutionary activity constitutes the exact, faithful expression of the contents of that activity, and gives its perspective proper depth.

To call Debord an artist is obviously something of a paradox. His criticism of art, intended to be devastating, was two-faceted. Modern art, on the one hand, with its succession of repetitious vanguards incapable of surpassing themselves, has exhausted its critical bite on alienated existence. But on the other hand and more deeply, art contrasts with “true life” in that it is congealed, so to speak, and therefore doomed to be no more than a cemetery of moments, affording fictitious, fallacious fulfilment of desires.

The same alienating force that Debord would later extend to the entire functioning of society, through the concept of the spectacle, applied, then, to the very principle of art. Art was nothing but separation from life.

Perhaps the explanation of the paradox by which the promulgator of so vivid a criticism actually turns out to be an artist, and profoundly so, resides in the fact that this criticism misses its mark, leaving its object intact, in essence. In fact, to reduce 20th century art to the movement of negation embodied by those vanguards is to mistake official art and some historicizing discourse on art for art work itself. The fact that Dada, and above all Duchamp, traced the theoretical limit of 20th century art with exemplary clarity – namely, that in the last resort it is the signature that makes the work of art, and for anything to be art the condition, necessary and sufficient, is that an artist decides it is – has in no way prevented art since then from being rich and meaningful within that limit. In striving obstinately to define what present-day art can or should be, the vanguards have succeeded only in becoming the “art pompier” of the second half of this century, in the person of Beuys, Buren and so many others – and in this it really has succeeded. And again, in any reference to vanguards, it is important not to align them all on any single historical trend. The Cobra movement, for instance, exemplifies a positive renewal much more than the work of negation.

This work of negation, which cannot be completed by art itself and can only achieve completion when life itself surpasses art – in “situations” – seems to rehash the old denial not only of art, but of symbolization, and of mediation by signs or figuration. To condemn art – and thence signs as well, or symbols – as false, in the name of the truthfulness of life or of things themselves, is not a judgment but a pure act of violence: does that make it revolutionary? Swift derided the academicians of Lagado who replaced words by specimens of things, in their attempt to reform language by doing away with its unfortunate polysemia, that is to say its very power of symbolism: endless transports were needed to have the slightest conversation!

Symbolization has avenged itself of this violent dismissal by taking over the very field of “destructive” activity to which Debord devoted himself, and by conferring the aura of the work of art on his life, as well as on his writings and films. And this came about through play and style.

As we all know, nothing is more serious than play, where the exercise of freedom adventures as close as possible to material and social constraints, or to chance; it guards us, then – but at such great risk ! – from the most repugnant kind of comfort: repetition – death in disguise in the eyes of Debord. But its seriousness also derives from its always, and especially in revolutionary action, being a world-play. Be it in tarots, chess or go, the physical objects and the rules of the game compose an analogue of the world, and each game or each move reorganizes and recommences the world. In the case of a group of revolutionaries, however small, the form of its organization, the way it functions, the content and the modalities of its action all prefigure, as in a microcosm, the desired state of the world. This was one of the bitter lessons drawn from the fate of the Bolshevik party, and the group S. ou B. was intent on drawing the consequences and on behaving immediately, concretely and on its own microscopic scale, as we thought a free society would demand.

Debord quite naturally extended this exigency to the area in which his desire to break with the “old world” was in fact most strongly focused, and which I will not call everyday life, because of the somewhat futile connotation of the term, but rather, “the use of life,” use of the fleeting moments, and of the most concrete contents of situations. And play was necessarily the model here, in the sense that the artist is playing when the progress of his work proposes an unheard of, desirable modulation of the course of time or the unfolding of space. “Experimenting” with the urban environment was this sort of play: through wanderings imbued with the hues and resonances lent by the peculiar qualities of the places visited, the drinks downed here and there and the remarks exchanged. The same was true of conversation, to be taken almost in the original sense of “shared life,” for it embodied something of a sensual fulfilment of friendship. For Debord it was a verbal derive, the playful experimenting, by several people, of ideas, words, new fancies – and anyone who ever spent some time with him knows how his presence and talk succeeded, in these exchanges with friends, in catalysing and freeing their imagination, in its liveliest expression. With real opponents, on the other hand, the discussion veered to another type of game, which he called a “boxing match” but was actually more of a free-for-all since he had no qualms about resorting to every available means, including the lowliest personal attacks.

In friendship, however, – and I think friendship is what really most accurately prefigured the kind of society he expected a revolution to produce -, he was intent on enforcing the rules dictated, in his opinion, by the constraints inherent in the fight against the existing order, and the degree of freedom required to be worthy to fight. And he often pushed that inflexible stance to the point of formalism, and of arbitrariness as well, since it was he who set those rules unilaterally, and most often left them implicit, the understanding being that they were self-evident. His disciples obviously were incapable of anything but an exaggeration of these practices, turning them into the most putrid fashionable snobbishness.

I myself was victim of that formalism, without even understanding, at the time, what had transpired, since the notion that relations between friends could be regulated by a code was completely alien to me. On the evening when Guy and Michele invited me to dinner at impasse de Clairvaux and served me a chicken-and-French-fries plate bought in some greasy joint on boulevard de Sebastopol, I should have understood that my hour of disgrace had arrived, even if the “insult” was strangely cloaked in an apology – “we’re broke” – which cancelled it and which I definitely could not revile. Had I been less of a fool I would probably have read the signals more fully, and understood that the mixture of chicken-fries plus apology was a sort of self-contradictory compromise between the will to exclude me – clearly imputable to Michele – and a desire to be indulgent. Etc. Here, then, in any case, is the method Debord chose when he felt the time had come to put an end to our friendship, without informing me of his reasons, even in the form of insults. Too bad for me, and for him.

The May ‘68 retreat by the SI, calling itself the council for the pursuit of occupations, into the Institut Pedagogique National (!), seems to me to be an infinitely more serious perversion of this kind of play. In doing so, the SI usurped the title of council which, in its own eyes, was supposed to designate the agency of collective empowerment of the revolutionary masses, turning it into a camouflage for a separate authority handing down judgments – that is, condemnations – of the innumerable protagonists of the May revolt, and above all of those people who dared to defend ideas barely distinguishable from their own.

Playing, under the circumstances, would definitely have demanded that the game be waged on a much broader scope, and Debord would no doubt have lost control of it, and the possibility of imparting a style to it.

No irony is intended in my use of the term “style.” Style, to me, is not an affected form used to facilitate or embellish the communication of a message, the meaning of which is located at some basement level of expressiveness. Play involves style; and so does the revolutionary action of a minority group, the idea being to give shape to a vision of the world that cannot be achieved at its own small scale. Each move or combination of moves outlines a gesture or a figure, projecting an order, however fleeting, into the existent chaos. To speak of beauty or elegance in reference to play is not superficial, but truly imparts the awareness that play operates in the objective world. And again, style cannot be defined as the mark of subjectivity, but rather, as the tension between the ephemeral and the utopian dimensions – between movement, on the one hand, wresting free speech from the inertia and senselessness of the pervading verbal noise to adventure it, in all its vulnerability, suspended over “the cataract of time,” and on the other hand utopia, the projection of a figure offering, by analogy, a foretaste of some desirable ordering of the world.

When a minority group acts, then, it is style more than the necessarily limited material effect that propels reality to a breaking point where open-ended time, and the incompletion of history, and the possibility of revolution make themselves felt, by surprise.

In the work of art this gaping openness to time, signature of its uniqueness, is what Benjamin called the aura. He deemed relinquishment of it necessary, in the name of his melancholic subjection to modern technicity. At a time when the fate of the revolution was believed to be tied to machines and the massified humanity presumably generated by them, he proclaimed “What one man has done can be done again by another” as a liberatory slogan. Now that we know a bit more about machines, and above all about society as a machine, it seems to me that the revolution needs to bet on the postulate that “what one man has done cannot be done again by any other” if we are truly intent on acknowledging equal dignity for all subjects, referred to here as men.

This is the postulate asserted in his practice by Debord, haunted by his horror of repetition and, what comes to the same, by his acute perception of the uniqueness of each moment: “(what is) beyond the violence of intoxication. . . peace, magnificent and fearsome, the true taste of time passing.”

The mirror as a figure – mirror adhering so closely to the fluctuating image of reality, but, at the same time, reversing it – acts as a deeply unifying structure for Debord’s work, and perhaps even for his life, from his writings to the singular critical posture he adopted, and including the contents of that criticism: the concept of the spectacle.

But again, the mirror figure embodies all of Debord’s ambivalence toward any mediation by signs, representation and symbolisation. It would ensnare us in alienation and commodity fetishism, or in the substitute for true life that art extends to us: because it is fake, distorting and fragmented, it is the instrument of domination through the spectacle. It must constantly be broken, to liberate “true life,” to rid oneself of the petrifying hold of images and reassert authenticity, constantly to be reinvented. From Memoires to Panegyrique, however, and in all of his films – down to the palindromic title marking his last film -, the mirror also figures remembrance: a memory both hurt to the quick, ravaged by nostalgia, and at the same time controlled and guided by critical thinking.

In his writing, then, mirrored phrases, used as a mode of criticism in themselves, proliferate. Debord himself theoretized “this insurrectional style that turns the philosophy of wretchedness into the wretchedness of philosophy,” and “is not a negation of style, but the style of negation”: because it ferrets out the instability in the “existing concepts . . . it simultaneously includes the grasp of their rediscovered fluidity, of their necessary destruction.”

On a broader level, the mirror served Debord again, as an instrument for reversing “existing concepts,” in an on-going reflection trained on the course of events, a sort of chronic of current events, of the kind he wrote in the twelve issues of the SI, and in Commentaires. And to me, it is when he did just that, speaking within the surging movement of history, that he saw farthest and aimed most accurately. He had to defend his life and work inch by inch, against concrete, constantly repeated facts, in “the resounding cataract of time.” And through that fight he drew a sort of reasoned, demythifying portrait of present times, yielding the subject matter for theorization, but still retaining the very grain of the event.

But when he came to a halt, and attempted to stand at a distance to construct a theoretical battleship, The Society of the Spectacle, he got bogged down, in my opinion – but I will not attempt to explain my reasons here. The very expression “society of the spectacle” seems abusive to me, but probably because I am captive of the existing meaning of the words. And the word spectacle seems right to me as a metaphor, not as a concept; that is, precisely, not as the generalization that Debord so stubbornly defended. The metaphoric power of the word, so cuttingly critical in partial applications, takes its revenge when Debord attempts to make all of social reality fit into it, and traps him; this is clear in Commentaires, in particular. Society is reduced to the oversimplified model of the conventional theater, and the dialectic of alienation wears thin in a pitiful denunciation of the stagehands pulling the strings behind the scenes. The society of the spectacle then becomes a society of backstage manipulations. . . . Here again, the demythification of how domination works is reduced to the simple denial of the symbolic dimension. The concept of the total spectacle completely flattens out the sphere in which, precisely, the enormous complexity of representation, and of the alienation generated by it, unfolds.

The extraordinary effectiveness of the machinery combining the commodification, the market economy, representative democracy, opinion polls, the mass media and the social sciences resides precisely in the fact that it does not impose its discourse unilaterally, as being the law, but rather, that it is interactive. The TV commentator is not Big Brother, authoritatively proclaiming the official lie, he is John Doe, who reads your mind and utters your thoughts. The agitated clowns on the screen have our faces, our gestures, our voices, and the thundering discourse that oppresses us and drives us to despair is depicted as our own. And in a sense, it is: lies, like taxes, are levied directly at the source. It is from us that a vast scheme extorts the basic material out of which the various organs of the domination-producing apparatus, and the social sciences in particular, then proceed to isolate the active principle of the lie, and to resynthesize a social discourse that is a sort of clone of our own – uncannily familiar. And, stupefied at hearing and seeing ourselves speak and act from outside of our selves, we shut up. Can there be any worse censorship?

Would Debord have agreed with an analysis such as this? Probably not. It hardly matters.

What does matter is that he denounced and described the universal lie proffered by our society about itself and the world; that he showed how this lie destroys reality by saturating everything animate and inanimate with inauthenticity and eliminating the temporal dimension, so that we circle ’round endlessly in the perpetual present of current events. And above all, what matters is that he detected the sickly locus of the devastating lie: the denial of death. “The social absence of death is the same as the social absence of life.” “The spectator mind no longer moves through life toward achievement and toward death.” “He who relinquishes expending his life can no longer admit his own death to himself.”

At such depths of critical thinking, Debord was very much alone. The denial of death also inhabited the revolutionary movement, with its dire need for positivity and optimism. Around ‘68, it was fashionable to qualify death as “reactionary.”

And, too, at such depths there can be no empty talk. Debord was not content to oppose a few statements to the key imposture of the times: his entire work and life were spurred by an awareness of the presence of death, and tensed between the ephemeral and the utopian dimensions. The “true taste of time passing” is also the taste of the true, be it in savouring wine, in certain moments, or in a revolutionary struggle. The presence of the “movement toward death” is the touchstone of authenticity, which revolution should restitute – or institute. It is in this sense that Debord was radically an artist. In the same sense that he acknowledged that his friend Asger Jorn had remained a situationist although, when enjoined to choose between the two, he gave up being a member of the SI to continue his work as painter, sculptor and ceramist. For, as Debord said in Une Architecture sauvage, writing about the perpetual metamorphoses operated by Jorn in his home and garden in Albissola, despite that choice, his life never ceased to be propelled by a constant spate of invention and desires.

Being by numbers – interview with artists and philosopher Alain Badiou – Interview

Lauren Sedofsky

Alain Badiou is an anomaly. What he has attempted has all the allure of the obviously impossible. That’s the fascination of the thing. Judge it retrograde or eminently contemporary, aberrant or a stroke of genius, but take it squarely for what it is: the painstaking effort on the part of an Althusserian Marxist, longtime Maoist, and unanalyzed disciple of Lacan to quit the confines that several generations of “limit-makers” have erected around philosophical practice.

 Wittgenstein’s fragmentary sophistics is merely a symptom. Revolutionary political theorizing, the various positivisms, and the vast textualization of the world all share the same restrictive modus operandi of suturing philosophy to some other, seemingly stronger, extrinsic body of thought. What’s more, Jacques Derrida’s interminable perambulations inside Western metaphysics involve a swap of one kind of system for another: the compelling demonstrative logic of systematic philosophy for the latent tissue of relations embedded in language. With the revelation of writing as the long-repressed factor–and its ultimate fetishization–the issue of demonstrability has curiously vanished from the horizon. Odd, wouldn’t you say, in a century thoroughly dominated by mathematization? Badiou emerges right here, with a singular question: how do we advance, proceed, reinsert ourselves into a pattern of succession, the “plus-one” established by taking “one step more”?

 In a word, Badiou has founded a philosophy. Take “founded” in the full philosophical sense. And that philosophy is rigorously systematic. Take “systematic” in the full philosophical sense. What does it require to reanimate a dead tradition? A single consolidating intuition permitting the kind of strategic move, in its elegance and simplicity, most often associated with a game of chess. It goes like this: ontology is mathematics. DON’T RECOIL. NOT YET. Some people don’t know what ontology is, and even those who do, don’t. (For confirmation, read the opening pages of Heidegger’s Being and Time.) The word “Being” has always resonated with a mysterious attribution of some extra added value to “what simply is,” and its science has remained philosophy’s foremost red herring. By slipping mathematics into that eerie slot, Badiou snaps the file shut with assurance of ontology’s thorough rationality. “What is” is pure multiplicity. As for what can be said about it, the mathematicians are still at work.

In his massive L’Etre et l’evenement (Being and the event), Badiou makes mathematical set theory the reader’s guide to some 2,500 years of problems raised by ontology. From the axioms of set theory he not only recapitulates the history of philosophy but derives all the concepts of his system. DON’T RECOIL. NOT EVEN NOW: his prose is so tight and lucid that even in your relative mathematical illiteracy you’ll be surprised to discover, like Plato’s Meno, that you already knew how to draw the inferences. And in those inferences the stakes are revealed. What were the devastating criticisms forever leveled against systematic philosophy? That the system was invented and arbitrary, its propositions unverifiable. In Badiou’s reformulation of philosophy as a contemporary systematics, only mathematics, the unassailable archetype of demonstrability, intelligibility, and transmissibility, can offer sufficient authority, sufficient legitimacy–not as a model but as the very armature of the system itself.

 Badiou’s philosophy, however, is not a philosophy of mathematics. For him there is no such thing. Nor is it about the world or consciousness or knowledge. He calls it a philosophy of time. Forget teleologies and historical determinisms, the Kantian a priori, Husserl’s time consciousness, Bergson’s duration. Think of it rather, to risk a neologism, as a neology. Set theory’s closing chapter, the generic set, the set with no ascertainable identifying characteristic, the “set without qualities,” provides Badiou with a unique and provocative prototype for theorizing the emergence of the new. The event is no more than an extraneous, evanescent incident–but it may make waves. When it does, it involves the active participation of subjectivities in a process whose contours and destiny elude and exceed them. To grossly reduce the subtleties of Badiou’s argument, call the sum total of activity in that formative stage a generic set. The time traced there is the discrete time of random, heterogeneous advances, indiscernible quantum leaps that jolt science, politics, art, and love, the four Platonic conditions on which Badiou’s system reposes. Yes, Platonic–Badiou is an unabashed Platonist, as may be surmised from the mathematical premise.

What’s happened to his Marxism? This, I think: change is precisely the issue. Badiou fixes his attention on disruptions of the status quo, the kind that have the power to activate human agency. The essence of history’s movement, we now know, boils down to these unpredictable, disparate, indeterminate countercurrents that circumscribe times of truths in the making, truths that lose their truth value once fully acknowledged and fully accepted. Times, truths, heterogeneity, pure multiplicity. No totalizing here. No forcing of the venture, no specific investments. Philosophy, in Badiou’s terms, stands outside these temporal ramifications. It guarantees only its aptitude to seize what’s happening and provide an aftermath for calculating what it will have been worth–in a future perfect tense that underscores endurance.

LAUREN SEDOFSKY: The return to systematic philosophy today might seem archaic, if not impossible. How do you explain your conviction not only that the systematic thinking that runs through the history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger is still possible, but also that this architecture serves some purpose?

 ALAIN BADIOU: Philosophy is always systematic. Naturally, if by “system” you mean an architecture necessarily endowed with a keystone or a center, then you can say, to employ Heidegger’s vocabulary, that it’s a matter of an ontotheological systematicity, and therefore no longer valid. But if by “system” you mean, first, that philosophy is conceived as an argumentative discipline with a requirement of coherence, and second, that philosophy never takes the form of a singular body of knowledge but, to use my own vocabulary, exists conditionally with respect to a complex set of truths, then it is the very essence of philosophy to be systematic.

The distinctive service that philosophy renders thought is the evaluation of time. The issue is whether we can say, and according to what principles, that this time, our time, has value. For that the systematic dimension is necessary. To my mind, it’s one and the same question to ask whether philosophy can be systematic and whether philosophy can exist at all.

 LS: Your project is strictly philosophical, “a thesis about discourse, not about the world.”

 AB: Absolutely. Strictly speaking, philosophy doesn’t take the form of knowledge about the world. What’s more, like Lacan, I’m inclined to think that the idea of the world is itself in the final analysis a phantasy. My project makes claims on the strictly philosophical, within a general logic of delimitation. Philosophy is irreducible to other forms of thought. And it should maintain this criterion of delimitation as one of its most precious possessions. The threat that has loomed throughout its history is a confusion between what philosophy is in itself and what it is not, for example political, or esthetic, or scientific discourse.

It should be understood that philosophy, in itself, has no object. It isn’t and mustn’t become a body of knowledge. Here I remain faithful to Louis Althusser, who was the first to have pointed this out with perfect clarity. What’s astonishing is that the thesis “philosophy is philosophy” seems original today. However tautological, it’s a militant thesis, and not at all accepted. We are in a period when philosophy is marked by doubt, or even by a conviction that it is extinct.

 LS: The striking equation “ontology = mathematics” has the immense merit of eradicating the mystification that clings to the word “being.” You’ve identified this choice as an exit from romanticism and a program for the death of God.

 AB: We’re far from having exhausted the consequences of the question of the death of God. The philosophical destiny of atheism, in a radical sense, lies in the interplay between the question of being and the question of infinity. The real romantic heritage–which is still with us today–is the theme of finitude. The idea that an apprehension of the human condition occurs primordially in the understanding of its finitude maintains infinity at a distance that’s both evanescent and sacred, and holds it in the vicinity of a vision of being that’s still theological. That’s why I think the only really contemporary requirement for philosophy since Nietzsche is the secularization of infinity.

If we take “ontology,” as we must, literally or etymologically, that is, as what can be said about being qua being, then we ought to say that it’s mathematics. Mathematics secularizes infinity in the clearest way, by formalizing it. The thesis that mathematics is ontology has the double-negative virtue of disconnecting philosophy from the questioning of being and freeing it from the theme of finitude. That’s why it represents a powerful break.

 LS: In your magnum opus, L’Etre et l’evenement (Being and the event, 1988), you manage, in an astounding way, to elaborate all the concepts of your system inside a presentation of the axioms of set theory. What led you to this improbable wager?

 AB: [laughs] To a degree, this performance is easy–once you’ve thought of it. The moment it occurs to you that mathematics is ontology, that idea itself has a considerable capacity to clarify mathematics. I was astonished myself. If we begin with the thesis that being is fundamentally pure multiplicity, including infinite chains of multiplicities, and if we consider that the most formalized, most complete framework of axioms of the multiple today is set theory, then why not examine set theory, axiom by axiom? What do those axioms say about being qua being? The mathematician doesn’t need to ask himself this kind of question. He can be an ontologist without knowing it.

If the philosopher examines set-theory axioms with the idea that they are statements about being qua being, he sees an unexpected pertinence emerge. Let’s take the simplest possible example, the axiom of extensionality, which says that two sets are equivalent when they have the same elements. It’s very straightforward. But if we look at it closely, we realize that this is in fact a theoretical deployment of the old question of identity and difference, same and other, that any thinking about being qua being must inevitably address. And it’s the same for the entire set of axioms. They constitute a coherent body of propositions about being qua being, based on the implicit supposition that being is reducible to pure multiplicity.

 LS: In Le Nombre et les nombres (Number and numbers, 1990), you write, “A number is neither a characteristic of a concept, nor an operational fiction, nor an empirical given, nor a constitutive or transcendental category, nor a syntax or a language game, nor even an abstraction of our idea of order. A number is a form of Being … the infinite profusion of Being in Numbers.” What is mathematics, then?

 AB: Ultimately, being qua being is nothing but the multiple as such. What there is is the multiple. Mathematics is the kind of thought, and consequently the kind of discourse, that apprehends the configurations of multiplicity independently of any characteristic other than their multiplicity. As a thought procedure, mathematics will be subject to general laws. It will be scanned by events, radical innovations, breaks, and interruptions.

From the moment that what is being taken into account is being qua being, that is, pure multiplicity, it is indispensable that language rid itself of its equivocalness. (There we are with Lacan.) Formalization, this way of tearing language away from its status of mother tongue, this transformation of the mother tongue into a tongue that no longer offers any natural reception for the speaker, is the discipline through which thought appropriates the form of the pure multiple.

 LS: You make another rather audacious wager on the possibility of resurrecting a philosophical concept of truth.

 AB: The relative discredit of the category of truth today has two sources. For a long time, philosophy suspended the question of truth on the protocol of the question of being, with the Supreme Being as an ultimate guarantor. The death of God, then, as Nietzsche saw, amounts to a checkmate of truth. The second source is the vast contemporary movement to anthropologize philosophy–the idea that philosophy deals with more or less heterogeneous linguistic or cultural organizations of thought, and is itself the result or production of one such organization. This movement obviously entails a relativism, what could be called “a pragmatics of exactitude.”

Mathematics dismantles the perilous theological connection Truth-Being-One. And quite apart from anthropological thought, I’m deeply convinced that procedures of a universal kind do exist. That’s why I’ve undertaken to reorganize philosophy in its entirety, entrusting it to the category of truth, at the price of a radical reformulation of the notion.

For me, paradoxically, truths are the nonphilosophical, even truths about being qua being when they’re mathematical. At the same time, the nonphilosophical is precisely what provides for the existence of philosophy. As a category specific to philosophy, truth is what I call an operator for seizing truths. Philosophy is active; at the heart of its discursive organization is an act, the particular act of seizing truths, principally the truths of its time, truths in progress, incipient truths, truths in the process of constituting themselves, the truths that indicate what our time is really made of. It is philosophy’s seizing of these truths that designates them as truths; they don’t appear as such in themselves. A work of art appears as a work of art, a mathematical theorem as a mathematical theorem, a great love as a great love, a political revolution as a political revolution. For philosophy, these are truths in my own special sense: they are truth procedures. Philosophy’s task is to show why and under what conditions these absolutely heterogeneous truths are, at least, compossible.

 LS: What does “compossible” mean?

 AB: Compossibility, a true philosophical creation, can’t be understood simply as empirical collection. Truths are compossible because philosophy’s seizing of them simultaneously designates them as truths. Truths are multiple and heterogeneous, but the philosophical act displays them together. In doing so, it evaluates its time. By “evaluating time,” I mean evaluating how far this particular time has gotten in its capacity to generate truths. It’s a matter of measuring our time according to an idea of what that time contains that exceeds it. A truth is what within time exceeds time. And the philosophical act is its active witness.

 LS: These truths emerge inside “the situation.” How do you put a mathematical construction on such a simple word?

 AB: The situation is an ordinary multiple, a multiple that is obviously infinite because all situations in reality are infinite. It can be a historical, political, artistic, or mathematical situation; it can even be a subjective situation. I take the situation in an exceptionally open sense, and to capture that openness I say it’s a multiplicity.

I also posit that every situation is accompanied by a language, a capacity to name that situation’s elements, their relations, their qualities, their properties. And in every situation there is also what I call “the state of the situation”–the order of its subsets. The situation’s language aims at showing how an element belongs to such and such a subset. The situation is what presents the elements that constitute it; the state of the situation is what presents, not the situation’s elements, but its subsets.

From this point of view the situation is a form of presentation, the state of the situation a form of representation. And knowledge, being the way we organize the situation’s elements linguistically, is always a certain relation between presentation and representation. Knowledge is most simply defined as the linguistic determination of the general system of connections between presentation and representation. The set of a situation’s various bodies of knowledge I call “the encyclopedia” of the situation. Insofar as it refers only to itself, however, the situation is organically without truth.

Considering the privilege I give to Plato–out of coquetry, or to go against the current–

 LS: Coquetry? And I’ve been taking you seriously!

 AB: [laughs] And you were right to–I mean, out of serious coquetry! Our century is fundamentally anti-Platonist. So there’s an element of coquetry in calling yourself a Platonist, which I am, profoundly.

In any case, as a Platonist I don’t make a clear distinction between knowledge and opinion. So the encyclopedia is the anarchy of our knowledge. You’ll find things in it that are correct, things that are incorrect, interesting classifications, lively opinions and sterile ones, reactive ideas and active ones. But this is all still without truth.

 LS: So how do you bring truth into the situation?

 AB: My system’s second major thesis, after “ontology = mathematics,” is: in order for there to be truth, there has to be something other than the situation. Now I am absolutely an immanentist–I am convinced that if there is truth, it isn’t something transcendent, it’s in the situation–but I am nevertheless led to the conclusion that the situation, as such, is without truth. This antinomy must be resolved. That’s where I turn to the category of “the event,” which pushes the system in another direction.

 LS: Everything hinges on the event, this possibility of the new that emerges in the situation and gives it a temporal, even transtemporal, dimension. How should we understand the event?

 AB: The event has posed formidable problems for me, and still does. Here, following both Mallarme and Lacan, I have recourse to the logic of the term “the evanescent”–something whose very being is to disappear.I think of the event as a totally chance, incalculable, disconnected supplement to the situation. It will be recorded in its very disappearance only in the form of a linguistic trace, which I call the “name” of the event, and will supplement the situation with next to nothing. You might say my thinking on this point is a minimalism of the new.

 LS: Still, the evanescent has to fit the system’s mathematical base.

 AB: Through a kind of miraculous convergence–but that’s how philosophy works–I found what I needed in mathematics. In 1964, the American mathematician Paul Cohen elaborated a doctrine concerning the generic subsets of a given set. That doctrine provided me with the concept of a subset whose particularity is precisely to have no particularity. This was truly a moment of discovery for me, a moment of real illumination. We were getting to the thesis that a truth is not in a simple regime of opposition to knowledge; as a generic subset, it’s really a gap or break in the encyclopedic organization of knowledge. It constitutes the void specific to this encyclopedia. All of this clarified the fact that a truth is a truth about the whole situation, not simply a truth about this or that.

 LS: A set with no apparent shared property among its elements must necessarily remain invisible or, to use your key word, indiscernible. Faced with the indiscernible, what do you do?

 AB: Take a simple event like the encounter of love. The encounter is the event’s specific mode in the truth procedure called “love,” the procedure that renders the truth of that totally particular situation, sexuation. The event itself is the encounter. The encounter does not constitute the situation, it supplements it: there is what there was before, and then there’s the encounter.

Next comes the truth procedure of love itself. Its name is marked by the various forms that the declaration of love can take; the declaration of love is strictly what constitutes the name, the enduring trace, of the event of love. We have to explore the situation with respect to this new entity in such a way as to find out what is related or unrelated or difficult to relate to this primordial event. In so doing, we will trace a subset of the situation, little by little over time–because the extraordinarily ramified activities of love necessarily circumscribe a particular time. The subset is generic and, therefore, indiscernible. This means that the lovers cannot discern the subset that they themselves constitute. It’s in this sense that I’d say they are its subject.

 LS: In entering into the truth procedures that activate the four Platonic conditions of philosophy–mathematics, politics, art, and love–are we exclusively in the realm of thought?

 AB: A truth procedure is the experience of thought, or thought as experience. All the possible elements of human activity–sensitivity, emotion, concepts, practice, violence–can be mobilized by the deployment of a truth. The doctrine of truth I propose has the merit of ending the confrontation between thought and experience, theory and practice. Those dichotomies are subverted by this conception of truth and of its subject.

 LS: What kind of subject is this exactly?

 AB: Truth induces the notion of a subject in a totally singular manner. The subject of a truth is the term or terms (here, the lovers) of the situation that are seized or engaged by a truth procedure, and that constitute the generic subset–that is, they trace the path by which this subset emerges as a truth. They are factors of the indiscernible. At the same time, it is only because there is this process of indiscernibility that the subject, in this singular moment, finds itself constituted. The subject of a truth is certainly not in a position of mastery over a truth. The only subject is the subject of truth. What is not the subject of truth is only an inhabitant of the situation.

 LS: The procedure has more being than the subject?

 AB: Inevitably. Because a single generic set of the situation, even if it’s always incomplete, is in its being essentially infinite. The subject, though, is only engaged in finite operations. The subject is always the differential or finite dimension of the truth procedure.

 LS: You characterize your system as a “philosophy of time of this time.” How do you situate the time you’re theorizing within the history of philosophy?

 AB: That’s an immense question. Every event constitutes its own time. Consequently, every truth also involves the constitution of a time. So there are times, not one time. On the other hand, philosophy doesn’t constitute time. That’s why I was led to reintroduce the old word “eternity,” which was even less used than “truth” was. I sought it out to designate the singularity of philosophy’s relationship to time.

Philosophy has a relation to the different heterogeneous times of truths, since those are what it seizes. It exposes these times to precisely the aspect of time that is not temporal. Because what within time is constituted as truth both marks a new time and, strictly speaking, exceeds the singularity of its time. What is specific to truth, after all, is that it endures. Philosophy tries to seize truth’s endurance, to capture the eternity contained within time.

 LS: What about the event’s historical dimension?

 AB: The fact that events belong to history signifies only that they can be located in arrangements of before and after. Those arrangements offer no reason to argue that they constitute a history. Historicism consists in referring the singularity of a procession of events to a historical meaning that penetrates it and goes beyond it. I’m not at all a historicist, in that I don’t think events are linked in a global system. That would deny their essentially random character, which I absolutely maintain.

 LS: Michel Foucault drew our attention to the breaks, the discontinuities, the nonlinear aspect of history, without proposing a thesis about the jolting of what you call the situation. Might you be the philosopher that many take Foucault to be?

 AB: Foucault is a theoretician of encyclopedias. He was never really interested in the question of knowing whether, within situations, anything existed that might deserve to be called a “truth.” With his usual corrosiveness, he would say that he didn’t have to deal with this kind of thing. He wasn’t interested in the protocol of either the appearance or the disappearance of a given epistemic organization. As long as you don’t have an immanent doctrine of what in the situation exceeds the situation, you can’t be concerned about answering the question of how we pass from one system to another.

 LS: In your Manifeste (1989), you propose the following program of compossibilization: mathematics from Cantor to Cohen, Paul Celan’s poems, love under the sign of Lacan, and, in politics, the “obscure incidents” of the period 1968-80. In the framework of a “philosophy of time of this time,” are these events really on the breach?

 AB: Today, I would certainly rework this mapping of events, which was meant only as an indication. Anything empirical is always only indicative, and rapidly contestable. In mathematics, something else would be needed to be on the breach; that would be the theory of categories, which has led me to further systematic developments that I hope one day to write as a sequel to L’Etre et l’evenement. In the arts, we would have to examine how arts other than poetry function as conditions for philosophy. Gilles Deleuze wasn’t wrong to consider film philosophically important; I’d like to say something a bit more elaborate about it. And music, in its complexity and relative uncertainty, interests me. And then of course there would be the visual arts. Supplementary deployments also need to be made in relation to the “obscure incidents” of politics. Politically the ’80s were strongly reactionary, and in no way clarified the new.

 LS: Mathematics is only one of the four conditions of philosophy, yet it constitutes the concepts and structure of your system. Isn’t your philosophy sutured to mathematics?

 AB: It’s an obvious objection. The impression that I privilege mathematics comes from my announcement that mathematics is the science of being qua being. But just as the declaration separates philosophy from ontology, from a questioning of being, it also separates philosophy radically from mathematics. It’s a protocol of distinction, not of suture at all.

The mathematical thread was absolutely necessary in L’Etre et l’evenement, but not in everything I’ve written. There, I wanted to convince my reader that mathematics is the science of being qua being. I couldn’t do that without making abundant use of mathematics. I also wanted to assure myself that the theory of truth I was proposing was mathematically consistent. But you mustn’t think that mathematics occupies such a privileged place in the whole of my philosophical program.

 LS: I would have thought that the strategic move of putting mathematics in the place of ontology would at last open the way to a philosophical seizing of the theoretical sciences, written in the same formal mathematical language and possessing an oblique, if not to say blind, relation to phenomena. You have remained silent on this point.

 AB: My silence about science is entirely temporary and contingent. There’s absolutely no principle involved. A whole series of aspects of the sciences, and particularly of contemporary physics, are of great philosophical interest. I had launched into arid studies of quantum mechanics years ago. But for the moment I still don’t feel sufficiently experienced or intimately acquainted with what’s in question there to talk about it. You can’t do everything!

 LS: Forgetting for the moment the military/industrial establishment, is there a better example of the truth procedure than the scientific community?

 AB: If the scientific community designates the system of protocols for evaluating scientific innovations, you’re quite right. Scientists are a body of the faithful. But the scientific community sometimes designates something more institutional: efforts to impose State control–which falls into the order of subsets that I refer to as the state of the situation–on the truth procedure. The relation between the state of the situation and the truth procedure is always complex, since the truth procedure disrupts the state of the situation, feeding on that situation’s void, not its closure. This makes for an ambivalence in the scientific community. On the truth side, it’s a community of the faithful. On the state side, it will always involve an attempt to sell its fidelity to the State.

 LS: Concerning politics, why have you seized on the “obscure incidents” of the period 1968-80 rather than a namable event?

 AB: I call these happenings obscure because I’m not convinced they have received their name yet. Nomination takes place in an aftermath. It can be left in abeyance for a long time. I have the feeling that what happened in the ’60s received a series of false names, because it wasn’t clearly perceived that what was at stake in these happenings was, precisely, a calling into question of the previous protocols of political nomination. (That’s why they’re obscure.) A lot of young activists in this period spontaneously tried to name what was happening through the Marxist vocabulary of class, or to inscribe it in the logic of a new party, or used the signifier “revolution,” etc. But these words were inadequate for what was happening. What events showed was exactly the opposite: even and especially in revolutionary politics, there was something used up, inoperative, and outdated in this protocol of nomination.

 LS: It’s possible there was no event at all?

 AB: It’s entirely possible that there was no event at all. I really don’t know.

 LS: You must know, or you wouldn’t have designated that obscure time for examination.

 AB: No, I really don’t know, because it’s possible that we’re in a time, itself uncertain, when we’re going to be able to find names for a whole series of events that have disappeared into the past. Although they remain undecided for the moment, they may become fixed as events. Undecidability is an intrinsic attribute of an event.

 LS: What was the last namable event?

 AB: In politics, the revolution of October 1917.

 LS: We’re very far behind.

 AB: We’re very far behind. But that’s the situation of politics.

 LS: In the U.S. right now, the left is splintered into communities organizing to promote the rights of those who are denied them. These subcommunities have spawned sectarian modes of thought. How do you see this situation?

 AB: As one of the most catastrophic imaginable. Some day it will be necessary to review this communitarian venture and the considerable damage it entails for thought itself. In order for there to be emancipatory politics, it is absolutely necessary that the substantiality of the community remain unnamable. If emancipatory politics claims to proceed in the name of any predicative characteristic, it denies itself the possibility of being generic. When you’re for African-Americans, women, and others having the same fights as anyone else, it’s absolutely indispensable to support that on other grounds than the existence of a community of African-Americans or women.

The theme of equal rights is really progressive and really political, that is, emancipatory, only if it finds its arguments in a space open to everyone, a space of universality. If not, despite all the apparent radicalism a community puts into its system of demands, we have a profound submission to the figure of the state of the situation. To every generic procedure I attach a limit, a term I call its “unnamable point.” More and more, I am tempted to think that in emancipatory politics the community in a racial or biological sense is strictly an unnamable point. In order for politics to remain emancipatory, the community must not be named as such.

 LS: Marxist from the outset, Maoist for a long time, would you accept the accusation of having yielded to a philosophical idealism?

 AB: Not at all. To be an idealist you have to distinguish between thought and matter, transcendence and immanence, the high and the low, pure thought and empirical thought. None of these distinctions function in the system I propose. Actually, I would submit that my system is the most rigorously materialist in ambition that we’ve seen since Lucretius.

 LS: Concerning the condition of love, is the event situated in the encounter of love or in Lacan’s renovation of Freud?

 AB: In the truth procedure that is love, the immanent event is the encounter of love. If I mention Lacan as a theoretical event, it’s because Lacan represents psychoanalysis’ contemporary time, when the question of love, in a modern form, has returned to the scene of thought as a real theoretical issue. Lacan tried to grant a quasi-ontological significance to the encounter of love. He inscribed love in its real terrain, the formula of sexuation. And he also tried to disentangle the extraordinarily complex web that ties and unties love and desire. For all these reasons, he made invaluable contributions to restoring love to its function as a truth procedure, a point that had been partially forgotten since Plato.

 LS: You’ve found a generic set and truth inside the analytic situation.

 AB: Until now, my interest in Lacan and psychoanalysis has been confined to showing that what I was saying in philosophy was compatible with Lacanian thought. In doing this, I was led to say a number of things about the situation of the analytic cure. But I’ve never resolved the issue of whether the analytic cure represents an independent, autonomous truth procedure. The difficulty is that there’s something in the analytic situation that’s analogous to the love situation. Transference, after all, is an encounter that is supposed to take the form of knowledge. Lacan himself was unable to clarify transference except by referring to the great philosophical works on love. The determination of the analytic situation’s exact point of autonomy requires research on my part that is not yet complete.

 LS: Sexuation enters your system as a radical disjunction between the fundamental Two. Expelling all pathos, you equate feminine jouissance with the structure of an axiom, and a woman with the generic function.

 AB: Given my relationship to the axiom, it’s hardly an insult to say that feminine jouissance is axiomatic. What interests me in feminine sexuality is its singular link to infinity. It’s a quasi-ontological process, a test of infinity, that seems subtracted from the finite regime prescribed by phallic logic. I don’t see how the irreducibility of this jouissance could be a source of any pathos whatever. That’s the price of a deromanticization of infinity.

 LS: How do you identify the unity of an pertinent for philosophy, what you call a “configuration”?

 AB: In music there is a sequence that starts with Arnold Schonberg and renders the truth of the tonal system retroactively by proposing an essentially different figure of musical composition. This sequence has all the attributes of a truth procedure. The protocol of the break is grouped around certain works by Schonberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern, the uncertain progressive protocol of nomination, dodecaphonic, then later serial music, and the labor of fidelity to that event. I would call this set a “configuration.” It’s not the work of an artist, or even of several artists, but a sequential constellation of works, inaugurated by an event and tracing a singular trajectory. In the investigation of art, we should completely abandon the notion of the auteur. Because of the encyclopedia, however, the auteur continues to paralyze our thinking.

 LS: You’ve explicitly rejected the kind of suture of philosophy to the visual arts that we find in the works of Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard, among others. Is that why you’re kept a distance from visual art?

 AB: Of all the arts, it’s the one that intimidates me the most. Its intellectual charge is the greatest. In front of great painting, contemporary as well as past, I’m often seized with emotion. So turning to visual art philosophically has always been rather difficult for me. It’s not a feeling of ignorance at all, but a feeling that the mode in which intellectuality proceeds irreducibly into complex and powerful sensory forms . . . really, painting intimidates me. That’s why I never talk about it.

What’s more, I’ve never been very satisfied by the attempts of my predecessors to place themselves under the condition of painting. Nor have I ever found a regime of prose adequate to talk about painting. Where phenomenology is concerned, it isn’t badly deployed, but it hasn’t brought anything really decisive to the problem, even in texts of great quality like Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s on Cezanne. Even if we take Lacan’s brilliant analyses, or Foucault on Velazquez, we see that painting is missing somehow, that it isn’t really the issue. Where my program is concerned, I don’t know if I’m capable of including it. I like painting too much, perhaps. Or it’s a lack of inventiveness on my part.

 LS: In the Manifeste, however, you propose an approach to painting: “exhibit what in painting is the gesture of all painting or, precisely, what is the nonspecifiable in painting as such,” by asking “where is the indiscernible in this affair.”

 AB: I think I see it in what I know about painting, which is incomplete, fragmentary, and now perhaps outmoded. The movement to disengage painting from mimetic space consisted in producing the pictorial configuration’s genericity, not as an induced or secondary effect, but as the central volition. When I propose exhibiting pictorially the act of painting itself, and showing its specific intellectuality in the work’s visible form, that obviously means rendering the generic truth of painting’s singular situation. That gesture is indiscernible in the sense that it will not allow itself to be captured by any of the encyclopedia’s previously constituted predicates for the recognition of forms.

 LS: As reference points in the arts you take Mallarme, Rimbaud, Osip Mandelstam, Fernando Pessoa, Kasimir Malevich, and Schonberg. How is it that a philosophy of time of this time remains faithful to the high Modernism of the early century?

 AB: I don’t in any way think the high Modernism of the early century has gone without breaks up to the present–that we can still refer to it as a notion of the contemporary. I don’t at all maintain that nothing is happening, that there are no new works. It must be remembered, however, that what philosophy designates as susceptible of being seized in truth procedures are generic truths, rather vast subsets, vaster generally than is imagined within the interior movements of these arts. I take these examples as testimony or metonymy of the configuration; I could take other, more contemporary ones. But in terms of configurations, is there an essential break? Of that I’m not completely convinced.

In the last twenty or thirty years, what intrigues me is: what is emerging? I can see this a bit in terms of works, but it’s much harder in terms of configurations.

 LS: Since the truth of each condition of philosophy is both immanent and singular, can we speak of political art?

 AB: Yes, we can, because there are different ways of singularizing the types of generic procedures. There is a matheme of politics; in its events, its names, its protocols of fidelity, its slogans, etc., every singular political sequence is irreducible to any other. But there is also the singularity of the unnamable term that remains the limit point of a generic procedure–for politics, the substantial community. Providing the matheme of each of the procedures–which I haven’t done in any of my published works–is a very important task. It’s what I call “time-two” of the event.

 LS: And if I were to ask you for the matheme of art?

 AB: Right now, I don’t think I can go any further.

 LS: You’ve made the choice, not without grave consequences, to situate ethics inside the generic procedures. Why?

 AB: Obviously, the idea of a general ethics overhanging ordinary situations would take me out of my general philosophical organization, which is under the merciless rule of immanence. Moreover, if ethics, in the real sense of the term, exists, it must be attached to what is not the ordinary regime of the situation’s pure and simple living multiplicity. In this way, ethics must be connected to truth procedures. There will be as many ethical forms as there are truth procedures, as many singular, ethical actions or determinations as there are singular truths.

 LS: But can one seriously confide and confine ethics to mathematicians, political activists, lovers, and artists? Is the ordinary person, by definition, excluded from the ethical field?

 AB: Why should we think that ethics convokes us all? The idea of ethics’ universal convocation supposes the assignment of universality. I maintain that the only immanent universality is found in the truth procedure. We are seized by the really ethical dimension only inside a truth procedure. Does this mean that the encounter of ethical situations or propositions is restricted to the actors of a truth procedure? I understand that this point is debatable.

Of course, it can happen to anyone. Anyone can be seized by a political event, anyone can be seized by love. Most of the time, the great majority of us live outside ethics. We live in the living multiplicity of the situation. When we are engaged in a truth procedure, however, we are seized by it and follow the maxim of fidelity to it. There is no ethical imperative other than “Continue!,” “Continue in your fidelity!”

 LS: If we find ethics inside the truth procedure, evil must inhabit the same space.

 AB: That’s the problem with which the trajectory ends. It’s necessary to understand how evil is connected to the existence of truth procedures: there can be an imitation, what I call a “simulacrum,” of the truth event, convoking not the void but the plenum. It’s a pseudoevent that has a substance as its agenda. Any closed community always approaches this kind of racial, biological, or territorial conception. In connection with fidelity, evil presents itself in the choice of fidelity. Only a fidelity offers the possibility of what I call “betrayal.” In connection with the unnamable, evil takes the form of the idea that a truth can be total, that a truth is not just a subset of the situation but can englobe the entire situation, ignoring the points that must remain unnamable. When a truth is forced beyond its unnamable point, the consequences are necessarily ruinous, even criminal. That’s what I call “disaster.”

 LS: As your ultimate wager, you acknowledge that philosophy itself can expose us to disaster.

 AB: In seizing truths, philosophy may come to consider itself the sole, synthetic source of all possible truth. Once it dominates, directs, or subsumes, it can constrain truths to make claims to totality, breaking their limits, smashing their unnamable points. When philosophy articulates its seizing of truths in the form of identity or fusion, it exposes us to disaster.

DELEUZE / ANTI OEDIPE ET MILLE PLATEAUX

Cours Vincennes – 16/11/1971

Capitalism, flows, the decoding of flows, capitalism and schizophrenia, psychoanalysis, Spinoza.

What is it that moves over the body of a society? It is always flows, and a person is always a cutting off [coupure] of a flow. A person is always a point of departure for the production of a flow, a point of destination for the reception of a flow, a flow of any kind; or, better yet, an interception of many flows.

If a person has hair, this hair can move through many stages: the hairstyle of a young girl is not the same as that of a married woman, it is not the same as that of a widow: there is a whole hairstyle code. A person, insofar as she styles her hair, typically presents herself as an interceptor in relation to flows of hair that exceed her and exceed her case and these flows of hair are themselves coded according to very different codes: widow code, young girl code, married woman code, etc. This is ultimately the essential problem of coding and of the territorialization which is always coding flows with it, as a fundamental means of operation: marking persons (because persons are situated at the interception and at the cutting off [coupure] of flows, they exist at the points where flows are cut off [coupure]).

But, now, more than marking persons–marking persons is the apparent means of operation–coding has a deeper function, that is to say, a society is only afraid of one thing: the deluge; it is not afraid of the void, it is not afraid of dearth or scarcity. Over a society, over its social body, something flows [coule] and we do not know what it is, something flows that is not coded, and something which, in relation to this society, even appears as the uncodable. Something which would flow and which would carry away this society to a kind of deterritorialization which would make the earth upon which it has set itself up dissolve: this, then, is the crisis. We encounter something that crumbles and we do not know what it is, it responds to no code, it flees underneath the codes; and this is even true, in this respect, for capitalism, which for a long time believed it could always secure simili-codes; this, then, is what we call the well-known power [puissance] of recuperation within capitalism–when we say recuperate we mean: each time something seems to escape capitalism, seems to pass beneath its simili-codes; it reabsorbs all this, it adds one more axiom and the machine starts up again; think of capitalism in the 19th century: it sees the flowing of a pole of flow that is, literally, a flow, the flow of workers, a proletariat flow: well, what is this which flows, which flows wickedly and which carries away our earth, where are we headed? The thinkers of the 19th century have a very strange response, notably the French historical school: it was the first in the 19th century to have thought in terms of classes, they are the ones who invent the theoretical notion of classes and invent it precisely as an essential fragment of the capitalist code, namely: the legitimacy of capitalism comes from this: the victory of the bourgeoisie as a class opposed to the aristocracy.

The system that appears in the works of Saint Simon, A. Thierry, E. Quinet is the radical seizure of consciousness by the bourgeoisie as a class and they interpret all of history as a class struggle. It is not Marx who invents the understanding of history as a class struggle, it is the bourgeois historical school of the 19th century: 1789, yes, it is a class struggle, they are struck blind when they see flowing, on the actual surface of the social body, this weird flow that they do not recognize: the proletariat flow. The idea that this is a class is not possible, it is not one at this moment: the day when capitalism can no longer deny that the proletariat is a class, this coincides with the moment when, in its head, it found the moment to recode all this. That which we call the power [puissance] of recuperation of capitalism, what is it?

[It consists] in having at its disposal a kind of axiomatic, and when it sets upon [dispose de] some new thing which it does not recognize, as with every axiomatic, it is an axiomatic with a limit that cannot be saturated: it is always ready to add one more axiom to restore its functioning. When capitalism can no longer deny that the proletariat is a class, when it comes to recognize a type of class bipolarity, under the influence of workers’ struggles in the 19th century, and under the influence of the revolution, this moment is extraordinarily ambiguous, for it is an important moment in the revolutionary struggle, but it is also an essential moment in capitalist recuperation: I make you one more axiom, I make you axioms for the working class and for the union power [puissance] that represents them, and the capitalist machine grinds its gears and starts up again, it has sealed the breach. In other words, all the bodies of a society are essential: to prevent the flowing over society, over its back, over its body, of flows that it cannot code and to which it cannot assign a territoriality.

Need, scarcity, famine, a society can code these, what it cannot code, is when this thing appears, when it says to itself: what is up with these guys? So, in a first phase, the repressive apparatus puts itself into motion, if we can’t code it, we will try to annihilate it. In a second phase, we try to find new axioms which allow it to be recoded for better or worse. 
A social body is well defined as follows: there is perpetual trickery, flows flow over from one pole to another, and they are perpetually coded, and there are flows that escape from the codes and then there is the social effort to recuperate all that, to axiomatize all this, to manipulate the code a little, so as to make room for flows that are also dangerous: all of a sudden, there are young people who do not respond to the code: they insist on having a flow of hair which was not expected, what shall we do now? We try to recode it, we will add an axiom, we will try to recuperate [it] but then [if] there is something within it that continues not to let itself be coded, what then?

In other words, this is the fundamental action of a society: to code the flows and to treat as an enemy anyone who presents himself, in relation to society, as an uncodable flow, because, once again, it challenges [met en question] the entire earth, the whole body of this society. I will say this of every society, except perhaps of our own–that is, capitalism, even though just now I spoke of capitalism as if it coded all the flows in the same way as all other societies and did not have any other problems, but perhaps I was going too fast. 
There is a fundamental paradox in capitalism as a social formation: if it is true that the terror of all the other social formations was decoded flows, capitalism, for its part, historically constituted itself on an unbelievable thing: namely, that which was the terror of other societies: the existence and the reality of decoded flows and these capitalism made its proper concern. If this were true, it would explain that capitalism is, in a very precise sense, the universal form of all societies: in a negative sense, capitalism would be that which all societies dreaded above all, and we cannot help but have the impression that, historically speaking, capitalism…in a certain sense, is what every social formation constantly tried to exorcise, what it constantly tried to avoid, why? Because it was the ruin of every other social formation. And the paradox of capitalism is that a social formation constituted itself on the basis of that which was the negative of all the others. This means that capitalism was not able to constitute itself except through a conjunction, an encounter between decoded flows of all kinds. The thing which was dreaded most of all by every social formation was the basis for a social formation that had to engulf all the others: that what was the negative of all formations has become the very positivity of ours, this makes one shudder. And in what sense was capitalism constituted on the conjunction of decoded flows: it required extraordinary encounters at the end of a process [processus] of decodings of every kind, which were formed with the decline of feudalism. These decodings of all kinds consisted in the decoding of land flows, under the form of the constitution of large private properties, the decoding of monetary flows, under the form of the development of merchant fortunes, the decoding of a flow of workers under the form of expropriation, of the deterritorialization of serfs and peasant landholders. And this is not enough, for if we take the example of Rome, the decoding in decadent Rome, all this clearly happened: the decoding of flows of property under the form of large private properties , the decoding of monetary flows under the forms of large private fortunes, the decoding of labourers with the formation of an urban sub-proletariat: everything is found here, almost everything. The elements of capitalism are found here all together, only there is no encounter. What was necessary for the encounter to be made between the decoded flows of capital or of money and the decoded flows of labourers, for the encounter to be made between the flow of emergent capital and the flow of deterritorialized manpower, literally, the flow of decoded money and the flow of deterritorialized labourers. Indeed, the manner in which money is decoded so as to become money capital and the manner in which the labourer is ripped from the earth in order to become the owner of his/her labour power [force de travail] alone: these are two processes totally independent from each other, there must be an encounter between the two.

Indeed, for the process of the decoding of money to form capital that is made all across the embryonic forms of commercial capital and banking capital, the flow of labour, the free possessor of his/her labour power alone, is made across a whole other line that is the deterritorialization of the labourer at the end of feudalism, and this could very well not have been encountered. A conjunction of decoded and deterritorialized flows, this is at the basis of capitalism. Capitalism is constituted on the failure of all the pre-existent codes and social territorialities.

If we admit this, what does this represent: the capitalist machine, it is literally demented. A social machine that functions on the basis of decoded, deterritorialized flows, once again, it is not that societies did not have any idea of this; they had the idea in the form of panic, they acted to prevent this–it was the overturning of all the social codes known up to that point–; so, a society that constitutes itself on the negative of all pre-existing societies, how can it function? A society for which it is proper to decode and deterritorialize all the flows: flow of production, flow of consumption, how can it function, under what form: perhaps capitalism has other processes than coding to make it work, perhaps it is completely different. What I have been seeking up until now was to reground, at a certain level, the problem of the relation CAPITALISM-SCHIZOPHRENIA–and the grounding of a relation is found in something common between capitalism and the schizo: what they have totally in common, and it is perhaps a community that is never realized, that does not assume a concrete figure, it is a community of a principle that remains abstract, namely, the one like the other does not cease to filter, to emit, to intercept, to concentrate decoded and deterritorialized flows. 
This is their profound identity and it is not at the level of a way of life that capitalism renders us schizophrenic, it is at the level of the economic process: all this only works through a system of conjunction, say the word then, on condition of accepting that this word implies a veritable difference in nature from codes. It is capitalism that functions like an axiomatic, an axiomatic of decoded flows. All other social formations functioned on the basis of a coding and of a territorialization of flows and between a capitalist machine that makes an axiomatic of decoded flows such as they are or deterritorialized flows, such as they are, and other social formations, there is truly a difference in nature that makes capitalism the negative of other societies. Now, the schizo, in his own way, with his own tottering walk, he does the same thing. In a sense, he is more capitalist than the capitalist, more `prole’ than the `prole’: he decodes, he deterritorializes the flows and knots together a kind of identity in nature of capitalism and the schizo.

Schizophrenia is the negative of the capitalist formation. In a sense, schizophrenia goes further, capitalism functioned on a conjunction of decoded flows, on one condition, that is, at the same time that it perpetually decoded flows of money, flows of labour, etc., it incorporated them, it constructed a new type of machine, at the same time, not afterwards, that was not a coding machine, but an axiomatic machine.

It is in this way that it succeeds in making a coherent system, on condition that we say what profoundly distinguishes an axiomatic of decoded flows and a coding of flows. Whereas the schizo, he does more, he does not let himself be axiomatized either, he always goes further with the decoded flows, making do with no flows at all, rather than letting himself be coded, no earth at all, rather than letting himself be territorialized. What is their relation to each other? It is from this point that the problem arises. One must study more closely the relation capitalism / schizophrenia, giving the greatest importance to this: is it true and in what sense can we define capitalism as a machine that functions on the basis of decoded flows, on the basis of deterritorialized flows? In what sense is it the negative of all social formations and along the same lines, in what sense is schizophrenia the negative of capitalism, that it goes even further in decoding and in deterritorialization, and just where does it go, and where does that take it? Towards a new earth, towards no earth at all, towards the deluge?

If I try to link up with the problems of psychoanalysis, in what sense, in what manner–this is strictly a beginning–, I assume that there is something in common between capitalism, as a social structure, and schizophrenia as a process. Something in common that makes it so that the schizo is produced as the negative of capitalism (itself the negative of all the rest), and that this relation, we can now comprehend it by considering its terms: coding of flows, decoded and deterritorialized flows, axiomatic of decoded flows, etc.

It remains to be seen what in the psychoanalytic and psychiatric problem continues to preoccupy us. One must reread three texts of Marx: in book I: the production of surplus value, the chapter on the tendential fall in the last book, and finally, in the ?Grundrisse,? the chapter on automation.

Richard Zrehen: I did not understand what you said in regard to the analogy between capitalism and schizophrenia, when you said capitalism is the negative of other societies and the schizo is the negative of capitalism, I would have understood that capitalism is to other societies what the schizo is to capitalism, but, I would have thought, on the contrary, that you were not going to make this opposition. I would have thought of the opposition: capitalism / other societies and schizophrenia/ something else, instead of an analogy in three terms, to make one in four terms.

Cyril: Richard means to say the opposition between: capitalism/ other societies and schizophrenia and neuroses, for example.

Deleuze: Haaa, yes, yes, yes, yes. We are defining flows in political economy, its importance with actual economists confirms what I have been saying. For the moment, a flow is something, in a society, that flows from one pole to another, and that passes through a person, only to the degree that persons are interceptors.

Intervention of a guy with a strange accent

Deleuze: Let me take an example, you say that in a society one does not stop decoding, I’m not sure: I believe that there are two things in a society, one of which pertains to the principle by which a society comes to an end [se termine], one of which pertains to the death of a society: all death, in a certain manner, appears–this is the great principle of Thanatos–from inside [dedans] and all death comes from outside [dehors]; I mean that there is an internal menace in every society, this menace being represented by the danger of flows decoding themselves, it makes sense. There is never a flow first, and then a code that imposes itself upon it. The two are coexistent. Which is the problem, if I again take up the studies, already quite old, of Levi-Strauss on marriage: he tells us: the essential in a society is circulation and exchange.

Marriage, alliance, is exchanging, and what is important is that it circulates and that it exchanges. There is, then, a flow of women–raising something to a coefficient flow seems to me to be a social operation, the social operation of flows; at the level of society, there are no women, there is a flow of women that refers to a code, a code of age-old things, of clans, of tribes, but there is always flow of women, and then, in a second moment, a code: the code and the flow are absolutely formed face to face with one another. What is it the problem then, at the level of marriage, in a so-called primitive society: it is that, in relation to flows of women, by virtue of a code, there is something that must pass through. It involves forming a sort of system, not at all like Levi-Strauss suggests, not at all a logical combinatory [combinatoire], but a physical system with territorialities: something enters, something exits, so here we clearly see that, brought into relation with a physical system of marriage, women present themselves in the form of a flow, of this flow, the social code means this: in relation to such a flow, something of the flow must pass through, i.e.: flow; something must not go through, and, thirdly–this will make up the three fundamental terms of every code–something must effect the passing through or, on the contrary, the blocking: for example, in matrilineal systems, everyone knows the importance of the maternal [utérine] uncle, why, in the flow of women, what passes through is the permitted or even prescribed marriage. A schizo, in a society like that, he is not there, literally, it belongs to us, over there, it is something else. There, it is different: there is a very good case studied by P. Clastres; there is a guy who does not know, he does not know whom he must marry, he attempts a voyage of deterritorialization to see a faraway sorcerer. There is a great English ethnologist named Leach whose whole thesis consists in saying: it never works like Levi-Strauss says it does, he does not believe in Levi-Strauss’ system: no one knows who to marry; Leach makes a fundamental discovery, that which he calls local groups and distinguishes from groups of filiation. Local groups, these are the little groups that machine [machinent] marriages and alliances and they do not deduce them from filiations: the alliance is a kind of strategy that responds to political givens. A local group is literally a group (perverse, specialists in coding) that determines, for each caste, what can pass through, what can not pass through, that which must be blocked, that which can flow. In a matrilineal system, what is blocked? That which is blocked in all systems, that which falls under the rules of the prohibition of incest. Here, something in the flow of women is blocked; namely, certain persons are eliminated from the flow of marriageable women, in relation to other persons. That which, on the contrary, passes through is, we could say, the first permitted incest: the first legal incests in the form of preferential marriages; but everyone knows that the first permitted incests are never practiced in fact, it is still too close to that which is blocked. You see that the flow is interrupted here, something in the flow is blocked, something passes through, and here, there are the great perverts who machine marriages, who block or who effect passages. In the history of the maternal uncle, the aunt is blocked as an image of forbidden incest, in the form of a jesting kinship, the nephew has, with his aunt, a very joyous relation, with his uncle, a relation of theft, but theft, injuries, these are coded, see Malinkowski.

Question: These local groups have magical powers?

Deleuze: They have an overtly political power [pouvoir], they sometimes call upon sorcery, but they are not witchcraft groups, they are political groups who define the strategy of a village in relation to another village, and a clan in relation to another clan. 
Every code in relation to flows implies that we prevent something of this flow from passing through, we block it, we let something pass: there will be people having a key position as interceptors, i.e. so as to prevent passage or, on the contrary, to effect passage, and when we take note that these characters are such that, according to the code, certain prestations return to them, we better understand how the whole system works. 
In all societies, the problem was always to code flows and to recode those that tended to escape–when is it that the codes vacillate in so-called primitive societies: essentially at the moment of colonialization, there where the code flees under the pressure of capitalism: for that is what it represents in a society of codes, the introduction of money: it scatters to the winds their entire circuit of flows, in the sense that they distinguish essentially three types of flows: the flows of production to be consumed, the flows of prestige, objects of prestige and flows of women. When money is introduced therein, it is a catastrophe (see what Jaudin analyses as ethnocide: money, Oedipus complex) 
They try to relate money to their code, as such it can only be a prestige good, it is not a production or consumption good, it is not a woman, but the young people of the tribe who understand quicker than the elders take advantage of money in order to seize hold of the circuit of consumption goods, the circuit of consumption that was traditionally, in certain tribes, controlled by women. So the young people, with money, seize hold of the circuit of consumption. With money which itself can no longer be coded, within a certain framework, we begin with money and we end with money. 
M[oney]-C[ommodity]-M[oney], there is absolutely no means of coding this thing here because the qualified flows are replaced by a flow of abstract quantity whose proper essence is the infinite reproduction for which the formula is M-C-M. No code can support infinite reproduction. What is formidable in so-called primitive societies is how debt exists, but exists in the form of a finite block, debt is finite. So, in this sense flows pass their time by fleeing, it does not prevent the codes from being correlative and coding the flows: undoubtedly, it escapes from all sides, and the one who does not let her/himself be coded, and so we say: that’s a madman, we will code him/her: the village madman, we will make a code of the code. The originality of capitalism is that it no longer counts on any code, there are code residues, but no one believes in them: we no longer believe in anything: the last code that capitalism knew how to produce was fascism: an effort to recode and reterritorialize even at the economic level, at the level of the functioning of the market in the fascist economy, here we clearly see an extreme effort to resuscitate a kind of code that would function like the code of capitalism, literally, it could have lasted in the form in which it has lasted, as for capitalism, it is incapable of furnishing a code that covers the ensemble of the social field like a grid [quadrille], because its problems no longer pose themselves in terms of code, its problem is to make a mechanism of decoded flows as such, so it is uniquely in this sense that I oppose capitalism as a social formation to all the other known social formations. Can we say that between a coding of flows corresponding to pre-capitalist formations and a decoded axiomatic, there is a difference in nature or is there simply a variation: there is a radical difference in nature! Capitalism cannot furnish any code. 
We cannot say that the struggle against a system is totally independent of the manner in which this system was characterized: it is difficult to consider that the struggle of socialism against capitalism in the 19th century was independent of the theory of surplus value, in so far as this theory specified the characteristic of capitalism. Suppose that capitalism can be defined as an economic machine excluding the codes and making decoded flows function by taking them into an axiomatic, this already permits us to bring together the capitalist situation and the schizophrenic situation. Even at the level of analysis that has a practical influence, the analysis of monetary mechanisms (the neocapitalist economists, this is schizophrenic) when we see how the monetary practice of capitalism works, at the concrete level, and not just in theory, its schizoid character, can we say that it is totally indifferent to revolutionary practice. All that we are doing in relation to psychoanalysis and psychiatry comes down to what? Desire, or, it matters little, the unconscious: it is not imaginary or symbolic, it is uniquely machinic, and as long as you have not reached the region of the machine of desire, as long as you remain in the imaginary, the structural or the symbolic, you do not have a genuine hold on the unconscious. They are machines that, like all machines, are confirmed as such by their functioning (confirmations==the painter Lindner obsessed by ?children with machine [enfants avec machine]?: huge little boys in the foreground holding a strange little machine, a kind of little kite and behind him, a big social technical machine and his little machine is plugged into the big one, in the background==that is what I attempted last year to call the orphan unconscious, the true unconscious, the one that does not pass through daddy-mommy, the one that passes through delirious machines, these being in a given relation with the large social machines: second confirmation: an Englishman, Niderland, was aware of Schreber’s father. This is what I object to in the text of Freud, it is as if psychoanalysis was a veritable millstone which crushed the deepest character of the guy, namely, his social character… When we read Schreber, the Great Mongol, the Aryans, the Jews, etc. and when we read Freud, not a word about all this, it is as if it was just some manifest content and that one had to discover the latent content=the eternal daddy-mommy of Oedipus. All the political, politico-sexual, politico-libidinal content, because in the end, when Schreber père imagined himself to be a little Alsatian girl defending Alsace against a French officer, there is political libido here. It is sexual and political at the same time, the one in the other; we learn that Schreber was well-known because he had invented a system of education == Schreber Gardens. He had produced a system of universal pedagogy. Schizoanalysis procedes in a direction that is the opposite of psychoanalysis, indeed, each time that the subject narrates something that brings her/him in the vicinity of Oedipus or castration, the schizo being analyzed says `Enough.’ What he sees as important, is that: Schreber père invents a pedagogic system of universal value, that is not brought to bear on his own child, but globally: PAN gymnasticon. If we suppress from the delirium [delire] of the son the politico-global dimension of the paternal pedagogic system, we can longer understand anything. The father does not supply a structural function, but a political system: I am saying that the libido passes through here, not through daddy and mommy, through the political system. In the PAN gymnasticon, there are machines: no system without machines, a system, rigourously speaking, is a structural unity of machines, so much so that one must burst the system to reach the machines. And what are Schreber’s machines: they are SADO-PARANOIAC machines, a type of delirious machine. They are sado-paranoiac in the sense that they are applied to children, preferably to little girls. With these machines, the children stay calm, in this delirium, the universal pedagogic dimension clearly appears: it is not a delirium about his son, it is a delirium that he constructs about the formation of a higher race. Schreber père acts against his son, not as a father, but as a libidinal promoter of a delirious investment of the social field. It is no longer the paternal function, but rather that the father is there to make something delirious pass through, this is certain, but the father acts here as an agent of transmission in relation to a field that is not the familial field, but that is a political and historical field, once again, the names of history and not the name of the father.

Comtess: We do not catch flies with vinegar, even with a machine

Gilles Deleuze: The system of Schreber père had a global development (belt-whipping for good conduct). It was a big social machine and it was, at the same time, sown in the social machine, full of little delirious sado-paranoiac machines. So too, in the delirium of the son, certainly it is papa, but as a representative of what authority does he intervene. He intervenes as an agent of transmission in a libidinal investment of a certain type of social formation. On the contrary, the drama of psychoanalysis is the eternal familialism that consists in referring the libido, and with it all sexuality, to the familial machine, and we can go on to structuralize it, it changes nothing, we remain within the closed circle of: symbolic castration, structuring function of the family, parental characters, and we continue to crush all the outside [dehors]. Blanchot: ?a new type of relation with the outside,? yet, and this is the critical point, psychoanalysis tends to suppress any relation of itself and of the subject who has just been analyzed with the outside. On itself alone it pretends to reterritorialize us, onto the territoriality or onto the most mediocre earth, the most shabby, the oedipal territoriality, or worse, onto the couch. Here, we clearly see the relation of psychoanalysis and capitalism: if it is true that in capitalism, flows are decoded, are deterritorialized constantly, i.e. that capitalism produces the schizo like it produces money, the whole capitalist project [tentative] consists in reinventing artificial territorialities in order to reinscribe people, to vaguely recode them: they invent anything: HLM [Habitation a Loyer Moyen, i.e.: government-controlled housing], home, and there is familial reterritorialization, the family, it is after all the social cell, so they will reterritorialize the guy in a family (community psychiatry): they reterritorialize people there where all the territorialities are floating ones, they proceed through an artificial, imaginary, residual reterritorialization. And psychoanalysis–classical psychoanalysis–fabricates familial reterritorialization, most of all by skipping over all that is effective in delirium, all that is aggressive in delirium, namely, that delirium is a system of politico-social investments, not just of any type: it is the libido that hooks itself onto political social determinations: Schreber is not dreaming at all when he makes love to his mother, he dreams when he is being raped like a little Alsacian girl by a French officer: this depends on something much deeper than Oedipus, namely, the manner in which the libido invests social formations, to the point that one must distinguish 2 types of social investments by the (?) desire: social investments of interests that are of the preconscious type, that, if necessary, pass through classes, and below these, not exactly in harmony with them, unconscious investments, the libidinal investments of desire. Traditional psychoanalysis enclosed the libidinal investments of desire in the familial triangle and structuralism is the last attempt [tentative] to save Oedipus at the moment when Oedipus is coming apart at the seams.

The task of schizoanalysis is to see that parents play a role in the unconscious only as agents of interception, agents of transmission in a system of the flows of desire, of desiring machines, and what counts is my unconscious relation with my desiring machines. What are my own desiring machines, and, through them, the unconscious relation of these desiring machines with the large social machines with which they carry out…and that hence, there is no reason to support psychoanalysis in its attempt to reterritorialize us. I take an example from Leclaire’ last book: there is something that no longer works: ?the most fundamental act in the history of psychoanalysis was a decentering that consisted in passing from the parents’ room as referent to the analytical office,? there was a time when we believed in Oedipus, and in the reality of seduction, it was not going strong even then, because the whole unconscious had been familiarized, a crushing of the libido onto daddy-mommy-me: the whole development of psychoanalysis was made in this direction [sens]: substitution of the phantasm for real seduction and substitution of castration for Oedipus. Leclaire: ?to tell the truth the displacement of the living kernel of the oedipal conjuncture, of the familial scene to the psychoanalytic scene is strictly correlative to a sociological mutation in which we can psychoanalytically demarcate a recourse to the level of the familial institution? page 30 = the family is shabby = the unconscious protests and no longer works to triangulate itself, happily there is the analyst to serve as a relay.

It no longer supports the family, custody and the concealment [dérobement] of an all-powerful real. We say, ouf!, we will finally have a relation with the extra familial real, ha! no! says Leclaire, for that which serves as a relay for the family, and that which becomes the guardian, the unveiling veiling of the all-powerful real is the office of the analyst. You can no longer triangulate, oedipalize in the family, it no longer works, you will come onto the couch to triangulate and oedipalize yourself and indeed, adds Leclaire: ?if the psychoanalytic couch has become the place where the confrontation with the real is unfolded.? The confrontation with the real does not take place on the earth, in the movement of territorialization, reterritorialization, of deterritorialization, it takes place on this rotten earth that is the couch of the analyst. ?It is of no importance that the oedipal scene has no referent exterior to the office, that castration has no referent outside the office of the analyst,? which signifies that psychoanalysis, like capitalism, finds itself faced with the decoded flows of desire, finds itself before the schizophrenic phenomena of decoding and deterritorialization, has chosen to make for itself a little axiomatic. The couch, the ultimate earth of European man today, his very own little earth. This situation of psychoanalysis tends to introduce an axiomatic excluding all reference, excluding all relation with the outside whatever it may be, appears as a catastrophic movement of interiority when it comes to understanding the true investments of desire. From the moment we seized upon the family as referent, it was all screwed up. (last earth, the couch that valorizes and justifies itself on its own terms). It was compromised from the beginning, from the moment when we cut desire off from the double dimension–what I call the double dimension of desire: and its relation, on the one hand, with desiring machines irreducible to any symbolic or structural dimension, to functional desiring machines, and the problem of schizoanalysis is to know how these desiring machines work, and to reach the level where they work in someone’s unconscious, which assumes that we will skip over Oedipus, castration, etc. On the other hand, with social-political-cosmic investments, and here one must not say, that there would be any desexualization of the findings of psychoanalysis, for I am saying that desire, in its fundamental sexual form, can only be understood in its sexual investments, in so far as they do not bear on daddy-mommy, this is secondary, but in so far as they bear–on the one hand, on desiring machines, and on the other hand, in so far they traverse our sexual, homosexual, heterosexual loves. That which is invested is always what cuts up [des coupures] of the dimensions of a historical social field, and certainly, the father and the mother play a role within it, they are agents of communication of desiring machines, on one hand, of the machines with each other, and on the other hand, of the desiring machines with the large desiring machines. Schizoanalysis is made up of three operations: A destructive task: skipping over the oedipal and castrating structures in order to reach a region of the unconscious where there is no castration etc. because desiring machines ignore this.

A positive task: That is to see and to analyze functionally, there is nothing to interpret = we do not interpret a machine, we grasp its functioning and its failures, the why of its failures: it is the oedipal collar, the psychoanalytic collar of the couch that introduces failures into desiring machines: The desiring machines only work as long as they invest the social machines. And what are the types of libidinal investments, distinct from the preconscious investments of interests, these sexual investments–across all the beings that we love, all our loves, it is a complex of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, that which we love, it is always a certain mulatto, a movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, it is not the scrawny and hysteric territoriality of the couch, and across each being that we love, what we invest is a social field, these are the dimensions of this social field, and the parents are agents of transmission in the social field.

–see Jackson’s letter = the classic black mother who says to her son, don’t fool around and marry well, make money. This classic mother here, is she acting like a mother and like an oedipal object of desire, or is she acting in such a way that she transmits a certain type of libidinal investment of the social field, namely the type that marries well, he makes love, and this in the strictest sense of the term, with something through his wife, unconsciously, with a certain number of economic, political, social processes, and that love has always been a means through which the libido attains something other than the beloved person, namely a whole cutting up [découpage] of the historical social field, ultimately we always make love with the names of history. The other mother (of Jackson)–the one who says ?grab your gun,? it follows that the two act as agents of transmission in a certain type of social-historical investment, that from one to the other the pole of these investments has singularly changed, that in one case, we can say that they are reactionary investments, at the limit fascist, in the other case, it is a revolutionary libidinal investment. Our loves are like the conduits and the pathways of these investments that are not, once again, of a familial nature, but of a historico-political nature, and the final problem of schizoanalysis is not only the positive study of desiring machines, but the positive study of the manner in which desiring machines carry out the investment of social machines, whether it be in forming investments of the libido of a revolutionary type, whether it be in forming libidinal investments of the revolutionary type. The domain of schizoanalysis distinguishes itself at this moment from the domain of politics, in the sense that the preconscious political investments are investments of class interests that are determinable by certain types of studies, but these still do not tell us anything about the other type of investments, namely specifically libidinal investments–Desire. To the point that it can happen that a preconscious revolutionary investment can be doubled by a libidinal investment of the fascist type = which explains how displacements are made from one pole of delirium to another pole of delirium, how a delirium has fundamentally two poles–which Artaud said so well: ?the mystery of all is `Heliogabalus the Anarchist,’ because these are the two poles–it is not only a contradiction, it is a fundamental human contradiction, namely a pole of unconscious investment of the fascist type, and an unconscious investment of the revolutionary type. What fascinates me in a delirium is the radical absence of daddy-mommy, except as agents of transmission, except as agents of interception for there they have a role, but on the other hand the task of schizoanalysis is to release in delirium the unconscious dimensions of a fascist investment and a revolutionary investment, and at a certain point, it slips, at a certain point it oscillates, this is the deep domain of the libido. In the most reactionary, most folkloric territoriality, a revolutionary ferment can surge forth (we never know), something schizo, something mad, a deterritorialization: the Basque problem: They did much for fascism, in other conditions, these same minorities could have determined, I am not saying this happens by chance, they could have secured a revolutionary role. It is extremely ambiguous: it is not at the level of political analysis, it is at the level of analysis of the unconscious: the way it whirls about [comment ca tourne]. (Mannoni: antipsychiatry in the question of the court judgement on Schreber = a completely fascist delirium). If antipsychiatry has a sense, if schizoanalysis has a sense, it is at the level of an analysis of the unconscious, to tip delirium from the pole that is always present, the reactionary fascist pole that implies a certain type of libidinal investment, towards the other pole, no matter if it is hard and slow, the revolutionary pole.

Richard: Why only two poles?

Deleuze: We can make many, but fundamentally, there are clearly two great types of investment, two poles. The reference of libidinal investments is daddy-mommy, these are the territorialities and the deterritorializations, this must be found in the unconscious, especially at the level of its loves. Phantasm of naturality: of a pure race, movement of the pendulum = revolutionary phantasm of deterritorialization. If you’re saying that, on the analyst’s couch, what flows still flows, alright then, but the problem that I would pose here is: there are types of flow that pass beneath the door, what psychoanalysts call the viscosity of the libido, an overly viscous libido that does not let itself be grasped by the code of psychoanalysis, alright here yes, there is deterritorialization, but psychoanalysis says: negative reaction [contre-indication]. What annoys me in psychoanalysis of the Lacanian camp is the cult of castration. The family is a system of transmission, the social investments of one generation passed on to another, but I absolutely do not think that the family is a necessary element in the making of social investments because, in any case, there are desiring machines that, on their own, constitute social libidinal investments of the large social machines. If you say: the madman is someone who remains with his desiring machines and who does not carry out social investments, I do not follow you: in all madness, I see an intense investment of a particular type of historical, political, social field, even in catatonic persons. This goes for adults as well as children, it is from earliest childhood that the desiring machines are plugged into the social field. In themselves, all territorialities are equal to each other in relation to the movement of deterritorialization, but there is something like a schizoanalysis of territorialities, of their types of functioning, and by functioning, I understand the following: if the desiring machines are on the side of a great deterritorialization, i.e. on the path of desire beyond territorialities, if to desire is to be deterritorialized, one must say that each type of territoriality is able to support such or such a genre of machinic index: the machinic index is that which, in a territoriality, will be able to make it flee in the direction [sens] of a deterritorialization. So, I take the example of the dream, from the point of view that I am attempting to explicate the role of machines, it is very important, different from that of psychoanalysis: when a plane flies or a sewing machine-the dream is a kind of little imaginary territoriality, sleep or a nightmare is a deterritorialization–we can say that deterritorialization and the reterritorialities only exist as a function of each other, but you can evaluate the force of a possible deterritorialization from the indexes on such or such a territoriality, i.e. how much it supports of a flow that flees–Flee and in fleeing, makes flee, not the others, but something from the system, a fragment.

A machinic index in a territoriality is what measures the power [puissance] of flight in this territoriality by making flows flee, in this regard all territorialities are not equal to each other. There are artificial territorialities, the more it flees and the more we can flee while fleeing, the more it is deterritorialized. Our loves are always situated on a territoriality that, in relation to us, deterritorializes us or else reterritorializes us. In this regard, there are misunderstandings + a whole game of investments that are the problem of schizoanalysis: instead of having the family as a referent, it has as a referent the movements of deterritoralization and reterritorialization.

Zrehen: I want to say that you employed the term ?Code? for so-called primitive societies, while I think it is not possible to think of them in terms of code, because of the well-known mark, because there is a mark, which requires exchange, it is because there is a debt that we have an obligation to exchange. What happens from their society to ours, is the loss of the debt, so when you say that the schizo is the negative of the capitalist and that capitalism is the negative of primitive societies, it is evident exactly what is lost, it is castration. With this mark of principle, you are anticipating what makes up capitalism while crossing out castration. What is foreclosed in capitalism is this initial mark and what Marx tried to do was to reintroduce the notion of debt. When you propose to me a reactionary pole of investments and a revolutionary pole, I say that you are already taking the concepts of `revolutionary’ and of `reactionary as already instituted in a field that does not permit an appreciation of what you are trying to say. You are using breaks [coupure], I will certainly admit that Oedipus and castration are dépassé, but capitalism… 


new left review 49 jan feb 2008 29 

Alain Badiou

THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS 

There was a tangible sense of depression in the air in France 

in the aftermath of Sarkozy’s victory.1 It is often said that 

unexpected blows are the worst, but expected ones some- 

times prove debilitating in a different way. It can be oddly 

dispiriting when an election is won by the candidate who has led in the 

opinion polls from the start, just as when the favourite horse wins the 

race; anyone with the slightest feeling for a wager, a risk, an exception or 

a rupture would rather see an outsider upset the odds. Yet it could hardly 

have been the bare fact of Nicolas Sarkozy as President that seemed to 

come as such a disorientating blow to the French left in the aftermath 

of May 2007. Something else was at stake—some complex of factors for 

which ‘Sarkozy’ is merely a name. How should it be understood? 

An initial factor was the way in which the outcome affirmed the mani- 

fest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within 

the electoral system: preferences are duly recorded, in the passive man- 

ner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes 

any embodiments of dissenting political will. A second component of 

the left’s depressive disorientation after May 2007 was an overwhelming 

bout of historical nostalgia. The political order that emerged from World 

War Two in France—with its unambiguous referents of ‘left’ and ‘right’, 

and its consensus, shared by Gaullists and Communists alike, on the 

balance-sheet of the Occupation, Resistance and Liberation—has now 

collapsed. This is one reason for Sarkozy’s ostentatious dinners, yacht- 

ing holidays and so on—a way of saying that the left no longer frightens 

anyone: Vivent les riches, and to hell with the poor. Understandably, this 

may fill the sincere souls of the left with nostalgia for the good old days— 

Mitterrand, De Gaulle, Marchais, even Chirac, Gaullism’s Brezhnev, who 

knew that to do nothing was the easiest way to let the system die.

Sarkozy has now finally finished off the cadaverous form of Gaullism over 

which Chirac presided. The Socialists’ collapse had already been antici- 

pated in the rout of Jospin in the presidential elections of 2002 (and still 

more by the disastrous decision to embrace Chirac in the second round). 

The present decomposition of the Socialist Party, however, is not just a 

matter of its political poverty, apparent now for many years, nor of the 

actual size of the vote—47 per cent is not much worse than its other recent 

scores. Rather, the election of Sarkozy appears to have struck a blow to the 

entire symbolic structuring of French political life: the system of orienta- 

tion itself has suffered a defeat. An important symptom of the resulting 

disorientation is the number of former Socialist placemen rushing to take 

up appointments under Sarkozy, the centre-left opinion-makers singing 

his praises; the rats have fled the sinking ship in impressive numbers. 

The underlying rationale is, of course, that of the single party: since all 

accept the logic of the existing capitalist order, market economy and so 

forth, why maintain the fiction of opposing parties? 

A third component of the contemporary disorientation arose from the 

outcome of the electoral conflict itself. I have characterized the 2007 

presidential elections—pitting Sarkozy against Royal—as the clash of 

two types of fear. The first is the fear felt by the privileged, alarmed that 

their position may be assailable. In France this manifests itself as fear of 

foreigners, workers, youth from the banlieue, Muslims, black Africans. 

Essentially conservative, it creates a longing for a protective master, even 

one who oppresses and impoverishes you further. The current embodi- 

ment of this figure is, of course, the over-stimulated police chief: Sarkozy. 

In electoral terms, this is contested not by a resounding affirmation of 

self-determining heterogeneity, but by the fear of this fear: a fear, too, of 

the cop figure, whom the petit-bourgeois socialist voter neither knows 

nor likes. This ‘fear of the fear’ is a secondary, derivative emotion, whose 

content—beyond the sentiment itself—is barely detectable; the Royal 

camp had no concept of any alliance with the excluded or oppressed; 

the most it could envisage was to reap the dubious benefits of fear. For 

both sides, a total consensus reigned on Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan 

(where French forces are fighting), Lebanon (ditto), Africa (swarming 

with French military ‘administrators’). Public discussion of alternatives 

on these issues was on neither party’s agenda. 

1 

This is an edited extract from De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, Circonstances, 4, 

Nouvelles Editions Lignes, Paris 2007; to be published in English by Verso as What 

Do We Mean When We Say ‘Sarkozy’? in 2008. 

badiou: After Sarkozy 31 

The conflict between the primary fear and the ‘fear of the fear’ was set- 

tled in favour of the former. There was a visceral reflex in play here, very 

apparent in the faces of those partying over Sarkozy’s victory. For those 

in the grip of the ‘fear of the fear’ there was a corresponding negative 

reflex, flinching from the result: this was the third component of 2007’s 

depressive disorientation. We should not underestimate the role of what 

Althusser called the ‘ideological state apparatus’—increasingly through 

the media, with the press now playing a more sophisticated part than tv 

and radio—in formulating and mobilizing such collective sentiments. 

Within the electoral process there has, it seems, been a weakening of 

the real; a process even further advanced with regard to the secondary 

‘fear of the fear’ than with the primitive, reactionary one. We react, after 

all, to a real situation, whereas the ‘fear of the fear’ merely takes fright at 

the scale of that reaction, and is thus at a still further remove from real- 

ity. The vacuity of this position manifested itself perfectly in the empty 

exaltations of Ségolène Royal. 

Electoralism and the state 

If we posit a definition of politics as ‘collective action, organized by cer- 

tain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility 

which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would 

have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apoliti- 

cal procedure. This can be seen in the gulf between the massive formal 

imperative to vote and the free-floating, if not non-existent nature of 

political or ideological convictions. It is good to vote, to give a form to my 

fears; but it is hard to believe that what I am voting for is a good thing in 

itself. This is not to say that the electoral-democratic system is repressive 

per se; rather, that the electoral process is incorporated into a state form, 

that of capitalo-parliamentarianism, appropriate for the maintenance of 

the established order, and consequently serves a conservative function. 

This creates a further feeling of powerlessness: if ordinary citizens have 

no handle on state decision-making save the vote, it is hard to see what 

way forward there could be for an emancipatory politics. 

If the electoral mechanism is not a political but a state procedure, what 

does it achieve? Drawing on the lessons of 2007, one effect is to incor- 

porate both the fear and the ‘fear of the fear’ into the state—to invest 

the state with these mass-subjective elements, the better to legitimate 

it as an object of fear in its own right, equipped for terror and coercion. 

For the world horizon of democracy is increasingly defined by war. The 

West is engaged on an expanding number of fronts: the maintenance of 

the existing order with its gigantic disparities has an irreducible military 

component; the duality of the worlds of rich and poor can only be sus- 

tained by force. This creates a particular dialectic of war and fear. Our 

governments explain that they are waging war abroad in order to protect 

us from it at home. If Western troops do not hunt down the terrorists 

in Afghanistan or Chechnya, they will come over here to organize the 

resentful rabble outcasts. 

Strategic neo-Pétainism 

In France, this alliance of fear and war has classically gone by the 

name of Pétainism. The mass ideology of Pétainism—responsible for 

its widespread success between 1940 and 1944—rested in part on the 

fear generated by the First World War: Marshal Pétain would protect 

France from the disastrous effects of the Second, by keeping well out 

of it. In the Marshal’s own words, it was necessary to be more afraid of 

war than of defeat. The vast majority of the French accepted the rela- 

tive tranquillity of a consensual defeat and most got off fairly lightly 

during the War, compared to the Russians or even the English. The 

analogous project today is based on the belief that the French need sim- 

ply to accept the laws of the us-led world model and all will be well: 

France will be protected from the disastrous effects of war and global 

disparity. This form of neo-Pétainism as a mass ideology is effectively 

on offer from both parties today. In what follows, I will argue that it is 

a key analytical element in understanding the disorientation that goes 

by the name of ‘Sarkozy’; to grasp the latter in its overall dimension, its 

historicity and intelligibility, requires us to go back to what I will call its 

Pétainist ‘transcendental’.2 

I am not saying, of course, that circumstances today resemble the 

defeat of 1940, or that Sarkozy resembles Pétain. The point is a more 

formal one: that the unconscious national-historical roots of that which 

goes by the name of Sarkozy are to be found in this Pétainist configu- 

ration, in which the disorientation itself is solemnly enacted from the 

2 

See my Logiques des mondes, Paris 2006 for a full development of the concept of 

‘transcendentals’ and their function, which is to govern the order of appearance of 

multiplicities within a world.

summit of the state, and presented as a historical turning-point. This 

matrix has been a recurring pattern in French history. It goes back to the 

Restoration of 1815 when a post-Revolutionary government, eagerly sup- 

ported by émigrés and opportunists, was brought back in the foreigners’ 

baggage-train and declared, with the consent of a worn-out population, 

that it would restore public morality and order. In 1940, military defeat 

once again served as the context for the disorientating reversal of the real 

content of state action: the Vichy government spoke incessantly of the 

‘nation’, yet was installed by the German Occupation; the most corrupt 

of oligarchs were to lead the country out of moral crisis; Pétain himself, 

an ageing general in the service of property, would be the embodiment 

of national rebirth. 

Numerous aspects of this neo-Pétainist tradition are in evidence today. 

Typically, capitulation and servility are presented as invention and regen- 

eration. These were central themes of Sarkozy’s campaign: the Mayor of 

Neuilly would transform the French economy and put the country back 

to work. The real content, of course, is a politics of continuous obedi- 

ence to the demands of high finance, in the name of national renewal. A 

second characteristic is that of decline and ‘moral crisis’, which justifies 

the repressive measures taken in the name of regeneration. Morality is 

invoked, as so often, in place of politics and against any popular mobi- 

lization. Appeal is made instead to the virtues of hard work, discipline, 

the family: ‘merit should be rewarded’. This typical displacement of poli- 

tics by morality has been prepared, from the 1970s ‘new philosophers’ 

onwards, by all who have laboured to ‘moralize’ historical judgement. 

The object is in reality political: to maintain that national decline has 

nothing to do with the high servants of capital but is the fault of certain 

ill-intentioned elements of the population—currently, foreign workers 

and young people from the banlieue. 

A third characteristic of neo-Pétainism is the paradigmatic function 

of foreign experience. The example of correction always comes from 

abroad, from countries that have long overcome their moral crises. For 

Pétain, the shining examples were Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany 

and Franco’s Spain: leaders who had put their countries back on their 

feet. The political aesthetic is that of imitation: like Plato’s demiurge, the 

state must shape society with its eyes fixed on foreign models. Today, of 

course, the examples are Bush’s America and Blair’s Britain. 

A fourth characteristic is the notion that the source of the current cri- 

sis lies in a disastrous past event. For the proto-Pétainism of the 1815 

Restoration, this was of course the Revolution and the beheading of the 

King. For Pétain himself in 1940 it was the Popular Front, the Blum 

government and above all the great strikes and factory occupations of 

1936. The possessing classes far preferred the German Occupation to 

the fear which these disorders had provoked. For Sarkozy, the evils of 

May 68—forty years ago—have been constantly invoked as the cause 

of the current ‘crisis of values’. Neo-Pétainism provides a usefully sim- 

plified reading of history that links a negative event, generally with a 

working-class or popular structure, and a positive one, with a military 

or state structure, as a solution to the first. The arc between 1968 and 

2007 can thus be offered as a source of legitimacy for the Sarkozy gov- 

ernment, as the historic actor that will finally embark on the correction 

needed in the wake of the inaugural damaging event. Finally, there is the 

element of racism. Under Pétain this was brutally explicit: getting rid of 

the Jews. Today it is voiced in a more insinuating fashion: ‘we are not an 

inferior race’—the implication being, ‘unlike others’; ‘the true French 

need not doubt the legitimacy of their country’s actions’—in Algeria 

and elsewhere. In the light of these criteria, we can therefore point: the 

disorientation that goes by the name of ‘Sarkozy’ may be analysed as the 

latest manifestation of the Pétainist transcendental. 

The spectre 

At first sight there may seem something strange about the new President’s 

insistence that the solution to the country’s moral crisis, the goal of his 

‘renewal’ process, was ‘to do away with May 68, once and for all’. Most 

of us were under the impression that it was long gone anyway. What is 

haunting the regime, under the name of May 68? We can only assume 

that it is the ‘spectre of communism’, in one of its last real manifesta- 

tions. He would say (to give a Sarkozian prosopopoeia): ‘We refuse to be 

haunted by anything at all. It is not enough that empirical communism 

has disappeared. We want all possible forms of it banished. Even the 

hypothesis of communism—generic name of our defeat—must become 

unmentionable.’ 

What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its 

canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class— 

the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the 

arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it 

can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collec- 

tive organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of 

wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of mas- 

sive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The 

existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer 

appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free asso- 

ciation of producers will see it withering away. 

‘Communism’ as such denotes only this very general set of intellectual 

representations. It is what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory func- 

tion, rather than a programme. It is foolish to call such communist 

principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are 

intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion. As a pure 

Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since 

the beginnings of the state. As soon as mass action opposes state coer- 

cion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the 

hypothesis start to appear. Popular revolts—the slaves led by Spartacus, 

the peasants led by Müntzer—might be identified as practical examples 

of this ‘communist invariant’. With the French Revolution, the commu- 

nist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political modernity. 

What remains is to determine the point at which we now find ourselves 

in the history of the communist hypothesis. A fresco of the modern 

period would show two great sequences in its development, with a 

forty-year gap between them. The first is that of the setting in place of 

the communist hypothesis; the second, of preliminary attempts at its 

realization. The first sequence runs from the French Revolution to the 

Paris Commune; let us say, 1792 to 1871. It links the popular mass move- 

ment to the seizure of power, through the insurrectional overthrow of 

the existing order; this revolution will abolish the old forms of society 

and install ‘the community of equals’. In the course of the century, the 

formless popular movement made up of townsfolk, artisans and stu- 

dents came increasingly under the leadership of the working class. The 

sequence culminated in the striking novelty—and radical defeat—of the 

Paris Commune. For the Commune demonstrated both the extraordi- 

nary energy of this combination of popular movement, working-class 

leadership and armed insurrection, and its limits: the communards 

could neither establish the revolution on a national footing nor defend it 

against the foreign-backed forces of the counter-revolution.

The second sequence of the communist hypothesis runs from 1917 

to 1976: from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Cultural 

Revolution and the militant upsurge throughout the world during the 

years 1966–75. It was dominated by the question: how to win? How to 

hold out—unlike the Paris Commune—against the armed reaction of 

the possessing classes; how to organize the new power so as to protect it 

against the onslaught of its enemies? It was no longer a question of for- 

mulating and testing the communist hypothesis, but of realizing it: what 

the 19th century had dreamt, the 20th would accomplish. The obses- 

sion with victory, centred around questions of organization, found its 

principal expression in the ‘iron discipline’ of the communist party—the 

characteristic construction of the second sequence of the hypothesis. The 

party effectively solved the question inherited from the first sequence: 

the revolution prevailed, either through insurrection or prolonged popu- 

lar war, in Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and 

succeeded in establishing a new order. 

But the second sequence in turn created a further problem, which it 

could not solve using the methods it had developed in response to the 

problems of the first. The party had been an appropriate tool for the 

overthrow of weakened reactionary regimes, but it proved ill-adapted 

for the construction of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the sense 

that Marx had intended—that is, a temporary state, organizing the 

transition to the non-state: its dialectical ‘withering away’. Instead, the 

party-state developed into a new form of authoritarianism. Some of these 

regimes made real strides in education, public health, the valorization 

of labour, and so on; and they provided an international constraint on 

the arrogance of the imperialist powers. However, the statist principle 

in itself proved corrupt and, in the long run, ineffective. Police coercion 

could not save the ‘socialist’ state from internal bureaucratic inertia; 

and within fifty years it was clear that it would never prevail in the fero- 

cious competition imposed by its capitalist adversaries. The last great 

convulsions of the second sequence—the Cultural Revolution and May 

68, in its broadest sense—can be understood as attempts to deal with 

the inadequacy of the party. 

Interludes 

Between the end of the first sequence and the beginning of the second 

there was a forty-year interval during which the communist hypothesis 

was declared to be untenable: the decades from 1871 to 1914 saw impe- 

rialism triumphant across the globe. Since the second sequence came 

to an end in the 1970s we have been in another such interval, with the 

adversary in the ascendant once more. What is at stake in these circum- 

stances is the eventual opening of a new sequence of the communist 

hypothesis. But it is clear that this will not be—cannot be—the con- 

tinuation of the second one. Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass 

democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist state—all 

the inventions of the 20th century—are not really useful to us any more. 

At the theoretical level they certainly deserve further study and consider- 

ation; but at the level of practical politics they have become unworkable. 

The second sequence is over and it is pointless to try to restore it. 

At this point, during an interval dominated by the enemy, when new 

experiments are tightly circumscribed, it is not possible to say with cer- 

tainty what the character of the third sequence will be. But the general 

direction seems discernible: it will involve a new relation between the 

political movement and the level of the ideological—one that was prefig- 

ured in the expression ‘cultural revolution’ or in the May 68 notion of a 

‘revolution of the mind’. We will still retain the theoretical and historical 

lessons that issued from the first sequence, and the centrality of victory 

that issued from the second. But the solution will be neither the form- 

less, or multi-form, popular movement inspired by the intelligence of the 

multitude—as Negri and the alter-globalists believe—nor the renewed 

and democratized mass communist party, as some of the Trotskyists 

and Maoists hope. The (19th-century) movement and the (20th-century) 

party were specific modes of the communist hypothesis; it is no longer 

possible to return to them. Instead, after the negative experiences of the 

‘socialist’ states and the ambiguous lessons of the Cultural Revolution 

and May 68, our task is to bring the communist hypothesis into exist- 

ence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political 

experience. This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental. 

We must focus on its conditions of existence, rather than just improv- 

ing its methods. We need to re-install the communist hypothesis—the 

proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not 

inevitable—within the ideological sphere. 

What might this involve? Experimentally, we might conceive of finding 

a point that would stand outside the temporality of the dominant order 

and what Lacan once called ‘the service of wealth’. Any point, so long  

as it is in formal opposition to such service, and offers the discipline 

of a universal truth. One such might be the declaration: ‘There is only 

one world’. What would this imply? Contemporary capitalism boasts, 

of course, that it has created a global order; its opponents too speak of 

‘alter-globalization’. Essentially, they propose a definition of politics as 

a practical means of moving from the world as it is to the world as we 

would wish it to be. But does a single world of human subjects exist? The 

‘one world’ of globalization is solely one of things—objects for sale—and 

monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelm- 

ing majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world. 

They are locked out, often literally so. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single 

world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the 

world’s wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it 

now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South. 

New walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians 

and Israelis, between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and 

the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of 

the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in fave- 

las, banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the 

supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human exist- 

ence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval 

patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is, 

in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other coun- 

tries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of 

globalization is a sham.

A performative unity 

The political problem, then, has to be reversed. We cannot start from 

an analytic agreement on the existence of the world and proceed to 

normative action with regard to its characteristics. The disagreement 

is not over qualities but over existence. Confronted with the artificial 

and murderous division of the world into two—a disjunction named 

by the very term, ‘the West’—we must affirm the existence of the single 

world right from the start, as axiom and principle. The simple phrase, 

‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is perfor- 

mative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this 

point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow 

from this simple declaration. 

A first consequence is the recognition that all belong to the same world as 

myself: the African worker I see in the restaurant kitchen, the Moroccan 

I see digging a hole in the road, the veiled woman looking after children 

in a park. That is where we reverse the dominant idea of the world united 

by objects and signs, to make a unity in terms of living, acting beings, 

here and now. These people, different from me in terms of language, 

clothes, religion, food, education, exist exactly as I do myself; since they 

exist like me, I can discuss with them—and, as with anyone else, we can 

agree and disagree about things. But on the precondition that they and I 

exist in the same world. 

At this point, the objection about cultural difference will be raised: ‘our’ 

world is made up of those who accept ‘our’ values—democracy, respect 

for women, human rights. Those whose culture is contrary to this are 

not really part of the same world; if they want to join it they have to 

share our values, to ‘integrate’. As Sarkozy put it: ‘If foreigners want 

to remain in France, they have to love France; otherwise, they should 

leave.’ But to place conditions is already to have abandoned the princi- 

ple, ‘there is only one world of living men and women’. It may be said 

that we need to take the laws of each country into account. Indeed; but 

a law does not set a precondition for belonging to the world. It is simply 

a provisional rule that exists in a particular region of the single world. 

And no one is asked to love a law, simply to obey it. The single world 

of living women and men may well have laws; what it cannot have is 

subjective or ‘cultural’ preconditions for existence within it—to demand 

that you have to be like everyone else. The single world is precisely the 

place where an unlimited set of differences exist. Philosophically, far 

from casting doubt on the unity of the world, these differences are its 

principle of existence. 

The question then arises whether anything governs these unlimited dif- 

ferences. There may well be only one world, but does that mean that 

being French, or a Moroccan living in France, or Muslim in a country 

of Christian traditions, is nothing? Or should we see the persistence of 

such identities as an obstacle? The simplest definition of ‘identity’ is 

the series of characteristics and properties by which an individual or a 

group recognizes itself as its ‘self’. But what is this ‘self’? It is that which, 

across all the characteristic properties of identity, remains more or less 

invariant. It is possible, then, to say that an identity is the ensemble of 

properties that support an invariance. For example, the identity of an art- 

ist is that by which the invariance of his or her style can be recognized; 

homosexual identity is composed of everything bound up with the invar- 

iance of the possible object of desire; the identity of a foreign community 

in a country is that by which membership of this community can be 

recognized: language, gestures, dress, dietary habits, etc. 

Defined in this way, by invariants, identity is doubly related to dif- 

ference: on the one hand, identity is that which is different from the 

rest; on the other, it is that which does not become different, which 

is invariant. The affirmation of identity has two further aspects. The 

first form is negative. It consists of desperately maintaining that I am 

not the other. This is often indispensable, in the face of authoritar- 

ian demands for integration, for example. The Moroccan worker will 

forcefully affirm that his traditions and customs are not those of the 

petty-bourgeois European; he will even reinforce the characteristics of 

his religious or customary identity. The second involves the immanent 

development of identity within a new situation—rather like Nietzsche’s 

famous maxim, ‘become what you are’. The Moroccan worker does not 

abandon that which constitutes his individual identity, whether socially 

or in the family; but he will gradually adapt all this, in a creative fashion, 

to the place in which he finds himself. He will thus invent what he is—a 

Moroccan worker in Paris—not through any internal rupture, but by 

an expansion of identity. 

The political consequences of the axiom, ‘there is only one world’, will 

work to consolidate what is universal in identities. An example—a 

local experiment—would be a meeting held recently in Paris, where 

undocumented workers and French nationals came together to 

demand the abolition of persecutory laws, police raids and expulsions; 

to demand that foreign workers be recognized simply in terms of their 

presence: that no one is illegal; all demands that are very natural for 

people who are basically in the same existential situation—people of 

the same world.

Time and courage 

‘In such great misfortune, what remains to you?’ Corneille’s Medea is 

asked by her confidante. ‘Myself! Myself, I say, and it is enough’, comes 

the reply. What Medea retains is the courage to decide her own fate; 

and courage, I would suggest, is the principal virtue in face of the diso- 

rientation of our own times. Lacan also raises the issue in discussing 

the analytical cure for depressive debility: should this not end in grand 

dialectical discussions on courage and justice, on the model of Plato’s 

dialogues? In the famous ‘Dialogue on Courage’, General Laches, ques- 

tioned by Socrates, replies: ‘Courage is when I see the enemy and run 

towards him to engage him in a fight.’ Socrates is not particularly satis- 

fied with this, of course, and gently takes the General to task: ‘It’s a good 

example of courage, but an example is not a definition.’ Running the 

same risks as General Laches, I will give my definition. 

First, I would retain the status of courage as a virtue—that is, not an 

innate disposition, but something that constructs itself, and which one 

constructs, in practice. Courage, then, is the virtue which manifests 

itself through endurance in the impossible. This is not simply a matter 

of a momentary encounter with the impossible: that would be heroism, 

not courage. Heroism has always been represented not as a virtue but as 

a posture: as the moment when one turns to meet the impossible face to 

face. The virtue of courage constructs itself through endurance within 

the impossible; time is its raw material. What takes courage is to operate 

in terms of a different durée to that imposed by the law of the world. The 

point we are seeking must be one that can connect to another order of 

time. Those imprisoned within the temporality assigned us by the domi- 

nant order will always be prone to exclaim, as so many Socialist Party 

henchmen have done, ‘Twelve years of Chirac, and now we have to wait 

for another round of elections. Seventeen years; perhaps twenty-two; a 

whole lifetime!’ At best, they will become depressed and disorientated; 

at worst, rats. 

In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century 

than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th- 

century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening 

inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism  

of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; 

the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways 

to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as 

in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at 

stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during 

the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination 

of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and 

political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew 

the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and 

on the ground.

The Emancipated Spectator

Jacques Ranciere

I have called this talk “The Emancipated Spectator.”* As I understand it, a title is always a challenge. It sets forth the presupposition that an expression makes sense, that there is a link between separate terms, which also means between concepts, problems, and theories that seem at first sight to bear no direct relation to one another. In a sense, this title expresses the perplexity that was mine when Marten Spangberg invited me to deliver what is supposed to be the “keynote” lecture of this academy. He told me he wanted me to introduce this collective reflection on “spectatorship” because he had been impressed by my book The Ignorant Schoolmaster [Le Maitre ignorant (1987)]. I began to wonder what connection there could be between the cause and the effect. This is an academy that brings people involved in the worlds of art, theater, and performance together to consider the issue of spectatorship today. The Ignorant Schoolmaster was a meditation on the eccentric theory and the strange destiny of Joseph Jacotot, a French professor who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, unsettled the academic world by asserting that an ignorant person could teach another ignorant person what he did not know himself, proclaiming the equality of intelligences, and calling for intellectual emancipation against the received wisdom concerning the instruction of the lower classes. His theory sank into oblivion in the middle of the nineteenth century. I thought it necessary to revive it in the 1980s in order to stir up the debate about education and its political stakes. But what use can be made, in the contemporary artistic dialogue, of a man whose artistic universe could be epitomized by names such as Demosthenes, Racine, and Poussin?

On second thought, it occurred to me that the very distance, the lack of any obvious relationship between Jacotot’s theory and the issue of spectatorship today might be fortunate. It could provide an opportunity to radically distance one’s thoughts from the theoretical and political presuppositions that still shore up, even in postmodern disguise, most of the discussion about theater, performance, and spectatorship. I got the impression that indeed it was possible to make sense of this relationship, on condition that we try to piece together the network of presuppositions that put the issue of spectatorship at a strategic intersection in the discussion of the relationship between art and politics and to sketch out the broader pattern of thinking that has for a long time framed the political issues around theater and spectacle (and I use those terms in a very general sense here–to include dance, performance, and all the kinds of spectacle performed by acting bodies in front of a collective audience).

The numerous debates and polemics that have called the theater into question throughout our history can be traced back to a very simple contradiction. Let us call it the paradox of the spectator, a paradox that may prove more crucial than the well-known paradox of the actor and which can be summed up in the simplest terms. There is no theater without spectators (be it only a single and hidden one, as in Diderot’s fictional representation of Le Fils naturel [1757]). But spectatorship is a bad thing. Being a spectator means looking at a spectacle. And looking is a bad thing, for two reasons. First, looking is deemed the opposite of knowing. It means standing before an appearance without knowing the conditions which produced that appearance or the reality that lies behind it. Second, looking is deemed the opposite of acting. He who looks at the spectacle remains motionless in his seat, lacking any power of intervention. Being a spectator means being passive. The spectator is separated from the capacity of knowing just as he is separated from the possibility of acting.

From this diagnosis it is possible to draw two opposing conclusions. The first is that theater in general is a bad thing, that it is the stage of illusion and passivity, which must be dismissed in favor of what it forbids: knowledge and action–the action of knowing and the action led by knowledge. This conclusion was drawn long ago by Plato: The theater is the place where ignorant people are invited to see suffering people. What takes place on the stage is a pathos, the manifestation of a disease, the disease of desire and pain, which is nothing but the self-division of the subject caused by the lack of knowledge. The “action” of theater is nothing but the transmission of that disease through another disease, the disease of the empirical vision that looks at shadows. Theater is the transmission of the ignorance that makes people ill through the medium of ignorance that is optical illusion. Therefore a good community is a community that doesn’t allow the mediation of the theater, a community whose collective virtues are directly incorporated in the living attitudes of its participants.

This seems to be the more logical conclusion to the problem. We know, however, that it is not the conclusion that was most often drawn. The most common conclusion runs as follows: Theater involves spectatorship, and spectatorship is a bad thing. Therefore, we need a new theater, a theater without spectator-ship. We need a theater where the optical relation–implied in the word theatron–is subjected to another relation, implied in the word drama. Drama means action. The theater is a place where an action is actually performed by living bodies in front of living bodies. The latter may have resigned their power. But this power is resumed in the performance of the former, in the intelligence that builds it, in the energy that it conveys. The true sense of the theater must be predicated on that acting power. Theater has to be brought back to its true essence, which is the contrary of what is usually known as theater. What must be pursued is a theater without spectators, a theater where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will learn things instead of being captured by images and become active participants in a collective performance instead of being passive viewers.

This turn has been understood in two ways, which are antagonistic in principle, though they have often been mixed in theatrical performance and in its legitimization. On the one hand the spectator must be released from the passivity of the viewer, who is fascinated by the appearance standing in front of him and identifies with the characters on the stage. He must be confronted with the spectacle of something strange, which stands as an enigma and demands that he investigate the reason for its strangeness. He must be pressed to abandon the role of passive viewer and to take on that of the scientist who observes phenomena and seeks their cause. On the other hand the spectator must eschew the role of the mere observer who remains still and untouched in front of a distant spectacle. He must be torn from his delusive mastery, drawn into the magical power of theatrical action, where he will exchange the privilege of playing the rational viewer for the experience of possessing theater’s true vital energies.

We acknowledge these two paradigmatic attitudes epitomized by Brecht’s epic theater and Artaud’s theater of cruelty. On the one hand the spectator must become more distant, on the other he must lose any distance. On the one hand he must change the way he looks for a better way of looking, on the other he must abandon the very position of the viewer. The project of reforming the theater ceaselessly wavered between these two poles of distant inquiry and vital embodiment. This means that the presuppositions underpinning the search for a new theater are the same as those that underpinned the dismissal of theater. The reformers of the theater in fact retained the terms of Plato’s polemics, rearranging them by borrowing from Platonism an alternative notion of theater. Plato drew an opposition between the poetic and democratic community of the theater and a “true” community: a choreographic community in which no one remains a motionless spectator, in which everyone moves according to a communitarian rhythm determined by mathematical proportion.

The reformers of the theater restaged the Platonic opposition between choreia and theater as an opposition between the true living essence of the theater and the simulacrum of the “spectacle.” The theater then became the place where passive spectatorship had to be turned into its contrary–the living body of a community enacting its own principle. In this academy’s statement of purpose we read that “theater remains the only place of direct confrontation of the audience with itself as a collective.” We can give that sentence a restrictive meaning that would merely contrast the collective audience of the theater with the individual visitors to an exhibition or the sheer collection of individuals watching a movie. But obviously the sentence means much more. It means that “theater” remains the name for an idea of the community as a living body. It conveys an idea of the community as self-presence opposed to the distance of the representation.

Since the advent of German Romanticism, the concept of theater has been associated with the idea of the living community. Theater appeared as a form of the aesthetic constitution–meaning the sensory constitution–of the community: the community as a way of occupying time and space, as a set of living gestures and attitudes that stands before any kind of political form and institution; community as a performing body instead of an apparatus of forms and rules. In this way theater was associated with the Romantic notion of the aesthetic revolution: the idea of a revolution that would change not only laws and institutions but transform the sensory forms of human experience. The reform of theater thus meant the restoration of its authenticity as an assembly or a ceremony of the community. Theater is an assembly where the people become aware of their situation and discuss their own interests, Brecht would say after Piscator. Theater is the ceremony where the community is given possession of its own energies, Artaud would state. If theater is held to be an equivalent of the true community, the living body of the community opposed to the illusion of mimesis, it comes as no surprise that the attempt at restoring theater to its true essence had as its theoretical backdrop the critique of the spectacle.

What is the essence of spectacle in Guy Debord’s theory? It is externality. The spectacle is the reign of vision. Vision means externality. Now externality means the dispossession of one’s own being. “The more man contemplates, the less he is,” Debord says. This may sound anti-Platonic. Indeed, the main source for the critique of the spectacle is, of course, Feuerbach’s critique of religion. It is what sustains that critique–namely, the Romantic idea of truth as unseparateness. But that idea itself remains in line with the Platonic disparagement of the mimetic image. The contemplation that Debord denounces is the theatrical or mimetic contemplation, the contemplation of the suffering that is provoked by division. “Separation is the alpha and the omega of spectacle,” he writes. What man gazes at in this scheme is the activity that has been stolen from him; it is his own essence torn away from him, turned foreign to him, hostile to him, making for a collective world whose reality is nothing but man’s own dispossession.

From this perspective there is no contradiction between the quest for a theater that can realize its true essence and the critique of the spectacle. “Good” theater is posited as a theater that deploys its separate reality only in order to suppress it, to turn the theatrical form into a form of life of the community. The paradox of the spectator is part of an intellectual disposition that is, even in the name of the theater, in keeping with the Platonic dismissal of the theater. This framework is built around a number of core ideas that must be called into question. Indeed, we must question the very footing on which those ideas are based. I am speaking of a whole set of relations, resting on some key equivalences and some key oppositions: the equivalence of theater and community, of seeing and passivity, of externality and separation, of mediation and simulacrum; the opposition of collective and individual, image and living reality, activity and passivity, self-possession and alienation.

This set of equivalences and oppositions makes for a rather tricky dramaturgy of guilt and redemption. Theater is charged with making spectators passive in opposition to its very essence, which allegedly consists in the self-activity of the community. As a consequence, it sets itself the task of reversing its own effect and compensating for its own guilt by giving back to the spectators their self-consciousness or self-activity. The theatrical stage and the theatrical performance thus become the vanishing mediation between the evil of the spectacle and the virtue of the true theater. They present to the collective audience performances intended to teach the spectators how they can stop being spectators and become performers of a collective activity. Either, according to the Brechtian paradigm, theatrical mediation makes the audience aware of the social situation on which theater itself rests, prompting the audience to act in consequence. Or, according to the Artaudian scheme, it makes them abandon the position of spectator: No longer seated in front of the spectacle, they are instead surrounded by the performance, dragged into the circle of the action, which gives them back their collective energy. In both cases the theater is a self-suppressing mediation.

This is the point where the descriptions and propositions of intellectual emancipation enter into the picture and help us reframe it. Obviously, this idea of a self-suppressing mediation is well known to us. It is precisely the process that is supposed to take place in the pedagogical relation. In the pedagogical process the role of the schoolmaster is posited as the act of suppressing the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignorant. His lessons and exercises are aimed at continuously reducing the gap between knowledge and ignorance. Unfortunately, in order to reduce the gap, he must reinstate it ceaselessly. In order to replace ignorance with adequate knowledge, he must always keep a step ahead of the ignorant student who is losing his ignorance. The reason for this is simple: In the pedagogical scheme, the ignorant person is not only the one who does not know what he does not know; he is as well the one who ignores that he does not know what he does not know and ignores how to know it. The master is not only he who knows precisely what remains unknown to the ignorant; he also knows how to make it knowable, at what time and what place, according to what protocol. On the one hand pedagogy is set up as a process of objective transmission: one piece of knowledge after another piece, one word after another word, one rule or theorem after another. This knowledge is supposed to be conveyed directly from the master’s mind or from the page of the book to the mind of the pupil. But this equal transmission is predicated on a relation of inequality. The master alone knows the right way, time, and place for that “equal” transmission, because he knows something that the ignorant will never know, short of becoming a master himself, something that is more important than the knowledge conveyed. He knows the exact distance between ignorance and knowledge. That pedagogical distance between a determined ignorance and a determined knowledge is in fact a metaphor. It is the metaphor of a radical break between the way of the ignorant student and the way of the master, the metaphor of a radical break between two intelligences.

The master cannot ignore that the so-called ignorant pupil who sits in front of him in fact knows a lot of things, which he has learned on his own, by looking at and listening to the world around him, by figuring out the meaning of what he has seen and heard, by repeating what he has heard and learned by chance, by comparing what he discovers with what he already knows, and so on. The master cannot ignore that the ignorant pupil has undertaken by these same means the apprenticeship that is the precondition of all others: the apprenticeship of his mother tongue. But for the master this is only the knowledge of the ignorant, the knowledge of the little child who sees and hears at random, compares and guesses by chance, and repeats by routine, without understanding the reason for the effects he observes and reproduces. The role of the master is thus to break with that process of hit-and-miss groping. It is to teach the pupil the knowledge of the knowledgeable, in its own way–the way of the progressive method, which dismisses all groping and all chance by explaining items in order, from the simplest to the most complex, according to what the pupil is capable of understanding, with respect to his age or social background and social expectations.

The primary knowledge that the master owns is the “knowledge of ignorance.” It is the presupposition of a radical break between two forms of intelligence. This is also the primary knowledge that he transmits to the student: the knowledge that he must have things explained to him in order to understand, the knowledge that he cannot understand on his own. It is the knowledge of his incapacity. In this way, progressive instruction is the endless verification of its starting point: inequality. That endless verification of inequality is what Jacotot calls the process of stultification. The opposite of stultification is emancipation. Emancipation is the process of verification of the equality of intelligence. The equality of intelligence is not the equality of all manifestations of intelligence. It is the equality of intelligence in all its manifestations. It means that there is no gap between two forms of intelligence. The human animal learns everything as he has learned his mother tongue, as he has learned to venture through the forest of things and signs that surrounds him, in order to take his place among his fellow humans–by observing, comparing one thing with another thing, one sign with one fact, one sign with another sign, and repeating the experiences he has first encountered by chance. If the “ignorant” person who doesn’t know how to read knows only one thing by heart, be it a simple prayer, he can compare that knowledge with something of which he remains ignorant: the words of the same prayer written on paper. He can learn, sign after sign, the resemblance of that of which he is ignorant to that which he knows. He can do it if, at each step, he observes what is in front of him, tells what he has seen, and verifies what he has told. From the ignorant person to the scientist who builds hypotheses, it is always the same intelligence that is at work: an intelligence that makes figures and comparisons to communicate its intellectual adventures and to understand what another intelligence is trying to communicate to it in turn.

This poetic work of translation is the first condition of any apprenticeship. Intellectual emancipation, as Jacotot conceived of it, means the awareness and the enactment of that equal power of translation and counter-translation. Emancipation entails an idea of distance opposed to the stultifying one. Speaking animals are distant animals who try to communicate through the forest of signs. It is this sense of distance that the “ignorant master”–the master who ignores inequality–is teaching. Distance is not an evil that should be abolished. It is the normal condition of communication. It is not a gap that calls for an expert in the art of suppressing it. The distance that the “ignorant” person has to cover is not the gap between his ignorance and the knowledge of his master; it is the distance between what he already knows and what he still doesn’t know but can learn by the same process. To help his pupil cover that distance, the “ignorant master” need not be ignorant. He need only dissociate his knowledge from his mastery. He does not teach his knowledge to the students. He commands them to venture forth in the forest, to report what they see, what they think of what they have seen, to verify it, and so on. What he ignores is the gap between two intelligences. It is the linkage between the knowledge of the knowledgeable and the ignorance of the ignorant. Any distance is a matter of happenstance. Each intellectual act weaves a casual thread between a form of ignorance and a form of knowledge. No kind of social hierarchy can be predicated on this sense of distance.

What is the relevance of this story with respect to the question of the spectator? Dramaturges today aren’t out to explain to their audience the truth about social relations and the best means to do away with domination. But it isn’t enough to lose one’s illusions. On the contrary, the loss of illusions often leads the dramaturge or the performers to increase the pressure on the spectator: Maybe he will know what has to be done, if the performance changes him, if it sets him apart from his passive attitude and makes him an active participant in the communal world. This is the first point that the reformers of the theater share with the stultifying pedagogues: the idea of the gap between two positions. Even when the dramaturge or the performer doesn’t know what he wants the spectator to do, he knows at least that the spectator has to do something: switch from passivity to activity.

But why not turn things around? Why not think, in this case too, that it is precisely the attempt at suppressing the distance that constitutes the distance itself? Why identify the fact of being seated motionless with inactivity, if not by the presupposition of a radical gap between activity and inactivity? Why identify “looking” with “passivity” if not by the presupposition that looking means looking at the image or the appearance, that it means being separated from the reality that is always behind the image? Why identify hearing with being passive, if not by the presupposition that acting is the opposite of speaking, etc.? All these oppositions–looking/knowing, looking/acting, appearance/reality, activity/passivity–are much more than logical oppositions. They are what I call a partition of the sensible, a distribution of places and of the capacities or incapacities attached to those places. Put in other terms, they are allegories of inequality. This is why you can change the values given to each position without changing the meaning of the oppositions themselves. For instance, you can exchange the positions of the superior and the inferior. The spectator is usually disparaged because he does nothing, while the performers on the stage–or the workers outside–do something with their bodies. But it is easy to turn matters around by stating that those who act, those who work with their bodies, are obviously inferior to those who are able to look–that is, those who can contemplate ideas, foresee the future, or take a global view of our world. The positions can be switched, but the structure remains the same. What counts, in fact, is only the statement of opposition between two categories: There is one population that cannot do what the other population does. There is capacity on one side and incapacity on the other.

Emancipation starts from the opposite principle, the principle of equality. It begins when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting and understand that the distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection. It starts when we realize that looking is also an action that confirms or modifies that distribution, and that “interpreting the world” is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it. The spectator is active, just like the student or the scientist: He observes, he selects, he compares, he interprets. He connects what he observes with many other things he has observed on other stages, in other kinds of spaces. He makes his poem with the poem that is performed in front of him. She participates in the performance if she is able to tell her own story about the story that is in front of her. Or if she is able to undo the performance–for instance, to deny the corporeal energy that it is supposed to convey the here and now and transform it into a mere image, by linking it with something she has read in a book or dreamed about, that she has lived or imagined. These are distant viewers and interpreters of what is performed in front of them. They pay attention to the performance to the extent that they are distant.

This is the second key point: The spectators see, feel, and understand something to the extent that they make their poems as the poet has done, as the actors, dancers, or performers have done. The dramaturge would like them to see this thing, feel that feeling, understand this lesson of what they see, and get into that action in consequence of what they have seen, felt, and understood. He proceeds from the same presupposition as the stultifying master: the presupposition of an equal, undistorted transmission. The master presupposes that what the student learns is precisely what he teaches him. This is the master’s notion of transmission: There is something on one side, in one mind or one body–a knowledge, a capacity, an energy–that must be transferred to the other side, into the other’s mind or body. The presupposition is that the process of learning is not merely the effect of its cause–teaching–but the very transmission of the cause: What the student learns is the knowledge of the master. That identity of cause and effect is the principle of stultification. On the contrary, the principle of emancipation is the dissociation of cause and effect. The paradox of the ignorant master lies therein. The student of the ignorant master learns what his master does not know, since his master commands him to look for something and to recount everything he discovers along the way while the master verifies that he is actually looking for it. The student learns something as an effect of his master’s mastery. But he does not learn his master’s knowledge.

The dramaturge and the performer do not want to “teach” anything. Indeed, they are more than a little wary these days about using the stage as a way of teaching. They want only to bring about a form of awareness or a force of feeling or action. But still they make the supposition that what will be felt or understood will be what they have put in their own script or performance. They presuppose the equality–meaning the homogeneity–of cause and effect. As we know, this equality rests on an inequality. It rests on the presupposition that there is a proper knowledge and proper practice with respect to “distance” and the means of suppressing it. Now this distance takes on two forms. There is the distance between performer and spectator. But there is also the distance inherent in the performance itself, inasmuch as it is a mediating “spectacle” that stands between the artist’s idea and the spectator’s feeling and interpretation. This spectacle is a third term, to which the other two can refer, but which prevents any kind of “equal” or “undistorted” transmission. It is a mediation between them, and that mediation of a third term is crucial in the process of intellectual emancipation. To prevent stultification there must be something between the master and the student. The same thing that links them must also separate them. Jacotot posited the book as that in-between thing. The book is the material thing, foreign to both master and student, through which they can verify what the student has seen, what he has reported about it, what he thinks of what he has reported.

This means that the paradigm of intellectual emancipation is clearly opposed to another idea of emancipation on which the reform of theater has often been grounded–the idea of emancipation as the reappropriation of a self that had been lost in a process of separation. The Debordian critique of the spectacle still rests on the Feuerbachian thinking of representation as an alienation of the self: The human being tears its human essence away from itself by framing a celestial world to which the real human world is submitted. In the same way, the essence of human activity is distanced, alienated from us in the exteriority of the spectacle. The mediation of the “third term” thus appears as the instance of separation, dispossession, and treachery. An idea of the theater predicated on that idea of the spectacle conceives the externality of the stage as a kind of transitory state that has to be superseded. The suppression of that exteriority thus becomes the telos of the performance. That program demands that the spectators be on the stage and the performers in the auditorium. It demands that the very difference between the two spaces be abolished, that the performance take place anywhere other than in a theater. Certainly many improvements in theatrical performance resulted from that breaking down of the traditional distribution of places (in the sense of both sites and roles). But the “redistribution” of places is one thing; the demand that the theater achieve, as its essence, the gathering of an unseparate community is another thing. The first entails the invention of new forms of intellectual adventure; the second entails a new form of Platonic assignment of bodies to their proper–that is, to their “communal”–place.

This presupposition against mediation is connected with a third one, the presupposition that the essence of theater is the essence of the community. The spectator is supposed to be redeemed when he is no longer an individual, when he is restored to the status of a member of a community, when he is carried off in a flood of the collective energy or led to the position of the citizen who acts as a member of the collective. The less the dramaturge knows what the spectators should do as a collective, the more he knows that they must become a collective, turn their mere agglomeration into the community that they virtually are. It is high time, I think, to call into question the idea of the theater as a specifically communitarian place. It is supposed to be such a place because, on the stage, real living bodies perform for people who are physically present together in the same place. In that way it is supposed to provide some unique sense of community, radically different from the situation of the individual watching television, or of moviegoers who sit in front of disembodied, projected images. Strange as it may seem, the widespread use of images and of all kinds of media in theatrical performances hasn’t called the presupposition into question. Images may take the place of living bodies in the performance, but as long as the spectators are gathered there the living and communitarian essence of the theater appears to be saved. Thus it seems impossible to escape the question, What specifically happens among the spectators in a theater that doesn’t happen elsewhere? Is there something more interactive, more communal, that goes on between them than between individuals who watch the same show on TV at the same time?

I think that this “something” is nothing more than the presupposition that the theater is communitarian in and of itself. That presupposition of what “theater” means always runs ahead of the performance and predates its actual effects. But in a theater, or in front of a performance, just as in a museum, at a school, or on the street, there are only individuals, weaving their own way through the forest of words, acts, and things that stand in front of them or around them. The collective power that is common to these spectators is not the status of members of a collective body. Nor is it a peculiar kind of interactivity. It is the power to translate in their own way what they are looking at. It is the power to connect it with the intellectual adventure that makes any of them similar to any other insofar as his or her path looks unlike any other. The common power is the power of the equality of intelligences. This power binds individuals together to the very extent that it keeps them apart from each other; it is the power each of us possesses in equal measure to make our own way in the world. What has to be put to the test by our performances–whether teaching or acting, speaking, writing, making art, etc.–is not the capacity of aggregation of a collective but the capacity of the anonymous, the capacity that makes anybody equal to everybody. This capacity works through unpredictable and irreducible distances. It works through an unpredictable and irreducible play of associations and dissociations.

Associating and dissociating instead of being the privileged medium that conveys the knowledge or energy that makes people active–this could be the principle of an “emancipation of the spectator,” which means the emancipation of any of us as a spectator. Spectatorship is not a passivity that must be turned into activity. It is our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know, as spectators who link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and dreamed. There is no privileged medium, just as there is no privileged starting point. Everywhere there are starting points and turning points from which we learn new things, if we first dismiss the presupposition of distance, second the distribution of the roles, and third the borders between territories. We don’t need to turn spectators into actors. We do need to acknowledge that every spectator is already an actor in his own story and that every actor is in turn the spectator of the same kind of story. We needn’t turn the ignorant into the learned or, merely out of a desire to overturn things, make the student or the ignorant person the master of his masters.

Let me make a little detour through my own political and academic experience. I belong to a generation that was poised between two competing perspectives: According to the first, those who possessed the intelligence of the social system had to pass their learning on to those who suffered under that system, so that they would then take action to overthrow it. According to the second, the supposed learned persons were in fact ignorant: Because they knew nothing of what exploitation and rebellion were, they had to become the students of the so-called ignorant workers. Therefore, initially I tried to reelaborate Marxist theory in order to make its theoretical weapons available to a new revolutionary movement, before setting out to learn from those who worked in the factories what exploitation and rebellion meant. For me, as for many other people of my generation, none of those attempts proved very successful. That’s why I decided to look into the history of the workers’ movement, to find out the reasons for the continual mismatching of workers and the intellectuals who came and visited them, either to instruct them or to be instructed by them. It was my good fortune to discover that this relationship wasn’t a matter of knowledge on one side and ignorance on the other, nor was it a matter of knowing versus acting or of individuality versus community. One day in May, during the 1970s, as I was looking through a worker’s correspondence from the 1830s to determine what the condition and consciousness of workers had been at that time, I discovered something quite different: the adventures of two visitors, also on a day in May, but some hundred and forty years before I stumbled upon their letters in the archives. One of the two correspondents had just been introduced into the utopian community of the Saint-Simonians, and he recounted to his friend his daily schedule in utopia: work, exercises, games, singing, and stories. His friend in turn wrote to him about a country outing that he had just gone on with two other workers looking to enjoy their Sunday leisure. But it wasn’t the usual Sunday leisure of the worker seeking to restore his physical and mental forces for the following week of work. It was in fact a breakthrough into another kind of leisure–that of aesthetes who enjoy the forms, lights, and shades of nature, of philosophers who spend their time exchanging metaphysical hypotheses in a country inn, and of apostles who set out to communicate their faith to the chance companions they meet along the road.

Those workers who should have provided me information about the conditions of labor and forms of class-consciousness in the 1830s instead provided something quite different: a sense of likeness or equality. They too were spectators and visitors, amid their own class. Their activity as propagandists could not be torn from their “passivity” as mere strollers and contemplators. The chronicle of their leisure entailed a reframing of the very relationship between doing, seeing, and saying. By becoming “spectators,” they overthrew the given distribution of the sensible, which had it that those who work have no time left to stroll and look at random, that the members of a collective body have no time to be “individuals.” This is what emancipation means: the blurring of the opposition between those who look and those who act, between those who are individuals and those who are members of a collective body. What those days brought our chroniclers was not knowledge and energy for future action. It was the reconfiguration hic et nunc of the distribution of Time and Space. Workers’ emancipation was not about acquiring the knowledge of their condition. It was about configuring a time and a space that invalidated the old distribution of the sensible, which doomed workers to do nothing with their nights but restore their forces for work the next day.

Understanding the sense of that break in the heart of time also meant putting into play another kind of knowledge, predicated not on the presupposition of any gap but on the presupposition of likeness. These men, too, were intellectuals–as anybody is. They were visitors and spectators, just like the researcher who, one hundred and forty years later, would read their letters in a library, just like visitors to Marxist theory or at the gates of a factory. There was no gap to bridge between intellectuals and workers, actors and spectators; no gap between two populations, two situations, or two ages. On the contrary, there was a likeness that had to be acknowledged and put into play in the very production of knowledge. Putting it into play meant two things. First, it meant rejecting the borders between disciplines. Telling the (hi)story of those workers’ days and nights forced me to blur the boundary between the field of “empirical” history and the field of “pure” philosophy. The story that those workers told was about time, about the loss and reappropriation of time. To show what it meant, I had to put their account in direct relation with the theoretical discourse of the philosopher who had, long ago in the Republic, told the same story by explaining that in a well-ordered community everybody must do only one thing, his or her own business, and that workers in any case had no time to spend anywhere other than their workplace or to do anything but the job fitting the (in)capacity with which nature had endowed them. Philosophy, then, could no longer present itself as a sphere of pure thought separated from the sphere of empirical facts. Nor was it the theoretical interpretation of those facts. There were neither facts nor interpretations. There were two ways of telling stories.

Blurring the border between academic disciplines also meant blurring the hierarchy between the levels of discourse, between the narration of a story and the philosophical or scientific explanation of it or the truth lying behind or beneath it. There was no metadiscourse explicating the truth of a lower level of discourse. What had to be done was a work of translation, showing how empirical stories and philosophical discourses translate each other. Producing a new knowledge meant inventing the idiomatic form that would make translation possible. I had to use that idiom to tell of my own intellectual adventure, at the risk that the idiom would remain “unreadable” for those who wanted to know the cause of the story, its true meaning, or the lesson for action that could be drawn from it. I had to produce a discourse that would be readable only for those who would make their own translation from the point of view of their own adventure.

That personal detour may lead us back to the core of our problem. These issues of crossing borders and blurring the distribution of roles are defining characteristics of theater and of contemporary art today, when all artistic competences stray from their own field and exchange places and powers with all others. We have plays without words and dance with words; installations and performances instead of “plastic” works; video projections turned into cycles of frescoes; photographs turned into living pictures or history paintings; sculpture that becomes hypermediatic show; etc. Now, there are three ways of understanding and practicing this confusion of the genres. There is the revival of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which is supposed to be the apotheosis of art as a form of life but which proves instead to be the apotheosis of strong artistic egos or of a kind of hyperactive consumerism, if not of both at the same time. There is the idea of a “hybridization” of the means of art, which complements the view of our age as one of mass individualism expressed through the relentless exchange between roles and identities, reality and virtuality, life and mechanical prostheses, and so on. In my view, this second interpretation ultimately leads to the same place as the first one–to another kind of hyperactive consumerism, another kind of stultification, inasmuch as it effects the crossing of borders and the confusion of roles merely as a means of increasing the power of the performance without questioning its grounds.

The third way–the best way in my view–does not aim at the amplification of the effect but at the transformation of the cause/effect scheme itself, at the dismissal of the set of oppositions that grounds the process of stultification. It invalidates the opposition between activity and passivity as well as the scheme of “equal transmission” and the communitarian idea of the theater that in fact makes it an allegory of inequality. The crossing of borders and the confusion of roles shouldn’t lead to a kind of “hypertheater,” turning spectatorship into activity by turning representation into presence. On the contrary, theater should question its privileging of living presence and bring the stage back to a level of equality with the telling of a story or the writing and the reading of a book. It should be the institution of a new stage of equality, where the different kinds of performances would be translated into one another. In all those performances, in fact, it should be a matter of linking what one knows with what one does not know, of being at the same time performers who display their competences and spectators who are looking to find what those competences might produce in a new context, among unknown people. Artists, like researchers, build the stage where the manifestation and the effect of their competences become dubious as they frame the story of a new adventure in a new idiom. The effect of the idiom cannot be anticipated. It calls for spectators who are active interpreters, who render their own translation, who appropriate the story for themselves, and who ultimately make their own story out of it. An emancipated community is in fact a community of storytellers and translators.

I’m aware that all this may sound like words, mere words. But I wouldn’t take that as an insult. We’ve heard so many speakers pass their words off as more than words, as passwords enabling us to enter a new life. We’ve seen so many spectacles boasting of being no mere spectacles but ceremonials of community. Even now, in spite of the so-called postmodern skepticism about changing the way we live, one sees so many shows posing as religious mysteries that it might not seem so outrageous to hear, for a change, that words are only words. Breaking away from the phantasms of the Word made flesh and the spectator turned active, knowing that words are only words and spectacles only spectacles, may help us better understand how words, stories, and performances can help us change something in the world we live in.

JACQUES RANCIERE IS PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS VIII.

* “The Emancipated Spectator” was originally presented, in English, at the opening of the Fifth International Summer Academy of Arts in Frankfurt on August 20, 2004. The text appears here in slightly revised form.