Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. (Spatial Practices)

Space in Theory

Spatial Practices

An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature

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General Editors:

Robert Burden (University of Teesside) Stephan Kohl (Universität Würzburg) Editorial Board:

Christine Berberich Christoph Ehland Catrin Gersdorf Jan Hewitt Ralph Pordzik Chris Thurgar-Dawson Merle Tönnies

Space in Theory Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze

Russell West-Pavlov

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover photo: © Russell West-Pavlov The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISSN: 1871-689X ISBN: 978-90-420-2545-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands

The Spatial Practices Series The series Spatial Practices belongs to the topographical turn in cultural studies and aims to publish new work in the study of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: symbolic landscapes and urban places which have specific cultural meanings that construct, maintain, and circulate myths of a unified national or regional culture and their histories, or whose visible ironies deconstruct those myths. Taking up the lessons of the new cultural geography, papers are invited which attempt to build bridges between the disciplines of cultural history, literary and cultural studies, and geography. Spatial Practices aims to promote a new interdisciplinary kind of cultural history drawing on constructivist approaches to questions of culture and identity that insist that cultural “realities” are the effect of discourses, but also that cultural objects and their histories and geographies are read as texts, with formal and generic rules, tropes and topographies. Robert Burden Stephan Kohl

Za moju ženu Tatjana, moju kerku Iva, i moge sine Joshua i Niklas

Contents

Introduction: Entering Space

15

1.

Kristeva’s Chora

37

2.

Kristeva’s Kehre

63

3.

Foucault’s Spatial Discourse

111

4.

Foucault’s Discursive Spaces

143

5.

Deleuze’s Territories

169

6.

Deleuze’s Intensities

209

In Place of a Conclusion …

247

Bibliography

259

Index

271

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the BVG and S-Bahn Berlin GmbH which made available seating and heating on the Berlin commuter trains and trams, thus facilitating a large part of the writing of the first draft of this book. The Free University of Berlin kindly afforded me a sabbatical semester in which the subsequent writing was carried out. The stay in Melbourne was partly funded by a grant from the German Research Council (DFG). The Australian Centre and the English Department at the University of Melbourne provided the socio-spatial infrastructure for a productive stay in Australia. I wish to thank Professor Kate DarianSmith, Professor John Murphy, and Professor John Frow, for hosting my time as an honorary visiting fellow at Melbourne. In particular the Baillieu Library at the University turned out to be a mine of useful material, and its staff unfailingly friendly and helpful. Queen’s College, affiliated to the University of Melbourne, kindly accommodated me and my family during the stay in Melbourne. Thanks to Professor David Runia, the Master of Queens, and the other staff members there, for the warm welcome they afforded us. Warm thanks to Elke Demant and Franziska Fröhlich who produced the find version of the typescript. Finally, I am grateful to the two anonymous readers and the many helpful suggestions they made regarding an early version of this book. Berlin, August 2008

R.P.-W.

Note on References and Translations All references to works by Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze are given, in order to ease the task of the reader, as short titles in the text. All other references are given according to the author/date method. Translations, wherever available, are taken from the most easily accessible editions. Where not otherwise indicated, translations are my own.

Introduction: Entering Space Spacing/Espacement It is perhaps only in the age of the word processor or PC that, as writers, we have begun to pay attention to the spaces between words. Constructing our text and re-reading it before printing it out, we scan the page on the screen, following the cursor, perhaps with the formatting symbols activated, and keep an eye out for spaces one-toomany or one-too-few. Maybe we have left- and right-flush margins without syllablebreaks, so that in some lines, the spaces between the words look unpleasantly large. Possibly we have the voice of a difficult editor in our ear, insisting perversely that after a full stop there be two spaces instead of the standard one (why on earth? but the editor’s word is law …). What are these spaces? Why their regularity – or irregularity? (Is an indentation a derivation or a perversion of the space between words?) Why their exact alignment within the space of the printed text? (A space at the end of the line is not allowed to disturb the flush margin of the text, nor does it indent the subsequent line – what distinguishes, then, margin and space?) Why the rules that govern their implementation (no space after a hyphen, but in some cases after a long dash)? Space has long been regarded in two ways: on the one hand, at a microcosmic level, as the gaps between things which, as it were, keep them apart; on the other hand, at a macrocosmic level, as the larger container into which all things are inserted. This, broadly speaking, has been the Euclidean understanding of space which has determined Western thinking since antiquity. It makes space neutral, homogenous, and insignificant, meaningless. Only the things which occupy space are of significance to philosophy or the sciences. With the inroads of twentieth-century physics, however, space began to be seen

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as less neutral or homogenous than before: Einstein’s theory of relativity showed that space appeared to have different consistencies, so that depending on the position of an experiencing or perceiving subject time might stretch or shrink accordingly. For the literary scholar, space was simply the background upon which writing was carried out. The relationship of space to writing (secondary, neutral, invisible) was similar to that of writing to thought (writing was merely the recording code necessary to preserve and fix thought, which, though primary, was always in danger of being forgotten). The deconstructionist philosopher Derrida has fundamentally questioned this hierarchy, suggesting that the economy of writing is not subservient to thought or speech, but actually is productive in its own right. Likewise, in an essay exploring the way the closure of any text can be undone by something which appears to be ‘outside’ but is always at work within the text, he speaks of space: L’écriture dite phonétique ne peut [...] fonctionner qu’en admettant en elle-même des ‘signes’ non-phonétiques (ponctuation, espacement, etc.) dont on s’apercevrait vite, à en examiner la structure et la nécessité, qu’ils tolèrent très mal le concept de signe. (Derrida, 1968: 45) [What is called phonetic writing can only function [...] by incorporating non-phonetic ‘signs’ (punctuation, spacing, etc.); but when we examine their structure and necessity, we will quickly see that they are ill described by the concept of signs. (Derrida 1973: 387)]

Derrida uses the presence of “spaces” in writing to illustrate the deconstructionist idea of something commonly regarded as extraneous to the text but which, upon closer examination, proves to be essential to its functioning. Yet this something cannot be assimilated to the signifying economy of the text itself – a space is not a sign, it has no meaning, it does not make sense. Deleuze intimated something similar when he noted that “Peut-être y a-t-il [...] un rapport de l’écriture encore plus menaçant que celui qu’elle est dite entretenir avec la mort, avec le silence” (Différence et repetition 4) [“perhaps writing entertains a relationship with silence which is altogether more threatening than its supposed relationship with death” (Difference and Repetition xxi)]. Space, like silence, is feared. Yet space and silence make sense, meaning, possible. Withoutspacesnocoherentsentencewouldexist. With spacing, however, it becomes possible to write, and read, meaningfully: “Without spaces no coherent sentence would exist.” In order

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to underline the active participation of spaces in the production of meaning (despite the incapacity of traditional theories of meaning to include space as part of their explanation of meaning), Derrida has recourse to the neologism “espacement” [“spacing”]. “Spacing” denotes the active, productive character of space. Far from being a neutral void in which objects are placed and events happen, it becomes a medium with its own consistency and its own agency. In a gloss on an interview with Houdebine and Scarpetta, Derrida has written that l’espacement est un concept qui comporte [...] une signification de force productive, positive, génératrice. Comme dissémination, comme différence, il comporte un motif génétique; ce n’est pas seulement l’intervalle, l’espace constitué entre deux (ce que veut dire aussi espacement au sens courant), mais l’espacement, l’opération ou en tout cas le mouvement de l’écartement (Derrida 1972: 108-9 n31) [spacing is a concept which [...] carries the meaning of a productive, positive, generative force. Like dissemination, like différence, it carries along with it a genetic motif: it is not only the interval, the space constituted between two things (which is the usual sense of spacing), but also spacing, the operation, or in any event, the movement of setting aside (Derrida 2002: 106 n42)]

Far from being a neutral void in which objects are placed and events happen, space/ing becomes a medium with its own consistency and, above all, its own productive agency. This book aims to offer an introduction to the role of space in three important French thinkers who regarded space as being the actively productive condition of social significance rather than merely the invisible, transparent receptacle for events, objects, and meanings.

The Return of Space Derrida’s notion of “spacing” [“espacement”] can also be understood as a parable for a larger process underway in French intellectual life from the 1950s onwards. The nineteenth-century had been the century of developmentalism à la Darwin and of historicism à la Ranke. Nineteenth-century social theories laboured under the hegemonic rule of a historicism which devalued, occluded and depoliticized space (Soja 1989: 4). Foucault, speaking in 1967, announced to a Parisian audience, “La grande hantise qui a obsédé le XIXe siècle a été, on le sait,

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l’histoire: thèmes du développement et de l’arrêt, thèmes de la crise et du cycle, thèmes de l’accumulation du passé” (Dits et écrits IV, 752). [“As we know, the great obsession of the nineteenth century was history: themes of development and space, themes of crisis and cycle, themes of accumulation of the past” (The Essential Works II, 175)]. He went on to explain: L’époque actuelle serait peut-être plutôt l’époque de l’espace. Nous sommes à l’époque du simultané, nous sommes à l’époque de la juxtaposition, à l’époque du proche et du lointain, du côté à côté, du dispersé. Nous sommes à un moment où le monde s’éprouve, je crois, moins comme une grande vie qui se développerait à travers le temps que comme un réseau qui relie des points et qui entrecroise son écheveau. (Dits et écrits IV, 752) [The present age may be the age of space instead. We are in the era of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, of the near and the far, of the sideby-side, of the scattered. We exist in a momenet when the world is experiencing, I believe, something less like a great life that would develop through time than like a network that connects points and weaves its skin. (The Essential Works II, 175)]

Elsewhere, Foucault, describing the “disqualification de l’espace” [“disqualification of space”] reigning since well before Bergson, parodically said: “L’espace, c’était ce qui était mort, figé, non dialectique, immobile. En revanche, le temps, c’était riche, fécond, vivant, dialectique” (Dits et écrits III, 34) [“Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic” (Power/Knowledge 70)]. Genette attacked “la tyrannie du point de vue diachronique introduit par le XIXe siècle” [“the tyranny of the diachronic perspective introduced by the nineteenth century” (Genette 1969: 48)] and Pierre Dockès referred to the nineteenth-century vision of the social world as “a wonderland of no dimensions” (Dockès 1969: 9). With the rise of structuralism, this epistemological hierarchy was progressively reversed, and the last thirty years have witnessed a turn towards analyses of space and away from historical analyses as the ultimate interpretative instrument. Edward Soja, for instance, has judged structuralism to be “one of the twentieth century’s most important avenues for the reassertion of space in critical social theory” (Soja 1989: 18). In 1966, as Parisian structuralism was at its zenith, Genette wrote:

Introduction: Entering Space

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Un fait paraît certain, sur le plan de l’idéologie générale, c’est que le discrédit de l’espace qu’exprimait si bien la philosophie bergsonnienne a fait place aujourd’hui à une valorisation inverse, qui dit à sa façon que l’homme ‘préfère’ l’espace au temps. (Genette 1966: 107) [One thing seems clear, at the level of general ideology, and that is that the discreditation of space expressed so well in Bergson’s philosophy has been replaced by the inverse value judgement, one which declares that in his own way, man ‘prefers’ space to time.]

With the benefit of hindsight, it was possible to declaim, albeit with a dash of mandatory Latin quarter exaggeration, “Une conscience planétaire, topographique, refoule la conscience historique. La temporalité bascule dans la spatialité” [“A planetary, topographic consciousness has repressed historical consciousness. Temporality has toppled over into spatiality”] (Dosse 1995: 413). More recently, Dick Hebdige has confirmed this trend for the English-speaking intellectual context, diagnosing a broader “growing scepticism concerning older explanatory and predicative models based in history [which] has led to a renewed interest in the relatively neglected, ‘under-theorised’ dimension of space. The preference for spatial rather than historical analyses and analogies influential in certain kinds of critical writing signals some kind of shift”. Similarly, Fredric Jameson claimed that the dominant cultural mode is one defined by categories of space; we inhabit the synchronic, he claims, rather than the diachronic (Hebdige 1992:16). In the English-speaking world, there is no longer any need to conduct skirmishes around this “spatial turn” in the human sciences. The new prominence of space was heralded by cultural geographers such as Derek Gregory with Geographical Imaginations (1993), John Urry with Consuming Places (1995), or Edward Soja, with his formative Postmodern Geographies (1989) and Thirdspace (1996). More recently, Doreen Massey’s For Space (2005), clearly echoing Balibar and Althusser’s For Marx, has summarized the developments of the past decade. Comprehensive theories of space in society such as that offered by Henri Lefebvre have gained broad acceptance. Lefebvre posits that space is not a container, but rather, the very fabric of social existence, a medium woven of the relationships between subjects, their actions, and their environment. Space in its traditional sense is not a pre-existing receptacle for human action, but is created by that action; space, in turn, exerts its own variety of agency, modelling the human actors who have configured it. Spatial practices gather up both

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environment and actors into a single over-determined continuum. Furthermore, space is always already caught up in representational practices, with different groups vying for control of discourses about space, but also of the messages which are coded in spatial artefacts themselves. CCTV cameras, for instance, even if they are not turned on, configure public space in such a way as to code it as being under constant surveillance, thus (ostensibly) discouraging crime (Mills 2003: 44-5). “Representations of space” controlled by powerful elites in society may be contested by subaltern space users who attempt to make out of them “spaces of representation” (Lefebvre 1974: 42-3, 48-9/Lefebvre 1991: 33, 38-9). Lefebvre’s seminal contribution to subsequent elaborations of spatial theory has been extensively acknowledged by theorists such as Harvey or Soja (Harvey 1989: 21819; Soja 1990: 40-50). The purpose of the present book is not to carry on rear-guard skirmishes over such theories. That task has been carried out thoroughly in recent decades. Recent contributions to spatial theorization such as Massey’s For Space, for instance, set out these assumptions as inaugural propositions which can be taken as widely accepted starting points for further explorations (Massey 2005: 9). This book, then, seeks, more modestly, to offer a spatial introduction to three French critical thinkers whose thought is particularly apposite to the “spatial turn” in the human sciences: Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. I have chosen Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze as symptomatic (not, let me stress, as representative) of three broader streams of thought in French poststructuralist theory. I take Kristeva as belonging to a loose grouping of psychoanalytical critics with an interest in the gendering of human subjectivity, such as Irigaray, Cixous, Ledoeff, Clément, Kofman. I take Foucault as one of a school of theoreticians with a more historical or sociological approach, such as Bourdieu, Gauchet or Latour. Finally, I have selected Deleuze as one of a group of more playful, exploratory, speculative thinkers such as Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard or Virilio. All of these thinkers are concerned with space to a greater or lesser extent. I do not intend to homogenize these rough groupings, or elide the manifest differences which can be drawn between thinkers thrown together in such an unceremonious manner. Nor do I pretend that these groupings could not be re-configured around other common themes. I merely wish to suggest that the three thinkers I have selected

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– though this trio could be expanded to include many more – may be understood as being symptomatic of a much larger field of thinkers. Of course, it would be possible to write a history of the emergence of spatial paradigms in French thought since 1960, mapping the “spatial turn” across all of these thinkers. That project, however, would go far beyond the purview of this book, whose very modest aim is simply to read Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze through the filtering lens of the “spatial turn”. Curiously, there has been only sporadic and patchy attention to the important theme of space in these three central thinkers. With the exception of two essays on space in Kristeva and Foucault, two chapters of a book on Heidegger and Foucault, and one essay collection on Deleuze, the role of space in these three thinkers has barely been explored (Berry 1992: 250-64; Philo 1992: 137-61; Elden 2001: part 2; Buchanan&Lambert 2005). In a recent volume entitled Key Thinkers on Space and Place Kristeva does not rate a mention at all, and the article on Foucault merely recapitulates Chris Philo’s earlier piece on him (Philo 2004: 121-8). There may be a rash of spatial theory in the social sciences at the present time, but a fundamental debt to the detailed work of these three central theorists has yet to be acknowledged. Thinkers such as Kristeva, Foucault or Deleuze/Guattari have produced a considerable body of work which less explicitly advertises itself as a reflection upon space, than, say, that of Lefebvre or Virilio. Perhaps for this reason their contributions to this field of spatial studies have yet to be given detailed attention they deserve. The work of Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze on space is none the less highly significant and it is time to give it the close analysis it merits.

The Production of Space The basic trait shared by Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze/Guattari in their spatial thought is what Baudrillard identified as a “production paradigm” (Baudrillard 1987: 20-1). Manuel DeLanda has suggested that the “theme of disguising of process under product is the key to Deleuze’s philosophy since his philosophical method is, at least in part, designed to overcome the objective illusion fostered by this concealment” (DeLanda 2002: 73). This concern is not only Deleuze’s. Common to all three thinkers is a dual motif made up of ‘producer’

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and ‘product’, whose duality is constantly blurred by the introduction of the term ‘production’. All three are interested in the manner in which the spaces which we inhabit are to be understood as processes – as dynamic, ongoing series of events of which we ourselves are a part. The notions of space-producers and space-products are constantly present, only to be overhauled by the idea of space as production, indeed, as productivity. Thus we move away from notions of space as “the material/phenomenal rather than the abstract […] [as] being rather than becoming” (Massey 2005: 29) towards a conceptualization which is more fluid, more dynamic. All three thinkers are concerned to reverse a common-sense relation of product and producer, which makes the product the object of interpretation, behind which a deeper meaning is to be deciphered. This, according to Foucault, is merely another instance of production – the production or re-production of replicative meaning – and thus needs to be considered as part of the field to be analysed. To go beyond this reproductive paradigm of meaning, one must ask not what artefacts or spaces mean, but how they mean (Archéologie du savoir 39-42/Archaeology of Knowledge 30-3). A deeper truth is not sought behind the statement, the text, the artefact, or the image. Rather the point of intellectual enquiry is to ask how that statement, text, artefact, or image came to be, what made it possible. Instead of a truth hidden behind the statement, one searches for the machinery or process which has produced it. This is the fundamental paradigm shift of modern thought. In Marx, an idealist interpretation of history is left behind for an enquiry into the manner in which production occurs under capitalism. In Freud, the question of the interpretation of dreams modulates into the question of the formation of the repressed, normed, neurotic subject. In Nietzsche the fundamental question is that of the genealogy of morals, their contingent emergence through accidents of history rather than their assessment as eternal truth. And Heidegger’s famous Kehre [about-turn, turning] took him from an interrogation of beings to that which gives meaning to beings, or enables their very existence, that is, Being. Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari are one and all busy with the question of the how of meaning. Their enquiry treats meaning as something produced, something specific to a time and a place, and that emerges out of that context. The task then becomes to lay bare the conditions of possibility which allow meaning to be gen-

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erated – and upon which truth is then delineated, not as something essential, intrinsic, or eternal, but as the contingent product of a process of production. Space as a paradigm of intellectual enquiry is crucial here because to situate a cultural artefact in space is to bring it down to earth, to re-orient reflection towards questions of context, of materiality, of relationship, of causality and interaction. Meaning is thus a function of the space in which it emerges. Truth and falsehood are replaced by space as the matrix of meaning. An artefact no longer has ‘a’ meaning, no longer unveils ‘a’ truth under the stern scrutiny of the scholar, but rather, participates in myriad relations and connections which permit it to be in such a way that it can subsequently be asked to reveal its truth. But before that interrogation of truth can happen, a more profound interrogation is demanded, one that asks questions about position, location, context, contours and dimension. Spatial analysis no longer searches for the hidden sense of an artefact. Like the letter in Poe’s “Purloined Letter”, what is to be found inside is of minimal significance. The secrecy of the letter lies in the place to which it has been assigned – a place perfectly visible, but undetected because the police do not think to search in the most prominent site of all, the sideboard in the entrance hallway. Like Poe’s letter, which is turned “inside out” (Poe 1986: 347), space is the perfectly, obvious, manifest fabric of social existence, not its mysterious underside. Under regimes of spatial analysis, nothing can be revealed because nothing is hidden. Everything is open to view. To quote Wittgenstein in the Philosophische Untersuchungen, “Da alles offen daliegt, ist auch nichts zu erklären” – or, in the Tractatus, “Das Rätsel gibt es nicht” (Wittgenstein 1990: 164, 88) [“Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain” – “The riddle does not exist” (Wittgenstein 2001: 84; Wittgenstein 1974: 88)]. Likewise, Deleuze: “Il n’y a rien à comprendre, rien à interpréter” (Dialogues 10) [“There is nothing to understand, nothing to interpret” (Dialogues 4)]. Analysis no longer means unearthing a cryptic meaning hidden within the artefact, but rather, drawing attention to a complex of ambient connections which have simply been neglected until now. Thus Rajchman’s maxim, referring to Deleuze, can be understood more broadly: “philosophy is about connections, it is an art of multiple things held together by ‘disjunctive syntheses’, by logical conjunctions prior and irreducible to predication or identification” (Rajchman 2000: 4). In De-

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leuze’s own words: “Seul est retenu […] ce qui augmente le nombre de connexions” (Mille Plateaux 634) [“What is retained […] is only that which increases the number of connections” (Thousand Plateaux 508)]. The fundamental difference between Kristeva and Foucault, and then between the latter two and Deleuze and Guattari, lies in the distance they identify between conditions of possibility and the meaning produced. In the progression we will be tracing through these three thinkers, the places from which meaning is produced, and the meanings produced in those places gradually blur into one another. In the trajectory from Kristeva to Foucault to Deleuze and Guatarri, meaning becomes increasingly more immanent to its conditions of production. Space as an ‘exterior context’ to be read off the artefact may well replace truth as a ‘deep secret’ to be extracted from the work – but the separation of object and meaning, whether spatial conditions of possibility or overhauled hidden truth, can all too easily remain one in which the two are clearly distinguished. For this reason, theorists such as Lefebvre, who by no means shared the same political or theoretical assumptions as Kristeva, Foucault or Deleuze and Guattari, but none the less participated in the same ‘spatial turn’, insist that space is not a pre-existing container for artefacts and practices, but is constituted by them in a relationship of reciprocal influence and inflection. Artefacts are made possible by the spatial configurations which give rise to them, but artefacts in turn reconfigure the spaces they inhabit. Indeed, to pursue this logic to its inevitable conclusion, one must eventually abandon the distinction between space and artefact, or between space and meaning. Instead, space emerges as the sum of relations between artefacts; artefacts in turn are pervaded and traversed by the space which they help to configure. In the playful formulation of Hiram Stanley, space is to be conceived as not “full of things, but things [as] spaceful” (quoted by Kern 1983: 153-4). Poe’s purloined letter has, in the end, no other meaning than the place where it lies and the manner in which it mobilizes actors and their respective interrelationships around it. The letter exists in a dynamic social space which is the letter’s exclusive meaning. Letter and space, once again, define each other in the reciprocal dynamic highlighted by Derrida’s work on “espacement” [“spacing”].

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The trajectory I trace from Kristeva and Foucault to Deleuze and Guattari sees an increasing abandonment of a structuralist paradigm. Structuralism conceived of space in a manner similar to the ostensibly undifferentiated pre-cultural field which culture then configures, using meaning-making binary oppositions. Instead, the spatial paradigms of poststructuralism stress that space persists in a constant re-configuring of already extant configurations. There is no space outside those configurations, disfigurations or re-configurations, and no virginal space before configured space. Space is the agency of configurement, and the fabric of configurations is from the outset spatial. It is in those spatial processes of configuration and re-configuration that human life takes place and unfolds its unceasing dynamic. In pursuing this line of argument, the first and second chapters are devoted to an examination of the role of space in the very diverse work of Julia Kristeva since her major publication La Révolution du langage poétique in 1974. Chapter one begins with a summary of the essential features of Kristeva’s theory of the Semiotic and the Symbolic in cultural and linguistic life. It then goes on to stress that the seat of the Semiotic, the chora, simply means space. This is an aspect of Kristeva’s much commented theory which, curiously, has received virtually no attention. The space of the chora is a pre-linguistic space of only partly structured proto-meaning, a space which must be left behind but none the less is essential to the establishment of socialized Euclidean space with its regularities and linearities, and above all its regime of absence and presence. The space of the chora, celebrated on the one hand as a maternal space of colours and rhythms, is simultaneously excoriated by Kristeva as a space which, when not relinquished by the subject, merely leads to a schizophrenic cul de sac. At this stage, Kristeva’s work evinces a dichotomous structure in which the pre-subjective space of the chora is accepted as the condition of social space, at the cost of its inevitable relinquishment. However, as I show in chapter two, the progression of Kristeva’s researches throughout the 1980s and 1990s take on a somewhat different tenor. The spaces which she investigates are less and less predominantly textual spaces and more and more psychosocial spaces derived from her own work as a psychoanalyst. The remaining sections of the chapter investigate the manner in which the dichotomy between pre-subjective space and post-Oedipal socialized space is progressively eroded, with the once denigrated space of the

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Semiotic taking on an increasingly significant role in her conception of post-Oedipal subjective space. In her work on abjection, Kristeva scrutinizes the movements of rejection provoked by visions of fluidity, viscosity and formlessness. She traces them back to the moment of emergence of a pre-Oedipal subject. But in the implicit critique of fascism which her theory of abjection contains there is an equally implicit critique of the normative move from pre- to proto-subjectivity, and thus a less willing compliance with the imperatives of relinquishment of pre-subjective spatiality. Kristeva’s new emphasis upon the spatial parameters of life in the Symbolic realm continues with her work on depression. Depression is defined, following Freud, as a clinging to an absent or lost object. The absence of the object is internalized, cannibalistically, in place of the object itself. This is an empty subject, one hollowed out by its loss. Borders once again become the site of abjection in the next area of social life Kristeva turns her attention towards, that of the foreigner and immigrant. Once again brittle borders are the sign of a dysfunctional relationship to that first, fluid realm of pre-subjective being. In her later work on love and revolt, Kristeva increasingly imports aspects of the chora as a loosely-structured fluid spatiality into social practices attributed a redemptive or salutary value in society. This development culminates in the strong emphasis, in her most recent writings, upon storytelling and sensation as linked facets of an existence founded upon the plenitude of being. The third and fourth chapters on Foucault follow a similar twostage trajectory to the reading of Kristeva. I begin in chapter three by concentrating upon Foucault’s initially relatively abstract notion of space, one which is not dissimilar in its structural functioning to Kristeva’s chora. In chapter four I then move on to a much more complex and real-world notion of space as a crucial element in practices of power and contestation in society. This second notion of space can be aligned with Kristeva’s second phase, that of the practices of constructing an existence in the Symbolic. In both cases, the early interest in explicating the manner in which social reality is generated by an invisible ground cedes to a subsequent scrutiny of the manner in which that productive process continues to operate in a society traversed by everyday conflicts and contests.

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Chapter three begins by tracing Foucault’s already intense focus in the 1960s upon the spatiality of language, which explains to some extent the spatialization of discourse which underlies the method of Les Mots et les choses. Even in the 1960s Foucault was reflecting upon space as that which makes language in its (post)modern manifestations possible. From there it was but one further step to the notion of discursive space as a realm that could be thought of as a “trihedron”. Its triple dimensions were: first, the conditions of possibility which enabled one to think and say certain things; second, the network of statements which were generated by that grid of possibilities; and third, the tectonic fault lines where one discursive epoch or episteme broke off. The chapter illustrates such abstract concepts as the episteme and epistemic rupture by utilizing Foucault’s own well-known work on the “author function”. In particular it is literature, the privileged bearer of language as the space of thought, which Foucault, in the first phase of his work takes as being the seismograph for tectonic shifts in the episteme. I trace the transition to this more complex, power-ridden notion of space across Foucault’s various mentions of what he called “heterotopias”. The notion of the heterotopia, in its several manifestations through the 1960s, slides from a literary concept to one situated in concrete social sites at specific moments in history. In chapter four I show how in the second phase of Foucault’s work, a more dispersed and complex notion of social, rather than aesthetic, space takes over the role previously occupied by literature as the privileged focalizer of spatiality. Foucault’s uses of institutional or architectural examples in his work successively modulate from crudely analogical instances in the early phase to a detailed analysis of the interactions of institutions, real social practices (architecture, the spatial configuration of subjects in institutions), political practices, and a wide variety of discourses and forms of knowledge. The nexus of discourse, practice and space is one that is traversed from top to bottom by relations of power. Foucault coined the term dispositif [apparatus] to designate these complex bundles of discursive, spatial and political practices, for which I also employ the triad ‘power-knowledge-space’. The chapter explores examples of these bundles of power-knowledge-spatial practices, focussing upon Foucault’s own typical case studies: the hospital, the prison and the population of nineteenth-century cities. These examples exemplify the transforma-

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tion evinced in his work from the 1960s to the 1980s: namely, a development from a static model of discursive space to a dynamic model of social space, one which is shot through with power relations and participates actively in their productive work. The remaining two chapters, on Deleuze (and Guattari, his cowriter on several major works) relinquish the two-tier system employed for Kristeva and Foucault. Deleuze’s thought eschews from the outset any form of binarism. The distinction that I have traced between a more theoretical or discursively dominated phase and a later more experiential or politically accentuated phase, with a gradual blurring of the boundaries between the two, does not hold with Deleuze’s work. Admittedly, Deleuze did publish, in the 1950s, works on single philosophers, subsequently moving on to publications on broader thematic bundles. None the less, in each of his books, Deleuze works consistently to highlight immanent forms of production of meaning in a given social context. This production of meaning is coeval with the generation of life in its dynamism itself and therefore does not admit of dichotomized thought. It is for this reason that there can be no double articulation in my presentation of space in Deleuze. These chapters are thus obliged to relinquish a linear model of exposition, and have recourse instead to a loose series of theoretical concepts. These concepts can be considered as nodes of thought in Deleuze’s philosophy. Indeed, the construction of Deleuze’s philosophical corpus makes it virtually impossible to proceed otherwise. His reflection on space consistently proceeds ‘rhizomatically’, beginning in many dispersed sites, and inevitably spreading out to interconnect with other themes or topoi in a dense web of allusions and overlaps. The very structure of Deleuze’s thought vitiates a hierarchically arranged, linear mode of exposition, and forces an author such as myself similarly to proceed ‘nodally’ or ‘rhizomatically’. Chapter five commences with the notion of flow so as to establish the most primary ground of being in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. Fluidity, difference, multiplicity are the basic generative facts of life, rather than clearly fixed identities or stabilities. This leads Deleuze and Guattari to eschew binaries, the contrastive differences upon which much social thought and practice is based. It causes them to reject the hypostatized 0-1 thinking of computational logic that arranges space according to alternating zones of presence and absence, inside and outside, here and there. Rather, they think in terms of an al-

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ternation between flow and the stemming of flow – what they call territorialization. Territory emerges when relationships of desire and attraction organize the flow of being in provisional zones of intensity. Such territorializations can occur in any area of organic, non-organic, animal, human or intellectual life. They are likewise subject to deterritorializations, when such zones subside, making room for new territorializations elsewhere under new conditions. Flow is then released once more to follow its fluid meanderings. Life in its cycles of becoming and unbecoming is an inherently spatial business. At the same time, however, Deleuze and Guattari recognize that the alternations of territorialization and de-territorialization have been co-opted by modern capitalism in a process of accelerated dissolution of traditional social relations so as to create new, consumer-oriented modes of social organization. Under this regime of cynical deterritorialization, the flow of becoming is displaced by the vectors of permanently insatiable consumer desire. One response to this constant de-territorialization under the ubiquitous regime of organized lack is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as re-territorialization – attempts to reconstruct sites of recuperated social meaning and tradition. Often these evince neo-conservative traits of a most disturbing sort, as in reterritorialized identities such as ‘our’ nation, ‘mainstream’ culture, the traditional marriage, so-called Christian values, and so on. Against such movements of nostalgic recuperation, Deleuze and Guattari pose the “line of flight”; a constant de-territorialization which moves through given territorialities, casting overboard established certainties, towards a horizon of the as-yet-unknown. What constitutes a territoriality? Desire, according to Deleuze and Guattari. In chapter six, I trace the way in which desire fixes upon an area of becoming-being and converts its flow into a “zone of intensity”. This zone of intensity can be understood as a luminous sign which signals to us, beckons to us. The sign, for Deleuze and Guattari, signifies fully and is not subjected to the regime of lack evinced by the Saussurean rift between signifier and signified. The sign is what orients the vectors of desire which make all beings alive. It is the trigger of a plenitude of becoming, not the medium of the non-being of language and of things which founds subjectivity according to Lacan. Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence upon the plenitude of the sign thus goes hand in hand with their rejection of the Oedipus complex and its institutionalized regime of psycho-social lack. In contrast, they declare

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that the subject is multiple, but not lacking. The subject relates to language not as that which splits it from itself at the very moment of affording social identity, but as a further plane of becoming along which we move from intensity to intensity, from territoriality to territoriality. This regime is schizoid, an entirely positive term in their eyes, for it denotes a happy proximity to the materiality of the world and an engagement with its becoming instead of an abstracted distance towards it. Zones, planes, territorialities – the persistently spatial language of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory exemplifies their conviction that reality is a tangible fluid medium which we traverse, constantly transformed by it and hence guided by passions and sensuality, and not by a remote, abstract, mediated set of mental categories or linguistic terms. In order to conceptualize the relationships of self and flows of becoming, of sameness and difference, without having recourse to the binaries which they consistently eschew, Deleuze works with perhaps his most genial concept, that of the fold. The fold is a notion which reconciles identity and difference, subject and environment, inner and outer, singularity and multiplicity, by deeming these paired terms the diverse surfaces of a single folded fabric. My concluding chapter employs the notion of the fold to account, finally, for the two sides of Deleuze’s own oeuvre, its commitment to exploring a spatial ethos of plenitude and to critiquing the Oedipal economies of lack which dominate contemporary society. The final chapter suggests that from the perspective of Deleuze’s ethics of plenitude and critique of the politics of lack, it is possible to integrate Kristeva’s and Foucault’s work, in their turn, to a larger spatial theory with both a positive and a negative theory of social agency. This book is at once passionate and critical. It addresses the theory of Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze from the point of view of an author who has been deeply formed by these three thinkers since his undergraduate degree, and whose peregrinations across Europe as a student and a teacher have been marked by successive readings of the texts analyzed. The approach of this book is enthusiastic, understanding these theories not merely as ways of comprehending the world, but also as instruments of articulating one’s place as a subject within it. Thus the theories are apprehended, in part at least, within the perspective of what Foucault called “le souci de soi” [“the care of self”], or what more recent philosophers, following Foucault’s lead, have

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termed “Lebensphilosophie” [life philosophy] or “sculpture de soi” [self-sculpture] (Schmid 1991; Schmid 1998; Onfray 1993). The book’s relationships with the writers it comments upon echoes that of an early translator/commentator of Foucault, Alan Sheridan, in his avowed intention to “praise” his object, appropriately for a meditation on space, “by making room” (Sheridan 1980: 1). At the same time, the book seeks to qualify praise while equally admitting critique. It mobilizes more critical, distanced perspectives upon Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze so as to open up what may easily become an excessively proximate relationship to their thought. Likewise, to ensure that this book does not remain completely abstract and removed from the phenomena it tries to describe, but none the less in order to refract the theories through another medium, it attempts to illustrate the concepts it discusses via a large number of literary examples. A poem in a recent collection by Chris WallaceCrabbe lambasts many of the vices of modern life, among others, literary theory, But let them not proclaim I am A late for literary production For I spin magic from the clam And weave a bright web through deflection. The self that I was going to be Language has blocked out and picked But what I will be writing next Nobody living can predict. Look, there goes a flimsy text Bobbing across our mortal sea. (Wallace-Crabbe 2001: 38-9)

Wallace-Crabbe’s lampoon of the tired notion that language writes the self, and that the self is a mere producer rather than the creator of an oeuvre, is wonderful. He demands a notion of writing which eludes ‘reflection’, in its manifold senses, which is always in advance on the tame platitudes of ‘reflection’ (be it mimesis of contemporary antimimetic theory!). Always in excess of ‘reflection’ there is something more sinuous and complex – the word as “deflection”: “But what I will be writing next | Nobody living can predict.” Some sophisticated literature today is written, perversely enough, to reflect not merely reality, but literary theory. Such texts are intricate, pretentious – and generally self-impoverishing. The literary

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text, like the world itself, should continue to “deflect” theory, not reproduce it. Literature has always outstripped theory in its adherence to the wonders of complexity. At its best, in turn, theory, “flimsy” theory, is a perplexed attempt to confront the exciting complexities of reality, and in that spirit should acknowledge its debts to the literary text. To pin down literature to literary theory, then, whether in writing or reading, is to miss the point. Spatial theory, however, “bobbing across our mortal sea”, deals in basal realities, and is perhaps better equipped to elude the pitfalls of abstraction. As Stephen Muecke has written, “thinking about place-based continuity seems more sustainable in its key ecological and ethical perceptions [than temporal continuity]. In short, one lives in a place more than in a time” (Muecke 2004: 9). My literary examples remind us of the existential fabric which underlies and pervades the theories of space I discuss here. The short anecdotal glimpses into literary texts (from Barrico, de Beauvoir, Beckett, Bodroži or Bonnefoy, via Borges, Forster, Gide, Gilbert, Glissant, Hall, to Kafka, Ondaatje, Perec, Proust, Sartre, Warner and Woolf) in their working constitutes a way of opening up theory to the complexities of something outside itself. Theory does well to remember its own ground – in many cases the literary, textual space out of which it has arisen, even when it has forgotten that past. In part, this attempt to ground theoretical abstraction in the earthiness of the narrative I is a response to literary texts’ own foregrounding of spatial ordering. Todorov has proposed that we “distinguerons deux types principaux d’organisation du texte, suivant en cela une suggestion de Tomachevski […] On appellera le premier type l’ordre logique et temporel, le second – que Tomachevski identifie négativement – l’ordre spatial” (Todorov [1968] 1973: 68) [“distinguish two main types of organization of the text, thereby following a suggestion of Tomashevski […] We shall name the first type logical and temporal order, the second – that Tomashevki identifies negatively – spatial order” (Todorov 1981: 41; translation modified)]. In introducing this distinction, Todorov claims, he is merely following clear impulses in contemporary literary production: “Aujourd’hui, la littérature s’oriente vers des récits de type spatial et temporel [le temps de l’écriture], au détriment de la causalité” (Todorov [1968] 1973: 77) [“Today, literature is oriented towards narratives of a spatial and temporal type [the time of writing], to the detriment of causality” (Todorov 1981: 46)]. Other critics such as Joseph Frank stress that the

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dominant spatial tenor in literature since the modernist period merely represents an increased emphasis on an essential aspect of literary production that was previously latent but none the less always present, with sporadic eruptions manifested by maverick writers such as Sterne or Diderot (Frank 1978). Moreover, in paying attention to literary exemplifications of spatial conceptualization, I go down the same path as my three theorists: Kristeva, whose gaze is directed from the outset towards narratives and the manner in which they are generated historically (Le Texte du roman), intertextually (6KPLHLZWLNK/Desire in Language), subjectively (Histoires d’amour/Tales of Love) and finally socially (Le Génie feminine: Hannah Arendt/Life as Narrative); Foucault, for whom literature is central in his early work, and whose work broadens to include a plethora of textual forms in later phases of his thinking (see During 1992); and Deleuze, for whom literature forms a privileged avenue for forging a non-philosophy (see Lambert 2002; Rajchman 2000; and more specifically Bogue 2003; Bryden 2007; Buchanan & Marks (eds) 2000; Colombat 1990). Whereas the text itself aims to work in a linear and centripetal manner, battening down a clearly articulated argument, the very articulations of the text, the ‘hinges’ linking the sections, seek to generate a centrifugal effect. A linchpin by definition introduces a small fissure between door and frame, a fissure which anticipates and inaugurates the opening of the door itself. Thus any articulation is an opening, a breach in the closed structure whose construction it both maintains and weakens. The insertion of literary vignettes into this work is an attempt, in Derrida’s words, to introduce “l’espacement à la fois comme ‘intervalle’ ou différence et comme ouverture au dehors” (Derrida 1967: 96) [“spacing both as ‘interval’ or difference and as openness upon the outside” (Derrida 1973: 86)], so as to mark the debt I owe to the world I live in and the ground upon which we stand.

1. Kristeva’s Chora Eruption, Disruption The 1960s saw the literal eruption of space into a French academic tradition whose dominant paradigm until then had been historicist. Structuralism privileged the analysis of systemic rather than developmental modes of meaning-making. Its example for this change of focus was the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, who shifted the attention of linguistics from the diachronic study of language change to the synchronic study of linguistic systems. In its efforts to describe cultural systems in terms which were tabular, dispersed and stratified, rather than linear or filiatory, structuralism inevitably had recourse to spatial concepts. Foucault, who knew enough about structuralism to be able to deny being a structuralist, commented: Le structuralisme […] c’est l’effort pour établir, entre des éléments qui peuvent avoir été repartis à travers le temps, un ensemble de relations qui les fait apparaître comme juxtaposés, impliqués l’un par l’autre, bref, qui les fait apparaître comme une sorte de configuration. (Dits et écrits IV, 752) [Structuralism […] is an effort to establish, between elements which may have been spread along a time-line, a collection of relationships which cause them to appear as if juxtaposed, implied by one another, in short, which make them appear as a sort of configuration.]

Structuralism introduced an idiom whose terminology was spatially inflected. But this terminology would take on more political resonances in the work of poststructuralist theorists such as Foucault. In a famous interview with a group of geographers, he commented that dans le repérage des implantations, des délimitations, des découpages d’objets, des mises en tableau, des organisations en domaines, ce qu’on faisait affleurer, c’étaient des processus – historiques, bien sûr –

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Space in Theory de pouvoir. La description spatialisant des faits de discours ouvre sur l’analyse des effets de pouvoir qui leur sont liés. (Dits et écrits III, 34) [in the identification of implantations, delimitations, of marking out of objects, of tabularization, of organization in domains, what one brought to light were processes – historical processes of course – of power. The spatializing description of discursive facts opens onto the analysis of the power effects to which they are connected.]

The connections between spatial analysis and a close attention to power may also alert us to the disruptive force of spatial analysis as a paradigm shift. In drawing attention to the workings of power the new emphasis upon space unmasked the fallacious neutrality of knowledge itself. By politicizing regimes of discourse and of production of knowledge it necessarily casts into question the university institution as well. The eruption of space into academic discourse was one index of the deeper turbulence in the academy, a turbulence which would spark off the 1968 uprisings and would continue in intellectual debates for several decades to come. The work of Julia Kristeva needs to be understood in this context of eruption and disruption. The young Bulgarian scholar arrived in France for doctoral study in 1966, and defended her first doctorate (the minor doctorat de 3e cycle introduced to make up the shortfall of lecturers in the expanding university system) during the uproar of the May 1968 revolts (Le Texte du roman). Her massive senior doctorate (the time-honoured and weighty these d’Etat), which was defended at the radical University of Paris VIII-Vincennes in 1973, theorized this duo of eruption and disruption. The central concept of Kristeva’s major thesis, subsequently published as La Révolution du langage poétique (Revolution in Poetic Language) in 1974 was that of a turbulent and sensual pre-linguistic regime of not-quite-meaning (the Semiotic) which is subsequently organized, disciplined, coded and repressed by the societal rules of language and propositional meaning (the Symbolic, or what Kristeva also calls the Thetic). This pre-Oedipal regime is identified, physiologically, with the infant’s relation to the mother’s body, during the time in the womb and after birth – a relationship not yet marked by a sense of separate selfhood, and not yet organized by fully-fledged access to language and other social codes. What constitutes proto-meaning at this early stage are colours, sounds, sensations, movements, fragments of language, configured only in very rudimentary ways by parental

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care and the presence of family relationships. The child has not discovered its own separateness from the mother; nor has it discovered the punitive law of the Oedipal process; nor has it acceded to language and the notion of the lacked object, for which the word will stand in as a replacement. The Semiotic, as a domain of ephemeral, constantly evolving flows of semiotic material, has not yet been subject to segmentation, discipline, and the binary code of presence and absence which makes social meaning work. None the less, it is the necessary basis upon which those later regimes of socially processed meaning will build. The Semiotic “provides the matter, the impetus, and the subversive potential of all signification. It is the ‘raw material’ of signification, the corporeal, libidinal matter that must be harnessed and appropriately channelled for social cohesion and regulation” (Grosz 1990: 151). The Semiotic is a ‘becoming’ which will later be moulded into ‘being’, both semantic, and by extension, existential. Paradoxically, this realm prior to language can only be hypothesized, but not genuinely known, precisely because it comes before the language which would be necessary to report it. We can, however, indirectly deduce the existence of this pre-linguistic domain of proto-meaning. It can be known by its effects, when it surges up within the realm of ‘common sense language’ in the form of avantgarde texts, art or music, in a way which ‘makes no sense’ but, we suspect, has some sort of obscure or perverse logic. The order of the Symbolic is ruffled by the turbulent messiness of the Semiotic, by the muddle of signs apparently cut loose from a neatly delineated meaning. The linear communication of normal language is disrupted by the syntactic breakages, verbal fragmentation, typographical dispersal and semantic punning of the avant-garde poem. Perspective and realist portrayal are distorted by the unrecognizable forms, the shattered contours or the shrill colours and textures of abstract painting. Melodies, harmonies and rhythms are rendered strange in twelve-tone-row, concrete or other experimental music; the singing human itself becomes a weird form of instrument or sets about producing unsettling sound effects. All these alienating forms of literature, art or music are witnesses, according to Kristeva, of something which precedes – but also founds – social communication, whether verbal, visual or tonal. Such art forms resist easy interpretation, but none the less insistently sug-

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gest a tantalizing meaning-beyond-meaning. They are not formless, as one might at first glance think. They do not evince a total collapse of coherence. Rather, they bespeak more fluid, mobile manifestations of structuration upon which form has been imposed. The Semiotic, Kristeva claims, albeit lacking a central authoritarian rule “n’en est pas moins soumise à une réglementation, différente de celle de la loi symbolique, mais qui n’effectue pas moins des discontinuités en les articulant provisoirement, et en recommençant continuellement” (Révolution 25) [“is nevertheless subject to a regulating process (réglementation), which is different from that of symbolic law but nevertheless effectuates discontinuities by temporarily articulating them, and then starting over, again and again” (Revolution 26)]. Kristeva is thus interested in an ostensibly foreign, and feminized, mode of signification which precedes the ordered domain of socially useful language, but which, though cast off, repressed, is never entirely absent and may from time to time re-emerge in maverick semiotic practices such as art or experimental literature. Although she does not pay very much explicit attention to questions of space, these are latently present in her work, in various forms, from the outset. Space is anticipated in a suggestive passage in a textbook of linguistics she published just after completing her minor doctorate: Pour nous, sujets appartenant à une zone culturelle dans laquelle l’écriture est phonétique et reproduit à la lettre le langage phonétique, il est difficile d’imaginer qu’un type de langage – une écriture – ait pu exister et existe aujourd’hui pour de nombreux peuples, qui fonctionne indépendamment de la chaîne parlée, qui soit par conséquent non pas linéaire (comme l’est l’émission de la voix), mais spatiale, et qui enregistre ainsi un dispositif de différences qui où chaque marque obtient sa valeur sa valeur d’après sa place dans l’ensemble tracé. (Le Langage, cet inconnu 32) [For us, subjects belonging to a cultural zone in which writing is phonetic and reproduces phonetic language letter by letter [or literally], it is difficult to imagine that a type of language – a writing – might have existed and still exist today for many peoples, which functions independently of the spoken chain, and which is thus not linear (like the emission of the voice) but spatial, and which in this way registers a system of differences in which each mark gains its value by virtue of its position in the whole apparatus.]

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Here the concept of an ‘other’ language is proposed – a language which is unimaginable for us because its very form and conceptualization is utterly different from ours. Eluding the linearity we take to be the very essence of language, this other language remains under the threshold of our notions of meaning. It does not constitute sense on the basis of detachable units which can then be put together at will in a chain, and thus, for us, does not constitute meaning. At best it can be assimilated to a semi-linear oral economy. Leroi-Gouhran detects behind such arrangements of figures “un contexte oral avec lequel l’assemblage était coordonné et dont il reproduit spatialement les valeurs” [“an oral context with which the symbolic assembly was connected and whose values it reproduced spatially”] (Langage, cet inconnu 32). The site where Kristeva discovers such forms of writing is significant: des les grottes de Lascaux, on peut remarquer des rapports topographiques constants entre les figures des animaux représentés : au centre, bison et cheval; sur les bords, cerf et bouqetins ; à la périphérie, lions et rhinocéros. […] De tels dispositifs spatiaux semblent constituer le support graphique-matériel, et par conséquent durable et transmissible, de tout un système mythique ou cosmique propre à une société donnée. (Langage, cet inconnu 32: Kristeva’s emphasis) [from the caves of Lascaux onwards, it’s possible to trace constant topographical relations between the animals represented: at the centre, bison and horse, on the edges, deer and mountain goat, on the margins, lions and rhinoceros […] Such spatial assemblages seem to constitute the material and graphic, and thus enduring and transmittable support for a whole mythical or cosmic system of a given society.]

These non-linear systems of semiosis are to be found in caves – out of sight, below the surface of our culture, coming to light only after millennia of obscurity. The space of spatial writing is an ‘other’ space, separate and distinct from ours. Kristeva’s subsequent theory, working initially with the notion of “genotext” and “phenotext” in poetry (Quelques problèmes de sémiotique littéraire 208-34), elaborated further the notion of an “archaic” spatial domain of meaning that is unimaginable – unrepresentable, in other words – within the linear means of representation of a “later” cultural realm.

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In her magnum opus of 1974, Kristeva had recourse to texts from classical philosophy (Plato’s Timaeus) to describe an analogous pre-verbal domain which erupts as a disturbance of ordered language, coming to light in the realm of avant-garde literature and art. Her term for this domain of proto-meaning is chora – space: Platon insiste sur le caractère […] tout en mutation et en devenir, du réceptacle […] qui est nommé aussi espace () vis-à-vis de la raison […] ‘Une place indéfiniment; il ne peut subir la destruction, mais il fournit une siège à toutes choses qui ont un devenir […]’ Timée §52 […] (Révolution 23 n15) [Plato emphasizes that the receptacle […] which is also called space () vis-à-vis reason, is […] ‘Space which is everlasting, not admitting destruction, providing a situation for all things that come into being […] (Timaeus)] (Revolution 25 n11 239)

It is significant that Kristeva describes this fertile, matrix-like receptacle, out of which subsequent socially coded forms of communication emerge, as a space. Granted, Kristeva may simply be reiterating a trope going back as far as classical philosophy which masculinizes time and feminizes space (Jardine 1985: 24-5). Despite this acquiescence to an ancient misogynist stereotype, it is none the less striking that Kristeva consistently privileges the latter half of the binary, discretely but insistently foregrounding its spatial aspects, in her work on poetics. What erupts into the realm of coherent communication, disrupting the well-oiled functioning of common-sense semantics and syntax, is a space – but more significantly, space. It is curious that in the considerable body of critical literature on Kristeva’s work, the patently spatial character of the chora has received virtually no attention. This oversight is all the more striking for the fact that Kristeva returns to the point repeatedly, and as recently as 1996: ‘Father’s time, mother’s species’, disait Joyce. C’est en effet à l’espace générateur de notre espèce humaine que l’on pense en évoquant le nom et le destin des femmes, davantage qu’au temps, au devenir ou à l’histoire. […] Freud, à l’écoute des rêves et des fantasmes de ses patients, pensait que ‘l’hystérie était liée au lieu.’ Les études ultérieures sur l’apprentissage de la fonction symbolique par les enfants démontrent que la permanence et la qualité de l’amour maternel conditionnent l’apparition des premiers repères spatiaux. […] les exemples […] convergent tous vers cette problématique de l’espace

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que maintes religions à résurgences matriarcales attribuent à la ‘la femme’. (Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme 301-2) [Joyce said ‘Father’s time, mother’s species,’ and it seems indeed, that the evocation of women’s name and fate priviliges the space that generates the human species more than it does time, destiny, or history […] Freud grew to believe that ‘hysteria was linked to place.’ Subsequent studies on children’s aquisition of the symbolic function have shown that the permanency and quality of maternal love pave the way for the earliest spatial references […] the examples […] all converge upon the problematic of space, which so many religions with a matriarchal bent attribute to ‘the woman’. (New Maladies 204)]

Immediately following this passage, she goes on to recapitulate her central thesis since the mid-1970s: Platon, résumant à l’intérieur de son propre système les atomistes de l’Antiquité, l’avait désignée [cette problématique de l’espace] par l’aporie de la chora: espace matriciel, nourricier, innommable, antérieur à l’Un […] (Nouvelles maladies 302) [Plato, who echoed the atomists of antiquity within his own system, referred to as the aporia of the chora, a matrix-like space that is nourishing, unnameable, prior to the one […] (New Maladies 204)]

Thus from the 1970s, with the appearance of the mythical chora in her first major work, through to the present, the problematic of space recurs unmistakeably across the entire trajectory of Kristeva’s thought. This chapter seeks to review her theoretical productions from the 1970s onwards, beginning with this obvious but hitherto barely remarked aspect of La Révolution du langage poétique. Kristeva’s work is part of the general privileging of space over time which took France by storm in the 1960s and 1970s. Her description of the Semiotic, this pre-verbal domain which furnishes the conditions of verbal communication, stresses that the chora is an alternative form of space which underlies space as we think of it in its everyday sense. Nous empruntons le terme de chora à Platon dans le Timée pour designer une articulation tout provisoire, essentiellement mobile, constituée de mouvements et de leurs stases éphémères. Nous distinguons cette articulation incertaine et indéterminée, d’une disposition qui relève déjà de la représentation et qui se prête à l’intuition phénoménologique spatiale pour donner lieu à une géométrie. […] la chora elle-même, en tant que rupture et articulations – rythme – est préalable

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Space in Theory à […] à la spatialité et à la temporalité. Notre discours – le discours – chemine contre elle […] de sorte qu’on pourra la situer, à la rigueur même lui prêter une topologie, mais jamais l’axiomatiser. (Révolution 23) [We borrow the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases. We differentiate this uncertain and undeterminate articulation from a disposition that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenomenological, spatial intuition, and gives rise to a geometry […] the chora as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes […] spatiality and temporality. Our discourse – all discourse – moves with and against the chora […] as a result, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can never give it axiomatic form. (Revolution 25-6)]

The chora is made up of movements and articulations. These movements and articulations constitute a spatial domain. It is a space which underlies and precedes, but by the same token eludes the dispositions of geometry or spatiality. Just as the chora precedes the segmentation of temporal experience, so too it precedes measurable, unified, empirical space as we are used to conceiving it. The space subsequent to the chora is Euclidean space, the stable, regular, knowable space of rationality and common-sense, upon which we all draw when we think about space. The Euclidean notion of space posits a container and medium unaffected by the changing objects, landscapes, persons or events, which inhabit it. The spaces of Euclidean stability are coeval with the world which is represented by common-sense thought and language. Space contains things, language represents them. In this down-to-earth view, space and the world are the pre-existent givens upon which language communicates and human action works. We take this sense of space for granted, and assume that it always has been this way and always will be. Kristeva, however, suggests that this space of common-sense, to paraphrase Foucault, also has a history (see Dits et écrits IV, 752-53), that it has emerged from a prior and very different sort of space. Kristeva’s feminization of the space of the chora, in contrast to Irigaray’s problematization of that selfsame feminization, has been trenchantly criticized, among others, by Judith Butler (Butler 1993: 35-42; for a riposte see however Nikolchina 2003). Clearly, Kristeva accepts classical philosophy’s masculine/feminine polarization of form as opposed to matter and time as opposed to space, thus essen-

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tializing the chora in ways which recent feminist theories find deeply problematic. Kristeva appears to essentialize maternity (see also Grosz 1989, Kuykendall 1989, Stanton 1989). Other theorists argue for a more indeterminate conception of maternity in her work (Ainley 1990, Ziarek 1992, Chase 1989). For our purposes the chora is less an essentialized localization of femininity than a de-essentialized version of space – one rendered dynamic and productive via its connection with embodiment.

Space before space Kristeva is interested primarily in the manner in which the Semiotic is canalized into the ordered forms of meaning which constitute the Symbolic, and the ways in which the Semiotic, conversely, then explodes back into those neat structures, usually in the guise of avantgarde literature and art. The terms with which she works are ambiguous. On the one hand, the model she constructs is a temporal one of early childhood development towards the acquisition of language and its concomitant logical processes. On the other hand, the countermodel she proposes, that of the “return of the repressed” Semiotic in the form of avant-garde artistic creation, is couched in spatial terms of eruption, effraction, displacement. In the ambiguous paradigms which underlie her dual model, what can be seen is the surging up of (deviant) space into (normative) temporality – an intrusion described in spatial terms. To this extent, the eruption of the space that was the chora and its concomitant Semiotic largely remains tacit, acknowledged only by the metaphors used to describe cultural processes. Consequently, Kristeva only seldom explicitly pursues the question of space. However, on the basis of the little she does say, it is possible to reconstruct the implications of her theory in terms of the spatial paradigm shift of the times. The space of the chora is a space not yet differentiated into the fundamental dichotomy of space-as-container and space-occupying objects/persons/events/landscapes. It thus eludes the basic tenets of Euclidean space. It is only later through the codings and regulations of this primordial, heterogeneous space, that Euclidean space will be constructed. It is for this reason that Kristeva attributes to this primordial, pre-Euclidean space, at the very utmost, a “topology” – perhaps

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one akin to the experimental topologies of alternatives spaces that have been envisaged since Riemann’s spatial models or Einstein’s theory of relativity and warped spaces. However, she refuses both a “geometry” and an “axiomatics” (Révolution 23/Revolution 25) both of which are redolent of Euclidean certainties. Just as the pre-language domain of meaning has not yet been carved up into the meaning-making blocks of syntactic units or of signifier/signified, so too the chora-space is prior to the division between space and things. If Kristeva asserts that the chora evinces “une modalité de la significance où la signe linguistique n’est pas encore articulé comme absence d’objet” (Révolution 25) [“a modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object” (Revolution 26)], the same goes for pre-Euclidean space. The spatiality of the chora knows no absence. In contrast, Euclidean space, by installing a central dichotomy between space and things, separates things from their environment. By so doing, it gives rise to the possibility of absence. It is possible for a thing to be separate (absent from here or there), from which it is only a step further to imagining its absence tout court. Other notions of space which do not install such a separation, for instance the spatial conceptuality of Australian indigenous philosophy, are thus not plagued by absence, and thus enjoy a boundless plenitude, as connection with space is never severed. Things, objects, persons, events are always part of a continuum that one can always tap into, and whose loss thus does not need to be compensated for by accumulating discrete objects or wealth. In the words of the novelist Craig Roberston, “battles […] were not fought over territory, as each tribe was only interested in its sacred lands, and had no motivation to expand and conquer those of other tribes” (Roberston [1980] 2002: 74). This contrast is embodied in Marina Warner’s Indigo, in her fictive Caliban, named Dulé, and his adoptive mother Sycorax: Dulé developed an idea of the past that was foreign to the people among whom Sycorax had been raised; it was a lost country for him which he wanted to rediscover, whereas for her, the past abided, rolling into the present, an ocean swelling and falling back, then returning again. But Dulé apprehended that he was born in a place that the ocean never brought back to lay at his feet, even in fragments, a shell here, a pebble there: something lay far, beneath him, and he could not dive deep enough to retrieve it. (Warner 1992: 95)

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Dulé’s space is posited on the experiences of loss, separation, and absence brought about by the slave trade, whereas Sycorax’s experience of space is one in which past and present, here and there, flow in and out of one another. It is a space of fluid connectivity very akin to Kristeva’s chora. It is also, as we shall see in due course, one very similar to that deployed by Deleuze and Guattari in their spatial thinking. Entry into the Symbolic implies both an ordering of meaning and a battening down of space. Kristeva conceptualizes these two notions together by spatializing meaning in its visualized manifestation as sentences on the page: “la proposition et, pour autant qu’il lui est coexstensif, le jugement déplient ou linéarisent (par une concatenation ou par une application) la significantion (enunciation + denotation) ouverte par le thétique” (Révolution 53) [“the proposition, and judgement as well – to the extent that the latter is coextensive with the proposition – unfold or linearize (by concatenation or application) the signification (enunciation + denotation) opened up by the thetic” (Revolution 54)]. The “unfolding” of discursive space which occurs in the realm of the Symbolic (or Thetic, as Kristeva also names it, in derivation from ‘thesis’) carries the unmistakeable hallmark of Euclidean space. This “unfolded” space is even, constant and smooth. It is without ripples, curves, kinks, and favours linearities – linearities epitomized in the Western mode of writing. Kristeva’s comments on Euclidean space are not merely a passing whim. Thirty years later she reiterates, “Notre esprit – le language, les formes de signification que nous employons – est toujours interprété selon les catégories aristoéliciennes. […] la linguistique ou la logique d’aujourd’hui se construsient toujours suivant le même order: sujet-objet-prédicat” [“Our mind – language, the forms of meaning we employ – is always interpreted according to Aristotelian categories. […] Today’s linguistics and logics are always constructed according to the same subject-object-predicate order”]. We should make an effort, she suggests, to think the “l’espace de l’esprit […] la vie psychique autrement qu’à travers la géométrie euclidienne” [“space of the mind […] the functioning of psychic life in other ways than via Euclidean geometry”] (Au risque de la pensée 50). According to this Euclidean geometry, subject and object, utterance and enunciation are clearly distinguished, just as the notion of space-as-container allows objects to appear in all their self-identity. The unfolded linearity, the

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unvarying order, which they attain in the sentence-like series of the Thetic world of Symbolic order, is that of the straight lines of Euclidean regularity. Implicitly, Kristeva sets up a binary opposition between preEuclidean space and Euclidean space. This binary pair corresponds to the oppositions between chora/Semiotic and Symbolic, and, by extension, between the pre-oedipal and oedipal phases. Because we inevitably inhabit Euclidean space, the customary common-sense space of everyday life, we have difficulty envisaging other spaces and the values that accompany them. This is, of course, the problem which underlies any attempt to represent that which precedes representation. As Kristeva does not tire of pointing out, the chora or Semiotic can only be known indirectly, by the manner in which they disturb or disrupt the Symbolic. At the same time, however, the binary between preEuclidean space and Euclidean space is one which is a function of the rigid parameters of Euclidean space itself. The binary is necessary to show up the differences between the two regimes, but by the same token, it is produced by only one of them and may thus distort, perhaps even wilfully falsify, our understanding of the other regime. This, of course, is one of the salient contradictions within Kristeva’s theory, cognate with the contradiction between her insistence upon the revolutionary character of the Semiotic and her insistence upon its inevitable subordination to the Symbolic: Although the semiotic is a possibility of language that escapes the paternal law, it remains inevitably within or, indeed, beneath the territory of that law. Hence, poetic language and the pleasures of maternity constitute local displacements of the paternal law, temporary subversions which finally submit to that against which they initially rebel. (Butler 1990: 88)

As we shall see in the later part of this book, it is just such a binary which is disputed by Deleuze and Guattari. Kristeva herself will also gradually move away from the implication of such spatial oppositions. Two things are worth noting about the manner in which these spaces are presented in Kristeva’s writing. First, it is striking that these respective spaces are presented as successive stages in a developmental process. “L’ordre symbolique – ordre de communication verbale, ordre paternal de la généalogie filiale – est un ordre temporal. Pour l’animal parlant, il est l’horloge du temps objectif” [“The sym-

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bolic order – the order of verbal communication, the paternal order of filial genealogy – is a temporal order. For the speaking animal, it is the clock of objective time”] (Des Chinoises 39). The temporality of the Symbolic is imposed upon that which precedes it – a space (as noted above, the Semiotic is coeval with the chora, which means literally ‘space’). This implies that it is normal to move from one to the other, from atemporality into temporality, in a process of individual and societal maturation. Secondly, these respective spaces are arranged as a binary, and binaries almost unavoidably shape up as hierarchies. The earlier phase is inevitably coded as being of less value than the later phase. Unsurprisingly, although Kristeva welcomes the eruption of the Semiotic into the Symbolic in her semi-revolutionary post-1968 stage of writing, there is a lingering impression in her work that the domains to which these semiotic modes correspond are morally coded, and that the ineluctable developmental process she accepts as the condition of growing up into sociability is also the right one. The ambivalence which surrounded her work on space for a number of years can be ascribed to a tension between a conviction of the necessity of travelling the developmental path and a strong sense that ‘maturation’ means suffering. In the course of our subsequent analyses, we will see that Kristeva gradually relinquishes this binary structure. One significant problem which Kristeva addresses is the peripherality of subversion: “By relegating the source of subversion to a site outside of culture itself, Kristeva appears to foreclose the possibility of subversion as an effective or realizable cultural practice. Pleasure beyond the paternal law can only be imagined together with its inevitable impossibility” (Butler 1990: 88). However, Kristeva will increasingly place these respective structures (spatialized meaning vs. temporalized meaning; pre-Euclidean vs. Euclidean space) in the very midst of social life, rather than on respective sides of the border dividing pre-social and social life. In this way, the initial hierarchy will be deconstructed, allowing a much more fluid approach to different spaces and the modes of social relationship associated with them. In turn, the incipient hierarchies between different spaces will be interpreted not as a transcendent given, but as an effect of worldly power relations.

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These power relations are evident in the very functioning of the terminology. To think the contrast between the temporality of the Symbolic and the pre-temporal Semiotic as a developmental progress, for instance, is to retrospectively impose a temporal understanding upon an atemporal domain. The developmental thesis is thus a coercive model which colonizes, by epistemological means, one space at the hands of the other. Likewise, as I pointed out above, to conceptualize pre-Euclidean and Euclidean spaces as binary oppositions is to impose upon the former the very oppositions which underlie the latter – and which the former, as fluid domain of connectivity, does not know. The debate between these two modes of understanding time, space and meaning, then, is not simply a function of ‘the way things are’. Rather, it is the result of a power struggle between two competing modes of understanding the world. It is a function of power relations. To this extent, as we will see in due course, Kristeva’s later work on space will come closer to that of Deleuze and Guattari. They refuse to cede to modernity’s central narrative of spatial banishment and loss (the story of Oedipal struggle, the status of factual description) relegating it instead to the realm of coercive ideology.

Kristeva’s ambiguous spaces In a famous passage from his L’Invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life in English), Michel de Certeau describes the view from the World Trade Centre (as once was) in New York. He employs the magisterial view from the top of the twin towers to set up a contrast with the everyday itineraries of space-users inhabiting the labyrinthine city streets below. De Certeau clearly privileges the spatial “tactics” of embedded, ground-level space-users, but this does not prevent him from qualifying them as “blind”: “ils en ont une connaissance aussi aveugle que le corps à corps amouereux” (de Certeau 1980: 141) “their knowledge of them [the cities] is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms” (de Certeau 1984: 93)]. Behind his politicized privilege of the local and immediate habitation of material space is a lingering hierarchy which persists in ascribing true knowledge to the aerial objectivity and (stereo-)scopic command of Euclidean distanciation – paradoxically enough, a hierarchy which is re-inscribed in the very act of critiquing the eroticism of scopic power. This ambigu-

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ity in his work becomes more clearly evident, perhaps, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks which manifestly aimed at the phallic visibility of the towers. As aerial constructions, these viewpoints were most vulnerable to aerial attack by terrorists employing micro-“tactics”. “Blind” as the inhabitants of the streets below may have been, they were less trapped than the three thousand victims tragically caught in the blazing towers. And in contrast, the patently myopic, blundering, grand geopolitical strategies of the subsequent war on terrorism hardly need commentary half a decade later. 9/11 may demonstrate some of the aporias which are latent to Euclidean space and its visual regimes of spatial command. Conversely, it may also point up residual elements of pre-Euclidean space (local, haptic, tactical) which may bedevil the implementers of a centralistic New World Order. This broader framework of strategies and tactics of space in the messy world of post-9/11 geopolitics may point up what is at stake in the micro-spatialities of the Semiotic and the Symbolic. For the moment, I wish to continue to explore the ambiguities surrounding Kristeva’s attempts at working with a strongly hierarchical, binary mode of opposed spatial regimes (Semiotic vs. Symbolic). Which values are attached to the “folding” that preceded the moment of unfolding, the non-linear before the linearization of language and the Symbolic? Kristeva’s oppositional and hierarchical notions of space are dominated by the normativity of the Oedipal process – a process which is eminently spatial because it imposes a distance in the putatively incestuous proximity between mother and son. The postOedipal intersubjective exile is in turn replicated, in the psychoanalytic theory of 1970s France which Kristeva helped to elaborate, by a distance between the linguistic signifier and its referent (signified). Oedipus produces a fundamental absence of the signified. For Kristeva, growing-up in psychic terms means leaving behind the maternal body and entering into the abstract order of language. Language, with its dislocation of signifier and signified, its inevitable displacement of the thing by the sign, is part and parcel of the necessary removal from maternal space. The scission of maternal fusion jolts the child into a linguistic realm in which the signifier stands in the place of a lost plenitude – without, however, being able to re-

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plenish that lack. The signifier does nothing to bridge the gap – even worse, it cannot but perpetuate it. The Oedipal moment coinciding with this loss of earlier maternal space is thus a quintessentially spatial event. The Oedipal crisis imposes absence, thereby inaugurating space as a negative dimension in humanity and its language. As Foucault notes in a succinct summary: Le père est alors celui qui sépare, c’est-à-dire qui protège quand, prononçant la Loi, il noue en une expérience majeure l’espace, le règle et le langage. D’un coup sont donnés la distance tout au long de laquelle se développe la scansion des présences et des absences, la parole dont la forme première est celle de la contrainte, et le rapport du signifiant au signifié à partir duquel va se faire non seulement l’édification du langage mais aussi le rejet et la symbolisation du refoulé. (Dits et écrits I, 199) [Consequently, the father separates; that is, he is the one who protects when, in his proclamation of the Law, he links space, rules, and language within a single and major experience. At a stroke, he creates the distance along which will develop the scansion of presences and absences, the speech whose initial form is based on constraints, and finally, the relationship of the signifier to the signified which not only gives rise to the structure of language but also to the exclusion and symbolic transformation of repressed material.] (The Essential Works II, 15-16)

The post-exilic regime is posited upon dialectic of presence and absence, of object and (empty) space. This quintessentially Euclidean space is thus coeval with a linguistic regime of absence and presence. It is a regime which brooks no questions. It is only via presence and absence, via the difference between this and that (this is not that, which can be translated into spatial terminology as follows: this is here and not there, that is there and not here), that language can function at all. Identity is posited upon the basic binary of a  non-a. Identity is differential, as is language. And without language, communication between discrete human subjects would be impossible. Indeed, without language, the separateness of individuals (their status as monads within an empty Euclidean social space) would possibly be vitiated, and with it, their very identity. There is, it seems, no alterative to this regime of spatial and linguistic absence. Kristeva is adamant about the consequences of a failure to emerge into the Symbolic realm. In some of her early work she argues

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that the price of not joining the Symbolic is the exclusion from language, history and politics. Speaking specifically of women’s ostensibly privileged connection to that domain, she accuses a woman who stays close to the formlessness of the maternal domain of evincing a dangerous complacency. Only an escape from the maternal space, she claims, facilitates an engagement with the wider world of society: Savoir qu’une identification censée être masculine, paternelle parce que support du symbole et du temps, est nécessaire, pour avoir voix au chapitre de la politique et de l’histoire. L’accomplir, cette identification, pour sortir du polymorphisme béat où, sans cela, une femme ici peut se complaire; et entrer ainsi dans une pratique sociale. (Des Chinoises 43) [We need to recognize that an identification which is supposedly masculine and paternal in character, because it is the basic for symbolization and for temporality, is necessary, because it allows one to have a voice in the congregation of political and historical participation. It’s necessary to accomplish this identification so as to escape from the serene polymorphism where a woman in the West can otherwise complacently tarry – so as to enter into social practice.]

Temporality must be taken up, at the cost of spatiality. In this account of psycho-social maturity Kristeva sees the maternal domain (that of polymorphous spatiality) as a place where one can only remain at the cost of falling out of social and linguistic processes. If there is no alternative to the Oedipal regime, there is likewise no alternative to Euclidean spatiality. For the early Kristeva, the spatial medium of the pre-Euclidean Semiotic must be left behind. One model of this failure to integrate with Euclidean space is proffered by Kristeva in the illustration of a schizophrenic mode of spatial organization. This mode of configuring space does not arrange objects against the background of an ordered, regular space which contains them, as in Euclidean space. Rather, the schizophrenic space places the subject within the accretive, haptic economy of an ‘and-and-andand’ without the salutary objectifying and ordering effect of distance. This focussing and clarifying distance vis-à-vis the earlier realm is relinquished by the schizophrenic: “L’opération essentielle qui domine l’espace du sujet en process et dont le schizophrène porte le témoignage douleureux, est une operation d’adjonction de territories – corporels, naturels, sociaux, investis par la pulsion” (Révolution 97) [“The essential operation dominating the space of the subject in proc-

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ess/on trial, and to which schizophrenia bears painful testimony, is that of the appending of territories – corporeal, natural, social - invested by drives” (Revolution 102)]. The schizoid space Kristeva speaks of here is one characterized by an immediate connection to things, without the intercalation operated by language as a system which represents, and thus distances, the world. This subject is caught in a relation of excessive proximity to the world. It negotiates space metonymically, without being able to attain the meta-level of spatial abstraction. Something resembling this schizoid space has been described by Piaget in his work on children’s conceptions of space. Piaget documents the child’s prescribed development towards an adult understanding of space – one which is akin to a mental bird’s eye view of space, distanced from places despite being embedded within a concrete spatial environment. Piaget’s infantile “pre-operational” stage of spatial conceptualization “implies that the child ‘may be able to negotiate successfully sequences or routes, but cannot reverse these, hypothesise about them, or add to them in any major way’” (Piaget 1929 in Ward 1979: 24). This child’s concept of space can only slide metonymically from one place to another, it cannot imaginatively gather up these places all at once. These material sites are the “folded” spaces which will be “unfolded” in language and Euclidean space. Such archaic spaces are “folded” together in a paranoid, intense agglomeration of subjects, things, affects, sensations, which all go to make up the gluey-ness of not-yet-(Euclidean)-space. Sartre gives some sense of this experience of space in his novel La Nausée: […] j’étais tout à l’heure au Jardin public. La racine du marronnier s’enfonçait dans la terre, juste au-dessous de mon banc. Je ne me rappelais plus que c’était une racine. Les mots s’étaient évanouis et, avec eux, la signification des choses, leurs modes d'emploi, les faibles repères que les hommes ont tracés à leur surface. J’étais assis, un peu voûté, la tête basse, seul en face de cette masse noire et noueuse entièrement brute et qui me faisait peur. […] la diversité des choses, leur individualité n’était qu’une apparence, un vernis. Ce vernis avait fondu, il restait des masses monstrueuses et molles, en désordre. (Sartre 1938 : 179-80) [ [ …] So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk into the ground just underneath my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with

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them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. […] the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous, masses, all in disorder. (Sartre 1964: 126-7)]

What is lost along with the words to identify things in their discrete existence is the subject’s own distance from the world. Deprived of words and the screen they set up between him and the world, Sartre’s narrator finds himself surrounded by a mass of things in their overwhelming thingness. He discovers himself submerged in existence, impotent to remove himself from its overpowering proximity. The condition of transforming this not-yet-space into the binary of empty-“space” or filled-“space” is the imposition of distance typified by the Oedipal narrative. The tension of presence and absence is, fundamentally, a spatial one, both on the synchronic axis of nearness and distance (vitiated fusion, forbidden intimacy), but also on the diachronic axis which leads away from a lost paradise of foreclosed plenitude. Freud discovered a concrete example of this apprenticeship in distanciation in the childhood game of “fort/da” [“now you see it, now you don’t” – more literally, the dialectic of “gone”/“there again”, or, in more static spatial terms, “elsewhere”/“here” (Freud 1920: 1113/Freud 1961: 13-16)]. Freud’s account of the “fort/da” game dramatizes the rehearsal of distance as an obligatory condition of social life. Not to undergo this rite de passage, to traverse this process of distanciation is, from the normative perspective of Euclidean spatial logic, unthinkable, quite simply deviant. However, Kristeva’s position on Euclidean distanciation is ambiguous. She does offer other models which are analogous to that of schizoid accretion, but which do not resonate with the same negative connotations. One example of a more positive model of pre-Euclidean space is the linguistic mode of deixis associated with early childhood. In the first stages of language acquisition, children produce utterances based on the topic-comment model rather than the subject-predicate model. Deixis, linguistic ‘pointing’ (including pronouns and prepositions such as “this”, “that”, “here”, “there”) is one of the main markers of language in its primary stages. Any parent can testify to the importance of deictic pointing in early language acquisition! “Nous verrons

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dans ce phénomène […] la récurrence du repère spatial qui non seulement amorce le sémiotique, mais aussi étaye les premières acquisitions syntaxiques” (Polylogue 486-7) [“we see here a recurrence of the spatial marker, which not only initiates the semiotic disposition but also shores up the first syntactic aquisitions” (Desire in Language 287)]. In this deictic mode of language, the gesture of pointing and the spoken word participate in the immediate space of reference, but are also involved in the construction of an emergent linear, syntactic order of language. On the one hand, then, deixis cannot abstract or distance itself from an immediate environment. Deixis, by definition, is dependent upon pointing at things. Deictic shifters are so multipurpose in character precisely because they have no semantic content, and thus need context in order to be deployed. By the same token, deixis is a linguistic mode more metonymic than metaphoric, and thus eludes the dialectic of absence and presence which bedevils metaphor. On the other hand, though, Kristeva notes that the use of spatial reference points straddles both the Semiotic and the early phases of the syntactically structured Symbolic. Clearly deixis is a linguistic mode which dissolves the rigid oppositions between pre-Euclidean and Euclidean spatial consciousness. To that extent it retains its allegiances to the prebinary Semiotic – to the maternal space which eschews any dichotomy between presence and absence. Curiously, despite Kristeva’s adamant insistence that relinquishment of the earlier spatial mode is a necessary condition of social life, this relinquishment it is repeatedly registered as a loss. Once inserted within language, within the Symbolic, within the linearity of the Thetic, the “being of language” [“être du langage”], according to Lacan, turns out to be the “nonbeing of objects” [“non-être des objets”] (Lacan 1966: 627/Lacan 2007a: 524) – and to this one might add the non-being of an earlier type of spatial experience. What has been lost, tragically left behind, is a form of space more tangible, tactile and immediate. (Kristeva will recuperate this space, if we may anticipate the next chapter, in her later work on sensuality.) What she terms an “adjunction of territories” is a rich and un-distanced spatial immanence of the world. During early childhood, the incipient subject remains in a fluid relationship of easy communion with its environment. Subsequently, however, the socialized spatial subject finds itself imprisoned in a world of non-being, of mandatory absence. In the spatial

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terms of this conception of psychic development, the plenitude of an inaugural ‘here’ without an opposed term must be relinquished. The subject moves to a second-order ‘here’ – abstract, regimented, and constituted from the outset by an oppositional relationship to a lost ‘there’. Kristeva insistently privileges the maternal facets of the chora and the Semiotic, celebrating them as an alternative to the oppressive rigidities of the patriarchal system. Much of her mid- to late-1970s work on maternity collected in Histoires d’amour celebrates the intensity of the mother-child relationship and the ways in which it eludes the ossified structures of adult life – while mourning the inevitable exilic loss of maternal proximity: “Destin toujours douloureux, l’exil est la seule voie qui nous reste […] Dans ce deuil infini, où la langue et le corps ressuscitent […] j’ausculte le cadavre toujours chaud de ma mémoire maternelle” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 69) [“An always painful destiny, exile […] is the only way left […] In this infinite mourning, where language and the body rise from the dead […] I place an ear to the still-warm cadaver of my maternal memory” (Intimate Revolt 2445)]. Even in this very recent reiteration of the theme, however, Kristeva still accepts the inevitability of this exile. Seen from the point of view of the lacunary but inevitable ‘here” of adult, Euclidean space, the pre-Euclidean, maternal, schizoid or deictic space, with its happy accretion of whatever comes to hand, its reliance upon the immediacy of context (‘that and that and that’) can only be construed as deviant. Its blithe indifference to vectors of post-Oedipal desire, vectors that are condemned always to miss the objects they pursue, is so provocative that it must be labelled ‘abnormal’. Its preparedness to do without the distanced (and thus absentee, abstracted) overview, for the sake of a full nearness to things and places, flies in the face of post-Oedipal spatial logic. The attribution of labels such as “painful” or “pre-operational” works to obscure the possibility that its modalities might offer viable alternatives to those of post-Oedipal Symbolic. Kristeva provides a mirror image, virtually identical but reversed, of the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari at about the same time, who, as we shall see below, conceive of schizoid space (that is, accretive space) in far more positive terms. For them, this embedding in space must not necessarily be renounced. It becomes clear that exile

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from immediate space is the norm which Kristeva unquestioningly accepts, just as the moment of the Oedipal conflict, exile from the mother is ordered by the punishing father as the condition of social belonging. It is paradoxical that although Kristeva celebrates many of the characteristics of the chora as a space (its links to maternity, to the sensual materiality of the concrete sign of modernist art) she can only reject its chaotic materiality from the normative perspective of Euclidean space.

Writing the Semiotic Kristeva’s patently ambivalent relationship to the spatiality of the chora gives rise to a further inconsistency. She writes about the Semiotic, but rarely visits it on her own intellectual journey. When she does pass close to it, it is almost always regarded from a safe distance. A classic example of this ambivalent rapport to the spaces of the Semiotic is her work on modernist poetry. The schizoid space of accretion, which annexes territories without abstracting them, is figured in striking visual form in the classic modernist poem by Mallarmé, “Un Coup de dés” [“A throw of the dice”] which forms the heart of her Révolution du langage poétique (293-313; see also La Charité 1987). The poem, whose typography sketches a stellar dispersal, cascading from upper-left to bottom-right-hand corner across twenty pages, offers no clear explanation of its textual space. It merely invites the reader to scan its constellation of variously-sized subphrasal fragments so as to constitute fleeting scraps of local meaning. What comes to light in this ostentatious dispersal of the text at the heart of an exceedingly formal academic exercise (that of the senior doctorate guaranteeing entry to the ranks of the French university professorat) is the concretude of the spatial genesis of the chora within the domain of symbolic language. Into the Thetic realm par excellence (the major university thesis) bursts a jet of lava-like molten language, rupturing the typographical and syntactic order of academic systems of communication and hierarchical rituals of institutional initiation. Yet the intrusion of the Semiotic is contained by the framework of the Thetic, and held at a safe distance by its patent attribution to a modernist poet.

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Kristeva herself, as she candidly admits in La Révolution du langage poétique (23) [Revolution of Poetic Language (25)], rarely adventures outside the conceptual linearity of the Symbolic in her own academic work. Even novels such as Les Samouraïs are built around the fundamental duality of the roman à clef. Only a few exceptions to this rule are to be found in her academic work: the article ‘Stabat Mater’ included in Histoires d’amour, her later detours into personal writing in her work on the loss of the maternal language, or the meditative concluding pages of her book on Proust. (Histoires d’amour 295-327; L’Avenir d’une révolte 65-73; Le Temps sensible 3958/Tales of Love 234-64 ; Intimate Revolt 240-8; Time and Sense 2236). ‘Stabat Mater’ sets two texts, a poetic stream-of-consciousness around the experience of pregnancy and motherhood, and a more formal discussion of representations of the Virgin Mary, alongside one another. The duality of pregnancy, the intimate together-apartness of the mother-child relationship, structures the double meditation. This deconstruction of the Thetic mode of writing, however, is very tentative, and does not exceed the side-by-side of two texts, thus remaining well below the threshold of formal experimentation in academic writing evinced in the work of Irigaray or Derrida, to name only two comparable examples. Kristeva pays tribute to the spaces of the Semiotic, even inhabits their immediate vicinity on occasions, but does not venture there herself. It is only in the later work, where the relation between sensation and language is being explored, that Kristeva begins to adventure into a more sinuous, fluid mode of writing. It comes as no surprise, then, when Kristeva, in a recent piece, distances herself from Mallarmé’s “musique surveillée de sens” [“music watched over by meaning”] as the embodiment of the Semiotic’s effraction of the Symbolic. Rather, she turns to Colette’s “saveurs païennes” [“pagan flavour”] and to her “la langue du sensible” [“language of the sensory”] as the locus classicus of the later, less shy delving into the sinuosities of the Semiotic (L’Avenir d’une révolte 71/Intimate Revolt 246). Above all, it is in her own fiction, in particular in the three works which follow upon her first roman à these, Le vieil homme et les loups (1991), Possessions (1996) and Meurtre à Byzance (2004), where she launches more fully into a poetic mode of writing – though always maintaining the presence of a incisive, limpid, Thetic mode which regularly imposes itself within the body of a more poetic flow

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of meaning. Poesis, in her fiction, although ever more dominant, is never absolutely bereft of analysis. Despite her sustained interest in the disruptive eruption of a preOedipal space into the ordered, linearized realm of socially normed language, Kristeva appears, then, only gradually to genuinely question the dominance of the latter social and linguistic order: Kristeva accepts the oedipal structure and its necessary organising role in the acquisition of culture without seriously criticizing Freud. […] [She] will use basically unquestioned psychoanalytic tools to explain the way ‘texts’ of all kinds function […] [She] remains committed to psychoanalysis as an overarching framework or theoretical paradigm. (Grosz 1989: 102-3)

And she has remained committed (until quite recently) to the Oedipal genealogy as the path down which every subject must go. The unified, albeit patterned space of the chora must be left behind if a subject is to attain full subjecthood and enter the world of social existence. To be fair, Kristeva does stress that the Semiotic and the Symbolic can never be found in isolation from each other: “Le sujet étant toujours sémiotique et symbolique, tout système signifiant qu’il produit ne peut être ‘exclusivement’ sémiotique ou ‘exclusivement’ symbolique, mais il est obligatoirement marqué par une dette vis-à-vis de l’autre” (Révolution 22) [“Because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he produces can be either ‘exclusively’ semiotic or ‘exclusively’ symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both” (Revolution 24)]. Yet this proclamation of heterogeneity and debt is none the less a secondary revision of a fundamental dichotomy which, though it may be palliated by such statements, is not wholly erased. The interlocking of Semiotic and Symbolic, though it may complicate the clear division between the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal phases insisted upon, for instance, by Lacan (to whom Kristeva owes much) never entirely abandons a fundamental dichotomous structure (Grosz 1990: 157-60). But its duality, as we will see, is increasingly eroded in her later writings from around 1980 onwards.

2. Kristeva’s Kehre The chora, always In a fine exemplification of Kristeva’s theory of the eruptive manifestations of presence, the chora continues to resurge in all her subsequent work, right through to the present – for instance, in the judicious lecture series on the necessity and possibility of revolt in the conformist, post-political 1990s (see La Révolte intime 19-20/Intimate Revolt 10-11). The theory of the chora was proposed in the heady (post-) revolutionary days of the early 1970s, and, if personal anecdotes are to be believed, put down on paper in one single feverish rush of writing (I owe this account to David Kelley). Yet it the chora has its own afterlife well beyond La Révolution du langage poétique and frequently resonates in Kristeva’s mature writing. Kristeva’s work from La Révolution du langage poétique onwards seeks less to overturn the structures of the Symbolic, than to ask the question: How does the subject manage life in the Symbolic? Parallels may be detected here with Foucault’s late works succeeding La volonté du savoir (1976) which pose a similar question: How does the subject manage its existence, and configure its life under regimes of surveillance? (see Histoire de la sexualité: 2 13-14/The History of Sexuality: 2 7-8). It is possible in the work of many French thinkers of this era to detect symptoms of an accommodation with mechanisms of social control, in the wake of the failed revolts and utopian aspirations of May 1968 (Starr 1995). In Kristeva’s case, it would appear that the increased orientation towards the pragmatics of life under the regime of the Symbolic are less a retreat from the political struggles of the 1970s, than a result of her engagement in another form of practice, that of psychoanalysis. The plethora of case studies which intersperse her theoretical reflections or aesthetic studies after the 1980s are an index of this in-

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creasingly hands-on approach to the pragmatics of human existence within the Symbolic. They embed her rigorous theoretical meditations, whether of psychoanalytic or philosophical nature, in the dialogical practice of a psychotherapy. In turn, the therapeutic session, in turn, is quite literally a synecdoche of the broader life of her patients and the contemporary society in which they live. One further symptom of an intimate engagement with contemporary existential contexts is a change of style. It is hardly a coincidence that in the wake of her engagement with psychoanalysis (the ‘talking cure’) Kristeva’s writing style became less technical and thesis-like, and more conversational. She herself notes that à partir du moment où j’ai entamé ma pratique analytique, mon écriture a changé. La cure apprivoise la langue quotidienne. L’analyse nous donne accès à notre mémoire infantile et nous parvenons à trouver des mots pour l’innommable, le sensible, la passion. C’est d’autant plus vrai pour un étranger ou une étrangère – comme moi – pour qui la langue française, jusqu’alors, avait été une sorte de code artificiel, théorique. Je parlais la langue artificielle de la philosophie, de la sémiologie, de la linguistique. (Au risque de la pensée 62-3) [from the moment when I began my [psycho]analytic practice, my writing changed. The cure tames everyday language. Psychoanalysis gives us access to our childhood memory and we come to find words for the unnameable, for sensuality, for passion. This is all the more so for a foreigner – like myself – for whom French had been, until then, an artificial, theoretical code. I had been speaking the artificial code of philosophy, semiology and linguistics.]

Likewise, it is hardly surprising, given the dialogical nature of psychoanalysis, that in Kristeva’s recent writing there are many indices of an oral context of delivery. She has a persistent habit of leaving marks of a text’s original address to an audience in the printed version. This proclivity finds its earliest manifestation in her unwillingness to erase the infelicities of expression from the first work she wrote in French, so as to preserve traces of its context of production (Le Texte du roman 193). Later works finish with a tag like “Si vous m’aviez suivi dans ce parcous volontiers heteroclite […]” (Au commencement était l’amour 77) [“If you have followed this deliberately unorthodox presentation […]” (In the Beginning was Love 59)]. These are peripheral symptoms of a significant paradigm shift in Kristeva’s work. From the late-1960s to the late-1970s, Kristeva’s

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spatial reflection staked out the spatial parameters of pre-Oedipal subject-formation as a fluid realm of becoming, as “le lieu d’un chaos qui est et qui devient” [“the site of a chaos which is and which becomes”] (Polylogue 57 n1; Kristeva’s emphases). The theory of the chora itself has also undergone a significant “becoming” since its original inception. Pippa Berry notes that Kristeva’s maternal origin occupies a liminal position. It is on the borderline between all polarities: […] this mysterious, negative ‘beginning’ is vitally related to the present as well as the future. […] for Kristeva, chora’s interest is not only in its association with what comes before the subject, but also as a means of thinking what might come after the subject. (Berry 1992: 256-7)

Indeed, the contours of the chora itself appear to undergo reworking as it undertakes its own textual trajectory towards the future in Kristeva’s work. From around 1980 onwards, beginning with Pouvoirs d’horreur, Kristeva has explored the consequences for post-Oedipal adult life of those dynamic spatial contours. This occurs in two principle ways. First, Kristeva increasingly imports spatial operations of the post-Oedipal subject into the pre-Oedipal realm. These imports will be discussed in the section which immediately follows on this one, with particular reference to abjection and melancholy. Secondly, she increasingly exports aspects of the chora into post-Oedipal, adult space, a matter which will be discussed in the sections below pertaining to racism and sensuality. First, however, let us turn to the importing of facets of post-Oedipal space into the domain of maternal fusion.

Abjection I remember, as a final year high-school student studying de Beauvoir’s Les belles images, my bewilderment at the narrator’s visceral rejection of her mother, described as “cette femme que je vomis” [“this woman that I vomit up”] (de Beauvoir 1967: 254). This expression made such an impact upon me that it is the only thing I have retained, a quarter of a century later, from that text. The possibility of an immediate physical reaction to a social relationship struck me as exaggerated – despite the patent evidence of my own viscerality, pure

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somatization unfathomable to myself at that time. What disturbed me even more, however, was that the French vomir quelq’un needed no mediating preposition like the English to vomit up or vomit out someone or something. But in retrospect what I had perhaps unwittingly identified in the French expression, the excessive syntactic proximity between the act of gagging, regurgitation, and that which was spat out, was the core of the matter. Maybe there was an inarticulate sense, in my vague discomfort with a syntactic difference, of an all-too-closeness which had to be rejected in a brusque assertion of the nascent subject’s own boundaries and autonomy. After all, despite my incapacity to make sense of this vomir quelq’un intellectually, some performative grasp of the notion of self-distancing came to the fore in my own striking out for the other side of the world only a few months later. What I had at some level approached, without realizing it, was something akin to the Kristevan concept of “abjection”. La Révolution du langage poétique picks up the Freudian concept of negation and “rejet” [“rejection”] to explain how the chora is a space in which a sort of proto-identity is constantly being constructed and deconstructed in the movement of sounds, colours, rhythms, motions, and pulsations of desire across the child’s infantile body (Révolution 101-50/Revolution 107-64). In Kristeva’s later work on “abjection”, she re-deploys the concept of negation to re-jink her ideas on proto-subjectivity. In Pouvoirs d’horreur (1980), Kristeva proposes a theory of expulsion which sketches the manner in which the proto-subject, even before the Oedipal phase and accession to language, is already beginning to delineate its own contours. “Avant le commencement: la séparation” (Pouvoirs d’horreur 20) [“Before the beginning: separation” (Powers of Horror 12)] is the telegraphic summary she gives of what she calls “abjection” The prefix ‘ab-’ signals the spatial aspect of this theory. Underlying Kristeva’s work subsequent to La Révolution du langage poétique is, alongside her continuing focus upon representation, subjectivity and temporality, a less obvious but equally important preoccupation with representation, subjectivity and spatiality. When, in the recent Sens et non-sens de la révolte (1999), Kristeva writes, “Ne craignons pas de raffiner ces explorations de l’espace subjectif, de ces méandres, de ces impasses” (Sens et non-sens de la révolte 17) [“Let

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us not be afraid to examine meticulously these explorations of subjective space, these complexities, these impasses” (The sense and NonSense of Revolt 9)], she is not employing a mere decorative turn of phrase. Rather, she is continuing a strand of her thought which considers subjectivity as a space – as something which is crafted spatially. Subjectivity is, from the outset, constructed and perpetuated spatially – by meanderings and impasses, by explorations and re-routing. As Victor Burgin observes, No space of representation without a subject, and no subject without a space it is not. This, of course, is precisely the import of the mirror stage […] For Julia Kristeva, however, there is a necessary gesture anterior to this first formation of an uncertain frontier in the mirror stage, a prior demarcation of space. (Burgin 1996: 16)

The theory of abjection continues the reflection upon the spaces at the origin of subjectivity. Into the erstwhile fluidity of the chora, however, it imports conflicts and demarcations hitherto reserved for the carving-up of the post-chora epoch. At the origin of subjectivity and its temporal trajectory from birth to death, is space – a space which continues to resonate all along the biographical path taken by the individual. The chora theory grounded the subject in a turbulent space of sensations; in the subsequent theory of abjection, Kristeva elaborates a spatial theory of genetic subjectivation, building upon the extant concept to create a more dynamic model of the emergence of selfhood. According to this model, becoming an individual is predicated upon carving out a space for oneself: “Avant même que les choses, pour lui [l’enfant] soient – avant donc qu’elles soient signifiables – il les expulse, dominé par la pulsion, et se fait son territoire à lui, bordé d’abject” (Pouvoirs 13) [“Even before things for [the child] are – hence before they are signifiable – he drives them out, dominated by the drive as he is, and constitutes his own territory, edged by the abject” (Powers 6)]. Before the object which will be internalized and loved and desired, there is the abject, that which has been thrown out. The subject itself is an abject in need of objects: “L’abjection de soi serait la forme culminante de cette expérience du sujet auquel est dévolié que tous ses objets ne reposent que sur la perte inaugurale fondant son propre être” (Pouvoirs 12) [“The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its ob-

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jects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being” (Powers 5)]. The condition of subjecthood, even at this very early phase of existence, is the rejection of that closest other, the mother, whose much needed proximity will forever be associated with a threat to the proto-subject’s own existence and apartness. The desired other will thus always be a dreaded other. To become a subject is to become a separated being – but one only ever separated precariously. Fusion is nostalgically longed for, but terrifies us because it contains the threat of our obliteration. This theory of abjection draws upon anthropological material on the sacred or taboo nature of detachable body parts such as fingernails, hair, blood, menstrual fluids, etc., in some pre-writing cultures. Our own modern culture has replaced the sense of sacred fear with disgust (see Menninghaus 1997/Menninghaus 1999). Kristeva claims that this disgust at fluids such as breast milk, blood, menstrual blood, vomit, saliva, mucus, and so forth, is the adult reaction to viscosities which are not susceptible of clear delineation. Rejection (the gagging reaction or vomiting which accompanies disgust) is a visceral repetition of an archaic movement of expulsion by which the proto-subject once asserted its own distinction from the mother. Critics of Kristeva’s theory of abjection have remarked upon the manner in which Kristeva’s identification of abjection with a murderous desire to escape from a fusional nearness to the mother appears to contradict her location of subversion and revolt in the self-same maternal site (Menninghaus 1997: 547-9/Menninghaus 1999: 387-9). Obviously, proximity to the body of the mother can be interpreted in less confrontational, and politically less self-defeating ways (see Irigaray 1981/Irigaray 1993; West 2007). However, this central contradiction in Kristeva’s theory of abjection may be resolved by the more concrete, and politicized spatializations assumed by the later avatars of the theory (the abjection of foreigners within the body of the nation, for instance). Disgust is a reaction-formation which focuses upon viscosities symbolizing, quite concretely, the absence of clear demarcation, the blurring of boundaries. Its concomitant, ‘abjection’, as ‘throwing off’, clearly relates to the “rejection” at work in the chora, is a phenomenon whose repercussions continue to be felt as long as the subject is an individual. But that individualism is gained at a cost, that of eject-

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ing the first nurturer figure, and can only be maintained by repulsing future avatars of that pre-secession persona. All figures of fusion, according to the theory of abjection, will call up the prospect of the subject’s non-existence, and must therefore be violently expelled again and again, in reactions which range from the individual to the collective – from visceral bodily spasms which performatively enact the primordial negation of the subject’s own amorphous origin, to racist attacks which aim to expunge the ‘dirty foreigner’ from the body politic. All figures of fusion, whether on the micro- or the macro-scale, will provoke gestures of expulsion. All forms of fluidity, viscosity, inbetweenness, remind me that in my far-distant pre-subjective past, I, before I became I, was not-I, merged with another. What is at stake is the very existence of the subject, predicated upon its fragile contours. “In terms of the thermodynamic model that informs Freud’s concept of the death drive”, comments Burgin, “what is feared is the ‘entropy’ at the heart of all organization, all differentiation. In religious terms, it is the ‘dust’ to which we must all return” (Burgin 1996: 55). Kristeva has been accused of anti-Semitism and fascism for devoting so much analytical attention to Céline (Gidal 1983; Stone 1983). For her, this author epitomizes the individual, psychic roots of collective racial extremism and for precisely this reason merits analysis. According to Kristeva, one cannot combat racist-fascist attitudes without running the risk of merely polarizing and thus replicating them, if one does not understand their structure and genesis. The racist hatred of all elements which threaten the clarity of nationalist boundaries, all ‘impurity’ which sullies the body politic, can be seen to be the driving force behind the pogroms, programmes of genocide great and small, or ethnic cleansing which have scarred world history up to the most recent years. An analogous account of the fear of ‘maternal flows’ underlying the fascist mentality is offered by Klaus Theweleit’s Männerphantasien (Male Fantasies). There he analyses the writings of the fascist Freikorps militia of the 1920s which subsequently became Hitler’s SA and SS troops (Theweleit 1987/Theweleit 1993). If Kristeva’s work on abjection spatializes human subjectivity, constructing the image of the body and its interior and exterior through the very action of expulsion, then the practical criticism she embarks upon prefigures the later spatialization of identity she studies in her work on the nation, and on foreignness and racism. Céline’s work is thus treated by Kristeva as a “symptom”, in Jacqueline Rose’s words

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(Rose 1985: 155). Its significance is synecdochic, looking forward to the later critique of the nation. But by the time of the later explorations, Kristeva’s attitude to such structures will be more explicitly contestatory. Implicit in the critique of fascism which underlies her work on Céline and abjection is moreover an equally implicit critique of the normative movement from fluidity-cum-fusion to coherence-cumseparation. If the anxiety of clearly demarcated borders of selfhood brings forth faschoid social tendencies, then the relinquishment of the pre-subjective space of porous intersubjectivity cannot be quite as easily accepted as in an earlier phase of Kristeva’s writings.

Melancholy According to the account of selfhood proposed in Kristeva’s work on abjection, subjectivity is a brittle construct, a paranoid structure defensively walled up against intruders from the outside. The ramparts of the self are bulwarks against infiltration by polluting flows and fluids of all kinds – but by the same token, they remain vulnerable to those in-fluences. Unsurprisingly, both Lacan and Kristeva employ the metaphor of the fortress or castle. But, in the formulation of Bruno Bettelheim, it is an empty fortress, a ring of walls encircling a central absence (Pouvoirs 58-60/Powers 46-48; Lacan 1966: 97/Lacan 2007a: 98; Bettelheim 1967). The self that constructs its space in the act of expulsion is a self marked from the outset by loss. The subject that has asserted its own existence already in the pulsion-based gesture of distancing the pre-Oedipal mother is condemned to seek forever objects of love which will promise full replacement of that rejected other. The Abject, the ab-jected, thrown-out fusional nurturer figure, heralds the procession of subsequent Objects which will take its place. They precede the avatars of the later lost mother barred by the forbidding Oedipal father. To lose the Object, however, through dispute, divorce, death, or any number of other modes of separation, merely hollows out that cavern at the centre of the self – the cavern which was once carved out by the very process instrumental in clearing a space around the henceforth separate self. Separateness inaugurates many subsequent avatar-

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separations, and each of these creates echoes in the subject’s interior space – echoes of mourning and melancholy. In her work on depression, Soleil noir, Kristeva pursues the spatial implications of loss, inscribed from the outset in her work on subjectivity, into adult life. According to Freud, depression ensues when the subject refuses to accept the loss of an object in the process of mourning and instead clings stubbornly to that lost object. Indeed, the object’s absence is held on to as an ersatz-object (Freud 1997: 428-46/Freud 1999: 20118). The empty space left by the departure of the loved one is internalized and preserved as a walled-up mausoleum, rather than being left open to new objects of love. Depression is the process by which the subject stops the process of mourning, acceptance, forgetting, and replacement. Depression freezes the progress of life, with its cycle of psychic death and regeneration, in the moment of loss. Let us make these processes more concrete by reference to an Australian indigenous text. In Kevin Gilbert’s Living Black, a text documenting the experiences of indigenous Australians in the 1970s in a society which continued to treat them in many respects as colonized peoples, one of the interviewees, Horry Saunders, lamented: You say anything in the lingo to the kids now and they wonder what yer talkin’ about. It breaks my heart to think of it, the way they’re goin’. We are losin’ our identity, our culture, you know? Just fadin’ out all the time. A lot of our young people don’t want to be part of it or learn it. The more we lose, the more it destroyin’ us. (Gilbert 1978: 33)

The phenomenon registered here is one of cultural loss, and the concomitant melancholia which goes with it. Saunders mourns, “It breaks my heart to think of it, the way they’re goin’.” The central structure is a depressive one: what has been lost constitutes an absence possessing a deadly agency: “The more we lose, the more it destroyin’ us.” In the context of Australian indigenous dispossession, the loss of territory underlies all other losses. Land was the ground of all other cultural forms in indigenous society. Upon its confiscation by predatory white settler culture in the nineteenth century, all other indigenous cultural forms (from subsistence practices such as hunting, to social practice such as tribal meetings, through to the mythological forms which pervaded land and custom) crumbled away. Language and land and the loss of language and land are at the heart of this perverse corrosive

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dynamic, with the “more”/“more” structure expressing the increasing self-destruction wrought by a pool of linguistic resources in inverse proportion to its lost spatial matrix and dwindling demographic spread. The chiastic concatenation of more and less is implicitly palliated, however, by the act of enunciation and publication embodied in Gilbert’s texts. The semi-oral genre of Gilbert’s text stands in as an ersatz-object for the erstwhile orality of a culture rooted in the land; it points the way, in turn, to enhanced indigenous political emancipation, and the renewed cultural self-confidence of the land-rights movement in recent decades. This example may help us to deal with a major problem associated with Kristeva’s theory of melancholy. If the theory of depression is partly based upon the theory of abjection, then it would appear to continue to perpetuate the central contradiction around the body of the mother which emerges in the theory of abjection: the maternal body is the site of space (chora) but also of time (the ostensibly necessary stagist development towards separation); of subversion (the source of the Semiotic) but also of matricide (the inevitable aggression provoked by the stifling proximity to the mother). The loss of the maternal site entailed by maturation would thus appear to plunge the social subject inevitably into melancholy. Melancholy, like Freudian neurosis, would be the condition of ‘normal’ adult subjectivity. Yet alternative theories such as Irigaray’s notion of a fluid, interstitial relationship between mother and child, eschewing the polarities of fusion and separation (see Irigaray 1984/1992), would suggest that matricide and ensuing melancholy might be a contingent, socially conditioned, rather than necessary path for subjective maturation. Seen from this point of view, rather than being ascribed to a putatively ‘natural’ process of separation as the psycho-spatial prerequisite for mature adult subjectivity, melancholy ought to be situated clearly within a field of social power relations, ranging in scope from mother-child relations to larger political configurations. This critique may explain the ambivalent character of language in Kristeva’s theory of melancholy. Kristeva suggests that the depressive process can be resolved by regarding language as a “counterdepressant”. Language may thus function, paradoxically, as both symptom and palliative. The word always stands in for a thing which it is not and cannot be. It re-presents something, which by virtue of its own place-taking, is rendered absent. Language stands in for the lost

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object. Accession to language in the form of the Symbolic is a moment of loss of access to the unformed Semiotic. But at the same time, by virtue of its stand-in function, language and psychoanalytical dialogue can also become a transitional space for the mourning subject, helping the movement from the static moment of depression to a dynamism of continued existence: life goes on. Kristeva is careful to stress that literary production does not replace psychoanalysis as a therapeutic tool. Literary creation does not offer an “elaboration” in the form of the “consciousness raising” of psychoanalysis. Rather, literary creation works more by catharsis and sublimation (Soleil noir 34-5/Black Sun 23-24). It stands at one remove from the more everyday process of the ‘talking cure’, pointing in its direction, elucidating its processes and structures, but never taking its place. It is here that a central divergence in Kristeva’s work, between the avant-garde literary text and the everyday language of anguish, despair and psychoanalytic conversation, begins to come to the fore. While the literary text continues to manifest the resurgence of archaic pre-linguistic structures within the Symbolic, psychoanalysis, with its emphasis upon the hic-and-nunc of analytic dialogue, shifts towards an immanent model of psychic life. The latter trend becomes increasingly prominent in Kristeva’s work, and brings her ever closer to the spatial thought of the late Foucault and of Deleuze and Guattari. If depression, the clinging onto loss, is put in the long-term perspective of the very constitution of the subject by a process of separation, then it must be regarded as being symptomatic of a broader structure. Depression may be a sign not merely of a punctual loss, but more globally, of the subject’s subjection to loss. Loss, in this view, is the very condition of possibility of subjectivity. Neurosis, the ‘normal’ condition of all well-adjusted post-Oedipal subjects, is characterized by a stoic, albeit anxious, acceptance of that loss. Depression is merely the acute state of an otherwise chronic condition. These two terms could be seen simply as graduations upon a scale of bereavement. Such a regime would admit of calibrations, but not of exceptions to a tragic regime deemed to be our ineluctable destiny. From La Révolution du langage poétique onwards, says Liz Grosz, Kristeva “makes explicit the unspeakable cost of representation, which requires the child’s abandonment of the immediacy of its pleasures and experiences, together with the loss of the most privileged and powerful of all its love objects” (Grosz 1989: 231). By

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Soleil noir, however, the traversal of the Oedipal phase, the relinquishment of the chora and the Semiotic for the Symbolic is no longer simply accepted as a norm, but is questioned as a repressive and destructive social mechanism. My choice of an Australian indigenous anecdote as an exemplar of depression attempts to index the roots of depression in worldly structures of power and powerlessness. Such an example casts into question the stoic acceptance of loss as the human condition, and as the very medium we inhabit as speaking beings. As early as the 1980s, Kristeva’s work on depression already displays the contours of a refusal of norms of adjustment and integration which erupts in her later works on revolt and revolution. A subjective space patterned from the outset by bereavement, and forever condemned to labour under the sign of mourning, appears to be more and more untenable for her. Increasingly, semiotics rediscovers its legacy of resistance in the upsurging of the Semiotic.

The foreigner, the insurgent In Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, in a parody of Boccacio’s Decamerone, four people gather in a ruined Renaissance villa in the Tuscan countryside during the last days of World War Two. The villa has been scarred by the recent combats: “Some rooms could not be entered because of rubble. One bomb crater allowed moon and rain into the library – where there was in one corner a permanently soaked armchair” (Ondaatje 1992: 7-8). The ruined villa is a synecdoche for European civilization with its now discredited Renaissance and Enlightenment legacy. But with its gaping mortar-shell holes, “wounds” in its walls (Ondaatje 1992: 11), the villa also figures the warring European nations and their shredded borders and boundaries. The four refugees from a war that has moved north are a Canadian nurse, an Indian bomb-disposal specialist, an Italian-Canadian criminal who has been tortured as a spy – and an English patient dying slowly of severe burns to the whole body: the “man burned black. Who turned out to be, up close, an Englishman” (Ondaatje 1992: 85), is, however, neither English nor white. If Englishness has long been the acme of whiteness, both categories are seriously confuted by Ondaatje’s English patient. His Englishness is merely attributed: by association with a group of British 1930 expedition members in the West-

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ern Desert; or by identification with his lover Katherine Clifton and by appropriation of her husband’s place and name (Ondaatje 1992: 250); or, finally, by perverse opposition to the nation against whom he took up arms for the German forces in North Africa. He appears to acquire his Englishness by a conglomeration of operations (association, identification, appropriation, opposition) which collectively lay bare the artifice of nationality. “Everything about him was very English except for the fact that his body was tarred black, a bogman from history among the interrogating officers” (Ondaatje 1992: 96). These “things about him”, so many metonymies by which nationality is constructed, are stripped away: “here they were shedding skins” (Ondaatje 1992: 117). His is a scorched “black body” (Ondaatje 1992: 3), the colour of Englishness reversed into the very colour of the colonial other against which whiteness has perennially defined itself. The dying man, Almásy, has acquired his Englishness at school in England (Ondaatje 1992: 165), making it merely a prosthetic addition to a Hungarian identity, a nationality in turn generically unstable. He and the others are all “international bastards – born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives” (Ondaatje 1992: 176). Englishness is thus an accretion, scorched off by the burns. But it is also a supplement, that which buttresses the ‘deeper’ identity of the permanently fluid Hungarian identity, not unlike the tannic acid sprayed on his burns at the hospital in Pisa “that hardened into a protective shell over his raw skin” (Ondaatje 1992: 48). Ondaatje’s English patient, the burned man, embodies, quite literally, Kristeva’s archetypical foreigner. Her foreigner bears one of the marks of the abject, one of the triggers of disgust: the loss of skin. “L’étranger est un écorché sous sa carapace d’activité ou d’infatigable ‘travailleur imigré’” (Etrangers à nous-mêmes 16) The English translation gives: “The foreigner is hypersensitive beneath his armour as activist or tireless ‘immigrant worker’” (Strangers to Ourselves 6) – thereby translating “écorché” figuratively and losing the brutal force of Kristeva’s “scorched” or “flayed” outsider. The foreigner is the flayed person, stripped of the protective epidermal coating of the nation, ejected from the national nest, ab-ject and vulnerable in a new environment. The foreigner, stripped naked to the raw flesh, is hated by the host nation because it reminds the natives of the fragility of their own outer mantle. The uncomfortable relationship between the

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foreigner and the local was neatly summarized by the German antiracism slogan of the 1980s that ran “Everyone is a foreigner – almost everywhere” [“Jeder ist ein Ausländer – fast überall”]. The foreigner is that which must be ‘abjected’, the foreign body in the commonwealth which reminds me of the fragility of the boundaries of the self, and the porosity of the boundaries of the nation. The fact that the foreigner can enter the host-country is often taken by the natives as evidence of the generosity of the nation (for which foreigners are proverbially ungrateful), thus pandering to national narcissism. But the fact of intrusion also raises a more disturbing suspicion that perhaps somehow the borders have failed in their essential function. They have failed to keep out that which does not belong, suggesting that the nation is somehow crumbling. The bounded self and the bounded nation exist in a mutually reinforcing symbiosis. I know who I am because I know where I belong, and the nation knows who it is because it is recognized by its citizens. The foreigner arrives on the border, and, stripped of her or his boundaries of national or personal identity, implicitly poses the uncomfortable question of my or our own boundaries: “Etrangement, l’étranger nous habite: il est la face cachée de notre identité, l’espace qui ruine notre demeure” (Etrangers 9) [“Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode” (Strangers 1)]. Kristeva highlights the symbiosis between national identity and individual identity by throwing them up against that polysemic entity which conflates in itself the threat to the individual and to the polis: l’étranger, the foreigner and the foreign space, abroad. Elsewhere and the immigrant from elsewhere ruins our dwelling [demeure], reactivates our forgotten mobility, and thus opens up the space of our identity to its constitutive other term. “Strangely, the stranger/strangeness dwells within us” [“Etrangement, l’étranger nous habite”] – strangely, because it is estranging to discover that what we took to be “we”, “us”, “here”, has been infiltrated by “them”, “there”. The “other space” of the Semiotic surges up in the national Symbolic, sowing disorder, but also revealing the conceptual ground upon which the Home, and by extension, its Homeowner, is constructed. It has become a political platitude to say that the homeland must be protected, and ironically, this is deeply true. For the homeland is

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indeed a vulnerable entity. “Homeland security” is under threat. Not merely because masked fanatics are everywhere on the prowl, but because the homeland has never ceased to be marked by the loss of that other space upon which it is predicated. The homeland is unwillingly connected to that abjected other realm in two interdependent senses: upon the other space as its ongoing but unavowed material precondition (often in a quite pragmatically literal sense: where does our unskilled, underpaid labour come from?), and upon its ongoing and willed erasure, as the rhetorical condition for the hermetic closure of the nation (whence the real meaning of the German slogan, “Germany is not a land of immigration” [“Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland”]). Because the other space as economic pre-condition and other space as erased contrast run at odds to each other, the homeland as that which is constructed out of the forgotten relationship with poor neighbours cannot but be a fragile entity. Into the conglomerate term ‘home-land’ something else is constantly threatening to intrude which will lay bare the spurious singularity of the term by inserting a hyphen. The hyphen, the connector, reveals within the concept its unseen dependence upon its environment. ‘Home-land’ would signal the difference at the heart of the nation which arises out of its constitutive relationship with the “Inquiétante, l’étrangété est en nous: nous sommes nos propres étrangers, nous sommes divisés” (Etrangers 268)]. [“Uncanny, foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners, we are divided” (Strangers 181)]. The unhomely influence must be warded off, in an avatar of the primeval spasms of abjection: “le moi archaïque, narcissique, non encore délimité par le monde extérieur, projette hors de lui ce qu’il éprouve en lui-même comme dangereux ou déplaisant en soi, pour en fair un double étranger, inquiétant, démoniaque” (Etrangers 271) [“the archaic, narcissistic self, not yet demarcated by the outside world, projects out of itself what it experiences as dangerous or unpleasant in itself, making of it an alien double, uncanny and demoniacal” (Strangers 183)]. The solution is simple: expulsion, extradition, deportation. In order words, the abject must be cast out. At the time of writing Etrangers à nous-mêmes, such exclusionist stances were clearly un-

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tenable in a Europe of increasing political integration, but also increasing racism. Victor Burgin comments: In this changed space, this new geometry, the abject can no longer be banished beyond some charmed, perfectly Euclidean circle. The postmodern spaces of our ‘changing places’ can now barely accommodate the old ghettos, which are going the way of the walled city-state. (Burgin 1996: 56)

By this stage of Kristeva’s reflection, it is becoming clear that the space of loss and abjection that underlies subjectivity also patterns social spaces at a macro-level. The same parameters of self-definition by exclusion and ejection appear to similarly constitute the macrosubjectivity of the nation. Abjection with national dimension founds the regimes of exclusion which increasingly marginalize large tracts of the European population (the poor within the gates), not to mention those who live beyond the borders of Europe (Sens et non-sens 1415/Sense and Non-Sense 7-8). Loss is not a given, it is created politically and institutionally. It is co-opted by nationalist rhetoric, whipped up by the incantations of terrorist threats. We can take the measure of this new perspective in Kristeva by examining to one of her late texts, a talk on the foreigner as “translator” published in L’Avenir d’une révolte. The talk begins with a meditation upon the foreigner as a “translator” whose translations do not erase the traces of the source language: “L’étranger est un traducteur non idéal: on repère toujours, plus ou moins, ‘quelque chose’ par où s’insinue sa différence” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 61-2) [“The foreigner is a nonideal translator: one can almost always locate something whereby his difference seeps through” (Intimate Revolt 241)]. Abruptly, then, she switches into autobiographical mode: “Supposons que je sois ce traducteur” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 65) [“Suppose that I am this translator” (Intimate Revolt 244)]. What then follows is a remarkably frank account of the loss but persistence of Kristeva’s native Bulgarian. It is worth noting the striking structural similarities with the corporeal theory of the maternal, matrix-like chora of two decades earlier: Je n’ai pas perdu ma langue maternelle. Elle me revient, de plus en plus difficilement, je l’avoue, en rêve. […] Dans ce deuil infini, où la langue et le corps ressuscitent dans les battements d’un français gref-

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fé, j’ausculte le cadavre toujours chaud de ma mémoire maternelle. (L’Avenir d’une révolte 65, 69) [I have not forgotten my maternal language. It comes back to me with increasing difficulty, I must admit - in my dreams; […] In this infinite mourning, where language and the body rise from the dead in the pulse of a grafted French, I place an ear to the still-warm cadaver of my maternal memory. (Intimate Revolt 242, 245)]

Kristeva’s description evinces all the dualism of the theory of the chora. French is the language of designation, of proposition, of logic, of sociability: “Nommer l’être me fait être: corps et âme, je vis en français” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 66) [“To name being allows me to be: I live in French, body and soul” (Intimate Revolt 243)]; “j’aime la frappe latine du concept, l’obligation de choisir pour tracer la chute classique de l’argument” (L’Avenir d’une révolte71) [“I like the Latin touch of the concept, the obligation to choose in order to trace the classical cadence of the argument” (Intimate Revolt 246)]. Her childhood Bulgarian resurges, an unruly and irrational force from ‘below’ which disturbs the regularities of French. With “les ambiguïtés lexicales et les sens pluriels, souvent indécidables, de l’idiome bulgare, insuffisamment rompu au cartésianisme, en résonance avec la prière du cœur et la nuit du sensible” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 71) [“the lexical ambiguities and often vague plural meanings of the Bulgarian idiom, insufficiently severed from Cartesianism, in resonance with the prayer of the heart and the darkness of the sensory”(Intimate Revolt 245-6 )]. French may impose an argumentative structure, but it is in narrative that the influence of Bulgarian makes itself felt: Pourtant, lorsque l’intrique s’en mêle, c'est-à-dire qu’à chaque fois que l’Être me revient comme une histoire, […] naturellement celle d’un songe, d’une passion ou d’un meurtre, alors une houle qui n’est pas des mots, avec sa musique bien à elle, m’impose une syntaxe maladroite, et ces métaphores abyssales qui, si elles n’ont rien à voir avec la politesse et l’évidence française, infiltrent ma sérénité d’une byzantine inquiétude. (L’Avenir d’une révolte 66-7) [Yet when plot interferes, that is, each time being returns to me like a story […] then a surge that is not composed of words, with its own music, imposes an awkward syntax on me. These abysmal metaphors, which have nothing to do with French politeness and clarity, infiltrate my serenity with a byzantine uneasiness. (Intimate Revolt 243)]

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Should we have any doubts about the analogies with the theory of the Semiotic and its resurgence within the Symbolic, Kristeva formulates this uneasy coexistence of two languages in specifically architectural terms which resonate with her earlier insistence that the chora is a space: Mais par-dessus cette crypte enfouie, sur ce réservoir stagnant qui croupit et se délite, j’ai bâti une nouvelle demeure que j’habite et qui m’habite, et dans laquelle se déroule ce qu’on pourrait appeler, non sans prétention évidemment, la vraie vie de l’esprit et de la chair. (L’Avenir d’une révolte 66) [But above this hidden crypt, on this stagnant and swamplike reservoir, I have built a new dwelling that I inhabit and that inhabits me, where what one might call, somewhat pretentiously, the true life of the mind and flesh unfolds. (Intimate Revolt 243)]

By striking an architectural tenor here, Kristeva underlines the analogy with the earlier spatial theory of Semiotic and Symbolic, of chora and socially utilitarian language. From the horizontal space of the nation infiltrated by the never-quite fluent foreigner, with its frequent topoi of dwelling, Kristeva’s account gradually modulates towards a vertical paradigm of multiple linguistic spaces. French is erected above the buried but not dead body of Bulgarian, the ab-jected putrefying other. That other language continues to surge up into the strict logic and clarity of French as a musicality, a disturbance of syntax, but also as a contamination, thus appropriating the terms of the choraSymbolic theory. A significant change has occurred, however, in this theoretical avatar. Both components of the dual system are located in the social world. Both languages are now part of the Symbolic. Bulgarian, albeit the mother tongue and intimately attached to the childhood world, is clearly always already part of a social structure, and not part of a presocial womb-world. If there is a Semiotic at work here (and Kristeva’s choice of metaphors enforces this analogy) it is a Semiotic, however, which is lodged, from the outset, in the Symbolic, not before or outside it. The previous duality has been blurred. From now on, there is only one realm in which the production of the social takes place, and that is the social itself. If there is transcendence, it is one which is immanent, through and through.

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What may appear as a philosophical subtlety is of considerable political importance. By abolishing the duality the earlier theory of the chora, and situating the Semiotic within the Symbolic, Kristeva indicates that she wants to have no truck with dualisms of any sort – for it is on the basis of such dualisms that the very nationalism and racisms that she opposes can be erected. The hierarchy that she experiences between French and Bulgarian is one which, though she does not say it explicitly, arises from the resolute monolingualism of French universalism and republicanism: Nulle part on n’est plus étranger qu’en France. […] Même lorsqu’il est légalement et administrativement accepté, l’étranger n’est pas pour autant admis dans les familles. Son usage malencontreux de la langue française le déconsidère profondément – consciemment ou non – aux yeux des autochtones qui s’identifient plus que dans les autres pays à leur parler poli et chéri. (Etrangers 57-8) [Nowhere is one more foreigner than in France. […] Even when they are legally and administratively accepted, they are not for all that received into families. Their awkward use of the French language discredits them utterly – consciously or not – in the eyes of the natives, who identify more than in other countries with their beloved, polished speech. (Strangers 38-9)]

France is a nation which resolutely marginalizes other languages for the simple reason that French understands itself as the universal language of reason – of the revolution, of the Encyclopédie, of the Emlightenment. The openness which allowed Kristeva to make her home in the French academic system (“Et pourtant, nulle part on n’est mieux étranger qu’en France” – Etrangers 58-9 [“And yet, one is nowhere better as a foreigner than in France” – Strangers 39]) was and is an openness predicated on taking on the stamp of humanity, that is to say, of Frenchness. To live in France is to insert oneself into an ambient identity which can only comprehend its others as the absence of identity. The immanent transcendence which Kristeva arrives at in her political translations of the theory of the Semiotic is a pragmatic response to the immanent transcendence of a French nationalism incapable of admitting of culture outside its own complacent universalism – one which thereby installs the most arrogant dualism possible. Such dualisms were reflected, for instance, in the comments made in 2005 by the Ministry of the Interior, and future Prime Minister, Sarkozy, when he branded the immigrant inhabitants of the poor housing estates

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on the outskirts of Paris (the banlieues or cites) as “canaille” [“scum”]. Against this overbearing universalism, with its racist scions, Kristeva poses a foreignness which is for her, from the outset, the very condition of subjectivity: “La psychanalyse m’a conduite à penser que c’est l’exil qui me construit, et non pas une appartenance” [“Psychoanalysis led me to think that it was exile which constructed me, not belonging”] (Au risque de la pensée 26). As such, foreignness also provides a model for social identity and by extension, for responsible citizenship. If there is any form of integration, national identity, collective belonging possible, it is only upon the condition of accepting the foreigner-within, the outside-inside at the heart of society. It is that element of otherness which may liberate a collective identity from an overly rigid adherence to its own origins, and open it up to evolution and flexibility.

Kristeva’s Kehre What spaces come after these spaces of loss? An answer comes from the protagonist of Kristeva’s novel Possessions, who declares, “J’étais sûre que mon père m’avait aimée” (Possessions 55) [“I was sure my father had loved me” (Possessions 38)]. In Histoires d’amour, the lost, banished or abjected pre-Oedipal mother is counterweighed by an idealized pre-Oedipal father. Identification with this ideal figure, one diametrically opposed to the punitive castrator of the Oedipus complex, founds the capacity to love (Histoires 56-61/Tales 41-45). Upon the basis of this positive relation of pre-Oedipal idealization, selfhood, fragile but potentially resilient, can emerge into being. An index of this trunk of selfhood is evident in Kristeva’s own retention of the patronymic (albeit feminized) in her authorial identity, rather than her French marital name (Le Langage, cet inconnu was originally published under the name of Joyau, before reappearing in the Points paperback series as a work by Kristeva). Histoires d’amour sketches a different type of primordial intersubjective space which is re-activated throughout the subject’s history. This primordial space, like that of abjection, comes hard on the heels of the chora. However, in contrast to abjection, it does not react to the amorphous, chaotic character of the chora. Rather, it finds in the

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chora the presence of a parental figure. Where abjection rejected the heterogeneity and fluidity of the chora space so as to constitute a discrete selfhood, in Kristeva’s theory, pre-Oedipal paternity retains the reassuring proximity and warmth of that first space. The chora as positive rather than negative space is exploited here to give the contours for a proactive adult subjectivity. The affirming relationship with the pre-Oedipal father reemerges in the transference relationship of the psychoanalytic therapy, which Kristeva understands as the workshop of a restored selfhood. Whereas Kristeva’s earlier work on the “subject in process” [sujet-en procès] deployed an unsubtle emphasis upon the legal resonances of procès [trial] to stress the deconstruction of bourgeois subjectivity, the new phase foregrounds the re-constructive character of psychoanalysis. This conception of psychoanalysis posits the viability of “une humanité adulte qui essaie de compter sur ses propres forces devenues disponibles grâce à l’accès du langage aux inscriptions les plus inaccessibles de la pulsion et aux représentations les plus toublantes du désir” (Au commencement était l’amour 73) [“Grownups who attempt to rely on our own strengths, made available by the ability of language to reach even the most inaccessible traces of instinct and the most troubling representations of desire” (In the Beginning was Love 56)]. Kristeva stresses that the triangular space of the therapy (analyst-patient-patient’s object(s) of love), is one where the ongoing work of self-making is carried out in a privileged manner: Car si je n’aime pas mes patients réellement”, she writes, speaking as an analyst, “que pourrais-je entendre d’eux, que pourrais-je leur dire? L’amour de contre-transfert est ma capacité de me mettre à leur place: de regarder, de rêver, de souffrir come si j’étais elle, comme si j’étais lui” (Histoires 21) [“For if I do not really love my patients, what could I understand in them, what could I tell them? Countertransference love is my ability to put myself in their place; looking, dreaming, suffering as if I were she, as if I were he” (Tales 11)]. The processual character of the chora is not, however, relinquished entirely in this workshop-theory of subjectivity. The task of reconstructing the self is not something that can be achieved once and for all. It remains, patently, a work-in-progress, no different in this respect to the earlier concept of “selfhood as process” (the sujet-en-procès) (Polylogue 55-106/Tel Quel Reader 13278). “When barbarism reigns”, Kristeva writes in her dystopian novel Le vieil homme et les loups,

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In modern times, one site where this concept of ‘selfhood as journey’ can be experienced is in the transference relationship of psychotherapy. The transference relationship is a space in which the patientobject relationship is mapped onto the patient-analyst relationship, and can be “worked through” and “elaborated” in a safe environment, on the basis of “recognition”: “A partir de votre désir ainsi reconnu, vous êtes libre de construire votre réalité comme bordure plus ou moins fragile de votre vie amoureuse” (Histoires 18) [“Once you have thus identified your desire, you are free to construct your reality as a more or less fragile border of your love life” (Tales 8)]. “Recognition”, of course, is a polysemic term. It is worth lingering on it a moment, in order to unpack some of the meanings which have accrued to it during its history of usage within psychoanalysis. Recognition can denote on the one hand cognitive understanding, but also on the other the admission of existence of an entity. Both aspects of the notion of recognizing desire are drawn by Kristeva from Lacan’s work. The cognitive notion of recognition clearly echoes the negative rhetoric of “misrecognition” which is at the heart of the concept of the mirror stage: the “méconnaissances constutives du moi” (Lacan 1966: 99) [“ego’s constitutive misrecognitions” (Lacan 2007a: 80)]. But it also resonates with the more positive ontological notion that what the subject most desires is to be recognized by another subject’s desire (Lacan 1966: 813-15/Lacan 2007a: 688-691). Here the sense of having one’s existence recognized is at stake, albeit filtered through the aporia of desire. “Recognition” also alludes to Lacan’s seminar on the “ethics of psychoanalysis”. This “ethics” does not promise the fulfilment of desire, but none the less demands that the subject be loyal to her or his desire – that she or he recognize that desire. Again, both facets of rec-

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ognition (cognitive and ontological) are at work here. Lacan enjoins the subject “ne pas céder sur son désir” [“not [to] relinquish her or his desire”] (Lacan 1986: 68-9). The odd negative form in which this positive injunction is couched is a stylistic device corresponding to the stoical pursuit of desire (ontological recognition) propelled by the knowledge that it is “there” (not there) that her or his inevitably lacunary meaning resides (cognitive recognition). The object of desire cannot be attained, but in following the path traced by the constantly retreating markers of desire, a path which is nothing other than a chain of signifiers, one will learn (recognize) who one is (not). Love can be understood as just such a process of engagement with an other or with others under the difficult conditions of cognitive self-honesty – recognizing the flimsiness of our desire at the same time as recognizing its central organizing agency. Desire and love here display the same characteristics which Kristeva later celebrates in narrativity: intersubjectivity, undeniable fictionality, but also the capacity to afford a subject a sense of direction and a constitutive meaning. These multifaceted processes of recognition which traverse love are all the more difficult today given that, according to Kristeva, “c’est le système même de reconnaissance-déni qui est en crise” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 54) [“it is the system of recognition-denial itself that is in crisis” (Intimate Revolt 236)]. It becomes increasingly difficult to know who we are because, in our simulacrum-society, it is also increasingly difficult to know who we are not. This dilemma is manipulated in the most facile and stereotypical manner by populist politicians. In Australia, for instance, “we” are not those who behave in an “unAustralian” way, like refugees in desert internment camps, sewing their lips closed or embarking upon hunger strikes to “manipulate” public opinion. Other more complex forms of the ‘not’ which might disturb rather than cement identity, forms of uncomfortable “recognition”, are difficult to activate in today’s culture. Love, perhaps, is one of the last bastions of “re-cognition” to eschew the simplistic and facile categories of stereotypical identity. The “notness” of selfhood which is the difficult object of recognition can be construed in different ways – either as a space of pure illusion to be put on trial (in the juridical sense of procès) or as a fluid space of becoming (in the processual sense of procès). Subjective space is then to be understood as a site of emergence without closure: “Wo es war, soll Ich werden. Là où fut ça, il me faut advenir” (Lacan

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1966: 416-7, 524, also 801) [“Where it was, I must come into being” (Lacan 2007a: 347, 435, also 678) said Freud, ventriloquized by Lacan. In other words, at the place where the Id was, I should become what I am. The place of selfhood is a pathway traced by the pursuit of unattainable desire, so that the self must be ultimately regarded as a journey without maps, and without a goal. Desire, if “recognized” in the multifarious senses sketched above, is the vector which guides us in navigating across the difficult terrain upon which love has its only chance of thriving. But what sort of desire is being staged here as the spatialized framework for subjectivity? According to Lacan, it is by embarking upon that futile journey, in full knowledge of its futility, do we accept our incompletion: “Le sujet ne s’y engage-t-il pas dans une dépossession toujours plus grande de cet être de lui-même […] il finit par reconnaître que cet être n’a jamais été que son œuvre dans l’imaginaire et que cet œuvre déçoit en lui toute certitude” (Lacan 1966: 249) [“Doesn’t the subject become involved here in an ever greater dispossession of himself as a being […] he ends up recognizing that this being has never been anything more than his own construction [oeuvre] in the imaginary and that this construction undercuts all certainty in him” (Lacan 2007a: 207)]. Desire, in the Lacanian axiology of human existence, thus marks out a tragic anti-ontological destiny to be stoically endured from birth to death. In Kristeva’s version of this injunction, however, it is not the facticity of the “imaginary work” of selfhood which counts, but the fact that there is a work of selfhood. Taking up, in her late writings, the notion of the chora and its manifestation in avant-garde literature, Kristeva specifies, cette musicalité infralinguistique que vise tout langage poétique, devient la visée principale de la poésie moderne, une ‘psychose expérimentale’. Je veux dire par là qu’elle est œuvre d’un sujet, mais d’un sujet qui se met en procès: c’est par le retour à l’archéologie de son unité, mené dans le matériau même de la langue et de la pensée, qu’elle atteint des régions risquées où cette unité se néantité. (L’Avenir d’une révolte 26) [this infralinguistic musicality that all poetic language aims for, becomes the main objective of modern poetry, an experimental psychosis. By this I mean that psychosis is the work of a subject, but a subject in process. It is through the archaeology of this unity, conducted in the material of language and thought itself, that the subject reaches

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the hazardous regions where this unity is annihilated. (Intimate Revolt 10)]

There is no doubt about the existence of the subject (“it is the work of a subject”), it is the self-scrutiny of its own existence (“a subject puts itself on trial/a subject which launches itself into a process”) which is important here. For Kristeva, we have a life fabricated out of the pursuit of desire, a necessarily fraught undertaking. This life is a fabric woven along the “bordure plus ou moins fragile de votre vie amoureuse” (Histoires 18) [“more or less fragile border of your love life” (Tales 8)]. Life is a margin, a peripheral residue, a realm of knotting and unknotting. The trajectory of human living takes place in a border zone where the braiding of selfhood goes hand in hand with its inevitable fraying. Risk, then, is the hallmark of subjectivity. But the risky liminal space in which subjectivity is constructed and reconstructed is counterweighed by the central anchor of desire-as-process – a process construed not as lack but as love.

Revolt, she said. The process of cautiously optimistic construction, celebrated in Kristeva’s writings on love, continues to be the privileged terrain of analysis in her recent writings on revolt. In Sens et non-sens de la révolte she begins her analysis by stressing the temporal and spatial resonances (rupture on the one hand, circularity on the other) of the term across its etymological history (Sens et non-sens 6-10/Sense and Non-Sense 1-3). These spatial and temporal aspects can then be applied to the subjectivity of the individual-in-revolt, from the very earliest episode of revolt, that of the Oedipal revolt against the father. This revolt is not the revolt of the Oedipal narrative in its classic denouement. This revolt is not curtailed by the threat of castration and deflected into the subject’s submission to social rules and regulation, with the concomitant repression of taboo desires. Rather, revolt in Kristeva’s recent work stands alone, prior to suppression and repression, as a powerful impulse by which the subject constructs itself. This construction is not that of a closed, stable, identity, but is one

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which, in revolting in some ways against identity itself, works towards a porous selfhood open to the world and to alterity: Déserrer ces enclos du ‘propre’ et de l’ ‘identique’, du ‘vrai’ et du ‘faux’, du ‘bien’ et du ‘mal’, devient une nécessité de survie, car les organisations symboliques, comme les organismes, perdurent à condition de se rénover et de jouir. (Sens et non-sens 31) [Loosening the strictures concerning ‘one’s own’ and the ‘identical’, ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ becomes necessary for survival, because symbolic organizations, like organisms, endure on the condition of renewal and joy. (Sense and Non-Sense 18)]

Revolt emerges here as a potent means of structuring the “l’espace subjectif” (Sens et non-sens 17) [“subjective space” (Sense and NonSense 9)] by a mode of ‘negativity’ which Kristeva has seen as a positive force from La Révolution du langage poétique onwards, and to which she has returned as recently as L’Avenir d’une révolte, written in pensive commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of May 1968 (L’Avenir d’une révolte 23-6/Intimate Revolt 223-4). Clearly revolt has graduated from the inevitable subordination to the Symbolic and the paternal law which hampered the earlier theories of the Semiotic. Equally important, in the passing reference to the “propre”, with its concomitant “propreté” and thus connection to the theory of disgust, it is patent that revolt has moved beyond the limitations of abjection. Revolt is no longer predicated upon a self-vitiating notion of matricide posited as a prerequisite of subjectivation in the theory of abjection and evoked subsequently as a cause of melancholy. The all-too-easy adherences to notions of the primeval space as a space of loss have been repudiated for a revolt as a site of unmitigated positivity. Revolt may be understood as the movement by which selfhood marks itself, to anticipate upon Deleuze and Guattari, as an intensity in search of other intensities. In the re-turning upon oneself which occurs in the self-interrogation of psychoanalysis, Kristeva notes the emergence of selfhood as a “singularity”: Par le récit de l’association libre et dans la ré-volte régénérant contre et avec l’ancienne Loi (interdits familiaux, surmoi, idéaux, limites oedipiennes ou narcissiques, etc.), advienne l’autonomie singulière de chacun, ainsi que son lien renouvelé à l’autre. (L’Avenir d’une révolte 22)

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[Through a narrative of free association and in the regenerative revolt against the old law (familial taboos, superego, ideals, oedipal or narcissistic limits, etc.) comes the singular autonomy of each, as well as a renewed link with the other. (Intimate Revolt 8)]

The singularity which comes to the fore in the talking therapy is plenitude. It emerges not in the ultimate moment of oedipal submission, and integration into society on the basis of renunciation of desire, but rather, in the preceding, penultimate moment of self-delineation, of self-marking in the very act of rejecting authority. It is a positive event, not the negative moment of loss under the order of threatened castration. Deleuze and Guattari, as we will see, condemn individual identity because it is posited upon Oedipal normativity. Kristeva defines “singular autonomy” precisely as an intensity untrammelled by that moment of capitulation. Rather, subjective space is constituted in a process of uprising which marks it out as an elevation above the surrounding landscape of collective space. In Deleuzian terms subjective space can be understood as a “signature” – a mark which establishes the unmistakeable neighbourhood of a subject. Lacan declares subjectivity nothing more than a signifier (“un signifiant, c’est ce que représente le sujet pour un autre signifiant” - “a signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier” [Lacan 1966: 819/Lacan 2007a: 694]). Thus he inscribes the gravestone for the signified of the self, its substantive content, meaning and identity. He thereby obliges us to understand subjectivity according to an elegiac mode. In her earlier work, Kristeva similarly highlights a subject dissolved by the work of the subconscious and a sign thus negated by the subject’s ignorance of itself: “Dans cet espace autre où les lois logiques de la parole sont ébranlées, le sujet se dissout et à la place du signe c’est le heurt des signifiants qui s’instaure” [“In this other space where the logical laws of language are unseated, the subject is dissolved and in the place of the sign we find a collision of signifiers cancelling each other out”] (6KPLHLZWLNK 273). In her earlier thinking, the sign of the subject is shattered by the concatenation of signifiers cut loose of their signifieds. But according to the more celebratory mode of her late works, subjectivity is a sign, a zone of intensity happily unaffected by the tragic cleavage of signifier and signified, a sign in all its plenitude for other signs.

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The sign which Kristeva particularly privileges in this emergence of the subject is the sign minted in psychoanalytic therapy. Within the ‘talking cure’ a revolt, a reflective, retrospective re-turn to the past via narrative, recuperates the doomed revolt of the Oedipal moment in its conformist guise. The instance of psychic re-structuring rescues the moment of happy revolt initiating the Oedipal narrative. For this reason, Kristeva claims, psychoanalysis must be preserved as one of the creative sites in our hyperconformist times: “A côté et en plus de la culture de l’image […] la culture des mots, la narration et la place qu’elle réserve à la méditation, me paraît être une variante de révolte minimale” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 18) [“Alongside and in addition to the culture of the image […] the culture of words, the narrative and the place it reserves for meditation, seems to me to offer a minimal variant of revolt” (Intimate Revolt 5)]. The sign of the subject which emerges in the space of therapy is a sign whose subversive potential is no longer understood under the aegis of a psychoanalytic conformism, but as a vital function of a residual spirit of revolt.

Telling experiences The later Kristeva is a story-teller. Perhaps, through her long years of semiotic analysis, she has always been a reader, but as an analyst, she has become a listener, and a reteller of the stories she has heard. The psychoanalytic case-studies scattered through Kristeva’s cultural analyses in Pouvoirs d’horreur, Soleil noir, Histoires d’amour and Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme are anecdotes which foretell her emergence as fully fledged novelist in Les Samouraïs (1990), Le vieil homme et les loups (1991), Possessions (1996) and Meurtre à Byzance (2004). Indeed, many of the descriptions of the characters in a novel such as Possessions could have been taken from the earlier psychoanalytic works, so similar is their style and structure. These stories are ubiquitous in her late writing. The frame-narrator of Les Samouraïs, the psychoanalyst Joëlle Cabarus, laments at the beginning of the novel, “Il n’y a plus d’histoires d’amour” (Les Samouraïs 9) [“There are no love stories anymore” (The Samurai 1)]. But the novel, like the study which also bears the title Histoires d’amour goes on to rectify this lack, multiplying tenfold its narratives of troubled selfhood.

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Kristeva is tacitly implying the generation of narrativity is the very stuff of subjectivity. In a deliberately gauche instance of self-reflexivity, Cabarus records in her diary that the other authorial alter-ego in the novel, the expatriate Eastern European academic Olga, has just published a children’s novel entitled Les Samouraïs. All novels, Joëlle adds, are a form of children’s literature: En definitive, toute literature est peut-être faite pour enfants. On dit que les romans sont achetés par les femmes. Je dirais: par les femmesenfants, par les hommes-enfants. Il faut un don de rêverie naïve pour fabriquer encore de l’émotion avec ces signes ridés que sont les mots. Après tout, cela ne vaut peut-être la peine d’écrire que pour refaire le jeu de vie et de mort à l’usage d’enfants que nous oublions d’être. (Les Samouraïs 458-9) [Perhaps, when you get right down to it, all literature is really for children. They say that nearly all novels are bought by women. I’d say by child-women and child-men. It takes a talent for innocent reverie to create emotion still out of those wrinkled old signs we call words. And after all, perhaps it’s only worth bothering to write in order to rewrite the game of life and death for children – the children we forget that we ourselves are. (The Samurai 340)]

The apparent clumsiness of this mise-en-abyme, from a writer so well versed in the devices of literary creation is perhaps no accident. It may aim to provoke a reflection upon the naivety of literature in general. Naivety, the youthful condition of not-yet-knowing, is perhaps the very raison d’être of narrative – the openness of existential possibilities yet to be unfolded. Narrative may be deeply symptomatic of ongoing processes of maturation and transformation. In an interview in which she comments on Olga’s children’s book, Kristeva speaks of “cette écriture de la plenitude et de l’abondance dans la joie et la souffrance. Puérile, infantile, elle répond […] à l’enfance permanente en nous, à son besoin de contes d’horreur, de contes de fées” [“writing of plenitude and abundance in the midst of joy and suffering. Puerile, childish, it responds to the permanent childhood in us, to its need for horror stories, for fairy stories”] (Lettre ouverte à Harlem Désir 68-9). Fantastic narrative contradicts the stasis of what is for the open horizons of what may come to be, it mobilizes childhood as a futureoriented mode of existence marked by plenitude rather than constric-

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tion. But more needs to be said about the precise mode of configuration of such ontological parameters in their narrative codifications. In this ingenuous mise-en-abyme, Kristeva is obliquely commenting upon the notion that the subject comes to being in narrative. In her work on Hannah Arendt, she suggests that pour que l’histoire vraie devienne une histore racontée, deux conditions inséparables sont nécessaires. D’abord, l’existence d’un interesse dans et par lequel se forment ensuite la mémoire et le témoinage. Le sort du récit depend d’un ‘entre-deux’ où surgit la logique résolutive de la mémorisation comme détachement du vécu ex post facto. A ces conditions seulement, le ‘fait’ peut être révélé en ‘pensée partageable’ par la verbalisation d’une ‘intrigue’. (Hannah Arendt 125) [for a true history to become a narrated history, there are two inseparable conditions. First, the existence of inter-esse within which and through which the second condition is realized. The fate of the narrative depends on an ‘in between’ where we eventually see the resolving logic of memorization as detachment from the lived ex post facto. On these conditions alone, the ‘fact’ can be revealed in ‘shareable thought’ by the verbalization of a ‘plot’. (Hannah Arendt 16-7)]

The ingenuous frankness of Kristeva’s mise-en-abyme in Les Samouraïs signals that it is simply saying what it does. The author introduces herself and her text into the narrative – a performative gesture which puts the subject, quite simply, back into the process of textuality. This gesture directly re-enacts the intersubjective nature of narrative and the narrative character of (inter)subjectivity which Kristeva has stressed from the very beginning of her writing. In her early linguistic textbook, Kristeva underlines the manner in which the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ of linguistic utterance are always mutually constitutive (Le Langage, cet inconnu 40-1). Likewise, Les Samouraïs suggests that it is in the narrating/reading process that selfhood and otherness come to being. In other words, textuality is not a ‘process without a subject’, it is the very opposite: the process by which the subject is constituted. Reading furnishes a mode of meaning-making which is analogous to the manner in which subjectivity is formed from the outset. A similar instance of this unsophisticated but self-mocking mise-en-abyme comes in L’Avenir d’une révolte, where Kristeva, speaking of her work on Proust’s manuscript notes, writes:

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Trop longtemps, un certain nombre de gens (Jakobson, Barthes, Kristeva) ont soutenu contre les salons, les idéologues et les syndicalistes qui s’appropriaient la littérature que celle-ci était un texte. Opération salavatrice, et cependant limitée. Les brouillons peuvent lever le voile sur l’expérience sous-jacente au texte […] [peuvent] reconstituer l’expérience dans le texte. (L’Avenir d’une révolte 80) [For too long, a number of people (Jakobson, Barthes, myself) maintained, against the salons, the ideologues, and syndicalists who appropriated literature, that literature was a text. A salutary process, yet limited. Rough drafts may lift the veil on the experience subjacent to the text […] reconstituting experience in the text. (Intimate Revolt 251)]

Once again, Kristeva, by means of clumsy mise-en-abyme, points to the link between subjectivity, narrative and experience. The mocking distance upon oneself engineered by the use of the third person turns the self into a text, and by the same token, points up the very processes by which subjectivity is constantly being re-made. As Colin Davis comments, “The story deforms what it gives form; in other words, its form is uneasy, precarious, and at best provisional, it never entirely accommodates the material which it nevertheless makes intelligible. Other forms, other stories, are always possible” (Davis 2004:146). The draft text, the scribbled note, the unfinished jottings witness to language in a raw form, also give a view upon the mobility of experience as it traverses and jostles the unfinished subject. Whence her glossing of notes as “a transition from experience to the text” [“Le brouillon: un passage de l’expérience au texte” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 80)]. The scribbled draft mediates between experience and the text, just as we can imagine the subject coming to being along a similar trajectory of processual constitution and re-constitution. Here Kristeva’s work also links up again with the notion of revolt – the term which best describes the unruly emergence of subjectivity and language among others. Narrative, and its correlative (not necessarily its referent), experience, are the central analytic categories with which Kristeva works in her study of revolt. She proposes un enjeu qui consiste à dépasser la notion de texte […] Je m’efforcerai d’introduire, à la place, la notion d’expérience qui comprend le principe de plaisir ainsi que celui de re-naissance de sens pour l’autre, et qui ne saurait s’entendre qu’à l’horizon de l’expérience-révolte. (Sens et non-sens 15-16)

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The return of experience is not to be heralded, as some critics did upon the publication of Foucault’s successor volumes to La Volonté de savoir, as signalling the rehabilitation of a much-maligned Cartesian subject (Merquior 1985: 135ff). On the contrary, experience (and particularly the experience of revolt) stands here as a category of the fluidity, instability, or impulsive dynamism, closely linked to revolt, which is the hallmark of life itself: “Dans des époques que nous sentons obscurément en déclin ou du moins en suspens, le questionnement demeure la seule pensée possible: indice d’une vie simplement vivante” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 11) [“In periods that we vaguely sense to be in decline or at least in suspension, questioning remains the only possible thought: an indication of life that is simply alive” (Intimate Revolt 223)]. Here Kristeva has recourse to concepts taken from systems theory and cybernetics which characterize the human being as an open system maintaining its existence via a positive feedback process (see Morin 1981). All healthy organisms, from the individual subject to the open society, stay alive by taking on board information from outside and integrating it into a system that thereby remains in a constant process of self-adjustment: Comme le concept de ‘processus’ distingue l’histoire moderne de celle de l’Antiquité basée sur le destin et le génie des grands hommes, le concept d’ ‘auto-organisation’ spécifie l’histoire contemporaine qui, à notre siècle, se fait à coups de crises. (L’Avenir d’une révolte 21) [Just as the concept of process distinguishes modern history from that of antiquity, based on the destiny and brilliance of great men, the concept of self-organization is specific to contemporary history, which, in the twentieth century occurred in bouts of crisis. (Intimate Revolt 7)]

Psychoanalysis, for Kristeva, epitomizes this positive feedback process of progress via crisis-driven re-organization. It is a re-turn (thus connected etymologically to re-volt) to the self’s past via the means of narrative and meta-narrative. Telling one’s story and reflecting critically upon the story one has told allows the psyche to re-organize it-

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self upon the basis of a re-presented past history. Psychoanalysis is concerned to “Reprendre sans relâche le tour rétrospectif pour le conduire aux frontières du représentable, du pensable, du soutenable” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 20-1) [“Relentlessly repeat retrospective return so as to lead it to the limits of the representable/thinkable/ tenable” (Intimate Revolt 7)]. In her preliminary overview of the etymology of the word ‘revolt’, Kristeva notes the tension between the circular, repetitive notion of re-turn and the discontinuous, innovative notion of turning in the history of the word ‘revolt’. This tension, however, is, or could be seen as nothing more than the fundamental set of parameters, themselves marked by flux and fluidity, underlying individual and social identity in its most sophisticated form. To transform oneself one must return to one’s own narrative and re-read it, indeed, re-write it. “L’homme révolté” [“The Rebel”] was the upstanding figure of Camus’ existential ethics. In Kristeva’s late works this subject in revolt is not a given entity but rather, by definition, a subject in process. Thus, experience is not a given to which we are passively exposed, but the very mode of processual engagement with a world which constantly provokes the active auto-re-organization of selfhood. This point is nowhere made clearer than in her latest works, when she defines experience as an openness to alterity: Ouverture à l’autre qui m’exalte ou me déstablise, l’expérience trouve ses fondements anthropologiques dans mes liens avec l’objet primaire: la mère, pôle archaïque de besoins, de désirs, d’amour et de répulsion. (L’Avenir d’une révolte 80) [As an opening to the other that exalts or destabilizes me, experience finds its anthropological foundations in my links with the primary object: the mother, archaic pole of needs, desires, love and repulsion. (Intimate Revolt 251)]

In Kristeva’s use of the word, experience is therefore not that rather jaded stock of topoi generated by the common-sense everyday functioning of language which in turn claims merely to represent normal, universally-shared human existence. Experience is not this reassuring object represented by a realist notion of narrative – the stable given which provides the referent of a stable representation. Rather, experience is radically destabilizing, transformative, aleatory, an engagement with the world in which both self and environment are embarked

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upon a process of ongoing change. Indeed, it is our situation from the beginning, the engagement with otherness which, by virtue of the way in which it always threatens to make us other (to the point of the fear of extinction) has accompanied us from the very beginnings of our existence. This is why Les Samouraïs opens with the lament, “Il n’y a plus d’histoires d’amour” (Les Samouraïs 9) [“There are no love stories anymore” (The Samurai 1)], and then proceeds to propose a cornocupia of happy/unhappy love stories.It is love, the fluid medium par excellence, going back to our intersubjective origins, which joins us to others and to our world, makes us (happy/unhappy/both of the above), unmakes us, re-makes us, forever. Kristeva achieves here a transition from a semiotic theory of textuality which mounts an aggressive onslaught upon a selfhood deemed illusory and fallacious (“un ‘sujet’ zérologique’” [“a zerological ‘subject’”] – 6KPLHLZWLNK274), via psychoanalysis, to a return to the categories of experience and narrative subjectivity. This return to experience and narrative aims to remedy what she sees as an ambient and deep-seated incapacity to narrate (“des difficultés ou des incapacités de representation psychique” – Les nouvelles maladies 19 [“difficulties or obstacles in psychic representation” – New Maladies 9]) as the ground of a contemporary malaise. Without this ability for narrativity, the very contours of the psyche are subject to erosion: “Les conditions de vie moderne, avec le primat de la technique, de l’image, de la vitesse, etc., induisant stress et dépression, ont tendance à réduire l’espace psychique et à abolir la faculté de représentation psychique” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 28) [“The conditions of modern lives - with the primacy of technology, image, speed, and so forth, inducing stress and depression – have a tendency to reduce psychical space and to abolish the faculty of representation” (Intimate Revolt 11)]. The spatial parameters of our psyche are defined by stories. Psychic space is a space structured by signs, by the tissues of narratives which make up the shape of our selves. Deprived of these narratives, the dimensions of our selfhood begin to shrink. Such ‘spaces’ are not merely metaphors, derived from the ‘real spaces’ outside. On the contrary, the ‘real spaces’ are equally imaginary in their semiotic organization. They are crucially inflected, represented, traversed, coloured by the dimensions of what we all too simplistically describe as ‘interior, psychic space’. It is hugely important, then, that we pay due attention to the stories structuring the puta-

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tive personal, private spaces of our inner lives, for they determine the public spaces we inhabit no less than vice-versa. Deleuze and Guattari speak of “interior charts” which dictate our navigation of the outside world, taking up a position very similar to Kristeva and her insistence upon the force of narrativity and its intimate connections to the configuration of experience.

Time, space and sensuality Experience re-enters Kristeva’s work in two guises. The first, as we saw above, is that of narrative. Experience is that encounter with the world which, in its codification by a subject in transmission to another subject, creates that subject as a living being. Experience is by definition textual, for without the process of narrativization there would be no subject to transmit its experience to another subject, as, for instance, in psychoanalytic therapy. This, then, is not a narrative without a subject, nor, however, is it a narrative controlled by the subject – rather, it is a narrative which provides the fabric for a subject. It is a narrative which allows a subject to continue to weave its own precarious, aleatory, unpredictable trajectory among other subjects. The second guise in which experience re-emerges as a category of analysis in Kristeva’s later work is one that is closely linked, as her major work on Proust demonstrates, to narrative: namely, sensuality and the senses. Kristeva plays heavily upon the ambiguity of the word ‘sense’, connoting as it does both ‘meaning’ and base-level perceptions of the body. As she summarizes in Les Samouraïs, “ajuster des mots […] aux sensations […] obtenir un sens, une direction qui font vivre” (Samouraïs 93-4) [“to fit […] words to the sensations […] attain a meaning or directions that promotes life” (The Samurai 68)]. Where sensation and meaning meet, as in Kristeva’s work from La Révolution onwards, space comes to the fore. It is at the triangular intersection of meaning, sensual receptivity and space that experience coalesces, in “l’indissociable co-appartenance du sensé et du senti, du Verbe et de la Chair. L’intermédiaire entre les deux – un état de grâce – devient un lieu possible” (Temps sensible 545) [“the indissociable symbiosis between the sensible and the sensed, between the Word and the flesh. This process created a space for the middle term: a state of grace” (Time and Sense 319)]. These abstractions are given tangible

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form in Proust’s work. His novel constantly searches for the moments of sensual experience in which the past, long gone but retrievable in memory, is reconstructed in the moment of recounting, and anchored anew in the immediacy of bodily sensation. Sensation cannot, in reality, bring back time past, but what it does achieve is to replace the linearity of time with the present dimensions of space. Time and its constant progress condemn experience to an irreversible process of loss (“le temps perdu”), but sensation alerts the subject to the plenitude of space. In the moment of focussing upon the intensity of physical sensation, the immediacy of such experience may banish any sentiment of the loss incurred by our subjection to time passing. Kristeva locates this redemptive intersection between time and space in the literary text. Narrative is, as Bakhtin and many after him have recognized, a ‘chronotope’, a hybrid space-time construct: In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. (Bakhtin 1981: 84)

Sensual experience is thus always torn between temporal loss and spatial plenitude. “Le temps proustien”, Kristeva summarizes, “est irrémédiablement perdu et immanquablement spatialisé” (Temps sensible 543-4) [“Proustian time is irreparably lost and invariably spatialized” (Time and Sense 318)]. The literary text binds these two apparently contradictory facets together in what Kristeva has famously termed “la négation non-disjonctive […] un accord des écarts, une identification des différences” [“non-disjunctive negation […] an agreement in separation, an identification of differences”] (6KPLHLZWLNK 83-4). This is the paradoxical undertaking which lies at the heart of any signifying process. Why is this paradoxical? Not simply because time forms an axis of loss (in our culture, the vector of time is irreversible).To situate the plenitude of the senses in the literary text is paradoxical because modern linguistics has overwhelmingly claimed that the sign is a site of absence. The sign stands in for a referent which by definition must be absent. In her work on Proust, however, reviewing Freud’s very sketchy work on sensation and recent neuro-cognitive research on

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sensation, she notes that sensual perception and linguistic activity are neurologically linked in aporetic ways from the earliest stages of cognitive development. Sensation flows into a regime of semi-signs [“quasi-signes”] akin to the realm of the Semiotic, which need to be accessed, in later stages of linguistic development, by fully-fledged language. Sensation is not coeval with cognition or judgement, but cannot be experienced without cognition and language (Temps sensible 286/Time and Sense 151-2). Sensation occupies the same structural position as the chora/Semiotic of Kristeva’s earlier work. But it does not function as a mere replica of the erstwhile matrix of avantgarde effraction. The connections to the hic et nunc of everyday experience are much stronger. And the links between sensation (the early stages of meaning-making) and socialized language are graduated and susceptible of a high degree of continuity. This constitutive, genetic connection suggests that far from being a medium riddled by absence, as post-Saussurean linguistics has claimed, language is intimately connected to the plenitude and presence (present-ness) of sensual experience, despite, or indeed thanks to the necessity of mediation. Here, another central category of Kristeva’s conceptualization, one which resurges again and again from the outset, is to be detected: the materiality of the sign. The concreteness of the sign is a central aspect of the theory of textuality in the early structuralist and semiotic phase of Kristeva’s thought (see Le Langage, cet inconnu 23-46). The emphasis upon the material status of the sign takes over the crucial task of banishing earlier abstract, idealist theories of linguistic meaning. To combat such theories was important for the structuralists and their successors because the idealization of linguistic meaning furnished the conceptual basis for a notion of selfhood whose thoughts, untrammelled by the body or desire, were in control of its life. It was the materiality of signs, their intrusive unruliness, their status as things, which bore the burden of dethroning self-control and selfknowledge as documented by Freud and pursued in the poststructuralist death of the subject. The paradoxical coupling of the materiality of the sign and the absence of full meaning is resolved here by the reestablishment of the lost link between signification and sensuality in its plenitude (albeit one which must be mediated). In other words, in the shift from the chora and its eruption in avant-garde literature and art to the world of sensation and its media-

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tion in language, there is a softening of the rigid dichotomies between spatial experience and the linearities of socialized, disciplined regimes of meaning. In the connections between sensation and language, Kristeva implicitly posits an easy, everyday accessibility of the spaces of sensation, and a permeability between sensation and language which, albeit dependant upon translation or mediation, is one which allows the possibility of a modest plenitude. These quite abstract notions are rendered more accessible in Kristeva’s own fiction – a genre which, as we will see, foregrounds the sensual category of experience. In her novel Possessions, the connection between language and sense is dramatized in the protagonist’s experience of learning a second language: La nouvelle langue pénétrait en Stéphanie par l’intelligence ou par l’âme, en tout cas elle venait d’en haut – le professeur Zorine dit qu’elle entre par les couches supérieures du cortex, suit une voie descendante pour exciter à la fin seulement les sens, les organes, le sexe. ‘[…] ce n’est pas la perception qui stimule le language, mais, à l’inverse, le langage qui provoque la perception. Vous connaissez mon modèle, que j’appelle top down […] Tout vient d’en haut: au commencement était la Verbe, comme on disait autrefois.’ (Possessions 236) [The new language entered into Stephanie through the mind or the soul - in any case, from above. Professor Zorin says it enters an individual through the upper layers of the cortex, working its way downward until it affects his or her senses, organs, and sex. ‘[…] it isn’t perception that stimulates language, but the reverse: language causes perception. You know the model I suggest, I call it a top down […] Everything comes to us from above: in the beginning was the Word, as they used to say once upon a time.’ (Possessions 177)]

Zorine describes the classic constructivist model of language, which suggests that the world is not there to be represented in language, but rather, that language renders the world intelligible, imposing its own structure upon the world. However, Kristeva, via her protagonist, proposes a countervailing model which she evidently regards as no less plausible than the first: Elle […] était prête à accepter qu’une nouvelle langue précède une nouvelle corps ; à condition d’ajouter au modèle top down de Zorine un autre modèle, tout aussi indispensable, appelons-le bottom up: lente, paresseuse, sensuelle, la montée commençait par le chatouillement des odeurs, le tremblé des sons, quelques soupçons de couleurs

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et leur mise en ébullition, puis s’éclaircissait jusqu’à choisir des mots, ce qui revenait à les inventer, ou, plus modestement, à renouveler leur sens ridés. Tant qu’elle n’avait pas accès à la seconde étape de l’alchimie, Stéphanie restait une somnambule dans l’autre langue – celle du top down. (Possessions 236-7) [she was willing to admit a new language does precede a new body – so long as Zorin’s top down model was complemented by another, equally necessary, that could be described as bottom up. This was slow, lazy and sensual: a rising movement with the tingle of smells, the flutter of sounds, a few hints of color, all boiled up together. Then the mixture cleared and chose words; to put it another way, invented words or, more modestly, overhauled their old meanings. Until Stephanie reached the second stage in this alchemy she was still sleepwalking through the first stage: that of the top down. (Possessions 177)]

Kristeva reiterates, in the bottom-up model, to something that looks very much like her old model of the Semiotic and the manner in which it gives rise to the Symbolic world of language. But if we are to take her point in this fictional passage, we must do more. Namely, we must blend the Semiotic and the Symbolic. The two processes are not temporally separate domains, those of early infancy and then childhood onwards. The two processes inhabit one another. And we should note a second modification to the theory of the chora. Kristeva is not speaking of the child’s gradual accession to language in close proximity to the mother. Here she describes second-language acquisition – that is, a process which is well and truly embedded in a Symbolic long-since established. This intersection of the plenitude of the senses and the plenitude of language is located squarely in the here-and-now of social existence. The language of sensual experience revises the earlier theories of Semiotic and Symbolic in two ways: first, by blurring a rigid distinction between the two levels; and secondly, by situating these processes irreversibly in the hic et nunc of our existence in the world of politics and social interaction. Let us return to the third element of the triad language-sensation-space. Proust, for Kristeva the writer of sensual experience par excellence, forges space out of the debris of time. He creates what she calls “an imaginary geometry in time” (part three of her exhaustive study of Proust is entitled “L’Imaginaire ou la géométrie dans le temps”). Proust’s narrator programmatically announces: “je passais la plus grande partie de la nuit à me rappeller notre vie d’autrefois, à

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Combray chez ma grande-tante, à Balbec, à Paris, à Doncières, à Venise, ailleurs encore, à me rappeller les lieux, les personnes que j’y avais connues” (Proust 1999: 17) [“I […] used to spend the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest; remembering again all the places and people that I had known” (Proust 2004: 9)]. Time modulates almost immediately here into space and place. The temporal vector of speech spreads out into a network of remembered sites of experience. Time, once released from its normal restraints, relaxes into space, and that space is the space of an attention to sensation, to the texture of the moment. Kristeva often expresses the sensation of the space of a moment most lucidly in her fiction: Quant il n’est pas saturé d’actes, quand il est livré à sa courbe naturelle, le temps s’élargit. Une journée se dilate et prend les dimensions d’une saison, d’une année ; l’aubre s’étire et se confond avec la longue fraîcheur du printemps ; la clarté du soleil mûrissant occupe de larges mois d’été ; le calme en fin d’après-midi n’en finit pas de piétiner vers le coucher comme un automne hésistant et fané ; tandis que la nuit creuse sans relâche des angoisses hivernales sous les menus faits du jour. (Possessions 169) [Time expands when instead of being saturated with action it’s left to take its natural course. A day grows into a season or a year: dawn stretches out and merges with the long coolness of spring; the strengthening daylight fills broad months of summer; the peace of late afternoon loiters towards sunset like a pale reluctant autumn; and night burrows endlessly wintry anguishes beneath the trivialities of day. (Possessions 127)]

Once time slows down and coagulates, it gradually transforms into space, producing, in this text, a collision of spatial attributes attached to temporal substantives. What links these apparently incompatible terms is the intermediary of sensation. In her study of Proust, Kristeva undertakes an extremely detailed analysis of the multiply embedded sentences of the famous halfdreamed-bedrooms sequence in the opening pages of Combray. She describes Proust’s sentences according to a spatializing vocabulary which includes articulation, embedding (“enchassement”), apposition, expansion, and localisation (Temps sensible 344, 346, 348, 350/Time and Sense 195, 197, 199, 201). Proust’s extraordinarily complex prose works via constant inward syntactic and semantic expansion. He un-

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packs and elucidates successive phrases by the means of attributive clauses so as to create multiply embedded structures resembling Russian dolls. The phrastic construction thus assembles a series of fictive places (the various bedrooms which the narrator reviews in the moment between sleep and awakening) each of which is excavated to yield successive levels of information embedded in subordinated clauses. This phrasal construction offers a model of the entire construction of Proust’s gigantic work. The novel as a whole portrays successive fictive places which become the scene of explorations of past memory. And this memory is, famously, anchored in physical sensations (the “madeleine” is only the most famous of many sensual anecdotes). Kristeva suggests that the phrastic excavation gives a ‘body’ to past time by taking past sites of experience and elaborating them into spaces of sensual immediacy. The spatialization of each past site engenders a global work of metonymic creation: expansions of space compensate the shrinking of temporal possibility. Les déplacements provoqués par cette syntaxe polymorphe construisent, en métonymie de l’espace psychique et de l’espace de représentation […] une cinquième chambre: la chambre psychique, celle de ‘ma pensée’ qui est celle d’un ‘je’ écartelé par ses sensations (yeux, oreilles, narines, cœur). (Temps sensible 351 498) [The displacements that ensue from this polymorphous syntax form a metonymy of physical space and the space of representation […] a fifth room: the room of the psyche, the room of ‘my mind’, which is an I ripped apart by sensations (eyes, ears, nose, heart). (Time and Sense 289)]

The re-membering self, created as a metonymy of the sites it remembers, is also a self located in various sensual experiences. It is a self whose being is anchored in locations that are assembled around an organ of sensual perception. The linearity of time as the tragic locus of existence is thus re-oriented towards the compensatory synchronicity of multiple spaces of sensory immediacy. Sensuality is the second route, alongside narrative, by which experience re-enters Kristeva’s late work. In the later Kristeva, the tangibility of experience restores the subject, not as sovereign, but as site of experience – a subject no longer in command but not, for all that, banished completely. Experience is a third term between the myth of the bourgeois sovereign subject and the abstraction of the text as process without a subject.

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Likewise, textualized sensual experience is also the median term between time as a site of loss and space as a new possibility for meaningful existence: Si la psyché est une nouvelle camera, un kinétoscope, elle nous restitue l’espace extérieur. Mais sans se fier aux apparences, en le faisant passer par sa propre technique qui est une syntaxe. La mémoire […] se rappelle pour finir que le monde est habitable. Habitude – habiter. La boucle est bouclée, qui clôt les mouvements centripètes des enchâssements. […] Nous revenons au Fragment O : ‘les chambres que j’avais habitées dans ma vie’. Les appositions nous avaient éloignés d’elles, en apparence. Elles nous y renvoient (habitude – habiter). (Temps sensible 353-4) [If the psyche is a new camera obscura or a kinetoscope, it restores external space to us. Yet it does so not by trusting appearances but by exposing external space to its own technique: syntax. Memory […] eventually reminds itself that the world is inhabitable. Habit – inhabitable. The loop is looped, concluding the centripetal movements of the embeddings. […]. We return to fragment O: ‘the rooms in which I had slept during my life’. The subordinating appositions have apparently drawn us away from these rooms. All the same, they refer us to them (habit – habitable). (Time and Sense 291)]

Language links psychic space and exterior space, sites of memory and sites of sensuality, which, despite the detours of linguistic meaning, finally bring us back down to earth again. The sensual language of space makes the world liveable according to our quotidian habits. We should ask, however, whether such formulations from Kristeva’s late work do not bring us back to an extraordinarily conservative version of space. Are we not confronted here with the most traditional binary view of space (psychic space vs. exterior space)? Is this not merely a dressed-up version of the worn-out Enlightenment dualism of public and private space? Does not this ultimate bourgeois binary merely fall into the same trap as phenomenology’s facile categorizations of space (‘lived space’, ‘perceived space’, ‘imagined space’, etc.) – categorizations which eschew any deeper analysis of the functioning of these putative spaces, thus failing to ask how they have come to be? On the contrary, Kristeva’s usage of these categories is predicated upon her analysis of their genetic emergence, textual and sensual. She implies that these two spaces, inner and outer, if we may employ this rather trite binary sous rature, are reciprocally constitu-

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tive of one another. For the exterior space of Proust’s introductory passage is no less textual then the interior space of malleable syntax. “The bedrooms that I had occupied”, ostentatiously lodged in the past perfect, are textual spaces, narrated spaces, subsequently subject to renarration. Exterior space as written space is moulded and made liveable by memory and the process of writing. Syntax restructures space in several phases, shifting its contours by the work of language, burrowing inwards so as to create a nest for subjectivity. Exterior space is not a given, it too is constituted, in tandem with psychic space, as a modus vivendi – that is, as a space which is always already mediated through language. The site of that mediation is the space of sensual experience, a space of plenitude: “A la recherche du temps, mais à condition qu’il soit perdu – gaspillé et détourné, s’ouvre l’espace des figures. Bâti des mots, métaphores, phrases, caractères, cet espace figurable est un ‘temps incorporé’” (Temps sensible 386) [“In search of time, but only if the time were lost, wasted and derouted, which would open up the space of figures. Built with words, metaphors, sentences and characters, this space can be represented; it is a ‘time embodied’” (Time and Sense 320)]. Paradoxically, the gap opened by the loss of time is the very realm in which that time can be recuperated in sensation. The immediacy of sensation in space reconciles us with the passing of time because time also forms the matrix of such experiences. If identity is supposedly plagued by lack, an idea which Kristeva adopts uncritically from Lacan in her early work, then by contrast, in her later writing the fragility at the heart of identity appears to become the central positive aspect of our being. The “primal lack” (During 1993: 18) which is rejected by Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze (pace Racevskis 1983), as we shall see, is inverted so as to become something signifying plenitude. In a “turning” or Kehre of her own, the later Kristeva specifies the non-completion of our identity as its defining characteristic of aliveness. Non-completion (being inprocess) is what allows the presence of being itself to be experienced. Similarly, Judith Butler specifies ontological non-completion as the ground for the presence of the ethical relation: The opacity of the subject may be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, one whose early and primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge. […] If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then

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As incomplete creatures we are generically open to our environment. This may be a cause of anxiety, or equally, it may be the quintessential ground of human experience. Experience is the mode, suggests Kristeva, by which we may be in the presence of being: “Dans la tradition religieuse, herméneutique, philosophique, l’expérience (lisez Hegel et Heidegger) implique une coprésence avec la plénitude de l’Être quand ce n’est pas une fusion avec Dieu” (L’Avenir d’une révolte 80) [“In the religious, hermeneutic, philosophical tradition, experience implies a copresence with the plenitude of being when not a fusion with God (see Hegel and Heidegger)” (Intimate Revolt 251)]. If for Lacan we are condemned to live in lack, if lack is the very condition of our subjectivity, it is for the later Kristeva something to be celebrated (as the very condition of our subjectivity) rather than stoically endured. In a sense, by the time we arrive at the late work of Kristeva, we appear to have returned, so to speak, to a space which looks very much like the chora, in its openness, its fluidity, and its constant recasting of symbolic meaning. Yet this space is no longer that which merely precedes subjectivity in its later, rigidified and normative form. Now it has become the ongoing condition of an individual subjectivity and a societal identity par excellence. A critics of Kristeva such as Anna Smith reamisn sceptical about the spaces of an avantgarde literary poetics while granting credence to the spaces of a psychoanalytically understood realm of everyday sensation and political engagement (see Smith 1996: 211-12). Part of what such a critique may be registering is the overcoming of a fundamental dichotomization which vitiated her philosophy in its earlier phases. There is a deep contradiction in Kristeva’s early writing between, on the one hand, an assertion of fluid transition between symbolic and semiotic and of the semiotic at work in experience and narration, and on the other, the belief in the immutability of a regime of

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loss governed by the law of the father, over which the phallus casts its long shadow. Space, however, militates against such economies of lack. Space is what is, in the sense of Wittgenstein’s opening gambit in the Tractatus: “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist” (Wittgenstein 1990: 9) [“The world is all that is the case” (Wittgenstein 1974: 5)]. Translated into spatial language, the world is without a negative term. It has no outside. It simply is. It may display qualitative distinctions, but not absolute quantitative differences. It may evince unevenness, viscosity or rarefaction, but it does not admit of lack or absence. In precisely this vein, the 1980s alter-ego frame-narrator of Kristeva’s novel Les Samouraïs meditates: Le bonheur est un présent achevé. Aucune attente. Tout, ici et maintenant. […] Le bonheur est qualité, j’essaie de ne pas l’enfermer dans la quantité. Dès qu’il a lieu, le bonheur est. (Les Samouraïs 380) [Happiness is a fulfilled present. No waiting. Everything here and now. […] Happiness is qualitative; I try not to restrict it to quantity. As soon as it happens, happiness is. (The Samurai 284)]

Happiness is a space, is space taking place, without lack. It is a plenitude of qualities in which quantity (that is, time and its passing, the onset of ageing and the approach of death) are irrelevant. This is the culmination of Kristeva’s forty-year project of exploring the semiotics of psychic life in modern society. Her inaugural gesture of setting “space”, chora, at the very incipit of her theoretical trajectory has profoundly inflected the tenor of that multifaceted undertaking. “Space” may be subjected to lack in the Symbolic, just as it has been read under the sign of absence in a good deal of her work until the late 1980s. However, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, this regime of lack itself is an ideological construction, albeit a ubiquitous and all-powerful one, which does not alter the fundamental plenitude of space. It is this plenitude which, in Kristeva’s later work, once again comes to the fore under the jubilant signs of love, exile, and revolt.

3. Foucault’s Spatial Discourse Anecdote of space In one of her thumbnail sketches of the intellectuals she knew in Paris from the late 1960s onwards, Kristeva, in her novel Les Samouraïs, paints a cold and austere portrait of Foucault. There appears to be little mutual liking between her protagonist and the fictionalized Foucault. However, she adds, “Cependant, Scherner sait être un mélomane des mots: ‘La limite de la mort ouvre devant le langage, ou plutôt en lui, un espace infini.’ Telle serait la littérature” (Samouraïs 187) [“But Scherner [i.e., Foucault] can love the music of words. ‘Before language, or rather inside it, the limit imposed by death opens up an infinite space’. Literature” (The Samurai 139)]. Kristeva’s fictionalized Foucault is paraphrasing Blanchot – an enigmatic critic and novelist whose works Kristeva had in her suitcase when she arrived in Paris in 1966 (‘Memoire’ 43). The real Foucault had also written extensively on Blanchot. The fictive Foucault of Kristeva’s novel narrates the manner in which language, stopped short in its temporal vector of intention and communication by the brute fact of death (see Blanchot 1981), is diverted into a spatiality – that of its systematicity, its contextuality, and what Foucault and others would name its ‘exteriority’. In the literary text, according to Kristeva’s fictive Foucault, language is transformed into an architectonics of vitiated referentiality. Kristeva’s one-liner is perspicacious, because it mimics much of Foucault’s own writing in the 1960s. That writing, I will claim in this chapter, gave birth to his perennial concern with space, thus highlighting an area of concern common to their respective oeuvres. More importantly, Kristeva’s fictional vignette also indexes the manner in which time would be brutally usurped by space as a dominant intellectual paradigm. In this last respect in particular, her novelistic anecdote resonates remarkably with one of Foucault’s own telling.

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Again and again, in interviews, Foucault recounted the story of a talk he once gave on “other spaces” to a group of architectural theorists, some time in the late 1960s. After he had concluded the forum was opened up for questions. He found himself, so he liked to relate, being vociferously abused by an existentialist psychologist who accused him of shamelessly neglecting history. Foucault in turn retrospectively poured scorn upon his blinkered interlocutor. The story recurs again and again in the four-volume Dits et écrits, often with virtually the same phrasing (for instance Dits et écrits III, 334/Power/Knowledge 69-70; III, 193/Power/Knowledge 149; III, 576; IV, 282/The Essential Works III, 349-64). Foucault used this recurring episode to illustrate the erstwhile hegemony of the temporal paradigm over the spatial in French academic circles until the late 1960s. The anecdote, in itself, is slight. In the course of its retelling, however, it appears to have developed a substance and a life of its own. In it, an agon between space and time, played out in the area of academic debate, is reiterated on multiple occasions so as to stake out a set of discursive power relations, a space of cultural capital and concomitant power, but increasingly one which would assert the power of space as an emergent academic and intellectual paradigm. I am making a claim which goes beyond Chris Philo’s suggestion that Foucault strategically deployed “geography” as a weapon capable of shattering the totalizing continuities of historiography (Philo 1992: 141-3). By virtue of being reiterated sufficiently often, an embattled discourse on space takes on the contours of a belligerent space of discourse. The increasingly combative new paradigm would occupy more and more terrain of academic discourse, to a large extent dislodging the hegemony of historiography. The “other spaces” anecdote thus takes on all the attributes of a perlocutionary speech act, bringing something into being by virtue of its discursive assertion. The very reiteration of this anecdote contributed, quite possibly, to cementing the persuasiveness of the new paradigm. I begin with Foucault’s anecdote as a way of rendering the progression I wish to track in his thought in the following two chapters. I envisage Foucault shifting from a notion of spatial discourse (discourses described with the help of an array of spatial metaphors) to a concept of discursive space (spaces in which discourses about space interact with physical space in its architectural, urban, institutional forms). I suggest the other spaces anecdote can be seen, from the point

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of view of its content, as a local illustration of the first instance, that of spatial discourse. In its contextual functioning, however, it exemplifies the second instance, that of discursive space. The anecdote embodies the interaction of a spatial discourse with a number of institutional, architectural spaces. These institutional spaces stretch from the unnamed seminar room where Foucault gave the paper recounted in the above anecdote, to the prestigious Collège de France, where he took up a newly created Chair of History of Systems of Thought in 1970. The historian Paul Veyne commented on this development in Foucault’s spatial thinking by noting that “L’historien Foucault a commencé par étudier des discours plus que des pratiques, ou plutôt des pratiques à travers des discours” [“Foucault began by studying discourses more than practices, or rather, by studying practices via discourses”] (Veyne 1979: 203). Veyne’s comment is tantalizingly ambiguous. He claims that Foucault was interested, initially, in ways of talking, writing, conceptualizing, and only subsequently became interested in the more material practices which accompanied discourses. Alternatively, however, it is possible to (mis)read the second part of Veyne’s comment as implying that through his study of discourses, Foucault became interested in practices – that is to say, that the relationship between the two phases was a causal one. In this chapter I will analyze Foucault in this latter manner, moving from an analysis of his early spatial imagining of discourse, to his ideas about the way space is part and parcel of the processes of power. Stuart Elden highlights this contrast in the following fashion: While Foucault shared with the structuralists a predilection for spatial metaphors, he alone continually paired them with analyses of actual spaces. His histories were not merely spatial in the language they used, or in the metaphors of knowledge they developed, but were also histories of spaces, and attendant spaces of history. (Elden 2001: 1012)

Elden has brilliantly brought to the fore the debt that Foucault owed to Heidegger and his reflections upon space. By contrast, my concern is to place Foucault alongside French contemporaries such as Kristeva and Deleuze. While Elden productively sees Foucault’s spatial thought developing in a delayed dialogue with Heidegger, I trace Foucault’s conceptualization of space as arising out of a confrontation

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with writers such as Blanchot and his meditation on ‘literary space’ (1955; Blanchot 1989). I will begin, therefore, with metaphors, and move on to materiality. My approach to Foucault will follow the same pattern as my reading of Kristeva in the previous chapter. I will begin by concentrating upon Foucault’s initially relatively abstract notion of space. This notion of space is similar in its structural functioning, to that of Kristeva’s chora. I will then move on to a much more complex and real-world notion of space as a crucial element in practices of power and contestation in society, explicitly linking “la pratique effective de la liberté, la pratique des rapports sociaux et les distributions spatiales” (Dits et écrits IV: 277) [“the effective practice of freedom by people, the practice of social relations, and the spatial distributions in which they find themselves” (The Essential Works III, 246)]. This second notion of space can be approximately aligned with Kristeva’s second phase, that of the practices of constructing a psychic and social existence in the Symbolic. In both cases, Kristeva and Foucault’s early interest in explicating the manner in which meaning in society is generated by an invisible semiotic or epistemological ground is left behind. Their initial interest in the productive relationship between instances somewhat akin to the dual components of a Marxist basesuperstructure dialectic, or the linguists’ langue-parole couple cedes to a more entangled problematic. What follows here is a scrutiny of the manner in which that productive process continues to operate in a society traversed by everyday conflicts and contests. Both thinkers move on to a more complex and materialist attention to the manner in which these abstract productive binarisms operate in the midst of multiple social pressures, restraints and processes.

From spatial language to spatial discourse In a 1982 interview, the American scholar Paul Rabinow asked Foucault why Les Mots et les choses displayed such a profusion of spatial metaphors. Foucault claimed they arose from the fact that classical knowledge emerged quite literally out of a spatialization of the objects of science:

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Ce qui est frappant dans les mutations et les transformations épistémologiques qui se sont opérées au XVIIe siècle, c’est de voir comment la spatialisation du savoir a constitué l’un des facteurs de l’élaboration de ce savoir en science. Si l’histoire naturelle et les classifications de Linné ont été possibles, c’est pour un certain nombre de raisons : d’un côté, il y a eu littéralement une spatialisation de l’objet même des analyses, dont la règle a été d’étudier et de classer les plantes uniquement sur la base de ce qui était visible. […] Tous les éléments traditionnels du savoir, comme, par exemple, la fonction médicale des plantes, furent abandonnés. L’objet fut spatialisé. (Dits et écrits IV, 283-4) [What is striking about the epistemological mutations and transformations that occurred in the seventeenth century is the way the spatialization of knowledge made up one of the factors allowing the elaboration of this knowledge to produce science. If Linnaeus’ natural history and his classifications were possible, it was for a certain number of reasons. On the one hand, there was very literally a spatialization of the object of analysis. Previously, the rule had been to study and classify plants purely on the basis of what could be seen. […] All the traditional elements of knowledge, for example the medical function of plants, were abandoned. The object was spatialized.

Foucault then went on then to enumerate the manner in which spatial parameters founded the very fabric within which knowledge could be framed so as to emerge as scientific knowledge: Par la suite, l’objet fut spatialisé dans la mesure où les principes de classification devaient être trouvés dans la structure même des plantes : le nombre de leurs éléments, leur disposition, leur taille, et certains autres éléments comme la hauteur de la plante. Puis il y a eu la spatialisation au moyen des illustrations contenues dans les livres, qui ne fut possible que grâce à certaines techniques d’impression. Plus tard encore, la spatialisation de la reproduction des plantes ellesmêmes, que l’on s’est mis à représenter dans les livres. Ce sont là des techniques d’espace, et non des métaphores. (Dits et écrits IV, 284) [Subsequently, the object was spatialized to the extent that the classificatory principles were to be found in the structure of the plants themselves: the number of the elements, their arrangement, their width, and certain other elements such as the height of the plant. Then there was spatialization by means of the illustration to be found in books, possible only with the help of certain printing technology. And even later, the spatialization of the reproduction of the plants themselves began to be portrayed in books. All these aspects are spatial techniques, and not merely metaphors.

In a quite pragmatic manner, Foucault thus demonstrates how space, or spatiality (rather than function, for instance) provided a basic grid

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that made possible certain new ways of framing the object of scientific study so as to produce new knowledge. He made similar claims for the history of medicine: Il est question […] de l’espace, du langage et de la mort […] L’apparition de la clinique […] est signalée […] par le changement infime et décisif qui a substitué à la question: ‘Qu’avez-vous?’, par quoi s’inaugurait au XVIII siècle le dialogue du médecin et du malade avec sa grammaire et son style propres, cette autre où nous reconnaissons le jeu de la clinique et le principe de tout son discours : ‘Où avez-vous mal?’ (Naissance de la clinique xiv) It’s about […] space, language and death […] The appearance of the clinic […] must be identified […] by the minute but decisive change, whereby the question ‘What is the matter with you?’, with which the eighteenth century dialogue between doctor and patient began (a dialogue possessing its own grammar and style), was replaced by that other question: ‘Where does it hurt?’, in which we recognize the principle of the clinic and the operation of its entire discourse. (Birth of the Clinic xviii)

Thomas Flynn summarizes the shift by saying, “Clinicians were now interested in ‘geography’ rather than ‘history’” (Flynn 1994: 23). But Foucault’s assertions of an empirical shift towards spatiality were slightly ingenuous. Space as a framework producing a new paradigm of knowledge was at work not only in the classical epoch, in the local environment of seventeenth-century science, described by Les Mots et les choses, but also in the book itself. The reason why Naissance de la clinique or Les Mots et les choses were so replete with spatial metaphors also lay closer to home – in the postwar context of Foucault’s own highly innovative reflection. Significantly, the role of space in “the elaboration of knowledge to produce science” is already massively evident in Foucault’s thinking all through the 1960s. Foucault was a polymath, completing his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in philosophy and psychology, toying with an alternative career in physics during his stay in Uppsala, Sweden, and writing his monumental senior doctorate in the interdisciplinary history of psychiatry. He was also a prolific writer on literature. The importance of space is everywhere evident in the articles and books on literature he wrote during the 1960s such as Raymond Roussel (Death and the Labyrinth) (see also Dits et écrits I, 205-15/The Essential

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Works II, 21-32, Philo 1992, 144-8). In a 1964 article about “language and space”, Foucault wrote: Ecrire, pendant des siècles, s’est ordonné au temps. […] Le XXe siècle est peut-être l’époque où se dénouent de telles parentés […] Ce qui […] nous dévoile que le langage est (ou peut-être est devenu) chose d’espace. […] Et si l’espace dans le langage d’aujourd’hui la plus obsédante des métaphores, ce n’est pas qu’il offre désormais le seul recours ; mais c’est dans l’espace que le langage d’entrée en jeu se déploie, glisse sur lui-même, détermine ses choix, dessine ses figures et ses translations. C’est en lui […] que son être même se ‘métaphorise’ […] L’écart, la distance, l’intermédaire, la dispersion, la fracture, la différence ne sont pas les thèmes de la littérature d’aujourd’hui; mais ce en quoi le langage nous est donné et vient jusqu’à nous: ce qui fait qu’il parle. (Dits et écrits I, 407) [Writing, over the centuries, has been coordinated with time. […] The 20th century is perhaps the era in which such kinships were undone. […] This […] reveals that language is (or, perhaps became) a thing of space. […] And if space is, in today’s language, the most obsessive of metaphors, it is not that it henceforth offers the only recourse; but it is in space that, from the outset, language unfurls, slips on itself, determines its choices, draws its figures and translations. It is in space […] that its very being ‘metaphorizes’ itself. The gap, distance, the intermediary, dispersion, fracture and difference are not the themes of literature today; but in which language is now given and comes to us: what makes it speak. (‘The Language of Space’ 163-64)]

In this view of things, language no longer has the shape of a direct transmission, from the past to the present. It relinquishes its uninterrupted vector of re-presentation of a prior meaning. Rather, language becomes something spread across distance, rarified, broken up, spaced-out. Its own constituent elements communicate and resonate with each other before they ever become communication with a recipient. Indeed, space begins to appear, in its work of ‘spacing’, of ‘making of intervals’, as that which defines the conditions of possibility of language as it is to be found in contemporary literature. Here the series spaceÆlanguageÆavant-garde literature, which we also find in Kristeva’s work, is once again in evidence. For Foucault, the language of contemporary literature de-linearizes the language of classical literature. His formulation thus reverses the “linearization” which Kristeva, as we saw above, identified as the mark of language in the Symbolic (“la proposition et […] le jugement déplient ou linéarisent

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[…] la significantion […] ouverte par le thétique” – Révolution 53 [“the proposition and jugement […] unfold or linearize […] the signification […] opened up by the thetic” – Revolution 54]). Literature, for both Kristeva and Foucault, is where language stops “symbolizing” and begins “semiotizing”, that is, going “off the beaten track” in a manner which is explored concretely in works such as Edouard Glissant’s runaway-slave novel Mahogany: Et j’en fus à me demander si dans ce maelström il n’existait pas quelque règle, une manière de loi qui eût imposé une ordonnance cachée ou tout au moins à découvrir, et si je ne devais pas indiquer que le marron Gani et le géreur Maho et le délinquant Mani, à des époques si éloignées, représentaient la même figure d’une même force dérivée de son allant normal. (Glissant, 1987: 22) [And I came to wonder whether there did not exist in this maelstrom some rule, a sort of a law, which might have imposed a hidden order, or at least one which could somehow made out, and whether I shouldn’t suggest that the maroon Gani and the overseer Maho and the runaway Mani, at periods so far apart, were the same face of a same force wandering from its normal path.]

Foucault contrasts to the “linearity” of traditional literature with its straight plot-line the paradoxical “curve” of a graph: Cette ‘courbe’ paradoxale, si différente du retour homérique ou de l’accomplissement de la Promesse, elle est sans doute l’impensable de la littérature. C’est-à-dire ce qui la rend possible. (Dits et écrits I, 408) [This paradoxical ‘curve’, so different from the Homeric return or from the fulfilment of the Promise, is without doubt for the moment the unthinkable of literature. Which is to say that which makes it possible. (‘The Language of Space’ 164)]

Space, evinced in the off-the-beaten-track-ness of modern literature, in its tendency to move sideways rather than forwards, is below the threshold of traditional literary thinking. With the concentration on the linearity of plot, older forms of literary criticism could not conceptualize a transversal literarity. Modern literature disturbs such paradigms. Alessandro Barico, in his novel City, proposes that “questo livro è construita come una città, come l’idea di una città. […] Le storie sono quartiere, il personaggi sono strada. […] Ci ho viaggiato tre anni, in City. Il lettore, se vorrà, potrà rifare la mia strada.” [“this book is constructed like a city, like the idea of a city. […] The stories are

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districts, the characters are streets […] I’ve travelled in City for three years. The reader, if he wishes, may retrace my path”] (Baricco 2002: dustjacket). The notion of narrative of journey is a familiar one which concurs with the linearity of plot. But Barrico asks the reader to bear with the space of narrative, not simply to move along its single path. He asks that we conceive of a sub-plot as a district, and not as a strand in a thread, that we imagine characters as spaces, not as points moving along a line. Indeed, Barrico’s “like a city” may be hinting at the city itself as a generator of stories, as the matrix out of which literature, especially in its modernist and postmodernist avatars (viz. Joyce, Döblin, Perec) arises. Space remains unthought within traditional meta-literature because it is the invisible framework which makes literature possible in the first place. Space, in Foucault’s notion of literature, is the imperceptible ground which enables this form of enunciation tout court. To take a banal example, the space of the white page, the background against which writing becomes readable, is something we ignore, but which enables the very act of literary communication. What would literary communication be without the material vehicle of paper, the human voice, or the plastic disc of a CD? These material “conditions of possibility” we take for granted until the stained velum of a manuscript, or the texture and format of an artist’s book, or what Barthes called “the grain of the voice”, arouse our attention. (Barthes 1973: 104/Barthes 1975: 66; Barthes 1981/Barthes 1985). What would be the words on the page without the printer’s ink of which they are made, or the spaces between them? Such aspects of writing go unnoticed until we are confronted with a manuscript written with a quill pen, or a concrete poem which actively works with the space between the words as part of its material. Space is an invisible ground which abruptly comes to light in modern literature because the avant-garde tradition insistently draws attention, by subverting the transparency of plot and linearity, to the other aspect of language. So, when Foucault said that Les Mots et les choses was full of spatial language because the scientific theories of the classical age depended upon such tropes and topoi, he was not telling the full story. From the beginning of the 1960s, space is always already present in his writing, especially on literature. It forms the matrix, as it were, for the mode of thought that is explored from Les Mots et les choses onwards: what is the invisible ground which makes possible the ways we

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think and talk? In Foucault’s writing on literature through the 1960s, the constant allusions to writerly space are already inflecting the concept of epistemological space that he works with henceforth (see Bellour 1989). The concept of epistemological space initially delineates a doubling of language, thought, or knowledge by their respective conditions of possibility, which transforms them from linear entities to be interpreted, to exterior “depths” demanding an “archaeological” analysis. Later on Foucault’s concept of space would be further elaborated to supplement a “deep”, “outside” doubling of language, thought and knowledge, by practices, power relations, and material spatial environments (see During 1992: 1-23). This elaborated concept of space then makes up a dispositif (or apparatus) of mutually enabling spatial practices. Yet this “doubling” of language was preceded by an important break in his thought. Foucault’s history of madness is an attempt to reconstitute the silenced voice of the mad –those excluded from the discourse of reason and thus condemned to be forgotten by virtue of the absence of a “work” (Histoire de la folie 575-82/History of Madness 541-549). Foucault gave literature pride of place in possessing the power to articulate the silenced voices of the mad, upon whose very elision reason had constituted its own empire. In a 1963 lecture (subsequently published in article form in 1964, and in his L’Ecriture et la différence in 1967), Derrida, one of Foucault’s most trenchant early critics, pointed out the fallacy of assuming that a voice from beyond reason could somehow be retrieved by the alternative historian who takes refuge in the persona of the literary critic. If reason had formed itself by drawing a dividing line beyond which madness was to be situated, then reason and madness were intimately connected with each other. Madness could thus not be said to be reason’s outside, nor literature the voice of that outside. Reason, madness and literature were all part of the same system, which could only be subverted from within (Derrida [1967] 1979: 51-98/Derrida 1978: 31-63) – namely, by the careful work of the subversive textual analysis which would subsequently come to be known as ‘deconstruction’. Foucault, clearly stung by Derrida’s all-too-accurate charge, made a biting riposte, included as an appendix to the 1972 reprint of his History of Madness. He accused Derrida’s textual analysis of being the most conservative tool of a decontextualizing school and university peda-

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gogy (Histoire de la Folie 602/History of Madness 573).Yet from this moment on, literature and spatial discourse would no longer hold centre stage in Foucault’s work, a clear sign that he had recognized the perspicacity of Derrida’s critique (see Young 1995: 69-77). What takes its place is, as we shall see, an examination of discursive space – a shift whose chiastic reversal evinces the relocations of ‘space’ from somewhere ‘outside’ reason and its hegemony, to the very spatial fabric of reason in its internal machinations. The putative ‘outside’ to which Foucauldian analysis would now refer would be the concrete exterior of discourse, its spatial imbrications in the world whose material construction it would underpin and render possible. Failing the possibility of establishing an ‘outside’ of reason indexed by the alinear spatializations of the literary text, Foucault turns his attention to the underlying conditions of possibility of discourse, thus constructing an alternative analytic couple whose respective terms increasingly fuse over the subsequent decades.

Discursive tectonics Foucault’s programme of study involves re-thinking the very parameters by which thought could be thought. He does this, quite literally, by re-setting the margins of thought, staking out its purview in quite a new way. He employed spatial instruments to redefine thought just as Linnaeus and Buffon, in his reading, had done several centuries before so as to rethink the life sciences. Foucault’s strategy was to place brackets around thought – both literally and figuratively. To bracket thought was to frame it but also relativize it, and thus to set it to one side so as to regard it from a different perspective. His bracketing instrument was the notion of the limit. In Gide’s ludic novel Les Caves du Vatican, one of the protagonists, Antime, gains an audience with the Pope. He is ushered into one antechamber after another, and finally, after many delays, reaches the Pope’s audience chamber. There, he is made to lie flat on the floor: “sitôt en face du Saint Père [une sorte de chambellan] […] m’a invité à me prosterner, ce que j’ai fait; de sorte que j’ai cessé de voir” (Gide 1958: 814) [“as soon as I was in the presence of the Holy Father, [a kind of chamberlain] […] instructed me to prostrate myself – which I did – so that I saw nothing more” (Gide 1969: 166)]. When the Pope

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does address him, it is as an invisible voice: “outre que je n’osais pas relever la tête, une façon de majordome, avec une espèce de règle […] me donnait sur la nuque des manières de petits coups, qui m’inclinaient à neuf” (Gide 1958: 814) [“not only didn’t I dare raise my head, but […] a kind of major-domo with a sort of ruler kept on giving me little taps on the back of my neck, which made me bow it again” (Gide 1969: 166, translation modified)]. The centre of Western Christendom is thus so hedged with spatial and gestural limits that there emerges a central epistemological vacuum: at the heart of the novel’s intrigue is the putative plot to kidnap the Pope and replace him with a substitute. In Gide’s hilarious narrative, the central anchoring point of European religious and ethical values is constituted less by a set of substantive characteristics than by an array of limiting mechanisms. These active constraints delineate the space at the core and only thus endow it with clearly identifiable attributes. Indeed, in Gide’s parodic dramatization, the limitations are so powerful that they effectively empty out the presence at the centre. In this the episode functions in a manner not dissimilar to Kafka’s darker narratives of the same period, where hurdles and barriers prevent the protagonists from attaining their goals. Vitiated knowledge is the fundamental paradigm here: “‘Du kennst das Schloß nicht’, sagte der Wirt leise.” (Kafka 1982: 15) [“‘You don’t know the Castle’, the landlord said softly” (Kafka 1998: 6)]. The castle is a presence in the narrative – not despite its preventing K. from gaining entrance to its monolithic bulk, but precisely because it constitutes the black hole at the centre of the novel: Es war spät abends als K. ankam. Das Dorf lag in tiefem Schnee. Vom Schlossberg war nichts zu sehen, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächste Lichtschein deute das große Schloß an. Lange stand K. auf der Holzbrücke die von der Landstraße zum Dorf führt und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor. (Kafka 1982: 7) [It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay under deep snow. There was no sign of the castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest gleam of light suggested the large Castle. K stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness. (Kafka 1998: 2)]

In these narratives, the centre as the site of ecclesiastical or feudal power has been oddly evacuated. As a result, the meaning which none

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the less continues to be attributed to these respective centres no longer has any genuine content. What emerges at the centre is not a fullness of meaning which gives an identity to the whole system, but rather, a fraying or crumbling of meaning more customarily associated with the limits of a system rather than its centre. It is not insignificant that Kafka’s protagonist K. stands on the bridge – a site of in-betweenness, but also a liminal space which marks the borders of a space or domain. The limit, in this passage, is intimately connected to the empty centre. Indeed, they may be two manifestations of the same inverted paradigm of cultural atopics which so interested Foucault. In 1961, Foucault sketched his intended direction of study, one that would take him towards “Une région, sans doute, où il serait question plutôt des limites que de l’identité d’une culture” [“a region, no doubt, where it would be a question more of the limits than of the identity of a culture”]. He continued: On pourrait faire une histoire des limites – de ces gestes obscurs, nécessairement oubliés dès qu’accomplis, par lesquels une culture rejette quelque chose qui sera pour elle l’Extérieur; et tout au long de son histoire, ce vide creusé, cet espace blanc par lequel il s’isole, la désigne autant que ses valeurs. (Dits et écrits I, 161) [We could write a history of limits – of those obscure gestures, necessarily forgotten as soon as they are accomplished, through which a culture rejects something which for it will be the Exterior; and throughout its history, this hollowed-out void, this white space by means of which it isolates itself, identifies it as clearly as its values. (History of Madness xxix)]

This is a typical post-Saussurean notion of differentiation as the defining factor in the construction of identity. An element gains its identity from its place in a system, and that place is constructed negatively, via its contrast with those neighbouring slots. The limit, the border, is thus what defines identity no less than some putative core or essence. In a 1968 interview Foucault pursued this point in relation to systems of thought, stressing his intention of Etablir des limites, là où la pensée, sous sa forme traditionnelle, se donnait un espace infini. […] A ce thème, je voudrait opposer l’analyse des systèmes discursifs historiquement définis, auxquels on peut fixer des seuils, et assigner des conditions de naissance et de disparition. (Dits et écrits I, 683-4)

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Clearly the limit laid the foundation for other analytic operations Foucault wanted to undertake. To employ the notion of the limit entailed two practical consequences. The first was to break of the notion of continuity that had hitherto governed the study of the history of science and the history of philosophy. The notion of the limit eschews long diachronic notions of filiation. Rupture, discontinuity, abrupt transformation replaced the traditional topoi of evolution. What was implicitly questioned by this re-adjustment of images of production was the suggestion of a driving force at the origin of such evolutionary processes – in other words, an intention, a mind … an author. As Foucault famously remarked in an important article on Nietzsche, “Ce qu’on trouve, au commencement historique des choses, ce n’est pas l’identité encore préservée de leur origine – c’est la discorde des autres choses, c’est le disparate” (Dits et écrits II, 138) [“What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity” (The Essential Works II, 371-2)]. Elsewhere Foucault put this shift of emphasis in even more succinct form: Métaphoriser les transformations du discours par le biais d’un vocabulaire temporel conduit nécessairement à l’utilisation du modèle de la conscience individuelle, avec sa temporalité propre. Essayer de les déchiffrer, au contraire, à travers des métaphores spatiales, stratégiques permet de saisir précisément les points par lesquels les discours se transforment dans, à travers et à partir des rapports de pouvoir. (Dits et écrits III, 33) [Metaphorizing the transformations of discourse in a vocabulary of time necessarily leads to the utilisation of the model of individual consciousness with its intrinsic temporality. Endeavouring on the other hand to decipher discourse through the use of spatial, strategic metaphors enables one to grasp precisely the points at which discourses are transformed in, through and on the basis of relations of power. (Power/Knowledge 69-70)]

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What becomes visible in the place of the author or intention or authoritative intention at the originary moment of a developmental narrative is conflict. There is no single unifying consciousness at the beginning of any given process, says Foucault, but merely a clash of discourses of which something new is generated: “l’émergence désigne un lieu d’affrontement. […] Nul n’est responsable d’une émergence, nul ne peut s’en faire gloire; elle se produit toujours dans l’interstice” (Dits et écrits II, 144) [“emergence designates a place of confrontation […] no one is responsible for an emergence; no one can glory in it, since it always occurs on the interstice” (The Essential Works II, 377)]. To this point we will return in more detail a little later. The second consequence of a spatialization of analysis in the human sciences was to force a relocation of the vector of interpretation. If the diachronic reconstruction of long patterns of continuity, of intellectual legacy or creative influence was vitiated by the notion of the break, inaugural or otherwise, as a result the synchronic vector of analysis took on a new importance. Foucault’s analyses thus enquired about the synchronic conditions of possibility of knowledge at any given moment in time. He asked how a given notion or concept became possible not on the basis of precursors and influences, but on the basis of a framework or grid which made a concept conceivable or a notion thinkable at all in any certain epoch. Beyond that “basement” of conditions of possibility lay the unthinkable, everything which was outside of the synchronic system. This concept is perhaps the most difficult to grasp of all the concepts in Foucault’s intellectual toolkit. This is so because it demands that we try to think beyond everyday activities to processes which make those everyday activities possible. Because we generally take such conditions of possibility for granted, we remain blind to their significance. We in the rich West are frequently unaware of the importance of clean air or clean drinking water, for instance, because they are always there, always have been. More often, their invisibility is not merely a matter of our own overlooking. Through catastrophes such as the 2007 poison-waste scandal in Abidjan, it became clear that European nations were consistently dumping toxic refuse in African countries. The manner in which European “cleanliness” is brought at the cost of the non-West become shockingly evident.

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Frequently, conditions of possibility of our existence are quite deliberately located out of our sight so as not to disturb our contented oblivion. Our jeans, our t-shirts and our jogging shoes, for example, may be produced in non-Western countries by people working long hours for low wages and without elementary forms of social security, but this remains largely irrelevant to us because it is conveniently beyond our horizons. Likewise, many of the largest Western multinationals have a long history of involvement in the colonial heritage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as an ongoing investment in the underdevelopment-military-industrial complex. Major German companies, participants in the economic miracle of the postwar period, also earned much of their wealth by the merciless exploitation of slave labour during the Second World War, and have only recently been obliged to pay minimal compensation to surviving members of that workforce. The same situation obtains with regard to the ‘Stolen Wages’ issue for unpaid indigenous labour in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australia. The wealth and prosperity enjoyed by us today is often the direct result of colonial or imperial exploitation in the past, or continues to be generated by the arms race in the non-West. These are relatively concrete examples. What Foucault is angling at, however, is something more difficult to conceptualize: the conditions of possibility of the ways we think. How do certain conceptual soil types give rise to a particular sort of conceptual vegetation? Which intellectual foundations support the conceptual houses we make our homes in? This puzzling notion can perhaps be explained by returning to the question we touched upon above, that of the author. Indeed, the author is one of Foucault’s own most famous examples of the way in which self-evident notions are created by certain historical conditions of possibility (see Dits et écrits, I, 789-821/ The Essential Works II, 205-22). Foucault suggests that the author is a creature of relatively recent invention. The author is a “function”, a way of talking about texts and literature so as to gather them under a unifying heading, only gaining a personified aspect after the Enlightenment. Once upon a time, an authorial name – say Aristotle or Plato or Galen – guaranteed the authority of a text, without referring to an authorial “person”. A manuscript had “authority” by virtue of the name attached to it, but

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this “author” was hardly a personality in our modern sense. Similarly today, “Einstein” generally designates the authoritativeness of a new theory of relativity, and only tangentially the tousled-headed eccentric who formulated that theory. Since the Enlightenment, with its emergence of the bourgeois individual citizen, and since Romanticism, with its inspired artistic genius-figure, the author has taken on a personality of his own. That personhood houses intentions, and the role of intentions is to unify the contradictory and heterogeneous tangle of an artistic oeuvre. By ascribing “what the author wanted to say” we can make sense of highly complex and often disunified bodies of writing. The concept of the author enables, facilitates, indeed, makes absolutely self-evident the ever-present talk about authors which circulates in our society. Beneath the constant chatter about authors in universities, in the media, in popular literary culture, there is a grid of unspoken, largely unconscious rules which make it possible to talk in such a way. Their very invisibility makes the talk they generate all the more natural. People (authors) are there, so why shouldn’t we talk about them? But precisely the notion of the writerly person as an ‘enabling device’ is the underlying concept, one more recent than we generally imagine, which Foucault wishes to lay bare. Its contingency and historicity are the objects of his “archaeology”. This author still stands at the centre of university criticism, despite decades of efforts to get students to shift their attention away from the author and what he meant, to the text and how it works. It also stands at the very centre of our media culture, which tends the cult of personality, from Prince Charles and Lady Di down to the shelf-loads of biographies which fill bookshops today – including figures such as Stephen Hawking, who until recently stood merely for complex but significant scientific theories. It is ironic, of course, that even theorists such as Foucault and Barthes, the French poststructuralist duo generally held responsible for proclaiming the death of the author, are themselves the subject of a number of biographies (see also Calvet 1990/Calvet 1995; Eribon 1991/Eribon 1992; Macey 1993; Miller 1993). The author is dead, long live the author! (Barthes 1984: 61-7/Barthes 1989 49-56). At the same time, however, this hegemony of the author seems, at the very moment at which it reaches a paroxysm of ubiquity, to be

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crumbling. Interactive literary forms delegate authorship to online users endowed with the capacity to construct alternative endings or plot structures. An author such as Andrew McCann, an expatriate Australian academic and novelist, is frequently confused with his compatriot and contemporary, Andrew McGahan. Both write in the Australian Gothic tradition, both have been resident in Melbourne for many years, where they are often confused for their quasi-namesakes when proffering their credit cards in bookstores (Griffin 2005). The author as a personality appears to have worn so thin that he can be easily exchanged or replicated, much to the amusement of the real individuals endowed with such identities. In a number of recent hoaxes, some writers have cannily but also cynically hijacked the aura of the author (often at the cost of immigrant groups or indigenous people) so as to further their own careers (Ruthven 2001). Such instrumentalization of the author function lays bare its central role in our society and the investments in social energies which it commands, but also its imminent exhaustion. A book such as this takes theorists such as Kristeva, Foucault or Deleuze as organizing labels for a body of work far more than as the signifiers of persons. Foucault suggests that we are witnessing a shift in the ground which makes a complex bundle of discourses of authorial identity possible and relevant. A new discursive “foundation” is emerging, he claims, in which the author function is losing its sacred significance after several centuries of hegemony in our society: “‘Qu’importe qui parle?’ En cette indifférence s’affirme le principe éthique, le plus fundamental peut-être, de l’écriture contemporaine” (Dits et écrits I, 789) [“‘What does it matter who is speaking?’ In this indifference appears one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing [écriture]” (The Essential Works II, 205)]. Quite simply, he said, “l’écrivain tend à disparaître comme figure de proue” (Dits et écrits III, 155) [“the writer tends to disappear as a figurehead” (Power/Knowledge 127)]. In Foucault’s vision of authorship, which was not without its ironies given the iconicity which he himself has posthumously attained, we have reached a sort of tectonic fault line, where one conceptual continent breaks up, and another emerges into view. Foucault saw himself as standing on that faultline, declaring himself once “qui ne suis pas un grand auteur, mais seulement quelqu’un qui fabrique des livres” (Dits et écrits IV, 735) [“not a great author, but only someone who writes books” (‘An Aesthetics of

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Existence’ 53)]. Such epistemological continents, the unthought foundations of what can be thought and said, he names “epistemes” [“épistèmès”].

Trihedron Despite the arcane aura of labels such as “episteme”, Foucault is committed to a pragmatic approach to thinking. In a 1978 interview with Pierre Boncenne, Foucault said of Surveiller et punir, “What I wanted to do was write a history book that would render the present intelligible and possibly lead to action” (‘On Power’ 101). He saw himself as providing a publicly accessible “boîte à outils” [“toolkit”] for thinking new thoughts: “non un système, mais un instrument : une logique propre aux rapports de pouvoir et aux luttes qui s’engagent autour d’eux […] à partir d’une réflexion […] sur des situations données” (Dits et écrits III, 427 [“not a system, but an instrument, a logic of the specificity of power relations and the struggles around them […] on the basis of reflection […] on given situations” (Power/Knowledge 145)]. On many occasions he noted that “ce que l’intellectuel peut faire, c’est donner des instruments d’analyse”, or similarly, “mon vrai problème, c’est de forger des instruments d’instruments d’analyse, d’action politique et d’intervention politique sur la réalité qui nous est contemporaine et sur nous-mêmes” (Dits et écrits II, 759; III, 414) [“what the intellectual can do is to provide instruments of analysis”; “my true problem is to forge analytical instruments, instruments for political intervention and action in our contemporary reality and our own selves” (Power/Knowledge 62)]. His myriad interviews are evidence of his will to make accessible to the public a complex but finally pragmatic perspective upon the world. This pragmatism can easily tip over into an anything-goes usage of his theory, or its reduction to the status of any other statement by any other person, thus depriving it of its critical cutting edge (Mills 2003: 7). These risks notwithstanding, and perhaps by virtue of them, Foucault’s work is predicated upon utility if not accessibility. For this reason he deploys a vocabulary drawing upon geography and geology, with clear spatial dimensions, to make tangible the slippery notion of discursive conditions of possibility.

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In his work on the epistemological moment of the nineteenth century, Foucault imagines different sorts of discourse (propositions, causal connections, and philosophical reflection) and their interrelationships with the help of a three-dimensional model: “Il faut […] se représenter le domaine de l’épistémè moderne comme un espace volumineux et ouvert selon trois dimensions […] [un] trièdre épistémologique” (Les Mots et les choses 358) [The “domain of the modern episteme should be represented […] as a volume of space open in three dimensions […] [an] epistemological trihedron” (The Order of Things 378-9)]. I wish to put to one side this spatial metaphor as a means of accommodating the various nineteenth-century disciplines treated in Foucault’s study. Rather, I intend to hijack this notion of three dimensional episteme in order to sketch an analogy of a three-dimensional discursive space. The concept of the “trihedron” lends itself perfectly to a concrete illustration of the way in which the episteme functions to facilitate and generate discourse during a specific historical period. Foucault works with the notion of “positivity” to get away from the concept of the rightness or wrongness of ideas, their accuracy or misguidedness. These notions are part and parcel of an evolutionist or progress-oriented concept of the development of science or philosophy. Such a concept sees as natural and inevitable a progression from primitive (and thus incorrect) ideas, towards complex (and thus more accurate) ideas. Foucault wishes to replace this developmental concept with a “positive” notion of ideas, with the assumption that ideas simply are. It replaces the linear notion of ‘influence’ with something akin to Kristeva’s ‘intertextuality’ – a depersonalized, non-authorial, structural mode of production of ideas. The interesting question then is to treat them as events or things, and to find out how they came to be. This assumes, however, that one can trace the parameters of their stable existence as a body of discursive enablings during a certain period of time: La positivité d’un discours […] en caractérise l’unité à travers le temps. […] Cette unité ne permet certainement pas de décider qui disait vrai, qui raisonnaient rigoureusement […] Mais ce qu’elle permet de faire apparaître, c’est la mesure selon laquelle Buffon ou Linné […] parlaient de ‘la même chose’, en se plaçant au ‘même niveau’ ou à ‘la même distance’, en déployant ‘le même champ conceptuel’ […]

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Elle définit un espace limité de communication. (Archéologie du savoir 166) [The positivity of a discourse […] characterizes its unity throughout time […] This unity certainly does not enable us to say […] who told the truth, who reasoned with rigour […] But what it does reveal is the extent to which Buffon or Linnaeus […] were talking about ‘the same thing’, by placing themselves at the ‘same level’ or at ‘the same distance’, by deploying ‘the same conceptual field’ […] It defines a limited space of communication. (Archaeology of Knowledge 142)]

These stretches of relatively stable discourse can be imagined as twodimensional surfaces in which many different discourses knit together to form an episteme. These discourses are sustained by similar underlying assumptions. The episteme has the form of a plateau stretching through time, for as long as century or two, but not for ever. At some point comes an abrupt cliff or ravine which marks the end of the episteme. Thus the idea of the long development flow of transformation is replaced by a concept of alternating static properties and moments of rupture. Gradual development is superseded by patterns of “fits and starts”. The long smooth flow of progress, once it has been overhauled by plateaux and their breaking-off, must also be complemented by a third dimension. The loss of developmental models of thought and “sayability” does not go without a concomitant gain in another place. Linear patterns of evolution, once they are broken up into plateaux of stable but contingent discursive systems, demand a different form of explanatory causality. The third dimension of analysis making up Foucault’s “trihedron” is that of the vertical relationship between discourse and its “deep” conditions of existence. In this vein, Foucault announces his work as Une étude qui s’efforce à retrouver à partir de quoi connaissances et théories ont été possibles; selon quel espace d’ordre s’est constitué le savoir ; sur fond de quel a priori historique et dans l’élément de quelle positivité des idées ont pu apparaître, des sciences se constituer, des expériences se réfléchir dans des philosophies, des rationalités se former, pour, peut-être se dénouer et s’évanouir bientôt. (Mots et choses 13) [An enquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experi-

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Foucault’s enterprise no longer sees knowledge as a constantly rising path towards truth, nor an accumulation of increasingly accurate knowledge. It replaces the horizontal, albeit upwardly-tilted vector, of the flightpath of historical progress, with a vertical vector of productivity. What makes knowledge possible at a given time? What are the foundations, upon which a scientific or philosophical edifice can be erected? What sets of assumptions provide the grid filtering what is sayable and what is unsayable? What makes it possible to deem that a particular statement is right or wrong, true or false? He continues: ce qu’on voudrait mettre au jour, c’est le champ épistémologique, l’épistémè où les connaissances, envisagées hors de tout critère référant à leur valeur rationnelle ou à leurs formes objective, enfoncent leur positivité et manifestent ainsi une histoire qui n’est pas celle de leur perfection croissante, mais plutôt celle de leurs conditions de possibilité; en ce récit, ce qui apparaître, ce sont, dans l’espace du savoir, les conditions qui ont donné lieu aux formes diverses de connaissance empirique. (Mots et choses 13) [what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or objective forms, grounds positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility; in this account what should appear are those configurations within the space of knowledge which have given rise to diverse forms of empirical science. (The Order of Things xxiii xxiv)]

Foucault’s interrogations are in the tradition of Nietzsche, who asked about the “genealogy” of morality, ignoring its veracity or validity, and of Heidegger, who enquired about the Being which gave rise to beings. And despite their many differences, Foucault and Kristeva also ask similar questions about the spaces which grounded language and representation. Both privilege literature, art and music as liminal domains where those epistemological a prioris are laid bare in the moment of rupture of the common-sense order of representation. Foucault, following Nietzsche, defines two kinds of countervailing “profundity” in language. One is the profundity of interiority, which leads to “interpretation” as a scientific procedure (Dits et écrits I, 568/The Essential Works II, 273). This sort of interpretation doubles

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the text with a second text, that of the academic gloss, which aims to retrieve the “hidden truth” at the heart of the text. It reposes upon a pursuit of the “signified” [“signifiant”] (Naissance de la clinique xiixiii/Birth xvi-xvii). Foucault, like Nietzsche favours, however, a second sort of profundity, a profundity of exteriority. The profundity which a non-interpreting analysis seizes upon is an outside profundity: “une dimension que l’on pourrait appeler celle de la profondeur, à condition de ne pas entendre par là l’intériorité, mais au contraire l’extériorité” (Dits et écrits I, 568) [“a dimension that could be called that of depth (profondeur), as long as this is not taken to mean interiority, but on the contrary exteriority” (The Essential Works II, 272-3)]. Exteriority refers not to the innermost ‘meaning’ of a text, but rather to that outer environment which makes its meaning possible. It refers to “depths” not ‘within’, but rather ‘beneath’ the artefact. In this outward, exterior analysis, le langage échappe au mode d’être du discours – c’est à dire à la dynastie de la représentation –, et la parole littéraire se développe à partir d’elle-même, formant un réseau dont chaque point, distinct des autres, à distance même des plus voisins, est situé par rapport à tous les autres dans un espace qui à la fois les loge et les sépare. (Dits et écrits I, 520) [language escapes from the mode of being of discourse – that is, from the dynasty of representation – and the literary word develops out of itself, forming a network whose every point, distinct from the others, distant even from its closest neighbours, is situated in relationship to all the others in a space which both locates and separates them.]

Language should not be interrogated for an innermost meaning. Rather, one can interpellate from language as a system that “space” which furnishes its enabling, deeper foundations. Profundity in this sense is not the profundity which invites interpretation, the text demanding to be glossed by a commentary so as to restore its ostensibly profound but cryptic essence. Rather, this profundity is the dimension of a spatial dispersion, in which disparate statements on a network are made possible by their invisible but active enabling grid. This aspect of the epistemic “trihedron”, the search for the depths underlying culture, is the object of an enquiry known as “archaeology”. The history of thought can thus be imagined as a succession of spaces of three dimensions: depth, breadth, and length – or, conditions of possibility of discourses, discursive systematicity, and epistemological rupture. Foucault sums up the three dimensions making up the

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epistemic “trihedron” of “l’espace général du savoir, à ses configurations et au mode d’être des choses qui apparaissent […] des systèmes de simultaneité, ainsi que la série de mutations nécessaires et suffisantes pour circonscrire le seuil d’une positivité nouvelle” (Mots et choses 14) [“the general space of knowledge: the mode of being of the things that appear in that space […] systems of simultaneity, as well as the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity” (The Order if Things xxv)]. The epistemic trihedron thus brings together three aspects of discourse. First, the configurations of knowledge, treated as a system of discourses valid at any one moment in history. Second, the mode of being of the knowledges that appear in this space, that is, the underlying assumptions which make those knowledges possible. And thirdly, the points at which those systems mutate radically enough to inaugurate the threshold to a new space of knowledge.

Rupture and art Discursive history can be envisaged as a series of blocks. Each block may extend for a period of several hundred years, but during its reign displays a degree of stability, until the next major epistemological rupture occurs. Archaeology’s job is to search out the “mutation of discourse” [“mutation du discours”] at the moment of epistemological rupture (Naissance de la clinique vii/Birth xi). Foucault locates these ruptures at several precise historical moments. In Les Mots et les choses, his first break occurs at the transition between the early modern age and what is known in France as the classical age, that is, sometime after 1600. This break saw the emergence of the tabular and taxonomic sciences such as Linnaeus’ botany, or the universal grammars of Port Royal. For instance, focussing upon medical discourse in Naissance de la clinique, Foucault asks, Quelle ligne décisive est donc tracée entre une description qui peint les membranes comme des ‘parchemins trempées’ et cette autre, non moins qualitative, non moins métaphorique qui voit, étalées sur les enveloppes du cerveau, comme des pellicules du blancs d’œuf. (Naissance de la clinique vii) [What sharp line divides a description that depicts membranes as being like ‘damp parchment’ from that other equally qualitative, equally

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metaphorical description of them laid out over the tunic of the brain, like a film of egg-whites? (Birth xi)]

The second break, at the beginning of the nineteenth-century, inaugurates humanist disciplines such as Adam Smith’s economics, or Marx’s political economy. Here, ‘man’ emerges not as the mere sum of tabular facticity but as a personality in his own right. A third break, Foucault claims implicitly, takes place at the end of the twentieth century, with the emergence of what we would now call postmodernism. It is marked by the demise of ‘man’, where, in one of Foucault’s most famous images, he likens to a face traced in the sand, now rapidly being erased by the rising tide (Mots et choses 398/The Order of Things 422). Foucault proclaimed, in an interview given in the year of the book’s publication “nous sommes les derniers hommes au sens nietzschéeen du terme” (Dits et écrits I, 553) [“we are indeed the last man in the Nietzschean sense of the term” (Religion and Culture 86)]. The end of ‘man’ as we know it was to usher in the posthumanist episteme. These “epistemes” have been the object of much well-founded critique (see for instance Ellul 1975: 73-4; Merquior 1985: 63ff), and our purpose here is not to continue the debate about their accuracy, but to register the shape of Foucault’s conceptualizing. As I remarked above, the history of thought is a succession of spaces of three dimensions: depth, breadth, and length – or, conditions of possibility of discourses, discursive systematicity, and epistemological rupture. Above all, the notion of rupture places Foucault’s epistemology in the domain of spatial analysis. Foucault is vitally interested in the symptoms of such epistemological rupture. His early 1960s work on literature and space resurfaces at the end of the 1960s in the form of a privileged attention to the spaces of literary manifestation of discursive tectonic shift. Literature, Foucault claims, is one of the social spaces where the transformations of epistemic regimes register most clearly. One example may suffice. The end of the early modern period is signalled, Foucault claims, by the moment of parodic self-reflexivity which emerges between the publication of the first and second parts of Cervantes’ epic Don Quixote. In the preface to the second part, the protagonist is confronted with audience reception of his adventures to date, and includes

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this reception in the construction of the second part: “Avec leurs tours et détours, les aventures de Don Quichotte tracent la limite: en elles finissent les anciens jeux de la ressemblance et des signes; là se nouent déjà de nouveaux rapports” (Mots et choses 60) [“With all their twists and turns, Don Quixote’s adventures form the boundary: they mark the end of the old interplay between resemblance and signs and contain the beginnings of new relations” (The Order of Things 51)]. Why the privileged focus upon literature? Perhaps because of literature’s innate affinity with discursive space and its recasting. Literature, it would seem, is a seismograph for language both as a system of rules, conditions of possibility (langue) and as the body of statements which emerge (parole). Language, when it is consciously working as language, crafting its own linguistic materiality – and this may be as good a definition of literary creation as any – is the ideal indicator for rifts and ruptures in the episteme. This is so, if we subscribe to Foucault’s notion of language and literature as evinced in his writing in the 1960s, because it is modern literature in particular which makes manifest the linguistic universe as the enabling space of thought. There is a striking parallel between Foucault’s late 1960s notion of literature as the privileged site of tectonic unrest, and Kristeva’s early 1970s concept of the chora as a site where the Semiotic emerges into the Symbolic. Both notions depend upon the idea of language in its social, knowledgeable forms being underpinned by largely invisible, unconscious conditions of possibility: on the one hand, the episteme, on the other hand, the pre-linguistic Semiotic. Both notions are informed, conversely, by a vulcanology of literary production. They depend upon a topology of rupture, fracture and eruption of the discursive configurations of an era or of the Symbolic. Both notions thus work with a dual notion of language as the generative machine for making meanings, and, in certain aesthetic forms, as the destructor of such stable meanings. It is significant, however, that after Les Mots et les choses, Foucault shifts his attention away from literature as a symptomatic aspect of discursive tectonics. Its place is taken by a broader interest, the social space in general as a site for contestation. Once again, the similarity to Kristeva’s trajectory is striking. Both Kristeva’s and Foucault’s initially textualist theories are succeeded by concepts of power and

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contestation spread across a range of social and semiotic practices and less obviously associated with elitist, modernist notion of avant-garde art. In Foucault, this shift from the literary site of tectonic turbulence to social space in general as a site of contestation is heralded by the notion of heterotopia, a concept already announced at the beginning of Les Mots et les choses, but revisited in the late publication of a now-famous talk entitled “Des espaces autres”, “Different Spaces” (Dits et écrits IV, 752-62/ The Essential Works II, 175-86). The notion of heterotopia in its first manifestation in Les Mots et les choses serves to conceptualize the radical confusion of conceptual categories Foucault discovers in a short text by Borges. Such confusion, he claims, both disturbs, but by the same token, lays bare the constitutive systems of epistemic organization upon which we depend to make sense of the world: Les hétérotopies inquiètent, sans doute parce qu’elles minent secrètement le langage, parce qu’elles empêchent de nommer ceci et cela, parce qu’elles brisent les noms communs ou les enchevêtrent, parce qu’elles ruinent d’avance la ‘syntaxe’, et pas seulement celle qui construit les phrases, – celle moins manifeste qui fait ‘tenir ensemble’ […] les mots et les choses. (Mots et choses 9) [Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things […] to ‘hold together’. (Order of Things xix)]

Heterotopias are thus places of epistemological and representational disorder on the margins of a society’s order of representation. In this first avatar, they are situated in literary language. But the heterotopia itself, in Foucault’s thinking, is situated on a faultline. The very figure of the heterotopia, in its liminal positioning, indicates a ‘tectonic’ shift in Foucault’s own ways of thinking discursive and social space. In the later text, given as a talk at roughly the same time but only published twenty years afterwards, literary heterotopias have been overhauled by social heterotopias as diverse as cemeteries, gardens, old peoples’ homes, or the ship. These heterotopias are very diverse places where society is reflected, but as if by a distorting mirror,

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so as to disturb the certainties of the age. Heterotopias offer an alienating representation of an epoch – one that lays bare what the times cannot think. Heterotopias, situated on the borders of society, in a liminal position, reveal the limits of the Symbolic. They thereby cause fissures to appear in orderly representation, thus stripping bare the systems of conditions of possibility of a given order of representation (Dits et écrits IV, 755/ The Essential Works II, 178). Heterotopias may also possess an eschatological, catastrophic dimension (in René Thom’s sense) of moments of rupture: Les hétérotopies sont liés, le plus souvent, à des découpages du temps, c’est-à-dire qu’elles ouvrent sur ce qu’on pourrait appeler, par pure symétrie, des hétérochronies; l’hétérotopie se met à fonctionner à plein lorsque les hommes se trouvent dans une sorte de rupture avec leurs temps traditionnel. (Dits et écrits IV, 759) [More often than not, heterotopias are connected with temporal discontinuities [découpages du temps]; that is, they open onto what might be called, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronias. The heterotopia begins to function fully when men are in a kind of absolute break with their traditional time. (The Essential Works II, 182)]

To return to the image of the “trihedron”, we can imagine heterotopias as being literal spaces (institutional, geographical, vehicular) which mark the spatial and the temporal margins of the three-dimensional volume of the episteme. Heterotopias emerge at moments when the conceptual bedrock is shifting, at places where the social and semiotic fabric is fraying. They may be compared with the Kristevan Semiotic at the moment of in its eruption into the Symbolic. They are sites where the Symbolic is ripped apart by an upsurge of undisciplined semiosis, thus reminding us of the genetic space out of which all meaning arises. They make us mindful of that bedrock precisely because that primordial space is undergoing change and can no longer be taken for granted. It is the spatiality of these heterotopias which make increasingly tangible the erstwhile metaphorical spaces of the discursive “trihedron”. Furthermore, they reveal, as I will point out in what follows, the political stakes of discourse. The heterotopia in the later version, that of “Other Spaces”, already assumes a set of social, political and spatial determinants which go far beyond the more narrowly literary or discursive parameters of Foucault’s earlier thinking. In the chapter

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which follows we will explore the more complex bundles of discourses, institutions, bodily practices, architectural monuments (what I call ‘discursive spaces’) which supersede the earlier concept of spatial discourse.

4. Foucault’s Discursive Spaces From rarity to power At the end of Samuel Beckett’s novel L’Innommable (The Unnameable), the protagonist (if he can be called that) terminates his monologue on a famous note of ambivalence: […] ce sont des mots, il n’y a que ça, il faut continuer, c’est tout ce que je sais, ils vont s’arrêter, je connais ça, je les sens qui me lachent, ce sera le silence, un petit moment, un bon moment, ou ce sera le mien, celui qui dure, qui n’a pas duré, qui dure toujours, ce sera moi, il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, il faut continuer, je vais donc continuer, il faut dire des mots, tant qu’il y en a, il faut les dire, jusqu’à ce qu’ils me trouvent, jusqu’ à ce qu’ils me disent, étrange peine, étrange faute, il faut continuer, c’est peut-être déjà fait, ils m’ont peut-être déjà dit, ils m’ont peut-être porté jusqu’au seuil de mon histoire, devant la porte qui ouvre sur mon histoire, ça m’étonnerait, si elle s’ouvre, ça va être moi, ça va être le silence, là où je suis, je ne sais pas, je ne le saurai jamais, dans le silence on ne sait pas, il faut continuer, je vais continuer. (Beckett 1953: 261-2) [ [ …] all words, there’s nothing else, you must go on, that’s all I know, they’re going to stop, I know that well, I can feel it, they’re going to abandon me, it will be the silence, for a moment, a good few moments, or it will be mine, the lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts, it will be I, you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the , where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett 1970: 179)]

Beckett’s final paragraph is marked by a tension between the impossibility of speaking and the necessity to do so, by the frantic, almost ob-

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sessive piling up of words, and the flimsy, ephemeral character of what is said. The protagonist is driven by the compulsive urge to speak, but there is, in fact, little to say: “il faut dire des mots, tant qu’il y en a” (“you must say words, as long as there are any”). Discourse is at once a gigantic undertaking, but by the same token, extraordinarily sparse in its literary manifestation. Beginning, continuing, ceasing all belong to a temporal scale, that entropic paradigm which informs Beckett’s work from beginning to end. Yet they also reside in the spatial dimension of his art, a dimension indexed by the “threshold of (his) work” (“seuil de [son] histoire”) – the point of entry which may equally be the definitive point of exit. Between the “I must” and “I can’t” there is a rift which is inherent to all discourse – the rift between expanse and paucity, between the production of discourse and the relatively narrow range of statements which can actually be enunciated. Given the enormous quantities of written, printed and spoken words produced across the world in a given year, the almost uncountable number of words circulating electronically by email or fax or telephone, the gigantic number of texts available in the internet, it is hard to think of ‘statements’ as something rare or sparse, as Beckett suggests we might do. Yet one question that Foucault asks in L’Archéologie is why there are, relatively speaking, so few statements (Archéologie 1547/Archaeology 132-5). Why is it that at any given point in time, there are some statements which have meaning, and many more others which can have no meaning? Why is it that in our epoch, QWERTY means nothing, except referring to the upper left-hand row keys on an English-language keyboard? The answer that Foucault gives to this question is that of the systematicity of discourse production. The conditions of possibility of statements pre-select what can be said and what can not be said. They determine which statements can be judged as making sense, even if they turn out to be falsifiable, and which statements remain below the threshold of meaning, which statements by definition cannot be understood as being “dans le vrai”. Such statements, for instance, the work of Mendel, were not “dans le vrai” at the moment of their enunciation, and would have to await shifts in the epistemological filter to enter the field of scientific truth (L’Ordre du discours 36-7/’The Discourse on Language’ 224-5).

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There is a moment in Foucault’s thinking, however (some time around the date of writing L’Archéologie du savoir or soon thereafter, quite probably coinciding with his experiences in Tunisia) at which the explanation for discursive rarity shifts slightly but significantly. In L’Archéologie, Foucault rejects “repression” as a reason for discursive rarity. There is no hidden cache of statements which remain unsaid because they are concealed in a discursive dungeon, kept out of sight by a discursive super ego. Rather, he says, discourse is a surface, upon which some statements simply cannot appear because they are rendered impossible by the regulations governing the sayable and unsayable (Archéologie 157/Archaeology 155). Soon after, however, Foucault introduces a factor not entirely dissimilar to repression – without for all that abandoning the notion of discourse as a positive space that has neither an empirical exterior nor a wastebin-unconscious. Power enters the game. Abruptly, it is no longer merely the principle of rarefaction which controls the sparseness of statements. Why one thing is said and not another, why there are comparatively few statements, is not only a matter of the filtering effect of the conditions of possibility of statements. Rather, discourse itself becomes, for Foucault, an object of power struggles. Its comparative rarity thus arises additionally from the fact that only some statements are permitted by systems of social control: dans toute société la production du discours est à la fois contrôlée, sélectionnée, organisée et redistribuée par un certain nombre de procédures qui ont pour rôle d’en conjurer les pouvoirs et les dangers, d’en maîtriser l’événement aléatoire, d’en esquiver la lourde, la redoutable matérialité. (L’Ordre du discours 10-1) [in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality. (‘The Discourse on Language’ 216)]

The conditions of possibility of discourse production (what allows one thing to be said while another remains unsayable, unthinkable, over the horizon of the imaginable) is a rarity which cannot be reduced to power, but none the less never ceases to be caught up in ubiquitous relations of power.

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Thus the idea of discursive space as a pre-selection of what can be said or thought at any given point in time gradually cedes in Foucault’s analysis, to a material space in which what can be said or thought is governed by relations of power, space, and knowledge. Once again, these shifts can be typified with reference to the context in which Foucault himself was trying to forge new concepts. Reflecting upon the reasons which made it so difficult to talk about space up till the 1960s, Foucault suggested a number of historical circumstances: Au moment où commençait à se développer une politique réfléchie des espaces (à la fin du XVIIIe siècle), les nouveaux acquis de la physique théorique et expérimentale délogeaient la philosophie de son vieux droit à parler du monde, du cosmos, de l’espace fini, ou infini. Ce double investissement de l’espace par une technologie politique et une pratique scientifique a rabattu la philosophie sur une problématique du temps. Depuis Kant, ce qui pour la philosophie à penser, c’est le temps. Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger. Avec une disqualification corrélative de l’espace qui apparaît du côté de l’entendement, de l’analytique, du conceptuel, du mort, du figé. (Dits et écrits III, 193) [At the moment when a considered politics of spaces was starting to develop, at the end of the eighteenth century, the new achievements in theoretical and experimental physics dislodged philosophy from its ancient right to speak of the world, the cosmos, finite or infinite space. This double investment of space by political technology and scientific practice reduced philosophy to the field of a problematic of time. Since Kant, what is to be thought by the philosopher is time. Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger. Along with this goes a correlative devaluation of space, which stands on the side of the understanding, the analytical, the conceptual, the dead, the fixed, the inert. (Power/Knowledge 14950)]

The very invisibility of space within the human sciences and within philosophy was itself the result of a power struggle over discursive space. Discovering its previous domain (space, the cosmos) usurped by the expansionist inroads of experimental science and political science, philosophy retreated to a fall-back position (time) which it then retrospectively declared its rightful fealty. In turn, it denigrated space as a field of study below its epistemological dignity. Foucault’s historical sketch is not without a self-referential, indeed performative dimension – much like his famous anecdote of the abusive existentialist psychologist. Foucault was perfectly well aware of the territorial skirmishes upon which he himself had embarked as a

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radical philosopher. To re-introduce space as a category of analysis in philosophy was to reshape the disciplinary terrain anew. This was not a matter simply of conceptual space, but also of institutional space, even of geographical space. Foucault’s own professional trajectory exemplified this perfectly. Until his appointment to the prestigious Collège de France in 1970, Foucault’s institutional affiliations were relatively marginal. They included French cultural institutes abroad, the provincial university of Clermont-Ferrand, and the erstwhile colonial University of Tunis. His peregrinations around Europe (from Uppsala to Warsaw and then on to Hamburg), North Africa, and towards the end of his life to the US, are the literal spatial indices of a thinker not at home among the dogmas of French intellectual life and only able to settle there on the condition of carving out a highly independent niche for his work (see Bourdieu 1984/Bourdieu 1990). Foucault himself thus exemplifies the very imbrication of discourse and power with quite concrete and tangible aspects of spatial practice (indeed, with geographical location and questions of (Parisian) centre and periphery) which I wish to pursue in this second part of my analysis of his thought. As I argued in previous chapters, Kristeva’s work on the chora in La Révolution du langage poétique has been followed by a sustained meditation over the subsequent thirty years on the practice of subjective and intersubjective existence under the rule of the Symbolic. A similar transition can be made out in Foucault’s work. His early interest in the organization of knowledge, largely articulated through an extensive vocabulary of spatial concepts, is succeeded by an analysis of the organization of knowledge in conjunction with the workings of power. Foucault terms this complex “power-knowledge”. Yet the addition of power to knowledge by no means implies the subtraction of space from Foucault’s conceptual apparatus. On the contrary, as he himself did not hesitate to point out, “L’espace est fondamental dans toute forme de vie communautaire; l’espace est fondamental dans tout exercice de pouvoir” [“Space is fundamental in all forms of communal life; space is fundamental in all exercise of power”] (Dits et écrits IV, 282). Space continues to play a decisive role in Foucault’s thinking about the social construction of knowledge and the construction of social existence via the generation of knowledge. Where is space to be situated in this new analytical configura-

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tion? And what sort of space is Foucault speaking of here? Space plays a fundamental role in answering such questions, not least because it goes some way to answering the fundamental critique of the concept of power-knowledge. That critique has been articulated for example by Habermas. He has argued that the very epistemological basis for the academic or scientific undertaking, its claim to the pursuit of truth under conditions of absolute neutrality, is removed by the notion of power-knowledge. For Habermas, such a conjunction is oxymoronic to say the least (see Habermas 1985: 310-2/Habermas 1990: 263-5). Precisely this non-neutrality of science was borne out, however, by work such as Said’s pioneering study of Orientalism (Said [1978] 1987: 9-15). Said’s work posits, behind the veneer of scientific empiricism, a spatial undertaking: in a 1986 retrospective on the earlier book, he notes that “the line separating Occident from Orient […] is less a fact of nature than it is a fact of human production, which I have called imaginative geography” (Said 1986: 211). Yet the concept of space restores the empirical aspect of academic enquiry in compensation for the failure of neutral truth. In the ‘Afterword’ to the 1995 reprint of Orientalism, he once again underlines that the task for the critical scholar is to connect “struggles of history and social meaning” with the “overpowering materiality” of the “struggle for control over territory” (Said [1978] 1995: 331-2). To answer these questions, we need to work with a more complex term than the duo power-knowledge – a more intricate term involving space. Such a term was minted by Foucault himself in a 1982 interview with Paul Rabinow entitled “Space, knowledge, power” (Dits et écrits, IV, 270-85/ The Essential Works III, 349-364). It has been taken up again by recent collections from the German- and English-speaking contexts respectively, entitled Raum, Wissen, Macht [Space, Knowledge, Power] (Maresch & Werber (eds) 2005), and Space, Knowledge and Power (Crampton & Elden (eds) 2007). In the second part of my pursuit of spatial theorization in Foucault’s work I shall try to mark out a “turning” or Kehre by virtue of which the dual enquiry of knowledge-space is succeeded by a triad of powerknowledge-space.

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Dispositif The power-knowledge-space complex designates an overlapping bundle of ways of acting, modes of thinking, seeing, speaking, understanding, forms of coercion and strategies of production. These are all which situated in, and indeed contribute to moulding concrete places and spaces – often in the configuration of architectural structures and the manner in which objects and persons are arranged within them. In order to describe such complexes, Foucault employed the term dispositif, “apparatus”, related to ‘disposition’ (arrangement), but also containing the cognate ‘positif’ (empirical). This piece of technical jargon aimed to highlight the machine-like, systemic nature of social processes. The dispositif designated a complex whole made up of many subordinated but interlocking functions, procedures, processes, elements. It is worth maintaining the French term, rather than replacing it with the English “apparatus”. The oddness of this expression for a non-French speaker may have a salutary effect. The italics I employ are intended to disturb our customary feel for social structures as natural or given. Dispositif may prevent us from regarding social reality as a homogenous, organic whole. Thinking of society as an unfamiliar, heterogeneous assembly of impersonal processes, subfunctions, mechanisms, which overlap but often work at odds with one another, is the gain perhaps to be had by holding on to the estrangement of the dispositif. How can we best think about the triadic complex of powerknowledge-space with the help of the dispositif? Foucault describes the dispositif as un ensemble résolument hétérogène, comportant des discours, des institutions, des aménagements architecturaux, des décisions réglementaires, des lois, des mesures administratives, des énoncés scientifiques, des propositions philosophiques, morales, philanthropiques […] Le dispositif lui-même, c’est le réseau qu’on peut établir entre ces éléments. (Dits et écrits III, 299) [a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions […] The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (Power/Knowledge 194)]

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The dispositif is thus something which does not pre-exist its own functioning. It is not a thing, but a dynamic which comes into play through the manner in which the elements, as processes, as events, work together and work upon each other. Foucault is at pains to stress the provisional, unstable character of the dispositif, underlining that “entre ces éléments, discursifs ou non, il y comme un jeu, des changements de position, des modifications de fonctions, qui peuvent, eux aussi, être très différents” (Dits et écrits III, 299) [“between these elements, whether discursive or nondiscursive, there is a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modifications of function which can also vary very widely” (Power/Knowledge 195)]. Local strategic pressures, rather than global concerns, thus drive the interrelationships between the constituent parts of the assemblage. The dispostif is “une sorte […] de formation, qui, à un moment historique donné, a eu pour fonction majeure de répondre à une urgence. Le dispositif a donc une fonction stratégique dominante” (Dits et écrits III, 299) [“a sort of […] formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need. The apparatus thus has a dominant strategic function” (Power/Knowledge 195)]. Foucault’s idea of a network (réseau) is an inherently spatial notion describing an ongoing interrelationship between parts. The dispositif is thus a dynamic and fluctuating space in which spaces also play a major role. Thus, space as a constituent element within this system needs to be thought of in a constantly shifting dynamic between two poles: those of actively productive instance, on the one hand, and product among products, on the other hand. It must be regarded as being intimately tied up with the generation of discourse and knowledge. It needs to be conceived of as a set of relationships itself and not as a given. And finally, it must be understood as being constantly shot through with relationships of power. Moreover, however, space is the dominant metaphor employed to conceptualize the dispostif assemblage. The dispositif is spread out, sprawling, multidimensional, enveloping extensions both in space and time, interconnecting, without a clear centre or commanding instance. Summarized thus, the dispositif may thus sound dauntingly abstract, yet Foucault uses the notion to describe a set of spatial proc-

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esses and relationships which are extremely concrete and down to earth. What does the dispositif mean in real, material terms? This question can best be answered chronologically. In the early embodiments of conceptual spaces into material spaces, before arriving at the notion of the dispostif, Foucault employed relatively simple isomorphisms of structures of knowledge and architectural constructions. Material space ‘translated’ conceptual space into concrete architectural structures, as in these passages from his early 1960s work on the history of madness: La déraison, c’est tout d’abord […] cette scission profonde, qui relève d’un âge d’entendement, et qui aliène l’un par rapport à l’autre en les rendant étranges l’un à l’autre, le fou et sa folie. […] L’internement, comme espace indifférencié d’exclusion, ne régnait-il pas entre le fou et la folie, entre la reconnaissance immédiate, et une vérité toujours différée, couvrant ainsi dans les structures sociales le même champ que la déraison dans les structures du savoir ? (Histoire de la folie 223) [Unreason is first and foremost […] that deep division, typical of an age of the Understanding, which alienates the one from the other, making strangers of the madman and his madness. […] As an undifferentiated space of exclusion, did confinement not reign between the mad and their madness, between immediate recognition and a truth that was permanently deferred, covering the same ground in social structures as unreason in structures of knowledge? (History of Madness 206)]

Here, Foucault builds upon his hypothesis of a fundamental shift from the exclusion of the insane via banishment to their exclusion via internment, from an external to an internal mode of exclusion from society (see Dits et Ecrits III, 577-8). By the same token, he traces a rupture between a pre-modern paradigm which, while exiling the mad just as it exiled lepers, at least granted them possession of their madness. The madman was attributed a special kind of supernatural knowledge as the privilege of madness. Under the classical regime, however, the notion of (self-) alienation stripped the madman of possession of his madness, driving a wedge between the subject and his madness. The spatial structure of internment created exclusion within society, just as it separated the insane from something which was inaccessible and alienated within themselves.

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At this stage of his thinking, Foucault pursued such isomorphisms between spatial structures and social or epistemological structures right down to details of architectural construction: Brissot trace, par exemple, le plan d’une maison de correction parfaite, selon la rigueur d’une géométrie qui est à la fois architecturale et morale. Tout fragment d’espace prend les valeurs symboliques d’un enfer social méticuleux. Deux des côtés d’un bâtiment, qui doit être carré, seront réservés au mal sous ses formes atténués […] Du côté du froid et du vent, on placera ‘les gens accusés du crime capital’. (Histoire de la folie 448-9) [Brissot for example drew up a plan for a perfect house of correction, according to the rigours of a geometry that was both architectural and moral. Every fragment of space took on the symbolic values of a meticulous social hell. Two sides of the building, which was to be square in shape, were reserved for less serious misdemeanours […] The cold and windy sides would house ‘people accused of capital crimes’. (History of Madness 428)]

In these early formulations of the relationships between space, discourse and power, concepts are mapped one-to-one onto social or institutional space. Deleuze, in his review of the later Surveiller et punir and its intellectual pre-history, claimed that such “correspondences” or “isomorphisms” between discourse and material space, indeed, “symbolization” of the one by the other, were already superseded by the time of L’Archéologie du savoir, that is, by the late 1960s (Foucault 39/Foucault 31). After that date, this mapping of analogous instances of concepts and space modulates into more complex and less clearly binary configurations. Deleuze saw L’Archéologie as marking a turning point, in which discursive practices, the focus of Foucault’s attention up until then, came to be supplemented by non-discursive practices. The material ‘other’ of discourse could only be marked negatively at this stage (by the epithet non-discursive practices). By the mid-1970s, however, Foucault had worked out a way of talking about space on its own terms, and not merely as a derivative of discourse. In Surveiller et punir, Deleuze envisaged spaces, such as the prison (le milieu) having a “content” (the prisoner, the subject to be created) and a “form” (the discourses about the prisoner which constituted him as such). The “ferme distinction de formes” [“clear distinction between forms”] still

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upheld by L’Archéologie has been overhauled by a more complex, “overdetermined” relationship (Foucault 39/Foucault 31). What Foucault increasingly undertook from then on may be compared fruitfully with Althusser’s attempt at overhauling the traditional Marxist notion of structural levels (base, superstructure) by replacing it with a notion of “overdetermined”, semi-autonomous but interlocking regimes of production. Althusser (Foucault’s erstwhile mentor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in rue d’Ulm and a long-time friend) attempted to rethink Marxist social theory outside of the hierarchical binary of base and superstructure. Althusser’s revised Marxism conceives of various elements (economics, material production, culture, ideology, and so on) operating each according to its own rules, and exerting an influence upon the other instances. The various functions are not subordinated to a central controlling instance, though the state may attempt to derogate such control to itself – usually without complete success, because modern societies are so complex, and their constitutive elements so multifarious, that there are always processes functioning in a semi-autonomous manner. Thus no single instance is primary. Rather, each instance exerts an influence on the others, and each instance is influenced, simultaneously but in different ways, by the others. The economic base is no longer the ultimate determining instance which moulds culture, policy, social structures, ideology, etc. Rather, the system of constituent elements functions simultaneously according to multiple vectors. It is structurally “overdetermined” (Jameson 1981: 35-45). The same decentralized and “overdetermined” relationship between heterogeneous and non-hierarchical elements applies in Foucault’s later work. Increasingly, the relationship is neither one of largely static homology, nor of parallelism, but rather, of production. Space is the matrix in which knowledge and identities are produced, but also one of the products, and in turn an agent of production. Foucault said in one of his many interviews, pour moi, l’architecture, dans les analyses très vagues que j’ai pu en faire, constitue uniquement un élément de soutien, qui assure une certaine distribution des gens dans l’espace, une canalisation de leur circulation, ainsi que la codification des rapports qu’ils entretiennent entre eux. L’architecture ne constitue donc pas seulement un élément de l’espace: elle est précisément pensée comme inscrite dans un

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Foucault is at pains to document in great detail the quite pragmatic manner in which spatial technologies interact with other technologies of power and knowledge to produce complex modern societies as we know them. These analyses extend from micro-descriptions of the topography of a court room (Dits et écrits II, 345-6/Power/Knowledge 8-9) to macro-accounts of public health measures which will culminate in the later analyses of bio-power (see Naissance de la biopolitique). For instance, Foucault documents the rules set up by the military administration of Vincennes to deal with the plague at the end of the seventeenth century. These measures serve as a model for the emerging spatial systems of societal discipline: Cet espace clos, découpé, surveillé en tous points, où les individus sont insérés en une place fixe, où les moindres mouvements sont contrôlés, où tous les événements sont enregistrés, où un travail ininterrompu d’écriture relie le centre et le périphérie, où le pouvoir s’exerce sans partage, selon une figure hiérarchique continue, où chaque individu est constamment repéré, examiné et distribué entre les vivants, le malades et les morts – tout cela constitue un modèle compact du dispositif disciplinaire. (Surveiller et punir 199) [This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead – all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. (Discipline and Punish 197)]

This example from three centuries ago describes, in schematic form, the entire operation of the modern disciplinary apparatus as Foucault imagines it. At the centre of this system is a principle of ordered

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knowledge which places knowledge in the service of social order: “A la peste répond l’ordre; il a pour fonction de débrouiller toutes les confusions […] Contre la peste qui est mélange, la discipline fait valoir son pouvoir qui est d’analyse” (Surveiller et punir 199) [“The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion […] Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one of analysis” (Discipline and Punish 197)]. But the dispositif is much more than merely the opposition between social chaos and ordered knowledge. This disciplinary apparatus bundles systems of knowledge, knowledge which allows some ideas to come into view and excludes others, and thus is linked to the workings of power. However, it is more extensively and more materially keyed into concrete spaces such as architecture, or practical ways of dealing with or living in space (bodily practices, daily rhythms, no-go zones and privileged places). “La discipline est avant tout une analyse de l’espace; c’est l’individualisation par l’espace, le placement des corps dans un espace individualisé qui permet la classification et les combinaisons” (Dits et écrits III, 516) [“Discipline is, above all, analysis of space; it is individualization through space, the placing of bodies in an individualized space that permits classification and combinations” (‘The Incorporation of the Hospital’ 147)]. This spatial machinery is massively productive of coercive social relationships. Foucault’s grand examples, the hospital and the prison, exemplify this productive, and not merely reflective, facet of space. Foucault calls the hospital a “jardin botanique du mal, vivant herbier des maladies. En lui s’ouvrait un espace d’observation facile et limpide; la vérité permanente des maladies ne pouvait plus s’y cacher” [“botantical garden of evil, a living herb-garden of diseases. The hospital opened up an easy and clear space of observation where the permanent truth of disease could no longer be hidden from sight”] (Dits et écrits II, 698). The hospital is a space of observation where knowledge of disease is produced in ways unknown before. The hospital is a discourse-generator, a place where the “truth” about disease is engendered – and not revealed, or found, as common sense would suggest. The relationship between the institution, the architectural space, the discourses which circulate around that institution and the knowledge produced there and taking effect upon the inmates is a complex and multi-directional one.

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Foucault explores these aspects in some of his comments upon the transformation of the Spital to the modern Hospital: “La question de l’hôpital à la fin du XVIIe siècle est fondamentalement une question de l’espace” (Dits et écrits III, 518) [“The question of the hospital at the end of the eighteenth century was fundamentally a question of space” (‘The Incorporation of the Hospital’ 149)]. He investigates the manner in which “l’introduction des mécanismes disciplinaires dans l’espace désordonné de l’hôpital allait permettre sa médicalisation” (Dits et écrits III, 517) [“the introduction of the disciplinary mechanisms into the disorganized space of the hospital allowed its medicalization” (‘The Incorporation of the Hospital’ 148)]. The modern hospital was based upon the principle of “un art de répartition spatiale des individus” (Dits et écrits III, 515) [“an art of spatial distribution of individuals” (‘The Incorporation of the Hospital’ 146)], in which “la distribution de l’espace devient un moyen thérapeutique” (Dits et écrits III, 519) [“the distribution of space becomes a therapeutic means” (‘The Incorporation of the Hospital’ 150)]. A new regime of space produced a new form of medicine which in turn produced a new form of patient as the model of the individual subject. The prison, another similarly closed space of observation and control, functions in an analogous manner in that it too generates a new form of social subject: “La prison ne peut pas manquer de fabriquer des délinquants” (Surveiller et punir 270) [“The prison cannot fail to produce delinquents” (Discipline and Punish 266)]. Prisons make criminals, according to Foucault’s notion of the productivity of the carceral space and the practices which ‘take place’ in it. The space of the prison also generates discourse, knowledge, and identities: Le réseau carcéral constitue une des armatures de ce pouvoir-savoir qui a rendu historiquement possible les sciences humaines. L’homme connaissable (âme, individualité, conscience, conduite, peu importe ici) est l’effet-objet de cet investissement analytique, de cette domination-observation. (Surveiller et punir 312) [The carceral network constituted one of the armatures of this powerknowledge that has made the human sciences historically possible. Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this domination-observation. (Discipline and Punish 305)]

The prison, like the hospital, creates identities, via the type of existence which it inculcates and the social relationships which it imposes.

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It is a space of control which is also a space of minute observation, a space in which information is gathered but also produced, by virtue of the manner in which the environment works upon the detainees or inmates. This information is the stuff of new regimes of knowledge which do not describe their objects so much as create them. Foucault’s subsequent work broadened its purview to include society as a whole. What had been explored in detail initially for the asylum, next for the hospital, and then for the prison, was now applied to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society as a global field of biopolitical intervention, the new domain of ‘bio-power’: L’homme occidental apprend peu-à-peu ce que c’est d’être une espèce vivant dans un monde vivant, d’avoir un corps, des conditions d’existence, des probabilités de vie, une santé individuelle et collective, des forces qu’on peut modifier et un espace où on peut les repartir de façon optimale. Pour la première fois sans doute dans l’histoire, le biologique se réfléchit dans le politique; le fait de vivre […] passe pour une part dans le champ de contrôle du savoir et d’intervention du pouvoir. (Histoire de sexualité: 1 187) [Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living […] part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention. (History of Sexuality: I 142)]

Foucault insists upon the radical nature of this newly emergent ‘biopower’ – a form of power which takes as its points of leverage every aspect of human life, from the broad sweep of epidemiological or demographic concerns, down to the smallest details of health and reproduction in the family. Once again, there is a performative subtext to this narrative of emergent bio-power gradually enveloping the whole space of society and social life. Such narratives can be understood in an academic context as enacting a new paradigm of spatial research. To that extent, they embark upon the same trajectory of accumulating epistemological capital as the spatialized knowledges they ostensibly document. Bio-power emerged in the overlapping of three forms of management of space: “la souveraineté s’exerce dans les limites d’une territoire, la discipline s’exerce sur le corps des individus, et enfin la sé-

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curité s’exerce sur l’ensemble d’une population” (Sécurité, Territoire, Population 13) [“sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory, discipline is exercised on the bodies of individuals, and security [or what Foucault would come to call “governmentality”] is exercised over a whole population” (Security, Territory, Population 11)]. Foucault suggests that what may look somewhat like a “transition from a ‘territorial state’ to a ‘population state’” [“Passage d’un ‘Etat territorial’ à un ‘Etat de population’?”] in the eighteenth century is not so much a replacement as a displacement of emphasis (Sécurité, territoire, population 373/The Essential Works I, 69). As political and administrative managers tried to control and channel the circulation of people, goods, money, criminality, diseases, what gradually emerged as the space for action was a domain inhabited by the population as a mass, defining what biology and physics named the milieu: Le milieu apparaît comme un champ d’intervention où, au lieu d’atteindre les individus comme un ensemble de sujets de droit capables d’actions de volonté – ce qui était le cas de la souveraineté –, au lieu de les atteindre comme une multiplicité d’organismes, de corps susceptibles de performances, et de performances requises comme dans la discipline, on va essayer d’atteindre, précisément, une population. […] Ce qu’on va essayer d’atteindre, par ce milieu, c’est là où précisément interfère une série d’événements que ces individus, populations et groupes produisent, avec des événements de type quasi naturel qui se produisent autour d’eux. (Sécurité, territoire, population 23) [Finally, the milieu appears as a field of intervention in which, instead of affecting individuals as a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions – which would be the case of sovereignty – and instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances, and of required performances – as in discipline – one tries to affect, precisely, a population. […] What one tries to reach through this milieu is precisely the conjunction of a series of events produced by these individuals, populations, and groups, and quasi natural events which occur around them. (Security, Territory, Population 21)]

The space of the milieu was defined, synchronically, by the spaces of streets, quarters, towns, and diachronically, by the unpredictable events which could erupt there: epidemics, riots, famines, crimes, events which had to be controlled from the individual to the collective level. Such all-encompassing ‘bio-power’, whose brief was the rigorous control of populations, especially the urban poor and labouring

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masses, implemented its policies with the help of a gigantic apparatus which monitored and accumulated information on those entities which would henceforth emerge as social subjects: Cette transformation a eu des conséquences considérables. […] Inutile d’insister non plus sur la prolifération des technologies politiques, qui à partir de là vont investir le corps, la santé, les façons de se nourrir et de se loger, les conditions de vie, l’espace entier de l’existence. (Histoire de sexualité: I 188-9) [This transformation had considerable consequences. […] There is no need either to lay further stress on the proliferation of political technologies that ensued, investing the body, health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living conditions, the whole space of existence. (History of Sexuality: I 143-44)]

It goes without saying that neither this knowledge nor the subjects it focussed upon were pre-given factors. Rather, they were constructed in the very process of acquiring knowledge.They took on their contours of modern humanity in the very act of being watched and controlled. “L’espace entier de l’existence” [“The whole space of life”] thus defines henceforth the radius of action of ‘bio-power’. That space, logically, can no longer be assumed to be a stable and preexistent container in which social processes “take place”. Nor is it merely a product of human practice, but more radically, it emerges as a semi-autonomous element with its own effects and contribution to relations of power. Spatial techniques, for instance, may radically determine and mould subjectivity, within the dispositif (see Dits et écrits IV, 282). Subjectivity thus appears as a crucial residue thrown off by the dispositif, but no longer as an originary or autonomous instance. It is merely a co-opted effect of spatialized techniques of power.

Histories, spaces In one of his interviews, Foucault explained in detail the significance of space in his work. Space appears as a central factor in the operation of the dispositif, demanding much more wide-ranging analyses than have hitherto been undertaken:

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These comments are significant, not merely because they point towards the future directions of his work, but also because they tacitly reveal the prior development of his programme of research. A number of retrospective continuities are evident in Foucault’s projections of a hypothetical history of space, as yet to be written. First, Foucault had insisted from the outset that space was important as a category of analysis because it opened up vistas in which power became visible: “Essayer de le déchiffrer, au contraire, à travers des métaphores spatiales, stratégiques permet de saisir précisément les points par lesquels les discours se transforment dans, à travers et à partir des rapports de pouvoir” (Dits et écrits III, 33) [“Endeavouring on the other hand to decipher discourse through the use of spatial, strategic metaphors enables one to grasp precisely the points at which discourses are transformed in, through and on the basis of relations of power” (Power/Knowledge 70)]. In one sense, Foucault was saying nothing new here. The spaces imagined by imperial geography in its nineteenth- and twentieth-century manifestations, for instance, were always patently linked to notions of power – the destiny of great, colonizing nations to wield power and to exercise it across the whole world. But the power Foucault envisages as being conceptualized in the dispositif is quite different. It is a power multifariously distributed among the plethora of actors it envelopes and enables, and it is anything but one-way in its vectors of functioning. To that extent it is always available for co-optation in local domains of struggle and contestation, thus calling for a very different topography of power. The usage of spatial concepts to describe a notion of power which has no ‘outside’ may counteract the commonly reiterated critique of Foucault, namely that the ubiquity of power vitiates the very possibility of

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repression (see for example McHoul & Grace 1993: 85-6; Mills 2003: 40-2). Yet the coupling of space and power may clarify this problem, suggesting that only in the ‘space’ of power can a ‘place’ for resistance be found. “Indeed, where there is power, there is resistance: contrary to what is often assumed, it is the absence of resistance which is impossible” (Young 1990: 87). Logically, then, much of the contemporary resistance to apparently ubiquitous relations of power such as globalizing capital has drawn upon Foucauldian notions of resistancewithin-power in highly effective ways which highlight precisely the relevance of geopolitical and local space for political theorizing. Secondly, the imbrication of space and time which Foucault had underlined from the outset continues to be stressed here. Foucault had always insisted that “l’espace lui-même, dans l’expérience occidentale, a une histoire, est il n’est pas possible de méconnaître cet entrecroisement fatal du temps avec l’espace” (Dits et écrits IV, 753) [“space itself, in the Western experience, has a history, and one cannot fail to take note of this inevitable interlocking of time with space” (The Essential Works II, 176)]. Indeed, if we are to believe Deleuze, Foucault’s late work on practices of personal ethos and ethics in antiquity and the early Christian epoch would cast the historical brief of his work so far back into Western history that the temporal and the spatial would effectively be folded into each other. Subjective spaces, the micro-analysis of power, and the entire diachronic development of European culture would thus form a single spatio-temporal fabric, in which temporality would be generated out of spatiality and vice versa (Foucault 115/Foucault 107-8). What is more intriguing than the continuities, however, are the transformations of Foucault’s thought which are hinted at in this passage. His comments throw an oblique light upon the mutations of notions of space in his own work. Following immediately upon the comments quoted above, Foucault backtracks to see how space has slowly developed as a category of analysis up until the present moment. His mini-chronology of the epistemology of space is significant because it forms the framework of his own projected history of spaces. Il est surprenant de voir combien les problèmes des espaces a mis longtemps à paraître comme problème historico-politique: ou bien l’espace était renvoyé à la nature – au donné, aux déterminations premières, à la géographie physique, c’est-à-dire à une sorte de couche préhistorique; ou bien il était conçu comme lieu de résidence ou ex-

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Foucault identifies two ways, often implicit, of theorizing space in nineteenth- and early twentieth century geography – in particular in imperial geography. These two vectors of analysis saw geography as determining the ‘character’ of a race, its predisposition to certain types of geopolitical activity (see Agnew & Corbridge, 1995) or as a limit to be overcome by masterful, pioneering colonizing or ‘civilizing’ races whose mission was to conquer ever greater territories for their own jurisdiction. Clearly these two versions of history are mutually constitutive of one another within imperial history: it is the geophysical predispositions of the masterful European peoples which predestine them to custodianship and conquest, and the geophysical predisposition of the natives which necessitates their subordination. Alternatives to such history are offered, according to Foucault, by a mode of spatial history developed in particular by Bloch and Braudel. Such history, Foucault argues, “il faut la poursuivre, en ne se disant pas seulement que l’espace prédétermine une histoire qui en retour le refond, et se sédimente en lui. L’ancrage spatial est une forme économico-politique qu’il faut étudier en détail” (Dits et écrits III, 192-3) [“must be extended, by no longer just saying that space predetermines a history which in turn reworks and sediments itself in it. Anchorage in a space is an economico-political form which needs to be studied in detail” (Power/Knowledge 149)]. Foucault traces a transformation of spatial analysis away from space as a pre-existing, determining factor underlying the destiny of nation or race, or from space as a constraint to be exceeded by energetic and forceful nationalisms. A new spatial analysis would abandon the notion of space as a starting point (either accepted as a determining parameter or overcome). Space would not be an origin, in this analysis, but a constantly

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evolving factor within politics and economics, an actor in its own right. It is surely no coincidence that the dual notions of ground/substrate and domain/limit as defining a now-overhauled notion of space have equivalents in Foucault’s early work. In Foucault’s early “archaeological” analysis, the discursive “trihedron” was marked out on the one hand, by the rules of discursive production which provided a ground or substrate for statements and discursive configurations, and on the other, by the domain of the episteme, whose limits were marked by epochal epistemic ruptures. Discursive space was thus delimited by a determining base and limiting frontiers, very much in the same manner as the imperial geography which Foucault would later critique. In Foucault’s comments quoted above one can detect an implicit criticism of his early implementation of spatial metaphors in the analysis of discursive history. Foucault’s own spatial analysis undergoes a transformation of the sort he recommends for a projected “history of spaces” in general – namely, a development from a static to a dynamic model of social space, one which is shot through with power relations and participates actively in their productive work. With the elaboration of the dispositif, Foucault was able to leave behind the rather hierarchical blocks of episteme and rupture, with their base-superstructure profile. Rather, his analysis moved into a realm of decentred relations of discursive and non-discursive practices and various types, which overlap and interact with one another. They make up decentralized, shifting, complexes of different varieties of social practice, ranging from the discursive to the individual to the spatial-architectural. The transformation effected thus was double. First, the entry of power into the analysis of discursive and social space, made these analyses much more attuned to the real complexities and conflicts of human existence. Secondly, the spatial element in this analysis worked back upon the notion of power, eschewing a notion of power which was linear (unidirectional), binary (to have power or not to have it) and repressive (power as restraining and constraining). Rather, Foucault’s dispostif suggested a type of power which was dispersed and ubiquitous, polyfocal, relational (resulting from an interaction between social actors), and productive (enabling, generative, making ef-

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fects happen) rather than repressive. This power was a power whose multivectorial and productive character was that of space itself. In previous chapters, we traced the development of Kristeva’s work from a notion of text to a notion of experience. The notion of text was designed to deconstruct the middle-class concept of individual personhood together with an array of conservative political and social practices associated with it (authoritarianism, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.). The idea of the text, spatially dispersed and semantically shattered, worked to undermine the dual notions of intention and authorhood underlying bourgeois conceptions of personhood. This attack on the putatively autonomous and reasonable self was however overhauled by a more complex concept of the constructed nature of subjecthood. Here, experience, buttressed by the notion of narrative (itself derived from that of the text) returned in Kristeva’s later work to illuminate the manner in which personhood as a social function resisted attempts to demystify it by means of the notion of text. Furthermore, if personhood and its socio-economic and political offshoots proved so durable, then it was necessary to produce an account of its resilience and its ongoing adaptability to changing economic conditions. Experience and narrativity provided Kristeva with a more complex, constructivist reading of the manner in which subjectivity, both as a disabling, ideological category and as a productive, potentially subversive complex of signification (as in her notion of revolt) might function within late-capitalist societies (see McAffee 2004: 122-5). Foucault’s work was carried out on rather different terrain: less literary or artistic and psychoanalytical in tenor, it concentrated more on socio-political institutions, practices and discourses. None the less, Foucault’s progression from the 1960s to the 1980s can also be roughly described as modulating from a primarily ‘textual’ notion of discourse and knowledge to an ‘experiential’, ‘narrative’ conceptualization of the discursive construction of manipulated but potentially resisting subjectivities, whether individual or collective, in society. In the work of both Kristeva and Foucault from the 1960s to the present, textual or discursive space is overhauled by, or rather, integrated into, social, power-ridden space. Space itself appears to be a driving conceptual force which imposes its own character – dispersed, non-hierarchical, productive of the realities which inhabit and mould it in its turn – upon the theoretical fields it is part of. The binary spaces which inaugurate their work in the 1960s, including the fundamental

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and agonistic binary time/space which signals the emergence of space as an intellectual paradigm, appear to becoming increasingly blurred across the decades, opening onto the complex vistas of social productivity employed in contemporary social, cultural and literary theory. Yet some critics continue to insist that, for all his brilliance and innovatory impact, Foucault’s spatial thinking has neglected much of the dynamics of texture of social experience. Nigel Thrift, for instance, enumerates what he sees as a number of blindspots in Foucault’s work: the phenomenology of perception, affect, things, and space (Thrift 2007: 53-6). He laments in Foucault’s spatial analyses a neglect of the lived textuality of spatial experience: Foucault had a spatial sensibility […], one that arose naturally from his critique of the architectonic space of the transcendental project, but it was not […] a sensibility that he did very much with. […] Foucault tended to think in space in terms of orders, and I think this tendency made him both alive to space as a medium through which change could be effected and, at the same time, blind to a good part of space’s aliveness. (Thrift 2007: 55)

Thrift suggests that space can not adequately be conceptualized by Foucault in its positivity: Thus, when he wanted to signal this spatial quality he often found other not-categories for it, like heterotopia. […] this is a spatiality that still seems strangely muted to me, neutered especially by its inability to systematically think co-incidence (except as aleatory). Perhaps part of this neutering comes from the lack of attention to energy in Foucault’s account of power, an account which has been reworked by others who were more concerned with motion. […] Perhaps part of it comes from a difficulty […] to imagine how different contents can inhabit the same space. (Thrift 2007: 55)

In the following chapters we seek to explore, through the work of Deleuze (and his co-writer Guattari) a spatial thought which appears not only to have rigorously blurred from the very outset the binary borders successively overcome in the theorizing of Kristeva and Foucault, but to escape the abstraction of spatial experience which may possibly dog some of this work, thereby moving towards a more sinuous and textured account of human existence in a spatial world.

5. Deleuze’s Territories Beyond binarism At the end of the 1960s, Michel Foucault left his chair in Philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand and took up a position at the University of Tunis. During his time in Tunisia, which spanned the turbulent events of May 1968, and only ended with his election to a Chair at the Collège de France, Foucault came in contact with highly politicized Tunisian students, students whose political activism frequently earned them police brutality and prison sentences. This experience, together with the influence of his young partner Daniel Defert, who was already politically active when the two first met, wrought a transformation in Foucault which would make him a wellknown, if sometimes maverick figure in French radical politics up until his death in 1984 (see Macey 1993: 204-6). Against this background of radical thinking and radical activism starting at the end of the 1960s, it is significant that Deleuze sets L’Archéologie du savoir, published in 1969 by the prestigious Gallimard house in Paris but written in Tunisia, at a turning point in Foucault’s thought. In Foucault’s early work on medicine and madness, Deleuze sees an exclusive interest in discourse, which then undergoes a significant modification at the time of L’Archéologie. This work introduces alongside discourse the notion of non-discursive practices. Deleuze wryly remarks that the non-discursive practices can only appear, at this stage of Foucault’s thinking, prefixed by the contrastive, negating “non-”. The broader social context of discourse appears on the horizon of Foucault’s work, but only as a counterpoint to discourse. Subsequently, however, this binary mode of thinking gradually modulates towards a less dichtomized concept. Foucault eventually arrives at a heterogeneous and highly complex notion of the overlaps of discourse and a multitude of other practices, institutional, pedagogical, political, spatial (Foucault 39/Foucault 31).

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It is not by chance that it was Deleuze who made these comments, for the sort of binarism which he saw Foucault as leaving behind little by little as his thinking developed is something which cannot genuinely be detected anywhere in Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) work. For this reason there will be no double articulation in my presentation of space in Deleuze. The distinction that I have traced in the chapters on Kristeva and Foucault between a more theoretical or discursively dominated phase and a later more experiential or politically accentuated phase, with a gradual blurring of the boundaries between the two, does not hold with Deleuze’s work. This is because his reflection consistently works, from the outset, to undermine such oppositions, and to think thought and practice as activities which merge into each other at some point. Both thought and practice must be considered as internally differentiated, dispersed fields whose inner heterogeneity is only the flip side of their common border regions, where thought becomes a practice and practice a form of thought. For this reason, the following two chapters evince a somewhat different structure to the chapters on Kristeva and Foucault. In its account of Deleuze’s theories of space, the third section of this book has recourse to a less linear model of exposition than its predecessors. Rather than employing the topos of two phases, in which a second phase increasingly erases the implicit binarism of the first, I work here with a series of theoretical concepts. These concepts can be considered as nodes of thought in Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) thinking. I have arranged these conceptual foci in what is intended as a step-by-step logical progression. I begin in chapter six with the most evidently spatial notions, those of flow, territorialization, de-territorialization and re-territorialization, and lines of flight. I then proceed in chapter seven to the concepts of the intensity, of the sign, of schizoid spaces and their maps, and the fold. However, there is nothing inherently necessary or final about the order I have constructed, and in principle a quite different order would serve equally well. These chapters can thus be conceived of as a space with multiple points of entry, as a configuration of planes or plateaux to be negotiated from any number of starting points. As Deleuze and Guattari themselves say of their book Mille plateaux, “Chaque plateau peut être lu à n’importe quelle place, et mis en rapport avec n’importe quelle autre” (Mille plateaux 33) [“Each plateau can be read starting anywhere, and can be related to any other plateau” (A Thousand Plateaus 22)].

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This principle of construction does not merely reflect that of Mille plateaux. It would appear to echo that of the entirety of Deleuze’s work, as Paul A. Harris observes: “Gilles Deleuze’s thinking about space is not to be found in a single text or statement. It is rather distributed through his writings about topics as diverse as Francis Bacon’s paintings, fractal geometry, biological morphologies, and geography”. Indeed, this perhaps explains why so little has been said until now about Deleuze’s work on space. With the exception of the edited collection from which Harris’s claim is taken, Deleuze and Space, no sustained attention has been paid to Deleuze as a spatial thinker. Significantly, as Harris adds, “Over the past decade or so, Deleuze’s diffuse philosophy of space has actually been most incisively clarified not by philosophers, but architects, and architectural theorists” (Harris 2005: 36). This is puzzling, as the spatial references in Deleuze’s work are no less ubiquitous than in that of Foucault. (Moreover, the spatial notions of the former thinker often resonate with the spatial reflections of the latter – unsurprisingly, as the two were close friends and devoted a number of writings to each other’s work.) Significantly Deleuze and Space never pretends to offer any overview of Deleuze’s spatial thought. Rather, it merely assembles a number of disparate and exploratory routes into this aspect of his work from quite heterogeneous starting points. The reason for the paucity of ‘overviews’ of Deleuze’s reflection on space lies in the nature of that reflection itself. Its architecture is “rhizomatic” rather than “arborescent”. Deleuze’s theory of space is not built like a tree, with a central hierarchical trunk from which subordinated ‘branches’ then spread out, themselves branching off into smaller twig-like subtopics. Rather, his theory of space seems to develop horizontally, spreading out tendrils and runner-shoots which then cross each other at some later point, forming a dense web of allusions and interconnections. The very construction of his theory of space itself evinces strong spatial (rather than linear or hierarchical) characteristics from the outset. The rhizomatic nature of Deleuze’s theorizing on space makes it very difficult to write about his work in the traditional ordered academic mode. Every topic one selects for discussion inevitably connects up to other topics. Any route of entry condemns one to proceed sideways in several directions at once to meet up with other principle nodes of his thought. A commentator like myself is therefore obliged

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to capitulate to this rhizomatic structure and to a certain extent to reproduce it in her or his commentary. The work of Deleuze resists any other mode of discourse. This practical resistance has inflected my central thesis. This book enquires about the shift in fundamental questions in French poststructuralist thought which replaced the question ‘What does it mean?’ with the question ‘How does it mean?’ Thus far, in Foucault and Kristeva, the answer to the question ‘How is meaning produced?’ has been spatial. In Kristeva’s theory the initial answer is the chora, the pre-Oedipal maternal space of pulsions which is then succeeded by a series of more concrete meditations around the subsistence of semiotic structures (broadly impulses to creativity and narrativity) within the symbolic realm of social life. In Foucault, the answer to the same question was the episteme, the grid of underlying assumptions which makes a historically delimited space of discourse possible. Later on, Foucault’s answer to the question ‘How is meaning produced’ is complicated by the addition of more pragmatic factors such as power, institutionality, and concrete spatiality. In both thinkers the earlier answer to the question of the production of meaning generates a relatively schematic two-tier mechanism for the production of meaning. In their later phases, with an increasing focus upon the socially relevant contexts of meaning-making (socio-psychic in Kristeva, evinced through a plethora of clinical case studies, historical-political in Foucault, attested by enormously detailed archival documentation) the networks of meaning-making develop more complex, decentralized ramifications. In Deleuze, the question of the production of meaning is from the outset located at a multiplicity of different levels and documented by examples taken from a range of disciplines, from history or anthropology via biology or zoology through to physics or aesthetic theory. We are missing the point if we fail to comprehend that these examples are understood not as mere illustrations, figurative anecdotes supporting a highly abstract argument. On the contrary, the bewildering range of examples in Deleuze’s work is to be understood as demonstrating the ubiquity of the productive processes being expounded. In other words, the production of meaning is coeval with the production of life itself, and this is happening everywhere. The dynamic process of life is a gigantic decentralized network of ongoing

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processes of connections which are in turn generative and are generative by virtue of emitting signs. A connection between two beings (say, animals mating) is triggered by signs (mating calls, patterns of ostentatious behaviour, configurations of fur- or feather-colours) and generates signs (recognition signals for parents and their young). Meaning is at the heart of life. Deleuze’s response to the question ‘How is meaning made possible?’ is thus to be found everywhere. His theory of meaning is thus by definition a theory of space because the answer to the question is necessarily a local one, situated quite literally at a node on a network of interconnections. The production of meaning is ubiquitous, giving rise to a theory which is elaborated by extending its purview across a spatially expansive plane of investigations.

Flow We tend to think of ourselves as persons with a relatively clear identity, inhabiting a body with clearly delimited boundaries. But what of the fact that we are ceaselessly shedding our skin? We do not do this as ostentatiously as snakes, of course, which abandon their scaly cutaneous housing in a single piece, leaving it behind like an echo of their former selves. We humans shed our skin constantly, in miniscule flakes which, so I have been told, contribute to much of the household dust accumulating in the corners of our habitations. In the space of seven years, a biblically symbolic span of time, we renew our skin completely. Completion, re-creation, de-creation. How constant are we as beings if the very boundaries of our selves are constantly being replenished from within and cast off without? Our skin, the porous surface of exchange with our environment, transmitting information from outside (temperature, touch, moisture) to the inner system, and heatreactions (blushing, pallor, sweating) to the outside world, is one single surface of exchange. Not only is it constantly exchanging information, it too is being exchanged from the moment of its creation, inner layers gradually becoming outer, cast out and then cast off. But let us pursue this extended metaphor a little further. In developmental terms, the brain develops out of a folding of skin. The loopings and infoldings of the cerebral matter are merely a visual image of the brain’s own genetic development. Thinking is posited upon

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synaptic connections maximised by the in-folding of what was once the external cutaneous surface of the self. We are thus a continuity of cutaneity which stretches from an outer world (with which an exchange of information and, in the last analysis, of matter, is constantly being carried on) to our innermost infolded recesses of intellection. This continuity is not a stable one. It is a paradoxical continuity of ceaseless change and flux. Materially and processually, we are, to seize upon a Deleuzian motto, becoming. We are becoming (gerund, continuous form), we are becoming (substantive). In order to express this state more accurately, we would need to replace the apparently simple statement “I am” with something like an “I am – I am – I am – I am […]”, or some other verbal or typographical device which would allow us to visualize the flux of being which is our real nature. Rather than merely imagining ourselves temporally, as a punctual self embarked upon a linear trajectory, we would need to imagine ourselves spatially: as a region of intensity partly marked off from its environment but only by blurred borders, by interstitial grey zones rather than by clear demarcations. By starting thus close to home – for our sense of selfhood is perhaps the site where we feel as close to who and what we are as we are going to get – it may be possible to illustrate what Deleuze and Guattari are getting at in their radically counter-intuitive theory of flow as the basis for all existence. To do so means to constantly unthink our received notions of how identity is formed and perpetuated. How might we visualize a space of flows? Let us imagine, for instance, a city seen at night from the air, in which the illuminated headlights of cars on the city streets create flows of light through space. Yet the drawback of this image is that it still assumes the primacy of a stable space as the background against which mobility can be perceived. Only against this stable space do the flows of traffic become visible. It is precisely this primacy of stability that Deleuze and Guattari in Mille plateaux wish to cast into question. We start, then, with a concept which for Deleuze and Guattari is crucial: that of flow. Their primordial concept, is one which is eminently spatial. To elaborate the concept of flow they have recourse to the notion of a “minor science” whose emergence they locate in antiquity:

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Elle aurait d’abord un modèle hydraulique, au lieu d’être une théorie des solides considérant les fluides comme un cas particulier […] le flux est la réalité même ou la consistence. […] un modèle de devenir et d’hétérogénéité, qui s’oppose au stable, à l’éternel, à l’identitque, au constant. C’est un ‘paradoxe’, faire du devenir lui-même un modèle, et non plus le caractère second d’une copie. (Mille plateaux 447) [First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of solids treating fluids as a special case […] flux is reality itself, or consistency. […] The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant. It is a ‘paradox’ to make becoming itself a model and no longer a secondary characteristic, a copy. (A Thousand Plateaus 361)]

Deleuze and Guattari are making a very simple but absolutely fundamental point here. Of two opposed terms, one is seen as being the conceptual starting point, the norm, against which the other one is a deviation or variation. Habitually, we assume that stable identities are the background against which fluidity can be measured. It is difficult for us to imagine that that fluidity is the basic reality, and that stability is the variation or deviation from that norm. Western societies have always claimed that ‘order’, ‘stability’, ‘settledness’ is the basic norm, against which ‘disorder’, ‘instability’, ‘mobility’ are secondary, deviant, indeed punishable states. Upon the basis of such assumptions, ugly social realities such as racism, nationalism, sexism, are constructed and stake their claims for legitimacy. Immigrants, for instance, by virtue of their mobility, are deviations upon the norm of national birthright (whether it is based on geographical place of birth, or blood-line descent) as a concept of spatial stability. Discrimination on the basis of ‘foreignness’ thus posits stability as the norm of social existence, with consequences we know all to well. ‘Tolerance’ as a principle of social coexistence may palliate this discrimination, but does not question its conceptual foundation. To question this hierarchy (not merely to reverse it, as we shall see), is not simply to play finicky intellectual games but to delegitimize the very ground upon which much exploitation and oppression is posited. Changing this conceptual order, as Deleuze seeks to do, however, is not easy. The notion of stability as the primary ground of reality – how could ground be anything other than stable, for instance? – is so deeply ingrained that it creeps back into almost any interrogative undertaking.

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One very everyday example will serve to demonstrate the mundane, empirical justness of Deleuze’s theory. The computer screen in front of which I am sitting, for instance, gives an impression of stability. Apart from the line I happen to be typing at this moment, the rest of the text, the framework of marginal rulers and pull-down command menus are all reassuringly constant. Yet at the same time, I am aware, if only by virtue of the slight shimmering quality of the screen, that what I see is constantly being generated by electrical currents travelling through minute LCD cells. The apparently stable screen display is regenerated at the frightening rate of a hundred times per second. This prosaic example illustrates nicely the nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s space, and secondly their idea of the genetic process (that is, how that space emerges) which corresponds to it. The space of an identity (of an entity) is a function of difference, and not vice versa. Spatially, it is based on a domain of flow. Temporally, it is based upon discontinuities. Deleuze thus posits in explicit terms what Kristeva and Foucault both work to show with their theories. In Kristeva’s chora we have space as flow as the very matrix out of which singular individual identity will be formed. The emergent self will be contained and regulated by linguistic and social rules, but its primary reality is one of material sensuality and flows of becoming. Foucault’s notion of the episteme describes a provisional order of rules of discursive generativity which explains how we can think or say certain things at a given period in history. The ground of the thinkable or sayable is contingent and malleable under the pressure of differing historical parameters, yet produces an apparently coherent body of knowledge which we take for granted as ‘doxa’. Knowledge does not reflect a pre-existing world. Far more, knowledge is the coagulated residue of shifting, contingent rules of discursive enunciability. In admittedly quite different areas of investigation, Kristeva and Foucault undertake a revision of the ways in which we understand being, demanding that we refocus our attention on the contingent, the heterogeneous, the aleatory and processual. Deleuze and Guattari expand the brief of this enquiry: whilst Kristeva is interested in the constitution of individual subjectivity and psychic reality in society, and Foucault addresses questions of knowledge and discourse particularly in an institutional context, Deleuze and Guattari broaden the diachronic focus to include Western history from the “primitive” onwards, and then widen their synchronic brief to take in psychic and

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social human existence, as well as the natural (organic and animal) world. It is important that Deleuze and Guattari do not simply reverse the order of the hierarchy stability-flow and replace it with a counter hierarchy: flow-stability. Rather, they posit a fluidity between the two terms themselves. There are several reasons for this. First, they are too conceptually realistic to believe that one might easily eradicate such deep-seated prejudices as the tendency to privilege order and stability in modes of thinking. They realize that we need a modicum of order in our concepts to reduce complexity in our environment: “Nous demandons seulement un peu d’ordre pour nous protéger du chaos. Rien n’est plus douleureux, plus angoissant qu’une pensée qui s’échappe à elle-même, des idées qui fuient, qui disparaissent à peine ébauchées, déjà rongées par l’oubli.” (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? 189) [“We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness” (What Is Philosophy? 201)]. Deleuze and Guattari comprehend that we instinctively settle things into stable categories in order to work more easily with them. They know that in pragmatic terms, any society needs certain rules and regulations to impose upon flow (of automobile traffic, for instance) simply to ensure the everyday functioning of social existence. They also recognize that political attempts to replace one order with its radical opposite tend to lead to autocratic regimes where one authoritarian rule merely replaces another. Thus they eschew the simple inversion of binary pairs, suggesting that these pairs themselves are subject to flow, and that a more realistic mode of transformation would also be one placed under the sign of fluidity. Whence a notion of transmutation which would propose “becoming fluid” as a tendency to be sought for, and constantly renewed. Re-thinking our assumptions about being is thus neither an absolute nor a one-and-for-all task, but rather, an ongoing inflection of our deepest patterns of thought. A second reason why Deleuze and Guattari do not simply reverse the hierarchy of binaries is their resistance to binaries as a structure posited upon lack. The most fundamental binary is the numerical option 0-1 which forms the basis of all computational logic. 0-1 stands for the couple power-off/power-on by which basic computational

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processes function. The 0-1 pair arranges space according to alternating zones of hypostatized presence and absence. Economies of absence-presence ubiquitously structure our culture and, under capitalism, pull all desire into the maelstrom of a desperate search for a presence which is always deferred, always absent. Against these economies, Deleuze and Guattari posit flows of becoming-being as a presence or plenitude without an opposite term. Oscillations or undulations within being create unevenness, mobility, coagulation and decoagulation, but this flow is fundamentally a plenitude. It has no outside, and it has no outside-within which could be designated as lack. Space, as the flow of being, conforms to the verb ‘to be’ without a negative, as in Wittgenstein’s declaration, already quoted earlier, that “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist” (Wittgenstein 1990: 9) [“the world is all that is the case” (Wittgenstein 1974: 5)]. Deleuze and Guattari eschew the mere inversion of binary hierarchies for the simple reason that such binaries are from the outset bound into the underlying economy of absence and presence. It is this fundamental binary which they wish to eradicate, instead proposing flow as an option towards which we would do well to move.

Territoriality, Territorialization Society has great difficulty in dealing with uncertainty, irregularity, change or flow. It inevitably tends to place restraints upon such phenomena, so as to package them for their more efficient integration into social processes. This, indeed, may be a definition of society par excellence: that which orders less-obviously-ordered social processes so as to create its own ostensibly better-organized, more efficient order: “Le problème du socius a toujours été celui-ci: coder les flux du désir, les inscrire, les enregistrer, faire qu’aucun flux ne coule qui ne soit tamponné, canalisé, réglé” (L’Anti-Œdipe 40) [“The prime function incumbent on the socius, has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly damned up, channelled, regulated.” (Anti Oedipus 33)]. In their implementation of the next spatial concept we will discuss, Deleuze and Guattari use the progression “terre”Æ “sol” (AntiŒdipe 40) [“earth”Æ”ground” (Anti Oedipus 33)] to concretize such

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processes of ordering of flux. The “earth”, in this conception, is something which is in flux: it is exposed to wind, rain. It is shifted by seismic movements, may be washed away by flooding, undergoes a constant process of attrition through erosion. Yet it is constantly being supplemented by the decomposition of other forms. All material decays, and returns to the earth. The “earth” is in flux. Not so “ground”, which is parcelled up, fenced off, marked out, entered in cadastre books. Before society imposes order upon its environment, before we have “ground” [“sol”], there is something prior to that order, “earth” [“terre”]. Though it may appear disorderly from the point of view of social government, earth actually possesses its own ‘other’ order. What is “earth” [“terre”]? One answer to this question is provided by the term Deleuze and Guattari employ to designate a process which mediates between flow/“earth” and “ground”: namely, “territoriality” or “territorialization” [“territorialité”, “territorialisation”]. Underlying flow and its direction is desire. This ostensibly psychoanalytic notion is actually one which can describe all sorts of movements within the natural world: the movement of a plant towards sunlight, of root systems towards water, of living beings towards each other, of beings towards a place. Desire pulls beings towards each other, generating connections. Such connections are thought of in spatial terms by Deleuze and Guattari. As soon as two elements or beings form a connection, a “territoriality” is formed. The process of life, before it creates temporalities, is already spatial: the vectoriality of desire creates spaces in which life takes on new and evolving forms. And these forms, identities, which are brought forth by the conjunctive production of territory, in turn define the nature of that territory: Précisément, il y a territoire dès que des composants de milieux cessent d’être directionnelles pour devenir dimensionnelles, quand elles cessent d’être fonctionnelles pour devenir expressives. Il y a territoire des qu’il y a expressivité du rythme. C’est l’émergence de matières d’expression (qualités) qui va définir le territoire. (Mille Plateaux 387) [There is a territory precisely when milieu components cease to be directional, becoming dimensional instead, when they cease to be functional to become expressive. There is a territory when the rhythm has expressiveness. What defines the territory is the emergence of matters of expression (qualities). (A Thousands Plateaus 315)]

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The territory is thus a text, because it is the trace of a vector of attraction between two beings. Space itself is, as it were, a sort of a love letter, an environment created by the vector which draws one being towards another, whether it be a living, an organic or an inorganic being. The environment itself is the text which emerges out of an encounter. Territory “devient expressive […] lorsqu’elle acquiert une constance temporelle et une portée spatiale qui en font une marque territoriale, ou plutôt territorialisante: une signature” (Mille plateaux 387) [“becomes expressive […] when it requires a temporal constancy and a spatial range that make it a territorial, or rather territorializing, mark: a signature” (A Thousand Plateaus 315)]. Space is at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking because life expresses itself in the creation of spaces. The temporality of life always brings us back to space (Laporte 2005: 176). Space is a text by which life signs its name. Their philosophy is, in literal etymological terms, a philosophy of ‘biotopes’. The identities that emerge out of the production of space are what give that space its character. Clearly, these spaces or territorialities are not pre-existent givens. Rather, they are what results from life processes themselves. The generation of space is part and parcel of life and its dynamics. Territories arise from the act of writing: “Le territoire n’est pas premier par rapport à la marque qualitative, c’est la marque qui fait le territoire” (Mille plateaux 388) [“The territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is the mark that makes the territory” (A Thousand Plateaus 315)]. Territorialization is a process, and what results never loses its processual quality. It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari often avoid the use of the word “territory”, preferring instead “territoriality” as a noun suggesting a quality rather than the stability and substance of a thing. When they do use the word “territory” it is understood as being inflected from the outset by a dynamizing process: “Le territoire est en fait un acte, qui affecte les milieux et les rythmes, qui les ‘territorialise’. Le territoire est le produit de la territorialisation des milieux et des rythmes” (Mille Plateaux 386) [“The territory is in fact an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that ‘territorializes’ them. The territory is the product of a territorialization of milieus and rythmns” (A Thousand Plateaus 314)]. Territoriality is thus a process which creates in-

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sides and outsides, limits, zones, unevenness. Claire Colebrook neatly summarizes territoriality thus: Life is force, the play of forces, and the interplay of these forces produce zones or sites of qualities, intensities. It is not that there is a space that is then qualified; rather, forces produce qualities and qualities produce fields or spaces, ‘blocs of becoming’. […] The zones add up to series of spaces, but this whole is never given, for there is always the potential for further connection and production. (Colebrook 2005: 192)

Territoriality takes pre-existing flows, the fluid materiality of being in itself in its state of becoming, and begins to make semi-formalized domains out of it. These domains are by no means permanent. They may dissolve once again back into the flux of being, only to be reformalized in another form, in another place, by the desiring attraction and conjunction of several elements. Becoming as flow is thus gathered up into becoming as territoriality, only to revert to flow once that alliance or cohesion has lost its validity. The process of life itself is inherently one of constantly changing spaces and movement generating social space. Territoriality thus functions very much like the passages of nomadic subjects across space in the most famous section of Mille plateaux. Nomadic space is not empty, as some critics have understood Deleuze and Guattari as claiming (Boer 2006: 115-20). Rather, it is a space which evinces another, more fluid order than that of “ground”. In Doris Pilkington-Garimara’s dramatization of the first contacts between the indigenous Australians and invading British settlers, a member of a Western Australian tribe complains: “We can’t go down along our hunting trails […] They are blocked by fences”. Another adds: “And when we climbed over the fence, one of those men pointed one of those things – guns – at us and threatened to shoot us if we went in there again” (Pilkington/Garimara 1996: 14). The networks of hunting trails are marked out in intimate and reciprocal interaction between hunters and prey, between humans and the natural environment. They make up the “territorialities” which configure “earth”. Such territorialities, however, are then cut up by the abstract, geometrical process of fencing, a linear pattern imposed from above by the logic of reification and commodification: the striations of “ground”.

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Smooth space, the “territoriality” of nomadic movement, is not marked by the pre-formed routes of roads, canals and fences which are characteristic of the state, and of the institutionalized attempts to control and subjugate the turbulences of water in the landscape. Smooth space constitutes a form of space which is “non-metricated” [“nonmétriqué”] (the metric system was born in tandem with the centralized French state). Smooth space is explored without calculation, without being quantified, it is constituted as a body of “rhizomatiques” which are explored in the moment of travelling [“explorer en chéminant sur elles”]. Unlike Euclidean space, which can be observed, quantified, conceptualized from the exterior, smooth space must be embarked upon in a tactile encounter with sound and colour, it must be conquered via a process of itinerarization and ambulation [“itinération, ambulation”] which resists the reproduction of a spatial matrix preexisting the act of traversal. The nomadism which belongs to the traversal of smooth space amounts to an activity of following the flow of matter, tracing and crossing smooth space [“Suivre un flux de matière”, “tracer et raccorder l’espace lisse” (Mille plateaux, 459-61, 509) A Thousand Plateaus 370-2, 409]. The space of nomadism is tactile, haptic, sonorous, thus reminding one of Kristeva’s chora (Mille plateaux, 474/A Thousand Plateaus 381). Paradoxically, the nomad, despite her or his mobility, does not shift, does not leave [“ne part pas, ne bouge pas”]. Unlike the migrant, leaving behind thankless spaces of poverty [“qui quitte un espace ingrat”], the nomad remains attached to the materiality of space (Mille plateaux, 472/A Thousand Plateaus 380). The nomad’s traversal of space also furnishes an image of the business of thinking as Deleuze and Guattari conceive of it. They describe their theories as “problématique, et non plus théorématique” (Mille plateaux 447) [“problematic, rather than theorematic” (A Thousand Plateaus 362)]. The role of thought is to invent problems, not to solve them: “L’art de construire un problème, c’est très important: on invente un problème, la position d’un problème, avant de trouver une solution” (Dialogues 7) [“The art of constructing a problem is very important: you invent a problem, a problem-position, before finding a solution” (Dialogues 1)]. To describe territoriality as “un acte, qui affecte les milieux et les rythmes, qui les ‘territorialise’” (Mille Plateaux 386) [“an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that ‘territorializes’ them” (A Thousand Plateaus 314)] may make it look rather like Kristeva’s Semiotic, a

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constant organization, dis-organization and re-organization of basic sensual, rhythmical and spatial materials in flow. Deleuze and Guattari differ from Kristeva in that they situate their processes of territoriality across the whole span of life-forms, from the non-organic via the animal to the human, from its individual to its collective manifestations. Their example illustrating the “signature” in the marking of territory, for instance, is taken from bird-life. Such a focus on the significance of colour in birds in marking out territory, is quite concrete, in contrast to the abstraction of the chora and its resistance to localization within human practice. It is here that the eminently practical facets of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory come to the fore. They may on occasions find exotic or bizarre examples such as the nomadic warrior cultures of Central Asia or schizophrenia as the vehicle for their conceptualization, but the essential thrust of their ideas is also easily applicable to our own everyday realities. Nor can Deleuze and Guattari’s examples of the flows of becoming-being be restricted to a pre-Oedipal phase. Rather, their notion of flow is flattened out, takes place all over the surface of human and natural existence. In contrast to Kristeva’s theorizations, where despite her declarations to the contrary, a two-storey conceptual effect tends to persist, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of flow has no inside or outside, in keeping with the theory itself, which eschews clear binaries. The basic process of life is dynamic and eternal, but the local territorialities formed by desiring couplings are only ever contingent and temporary, subject to entropy and renewal in another form elsewhere. Territorialization and its concomitant de-territorialization are two of the hallmarks of life, as contingent couplings dissolve so as to make space for new connections. To take the most banal and common everyday example, even the longest-lasting life-partnership or marriage must at some point terminate when one of the partners dies – although the children from that partnership or marriage may themselves form other couples or found families in their turn. Deleuze and Parnet comment: “Les noces sont toujours contre nature. Les noces, c’est le contraire d’un couple” (Dialogues 8) [“Nuptials are always against nature. Nuptials are the opposite of a couple” (Dialogues 2)]. Contemporary experience seems to bear this out. The territorializations and deterritorializations of partnerships are complicated (or rather epitomized) by the emergence of new familial forms: single-parent families, gay or lesbian families, and the aggregative families which are

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produced by successive marriages, divorces, remarriages, liaisons, with children from several partnerships. The negotiations around access to children, moving-in and moving-out, house-sharing or househopping, and experiments such as LAT (living-apart-together) configurations exemplify the modern plurality and mobility of domestic and familial territorialities. The example of marriage is deliberately chosen to show how the workings of the flows of becoming-being may be manifest in the most rigidly codified and highly regulated social practices. Deleuze and Guattari note that the flows of becoming and un-becoming, territorialization and de-territorialization, are constantly seized upon by society from its earliest forms and subject to codification. All rituals and ceremonies are examples of the effort to formalize and contain flows of becoming in socially recuperable form. As they say in the quotation already cited above, “Le problème du socius a toujours été celui-ci: coder les flux du désir, les inscrire, les enregistrer, faire qu’aucun flux ne coule qui ne soit tamponné, canalisé, réglé” (AntiŒdipe 40) [“The prime function incumbent on the socius, has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly damned up, channelled, regulated” (Anti Oedipus 33)]. Yet there is never an absolutely clear boundary between territoriality and codification. Just as the flows of becoming-being oscillate in a fluid form between the poles of fluidity and territoriality, constantly moving from the one to the other, so too are social forms in general dynamically mobile between degrees of codification and decodification. Deleuze and Guattari are too canny to attempt to set hard boundaries between these states. They observe their constant evolution from one to the other and back again, or indeed their co-existence within one and the same social institution or practice. Marriage would at the same time be a site of maximum codification under Church and civic law and social expectation. Yet in its patterns of attraction and connection, the creation of territoriality and eventual dissolution of territoriality, it evinces all the characteristics of the oscillations of being as becoming. Marriage could hardly be celebrated as the most obvious site where the Semiotic erupts into the Symbolic. Nonetheless, in its modern avatars, with all their variations and permutations, contemporary life partnerships can serve as an example of the interface between connectivity and social codifications.

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Capitalism and De-territorialization So far we have explored three spatial concepts fundamental to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of social forms: flow, territoriality, and codification. These represent in order of succession three increasingly regulated manifestations of becoming-being, situated on a scale from fluidity to rigidity. These three degrees of regulation cannot necessarily be teased apart, as they may exist in complex relationships of entanglement with each other. The boundaries between them may blur, and any one social practice may shift between them under different circumstances or historical conditions. The historical condition which Deleuze and Guattari are primarily interested in exploring is that of capitalism. In many ways, capitalism for them represents a state of permanent perversion of the basic patterns of flow, territorialization and de-territorialization and codification because it co-opts elements of this triadic process for its own purposes. In Marina Warner’s Indigo, Xanthe, the canny tourism manager in the Caribbean island-state of Liamuiga comments on the interior decoration of her hotel: Tradition is a lie […] It’s always a selective process, whatever you do – the dominant class picks its tradition to suit. We’re prisoners of that, so we might as well accept it and do exactly what we please. So, let’s have an arbitrary décor. It’ll turn out not to be capricious or arbitrary, you’ll see. (Warner 1993: 357-8)

Xanthe notes the arbitrary shifts of identity endemic to human culture. Knowing that the putative continuities of tradition and history are contingent constructions, she issues herself a brief to participate cynically in that process of un-grounded fabrication – in the interests of neocolonial globalizing capital, thank you very much. Capitalism has been so successful as a global socio-economic form precisely because it mimics flows of becoming and un-becoming. It does this, however, for its own purposes, namely, to co-opt the totality of human processes for an economics of universal lack. It does this by converting everything into the basal value of monetary exchange, and then subjects these exchanges to the principle of surplus value. Flow is coopted by capitalism for the ceaseless dissolution of what-I-have in a greedy vector oriented towards what-I-do-not-have.

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George Perec’s classic of the 1960s, Les Choses exemplifies this process in its opening pages. The novel opens with a cinematic gaze upon a space of domestic tranquillity, panning from one object and thus moving slowly through the interior of a small Parisian flat: L’œil, d’abord, glisserait sur la moquette grise d’un long corridor, haut et étroit. […] Ce serait une salle de séjour, longue de sept mètres environ, large de trois. A gauche, dans une sorte d’alcôve, un gros divan de cuir noir fatigué serait flanqué de deux bibliothèques en cerisier pâle où des livres s’entasseraient pêle-mêle. Au-dessus du divan, un portulan occuperait toute la longueur du panneau. […] un autre divan, perpendiculaire au premier, recouvert de velours brun clair, conduirait à un petit meuble haut sur pieds, laqué de rouge sombre, garni de trois étagères qui supporterait des bibelots, des agates et des œufs de pierre, des bonbonnières, des cendriers de jade, une coquille de nacre, une montre de gousset en argent, un verre taillé, une pyramide de Crystal, une miniature dans un cadre ovale. (Perec 1993 : 192) [The eye, first of all, would sweep across the grey carpet of a long corridor, high and narrow. […] There would be a living-room, about seven metres long and three wide. On the left, in a sort of alcove, a large leather sofa, rather battered, flanked by two bookshelves of pale cherry-wood, filled with an untidy jumble of books. Above the sofa, an old navigator’s map fills the whole length of the panelling […] another sofa, perpendicular to the first, covered with light brown velvet, would lead to a small, high cabinet on feet, whose three shelves would bear trinkets, agate-stones, stone eggs, jars of sweets, jade ash-trays, a sea-shell, a silver pocket-watch, an engraved wine-glass, a glass pyramid, and a miniature in an oval frame.]

In Perec’s opening description, we are, it would seem, embarked upon an almost schizoid progression from isolated thing to isolated thing. The cinematic gaze allows the reader to participate in an accretion of spaces. It focuses upon a series of objects each possessing their own intensity. One micro-territoriality gives way to another. Yet the employment of the conditional tense marks this obsessional accumulation of things and their ambient space with an uneasy provisionality which banishes the ‘ipseity’, the ‘is-ness’ of this calm interior. The things described, in their putative presence, are relegated to a half-existence under the reign of wish-fulfilment and frustrated desire. Very soon the tenor of the description tips over into that of a strictured reality: Ils vivaient dans un appartement miniscule et charmant […] mais, à l’intérieur, tout commençait à crouler sous l’amoncellement des objets, des meubles, des livres, des assiettes, des paperasses, des bou-

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teilles vides. […] Certains jours l’absence d’espace devenait tyrannique. Ils étouffaient. Mais ils avaient beau reculer les limites de leurs deux pieces, abattre des murs, susciter des couloirs, des placards, des dégagements, imaginer des penderies modèles, annexer en rêve les appartements voisins, ils finissaient par se retrouver dans ce qui était leur lot: trente-cinq mètres carrés. (Perec 1993: 19-21) [They lived in a tiny, charming apartment […] but inside, everything was beginning to collapse under the piles of objects, furniture, books, plates, bits of paper, empty bottles […] There were days where the lack of space became tyrannical. They felt locked in. In vain they imagined pushing back the limits of their two rooms, knocking down walls, creating corridors, cupboards, making space, in vain they imagined ideal wardrobes, annexed in their dreams the apartments next door, for in the end they always found themselves back in what was their lot: thirty-five square metres.]

The space of life in its present-ness can only be construed as a space of restriction, of stricture. Consumer desire generates a gaze always directed elsewhere: a vector of de-territorialization constantly oriented towards the new. The novel as a whole is structured by a duality which constantly co-opts the ‘is-ness’ of things, indeed, of life itself in its moments of intensity, for a regime of virtuality. The presence of things and the present-ness of existence are repeatedly abolished by the desire for more: Dans le monde qui était le leur, il était presque de règle de désirer toujours plus qu’on ne pouvait acquérir. Ce n’était pas eux qui l’avaient décrété ; c’était une loi de la civilisation, une donnée de fait dont la publicité en général, les magazines, l’art des étalages, le spectacle de la rue, et même, sous un certain aspect, l’ensemble des productions communément appelées culturelles, étaient les expressions les plus conformes. (Perec 1993: 46) [In their world, it was almost de rigeur always to desire more than one could possibly acquire. It was not themselves who had decided things this way: it was a law of civilization, a given fact of which advertising in general, magazines, the art of shop-window displays, street scenes, and even, from a certain point of view, the entirety of the productions usually referred to as culture, were the most immediate expressions.]

Clearly the experience of these modern young people of the early 1960s illustrates the systematicity of consumer capitalism in its flourishing postwar baby-boom phase. Under that ebullient regime of incipient consumer abundance, everything is endowed with a fiduciary value which determines its status on the market, and that status is in

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turn governed by the pressure to constantly increase profit. An object is thus emptied of its qualities except for those which can be reduced to the universally translatable language of monetary value. The object and its qualities are always less than the value it is supposed to obtain on the market. Thus the regime of monetary exchange depends upon but simultaneously absents the object itself. The object is a mere vehicle or bearer of abstract values. Some of these may be very abstract and mediated at several removes: not only the object itself (the sportscar, for instance), but even its trademark (Ferrari) may bespeak qualities such as sophistication, prestige. In the experience of Perec’s 1960s protagonists, “Trop souvent, ils n’aimaient, dans ce qu’ils appelaient le luxe, que l’argent qu’il y avait derrière. Ils succombaient aux signes de la richesse; ils aimaient la richesse avant d’aimer la vie” [“All too often, they merely loved, in what they called luxury, the money which was behind that luxury. They succumbed to the signs of wealth. They loved wealth before life”] (Perec 1993: 245). Symbolic values merely point back to fiduciary values, for the symbolic status displayed in the object advertises the buying power of the consumer. Monetary value is thus always in excess of the object and its ‘real’ value. The object, by contrast, is always on the side of poverty, lack. Paradoxically, the closer Perec’s protagonists come to the prosperity they desire, the more “il se trouve pourtant que ces exaltantes promesses se font toujours fâchesement attendre” [“it happens however that these ecstatic promises, annoyingly, must always be waited for”] (Perec 1993: 63). The object bought this year will be obsolete next year. The ‘life-span’ of technical objects grows shorter by the second. The object of the future, the absent object, is the real object of desire under the capitalist regime. The object the consumer has just obtained is always already inadequate, and so desire pushes on, like profit itself, to ever receding horizons, towards an absent elsewhere. The fluid processes of territorialization and de-territorialization which constitute becoming-being are cynically integrated, under capitalism, to an interested de-territorialization whose mainspring is an unstancheable lack. Under the economy of capitalist desire (or greed), plenitude is always virtual. Any profit generated via the object must always be exceeded by subsequent exchanges. Profit defines itself by never sufficing. Translated into the existential feeling of Perec’s 1960s generation,

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that is, in its manifestation on the consumer side of the dividing-line of capitalism, this profit mechanism generates a sense of permanent insecurity: “Ils auraient voulu que leur histoire soit l’histoire du bonheur; elle n’était, trop souvent, que celle d’un bonheur menacé” [“They would have liked their story to be a story of happiness; it was, all too often, merely a story of happiness under threat”] (Perec 1993: 66). The illusory plenitude with which Perec’s novel opens is undermined from the outset by the broader framework in which it is placed: that of a self-perpetuating consumer desire which cannot but generate the very lack it promises to satisfy. Profit, despite its inbuilt drive towards infinite heights, or rather by virtue of its infinite greed, always contains a constitutive lack. This is the mainspring of the capitalist machine, the core of its relentless energy, and the secret of its astounding resilience and success – a success purchased, it goes without saying, at the cost of all those who are swept aside or left behind in its obsession to maximize profit and gather wealth into the hands of the few rather than the many.

The Topography of Capitalism What is, then, is only ever of interest for the capitalist undertaking to the extent that it can be transformed into monetary exchange values. Traditions, established customs, sacred sites, enshrined places, constitute one and all hindrances in their material ipseity to capitalism’s drive to recast everything as mobile and convertible values. In the words of Marx and Engels, “Alle festen, eingerosteten Verhältnisse mit ihren Gefolge altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern können. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht” (Marx 1953: 10) [“All fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” (Marx 1967: 83)]. The constant de-realizing process to which capitalism subjects material reality is not merely a side-effect of its restless search for the new. It is the constitutive topography by which capitalism works. For capitalism, any place must be converted into an elsewhere of desire for it to be recuperable within the economics of absentee profit.

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The expansion of the capitalist world economy under colonization was not merely a happy coincidence of two parallel developments, one geo-political, the other economic. On the contrary, the capitalist undertaking was quintessentially colonialist from the outset. The colonial engulfment of the globe merely carried to its logical extreme the logic at the heart of capitalism. Global capitalism today does nothing but perpetuate this logical, at ever increasing speeds, and without the hindrance of material space or conquered territory. It is hardly a coincidence that decolonization from the 1940s to the 1960s uncoupled the territorial element from the capitalist machine, thus fuelling the de-territorializing process at the core of capitalism. Freed of the burden of large scale spatial anchorage, neo-colonial globalizing capital since the 1960s has become ever more flexible and dynamic. Capitalism is thus a spatial economy, very much like becomingbeing, because it is driven by flows of desire, and for that reason is constantly and restlessly fluid. Like becoming-being, capitalism is constantly creating new connections, propelled by the force of desire, and dissolving them, likewise driven by desire. It is a flow-system of desire based on intensities – we desire consumer goods not merely for their utility value, but also for their value as artefacts, as focalizers of feelings, for their material and sensory qualities. By dissolving territories and codes, capitalism tends to behave like the schizoid system, which moves instead from intensity to intensity. Similarly, capitalism is nomadic, constantly searching for new markets, new niches, relentlessly exploring an already satiated world. This restless exploration has no ultimate goal, it is simply in the logic of surplus value to expand the market. Capitalism is an excentric, deregulated, selfregulating system (albeit one increasingly steered by decentralized global institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and GATT agreements). Capitalism subjects established spaces to a constant and corrosive process of de-territorialization. It works by implementing what the contemporary science of urban development refers to as “creative destruction” (Klinenberg 2003: 11). The increasingly rapid transformation of the urban centres of capitalism bears witness to the manner in which space undergoes a constantly accelerating transmutation under the pressure of capitalist expansion. The codes which regulate the process of territorialization, both in the philosophical sense employed by Deleuze and Guattari and also in the concrete examples which they

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constantly provide, are brutally shoved aside by capitalist progress. Codification is abolished so as to make way for a profit-driven deterritorialization the likes of which have never been seen before: A l’idée même du code, [le capitalisme] a substitué dans l’argent une axiomatique des quantités abstraites qui va toujours plus loin dans le mouvement de déterritorialisation du socius. Le capitalisme tend vers un seuil de décodage qui défait le socius au profit d’un corps sans organes, et qui, sur ce corps, libère les flux de désir dans un champ déterritorialisé. (Anti-Œdipe 41) [By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius. Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field. (Anti-Oedipus 33)]

It is increasingly clear that capitalism flourishes best where old codes, regulations, rules, have been abolished, and have not yet been replaced by new institutions for the regulating of social processes. The flagship cases for such contexts are the countries of the erstwhile socialist block, where the unjust and authoritarian rule of socialist autocracy has been cleared away before a strong civil society has emerged to take its place. In such societies, capitalism is in its element, installing consumer desire under a regime of unbridled decoding and deterritorialization. Similarly, the territorial expansion of the US military machine, with its creeping hegemony over so-called ‘rogue states’, seeks to replace established governments with a ‘procedural’ democracy (elections and a nominal democratic party system) leaving the economic and social infrastructure open to be occupied by Western companies. What differentiates the constantly de-territorializing processes of becoming-being and the de-territorializing processes of capitalism is the agency of regimes of plenitude in the former and the dominance of patent lack in the latter. Social coding, that is, the imposition of rules and regulations upon the basal creativity of existence, may have a role to play in this context. It may function as a vital bulwark against the unrelenting dissolution of social bonds perpetrated by capitalism. There are institutions of social control or social support (the welfare state at its best) which it behoves us to preserve against the inroads of a relentless erosion of human values by the search for profit. The

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agency of self-perpetuating lack which drives capitalism casts millions and millions of people around the world, in the non-West, but increasingly in the West as well, into conditions of real lack – poverty, deprivation, malnourishment, illness, war. All too often, however, the preservation of social coding in the interests of guaranteeing minimum human and civic rights is less manifest across the globe than the fabrication of synthetic traditions and communities. These factitious continuities more often than not merely serve the interests of globalized capital. Such invidious configurations can best be described by what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “re-territorialization”, to which I now turn.

Re-territorialization For Deleuze and Guattari, space is a fluid medium, a domain whose topography is one of constant flux, and it is out of this flux of becoming that bounded, mappable territorialities with identifiable coordinates emerge. Connections between domains of flow are the primary stabilizations by virtue of which territorialities come to being. A territoriality, however, because it coagulates or crystallizes out of a flow, can equally easily revert to such fluidity. Patently, what can be territorialized can also de-territorialized. Flow is the default mode to which territorialities willingly revert, not as a failure of consistency but rather as a renewed participation in the process of dynamic becoming which is the hallmark of all life. Indeed, the process of deterritorialization is something which is braked or slowed by territorialization, but never puts an end to it. Even without the intervention of humans, for instance, a landscape is constantly changing under the influence of wind, rain, snow, sun, the flow of a river and the running of pebbles, the cycle of the seasons, the movements of the earth’s innards, and so on (Ascherson 2006: 11). Human territorialization may accelerate the process of de-territorialization, as in ecological catastrophes, or may seek to stem it in actions of re-territorialization, as in landscape regeneration projects. Often such re-territorialization may be quite artificial: when such purportedly natural wilderness parks as Yosemite were established, they were cleared of their original native American inhabitants who had hitherto lived in a careful equilibrium

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with the natural environment (Nixon 2005: 238). Deleuze and Guattari caustically observe that le capitalisme instaure ou restaure toutes sortes de territorialités résiduelles et factices, imaginaires ou symboliques, sur lesquelles il tente, tant bien que mal, de recoder, de tamponner les personnes dérivées des quantités abstraites. (Anti-Œdipe 42) [capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities. (Anti-Oedipus 34)]

In other words, capitalism, by de-territorializing so ferociously, unleashes so much rootlessness, disorientation, and anomie, that it must re-construct the existential fabric it has torn apart. Claims made by indigenous Australians to re-possess their expropriated land have been legally sanctioned for several decades, especially since the High Court’s Mabo ruling of 1992. The indigenous group lodging a case, however, must demonstrate an unbroken attachment to or usage of the traditional land in order to validate their claim to unextinguished native title. This is paradoxical, because it is precisely the rupture of cultural continuity, manifest in the loss of land, which such cases are supposed to reverse. Where there has been durable dispossession, there are no prospects of repossession. The legislation is also paradoxical because it demands that indigenous people provide evidence of a ‘primitivist’ nature to defend their claims, thus cementing nostalgia-ridden stereotypes of an archaic, ‘timeless’ culture (see Povinelli 2005). Because this legislation depends upon longdiscredited discourses of the ‘noble savage’, it often encourages spurious re-territorialization. Bain Attwood notes that under the Native Title Act, like other Aboriginal land rights legislation, Aboriginal communities are required to prove a prior and continuous association with the land they are claiming, and this necessitates the production of ethnographies and histories to support such a past even though these might be contradicted by empirical ethnographical and historical records which tell a story of discontinuity and dispossession.

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Often, Attwood concludes, “this regime of authenticity […] results in Aboriginal communities representing their past in ways which are patently false in historical terms” (Attwood 1996: xxxvi-xxxvii). Two literary examples may also exemplify the processes of deterritorialization and concomitant re-territorialization. In 1993, the prominent Australian writer David Malouf published a novel entitled Remembering Babylon. The cover image of the first hardback edition, published by Chatto & Windus of London, featured a striking image by the artist Jeff Nuttal. A figure in three shades of grey balances unsteadily on a colonial-style post-and-rail fence against an orange background. Significantly, the image disappeared from subsequent editions of the book, especially the large print-run paperback published by Vintage (Malouf 1994). Perhaps the image was too pregnant with problematic connotations to be welcome in a publishing world more interested in mass-marketability than uncomfortable historical truths. The cover image refers to the inaugural scene in Malouf’s novel where the protagonist, a ship’s boy named Jemmy who has grown up among the Queensland natives after a shipwreck, first re-enters European civilization. He springs onto the rough-hewn fence which marks the boundaries of a bush settlement in Northern Queensland, totters for a moment, and then tumbles over the fence and into the outpost of European society The post-and-rail “boundary fence” marks the frontier, the interface between the advancing front of white colonization, and the retreating line of still intact indigenous society, rooted in respect and responsibility for the land. The fence stands for the striations which convert indigenous “territoriality” into “deterritorialized” “ground”. The fence possesses exemplary status within white Australian settler culture, as is demonstrated, for instance, by the cover image of David Day’s recent Claiming a Continent. Day’s history of Australia is written around the thematic axis of possession and dispossession. It features an outback boundary-fence as its cover image (Day 2005). Likewise indigenous artists such as Lin Onus have focussed upon this phenomenon, with paintings such as Fences, fences, fences (1985) which superimposes a wire-mesh fence upon a bush landscape (Bunjilak collection, Museum of Melbourne). It is significant that Jemmy’s incoherent cry, as he balances on this tangible manifestation of the frontier, is “Do not shoot! I am a B-

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b-british object!” For a Scots settler child has raised a stick in imitation of his parents’ rifle at the terrifying prospect of what they take to be a native attack (Malouf 1994: 2-3). Malouf thus alludes indirectly to the brutal character of the colonization process, which was less a matter of ‘settlement’ than of driving back the native inhabitant by means of armed violence. The land was less settled, along the jagged line of black-white demarcation, than seized by bloody force, as befits an Empire. At the end of the novel, we learn that Jemmy, who has returned to his tribe, has probably died in a “‘dispersal’” – a euphemistic description of a strategically planned massacre of an indigenous group gathering for a corroboree (Malouf 1994: 196). The inaugural post-and-rail fence is the anodyne textual marker, a spatial index, of the brutal frontier in erstwhile colonial Australia. A recent poem by Anthony Lawrence, “Fencing”, returns to the motif of the fence in its modern-day avatar, the high-tensile wire fence: High tensile wire, when strained, is a volatile thing. I’d been warned how the wire can break, whipping back through the eyes of the fence posts, leaving your fingers flexing at your feet, or worse, your throat smiling redly from ear to ear. You hear stories. I was straining the last section before smoke. I worked the handle of the strainer back and forth, daydreaming, watching clouds move in. Then I heard it: a loud ping like a struck tuning fork. I leapt away from the fence as the wire ripped past me – silver, on fire with my name cut into its tail. (Lawrence 2002: 17)

The fence is the device by which unmarked space becomes marked, by which identity, and in this European idiom, possession is asserted. The fence was the mode of concrete, material inscription of the cadastre grid employed to overwrite the older network of tribal tracks and boundaries by white pastoralists. Both Malouf’s opening and Lawrence’s poem thus reiterate the destruction of indigenous territoriality exemplified above in the extract from Pilkington-Garimari’s RabbitProof Fence.

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Fencing and naming-possessing go hand in hand. In this poem, the fence in turn re-writes the “name” of the pastoralist. “Fencing” here is a brutal duel, in which the occupier’s weapon becomes his own nemesis. The high-tensile successor of the erstwhile barriers around white settlements no longer does its work of disciplining the country, but wields language, the owner’s name, against him. The poem suggests that the fence itself, strained to breaking point in the process of holding in check for more than a century the conquered country. Moreover, it has become charged with the accumulated force of onlyhalf-told frontier narratives: “You hear stories”. One day the strungout linearity of the fence snaps, and the history of the land since white settlement comes dangerously close to branding those who tacitly owe their existence to it. In such cases, capitalism may attempt to recuperate its excessively destabilizing forces by re-installing non-organic social codes. Philip Noyce’s Film Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002, distributed overseas as Long Walk Home), made from Doris Pilkington-Gamari’s novel, is an example of such re-territorialization. It recasts in a visual medium the original narrative of three indigenous girls’ escape from their orphanage in southern Western-Australia to their tribal territories in the north. They make their way home on foot, navigating thousand kilometres by following the rabbit-proof fence built from north to south to prevent the wheatlands in the West from being overrun by the rodents introduced by the British settlers in the Western states. The fence, as symbol of white settlement, is co-opted as the leitmotif of this heroic tale of indigenous resistance to white institutional cruelty. Yet the fence itself runs through landscapes of extraordinarily stark beauty, so that the dispossessed territories of the indigenous people are re-packaged for a white audience. The re-territorialized landscapes, synecdoches of a pristine indigenous spirituality, thus aid the white majority to digest the unpalatable narrative of Australian governmental removal of indigenous children which forms the historical background to the film and the book. Colonial de-territorialization, whether of land, of culture, or of families, is documented but by the same token re-territorialized under the medial regime of the entertainment industry. Patently, such re-territorializations attempt to brake the speed of the deterritorializations engendered by capitalism, to put the clock back to a pristine past extracted from the flow of history. It aims to re-

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constitute spaces of untouched nature, nostalgic period interiors, or artefacts which index an organic past (for instance the Irish theme pub, one of a chain of clones, which generates a fallacious aura of rustic village community warmth). Deleuze and Guattari comment Ces néo-territorialités sont souvent artificielles, résiduelles, archaïques ; seulement, ce sont des archaïsmes à fonction parfaitement actuelle, notre manière moderne de ‘briqueter’, de quadriller, de réintroduire des fragments de code, d’en ressusciter d’anciens, d’inventer des pseudo-codes ou des jargons. Néo-archaïsmes, d’après la formule d’Edgar Morin. (Anti-Œdipe 306) [These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of “imbricating” of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes, inventing pseudo codes or jargons. Neoarchaisms, as Edgar Morin puts it. (Anti-Oedipus 257)]

The literary examples may offer useful vignettes of the functioning of these “neo-archaisms”, but they should be supplemented by other cases from the global political context in which we live. Only then does the acute relevance, and the global reach of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory become fully evident. At the anodyne end of the spectrum, one could enumerate the various contemporary heritage movements designed to recuperate for the present the idyllic aura of a bygone rural or aristocratic or colonial age in films, tourist attractions such as reconstructed gold-rush towns, historical re-enactments of battles, or the pursuit of family genealogies. These re-territorializations seek in the past a renewed ‘spirit of place’ for the present. Less anodyne are the new fundamentalist religions experiencing a boom across much of the American-influenced world. These religious movements combine enthusiasm, vibrancy and clear-cut blackand-white belief structures to offer ersatz frameworks of meaning and orientation in a de-territorialized world. Using the forms and strategies of TV talkshows, marketing and harnessing not only consumer desire but also nostalgia for lost social codes, the fundamentalist religions offer certainties, ‘truths’, existential frameworks and a sense of community. Their language is that of fast-sell-hype, cast in the diction of the King James Bible. Their micro-social structures are often coercive, indeed autocratic.

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These fundamentalist re-territorializations intersect with the spatiality of geopolitics at the points where their brand of religious belief concurs with a new American imperialism, interpreting the recent conflicts in the Middle East as Armageddon, the gate to the Second Coming, and so on. These re-territorializations are certainly not hostile to neo-capitalism, nor to neo-colonialism, welcoming both as the auspicious auguries of the apocalyptic age in which we live. At this vicious end of the spectrum of contemporary reterritorializations there are the various neo-nationalisms flourishing across Europe among the dispossessed working classes left behind by the onroads of global capitalism. Similarly, one could point to the virulent nationalisms in the former Eastern block, whose most ugly manifestation were the orgies of ethnically-legitimized expulsions and massacres in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, traces of which still persist today. One could mention the brutal new nationalisms which have taken the world by storm, for instance in English-speaking countries currently engaged upon a spurious war against terror (read: against the extremist protest movements emerging from largely Muslim societies hedged in by Euro-American cultural and economic power). These counter-fundamentalisms are no less re-territorializing than the Western encroachments they aim to combat – not unsuccessfully, it would appear, given the sluggish progress of so-called ‘democratization’ in Iraq.

Becoming-being and its translations In the face of the virulent spate of re-territorializations, some of which may have grave repercussions for the geopolitical stability of the global community, de-territorialization may at times become a form of moral imperative – a mode of de-escalation of nostalgia-driven conflicts which seeks to defuse their catastrophic potential. Indeed, it would appear that the only healthy territorialities are those which have the capacity to monitor their own nefarious tendencies, to constantly reorganize themselves so as to preserve a sane modicum of contingency. They are, in other words, open systems in the sense used by Julia Kristeva in her late work on nationalisms and the regenerative role of narrative in psychotherapy.

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All space emerges from the flow of becoming-being, crystallizing or coagulating at the moment when connections occur. Connections are the beginning of a territoriality. Such a territoriality may be relatively stable. Indeed, it may become codified and regulated precisely in order to confer upon it an enhanced permanency. Witness the home, the garden, the city, the nation. Such permanency is not without its merits. It is useful to know that the tram will arrive at 9.05 a.m. as the timetable predicts. It is reassuring to know when one comes home from work that one’s dwelling has not been hit by a rocket or razed by bulldozers. All territoriality, however, preserves some marks of the contingency of flow out of which it emerges. It can always dissolve, give way to other connections, forming new territories. It may also be forcibly dissolved – as in the de-territorialization everywhere in evidence in the service of the capitalist tabula rasa. Such deterritorialization provokes the insecurity and confusion generic to contemporary victims of globalization, those hit by the re-location of productive bases to cheaper countries or the slashing of public services. These manifestations of de-territorialization make way for modes of artificial recuperation (junk re-territorialization) whose hallmark is the cynical, calculating re-coding no less in the service of neo-capitalism than the de-territorialization which provokes it. What is left out of this balance sheet, however, is a mode of creative destabilization (de-territorialization) which would be part and parcel of the oscillations and undulations in flows of being. Emerging out of the flows of being-becoming, territorialities are gathered up and then subside again, like the crests of waves on the surface of the sea. The moment where the wave subsides back into the fluid medium from which it came furnishes an instance of de-territorialization in service of nothing except being-becoming itself. The stabilization of becoming-being is a reduction. Identity needs to be understood not as an expression of being, but as a slowing-down of being, a selection or filtering of being so as to produce a lowest common denominator suitable for social exchange and intercourse. Socially manageable states of being, “identities” as we call them and desire them, are what is left after the turbulent reality of becoming-being has been strained off and tamped down. If we are to remain true to becoming-being, we urgently need to find ways of

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thinking about creativity which damp down the multiplicities of becoming-being and which do not immobilize its constant impulsive movement across the plane of being. We need to find ways of preserving salutary de-territorialization as the flip-side of desire-driven territorialization. A major critique of Deleuze’s theory of being as the slowingdown of becoming has been articulated by Žižek. Rather than becoming being a plenitude out of which being is briefly coagulated, he suggests that being itself is a void (the Lacanian Real) which beings frantically try to cover over in their modes of existence. In contrast to what he calls “Deleuze’s ‘idealist’ project of generating bodily reality from virtual intensities”, he counters, “There is a way to conceptualize the emergence of Something out of Nothing in a materialist way: when we succeed in conceiving this emergence not as a mysterious excess but as a RELEASE – a LOSS – of energy” (Žižek 2004: 24). Žižek’s exposition of Deleuze may at first glance seem very similar to that of the latter: The proper site of production is not the virtual space as such, but rather, the very passage from it to constituted reality, the collapse of the multitude and its oscillations into one reality – production is fundamentally a limitation of the open space of virtualities, the determination and negation of the virtual multitude. (Žižek 2004: 20)

The passage from what comes before being to being itself is for both philosophers a gearing-down. But that gearing-down, for Žižek, merely translates the void of being at the heart of things: it does not “close the gap, but, on the contrary, [opens] up the radical gap in the very edifice of the universe” (Žižek 2004: xi). In this reading, deterritorialization would lay bare the Real, rather than express a multitude of flows of becoming. Žižek’s Lacanian stance is diametrically opposed to Deleuze’s position, and in a sense there is no way in which a dialogue can be negotiated between the two. Žižek himself admits that his book can merely stage “an attempt to trace an encounter between two incompatible fields” (Žižek 2004: xi). The flaw of the Lacanian perspective, with its stress upon a fundamental and constitutive lack, is that its response to the ravages of capitalism can only ever be secondary, because it shares the same presuppositions. Like capitalism it is predicated upon lack and desire. It can only scold the palliatives of lack and preach a stoical acknowledgement of lack. In contrast,

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Deleuze’s territorialization and de-territorialization posit from the outset a plenitude of flows which must be elided by capitalism in order to generate lack-driven desire. Its response to capitalism is thus more fundamental and potentially more radical than that of the Lacanian critique, because it queries the very basis upon which capitalism can so powerfully mould the fabric of individual subjectivity.

Lines of flight De-territorialization is resistant to coding because it follows the flows and undulations of becoming-being rather than proffering obeisance to social institutions. Its achievement is to constantly undo its own achievements. In terms of place it can best be illustrated by the imaginary nomads to which Deleuze and Guattari devote so much attention in Mille plateaux. In terms of thought it can be understood as a mode of constant un-thinking, of re-thinking, of thinking anew. In terms of personal identity it can be understood as acquiescence to the constant re-jinking of personality which creates the unplanned, unpredictable, eminently creative trajectory of a human existence. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the fluctuation of territorialization and de-territorialization forment des chutes ou des hausses relatives d’après leur rapport complexe et la proportion d’attraction et de répulsion qui entre dans leur cause. Bref, l’opposition des forces d’attraction et de répulsion produit une série ouvert d’éléments intensifs, tous positives, qui n’exprime jamais l’équilibre final d’un système, mais un nombre illimité d’états stationnaires métastasables par lesquels un sujet passé. (Anti-Œdipe 25-6) [undergo relative rises or falls depending on the complex relationship between them and the variations in the relative strength of attraction and repulsion as determining factors. In a word, the opposition of the forces of attraction and repulsion produces an open series of intensive elements, all of them positive, that are never an expression of the final equilibrium of a system, but consist, rather, of an unlimited number of stationary, metastable states through which the subject passes. (AntiOedipus 19)]

De-teritorialization is thus a construction of a space by connecting successive sites of intensity arranged without a prior plan or destiny along the immense and multiple strata of becoming-being: “Devenir,

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ce n’est jamais imiter, ni faire comme, ni se conformer à un modèle, fût-il de justice ou de vérité. Il n’y a pas de terme dont on part, ni un auquel on arrive ou auquel on doit arriver” (Dialogues 8) [“To become is never to imitate, nor to ‘do like’, nor to conform to a model, whether it’s of justice or of truth. There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at” (Dialogues 2)]. Deleuze and Guattari call these trajectories of becoming “lignes de fuite” [“lines of flight”]. Lines of flight are the routes that take us from one site of intensity to another, thus inciting a permanent state of creative transformation which is subjectivity in its true state. Alongside the maintenance of forms of social coding, then, we need simultaneously to preserve domains of frank creativity. The moment of de-territorialization, may, by loosing the old anchors, open onto unbridled consumption under a regime of lack. Alternatively, however, it may allow a moment of genuine, or “absolute” deterritorialization. For this to come about, however, we need a concept which may motivate such de-territorialization – one that can work against the pressures of consumer desire. Capitalist de-territorialization is well entrenched enough to recuperate the exciting potential of unstable transitional moments between old and new, thus merely perpetuating the virulent re-production of capitalism across the thresholds of transition. The disappointing case of Eastern Europe after 1989 speaks eloquently of the lost hopes for a new post-socialist society pursuing an alternative route to that of capitulation to capitalism. The “ligne de fuite” can be translated literally, but it can also refer to the lines leading to the point of converge within the system of perspective representation. Lines of flight are lines which lead away from the centred site of gaze and out of the ordered picture. Lines of flight are vectors which lead over the horizon, towards that which cannot yet be represented. They are escape routes out of the cage of codification – codification of social practice, rules of behaviour, modes of thought, axiomatic philosophies. This book, for instance, attempts to allude towards lines of flight by prising open the structure of the academic monograph, the university ‘thesis’ mode of writing, by inserting untitled images in the interstices of such writing. My hope is that these images, in the resistance to easy co-optation to an argument, may dislocate the Thetic

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realm to which such a work belongs. Their role is, superficially, to resonate in some way with the text, albeit in a different language, but by the same token, to open up gashes in the body of the work. These rifts are an emergency exit out of the closure of academic writing. Because the image cannot be easily codified into the Thetic mode of enunciation, because it does not ‘say’ anything, it opens up an exteriority within the work. It seeks to le territorialise et le déterritorialise (faire du dehors un territoire dans l’espace, consolider ce territoire par construction d’un second territoire adjacent, déterritorialiser l’ennemi par l’éclatement interne de son territoire, se déterritorialiser soi-même en renonçant, en allant ailleurs […]) (Mille plateaux 437; Deleuze’s ellipsis) [territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere […]) (A Thousand Plateaus 353)]

The images in this book are windows onto the works outside. They make connections, but by the same token, dissolve them as soon as they become too restrictive or constraining. Territorialization takes the flow of being, focuses it via the selection of a region of intensity, which, when connected to other intensities, creates a territory, which can then in turn be connected to further intensities, other territories. However, the creative movement of conjunction goes hand in hand with an equally creative movement of dissolution. The preceding territories may be dissolved as their centres of intensity diminish or expire, and as the character of the travelling, nomadic theorist changes in the wake of the journey undertaken. Lines of flight lead off the horizon, to places as yet unimagined. Yves Bonnefoy opens his poetic autobiography L’Arrière-pays with the declaration: “J’ai souvent éprouvé un sentiment d’inquiétude, à des carrefours. Il me semble dans ces moments qu’en ce lieu ou presque: là, à deux pas sur la voie que je n’ai pas prise, c’est là que s’ouvrait un pays d’essence plus haute” [“I have often experienced a sense of unease at crossroads. In these moments it seems to me that at this site, or thereabout – there, a stone’s throw away, on the path that I have not taken – there it is that a country of a higher essence opens up”] (Bonnefoy 1982: 7). Bonnefoy’s poignant opening lines render tangible the desire kindled by the perspective of the line of flight, be it

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visual, conceptual or existential. Socially-coded practices fear such centrifugal trajectories because they fear their own dissolution. Social codifications imagine that to go off the beaten track, to leave the straight and narrow and to venture into unknown territory will signal their demise. Such apprehensions, however, are embedded within a binary economy of being-and-nothingness, of here-and-nowhere. They cannot imagine an economy which does not admit of nothingness or nowhere, and which thus sees de-territorialization as an opportunity for regeneration, renewal. De-territorialization offers the possibility of escaping from what or where ‘one’ is, in the perspective of becoming ‘an other’. With this in mind, Deleuze and Guattari criticize Freud for his incapacity to understand the desire for transformation at the heart of the Wolf Man’s dreams of wolves: Lignes de fuite ou de déterritorialisation, devenir-loup, devenirinhumain des intensités déterritorialisées, c’est cela la multiplicité. Devenir loup, devenir trou, c’est se déterritorialiser, d’après des lignes distinctes enchêvetrées. […] Des physicians dissent: les trous ne sont pas des absences de particules, mais des particles allant plus vite que la lumière. (Mille plateaux 45) [Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, becoming-wolf, becominginhuman, de-territorialized intensities, that is what multiplicity is. To become wolf or to become hole is to deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines. […] Physicists say that holes are not the absence of particles, but particles travelling faster than the speed of light. (A Thousand Plateaus 32)]

De-territorialization does not mean the loss of being, but rather, an acceleration of being, a speeding up, a moving away, a change of being across the threshold of what is known at the current time, in the present place, or within the present framework of knowledge. If Kristeva and Foucault, in their initial phases, situate their generative instances in the singular sites of the chora or the episteme, they also locate their sites of rupture in similarly restricted domains: in the rarefied world of avant-garde aesthetic production (for Kristeva) or in the moments of epistemic seism which occur every couple of centuries (for Foucault). Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, see such ruptures as constant and everywhere latent potential. Lines of flight can emerge at the smallest and most frequent micro-levels of existence. Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with extricating us from the

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morass of the ubiquitous economies of loss that bog us down, thereby propelling us over a threshold of current perception towards an unceasing transformation.

6. Deleuzes’s Intensities Zones of intensity Why take a photograph of a neon sign bearing an instance of rhetorical troping behind a reflective window pane? Any number of reasons might be sought: some unconscious mechanism in my psyche; an element in the photograph which irresistibly suggests itself to me as meaningful; an aesthetic idea for which I am seeking a material embodiment or ‘objective correlative’, to take T. S. Eliot’s famous term, and so on. But why not be honest? Perhaps all these reasons are merely attempts to skirt around the fact that there is no reason for taking this photograph, except that I am attracted by a scene, and that this attraction creates a productive rapport with the object photographed. Perhaps there is no ‘reason’ or ‘excuse’ for the creation of a relationship, a connection, between myself and the site I invest with meaning. That investment of energy may be ‘unmotivated’, with the meaning emerging only after the connection has been established. This is dangerous, of course. For it means that the meaning of an aesthetic action is not pre-determined, laid out in advance. It means that out of an encounter between subject and object, anything could emerge, and that one cannot say beforehand what the product of such an encounter is going to be. The aesthetic interaction and the space it creates are thus unpredictable, aleatory, potentially undisciplined. It also means that the meaning of such an encounter is immanent to the encounter itself. It is not situated elsewhere – in the psyche, in the semantic element of the image, in some pre-existing concept with which I am toying. These are alibi-meanings, meanings which replace the real site of meaning. All these alibi-meanings are situated in some ‘signified’ concept which governs the materiality of the image, the ‘signifier’. Under such a regime, by a paradoxical in-

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version, the ‘signifier’, the material sign which grabs my attention, is relegated to a secondary position. Over it bends the imperious figure of a meaning which legitimizes the selection I have made. The ‘signifier’ in its insistent there-ness is displaced by an abstract and immaterial ‘signified’ which then behaves with the arrogance of the active ‘signifier’. Let us banish the alibi so as to restore things to their rightful place. The image exerts a fatal attraction upon me. Its luminosity draws me to it for no other reason than the productive potential of an imminent connection. The image becomes a “zone of intensity” generating meanings hitherto unforeseen and unthinkable. Possible resonances of the semantic element “oxymoron” emerge out of the immanent relationship between myself, the built environment, the text in which I have now embedded the image – then and only then. The zone of intensity is one of a cluster of important spatial metaphors (though we must abandon the very concept of the metaphor forthwith) or sites of meaning-making employed by Deleuze. Others which we will explore in this chapter are that of the schizoid chains of intense objects, the still-whole Sign, the spatializing multiplicities of love and depersonalization, the Chart, Alveoli, and the Fold. All of these figures eschew the status of the metaphor. They all claim, implicitly, to be zones in which becoming-being is intensely immanently brought forth.

Signs of intensity The zone of intensity needs no explanation, no justification, no legitimization. There is in this fact an ethical aspect of the zone of intensity. It forbids devolution of responsibility for the image onto any other instance except my own desire. Claire Colebrook, writing on Deleuze and Guattari, notes that identities are formed from desires, such as investments in colours, body-parts, tastes and styles. Desire is originally productive, connective and intensive, the investment in qualities that are neither masculine nor feminine but singular. Through repetition and coding these qualities are read as signifiers of some individual essence that precedes and governs the intensities.

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In contrast to this reductive coding which locates the essence of a desire or intensity “elsewhere” Colebrook poses “Immanence”. Immanence is “just this commitment to staying at the level of difference, refusing any external explanation of difference” (Colebrook 2002: 45, 32). The zone of intensity obliges me to ‘own’ the image, to ‘own up’ to it, to acknowledge it as being my ‘own’ choice. The rapport which is established with and through a zone of intensity evinces a visceral attraction for the immediacy of the thing, not for a displaced meaning or utility. Let us take an immediate example, the process of writing through which this text is gradually emerging. Often, without my knowing them in advance, ideas crystallize out of the process of composition itself. Writing is not writing about the real. Rather, it is writing in the real. Or even more accurately, it is writing the real, a transitivity without the mediation of a preposition. In other words, it is part of the ongoing process of creative becoming of the world. Just as there is no separation within the sign itself, between sign and meaning, so there is no separation between the world and the meaning attributed to the world. Writing is an event which takes place within the plane of becoming-being. It is a site and a moment where change happens, where a modulation from one way of being to another, propelled by desire, is happening. Signs produce desire, they are themselves intensities which are invested, they create territorialities as do any other connectivities: Les enregistrements et transmissions venues des codes internes, du milieu extérieur, d’une région à l’autre de l’organisme, se croisent suivant les voies perpétuellement ramifiées de la grande synthèse disjonctive. S’il y là une écriture, c’est une écriture à même le Réel, étrangement polyvoque et jamais bi-univocisée, linéarisée, une écriture transdiscursive et jamais discursive: tout le domaine de l’ ‘inorganisation réelle’ des synthèses passives, où l’on chercherait en vain quelque chose qu’on pourrait appeler le Signifiant. (Anti-Œdipe 47) [The recordings and transmissions that have come from the internal codes, from the outside world, from one region to another of the organism, all intersect, following the endlessly ramified paths of the great disjunctive synthesis. If this constitutes a system of writing, it is a writing inscribed on the very surface of the Real: a strangely polyvocal kind of writing, never a biunivocalized, linearized one; a transcursive system of writing, never a discursive one; a writing that constitutes the entire domain of the ‘real inorganization’ of the passive

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The Saussurean division of the sign into two constituent parts, material signifier (the word) and conceptual signified (the thing referred to by the sound), is staunchly refused by Deleuze and Guattari. For them, things mean in their immediate materiality. Their meaning is not detached from them, located elsewhere in an abstract or conceptual realm of the mind or of semantics. To install this split within the sign is to divide meaning into a here and an elsewhere, into a presence of materiality and an absence of intended meaning. Alternatively, it is to divide meaning into a lower order of materiality, the mortal world where we are caught, and an elusive higher order of semantic fullness, an elsewhere we wish to attain. Rather, propelled by desire, we already generate immanent meaning as we connect with signs and intensities, thus creating a territoriality which means (the verb is intransitive) from the outset. The zones of intensity which crystallize around images or objects are thus generated by desire and in turn generate desire. They are part of an immediate economy of presence in which meaning is not deferred, but is present because produced in an event of immanent plenitude. Deleuze and Guattari reject la division platonicienne qui nous fait choisir entre production et acquisition. Dès que nous mettons le désir du côté de l’acquisition, nous nous faisons du désir une conception idéaliste (dialectique, nihiliste) qui le détermine en premier lieu comme manque, manque d’objet, manque d’objet réel. (Anti-Œdipe 32) [the Platonic logic of desire forces us to […] choose between production and acquisition. From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of the real object. (Anti-Oedipus 25)]

Rather than something to be pursued in view of obtaining it in some more or less distant future, a zone of intensity is a site which is invested by desire The zone of intensity cannot be pursued, because it is not elsewhere. It is here, now, and there to be enjoyed in a productive, meaningful relationship (possessing a plenitude of meaning) generated by my connecting with it.

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Oedipal or schizoid? In L’Arrière-pays, Yves Bonnefoy describes a decisive moment in his youth. On the occasion of his grandfather’s funeral in the south of France, he becomes aware of the here-and-nowness of life: Et moi, pour la dernière fois, mais avec quelle émotion, je regardais un certain arbre sur la colline d’en face, de l’autre côté du Lot. J’aurais être ici, dans le petit cimetière, non, je marchais là-bas, dans sa direction, m’arrêtant à quelques pas toutefois, m’abîmant dans l’absolue de sa forme et l’évidence du vide, autour de lui, et des pierres. (Bonnefoy 1982: 94 - 5) [As for me, for the last time, and with such emotion, I gazed at a certain tree on the hill opposite, on the other side of the river Lot. I ought to have been here in the little cemetery, but no, I was walking over there, stopping none the less at some distance, losing myself in the absoluteness of the form and the emptiness around the tree, and of the stones.]

Such a zone of intensity attracts the spectator, and founds her or him as a subject within a coagulated sector of flows of becoming-being: Que m’était-il, je le comprends aujourd’hui. Isolé entre la terre et le ciel, figure intense, bien définie, signe, privé de sens, je pouvais reconnaître en lui un individu comme moi, je savais désormais que le fait humain a pour racine la finitude. (Bonnefoy 1982: 95) [ I t’s only today that I realize what it was for me. Isolated between earth and sky, an intense figure, clearly defined, a sign, stripped of meaning, I was able to recognize in it an individual like myself, and I knew from that moment on that human reality has its roots in finiteness.]

It is the sign, the zone of intensity marked by the tree and without any other “meaning”, which defines the space of immanent being, welling up as an individualized territoriality. But the narrator turns away, in the same moment rejecting that immanence for another reality: Mais si je décidais de faire de celle-ci ma ‘réalité rugueuse’, mon devoir (oui, c’était ma pensée, qui s’obstina par la suite) je n’interrompais pas pour autant mon rêve, qui simplement se détournait du lieu proche, et reformulait, là-bas, l’unité regrettée du relatif et de l’infini. (Bonnefoy 1982: 95) [ B ut if I decided to make this finiteness my ‘rough reality’, my duty (yes, that was my thought, one I clung to afterwards), I did not how-

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Perversely, the narrator, confronted with a zone of intensity and the opportunity of embracing the immanence of becoming-being, willingly chooses the split subjectivity endowed by a desperately desired ‘elsewhere’ which cannot but perpetually elude him. The tree, sign of immanent plenitude, is reduced to a signifier of desired plenitude. The cleavage of signifier from signified submits meaning to a regime of lack which accompanies the speaking subject from the moment of entry into language to the moment of its death. As subjects socialized in the inadmissibility of desire, the very structure of our existence is coeval with the split between the signifier and an infinitely deferred signified. According to Lacan, every signifier stands in for an absent signified. And as subjects formed as social beings by repression, we are constituted by the inaccessibility of the unconscious, the place where our deepest truth is hidden away. The very ‘signified’ of our identity (the Real me) is remote from the ‘signifiers’ which define me on the social stage (my name, my professional description, etc). For Kristeva, the pre-Oedipal subjects exists in “une modalité de la significance où la signe linguistique n’est pas encore articulé comme absence d’objet” (Révolution 25) [“a modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object” (Revolution 26)]. The fate of the subject after the Oedipal rift is to be given expression in a linguistic medium marked permanently and irreversibly by lack. However, Deleuze and Guattari disagree vociferously with this account of lack. In their opinion, this rift between signifier and signified never genuinely occurs, but is merely an effect induced by ideology. In their view, the subject in reality continues to live on in semiotic plenitude. What is repressed is not so much the impossible, inaccessible truth of the subject. Rather, it is the subject’s existence in a semiotic fullness of which is hidden from its sight as a well-kept secret. From here, it is not difficult to trace the productive dialogue between Deleuze and Foucault, detecting its influence upon the latter’s rejection of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ in La Volonté de savoir. In place of the alienating split between signifier and signified, Deleuze and Guattari propose a relationship to the still-whole Sign

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which they describe as schizoid. The schizophrenic, according to their admittedly poetic version of the person suffering from this disorder, is someone who refuses to accept reality on the terms dictated by society. The simplistic but widespread notion of the schizophrenic as having a ‘split personality’ is based upon a misnomer. What is conceived in this simplistic idea as a ‘split’ or ‘multiple’ personality, that is, a conglomeration of conflicting and contradictory states of being is in fact a sign of plenitude. It is an unruly plenitude which ‘normal’ people keep under control by ‘splitting off’ many of the disturbingly foreign parts of themselves. These wild semi-selves are relegated to the junk-room of the unconscious – and then sealed over by an act of forgetting which itself in turn is wilfully forgotten (what we call ‘repression’). The normal personality is the truly ‘split personality’. The schizoid economy of subjectivity does not ‘split off’ at all, but, disturbingly for the rest of us, allows the jumbled bric-à-brac of selfhood to circulate freely. Likewise, the schizophrenic, in Deleuze and Guattari’s imaginative account, does not split meaning in the same manner as ‘normal’ subjects learn to do. Language in schizophrenia is not usefully carved up as in everyday social use. Objects and their meanings are not separated off from one another, but are experienced as imperiously present entities. The schizophrenic occupies a realm of meaning in which objects themselves mean, immediately, overpoweringly. Where normal reality keeps things at a distance by putting labels on them, sorting them into convenient sets or groups, and establishing relationships of similarity and difference between them, schizophrenia experiences them in their gigantic there-ness. Bereft of mechanisms to keep things behind a reassuringly secure semantic screen, the schizophrenic economy senses things as an overwhelming presence of discrete objects. This is an “expérience déchirante, trop émouvante, par laquelle le schizo est le plus proche de la matière, d’un centre intense et vivant de la matière” (Anti-Œdipe 26) [“harrowing, emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to matter, to a burning, living center of matter” (Anti-Oedipus 19)]. The subject engulfed in this experience is structured by “l’émotion vraiment primaire qui n’éprouve d’abord que des intensités, des devenirs, des passages” (Anti-Œdipe 25) [“the really primary emotion, which in the beginning only experiences intensities, becomings, transitions” (Anti-Oedipus 18-9)]. The objects perceived in this manner cannot be grouped or

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categorized, but are apprehended in series, according to the logic of this + this + this. In the place of a mediating order, the schizophrenic realm of meaning imposes a crushing, luminous presence of intense object-signs. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari say, full schizoid meaning is a realm which “ne cesse de composer et de décomposer les chaînes en signes qui n’ont nulle vocation pour être signifiants. Produire du désir, telle est la seule vocation du signe, dans tous les sens où ça se machine” (Anti-Œdipe 47) [“ceaselessly composes and decomposes the chains into signs that have nothing that impels them to become signifying. The one vocation of the sign is to produce desire, engineering it in every direction” (Anti-Oedipus 39)]. It is significant that there is a pun upon “sens” (sense, meaning, direction) which embodies Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis: meaning is spatial, located in the here-and-now, immediately attached to the sensuality of the present, but also unpredictable, productive. It is striking how close we are here to the position of the later Kristeva, privileging the senses as the site of subjectivity, gathered up and mediated by narratives whose outcomes can never be guaranteed. What Deleuze and Guattari recommend as a therapeutic measure is to displace and relocate the semiotic regimes of lackingmeaning which we take for granted. They then situate these regimes of meaning-as-lack squarely where they belong: within the coercive order of capitalism. Their injunction is clear: “Déterritorialiser Œdipe dans le monde, au lieu de se reterritorialiser sur Œdipe et dans la famille” [“De-territorialize Oedipus within/into the world, instead of reterritorializing oneself on the basis of Oedipus and within the family”] (Kafka 19). Their programme is dual: first, dislodge Oedipus from its naturalized pedestal, so that it no longer holds our credence and thereby dictates our ways of understanding family life as the smallest unit of social codification; secondly, re-insert Oedipus within the context which produces it so as to understand its ideological and coercive functioning in the larger socio-psycho-economic context of our times. This means that rather than reinscribing the given regimes of lack within the customary restricted social contexts, it becomes necessary to cast the Oedipus complex as a figure for an institutionalized regime of desire-as-lack back into the politicized realm where it takes effect. Oedipus should not be taken as a given, but should be interro-

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gated as a contingent but effective mechanism which dictates certain ways of organizing and conceptualizing social life. Oedipus is simply the name given by Deleuze and Guattari to that which persuades us of the inevitability of lack. When the law of the father intervenes to separate the child from the mother, wielding the incest taboo and the threat of castration, lack-absence-distance as the concomitant of desire is installed as the defining principle of psychic and social life. This perpetuation of desire-as-lack, in their view, is one of the principl taks taken on by psychoanalysis as a powerful social institution which “cures”, that is to say “normalizes”, deviant subjects. Oedipus is the name for an epistemological structure which situates us in a field polarized between the stark extremes of lack and plenitude. It sets up an absolute and therefore unattainable form of plenitude, one which cannot but be undermined by lack, thereby in turn generating a nostalgic-melancholic desire for an impossible wholeness. A lack-driven-desire can then be co-opted for multifarious purposes, most of them in the service of power. He who is hollowed out by lack will commit a multitude of sins in the pursuit of plenitude. Furthermore, this pair of reciprocally self-reinforcing terms functions in a more sinister manner to obscure the possibility of alternatives potentially lying outside of its dualism. Oedipus thus functions to ensure two crucial mainsprings of late capitalism: first, to keep lack in circulation as a generator of desire; and secondly, to prevent us from finding alternatives to itself. Deleuze and Guattari’s position can be fruitfully compared to Foucault’s in the first volume of Histoire de la sexualité. In La volonté de savoir he rejects the repression of sexuality as a negative social instance, branding it a Victorian myth. Instead, he replaces the principle of repression by a massive, socially effective machinery for inciting discourse about sexuality. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century generation of discourse and production of knowledge on sexuality was a gigantic coercive machine for creating forms of subjectivity, for channelling ways of living, of restricting them positively. Foucault’s productive notion of discourse on sexuality fulfils a similar socio-political role to Deleuze and Guattari’s coercive Oedipal structure. Their analogous positions converge in the work of scholars such as Jacques Donzelot on the family as a coercive social

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institution (see Dits et écrits III, 233; Donzelot 1997), or of writers such as Viviane Forester on “calm” forms of social violence (Forester 1980). To “de-territorialize Oedipus” is, on the one hand, to submit it to a rigorous critique, and on the other, to pursue meaning beyond its constraining borders. The beyond, however, is not an elsewhere, it is here and now. The escape from Oedipus means to discover the plenitude of productive meaning around us. To accept zones of intensity, the plenitude of meaning in the signs which surround us, is to connect to that which is given to us in all its immediacy by the world. Such connectivity can in turn release us from the ubiquitous regimes of lack imposed upon us by our consumer culture and their messages of selffrustrating commodity desires.

Subjectivity-intensity-multiplicity One of the iconic moments of Paris in May 1968 is embodied in the famous photograph of Daniel Cohn-Bendit mockingly raising his eyebrows at a helmeted paramilitary CRS during the revolt. His expression is quirky, quizzical, cheerfully defying the sternness of the figure looking down upon him. The photograph now adorns the cover of the seventeenth volume of Lacan’s seminar series (Lacan 1991: cover image). CohnBendit, of Jewish French-German extraction (his parents had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s for France) was one of the most prominent ringleaders of the 1968 student movement. He was eventually deported by the French government and forbidden re-entry to France. Thereupon, a movement of solidarity among French students, remembering Cohn-Bendit’s Holocaust past, coined the slogan “Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands” [“We are all German Jews”]. CohnBendit subsequently worked as a kindergarten teacher, held a position in the City of Frankfurt’s office of multicultural affairs, and went on to become a Green Party member in the European Parliament. He left behind him in France such an aura of revolutionary bravado that ultraconservative acquaintances of mine in Paris in the 1990s, thirty years after May ’68, could express disbelief and outrage that an antisocial element like this could exercise a position of political power in local or European politics.

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The photograph of Cohn-Bendit cocking a snook at the helmeted representative of state authority in its armed, punitive form has become a “zone of intensity” connecting contemporary viewers to a moment of ‘up-rising’ – a thrusting-forth of flows of becoming-being, of myriad differences and multiplicities which coagulate in a moment and place. This photo works like a magnetic field, organizing and polarizing iron filings in a field of attraction. On the photo one can sense the electric rapport between Cohn-Bendit and the helmeted policeman, a rapport laden respectively with humour, defiance, mockery, mistrust, and contempt. The image epitomizes the standoff between authority and revolt. It concretizes the tension between the anonymity of the uniformed representative of hierarchy, over whose shoulder we gaze, and the individual, facing-up to that faceless authority. Cohn-Bendit stands out from the crowd, challenging state power to identify him as the crystallization of unrest, turbulence, disorder. The multiplicities which traverse the photograph are multiplicities within and yet they call forth multiplicities without, identifications, associations, connections. The photograph as a book cover-image now indexes the unruly discourse of a maverick psychoanalytical guru, Lacan, whose authoritarian doctrines have polarized opinion and provoked innovation ever since. The image continues to crystallize a “zone of intensity” gathering about itself emergent relationships, giving birth to new and local meanings that result from the interaction of subjects and sites. How does a zone of intensity operate? A zone of intensity emerges when a sector of becoming-being in its fluidity and constant self-differentiation is focussed upon and thus marked out as a zone. For Deleuze, the nature of this relationship between zone of intensity and connecting subject can be exemplified in several ways. A first exemplification would be quite simply love. It is the act of falling in love which constitutes a zone of intensity, concentrating the attention by selecting something for its sensual attributes. Speaking of Proust’s protagonist Albertine, Deleuze comments: Albertine est lentement extraite d’un groupe de jeunes filles, qui a son nombre, son organisation, son code, sa hiérarchie; […] Albertine a ses propres multiplicités que le narrateur, l’ayant insole, découvre sur son corps et dans ses mensonges – jusqu’à ce que la fin de l’amour la rende indiscernable. (Mille plateaux 49)

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The zone of intensity establishes a temporary intensification, a slowing or coagulation of flow, which will later accelerate or de-coagulate once again. Feeling and thinking in this mode of attraction is a thrusting-forth of flows of becoming-being. Nietzsche once commented that “Thinking is a thrusting-forth” [“Denken ist ein herausheben”] (Nietzsche 1996: 30). One can understand this in the structuralist sense, so that thinking is the marking of an unmarked field. Alternatively, however, Nietzsche’s quip could also be reading in the sense of a fluid lifting-out of the flow, a slowing-down, a provisional raising of the landscape to create a territory. This provisional raising-up creates individuals in their connectedness, not in their separation. It generates concepts in their capacity to establish relationships more than their ability to clearly delineate terms. To this extent, the “love” which Deleuze and Guattari have in mind is not one which confirms and reinforces the ‘split-off’ socialized person structured by normative repression. This love merely sets up the loved one as a replacement for the lost object, a replacement which can never of course be that object, thus deferring the ultimate fulfilment of desire and leaving intact the absence at the heart of selfhood, the bar upon that which has been forbidden and repressed. This love sets up the person as a lonely individual, forever searching for that which might stanch the originary lack at the heart of being. This is why Deleuze and Guattari connect love with “depersonalization”. Depersonalization is a process which resists the experience of personhood as separation. Depersonalization allows the connectivities of desire to have full rein. It counteracts the normative installation of lack at the core of the individual. Shifting aside the mechanisms designed to control and reduce the multiplicities at work within ourselves and without, depersonalization is a salutary process of opening up the flows of becoming-being and making them available for connection so as to form a zone of intensity. Love does not send off a lacking person in pursuit of another lacking person. Love, on the contrary, obliterates the person so as to re-install the plenitude of a multi-

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ple individual in desiring attraction to the plenitude of another multiple individual. A second exemplification of the process of individuation-asintensification might be that of naming. The intersection of language and subjectivity is customarily crystallized for us in the expressive site of the proper name. Such a name gives us a social identity, and thus also bears the burden of neatly summarizing the person. Such summarizing is also a summary execution, reducing the myriad complexity of personality to the tight contours of a coherent self. As Deleuze notes, La lutte pour une subjectivité moderne passe par une résistance aux deux formes actuelles d’asujettissement, l’une qui consiste à nous individuer d’après les exigences du pouvoir, l’autre qui consiste à attacher chaque individu à une idenité sue et connue, bien determinée une fois pour toutes. La lutte pour la subjectivité se présente alors comme droit à la différence, et droit à la variation, à la metamorphose. (Foucault 113) [The struggle for a modern subjectivity passes through resistance to the two present forms of subjection, the one consisting of individualising ourselves on the basis of constraints of power, the other of attracting each individual to a known and recognized identity, fixed once and for all. The struggle for subjectivity presents itself, therefore, as the right to difference, variation, and metamorphosis. (Foucault 1056)]

In the same vein, Claire Colebrook notes that “Identity occurs with the reduction of intensities to a signifier, when we imagine the intensity as the image of something” (Colebrook 2002: 45). She expands this notion, adding that Both capitalism and psychoanalysis explain desire from the individual, but the individual is the outcome of a reduction and homogenisation of difference. The concept of the individual is itself repressive or reactionary, reactionary because it grounds all desires on some prior value of the self. (Colebrook 2002: 40)

In Deleuze and Guattari’s conception, by contrast, the process of naming, once again, does not localize the social signifier whose condition of existence is the banishment of the repressed signified. On the contrary, the process of naming as Deleuze and Guattari understand it is at one with the sensual multiplicities of the self:

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Space in Theory Or le nom propre ne désigne pas un individu: c’est au contraire quand l’individu s’ouvre aux multiplicités qui le traverse de part en part, à l’issue de la plus sévère exercice de dépersonnalisation, qu’il acquiert son véritable nom propre. Le nom propre est l’appréhension instantanée d’une multiplicité. Le nom propre est le sujet d’un pur infinitif compris comme tel dans un champ d’intensité. (Mille plateaux 51) [The proper name does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity. The proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a field of intensity. (A Thousand Plateaus 37)]

Rather than stressing the properness and property (propreté, cleanliness in French) of the name that designates a subjectivity-as-person (le nom propre) Deleuze and Guattari attempt to locate the name elsewhere. They focus upon a name which emerges in lieu of the lonely person, at the interstices of zones of intensity, flows of becoming, and the rapport which lifts the subject-intensity out of a flow of becoming into the limelight of love. Both love and naming, then, can be understood as facets of a contestatory practice of depersonalization which Deleuze and Guattari hold up as a subversion of the socially restrictive forces of Oedipus. Both love and naming as aspects of depersonalization work to resist those processes which subsume the contradictory facets of subjectivity to a central, unifying ‘identity’. Pas d’amour qui ne soit exercice de dépersonnalisation sur un corps sans organes à former; et c’est au point le plus haut de cette dépersonnalisation que quelqu’un peut être nommé, reçoit son nom ou prénom, acquiert la discernabilité la plus intense dans l’appréhension instantanée des multiples qui lui appartient et auxquels il appartient. […] Chacun passé par tant de corps en chacun. (Mille plateaux 49) [Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that someone can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. [...] We each go through so many bodies in each other. (A Thousand Plateaus 35-6)]

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The raising-up which occurs when a zone of intensity emerges as a result of love or of naming does not bring forth an individual. That would be merely to confirm the regime of lack by which the normed individual is constructed, and to press the desiring subject back into that same regime of desire-as-lack. Rather, the zone of intensity identifies the flows of becoming within the individual. The zone of intensity draws forth these flows in a manner which is provisional, a semifixing soon to give way to an unfixing, released from any economy of loss or mourning. The coming-to-being of a subject, a process which never leaves behind the fluidity of becoming-being, can be compared to the moment of revolt which Kristeva in her late work sees as crucial to the formation of subjectivity. Revolt, up-rising, is the movement by which a subject is constituted by emergence into or within a zone of intensity. Rather than the moment of Oedipal submission, by which the subject falls into line, accepting constraints, and undergoing a normalizing repression, the moment of revolt is a moment of differentiation. Here the subject emerges not as an individual but as an Other. For Deleuze and Guattari, this “revolt” is an example of deterritorialization and re-territorialization, that is, a constant renewal of the parameters of selfhood. Revolt, in the truest sense, would not only shake up the shape of the environment, it would also trigger a line of flight away from the fixed contours of the self. Revolt would exemplify the foci and intensities which define the self in its field of force and field of attraction. This self is a force field, a site of contestation, a blazing intensity leading to another blazing intensity and so on without end.

Mapping subjectivity What is a map? Does it accurately reproduce the territory it documents or does it give us ‘the lie of the land’, a necessarily false and partial version of a place from upon which it claims to offer a distanced, objective perspective? A story by Jorge Luis Borges lampoons, in a very grave tone of voice, the idea of the perfectly accurate map: “los Colegios de Cartógrafos levantaron un Mapa del Imperio, que tenía el tamaño del Imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él” [“In that Empire […] the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was on the same Scale as the Empire and coincided with it point for

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point”]. Such a map is not without disadvantages, however, despite its perfect accuracy, and for precisely this reason, it finally becomes obsolete: Menos Adictas al Estudio de la Cartografía, las Generaciones Siguientes entendieron que ese dilatado Mapa era Inútil y no sin Impiedad lo entregaron a las Inclemencias del Sol y de los Inviernos. En los desiertos del Oeste perduran despedazadas Ruinas del Mapa […] (Borges 1969: 103) [Less attentive to the study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome and, not without Irreverence, abandoned it to the Rigors of sun and rain. In the Western deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found […] (Borges 1964: 90)]

A map, by definition, cannot faithfully replicate that which it represents. If it did so, it would not be a map, but rather, a monstrous second reality. It is only via the illusion of escape from brute reality which it affords that, though fundamentally undermining its simultaneous claims to accuracy, a map can sustain itself as such. Deleuze and Guattari prominently employ the notion of the map (another spatial metaphor) to explore anti-Oedipal practices of subjectivity and social existence. They wish however, to avoid the pitfalls of the idea of the map as “calque”, faithful copy. Therefore they deploy the concept of “carte” (map) in a different manner to its customary usage. In order to render this difference, I have recourse to a somewhat quaint translation of the French: “Chart”. A Chart resonates with premodern, pre-technical map-making practices. The Chart’s imaginary, fanciful, indeed sometimes poetic qualities may shake our belief in the representational veracity of maps. A Chart, in Deleuze and Guattari’s usage of the term, is open-ended, reversible, can be constantly modified. It is part of a practice which has purchase upon the real, one which can be constructed in any place, read from any point, as part of any number of diverse practices. A Chart can be ‘entered’ from diverse points, and thus constitutes a rhizomatic structure, in contrast to arborescent representational genres, which always come back to a representational root (the map as accurate rendering of reality), thus conforming to an economy “revient toujours au meme” [“which always comes back to the same”]. The Chart stresses performance rather than “compétence prétendue” [“alleged competence”]. The Chart is thus against all forms of fatality, it resists the reproduction of prior struc-

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tures as, for instance, in psychoanalysis, where the Oedipal scenario declares itself again and again as the pattern to be imposed upon the subject (Mille plateaux, 19-21/A Thousand Plateaus 12-13). The Chart thus provides a spatial image of a mode of representation which interacts with its environment rather than making fallacious claims to reproduce it. The Chart is implicated in its world. Its representations, Deleuze and Guattari implicitly claim, are of the same essential fabric as the world. It is a mode of spatial representation apposite to a provisional, nomadic mode of practice. In his later work on subjectivity, Deleuze returns to the notion of the Chart (I persist in this translation) to offer a model of psychic existence which stresses the unfinished, constantly self-revising, selfmodifying character of the psyche. This model posits a number of distinct but interacting Charts: les cartes se superposent de telle manière que chacune trouve un remaniement dans la suivante, au lieu d’une origine dans les précédantes: d’une carte à l’autre, il ne s’agit pas de la recherché d’une origine, mais d’une évaluation des déplacements. Chaque carte est une redistribution d’impasses et de percées, de seuils et de clôtures, qui va nécessairement de bas en haut. Ce n’est pas seulement une inversion de sens, mais une différence de nature: l’inconscient n’a plus affaire à des personnes et des objets, mais à des trajets et des devenirs; ce n’est plus un inconscient de commémoration, mais de mobilisation, dont les objets s’envolent, plus qu’ils ne restent enfouis dans la terre. (Critique et clinique 83-84) [The charts are superimposed upon one another in such a way that each one finds itself reworked by the one that succeeds it, instead of having an origin in the sheet that preceded it. From one chart to another, we are faced not with a search for origins, but rather, with an evaluation of displacements. Each chart is a redistribution of impasses and break-throughs, of thresholds and closures, which necessarily runs from below to above. This implies not merely an inversion of meaning, but a difference of nature: the subconscious is not a business of persons and objects, but of journey and becomings; it is not a subconscious of commemoration but of mobilization, whose objects shift their position rather than remaining buried in the earth.]

The subconscious, Deleuze and Guattari suggest here, can be conceived of as a cartographic process. But it is not one which lays down a fixed narrative of origins. Rather, the Chart traces a history of con-

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stant modifications and shifts. The Chart looks forwards, not backwards. Against a depth model of repression, of burying (as in the image of the crypt in Nicholas Abraham’s work (Abraham&Torok 1987)), Deleuze and Guattari propose a model of the psyche which is mobile, spread out across a surface, topographical. The past and its objects evaporate or shift because they are only created through the relations which existed at the time. They are not preserved, hidden somewhere to be retrieved in psychoanalysis, but are recast, reworked constantly. The Charts which psychoanalysis might scrutinize do not trace a lost origin, something which founds them. As temporal markers, they function in one direction only. Their temporal vector eschews movement in reverse gear, permitting only movement forwards. These Charts are the plans of strata constituted by the subject’s ephemeral network of relationships at a given moment in time. They are signs of movement from one place to another, and of movement through a history of becoming. Just as those relationships dissolve and reform, dissolving and reforming the subject in their wake, so the past versions of the charted strata can be rewritten, but not, so to speak, unwritten, as one might unravel a piece of knitting. They can only be re-knitted. The rhizomatic space of relational, open-ended becoming can only continue to evolve, irreversibly, in its becoming. Deleuze goes on to project these diachronic superimpositions upon an inner-outer axis which may initially confuse the reader. It is paradoxical that for a theorist who disputes the notion of the person, and who constantly struggles against the idea of repression and of the subconscious as a repository of buried memories, Deleuze frequently refers to the interiority of selfhood. This is puzzling because the notion of the interior self is predicated upon the assumption of a stable boundary between inner psychic or spiritual life and outer world. The drawing of this spatial border in turn grounds the temporal continuity of a delimited selfhood. Out of this dual synchronic and diachronic stability emerges the notion of a coherent selfhood expressing itself by language: the self speaks forth its inner thoughts, feelings, intentions. But Deleuze and Guattari dispute such a bounded selfhood because it is posited upon a coercive unifying impulse which subsumes selfhood to an overarching “image” or “idea” which cannot be anything but violently reductive. Why then

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do they employ a notion of interiority apparently so loaded with problematic assumptions? Freud’s theory of socializing repression queries whether the speaking self knows what it is saying when it speaks. Nevertheless hist theory works with the notion of a bounded self. Whereas the interior selfhood of Freud’s oedipalized subject is determined by pressures from without (paradigmatically, the father’s act of interdiction), Deleuze’s interiority dictates the outside world. It is the welling-up of a sector of becoming-being into a zone of subjective intensity which establishes a field of force, a field of magnetic attraction, which then configures the social space around it. We must imagine this interiority as an unruly, contestatory space which focuses the flows of becomingbeing. This is an interiority which in reality evinces the contours of a massive and undisciplined exteriority. Significantly, the interior psychic map of shifting flows of becoming is equated with a map embodied in the work of art, a work which we now know to identity as sign-intensity: [il appartient bien à cette nouvelle sculpture de prendre position sur des trajets extérieurs, mais cette position depend d’abord de chemins intérieurs à l’œuvre elle-même; le chemin extérieur est une création qui ne pré-existe pas à l’œuvre, et dépend de ses rapports internes. […] la position dans l’espace environnant depend étroitement de ces trajets intérieurs. […] Une carte des virtualités, tracée par l’art, se superpose à la carte réelle dont elle transforme les contours. (Critique et clinique 87-8)] [it’s the role of this new sculpture to take a position upon exterior journeys, but this position depends first of all upon paths which are interior to the work of art itself. The external path is a creation which does not pre-exist the work and depends upon its internal relationships. […] its position in space depends intimately upon its internal journeys. […] A chart of virtualities, drawn by art, is imposed upon the real map, whose contours it transforms.]

Deleuze’s vector of reflexion takes us from the chart of the subject’s own history of becomings. These becomings are envisaged as a constant reworking of an interior topography, a reworking which has its functional correlative in the work of art, to the outside world. This is a world whose reality can be transformed and inflected by that virtual chart of flows of becoming.

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This vector of progressive transformation is logical because Deleuze conceives of selfhood not as something stable, but as an already differentiated internal world. From there it is an unproblematic logical step to have the self-as-difference project its differentiation upon its environment, thus potentially triggering a transformation of the world without.

Alveoli From his earliest works onwards, Deleuze radically rejinks received notions of interiority with the help of the concept of difference: “Qu’est-ce qu’une essence, telle qu’elle est révelée dans l’oeuvre d’art? C’est une différence, la Différence ultime et absolue. C’est elle qui constitue l’être, qui nous fait concevoir l’être” (Proust et les signes 53) [“What is an essence”, he asked in his book on Proust, “as revealed in the work of art? It is a difference, the absolute and ultimate Difference. Difference is what constitutes being, what makes us conceive being” (Proust and Signs 41)]. Flying in the face of received philosophical wisdom, Deleuze claimed that difference, not identity, is what constitutes being. Difference is also, however, what allows us to understand being. Difference is what makes things, and what makes them legible for us. In other words, we too are involved in this difference. It is not something outside us, something which we observe from a safe site of identity, but it forms and informs our own gaze upon the world. We are not separated from this difference, but are participants in it. Our being as difference is entangled with the world’s being as difference, and the relationship between the two is a relationship of difference. What sort of difference are we dealing with here? Deleuze asks himself, “Mais qu’est-ce qu’une différence ultime et absolue? Non pas une différence empirique entre deux choses ou deux objects, toujours extrinsèque” (Proust et les signes 54) [“But what is an absolute, ultimate difference? Not an empirical difference between two things or two objects, always extrinsic” (Proust and Signs 41)]. We generally assume that difference is a difference between identities, between things which are identical with themselves. No, replies Deleuze: Difference exists between things precisely because they are always different to themselves, within themselves. It is the differences within en-

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tities which in turn generates their difference from other entities. I am different from you because I am also different from myself. It is not my identity which makes me an individual, but my difference – both within and without. Whence the meaning of Deleuze’s term “ultimate and absolute difference”. True difference is “ultimate and absolute” because it is everywhere, not simply there as one half of the binary Identity/Difference. If we take any object or thing which can be differentiated from other things, we will find that its matter is multiple. Virginia Woolf writes in To the Lighthouse: James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see the windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other was the Lighthouse too. It was sometimes hardly to be seen across the bay. (1927; Woolf 2002: 202)

What can be seen, what exists, also includes its own other. It is shadowed by what it is not, what cannot be seen. The thing-in-itself, consecrated by the subject-object regime of ocular visibility and concretized here in the figure of the lighthouse, is always already multiple. If we examine any of the elements which make up the multiplicity of an entity, we will discover, in turn, that they too are differentiated in themselves. And that, it will transpire upon even more detailed examination, these differentiations too are likewise infinitely divisible. And so on, ad infinitum. Absolute difference is a difference within and without which can be pursued infinitely in any direction. The very binary within/without, which presumes an identity/difference binary, thus also begins to crumble. Difference, then, is a quality which reaches down infinitely into the innermost regions of objects, rendering the world “alveolar”: “La matière présente donc une texture infiniment poreuse, spongieuse ou caverneuse, toujours une caverne dans la caverne: chaque corps, si petit soit-il, contient un monde, en tant qu’il est troué de passages irréguliers” (Le Pli 8) [“Matter thus offers an infinitely porous, spongy, or cavernous texture without emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in other caverns: no matter how small, each body contains a world

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pierced with irregular passages” (The Fold 5)]. Difference does not just seep down into things, it also radiates out from things. If it can be traced into the innermost cavities of objects, it can also be tracked outwards into the environment, on a larger and larger scale. It is the difference from within which differentiates without. Sameness is no longer necessary to keep the world together (the old excuse which founds community feeling from nationalism to esprit de corps) because desire, that which links difference, is at work as a force for coherence. This is a coherence which is dynamic and generative, rather than a sameness, which tends towards static states. Thus the synchronic plain of absolute difference, posited upon desire between differences, also generates history and temporality, as a process. Objects themselves are not stable entities (identities). Rather, they are processes emerging from a process, in relationships which in turn are of a differential, that is, contingent and transformative nature. As a whole, reality is an infinitely differential and differentiated space, engaged in a process of becoming (differentiation), which eschews any similarity with Euclidean space and its regularities. Following this notion of the ubiquity of difference, Deleuze suggests that “Chaque sujet exprime le monde d’un certain point de view. Mais le point de vue, c’est la différence elle-même, la différence interne absolue. Chaque sujet exprime donc un monde absolument différent” (Proust et les signes 55) [“Each subject expresses the world from a certain view point. But the viewpoint is the difference itself, the absolute internal difference. Each subject therefore expresses an absolutely different world” (Proust and Signs 42)]. Difference in this sense is not simply a difference between points of view in the usual sense – I’ve got my opinion, you’ve got yours. That would simply reduce difference to a matter of personal taste, to different opinions tolerated by a liberal humanism that regards opinions as the private affairs of subjects. Such private opinion is modelled on consumer choice, and restricts opinion to an expression of individualism. This individualism is an attribute of persons sharing a basic homogeneous humanity. Private, heterogeneous opinions are a consumer option compensated by a public homogeneity of common humanity. Differences of opinion would be comfortably cushioned by the sense that we are all individuals in the same way. Paradoxically, our individuality is a mass-produced ersatz which in fact suppresses real differences. Dif-

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ferences of opinion are mere cosmetic differences masking a deeper conformism. Deleuze suggests that our internal difference, one which funnels back into the immanent plane of absolute heterogeneous becomings, is also what dedicates us to differing in our particular articulation of a space of becoming, The subject is a point of intensity in a segment of the world which is caught in becoming in a manner no other segment of the world can achieve. At the same time, each zone of being, each zone of intensity is linked to all the others by virtue of its difference. Our difference is what we have in common, a formulation which is even more paradoxical than the one offered above. Our difference is what constitutes the profound community of the world, what connects us to each other, and what defines our situation within a rhizomatically organized world. This regime of individualism which Deleuze and Guattari refute here is modelled on Euclidean space, with its selfidentical objects arranged in a shared container-space. Euclidean spatial theory, which continues by and large as the one we have inherited and which we employ as our common-sense notion of space, imagines space as an empty container filled with discrete objects. Because these objects are discrete, bounded, they are marked off by the spaces between them. Lucretius claimed that “all nature as it is in itself consists of two things – bodies and the vacant space in which the bodies are situated and through which they move in different directions” (Lucretius 1951: 39). Euclidean space thus posits the fundamental binary opposition solidity-emptiness. Emptiness is the insubstantial background upon which solid objects appear. “If there were no place and space, which we call vacuity, these bodies could not be situated anywhere or move in any direction whatsoever. […] nothing exists that is distinct from both body and from vacuity and could be ranked with the others as a third substance” (Lucretius 1951: 40). Euclidean space is remarkably resilient and makes a return in unexpected forms. The thesis of empty space recurs in Žižek’s critique of Deleuze: Perhaps the limit of Deleuze resides in his vitalism, in his elevation of the notion of life to a new name for Becoming as the only true encompassing Whole, the One-ness, of Being itself. […] Against this ‘idealist’ stance, one should stick to Badiou’s thesis on mathematics as the only adequate ontology, the only science of pure Being: the meaning-

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By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory imagines a space made up not of alternating domains of discrete entities and the voids between them, but rather, one which is never completely empty and never completely full. Wherever we think there is empty space there is actually a substance which is simply invisible at the normal threshold of our perception, but which, were we to see more accurately, would become perceptible. We know from high-school classes, for instance, that solids, liquids and gases are simply various compact structures of molecules. Deleuze and Guattari comment: “Des physicians dissent: les trous ne sont pas des absences de particules, mais des particles allant plus vite que la lumière” (Mille Plateaux 45) [“Physicists say that holes are not the absence of particles, but particles travelling faster than the speed of light” (A Thousand Plateaus 32)]. Conversely, wherever we see a substance, we ought likewise to suspect, at a higher level of resolution, a plethora of miniscule gaps. If we were to zoom in on our environment with an electron microscope, each solid entity would turn out to be riddled with cavities, and each apparent void would be revealed as being filled with matter. Refusing to subscribe to a dichotomous theory of empty vs full space Deleuze and Guattari thus arrive at a theory of space that is alveolar, exemplified in a passage already quoted in part above: La matière présente donc une texture infiniment poreuse, spongieuse ou caverneuse, toujours une caverne dans la caverne : chaque corps, si petit soit-il, contient un monde, en tant qu’il est troué de passages irréguliers, environné et pénétré par un fluide de plus en plus subtil, l’ensemble de l’univers était semblable à ‘un étang de matière dans lequel il y a de différents flots et ondes’. (Pli 8) [Matter thus offers an infinitely porous, spongy, or cavernous texture without emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in other caverns: no matter how small, each body contains a world pierced with irregular passages, surrounded and penetrated by an increasingly vaporous fluid, the totality of the universe resembling a ‘pond of matter in which there exist different flows and waves’. (The Fold 5)]

Wherever we see an ‘empty space’ or a ‘solid object’, we should expect the same alternation between emptiness and fullness that we currently perceive at our normal threshold of perception. Any apparent

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contrast between full and empty will turn out to be fallacious once we look more closely: the fullness will reveal itself to be porous, and the emptiness to be partially inhabited. A shift of the frame of perception at each juncture would reveal that space is never empty, but always a relative plenitude, but one which, because of its cavities, leaves room for “intercalation”, for shift and novelty. The alveolar theory of space refutes a model of space which posits emptiness as the background of consistency, and thus awards solids their primacy on the basis of the negative void which constantly threatens to engulf them should they lose their clear contours. Rather, alveolar space suggests that the interactions between fullness and emptiness are always fluid and are characterized by “flows and waves”.

Fold What sort of a chart, to return to our previous theme, is capable of doing justice to these plateaux and strata of interwoven differences? What sort of superimposed charts, modifying and revising each other reciprocally, could possible keep pace with the flows of becoming of subjective and extra-subjective worlds? The answer would be a chart which, by virtue of its folds, creases, wrinkles, combines in itself many different charts. The chart can be folded, and it is in its folds that it gathers together the “superimposed charts” Deleuze employs to conceptualize the multiplicities gathered up within the so-called individual (etymologically, undivided). The fold is Deleuze’s most genial solution to resolving the paradox of simultaneous indivisibility and multiplicity. The alveolar notion of space is the spatial equivalent of the theory of desire announced in Anti-Oedipe. The anti-oedipal theory of desire refutes lack as the basis for human existence. Anti-Oedipe insists that all production is positive, that production is driven by desire and attraction and the resulting coupling and interaction which motivates the natural world, not by the lack of something we desire. Lack has no place in Deleuze and Guattari’s universe of desiring, productive connections.

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Rather, apparent dichotomies or differences such as the pairs plenitude/lack, here/elsewhere, emptiness/fullness are generated out of a single fabric. A myopic gaze sees them as contrasts, whereas in fact they turn out to be relative, always constituted out of a combination of their own qualities and of those of their other. Much of Deleuze’s work appears to employ binary pairs (smooth space vs. striated space, nomad order vs. state order, territorialization vs. deterritorialization). This leads to critiques such as that of Žižek: “One should therefore problematize the very basic duality of Deleuze’s thought, that of Becoming versus Being, which appears in different versions (the […] molecular versus the molar, the schizo versus the paranoic, etc.). This duality is ultimately overdetermined as ‘the Good versus the Bad” (Žižek 2004: 28). Yet the texts constantly insist that these oppositions should not be understood as dichotomies. Deleuze and Guattari stress, for example, that “A la limite il est impossible de distinguer la déterritorialisation et la re-territorialisation, qui sont prises l’une dans l’autre ou sont comme l’envers et l’endroit du même processus” (Anti-Œdipe 307) [“It may be all but impossible to distinguish deterritorialization from reterritorialization, since they are mutually enmeshed, or like opposite faces of the same process” (Anti-Oedipus 258)]. This apparent contradiction within Deleuze and Guattari’s work, obliging them to work with a number of binary oppositions ‘sous rature’, is resolved by the metaphor of the fold. In the fold, the spatial dichotomies that apparently dog their work despite their best efforts to eradicate them are revealed, in concrete spatial terms, to be part and parcel of a single spatial continuum. The fold allows Deleuze to imagine reality as a surface which eschews inside and outside. Rather, a folded surface, depending on the nature of the folding, will be sometimes folded outwards and sometimes folded inwards. Indeed, any fold in one direction will necessarily produce a fold in the other direction on the obverse face of the fabric. In this way, interiority and exteriority are always being produced out of a single continuous textile. With this metaphor, it becomes possible to do away with the old Western dichotomy of self-and-world, interior-self and external-reality, while showing how it came to be that one can perceive oneself as possessing an enclosed interior consciousness set off against a surrounding environment.

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Furthermore, the fold can be re-folded. Any fold, producing a difference within a sameness, can in turn be folded once again, so that within a difference, a further difference can be discerned. The integrity of the multiply differentiated surface remains none the less intact. The fold-within-the-fold exemplifies the notion of flows of becoming as a single interconnecting fabric of becoming-being that is also infinitely differentiated. Thus difference and sameness, which are usually construed as dichotomies, emerge as functions of each other. The Baroque fold is one that functions in two directions at once, from inner to outer and outer to inner. The Baroque pursues differentiation from surface to fold and from fold to surface at the same time. On the one hand, the Baroque takes what we perceive as singularity and folds it into multiplicity: “Le Baroque […] ne cesse de faire des plis. […] Il courbe et recourbe les plis, les pousse à l’infini, pli sur pli, pli selon pli. Le trait du Baroque, c’est le pli qui va à l’infini” (Pli 5) [“The Baroque […] endlessly produces folds. […] twists and turns its folds, pushing them into infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity” (The Fold 3)]. On the other hand, the Baroque takes multiplicity and, conversely, unfolds it back into singularity: “Suivant Leibniz, deux parties de matière réellement distinctes peuvent être inseparables. […] Il faut donc dire qu’un corps a un degré de dureté aussi bien qu’un degré de fluidité” (Pli 8) [“According to Leibniz, two parts of really distinct matter can be inseparable […] Thus it must be stated that a body has a degree of hardness as well as a degree of fluidity” (The Fold 5-6)]. Deleuze’s Baroque fold is multi-vectorial. One can pursue the strands of the fabric in several directions, starting from various potential beginnings (multiplicity or singularity) but they remain the inseparable faces of a complex entity. It is clear that a simple reversal of the received hierarchy of sameness over difference into an antagonistic counter-hierarchy (difference over sameness) is irrelevant here. In the folded surface a hierarchy of the two terms is impossible, for the simple reason that they cannot be told apart. The fold asks us to think sameness and difference in a fluid relationship in a way which is radically unfamiliar to our customary modes of thought. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this as a continuum. Deleuze later describes the concept of the fold as a “PLURALISME = MONISME”

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(Mille plateaux 31) [“Pluralism = monism” (A Thousand Plateaus 20)]. Plural monism conceives of being as a plane of an infinite variety of differences, thus discarding the simplistic dualism that imagines a stable background against which difference can be explained. “Monism” should not be understood as suggesting that this plane is one of sameness. This is the essential criticism mobilized by opponents of Deleuze such as Badiou (Badiou 1997: 31-47). Rather, it is infinitely varied. Monism means that there is nothing outside that plane of differences which might summarize it, reduce it to a single common denominator, or make sense of it according to a single higher language. The theory of fold insists that difference must be located within the world, on the same terms as the world as it is. Where might the theory of folding take us? Let us try out some variations of “folded”, “inflected” or “curvilinear” thought of our own. The French psychologist Didier Anzieu has elaborated a theory of psychic life hinging on the fact that that the brain develops as a gradual and infinite infolding of the skin (Anzieu 1985). The brain, the seat of interior consciousness, is produced by an infolding of the outer, epidermic surface of the body. This theory posits a continuity, both genetic and ongoing, between feeling and thinking, between inner and outer. Indeed, once this continuity between internal psychic space and external bodily space has been established, it is only logical to pursue that continuity further. The space around the body then becomes a further extension of the folded fabric of being. The individual subject is produced by an infolding, or, if one will, an out-folding, of the environment. The in-folding describes the emergence of interior subjectivity, while the out-folding accounts for the ‘welling up’ of subjectivity within the less dense space around the human body. A zone of (human) intensity is produced, as it were, by ‘laying it on thickly’. Folding thickens and intensifies space without creating a break between the zone of intensity and that space out of which it has emerged. Thus the old Euclidean distinction between entity and environment, between fullness and surrounding emptiness, becomes irrelevant. Indeed, Deleuze interprets Foucault as undertaking just such a blurring of subject and discourse in his work from Les Mots et les choses onwards (Foucault 101-30/Foucault 94-123). If entity and environment are thought of as sectors of a folded surface on a synchronic axis, one could likewise think of entities,

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events and processes as folded sectors on a diachronic plane. This theory space-as-fold thus gains a temporal aspect as it enables us to posit a genetic narrative of events of novelty as the crystallization of prior space through acts of folding. An event is therefore a folding-out, a coagulation of the temporal flow of becoming. A process can be seen as a zone of intensity in the midst of the temporal flow of becomingbeing. In turn, of course, we would then have to imagine time and space as folded facets of a single time-space continuum, bringing us very close, for instance, to contemporary physics. This, indeed, is what can be seen in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, which unfolds the loss of time to generate the recuperation of space and in turn regenerates time (Le temps retrouvé) in the midst of sensual, spatial experience. Kristeva’s late work can be conceived of as investing in a literary manifestation of the folded space-time continuum in a manner similar to that which Deleuze perceives in the late Foucault: “Longtemps Foucault avait pensée le dehors comme l’ultime spatialité plus profonde que le temps; ce sont les derniers ouvrages qui redonnent une possibilité de mettre le temps au dehors, et de penser le dehors comme temps, sous la condition du pli” (Foucault 115) [“For a long time Foucault thought of the outside as being an ultimate spatiality that was deeper than time; but in his late works he offers the possibility once more of putting time on the outside and thinking of the outside as being time, conditioned by the fold” (Foucault 108)]. Virginia Woolf conceives of the subject’s history as such a folding: Turning back among the many leaves which the past had folded in him, peering into the heart of that forest where light and shade so chequer each other that all shape is distorted, and one blunders, now with the sun in one’s eyes, now with a dark shadow, [James] sought an image to cool and detach and round off his feelings in concrete shape. (Woolf 2002: 200)

Woolf imagines the past as a laying down of fallen leaves in a forest, but also as the folding of the papers making up a book – a folded text which must be unfolded in the process of extracting discrete memories. Similarly, culture can be figured as a folding which can be unfolded so as to isolate discrete artefacts or texts. The German-Croatian author Marica Bodroži also employs the image of folds to describe the hidden ‘other’ lives which make up the

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fabric of the immigrant existence. She envisages the immigrant as having ein anderes Leben […] in dem es viele Vorhänge gab. Hinter dem ersten Vorhang, ein mögliches erstes Leben. Alles wartet darauf, fortgesetzt oder gelassen zu werden. In jeder Falte des Vorhangs, schien es Jelena, gab es einen Eingang in die Spirale des karussellartig sich drehenden Spiels; ein neuer Vorhang, ein neues Wort; ein alter Vorhang, ein altes Wort. (Bodroži 2005: 138) [another life […] in which there were many curtains. Behind the first curtain, a possible first life. Everything is waiting simply to be continued or abandoned. In each fold of the curtain, it seemed to Jelena, there was an entrance to the spiral of a carousel-like game; a new curtain, a new word; an old curtain, an old word.]

Bodroži’s metaphors of curtains appear to keep the immigrants’ lives in various countries or cultures separate from each other. This is indeed the customary way of thinking of polyculturalism or multiculturalism, among host nation and immigrants alike. Yet the folds in the curtains appear to contain entrances to old and new lives, old and new languages, which are part of the same fabric of a discrete curtain, thus blurring the hitherto clear distinctions. In this way, past and present lives, here and there, Germany and Croatia for Bodroži’s Dalmatian Gastarbeiter, can be read as folds of each other, in a way unsuspected by the defendants of discrete cultural identities? This is no mere philosophical finesse, but represents a fundamental alternative to a politics of multiculturalism based upon ongoing distinctions between host population and ethnic groups. A theory of interethnic folding better accounts for the ways in which cultures in contact reciprocally inflect and transform each other. To unfold and re-fold the Deleuzian theory of the fold as we have done here in a very sketchy manner clearly has major consequences for the way in which we understand ourselves, our environment, the grounds of our existence and our social and political practice. The notion of folding thus establishes a fluid interconnectivity, for instance, between the organ of intellection and the process of intellection. Thus Deleuze suggests that “on dira que la connaissance n’est pas moins pliée que ce qu’elle connaît” (Pli 65) [“it could be stated that knowledge is known only where it is folded” (The Fold 49)]. It is

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at this juncture that the politics of his folded epistemologies begins to become fully evident.

Plenitude The refusal of inside/outside divisions, of here/there distinctions (which are in turn the spatialized concomitants of the absence/presence opposition fundamental to capitalist society) is perfectly exemplified in the concept of the fold. The fold suggests that apparently clear differences as discrete domains of life are merely differentiations on one and the same undulating surface of fabric. The fold is an important spatial metaphor which allows Deleuze to conceptualize a notion of being and existence which admits of difference and sameness on a continuum, without installing a clear binary dichotomy between them. As always in Deleuze, this conceptual instrument is not merely an abstract, theoretical construct. On the contrary, the notion of the fold has important consequences for the manner in which we think about the connections between different domains of practice. It has the potential to inflect deeply our politically informed practices and the concrete choices we make in our lives. Deleuze and Guattari’s work consists of undermining all clear boundaries, of setting up a panorama of fluidities, which can be slowed down, coagulated, thickened, to form territorialities or events – but only ever temporarily. The temporal processes are no more clearly segmented than the spatial processes. They elaborate a notion of space which is mobile, which marks boundaries as more or less porous, as more or less opaque, without ever refusing the evidence of variations and difference. To this extent they can create a space which eschews the structuralist notion of difference. Structuralism posited a pre-existing undifferentiated space, unmarked and illegible, which is then made to signify through the imposition of marking. Binary oppositions are the principle signifying technique which structuralism identifies for marking unmarked space. Similarly, Luhmann’s systems theory posits an inaugural boundary-drawing, the assertion of a fundamental scission which allows meaning-making operations to proceed, “a difference that makes a difference” (in English in Luhmann 1984: 112, possibly alluding to Bateson [1972] 2000: 459). In the fictional terms con-

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structed by Rodney Hall, “First, there is a river. Without the river there would be no story”. In Hall’s recent novel The Last Love Story: A Fairytale of the Day After Tomorrow it is the river which furnishes the primordial line of demarcation dividing his post-apocalyptic City North and the City South in a recent novel (Hall 2004: 1). Yet the river also precedes its co-optation as semiotic (and thus political) border. It has its own flows which run perpendicular to the neo-Cold War scission of Hall’s futuristic dystopia, replicated in the inevitable links of love which transgress the divide. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari reject this fundamental binary of nature vs. culture, unmarked vs. marked. For them, there are always already preexisting spaces of flows, internally differentiated by virtue of their fluidity. These flows are then re-organized, “territorialized” and their fluidity reduced, so as to create spaces of enhanced, intensified meaning. This fungibility of boundaries is valid not only for the spaces Deleuze and Guattari describe, but also, necessarily, for the notions they employ in order to create such descriptions. Their categories ask us to place “toute chose dans des rapports de devenir, au lieu d’opérer des répartitions binaires entre ‘états’” (Mille plateaux 436) [“all things in relations of becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between ‘states’” (A Thousand Plateaus 352)]. For there is no clear distinction between “meute” et “masse”, mob and mass, between molar and molecular formations, between smooth and striated space, between despot and legislator (Mille plateaux 46-8/A Thousand Plateaus 33-4). Rather, these formations overlap, with one succeeding or contesting another, the one erupting within the other as when the nomadic warrior figure bursts into the state machinery, as in the disturbing figure of Shakespeare’s Richard II: “Ce qui complique tout, c’est que cette puissance extrinsèque de la machine de guerre tend, dans certaines circonstances, à se confondre elle-même avec l’une ou l’autres des têtes de l’appareil d’Etat” (Mille plateaux 438) [“What complicates everything is that this extrinsic power of the war machine tends, under certain circumstances, to become confused with one of the two heads of the State apparatus” (A Thousand Plateaus 354)]. This complication and confusion, is nothing other, on the plane of ideas, than the interconnections which make up life itself. The importance of Deleuze’s theory lies in the easily acknowledged fact that we suffer daily from the inability to make connections.

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Our sense of ourselves is based upon the notion that a self is a discrete entity. Such separateness, however, is plagued by inadequacy, lack. It may well be that this ubiquitous sense of lack is not merely a marginal phenomenon, something we have to put up with like an annoying tick or nervous twitch. More disturbingly, it may well be that it is directly produced by the aspiration to completeness itself. Perhaps the desire for wholeness and desire as a sense of lack go hand in hand. They may well be locked in a fatal embrace with each other, so that if we do not escape from their deathly union, we may be condemned to a life of dissatisfaction and yearning. And, perhaps worse still, capitulation to this sense of desiring dissatisfaction may signal our enslavement to the temporary compensations offered us by the short-term regimes of consumption. Such systems of consumption daily crowd in upon us from our computer and television screens and pluck relentlessly at our wallets and credit cards. By contrast, Deleuze’s theory suggests that we are in fact engulfed in plenitude. Conditioned as we are to seek discrete plenitude we are incapable of recognizing the fullness around us – a fullness which is there but simply does not appear within our field of vision. It is a fullness which consists not within the opposed terms having/not having or completeness/lack, but one which demands, for us to comprehend it, that we relocate our very frames of reference to the domain of ‘becoming’. By focussing upon becoming, we focus upon the sensual fabric of existence itself, a fabric which is characterized by an infinity of levels of filigrane-like differentiation – difference in time (devenir) and space (multiplicité). At no point, if we pursue the fabric of existence, do we encounter moments of lack – merely recurring instances of variety, differentiation, transformation, transmutation. Beyond the stranglehold of the binary plenitude-lack, expressed formally in the 0-1 of computer code, there may appear the flow of textures of lived existence itself, constantly different, constantly new, constantly surprising. Likewise, within the everyday defined by extremes of banality and dissatisfaction, we may discover other calibrations of existence which release us from such a binary straitjacket. What does this mean for space? Space is the fluid environment in which we make our homes. Indeed, it is the world from which we emerge as out-folded subjects, with which we never fully break, however much we may be party to the illusion of autonomy and separateness. We are embodied signs in zones of intensities within a spatial

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continuum. We share that continuum with all other becoming-beings. ‘Space’ is the word which, coined anew, can be used to name our common belonging within a constantly evolving field of infinite connected and related differences. ‘Space’ is also, however, the object of a ubiquitous cutting-up process which is imposed upon the shared continuum in which we are all neighbours so as to make us competitors for our little plot, paranoid possessors of what we are told we might always already have lost. Despite the all-pervasiveness of these spurious, ideologically driven claims about the dissection and rarity of space, however, we can remain attentive to its plenitude and presence. Space is not a ‘here’ in contrast to an ‘elsewhere’ (home and away), a ‘mine’ in contrast to ‘theirs’ (private space), but rather the constantly changing seascape of what is, of which we are only temporary marginal residues. Our sense of selfhood, suggests Deleuze, exemplifies “[l]e dedans comme opération du dehors […] un dedans qui serait seulement le pli du dehors, comme si le navire était un plissement du la mer” (Foucault 104) [“the inside as an operation of the outside […] an inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a folding of the sea” (Foucault 97)]. This space is not the pre-existing stage upon which human life is played out. Rather, space is what is produced by the flow of human and non-human life. This is not an academic distinction. On the contrary, it introduces a moral dimension into our everyday activities. It makes us responsible for the world, for the simple reason that we configure and create that world by the very act of living in it. The world creates us, as we create it, in relations of reciprocity. Here, we are far from a conception of living-in-the-world which assumes our triumphant control over nature. The notion of the worldas-pre-existing installs a separation between us and our environment, thereby eliding the reciprocity between us and it, and erasing a possible relationship of responsibility. Such clear demarcations between subject and object make this cavalier attitude to the world and others possible. As soon as space becomes a pre-existing stage upon which human actions are played out, the object of our subjective practice, it can also become the object of our desire-as-lack, of our acquisition. Objectified space becomes the pawn of struggles for territorial control, something which can be had in relationship to a sense of not-having.

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In erasing the subject-object distinction in favour of a subjectsubject concept, by virtue of which the human subject is produced by but also produces the environmental subject, we enable a different way of thinking our everyday actions. Clearly Deleuze and Guattari’s view of space does not deny the reality of spatial struggles, which have been occurring since time immemorial, and which continue to dominate our television screens on a daily basis. Rather, they question the understanding of the world which normalizes and institutionalizes lack so as to render natural the very epistemological basis upon which such spatial struggles are then founded. An understanding of space which was based not upon lack but upon internally differentiated plenitude would vitiate the starting point for many, if not all, spatial conflicts in the current world. Of course, it would not palliate the plight of refugees, homeless people, or slum dwellers. For that, other more pragmatic strategies remain necessary. But a concept of the plenitude of space would relativize claims for ethnic cleansing, terra nullius, settler rights, or Lebensraum. It would place such claims in a context of relations rather than of dichotomized lack and fullness, and would necessitate other forms of conflict resolution than the expulsion of indigenes or legislation for ‘mandatory detention’ of illegal immigrants. Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial theory is imaginative, figural, replete with parables about nomadism and baroque architecture. It is manifestly utopian. It is, to use its own terminology, unashamedly deterritorializing, going beyond the bounds of established notions and common-sense thought. It pursues lines of flight leading one knows not whither. In their own words, Deleuze and Guattari’s model of space is problématique, et non plus théorématique; les figures ne sont considérée qu’en function des affections qui leur arrivent, sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections. […] Il y a là toutes sortes de deformations, transformations, de passages à la limite, d’opérations où chaque figure désigne un ‘événement’ beaucoup plus qu’une essence.” (Mille plateaux 447-8) [problematic, rather than theorematic: figures are considered only from the viewpoint of the affections that befall them: sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections. […] This involves all sorts of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an ‘event’ much more than an essence. (A Thousand Plateaus 362)]

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It is a model of space that they describe in patently spatial terms – open, uneven, unfinished, evolving rather than given, only partly explored. The virtue of such a theory of space is that it demands we think against common sense, so as to make of our own thought-world a zone of intensity extruded from the territorialities around us. Of course that zone of intensity must continue to evolve, it must deterritorialize itself constantly if it is to maintain its integrity as a part of the becoming-world. Only then may we remain truly alive in the place where we are.

In Place of a Conclusion … “Only Connect …” The title page of E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End displays the telegraphic epigram “Only connect …” (Forster 1980: title page). As part of the framing apparatus of the literary text, the paratext or the parergon, in Genette’s and Derrida’s terms, the epigram oddly refers to the plot of the novel, its interior, but also, functions as an injunction to ourselves as readers, situated outside the novel. But to the extent that we activate that injunction in the act of reading, of inserting ourselves somehow into the fictive world of the narrative, we perform a ‘connective’ activity which bridges the gap between the two separated worlds upon whose distinction ‘connection’, paradoxically, is predicated. The very injunction “Only connect …” is strangely split within itself and it owes its functioning to that split, and only thus can go about the process of healing that rift. Perhaps the latent contradiction between “Only” (isolation, restriction) and “connect” (community, cohesion, accretion) already points, from the outset, to the larger contradiction which inhabits, but also mobilizes this injunction: Why enjoin us to connect, if connection is already achieved? The succession of dots which follow that command may be doing similar work. They mediate the white space of the title page which surrounds the epigram, stranded as it is between author and title above, publisher below, and the decorative cartouche frame which is to be found in some older editions. The succession of dots are halfway between the significance of letters and the blankness of paper.In their status of visual series (alternation between dot and space), they themselves embody the mediation between presence and absence which they may inaugurate. Their semantic function, that of “suspension”, both announces but refuses to fulfil the promise of something which comes after. They connect but do not give the thing to which connec-

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tion is established. They only connect. Their function is that of the hyphen, not of filling the place of that which is to be hyphenated. In its paradoxical, hyphenating status, indexed by its situation on the page, by its semantic content, and its typographical coda respectively, “Only connect …” offers a complex injunction which is both spatial and temporal in nature. It performs a latent analysis of the spatial mechanics of connection, the necessary interplay between difference and community in which both separation and togetherness are mutually constituting, prohibiting any banishment of either of the terms. By the same token, it performs an enactment of the temporal processes, by definition open-ended, demanding performative completion on the part of an agent-reader, which it initiates from its liminal but inaugural position. I opened this book with a meditation upon ‘spacing’ which reintroduced space into the temporal process of semiosis. In this concluding section I attempt to reconcile time with space so as to suggest the manner in which the spatial theories of the three thinkers addressed here inevitably flows into a political (that is, historical) practice of engaged contestation. ‘Spacing’, the textual act which I employed in the opening pages to bring to light the spaces underlying and pervading the creation and transmission of socially productive meanings, is placed back in the process of history by the three thinkers whose work is treated in this book. Symptomatically, Foucault’s friend and commentator Deleuze undertook such an operation in his late tribute to his deceased fellow philosopher. In that work, Deleuze commented on the plethora of interviews which Foucault gave in the course of his writing career, now documented in the massive four volume Dits et écrits: Si les entretiens de Foucault font pleinement partie de son œuvre, c’est parce qu’ils prolongent la problémisation historique de chacun de ses livres vers la construction du problème actuel, folie, châtiment ou sexualité (Foucault 122; Deleuze’s emphasis) [If Foucault’s interviews form an integral part of his work, it is because they extend the historical problematization of each of his books into the construction of the present problem, be it madness, punishment or sexuality (Foucault 115)].

The spatial issue in question is that of the uncertain status of occasional, informal, semi-oral texts such as interviews within a highly

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theoretical oeuvre such as Foucault’s. This spatial question then flows into the linearity of “extend” and from there into the temporality of a historical meditation linking past and present. This connection between the spaces of the textual oeuvre, the temporality of history and, for those who know of Foucault’s political engagement particularly in the area of prisoners’ rights, a contemporary political practice, is the pragmatic successor of a more abstract question which Deleuze addresses a few pages previously. In the preceding section, Deleuze retrospectively recasts Foucault’s erstwhile distinctions between episteme and statement at the period of L’Archéologie du savoir, or his distinctions between temporalities and spatialities in the polemical interviews. Deleuze aims to highlight, and then erase, the dualistic character of the binary time/space: Longtemps Foucault avait pensée le dehors comme l’ultime spatialité plus profonde que le temps; ce sont les derniers ouvrages qui redonnent une possibilité de mettre le temps au dehors, et de penser le dehors comme temps, sous la condition du pli. (Foucault 115) [For a long time Foucault thought of the outside as being an ultimate spatiality that was deeper than time; but in his late works he offers the possibility once more of putting time on the outside and thinking of the outside as being time, conditioned by the fold. (Foucault 108)]

Foucault had once thought of space as the radical other of temporality. Space was the alien factor that had been banished by theories of temporality; it was now reasserting its rightful place. According to Deleuze, Foucault, in his late work, would gradually undo this agonistic opposition. Instead, he came round to seeing time and space as folded aspects of one another. Thus the present would be the inside surface of a folded temporality of the experience of time, whose exterior surfaces would be the past and the future. The past that we relate to is only apparently out of our reach. In reality it is part of the fabric within which we are also situated, what Deleuze calls “la vie dans les plis” (Foucault 130) [“life within the folds” (Foucault 123)]. The interfolding of past, present and future in Deleuze’s version of the older Foucault is important for two reasons. First, it gives us a hint of the way in which we may approach the differences and commonalities of three thinkers of space as diverse as Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze. I suggest that the process begun by the preceding chapters, which expounds the elements of their respective theories of space

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while trying, at various junctures, to build bridges between those theories, may be extended in a final cursory comparison of their respective conceptions of space. Secondly, the interfolding of past, present and future in a spatialized continuum can offer a model for a political practice which combines both “scepticism in critique, optimism in action”, to cite Gramsci, that is, a critique of lack and a practice of plenitude.

Divergence Convergence In this book I conclude with Deleuze and Guattari, but in a sense their theory has been there from the beginning, underlying my critique of Kristeva and Foucault and overshadowing the progression away from dualisms which I have detected in their work. At this juncture it may be worth attempting to sum up some of the points where these three thinkers differ or converge in their distinct theories of space. Kristeva (in my experience) is, and Foucault and Deleuze were all exemplary teachers, gifted in their capacity to condense and synthesize knowledge in a pedagogical context. Therefore it is perhaps no betrayal of their work to attempt to draw together the distinct and divergent strands of their reflections upon space. This book undertakes an enquiry about a fundamental paradigm shift in French postwar philosophy. That paradigm shift is expressed in the replacement of the traditional interpretative question ‘What does it mean?’ by the generative question ‘How does it mean?’ For Foucault and Kristeva, like Deleuze, the response to this undertaking is spatial. ‘How is meaning produced?’ is by definition a novel question which provokes a new spatial mode of analysis. Both Kristeva and Foucault, in their determination to escape the single, linear determining vector (authorhood, origin, fixity of meaning) opt for a spatialization of the productive matrix of meaning: the chora, the episteme. Corresponding to both these productive bases are superstructural domains of that which is produced: the Symbolic in Kristeva, statements and the archive in Foucault. In the later development of their thought, these productive bases and their superstructural counterparts, all too redolent of the langue/ parole schism of structuralist linguistics, merge in an increasingly in-

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tegrated and immanent whole which takes place in the power-ridden complexities of everyday psychic life or historical and economic process. These immanent phenomena of psychic and social productivity under the sign of relations of power and the struggle for power produce an array of concepts such as abjection, melancholy, love, narrativity for Kristeva, and carcerality, sexuality, bio-power, and regimes of power-knowledge, for Foucault. These immanent notions of psychic life and power-knowledge are evinced by the myriad case studies with which Kristeva intersperses her analyses, and the extensive archival evidence Foucault employs to buttress his theses. In both cases, space is no longer the productive matrix in a two-tier system, but the very fabric of relations of immanent productivity. Space continues to exert its agency in the Kristevan structures of expulsion, internalization, transference and narrative intersubjectivity which create and maintain the contours of selfhood in relation with others. In Foucault, spaces of institutional architecture, of urban unrest, of populations and their teeming medical and sexual life, succeed those of the episteme and its ruptures. Space is no longer that which gives rise to society. Rather, in these later works, space is the very fabric of psycho-social life in all its complex productivity. At this juncture, Kristeva and Foucault’s immanent spaces of psycho-social existence and power-knowledge intersect with the immanent spaces of becoming-being and intensity-sign which are the hallmarks of Deleuze’s work. From the outset, Deleuze dispenses with any form of dualism in his theories of the generativity of life-asmeaning. In their two-tier base-superstructural phases, Kristeva and Foucault, although eschewing the singular vector of interpretation, none the less maintain what one might call a ‘vertical’ vector of Semiotic rupture within the Symbolic, and epistemic generativity emerging from the “depths” of language’s “exterior”. In Deleuze, by contrast, the generativity of life is always already understood as ‘horizontal’: flows of becoming-being coagulated into territorialities and then in turn into zones of intensity, signs in all their immediate tangibility and agency. Gregg Lambert comments that “in the philosophy of Deleuze […] the sense of ultimate orientation is no longer described in terms of verticality – a dimension of transcendence that Deleuze takes great pains to avoid – but rather in terms that are essentially horizontal, terrestrial” (Lambert 2002: 9). The bewildering range of Deleuze’s examples, taken from anthropology, biology, zoology, physics, aesthetic

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theory, are not mere illustrations. They express the ubiquity of generativity across the entire expanse of human and non-human life. In a sense, space has always been at work in these theories by default, to the extent that they employ as their linchpin the notion of difference as opposed to that of identity. Identity is based on the notion of the one, difference upon the notion of the two-or-more. Identity as a concept can be conceived of as singular, punctual and unitary, while difference is necessarily dispersed, fractured, dual (at the very least) and spatialized: “What can be seen as an ecological vision emerges of the interdependence and interaction of a multitude of existential territories; from this perspective, any elevation of a dominant territory seems absurd” (Goodchild 1996: 170). Space, then, is fundamental to any theory of difference. For Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze, all forms of identity emerge out of difference. For Kristeva, it is the heterogeneous space of the chora, and later, the turbulent spaces of abjection, or narrative negotiation, which produce subjectivity. For Foucault, it is the episteme, with its contingency, its periodic ruptures, its regimes of sayability/unsayability, and later the agonistic dynamics of powerknowledge which produce discourse and the subject. For Deleuze, genetic processes arise out of always already differentiated flows of becoming, emerging into temporary territorialities which will subside again, only to be replaced by new formations. The fluid discontinuities of becoming-being, their embedding in infinite series of differences, in both ascending scales of greatness and descending scale of minuteness, are the flip side of their plenitude. Space is thus paradigmatic in the exploration of the contingent, the heterogeneous, the aleatory and processual which make up the fabric of being. Kristeva and Foucault constantly expand their spatial brief, moving from the restricted spaces of the psychic and epistemological formation to the broader imbrications of both dimensions within social struggles. Their notions of rupture, located initially in moments of Semiotic eruption or of tectonic seism at points of epistemic breakage, both manifested in avant-garde literature and art, give way to less punctual movements of transformation. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari’s omnivorous, encyclopaedic writing had always encompassed a bewildering range of regimes of difference, of myriad multiplicities everywhere latent and productive of life itself.

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Kristeva, speaking through the alias of her fictional journalistcum-detective Stéphanie Delacour, puts her hope in something “qui garantit la vie de l’espèce. […] C’est aussi limpide que cela. Vrai ou faux? Là n’est pas la question. La question ne se pose pas, la vie continue, c’est la vie” (Possessions 274-5) [“that’s what ensures the continuing life of the race. […] It’s as simple as that. But is it true or false? That is not the question. There is no question. Life goes on. That’s life” (Possessions 208)]. There is perhaps an oblique reference here to the sorts of preoccupations which motivated Kristeva and Foucault in their earlier works: the manner in which the Thetic regime of logical, propositional meaning is disturbed by the recurrence of its elided matrix of production, the Semiotic; or the way in which regimes of truth, at a given period in history, make some statements utterable and others simply nonsensical. For both theorists, these concerns ceded to more all-enveloping issues of the conduct of psychic life in the narrative paucity of the contemporary world for Kristeva, and the ethics of human existence in the final Foucault. From the task of laying bare the conditions of possibility which allow meaning to be generated, both turn increasingly to what Judith Butler has called the problematic of the “liveability of life” under symbolic regimes (Butler 2002: 54-5). Whereas the crucial question was once the manner in which truth, no longer conceived of as something essential, intrinsic, or eternal, emerged as the contingent product of a process of production, the fundamental question has shifted. The question of the production of truth leads into the question of the production of meaning, and the production of meaning leads into the question of life and its continuation itself. Kristeva situates her recent enquiries in the realm of the sacred and of the feminine (see Le Féminin et le sacré). In her newest work, the nexus of social semiosis is at the intersection of biology and representation, that is, of material existence and the regimes of meaningmaking which allow that existence to be perpetuated. Existence is meaning, without meaning it would collapse (Au risqué de la pensée 58-9). This is the terrain upon which Deleuze and Guattari situate their enquiries from the outset: the immanent site of life as becoming. Becoming is driven by desire, which creates connections, and in turn, territorialities. Every territoriality is a sign whose intensity beckons to an other, drawing together the multiplicities whose communicationconnections are the stuff of life itself. Desire, semiosis, connectivity

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and space all converge at a place where the ethics and ethos of life and the critique of lack are one and the same.

The interfolding of critique and plenitude Deleuze’s proposal of the interfolded mediation of that which is completed, that which is still in process, and that which is to come via the inflection across spatiality opens it up as a multi-dimensional fluidity that is inflected by human political agency. The active political subject is embedded within this fabric of becoming-being, and has a responsibility to call up the genuine fluidity of existence so as to work for alternative social realities in the future. The interfolding of past, present and future is thus the central framework for the interfolding of an ethos of plenitude and a critique of lack – that is, of a theory of space. Deleuze and Guattari argue for an unruptured continuity within becoming-being and thus banish the notion of hypostatized difference, loss, and exile. They do not dispute that these concepts operate powerfully and effectively at the level of ideology. On the contrary, they see them as fundamentally dictating the terms upon which we lead our contemporary lives. For instance, they distinguish smooth and striated space but insist that these two manifestations of space are ineluctably entangled with one another in the domain of real spatial practices. Likewise, territorialization, de-territorialization and re-territorialization are imbricated with one another in a constant agonistic play of forces. This interdependence, which by no means erases dichotomies, is one which exists not between becoming and being, but between the reality of becoming and being, and the imposed ideology of loss. Out of this distinction arises their critique of a massively oedipalized societal order. They question the ultimate essence of the Oedipal break, suggesting that the Real is a continuity of heterogeneous plenitudes, and not a regime of inevitable loss to be stoically endured. Alain Badiou claims that because Deleuze’s philosophy is an ontology in the most traditional sense, positing as it does the unity of being, it remains ultimately conservative (Badiou 1997: 19-20, 31-33). Badiou goes as far as to suggest that “De ce point de vue, la philosophie de Deleuze n’est aucunément une philosophie critique” [“From this point of view,

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Deleuze’s philosophy is in no way a critical philosophy”] (Badiou 1997: 33). On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory, as a result of its dual emphasis upon the continuity of the real and an imposed ideology of lack, assigns us two major tasks. On the one hand, their theory enjoins us to embark actively upon a radical critique of the politics and economics of lack. On the other hand, it recommends an affirmative engagement with an everyday politics of plenitude. As Michael Hardt notes, “Affirmation, then, is not opposed to critique. On the contrary, it is based on a total, thoroughgoing critique that pushes the forces of negation to their limit. Affirmation is intimately tied to antagonism” (Hardt 1993: 115). The intimate connection between plenitude and critique also guides us to the location of political struggle. The interdependence of these two terms means that Deleuze’s theory never posits an “outside” of power, as Lyotard has intimated, where liberation might be attained (see Chambers 1991: xiii-xvi), but on the contrary, sees them as occupying the same variegated space. If we are to heed E. M. Forster’s injunction “Only connect …”, then we must regard these two tasks as the two faces, or surfaces, of a folded continuum – the public and the private faces (if we may employ, this tired and ultimately spurious distinction) of a single undulating fabric. Other manifestations of this heterogeneous continuum can also be imagined, for instance the continuum between the global division of labour, the domestic household division of labour (or its equitable distribution), right down to the textures of one’s own intimate relationships. Here, culture, science, economics and bodily life all make up the respective pleats and troughs of a single folded surface. To launch ourselves into an apparently Janus-faced enterprise such as this is only apparently a double-edged task. In reality the two or more facets of the Deleuzian project make up a single contestatory practice of plenitude. “So how does the story end?” asks one of the characters in Khyentse Norbu’s film The Cup (1999). “Why all this fuss about endings?” replies another character. Precisely. A conclusion may well appear out of place in a work such as this, which suggests that the material of bio-semiosis is not cut up, regulated, disciplined, extracted from its original context, in order to make meaning. There is no transformation of a prior unsignifying mass into social meaning. There is

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no break in the flow of semiotic raw material to produce social reality. Rather, extant flows of life are folded over, intensified, rendered denser. Social life is a coagulation, a gathering up, a welling up of flows of becoming-being. The question then, is not how to conclude, but how to continue ...

Bibliography Works by Deleuze, Foucault and Kristeva (in French) Deleuze, Gilles. 1974 [1964]. Proust et les signes. 3rd ed. Paris: PUF. . 1968. Différence et répétition. Paris: PUF. . 1988. Foucault. Paris: Minuit. . 1989. Le Pli. Paris: Minuit. . 1999. Critique et clinique. Paris: Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1972. Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’AntiŒdipe. Paris: Minuit. . 1975. Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Minuit. . 1980. Capitalisme et schizophrénie: Mille plateaux. Paris: Minuit. . 2005 [1991]. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. 1996. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion/Champs. Foucault, Michel. 1980 [1963]. Naissance de la clinique. Paris: PUF/Quadrige. . 1992 [1963]. Raymond Roussel. Paris: Gallimard/ folio essais. . 1966. Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard. . 1969. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. . 1986 [1971]. L’Ordre du discours: Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970. Paris: Gallimard. . 1972. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. New ed. Paris: Gallimard. . 1975. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. . 1976. Histoire de sexualité: 1: La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard. . 1997 [1984]. Histoire de la sexualité: 2: L’Usage des plaisirs. Paris: Galimard /Tel. . 1984. ‘Du pouvoir’, interview with Philippe Boncenne, L’Express, No. 1722: 568. . 1994. Dits et écrits 1954-1988 (eds Daniel Defert and François Ewald). 4 vols. Paris: Gallimard. . 1999. Religion and Culture (ed. Jeremy Carrette). New York : Routledge. . 2004. Naissance de la bio-politique: Cours au Collège de France (1978-1979). Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. . 2004. Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France (1977-78). Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. Joyau, Julia. 1969. Le Langage, cet inconnu: Une initiation à la linguistique. Paris: SGPP. [Republ. under the name of Julia Kristeva, as Le Langage, cet inconnu: Une initiation à la linguistique. Paris: Seuil/Points, 1981.] Kristeva, Julia. 1981 [1969]. Le Langage, cet inconnu: Une initiation à la linguistique. Paris: Seuil/Points. . 1969. 6KPLHLZWLNK: Recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Seuil. . 1970. Le Texte du roman: Approche sémiologique d’une structure discursive transformationelle. The Hague: Mouton.

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. 1972. ‘Quelques problèmes de sémiotique littéraire à propos d’un texte de Mallarmé: Un coup de dés’, in Greimas, A.J. (ed.), Essais de sémiotique poétique. Paris: Larousse: 208-34. . 1974. Des Chinoises. Paris: des femmes. . 1974. La Révolution du langage poétique: L'avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé. Paris: Seuil. . 1977. Polylogue. Paris: Seuil. . 1980. Pouvoirs d’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Seuil. . 1985 [1983]. Histoires d’amour. Paris: Folio/Gallimard. . 1983. ‘Mémoire’. L’Infini 30 (2): 39-54. . 1985. Au commencement était l’amour: Psychanalyse et foi. Paris: Hachette. . 1987. Soleil noir: Dépression et mélancholie. Paris: Gallimard. . 1988. Etrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Fayard. . 1992 [1990]. Les Samouraïs. Paris: Folio/Gallimard. . 1990. Lettre ouverte à Harlem Désir. Paris: Rivages. . 1991. Le vieil homme et les loups: Roman. Paris: Fayard. . 1993. Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme. Paris: Fayard. . 1994. Le Temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire. Paris: NRF/Gallimard. . 1995. L’Avenir d’une révolte. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. . 1996. Possessions: Roman. Paris: Fayard. . 1999 [1996]. Sens et non-sens de la révolte: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse I. Paris: Livre de poche essais. . 1997. La Révolte intime: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse II. Paris: Fayard. . 2001. Au risque de la pensée. Paris: Aube. . 2003. Le Génie feminin I: Hannah Arendt. Paris: Folio/Gallimard. Kristeva, Julia and Catherine Clément. 1998. Le Féminin et le sacré. Paris: Stock.

Works by Deleuze, Foucault and Kristeva (in English Translation) Deleuze, Gilles 2000 [1972]. Proust and Signs (transl. Richard Howard). London: Athlone. . 1988. Foucault (transl. Seán Hand). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. . 1992. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (transl. Tom Conley). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. . 1995. Difference and Repetition (trans. Paul Batton). New York: Columbia UP. Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. 2005 [1983]. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (transl. Robert Hurley et al.). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. . 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P. . 1994. What Is Philosophy? (transl. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell). New York: U of Columbia P. . 2003. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (transl. Brian Massumi). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. 1977. Dialogues (transl. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam). New York: Columbia UP. . 2002. Dialogues. (transl. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam). New York: Columbia U P.

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Index Deleuze Affect 243 Alveoli 210, 228-229, 232-233 Critique et clinique 225, 227 De-territorialization 29, 170, 183-204, 216, 218, 254 Dialogues 23, 182-183, 202 Différence et répétition/Difference and Repetition 16 Fluidity 28-30, 175, 177, 181, 184185, 188, 190, 192, 199, 219220, 223, 232-233, 235, 238239, 240-241, 252, 254 Fold 30, 170, 173-174, 210, 233-239, 241-242, 249-250, 254-56 Foucault 152-153, 161, 169, 221, 236-237, 242, 248-249 Kafka 216 L’Anti-

Œdipe/Anti-Oedipus 191, 193, 197, 201, 211-212, 215216, 234 Le Pli/The Fold 229-230, 232, 235, 238 Line of Flight 29, 203, 223

Mille plateaux/A Thousand Plateaus 24, 170-171, 174-175, 179182, 201, 203-204, 219-220, 222, 225, 232, 236, 240, 243 Plenitude 29-30, 46, 178, 188-189, 191, 200-201, 212, 214-215, 217-218, 220-221, 233-234, 241-243, 250, 252, 254-255 Proust et les signes/Proust and Signs 228, 230 Qu’est-ce que la philosophie/What Is Philosophy? 177 Re-territorialization 29, 170, 192-194, 196-199, 223, 234, 254 Sensuality 30, 183, 216, 219, 221 Smooth Space182, 234 Space, schizoid 54-55, 57-58, 177 Striated Space 234, 240, 254 Subjectivity 201, 214-218, 221-225, 227, 233, 236, 242, 292 Vector 29, 179-180, 185, 187, 202, 226-228, 235 Zones of Intensitiy 29, 209, 212, 218, 222, 251

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Foucault Discipline 130, 135, 138, 147, 154158 Discourse 27, 38, 44, 111-114, 116, 120-121, 124-125, 128, 130131, 133-135, 138-139, 144145, 147, 149-150, 152, 154, 156, 160, 164, 169, 172, 176, 193, 217, 219, 236, 252 Dispositif 27, 40-41, 120, 149-151, 154-155, 159-160, 163 Dits et écrits 1954-1988/The Essential Works of Foucault 19541984 151 Episteme 29, 129-132, 135-136, 138, 163, 172, 176, 204, 249-250, 252 Governmentality 158, 179, 191, 196, 218 Heterotopia 27, 137-138, 165 Histoire de la folie/History of Madness 120-121, 151-152 Histoire de la sexualité 2/The History of Sexuality Vol. 2 157, 159 Histoire de la sexualité 1/History of Sexuality Vol. 1 63, 217 L’Archéologie du savoir/The Archaology of Knowledge 22, 131, 144-145, 152-153, 169, 249 Les Mots et les choses/The Order of Things 130-132, 134-137,

L’Ordre du discours/‘The Discourse on Language’ 144-145 Madness 120, 151, 169, 248 Naissance de la bio-politique 154 Naissance de la clinique/The Birth of the Clinic 116, 133-134 Population 27, 78, 158, 238, 251 Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 18, 112, 124, 128129, 146, 149-150, 154, 160, 162 Raymond Roussel/Death Labyrinth 116

and the

Sécurité, Territoire, Population/Security, Territory, Population 158 Security 126, 158 Space, discursive 27-28, 47, 112-113, 121, 130, 136, 139, 143, 145146, 163-164 Space, Knowledge, Power: Foucault and Geography 148 Surveiller et punir/Discipline and Punish 129, 152, 154-156 Topography 154, 160

Kristeva Abjection 26, 65-70, 72, 75-78, 8283, 88, 251-252 Au commencement était l’amour/In the Beginning Was Love 64, 83 Au risque de la pensée 47, 64, 82, 253

Chora 25-26, 37, 42-49, 57-58, 60, 63, 65-68, 72, 74, 78-83, 86, 99, 101, 106-107, 114, 136, 147, 172, 176, 182-183, 204, 250, 252 Consciousness 19, 56, 59, 73, 124125, 156, 234, 236

Index Des Chinoises 49, 53 Disgust 68, 75, 88 Etrangers à nous-mêmes/Strangers to Ourselves 75-77, 81 Fluidity 26, 40, 47, 50, 65, 67-70, 83, 94- 94, 106, 175, 177, 184185, 192, 219, 223, 235, 240, 254 Hannah Arendt 33, 92 Histoires d’amour/Tales of Love 33, 57, 59, 82, 90

273 Le Texte du roman 33, 38, 64 Lettre ouverte à Harlem Désir 91 Le vieil homme et les loups/The Old Man and the Wolves 59, 8384, 90 Melancholy 65, 70-72, 88, 251 Plenitude 26, 51, 55, 57, 89, 91, 98101, 105-107 Polylogue/Desire in Language 56, 65, 84 Possessions 59, 82, 90, 100-102, 253 Pouvoirs d’horreur/Powers of Horror 65-67, 70, 90

Kehre 22, 63, 82, 107, 148 La Révolte intime/Intimate Revolt 63 La Révolution du langage poétique/ Revolution in Poetic Language 25, 38, 40, 42-44, 4649, 53-54, 58-60, 63, 66, 73, 88, 97, 118, 147, 214 L’Avenir d’une révolte 57, 59, 78-80, 85-86, 88, 90, 92-96, 106 Le Féminin et le sacré 253 Le Langage, cet inconnu 40-41, 82, 92, 99 Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme/New Maladies of the Soul 43, 90, 96 Les Samouraïs/The Samurai 59, 9092, 96-97, 107, 111 Le Temps sensible/Time & Sense 59, 97-99, 102-105

Revolt 26, 38, 63, 68, 74, 87-90, 9395, 107, 164, 223 Sens et non-sens de la révolte/The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt 66, 78, 87-88, 93-94 Sensuality 30, 56, 64-65, 97, 99, 103104, 176, 183, 216 Soleil noir/Black Sun 71, 73-74, 90 Space, maternal 25, 51-53, 56, 172 Subjectivity 20, 25-26, 33, 51, 66-67, 69-74, 78, 82-96, 105-106, 159, 164, 176, 201-202, 214225, 263, 251-252 6KPLHLZWLNK: Recherches pour une sémanalyse 33, 89, 96, 98

General Index Abraham, Nicolas 226 Agnew, John 162 Ainley, Alison 45 Anzieu, Didier 236 Ascherson, Neal 192 Attwood, Bain 193-194 Badiou, Alain 231, 236, 254-255 Bakhtin, Mikhail 98

Barrico, Alessandro 32, 119 Barthes, Roland 20, 93, 119, 127 Bateson, G. 239 Baudrillard, Jean 20-21 Beckett, Samuel 32, 143-144 Bellour, Raymond 120 Berry, Phillipa 21, 65 Bettelheim, Bruno 70 Blanchot, Maurice 111, 114 Bodroži, Marica 32, 237-238

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Body 38, 51, 57, 66, 68-69, 75-76, 79-80, 97, 99, 101, 103, 157, 159, 173, 191, 203, 210, 220, 222, 229, 231-232, 235-236 Boer, Inge E. 181 Bogue, Ronald 33 Bonnefoy, Yves 32, 203, 213 Border 26, 49, 65, 70, 74, 76, 78, 84, 87, 123, 138, 158, 165, 170, 174, 218, 226, 240 Borges, Jorge Luis 32, 137, 223-224 Bourdieu, Pierre 20, 147 Bryden, Mary 33 Buchanan, Ian 21, 33 Burgin, Victor 67, 69, 78 Butler, Judith 44, 48-49, 105-106, 253 Calvet, Louis-Jean 127 Chambers, Ross 255 Chase, Cynthia 45 Colebrook, Claire 181, 210-211, 221 Colombat, André 33 Convergence 202, 217, 250, 254 Crampton, Jeremy W. 148 Davis, Colin 93 Day, David 194 de Beauvoir, Simone 32, 65 de Certeau, Michel 50 DeLanda, Manuel 21 Derrida, Jacques 16-17, 20, 24, 33, 59, 120-121, 247 Divergence 73, 250 Dockès, Pierre 18 Donzelot, Jacques 217-218 Dosse, François 19 During, Simon 33, 105, 120 Elden, Stuart 21, 113, 148 Ellul, Jacques 135 Eribon, Didier 127 Flynn, Thomas 116 Forester, Viviane 218 Forster, E. M. 32, 247, 255 Frank, Joseph 32-33

Freud, Sigmund 22, 26, 42-43, 55, 60, 66, 69, 71, 86, 98-99, 204, 227 Frontier 67, 124, 162-163, 194-196 Genette, Gérard 18-19, 247 Geography 3, 19, 37, 112, 116, 129, 138, 147-148, 160-163, 171, 175 Gidal, Peter 69 Gide, André 32, 121-122 Gilbert, Kevin 32, 71-72 Glissant, Edouard 32, 118 Goodchild, Philip 252 Griffin, Michelle 128 Grosz, Elizabeth 39, 45, 60, 73 Habermas 148 Hall, Rodney 32, 240 Hardt, Michael 255 Harris, Paul A. 171 Harvey, David 20 Hebdige, Dick 19 Intertextuality 33, 130 Irigaray, Luce 20, 44, 59, 68, 72 Jameson, Fredric 19, 153 Jardine, Alice 42 Joyau, Julia 82 Kafka, Franz 32, 122-123, 216 Kern, Stephen 24 Klinenberg, Eric 190 Kuykendall, Eléanor 45 La Charité, Virginia A. 58 Lacan, Jacques 29, 56, 60, 70, 84-86, 89, 105-106, 130, 200-201, 214, 218-219 Lambert, Gregg 21, 33, 251 Laporte, Yann 180 Lawrence, Anthony 195 Lefebvre, Henri 19-21, 24 Lucretius 231 Luhmann, Niklas 239 Macey, David 127, 169 Malouf, David 194-195

Index Maresch, Rudolf 148 Marx, Karl 22, 114, 135, 153, 189 McHoul, Alec 161 Menninghaus, Winfried 68 Merquior, José Guillerme 94, 135 Miller, James 127 Mills, Sara 20, 129, 161 Morin, Edgar 94, 197 Muecke, Stephen 32 Nation 3, 29, 68-70, 74-82, 125-126, 160, 162, 175 198-199, 230, 238 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 124, 133, 135, 220 Nikolchina, Miglena 44 Nixon, Rob 193 Ondaatje, Michael 32, 74 Onfray, Michel 31 Perec, Georges 32, 119, 186-189 Philo, Chris 21, 112, 117 Pilkington, Doris 181, 195-196 Place 22-24, 30, 32, 43, 46, 53-54, 57, 72-73, 75, 78, 83-86, 89-90, 102-103, 123, 125, 131, 136138, 149, 154-55, 159, 161, 175, 179, 181, 197, 201, 203204, 210, 212, 214, 219, 223224, 226, 231, 243-244, 247249, 254 Poe, Edgar Allan 23-24 Power 20, 26-28, 38, 49-50, 55, 7274, 84, 108, 112-114, 120, 122, 124, 129, 136, 143, 145150, 152, 154-161, 163-165, 172, 177, 188, 198, 201, 215, 217-219, 221, 240, 251-252, 254-255 Povinelli, Elizabeth 193 Proust, Marcel 32, 59, 92, 97-98, 101103, 105, 219, 228, 237

275 Rabinow, Paul 114, 148 Racevskis, Karlis 105 Rajchman, John 24, 33 Rose, Jaqueline 69-70 Ruthven, Ken 128 Said, Edward W. 148 Sartre, Jean-Paul 32, 54-55 Schmid, Wilhelm 31 Sheridan, Alan 31 Smith, Anna 106 Soja, Edward W. 17-20 Stanton, Domna 45 Starr, Peter 63 Stone, Jennifer 69 Tectonics 27, 121, 128, 135-137, 252 Territory 29, 30, 46, 48, 56, 58, 67, 71, 146, 148, 158, 162, 169, 178-205, 211- 213, 220, 223, 234, 239-240, 242, 244, 251254 Theweleit, Klaus 69 Thrift, Nigel 165 Todorov, Tzvetan 32 Veyne, Paul 113 Wallace-Crabbe, Chris 31 Ward, Colin 54 Warner, Marina 32, 46, 185 West, Russell 68 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 23, 107, 178 Woolf, Virginia 32, 229, 237 Young, Robert 121, 161 Ziarek, Ewa 45 Žižek, Slavoj 200, 231-232, 234