Paul McCarthy
Division of Commerce and Administration
Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
I.
Introduction
This study traces the nature and consequences of the circulation of desire in a postmodern order of things (an order implicitly modelled on a repressed archetype of the new physics’ fluid particle flows), and it reveals a complicity between scientism, which underpins the postmodern condition, and the sadism of incessant deconstruction, which heightens the intensity of the pleasure-seeking moment in postmodernism. This complicity raises disturbing questions about the credentials of postmodernism, and it has the dehumanising effect of obscuring the individual and putting an end to praxis. In addition, the unbounded play of difference in this order of things tends to dissolve restraints to sadism and barbarism, giving desire and capital free rein in the fluid play of market signifiers.
The analytical procedures of deconstruction are a key component of postmodern thought: Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari engage structures through breaking them into their component parts. Deconstruction’s notion of the “structurality of structure” is grounded in the history of atomising thought which begins with the relations of Dionysus and Apollo, in which desire is contained by the atomistic concept. Deconstruction sets forth a de-centered and unbounded horizon in Derrida: “Differance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by which elements are related to each other” (1981: 27). Deleuze and Guattari’s atomistic “multiplicity” is also evident in Derrida’s “irreducible and generative multiplicity” (1981: 45).
The relations of capitalism and atomising thought, particularly as they manifest themselves in science and instrumental reason, are mutually supportive. Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) trace these relations (demonstrated in de Sade’s Juliette) as a pre-condition for the turn of enlightenment thought into barbarism. Adorno’s non-reductive stance refuses to collapse subject and object or “other.” This distinguishes his project from deconstruction and postmodernism generally. From this stand-point, atomising thought engenders the free play of desire, signifiers, and capital which characterises postmodernism.
The complicity of postmodern form and atomising thought in the commodification of culture and intellect is also suggested by Lefebvre’s conditions for the production of space. Lefebvre questions “the multiplicity of these descriptions and sectionings” (1991: 8). The same complicity is also pointed out in Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (1984). Here, the accumulation of capital by multinationals is furthered by the discontinuous forms of postmodern architecture. This problem is illustrated by Liggett’s distress, in stepping around young men asleep on the sidewalk, in transit to the restored Biltmore in Los Angeles for a planning convention. Liggett attributes the circumstances of the homeless to the “theoretical, administrative and economic `space’ of contemporary urban forms which are organised to facilitate global exchange” (1991: 66).
The deconstructing moment of postmodernism molecularises the complex texture of existence into an order conducive to positivist categorisation: culture is rendered into a particle form amenable to numericisation, and, through the device of probability, the random number machine orchestrates difference. The postmodern order of things assumes its own legitimacy, thereby revealing itself as the quasi-transcendental projection of an idealised world view. This view instates a new mysticism and a new form of pleasure-seeking, acted out through the unrestrained dance of capital and desire in the social. The social, in turn, is implicitly conceptualised in terms of atomised, deconstructed elements which constitute a neo-positivist play of particles and desire. The patterns revealed in sketching out these circuits of desire also reveal the turbulent and fateful grounding of a survivalist neo- conservatism which grows within and in reaction to the arbitrariness of the postmodern order of things. Such underpinnings short-circuit the critical force of deconstruction into affirmation.
There is reason for concern when unresolved “antinomies of culture” such as “consciousness and experience” are collapsed (Rose, 1984: 212), let alone when the categories of postmodernism recapitulate those of post-structuralism in “commencing from a starting point outside of human experience” (Harland, 1987: 75). In these circumstances, there is wisdom in Priest’s “dialethism” (1987), a no-reduction logic of dialectic. This perspective is compatible with Rose’s suspension of the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history, each within the other, in order to resist the reduction of the complexities of history to the “unitary and simply progressive” (1984:3). The reduction of experience to a play of signifiers with such characteristics is dehumanising, as is evident in a postmodernism which fulfills Horkheimer and Adorno’s prognosis with the dominance of “the myth of things as they actually are, and finally the identification of intellect and that which is inimical to the spirit” (1972: Xii). Rose (1988) seeks a way beyond this. In contrast to Derrida’s interpretation of the biblical Babel allegory as a triumphal encounter of humanity with God which opens the “endless labyrinth” that is postmodernism, Rose reads Babel as a point of configuration and of learning in the on-going measure and revision of the limits of human potentialities in encounters with absolute power (1988: 386). Recognising the architectural moment of deconstruction here, Rose warns of “a tendency to replace the concept by the sublimity of the sign, which is, equally, to employ an unexamined conceptuality without the labour of the concept” (1988: 368).
This re-opening of the antinomy of consciousness and experience invites evaluation against predecessors. For example, to what extent is Lukacs’ (1971) indictment of modernism as fragmenting and dehumanising carried forward in this project? If it is, then how can the cul-de-sac of his tortured attempts to reconcile the absolute and experience be avoided? Heller rejects the ending of the philosophical discourse of “production and collective morality,” such as concerned Lukacs, in “paradigmatic failure” (1983: 190). Lukacs’ late desire to start anew does not stem from despair or faith, but arises because “the absolute character of the absolute had been called into question” (Heller, 1983: 190). In continuing to seek an ethics, Lukacs embodied “the courage of the critical spirit.” An Adornian stance circumvents some aspects of Lukacs’ impasse in refusing to privilege the proletariat as the bearers of praxis. It also refuses to defer to an absolute, in favour of a contradictory, non-reductive “constellation” of tensions (Jay as cited in Bernstein, 1991: 42). This stance maintains the “unresolved paradox” of reason as simultaneously a vehicle of emancipation and entrapment–a paradox which contributes to the contemporary “rage against reason” (Bernstein, 1991: 40). From this vantage point, Adorno anticipates the escape from reason and the capture of desire in an absolutised postmodern play of difference.
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, presented as the fully developed form of postmodern thought, will provide a focal point for this discussion; when weighed against the prototypical deconstructionism of de Sade, it is arguably more mimetic than critical. The approach here shapes an immanent critique which distances the reader from compelled immersion in an all-encompassing world of signifiers (Harland, 1987). Specifically, tracing the complicities of desire and concept reveals an ontology of postmodernism and contributes to the broader project of locating postmodernism at the intersections of history, philosophy, science, and global socio-economic and political formations. This process revives the subject of praxis and picks up the threads of radical humanism, admittedly a difficult task in the fragmented theoretical terrain beyond the end of history, structure and Marxism. A non-reductive stance, in the Adornian sense, also provides points of reference for tracing lines of desire and opens perspectives from which to evaluate the “ethical-political” moments (Bernstein, 1991) in a postmodernism which will be regarded as the flux at the cutting edge of modernism, abetting the passage of modernism into culture. In these terms, the quest for incessant innovation points to the mutually supportive dynamics of modernism and postmodernism, as Lyotard observes: “Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant” (1984:79). Problems of Particles, Pleasure and Mysticism in Postmodernism
Some postmodern theorists (Baudrillard, 1983; Kroker, 1985; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Lyotard, 1988) have recognised the relations between postmodernism and quantum scientism. An explicit recognition of the appropriation of quantum scientism to cultural analysis is given by Kroker (1985), who sees postmodernism as the culmination of the logic of Capital in culture. This appropriation is flanked by Nietzsche’s The Will to Power and by Baudrillard’s “fetishism of the sign” (Kroker, 1985: 69). For Kroker, Baudrillard is “a quantum physicist of the processed world of mass communications,” who reinterprets Marx’s Capital as “the imploded, forward side (the side of nihilism in the value-form of seduction) of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power” (Kroker, 1985: 72, 69). The quantum dance of Capital, power and the desire which characterises postmodernism is fully revealed in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Here, the celebration of the libidinal economy of deconstruction takes the form of a quantum logic of particle flows of desire, and is at the apogee of the trajectory of atomising thought.
Another writer who recognises the influence of the quantum form in social analysis is Lyotard. His prescription of the relativistic clash of genres subsuming the subject reveals the longing for an epistemological fluidity which underpins the postmodern science of language. For Lyotard, “in the matter of language, the revolution of relativity and the quantum theory remains to be made” (1988: 137). The focus of the postmodernists is on contradiction and on tracing the play of difference, and it is here that they are most prone to reach into the quantum archetype to shape their explanations. This tendency is also evident in Foucault’s (1972) fluid positivity of the archival field as the principle of the dispersion of statements. In Foucault there are many examples of the seepage of quantum scientism into the epistemological void of postmodern thought. Postmodern reason rides quantum logic into culture; the confluence of Nietzschean desire, Capital, and quantum logic constitute the repressed conceptual field for the postmodern play of signifiers.
An implicit telos of desire is at work within Deleuze and Guattari’s schema, namely the potential of flows of desire to reach the continuous intensities of the “plateau” or “plane of consistency.” While these two writers end totalising thought, one can discern in their work a repetition of ideas concerning the relations of unity and difference which emerged with Heraclitus and which were also evident in ancient Hindu and Taoist mythology (Capra, 1976; Postle, 1976). Also, while Deleuze and Guattari appear to suppress the moment of unity and eschew dialectics, implicit ideas of unity and dialectical relations of unity and difference remain in their work. The telos of their “plateau” carries forward the desire to submerge self in the streams of molecularised existence which characterise the great Eastern religions. In A Thousand Plateaus, rationality turns back on itself, breaking into pure desire as flows and clashes of particles. In a schizoid sense, desire has been split and projected out into the “plateau”– a term drawn from Gregory Bateson’s “continuous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than they allow themselves to build towards a climax” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 158). There is a mystical play of forces implicit in postmodernism generally, and the incantations by the gnostics traversing the plateaus of postmodern pleasure are phrased in a fluid positivism, in the form of a scientology.
Desire has floated free from the material reality of everyday life, and this is what constitutes the ontology of the particle, and tendentially, the form of the signifier: the postmodernist now acts out, intellectually, the yearning which immersed the body in the flows of desire in the 1960s. Contra physical, corporal, or semiotic interpretations, the abstract machine of Deleuze and Guattari is diagrammatic, “is pure matter-function–a diagram independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute” (1987: 141). It is at the threshold of an assemblage that this diagrammatic genetic circuitry is able to calculate the marginal trade-off of pleasure and pain, doing so in terms and directions which could lead to a change of state: “Exchange is only an appearance: each partner or group assesses the value of the last receivable object (limit- object), and the apparent equivalence desires from that . . . ” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 439). In this manner, the calculus of desirability at the threshold draws upon the pleasure-pain preferences of every element of the group, which, at a given point, may change state.
We must also consider the location of postmodernists, including the post-structuralist writer, within the bureaucratised intelligentsia which is under considerable threat in the conditions of late capitalism. The move to roll back government expenditure on education, and the resurgence of corporate claims to power, contribute to a sense of heightened anxiety. This anxiety underlies the desire to deconstruct, into their component parts, structures which have failed to provide solutions in the conditions of image capitalism. In addition, there is a sadistic pleasure, one which heightens the sensitivity of the organism, to be had from sublimating anxiety into the deconstruction of some object, or code, into its constituent particles. The heightened sensitivity and pleasure gained from this deconstructing molecularisation reveals the perverse and narcissistic underside of the postmodernists’ absorption in the play with the elements of their own deconstructions. They reduce culture and individuality to a pseudo-difference, in fact more a bland consistency of component parts. In so doing, they feed capital with a flow of particle inputs which are more easily reconstituted to suit the infinitely changing tastes of the market. In this sense the postmodernists, rather than orchestrating genuine difference, pre-digest culture, tradition, and structure, reducing it to a form more palatable to capital.
II.
De Sade’s Legacy: Postmodern Pleasure and Perversity
The postmodern heightening of sensitivities of pleasure through the perversity of molecularisation as code-breaking is grotesquely prefigured by de Sade’s Juliette. Simone de Beauvoir questions “must we burn de Sade? . . . the supreme value of his testimony is that it disturbs us” (cited in de Saint-Yves, 1954: 16). In addition, de Saint-Yves suggests that de Sade reveals the hypocrisy of the social display, a refinery which barely conceals Juliette’s gross machinic organising for pleasure (1954: 16). This hypocrisy is now repeated beneath the attractiveness of the social order signified by the global capitalist imaging of desirable social machines within the information networks of global capitalism. The mating of desire, images, and production is electronically sorted on a global scale. The laws and moral conventions, which are postured by and maintain the content of these social machines, themselves provide the codes through which a pleasure is gained in transgression. The postmodernists, as a part of the new class intelligentsia whose status is enmeshed within the legal and moral status quo, experience a doubling of pleasures: firstly, in the benefits of their position, and secondly, in the heightened sensitivity derived from the perversity of code-breaking within their deconstructing discourses.
The postmodernists are less likely to speak of the sadistic side of their prescriptions. Yet, tracing the epistemological affinity between de Sade’s (1796) Juliette and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) A Thousand Plateaus reveals that this inheritance persists. Both are concerned with flows of desire at the molecular level and with heightening intensities. Both parody the social and productive conditions within which they were produced. De Sade’s (1796) Juliette appeared just before Goethe’s (1808) Faust, which Berman’s (1980) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air identifies as embodying the modernist cum- postmodernist spirit. Goethe’s Faust is also a precursor to Nietzsche’s (1887) On the Genealogy of Morals and his (1888) The Will to Power, expressing the strong man as a code-breaker of the weak principles of Christianity and socialism, and as a manipulative developer. We find this trajectory of indefinite cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction continues through postmodernism to culminate in the inversion of Marx’s Capital and Nietzsche’s “abstract power” in Baudrillard (Kroker, 1985).
The postmodern order of things is prefigured in de Sade’s “matrix of maleficent molecules” (1968: 400), in which the propensity to rule-breaking and irregularity is natural. Pleasure-seeking in postmodernism may be seen as pain avoidance which both stems from and drives the cycles of desire in the postmodern condition. This calculus is at the basis of an incipiently postmodern reason which, in de Sade, mirrors natural law: “What is reason? The faculty given to me by nature whereby I may dispose myself in a favourable sense toward such-and-such an object and against some other, depending on the amount of pleasure or pain I desire from these objects” (1968: 34). Heightening Intensities: The Pleasures of Code-Breaking
Juliette’s machinic organising conjoined sadism and code-breaking to raise the level of excitation of the nervous system, so that the experience of pleasure is heightened in intensity: “There is a certain perversity than which no other nourishment is tastier, drawn thither by nature–if reason’s glacial hand waves us back, lusts fingers bear the dish towards us again, and thereafter we can no longer do without the fare” (de Sade, 1968: 11). Thus driven, the unconstrained imagination may wreak havoc and destruction as nature does in pursuing its ends (de Sade, 1968: 12). This opportunism is evident in Lyotard’s (1984) affirmation of what we might see as the polymorphous perversity of the play of Eros, Thanatos, and Capital through the electromagnetic dance of the information society in his Postmodern Condition. Lyotard concludes that “our fear of the system of signs and thus our investment in it, must still be immense if we continue to seek these positions of purity . . . what would be interesting would be to stay where we are, but at the same time to seize every opportunity to function as good conductors of intensities” (1984: 311). However, the focus of Lyotard’s argument represses the pathology of the postmodern subject, who–as de Sade predicted in Juliette–heightens the intensities of pleasure through the sadistic adventures of indefinite deconstruction.
The political claims of deconstruction are repeated when Deleuze and Guattari enlist pleasure-seeking molecularisation to “[overcome] the imperialism of language” (1987: 65). Deleuze and Guattari’s logic has its precursor in Juliette, in the form of Debene’s exhortation to a “voluptuousness which can tolerate no inhibitions”: this voluptuousness “attains its zenith only by shattering them all” (de Sade, 1968: 53). The zenith is the excitement of transgressing laws, which, for Juliette, “has a strong impact upon the nervous system.” Deleuze and Guattari’s molecularising thought crystallises de Sade’s deconstructionist lubricity in the intellectual sphere: their social machine is not cast in terms of the Marxist preoccupation with the production of goods, but rather in terms of the “state of the intermingling of bodies in society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies, and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations and expansions that affect the bodies of all kinds in their relations” (1987: 89). One consequence of this is the relativising of moral-ethical concerns, since “good and bad are only products of temporary selection which must be renewed” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 10).
Deleuze and Guattari propose the withdrawal to the “Body without Organs” as their pleasure dome–“a tantric egg,” a condition in which all the attachments of organs to stratified social space have been cut off. It is a matter of pushing desire through to point of its origins in the body, by intensifying the behaviour to which desire is attached, whether masochistic, sadistic, or paranoid: “Where psychoanalysis says ‘stop find yourself again,’ we should say instead, ‘lets go further still we haven’t found our BwO yet, we haven’t sufficiently dismantled ourselves’” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 151). The desire to achieve the intensity of the experience of pure desire in the body without organs is evident in Deleuze and Guattari’s masochist, who closes off organs:
The masochist body: it is poorly understood in terms of pain; it is fundamentally a question of the BwO. It has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts, and nose are sewn shut. It has itself strung up to stop the organs from working, flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized, smothered, to make sure everything is sealed tight. (1987: 150)
This scene might have been drawn from one of the many instances of sado-masochism in Juliette. It is from such a point that Deleuze and Guattari’s masochist must break through to the pleasures of the body without organs, not by exercising caution or holding onto self, but through further experimentation and “dismantling of self” (1987: 151). This pleasure-seeking is unconstrained by remorse, carrying forward Clairwil’s prescription that guilt must be overcome by breaking any restraining rules–in fact, by “destroying everything it rests upon” (de Sade, 1968: 396).
It is de Sade who kills the God that Nietzsche declares to be dead: de Sade declares that “the impediment presented by religion is the first that ought to be liquidated” (1968: 341). De Sade’s transgression of moral codes as a natural outcome of human striving is also a precursor to Goethe’s Faust. In this work, Gretchen’s virtue is violated in natural cycles of desire, deconstruction and development, cycles which are carried forward in Nietzsche’s The Will to Power. For Kroker, Nietzsche stands at the beginning and end of Capital, in a trajectory which spans the thought of Deleuze, Lyotard and the early Barthes: “In this account, Capital is disclosed to be a vivid, almost clinical study of the inner workings of modern nihilism” (Kroker, 1985: 69). However, it is in de Sade that we find the prototypical pleasure and perversity of a deconstructing desire acted out in a complicity with capital in the mass culture of postmodernism. Juliette’s desire for pleasure, luxury, property and income are furthered by “the most terrible orgies,” and her sadistic pleasure-plays are financed in a manner in which capital itself becomes both object and instrument of pleasure-seeking.
It is only recurrent cycles of sadistic deconstruction which break Juliette out of the intoxication resulting from “giving in to every irregularity” of her senses. Here Juliette’s strategies are prototypes for the image-making and image-breaking binges of the postmodern accumulators, who produce models for emulation by everyman. Juliette’s Gods carry forward the coupling of Dionysiac materiality, eroticism, and spatial intellectualisation in a manner which prefigures the eroticism invested in the figural delineation of postmodern commodity signifiers. One must go through pleasure to experience the nature of things:
Pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to find themselves. But the question is precisely whether it is necessary to find oneself . . . It is a question of making a body without organs upon which intensities pass, self and other--not in the name of a higher level of generality or a broader extension, but by virtue of singularities that can no longer be said to be personal, and intensities that can no longer be said to be extensive. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 156)
In Juliette, also, pleasure is the pathway to the life principle: “a consuming and delicious conflagration will glide into your nerves, it will make boil the electrically charged liquor in which your life principle has its seat” (de Sade, 1968: 19). The play of irregularity and pleasure is the natural order of things: “As soon as you have discovered the way to seize nature, insatiable in her demands upon you she will lead you step by step from irregularity to irregularity” (de Sade, 1968: 19). This allure of the immersion in irregularity re-surfaces in Foucault’s (1972) archaeology, Derrida’s (1973) difference, Lyotard’s (1984) agonistics, and in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) plateau. Postmodern Sadism
There is a long trajectory of that desire which circulates through sadistic activities, a manipulation of the Fates in the interest of group survival and pleasurable existence. This trajectory is observable in Dionysus and in Juliette. It also manifests itself in postmodernism, but is concealed beneath the pleasures of the pursuit of difference. The channels through which desire flows into sadism, and the mutually supportive relations of this desire with anality, require some examination as a moment in the understanding of the pleasures and perversities of postmodernism. De Sade’s legacy may be discerned in the writing of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and in postmodernism generally.
Juliette is a precursor to Nietzsche’s Superman. In Juliette, the heightening of the intensities of the perversity and pleasure arising from the mimesis of nature’s propensity to self-destruction is rampant. However, a problem which is a source of sadistic pleasure in de Sade, and which is glossed over in postmodernism, is that the adverse consequences of unrestrained pleasure-seeking fall more heavily on the weaker sections of the society. This is of particular concern in the coupling of postmodernism and neo-conservatism:
The stronger . . . by despoiling the weaker, that is to say by enjoying all the rights which he has received from nature, by giving himself every possible license, enjoys himself more or less in proportion to that license. The more atrocious the harm he does the weaker, the more voluptuous the thrill he gives himself. (de Sade, 1968: 119)
The problem with the mimesis of natural strength is that it, of necessity, is cast in terms of an unconstrained destructiveness. Likewise, the postmodern desire to deconstruct sublimates the anxiety of existence into strong solutions which carry forward both Faust’s and Juliette’s sadistic pleasure-seeking at the expense of the weak. With respect to tendencies to neo-conservatism within postmodernism, we might consider the pleasures inherent in policies of deregulation and restructuring: there is a perverse thrill, legitimated by nature, to be gained from tough solutions which sadistically degrade conditions of the poorer sections of society. In postmodernism, as in de Sade, there is little concern for the cruelty or terror inflicted upon particular individuals or groups: “When the law of nature requires an upheaval, does nature fret over what will be undone in its course?” (de Sade, 1968: 121).
Juliette‘s natural order anticipates the free flowing, unbounded play of assemblages later found in Deleuze and Guattari:
The perpetual movement of matter explains everything: The universe is an assemblage of unlike entities which act and react mutually and successively with and against each other; I discern no start, no finish no fixed boundaries, this universe I see only as an incessant passing from one state into another, and within it only particular beings which forever change shape and form. (de Sade, 1968: 43)
This indefinite atomism is carried forward into both Foucault’s and Derrida’s difference, and it culminates in Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomic multiplicities:
A multiplicity is neither subject or object, only determinations, magnitudes and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in state . . . An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 8)
It is into these flows of a natural order of difference that both de Sade’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s subject dissolves itself. In both cases, it is a mimesis which seeks satisfaction at the cost of losing the memories, desires, and the mind of the subject, which–collectively with other subjects–could contain the propensity to sadism.
The sadisms which may be unleashed in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) unrestrained flight to pleasure lie repressed in the crevices beneath their plateaus. It is into their black holes that is consigned the repressed anality of the polymorphously perverse stage, which, I have argued, is latent in the desire for deconstructing play with the objects of postmodern existence. In their schizo-analytical re-interpretation of Freud’s wolf-man, Deleuze and Guattari argue against phallocentrism, the father, and castration as key analytical criteria. They interpret the wolf-man by projecting anality into multiplicity delineated as the quantum dynamics of swarming particles and black holes. “Who could ever believe that the anal machine bears no relation to the wolf machine . . . a field of anuses just like a pack of wolves . . . lines of flight or deterritorialisation, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialised intensities: that is what multiplicity is . . . a wolf is a hole, they are both particles of the unconscious” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 32).
The relations of anality, pleasure, and sadism might be better grasped by recovering the subject-object dialectics of the polymorphously perverse stage within capitalism: however, the implications of this anality remain unexamined when Deleuze and Guattari escape the pain of everyday postmodern existence by projecting it out onto the heights of the continuous pleasure of the plateau. Thereupon, the dissolution of self into the neo-Platonism of the perfect form of the pure multiplicity of particles is completed. This is the essence of molecularising thought, and it is driven by sublimating a latent anality which relentlessly and sadistically renders wholes into their molecular elements as objects of play. The Platonism of this process in molecularising thought carries forward the “vision of the human body as excremental” (Brown, 1977: 295). It is through this moment of atomising thought that we may uncover the suppressed anality of the postmodern character, the precursor to which is Freud’s 1908 essay, “Character and Anal Erotism.” The traits of the anal character of orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy are sublimated into desires to control as the delineations of postmodern signification. The movement is both controlling and pleasure-seeking, and the postmodern desire to immerse self in the play of images acts out the desire to play in the objects one has created. This latent anality at the individual level is in mutually reinforcing relations with a disorganised capitalism, within which the phallus still dominates social expression. Hocquenghem (1987:24) says of this that “the anus is over invested individually because its investment is withdrawn socially.”
While in Deleuze and Guattari anality is projected into the pleasure and covert sadism of the plane of consistency, in de Sade it is unmasked and brought into direct experience as an aperture through which self may be sado- masochistically dissolved into the natural pleasures of the incessant transgression of the order of things. Saint- Frond’s instruction of Juliette in the pleasures of sadistic code-breaking are legitimatised by nature’s own processes. There is an on-going play of anal pleasure and sadism in Juliette: Juliette relates that he “kissed me and ran his hand down my behind, into which he promptly popped a finger” (de Sade, 1968: 235). Commonly, the intensity of the pleasures of Juliette’s orgies is heightened by the acting out of sadistic anality (de Sade, 1968: 266). Juliette’s deconstruction of sexual codes knows no bounds: her unconstrained lust abases more noble concerns and is demanding and militant in its tyrannical perversion of beauty, virtue, innocence, candour and misfortune (de Sade, 1968: 270). Postmodernism’s own polymorphous perversity is acted out by playing in the mess of deconstruction, but the memory of how the subject was drawn into this mess remains repressed. Postmodernism: Pleasure and Perversity for Everyman
Bourdieu finds that the impetus for code-breaking has devolved to a growing petite bourgeoisie who further the processes of accumulation, dealing in information in a manner which was once reserved for privileged groups:
In the name of the fight against "taboos" and the liquidation of "complexes" they adopt the most external and easily borrowed aspects of the intellectual life style, liberated manners, cosmetic or sartorial outrages, emancipated poses and postures and systematically apply the cultivated disposition to not yet legitimate culture (cinema, strip cartoons, the underground, to every day life (street art), the personal sphere (sexuality, cosmetics, child-rearing, leisure) and the existential (the relation to nature, love and death). (Bourdieu, 1984: 370)
These cycles of code-breaking are driven by a desire to emulate higher status groups. The style and opinion leaders of the new petite bourgeoisie perpetuate the play of difference inherent in commodity signs, deconstructing tradition and high culture into everyday life and increasing the possibilities for the attachment of capital and desire. From beneath the veneer of an attractive style, sadism is projected out elsewhere. For example, it is projected into the Third World as life-threatening methods of production, as the disruption of communities, and as the practice of using torture to maintain the system of power and control. It is also projected into the psyches of the postmodern worker and consumer, wherein the anxieties of maintaining position in the play of commodity signifiers, and in the hierarchies of symbolic accumulation, are aggravated.
The pleasurable and terroristic nature of postmodern consumer society can be discerned as two sides of the same coin. Firstly, the writing of lifestyle ideals in consumer consciousness terrorises the masses into appropriate consumption and productive behaviours. Secondly, as Baudrillard has argued, the immersion of the masses in symbolic exchange sets in train a terroristic reaction to the simulacra which will lead the system of simulations to collapse in on itself:
The system's own logic turns into the best weapon against it. The only strategy of opposition to a hyperrealist system is pata-physical, a "science of imaginary solutions" in other words a science fiction about the system returning to destroy itself at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of destruction and death. (Baudrillard, 1984: 58-9)
Postmodernism promises the masses a veritable orgy of code-breaking in the play of signifiers. It completes the devolution of the pleasures of code-breaking through de Sade’s aristocracy to the elites of Marx and Weber, and to Bourdieu’s higher status groups, intellectuals and the new petite bourgeoisie to everyman. The postmodern allure is that everyman may experience the pleasure and sadism of code-breaking, at the level of bodily molecular excitation, by dissolving self in the play of commodity signifiers. Beyond Justice: Everyman a Deconstructionist
One consequence of postmodernism associated with the dissolution of self into the pleasures and perversities of an unfettered play of difference is the end of meaningful discourse concerning justice and human agency. Justice is relativised in the language games of postmodernism. For example, Lyotard argues that we must arrive at an idea of justice that is not linked to that of consensus (1984: 66). In postmodernism, desire wells up in the sphere of language and is the exotic force driving the play of difference: “a move can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention” (Lyotard: 1984: 10). De Sade prefigures this abasement of justice to desire, pointing to the universal motion of justice evident in nature by arguing that justice is relative and it is natural to heighten the intensity of pleasure by breaking its codes.
This relativising of justice de-sublimates the modernists’ desire for equality, liberty, and happiness for all into contingencies subject to the play of market fates. The consequence is an abdication of any containing ethical discourse in favor of the play of difference among signifiers: this means that anything is possible as the molecularities of desire and production pursue one another in a dance which tramples the less powerful, less involved bystanders. The Faustian cycles of eternal deconstruction and reconstruction work their way through Nietzsche into a postmodern will to signify, a will which carries the developer’s ethic into cultural and intellectual processes. De Sade provides an earlier illustration of the relations of desire fixated in deconstruction, an illustration which is also repeated in Nietzsche’s incipient postmodernism. De Sade reveals the hypocritical and pitiless side of this complex, characteristics further revealed in the complicity of postmodernism and neo-conservatism. There is nothing to constrain the terrorisation, or elimination, of those who stand in the way of a natural flow of desires into cycles of indefinite change:
One of the basic laws of nature is that nothing superfluous subsists in the world. You may be sure of it, not only does the shiftless beggar, always a nuisance, consume part of what the industrious man produces, which is already a serious matter, but will quickly become dangerous the moment you suspend your dole to him. My desire is that instead of bestowing a groat upon these misfortunates we concentrate our efforts upon wiping them out. (de Sade, 1968: 726)
De Sade prefigures the contemporary conflation of desire, rationality and market naturalism, which I have argued become mutually supportive within postmodern logic. This is acted out when everyman may have the pleasure of Faustian deconstruction and development in postmodernism. Again, de Sade expresses in advance the naturalism which is to surface in postmodernism as a rejection of the idea of generalised rules: “No man has the right to repress in him what Nature put there . . . A universal glaive of justice is of no purpose” (1968: 732). De Sade’s prototypical natural order of difference carries forward that of Heraclitus and its ideal type is realised in Derrida’s epistemology of difference. This epistemology instates the clash of signifiers as the self-driving force of language:
In a language, in the system of language these are only differences . . . what is written as difference, then, will be the playing movement that "produces"--by means of something that is not simply an activity--these differences, these effects of difference. (Derrida, 1982: 11)
Derrida’s naturalism here opens language to a Darwinism in which there is nothing to contain the slide into de Sade’s “perpetual outpouring of conflict, injury and aggression” (1968: 733). For Lyotard also, “to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domains of a general agonistics” (1984: 10). The postmodern hope is that unconstrained difference will break through to a liberalist ethics of equal opportunity for participation in language games. The corresponding promise is that this equality of participation will alleviate the condition of those who are victimised by the social structure: Lyotard’s agonistic language games protect against “piracy” by breaking the rules (1984: 7). For postmodernism, the act of deconstructing the law and social codes is held to undermine the propensity to despotism (1968: 735); however, there is nothing to constrain the slide into terrorism. De Sade’s unconstrained anarchism is the precursor to this play of postmodern difference, and reveals its propensity to turn into terror against the weaker sections of society. For de Sade, “give us anarchy and we will have these victims the less” (1968: 733).
The neurology of de Sade’s propensity to the heightened intensity of law breaking prefigures Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of desire at the molecular level: “Foreign objects act in a forceful manner upon our organs, if they penetrate them violently, if they stir into brisk motion the neural fluid particles which circulate in the hollow of our nerves, then our sensibility is such as to dispose us to vice” (de Sade, 1968: 278). It is in atrocity that the highest intensity from this code-breaking is achieved. Within de Sade’s technics of heightening the intensity of pleasure, doing good is useless. De Sade’s language is carried forward in Deleuze and Guattari’s studies of the particle flows of intensities; here, by implication, arguments concerning the good are dissolved in particle flows. Heightened intensity is achieved to the extent that particles of desire can crash through striated (coded) space to the libertinage of the plateau (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 507). However, the consignment of justice to a space beyond the subjective and collective relations of concern for others leaves a state of lawlessness in which no individual or sub-group is safe.
III.
Particle Thought and the End of the Subject
The trajectory of social thought which reduces the complex texture of existence to molecules, or to particles, reaches its fully developed form in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing. Their concepts reveal that the epistemology of difference, which underpins postmodernism, rests on a cultural scientism. Furthermore, Lyotard proposes modelling social relations in terms of quantum theory, since “research centred on singularities and “incommensurables” is applicable to the pragmatics of most everyday problems” (1984: 60). These models provide prospects for Lyotard to realise the quantum revolution within language. Lyotard would then be able to explain the logic of the clashes and discontinuities, in his study of the agonistics of discourse, in terms of the probabilistic positivism applicable to this model. There is a problem for the subject in this view, since the subject is overawed by, and precariously existing in, an unfathomable cosmic flux of energies. I propose to trace the trajectory of this view and to evaluate it by directing Simone Weil’s critique of quantum theory at the manifestation of this form within postmodernism.
The trajectory of probabilistic positivism begins with Heraclitus, and continues through Nietzsche’s universe as a “monster of energies without beginning, without end–a play of forces a wave of forces” (1968: 550). It is the base matter of classical scientism, revitalised in a fluid positivism by the quantum theorists, and emerging as the repressed archetype for the postmodern play of difference as a quantum scientism of signifiers. We find that this trajectory culminates in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus which imports quantum modelling of particle movement into social theory. This importation tends to gloss over problems in relation to knowledge which remain to be resolved.
Simone Weil’s (1968) Reflections on Quantum Theory is instructive in revealing the manner in which quantum theory furthers an epistemology of particle plays which ends human concerns. We might reasonably depict these concerns as those that derive from the modernist catch cry of equality, liberty and fraternity. Weil’s critique usefully informs this evaluation of the form of postmodern thought. Weil perceives a crisis in twentieth-century physics which we may also discern in the social physics of postmodernism in general, and in Deleuze and Guattari’s work in particular. Weil argues that scientism must not eliminate the concerns of “human destiny” and “human truth” from culture or intellectual pursuits (1968: vii). She criticises the ending of human truth in the seeking of scientific truth: “utility at once takes its place . . . utility becomes something which the intelligence is no longer entitled to define or judge, but only to serve” (Weil, 1968: ix).
In Deleuze and Guattari (1987) we find that there is a utility of particle flows to understanding, but that it is a utility which deconstructs ideas of “human destiny” into a dynamic atomism. It is a dead atomism devoid of a humanising moment. Their world of particles recapitulates the trajectory of the ancient Greek atomism, through to the atoms of modern physics, from which Cornforth (1912) claims that the concerns of human life had passed. Deleuze and Guattari reduce a humanised utility and pleasure-seeking, from activities subject to human thought and wisdom, to a universal and autonomous pleasure-seeking which is diagrammatically programmed into a universal field of particle flows.
Quantum theory reflected the re-emergence of an over- riding concern with the discontinuous in science. Weil (1968: 5) criticises this tendency stating that “the human mind cannot make do with number alone or with continuity alone; it oscillates between the two.” The potential to think in terms of both number and space is instated as a necessary a priori of comprehension. In this sense Weil carries forward the paraconsistent logic of Heraclitean unity and difference. It is the loss of the sense of spatial unity in the reduction to the discontinuity of atoms and quanta that has led to a loss of meaning. Here, Weil expresses a similar observation to that of Cornforth (1912), who claims that the atomism of physics carries forward the spatial rationalisation entailed in the naming of the Olympian Gods. However, with the vanishing of the Gods from Mount Olympus and the diminution of their influence in everyday life, a space opened in which the secularised, dead particles of physics were constructed. The concerns of human life, which had maintained their vitality through projection into the Olympian Gods, now pass out of the conceptualisation of the nature of things, leaving the dead matter of atomism.
Weil argues that scientists between the Renaissance and the end of the nineteenth century carried on their experiments within the context of a broader attempt to establish the relations of people and the universe. Their anthropo-mytho-materio framework for this was Promethean. People had been cursed to act out desires through work. Causality was grasped in terms of “intermediate stages analogous to those traversed by a man executing a simple manual labour” (Weil, 1968: 6). These relations of work were further reduced to the universal formulae of energy, effectively dehumanising relations of distance and force (or mass and velocity), relations which hitherto had been grasped in terms of the human work required to move weight. Furthermore, the experience of the consequences of directional time was added in terms of the concept of entropy, expressed algebraically.
Coupled with necessity, these ideas reduced human nature (including relations of desires hopes, fears, becoming and the good) to something determined within the constellation of energies and atoms of the universe. The cost is a world deprived of human meanings: “It tries to read behind all appearances that inexorable necessity which makes the world a place in which we do not count, a place of work, a place indifferent to desire, to aspirations and the good” (Weil, 1968: 10). In these terms, classical science contained a vital flaw which would lead to its demise, namely the gap between human thought (including wisdom) and an infinitely accumulating array of facts. Human beings are more than particles of matter condemned to work. They are able to imagine, construct becomings, and experience the good and the beautiful. The reduction of language to scientism ends this aspect of human existence, one which “can, perhaps, only be expressed in the language of myth, poetry and image, the images consisting not only in words but also in objects and actions” (Weil, 1968: 13).
The spatio-temporal relations of desire and action are also dehumanised in the transition from Greek to modern science in a manner which we shall see has been carried into postmodern cultural scientism. Weil sees in ancient Greek science the foundations of classical science. Classical science is cast in terms of a tendency to equilibrium, an equilibrium which encompasses the relations of injustice and justice, and ideas of beauty such as expressed in Greek art (Weil, 1968: 15). However, these humanising relations are lost in classical science. The desire of Greek science is “to contemplate in sensible phenomena an image of the good” (Weil, 1968: 21). Classical science takes as its model for representing the world the relation between a desire and the conditions for its fulfillment. However, it suppresses the first term of the relation (Weil, 1968: 15). The linear motion of classical science encapsulates desire as an acting out of “desires to go somewhere” (Weil, 1968: 26).
One might also discern an early expression of this travelling motion in Homer: Odysseus’ restless adventuring now continues its trajectory through modern physics to culminate in the spatial explorations of the postmodernists. The postmodern reduction of distance, space and desire into the image as commodity signifier reproduces Odysseus’ adventuring through mass travel–in a manner which involves an unending hopping from one simulation of culture and history to the next–and one in which desire goes nowhere really positive but around in a circle to return repression to itself. Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1972) reading of Odysseus as an archetypal bourgeois character fits with Weil’s modernist (1968: 16). Both act out desires “to go somewhere, for example, or to seize or hit something or somebody, and upon distance which is a condition inherent in every desire of a creature subjected to time.” This incessant journeying prefigures the postmodernists’ spatial traversing and subdividing of the activities of everyday life into a kaleidoscopic symbolic field. However, aesthetical and ethical considerations are suppressed in this acting out of classical scientific perceptions. It is in Weil’s reference to an earlier image of the Manichaeans that the tendency to fragmentation now carried forward by the postmodernists is most visible.
Weil’s Manichaeans saw the fragmentation of the spirit through its attachment to the necessities of time and space. We may also recall the crises of Odysseus’ adventuring in these terms. Both Odysseus’ experiences and those seen by the Manichaeans prefigure the postmodern condition as one in which character is fragmented in spatial delineation driven by the temporality of a play of difference. Weil is prescient to the postmodern split, conceiving of character as split between desires and aspiration. Any sense of having found oneself is continually undermined as the past is lost. The feelings arising therefrom are repeated in postmodern nihilism.
What he is at any single moment is nothing; what he has been and what he will be do not exist; and the extended world is made up of everything that escapes him, since he is confined to one point, like a chained prisoner, and cannot be anywhere except at the price of time and effort and of abandoning the point he started from. Pleasure rivets him to his place of confinement and to the present moment, which nevertheless he cannot detain; desire attaches him to the coming moment and makes the whole world vanish for the sake of a single object; and pain is always for him the sense of his being torn and scattered through the succession of moments and places. (Weil, 1968: 16,17)
This splitting of the psychic space of the subject is also expressed by Lacan in that the signifier is the death of the subject.
Hence the division of the subject--when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as "fading," as disappearance. There is, then, one might say a matter of life and death between the unary signifier and the subject, qua binary signifier, cause of his disappearance. (Lacan, 1968: 218)
These terms are also applicable to the source of the anxiety of postmodern existence which arises from the dissolution of self into the world of signifiers. The context of postmodern existence is given its dynamic ontological structure by the new physics. The new physics is the atomism of classical science dissolved into transitory particles which emanate from underlying fields. This form provides a natural scientific legitimation for a postmodern existence remarkable for its fragmentary and transitory nature. In addition, it stylistically underpins the electrodynamics of the global image making systems which channel postmodern desire. This is the context for the pain of postmodern existence manifested by the postmodern split. The splitting or play of difference within character acts in sympathy with a play of difference in an everyday life. What is remarkable here is the predominant preoccupation with the pursuit of difference as distinction, measured in terms of signifying fashions.
In this on-going deconstruction and reconstruction of self, elements are continually shed and replaced with new signifiers. However, something is gained only at the expense of something lost, and as repeated failures of satisfaction are experienced, the feeling of the tragedy of deconstruction grows. In its psychotic mode, the postmodern split manifests a masochistic self-deconstruction, on the one hand, and a sadistic rending of culture into its elemental particles, on the other. This postmodern desire to reduce things to their elemental particles carries the quantum hypothesis into culture as a stylistic legitimating form, and we shall see that it also imports a loss of the connection of humanity and materiality.
The dehumanising loss in the quantum hypotheses is the loss of “analogy between the laws of nature and the conditions of work” (Weil, 1968: 22). The work of the human being to move a weight over distance is represented in terms of the mechanical devices of classical science (mechanical man). In contrast, quantum conceptions (for example, Planck’s) subsume discontinuous mechano-humanism under the continuity of formulae which express the product of number and a constant (Weil, 1968: 23). Weil’s conception of the spatial continuity implied by such formulae belies the apparent discontinuity of quantum particles. This spatial continuity is the underlying unity of the field. In an equivalent form, Foucault’s (1972) “archive” functions as a field which emanates difference. In Deleuze and Guattari’s social physics, this is the same unity as the suppressed term of the relations of pure discontinuity, and in postmodernism generally it is the suppressed unity of spatial continuity which underlies the plays of difference.
The postmodern idea of infinite difference rests on an unbounded continuity of space within which there is no limit to figural divisions. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) idealisation or telic destiny of this is the “plateau” or “plane of consistency.” However, such a schema dissolves humanity itself, and with it, human meaning. On the social plane, Deleuze and Guattari repeat the formulations of physics which move outside human thought into pure algebra. The problem, to Weil, is that algebra is “a language with this peculiarity, it means nothing” (Weil, 1968: 24). In this manner, the conditions of human existence are reduced to the algebraic relations of dead atoms out of which the concerns of human life have passed, thus realising the condition foreseen by Cornforth (1912). The idea of human agency is lost in the traversing of continuous space which mindlessly emanates difference.
The discontinuities of quantum physics are grasped at the micro level through the linking of atomism, chance, and probability. Weil warns that the idea of chance at the micro level does not end spatio-temporal necessity, since the same macro-structures, for example, the distribution of thousands of throws of a dice, are carried forward–by necessity (1968: 24). The same argument may be used to question the postmodernists, in general, and Deleuze and Guattari’s ending of concern with totalities. From this perspective, we may question Deleuze and Guattari’s social physics in respect of its concern with plays of difference at the particle level. The characteristic postmodern indulgence in chance ends structural necessity in favour of the idea of a random number machine which authorises infinite spatial multiplicity.
In problematising this, consider the manner in which modern physics reduced the concerns of energy, particles, entropy, and continuity to the discontinuous numbers of probability. The algebraic formulae of probability functions overrode paradoxical concerns of human thought: Einstein’s paradoxes as expressed in terms of a “velocity which is both infinite and measurable, a time which is assimilated to a fourth dimension of space” (Weil, 1968: 29). Weil proposes investigating ways in which probability can be conceived without reduction to the discontinuity of numbers–for example, through generalised numbers. It is clear that atomising thought is an artifice which suppresses the potential of the human mind to conceive continuity, and with it conceptions of destiny and the good. These are suppressed in favour of the measuring convenience of numbering in science, or its equivalent, signifiers as the cultural atomism of postmodernism.
The same problem exists in the Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of atomistic particle thought. They assign the idea of continuity to the utopian, transcendental space of the “plateau” or “plane of consistency,” thus projecting the continuous and the good to Olympian heights above the conditions of human existence. Their flows of particles are a mathesis and their molecularising thought is one to which human experience is not reducible. Weil remarks that “Physics is essentially the application of mathematics to nature at the price of an infinite error” (1968: 34). And Deleuze and Guattari’s social physics carries forward the same error–the discontinuous particle experience is not the universal experience. It is a product of individual human minds, a product which is shared, not a producer of human minds. In addition, Lyotard also carries forward this error in his dehumanising relativism. He discusses “genres of discourse” as “strategies . . . of no-one.” He also characterises conflict as autonomous, “not between humans or between any other entities,” but rather the as product of “phrases” (Lyotard, 1988: 137).
Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisations are perhaps best grasped as an attempt by the postmodern mind to locate itself in a changing terrain, but a terrain which instates the hypotheses of quantum physics in culture as a repressed absolute governing human existence. However, it is apparent that this view raises problems for cultural analysis, problems which remain to be examined. Both the human potential to imagine the Olympian Gods and the form of the existence of the particle contain the infinite error of assuming the pre-eminence of these products of imagination over the conditions of human existence:
The grace which permits wretched mortals to think and imagine and effectively apply geometry, and to conceive at the same time that God is a perpetual geometer, the grace which goes with the stars and with dances, play and work is a marvelous thing; but it is not more marvelous than the very existence of man, for it is a condition of it. (Weil, 1968: 41)
The infinite error carried forward in postmodern thought is that of regarding the play of difference as a universal and a valid resolution of the twentieth century’s contradictions: the discontinuities of difference with the continuities of infinite space, time and desire. This error arises from the belief in interminable deconstruction and its counterpart in capitalising the unending possibilities of attaching desires to an infinite array of consumption images. It does not end the modernist project but updates it by substituting the more dynamic particle plays of quantum physics for nineteenth-century atomism. The instating of the principles of quantum physics in social thought provides a more reactive reagent for the furthering of modernist concerns:
The nineteenth century, that century which believed in unlimited progress, and believed that men would grow richer and richer, and that constantly renovated techniques would enable them to get more and more pleasure while working less and less, and that education would make them more and more rational and that public moral in all countries would grow more and more democratic, believed that his domain of physics was the whole universe. The goods to which the nineteenth century attached were precious, but not supreme; they were subordinate values but it thought it saw infinity in them. (Weil 1968: 42)
This prognosis of the nineteenth century is applicable to our so-called postmodern era. We observe postmodern thought investing human hopes and desires into a universe which is an infinity of signified differences at the level of culture and consumption. However, the idea, implicit in postmodernism, that desire can be infinitely attached to the play of signifiers, is neither supreme nor sublime. Postmodern Neo-Positivism, or the Signifier as Number
The culmination of the logic of the postmodern world of signifiers is in the neo-positivism of Deleuze and Guattari’s “numbering” within “nomad space.” “Nomad space” is conceived as numerical space and is contrasted with the linear space of primitive society and the territorial striations of State society. While the State numericises its striations, it is in nomad space that the “autonomous arithmetic organisation” of the “numbering number” comes to function: “The number is no longer a means of counting or measuring but of moving: it is the number itself which moves through smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 389).
To reveal the numerics at the underside of the signifier, first let’s recapitulate the tendency to fragmentation in postmodern thought. The fully developed form of this is in Deleuze and Guattari’s reduction to the particle. This adds a new fluidity to culture and provides more opportunities for desire to attach to capital. Under these circumstances, postmodernism gives modernism entree to culture. In this sense, Kroker has recognised postmodernism as the culmination of the logic of capital in a culture which is driven by a Nietzschean will to power. We might regard Deleuze and Guattari’s reduction of the complex texture of individual and social relations to an essential constitution of rampant particles of desire as a Nietzschean desire for power through deconstruction. In postmodernism, this will to power draws on the fluid epistemology of the quanta of modern physics and uses it to fragment social spaces and structures. The play of particles so formed is one of a cultural positivism, in which the signifier behaves probabilistically in the form of the number. It is at this point of the rendering of culture into its elemental quantum numerics that the social field is most permeable to the passage of capital.
Furthermore, within the sense of a dialectical view of history, I have previously argued that the moment of deconstruction or fragmentation is often misconstrued as a permanent condition, unjustifiably freezing dialectic at this point. This fixation on the moment of difference is central to postmodern reason and lies at the confluence of the trajectories of a number of historical tendencies. These trajectories are mutually attractive and intersect to create the space of postmodern reason. They include the global capitalism of the information society, which heightens the intensities of the relations of fear, anxiety, and the pleasure and perversity of infinite deconstruction by abetting their investment in the flux of commodity signifiers.
Postmodern reason facilitates the fluidity of these relations by conjoining the propensity to think atomistically with the notion of the random number machine and probability. In effect, it dissolves culture into a quantum epistemology. Here, the fluid, probabilistic, and rapidly appearing and disappearing number, as the concealed form of the signifier–for example in the mathematical coordinates which blueprint the electronic image–becomes the epistemological currency of postmodern thought. This is the order of things driving the postmodern cutting edge of modernism, a postmodern neo-positivism which breaks up culture into the form of a probabilistic mathesis.
It is the random number machine of postmodern reason that is the hidden orchestrator of the production of infinite difference as pure multiplicity, in which the signifier is reduced to the form of the self-moving number. The random number machine is revealed at the seat of that quasi-transcendental force which is self-referential in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s “numbering number” and sets forth its own probabilistic order of things. Desire and capital pursue one another through patterns issuing from the random number machine as it arbitrarily pours forth an infinite array of profiles of the possible relations of desire and commodity signifiers. The random number machine also sets forth lines of escape from the hegemony of State and market relations–for example, into the probabilities that reactive numbers will coalesce in reaction against the dominant order. Deleuze and Guattari’s “numbering numbers” escape from their State organisation into “autonomous arithmetic” (1987: 389). In the death knell of praxis and the subject, “the number is no longer a means of counting or of moving: it is the number itself which moves through smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 389). The culmination of the logic of postmodernism, then, is in the play of signifiers, the essential constitution of which is a play of numbers: in other words, the fluid neo-positivism of signifiers is a play of difference among “numbering numbers.”
The desire to systematise the play of difference into a fluid positivism is also apparent in the positivity of Foucault’s (1972) statement. In addition, Lacan (1968) attempts to geometricise post-structural desire, and one also senses that Lyotard (1984) desires a mathesis as the basis of his agonistic discourse-games. Deleuze and Guattari’s reduction of social quanta to particle flows realises the telos of postmodern thought, reducing cultural complexity to signifiers in the form of number-signs. This is also the designation of the subject in postmodernism, an order which abets the depiction of everyday life in terms of the concealed numerical coordinates which make up the electronic flashes of the image machines. A self-perficient and determining neo- positivism thus overtakes human reason.
This order of things is the end of reason–an electronic mating of capital with a Faustian cum-Nietzschean will to deconstruction. The reality of Deleuze and Guattari’s escaping social quanta within late capitalism is that they are fearful and greedy multiplicities of desire which do not break free of capital but ride it into the fantasy of pure difference, seeking the pleasure of the “plateau.” The will to signify steers and provides the legitimating rationale for the passage of the turbulent leading edge of modernist capital into culture: atomising postmodern thought breaks up culture into exceedingly fine particles, creating a cosmic soup through which capitalism may re-nourish itself, unconstrained by structure. The particle flows of pleasure-seeking capital and fearful desire mutually attract and interpenetrate, and out of this mutual attraction arises an interminable metamorphosis that is the postmodern condition. While I contend that the reduction of the individual and social space to “numbering numbers” leaves no containing ethico-politico structure to constrain the propensity for terror, Deleuze and Guattari are at pains to disagree: “Horror for horror the numerical organisation of people is no crueler than linear or state organisation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 390). However, the individual, with an inherent potential for ethical and political praxis, can say no to the madness of the crowd in its elemental form of a swarming numerics of particles of desire.
To place this discussion within the broader project of locating postmodernism historically, something has been lost in our focus on the luminescent trajectory of postmodernism since Paris in May, 1968: we have lost sight of the function of postmodernism as that which carries the modernist ethos into culture. This has seriously weakened the critical credentials of postmodernism. However, as this trajectory burns out (Los Angeles in May, 1992, is arguably postmodernism’s memorial monument), a re-orientation is called for. Opening up the reductiveness of the signifier to an understanding of the complicities of desire and concept is a step to relocating the individual, as the subject of ethico-politico praxis, within the mutually supportive dynamics of modernity and postmodernity. If the pleasures of deconstruction have perverted the modernist spirit of equality, liberty and fraternity into degrading conditions of existence for the weaker sections of society, then reversing this process entails an awareness of the subject’s dissolution, by stages, into signifier, difference, particle-quanta, and finally into that autonomous mathesis of number concealed beneath postmodern figural play.
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