One of the key claims of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is that the functioning of capitalism is premised on the expenditure of abundance rather than the allocation of resources under essential conditions of scarcity. This premise, of course, accompanies their more generalized critique of lack as a foundation of desire.

Anyone who pauses to reflect on the logic of non-academic discussions of political thought can discern just why this critique of scarcity is so important. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, if we falter on this point, "...all resignations are justified in advance" (AO, 74). Where the social comes to be understood as a response to scarcity, then politics becomes the means by which decisions are made as to how scarcity is distributed. While there might indeed be many different ways of distributing scarcity, what is ineradicable or impossible is inequity. In short, all inequity is justified in advance and a priori.

What we thus encounter here is the essence of ideology as understood by Meillassoux. As Meillassoux puts it in After Finitude,

If every variant of dogmatic metaphysics is characterized by the thesis that at least one entity is absolutely necessary (the thesis of real necessity), it becomes clear how metaphysics culminates in the thesis according to which every entity is absolutely necessary (the principle of sufficient reason)... ...[The] refusal of dogmatism furnishes the minimal condition for every critique of ideology, insofar as an ideology cannot be identified with just any variety of deceptive representation, but is rather any form of pseudo-rationality whose aim is to establish that what exists as a matter of fact exists necessarily. The critique of ideologies, which ultimately always consists in demonstrating that a social situation which is presented as inevitable is actually contingent, is essentially indissociable from the critique of metaphysics, the latter being understood as the illusory manufacturing of necessary entities. In this regard, we have no desire to call into question the contemporary desuetude of metaphysics. For the kind of dogmatism which claims that this God, this world, this history, and ultimately this actually existing political regime necessarily exists, and must be the way it is-- this kind of absolutism does indeed seem to pertain to an era of thinking to which it is neither possible nor desirable to return. (AF, 33 - 34)

Meillassoux is able to demonstrate an internal link between metaphysics and ideology, demonstrating the manner in which metaphysics functions as an apologetics for the necessity of whatever social system happens to exist. In developing this position, he moves in the radical direction of demonstrating the contingency of existence itself (regardless of whether any humans exist), and attempts to show the impossibility of any necessary being. If philosophy is to be measured by the originality and novelty of its arguments coupled with its conceptual creations, then Meillassoux certainly ranks highly. (In an unrelated vein, it seems to me that this also raises a number of questions about the Lacanian use of the matheme and the tendency among Lacanians to treat certain structures like the graphs of sexuation, the discourses, etc., as real in the Lacanian sense of "that which always returns to its place". Zizek, for example, seems to make a number of deductive claims about what is and is not possible, what is and is not fantasy, in his political thought. This is reflected in the enthusiastic way some have been taking up Schmitt, though with very different aims than Schmitt himself advocated).

At any rate, the manner in which the argument from scarcity works is clear within the framework of Meillassoux's understanding of ideology. On the one hand, we are told that since resources are intrinsically scarce, social organization must necessarily take the form of inequity and hierarchy. As the old saying goes, "there are the haves and the have nots, and so it is, so it has been, and so it will always be." As a result, questions of distribution and production, and the principles and decisions underlying distribution and production become invisible and naturalized. On the other hand, we are told that envisioning any other possibility either a) necessarily leads to the political terror of social systems such as those found under Mao or Stalin, or b) is just an immature fantasizing that fails to recognize the true nature of reality. In connection to point a, it is intriguing to note that we are told both that other alternatives are impossible and are implicitly forbidden from even contemplating alternative systems of production and distribution. There is something symptomatic in the way that something that is impossible is simultaneously prohibited. Here the elementary gesture of any critique of ideology would lie in 1) demonstrating the contingency of existing social relations, and 2) uncovering the site of possibility where another form of social relations is really possible and coming into existence. Negri and Hardt, for example, attempt to do this with their analysis of emerging multitudes, that evade the logic of sovereignity, representation, national boundaries, and traditional factory models of production. Whether they're successful is another question altogether.

If, however, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, social production is always based on abundance and surplus, if the question is how to expend surplus, then we come to see that the current mode of distribution is, in fact, contingent and that scarcity is manufactured through relations of anti-production. As Deleuze and Guattari put it,

We know very well where lack-- and its subjective correlative --come from. Lack (manque: lack/need in the psychological sense, want/privation/scarcity in the economic sense) is creat4ed, planned, and organized in and through social production. It is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of antiproduction; the latter falls back on the forces of production and appropriates them. It is never primary; and production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack. It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propogates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one's needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy. (AO, 28)

Here we encounter the ground necessitating the linkage between psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, and Marx. If Marxist thought requires supplementation by the theory of desire developed by Nietzsche and psychoanalysis, then this is because all too often Marx concedes too much to liberal economists and political theorists by developing his thought in terms of naturalized needs and scarcity. Although Marx occasionally speaks of the manufacture of needs (see, for example, the very first section of chapter 1 of Capital), he all too often privileges natural biological needs and the attendant scarcity of goods in the environment. In short, Marx fails to think through the logical implications of his own observations of the produced nature of desires. Likewise, although Freud glimpsed the productive nature of desire, he falls back into ideology by arguing for the necessity of the Oedipus, the family structure, and treating lack as a primordial ground that precedes desire rather than lack being a product of desire. Where, by contrast, desire becomes productive, it becomes possible to discern the possibility of alternative social relations to those premised on lack and scarcity.

My naive question is to what degree is it true that the world is characterized by abundance rather than lack. Clearly when we talk about intellectual resources it is idiotic to speak in terms of lack and scarcity. Computer programs, books, music, articles, etc., can all be reproduced without limit; especially now with modes of electronic transmission. Given that academics and scientists get little or no compensation for their intellectual work, yet continue to produce outstanding work, it also seems ridiculous to argue that somehow art or science would suffer were there not the lure of great financial rewards. Deleuze and Guattari are able to also show how the desire for types of clothing, transportation, entertainment, food, etc., is manufactured. But it is difficult to see how their analysis of desire and lack can be squared with the need for food as such, the need for clothing as such, the need for shelter as such, the need for good medical care, etc. Can these forms of scarcity be so easily exorcised from the foundation of the political? Is it that somehow semiotized desires that are produced or manufactured rebound back on basic biological needs, creating scarcity in these domains as well through the hoarding of resources by a select class of people? I don't know.

In response to my recent diary on the public, Shahar of Perverse Egalitarianism writes:

the “pedagogic” comments are all too irritating, but then again, the hazard of the public is of course, nothing less than the perverse egalitarianism of the internet.

Recently, in an argument or line of reasoning that makes me suspicious or somewhat uncomfortable, I've been thinking that democracy is the one "true" form of the political. This line of reasoning arises in response to Socrates' question in the Euthyphro where it is asked "is piety pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious?" Under the first option, we get the logic of sovereignity, where the sovereign is the first term (whether that sovereign be the gods, God, the emperor, the priest, or the leader) such that the sovereign makes the good what it is. That is, under this first option there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of the good, but rather it is the will of the sovereign that makes the good what it is. Thus, for example, it is impossible to claim that the actions of Caligula or Nero are wrong in themselves, for Caligula and Nero, as sovereigns, are those who decree and create the law. By contrast, under the second option-- moral realism --there are transcendent standards by which sovereignity itself can be evaluated. If the actions of the Greek gods or the Christian God can be said to be wrong, if it is possible to claim that the caesar is a bad emperor, then this is because there is some standard that transcends the gods, God, and the caesar. All of this is bound up intimately with previous diaries I have written on Lacan's graphs of sexuation and, in particular, the masculine side of the graph of sexuation.

Setting aside the possibility of moral realism (which is a position I reject due to it's commitment to transcendence), what might lead to the conclusion that democracy-- which I do not believe has ever existed or been realized despite certain configurations that call themselves democracy --is the one true form of politics? If democracy is the one true form of politics, then this is because it is that form of the political where relations of power and the social are least obfuscated or disguised. Here my inspiration is Feuerbachian. Feuerbach famously argued that God is nothing but alienated man. That is, we project our highest aspirations and desires onto another being, but then experience these qualities not as existing in and from us, but in something else. God is thus an alienated and distorted image of our own essence or nature.

Something similar seems to occur in the case of political systems. Let us take the example of a monarchial system. In a monarchial system I experience power as residing elsewhere in the figure of the monarch. The monarch possesses some enigmatic feature that grants the monarch a power that other subjects do not possess. However, just as the protagonist of Kafka's Before the Law is the secret of the law, the source of the law's power, so too can the monarch only be a monarch if his subjects recognize him as a monarch. In short, the source of the monarch's power is the monarch's subjects, yet the monarch's subjects do not recognize themselves as the ones who give the monarch his power, but instead, like Feuerbach's religious subjects, see the power of the monarch as a mysterious and enigmatic property that is "in the monarch more than himself".

In light of this line of reasoning, democracy would be the "true" form of politics insofar as it is that form of politics where the social relations underlying power are no longer obfuscated, but are now encountered directly and immanently. Under democracy social subjects encounter themselves as both the source of power and the principle of their own constraint. Or to put the point a bit differently, every form of politics is democratic since every social organization only sustains itself through the consent of the demos, but only democracy reveals this truth in and for itself. In this connection, rather than claiming that democracy is the "true" politics, it could instead be said that democracy is the real of the political, or the truth of the political. The question would then become that of what would be required for democracy to be genuinely realized. Negri and Hardt have a great deal of interesting things to say, for example, about the problems of representation with regard to radical democracy in Multitudes. At any rate, perhaps others could explain to me why I'm suspicious of this argument or why I should be suspicious of this argument.

This line of reasoning arose out of anxiety in relation to the most recent article I wrote on Deleuze and individuation, where I was asked to discuss politics and individuation. What I discovered as I worked through a good deal of Deleuze, and those influenced by Deleuze, is that while there is a great deal that is of interest and significance to political theorists in Deleuze, there is not, I think (and I could be mistaken), a determinate or worked out conception of the political in the work of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari. Much of their work, I would say, is in fact sociological, describing the dynamics of the social, without being political. And if this is the case-- Paul Patton's treatment of Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche in Deleuze and the Political aside --then this is because we are left without any sort of decision procedure for choosing multiplicities, immanence, nomadic singularities, etc., over molarities and transcendence. Note, in saying this I am not suggesting that a Deleuzian politics is not possible, only that I am unable to find it directly in Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari's work. Towards the end of Anti-Oedipus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari directly say that they have no political program. However, it is clear that there isn't a single page of their collaborative work-- and much of Deleuze's own work --that isn't political in nature.

At any rate, what does any of this have to do with Shahar's off-hand, yet on-target comment about egalitarianism and the internet? Well, I think Shaher's comment speaks to questions about the possibility of concretely realizing democracy. In many respects I think it could be said that academia is a sort of reaction formation or defense against democracy. Is it a mistake that Plato forms the academy following the murder of Socrates? Socrates, as it were, reveals a sort of real or impossibility or real at the heart of dialogue, or the manner in which it is always beset by the antagonism of the imaginary. The academy defends against this through the production of regulated encounters in the form of journals, discourse in the form of books, organized conferences with like minded or like conditioned (Bourdieu) individuals, credentializing institutions, the hierchialization between student and professor, and controlled encounters. The academy thus becomes a way of avoiding the repetition of Socrates' fate. Everyone is happy. The social world need not put up with the irritation of having a gadfly like Socrates on the street corner, and the philosopher can continue on with his or her discussions.

Yet with internet the controlled nature of these encounters is undermined and we are faced, once again, with the question of the uncontrolled, an-archic encounter sans the protections of an academic habitus, ranking, credentialing, or the reassuring and pacifying mediating difference of discussion through articles and books as opposed to sloppy, real-time encounters, etc., by being confronted with a space where everyone can participate (that is, everyone that is who enjoys a rank within the system of capitalism that would allow them internet access... not a small thing). Yet the internet is not simply an an-archic space where one is unable to anticipate his or her interlocutors, where a shared academic habitus cannot be assumed. It is also a space in which one can no longer hide behind polished and delayed work that would allow for the presentation of oneself in the form of a simulacrum of completeness and mastery. Incidentally, the nature of the net as a democratic space would also be why the question of whether to moderate comments is an ethical and political question. The only real democratic solution here would be one of community moderation. This aside, the manner in which all of the nasty elements of the imaginary are released within the space of the an-archic, non-representational encounter raises the question of the possibility of the democratic, as this imaginary dimension seems to internally destroy the democratic, and calls for a renewed thinking of communicative action that would be very different from the idealized picture presented to us by Habermas. Where I'm going with this, I don't know.

dear the atheist,
“i am so like totally lost” ;D in regards to all of this.
i am confused about how to go about all of these things.
i hope this works.
before i forget mr/s the atheist you sound like a very nice person.

okay here blows.

why is it that at&theist insist upon arguing science vs. philosophy?
definition of at&theist: “reach out and touch someone” an old at&t campaign ad ;D
at&theist force science against God in order to reinforce their own refusal to believe that YES GOD IS !
a good scientific argument would be :
intelligent design
or
global warming
a good philosophical argument would be:
reincarnation

at&theists continue to argue matter vs. faith to put it another way.

when you call someone you Believe someones out there.
when you pray you Believe God is out there.

i have read many entries on different lines or blogs and/or whatever. almost everyone out there to a [wo]man ;) sounds very intelligent some with their own sites, books pending,etc. mind you i’m not a mental midget, but once more almost to a [wo]man on both sides people seem to enjoy hearing themselves talk. you want 15 minutes of fame go shoot your post[wo]man :D personally i am a minimalist. there is too much over thinking on here. too many references to books [yawn].
as for myself i believe in kiss [not the band ;) keep it short &simple stupid. to do anything but that is once more enjoying the sound of your fingers on the keys.

so once more:

why do at&theists continue to argue science vs. philosophy?

best wishes & God bless you,
doug

When we look at an object or at another person we necessarily apprehend them in space. There they stand before us, alongside other things, in three-dimensional space. This phenomenological presentation of persons and objects thus gives the impression that those things are in space together, that they are side by side in space, but also, under the order of temporality, that they are simultaneous. Before my apprehending gaze I encounter the entities there, together, as being "at the same time". Perhaps this would be one of the basic premises of structural approaches to social formations, for the structuralist tells us to approach the social formation in its synchrony, as a set of interdependent relations that are simultaneous with one another.

Perhaps the problem with this view is that social formations are accompanied by archives, whether in the form of texts or in stories, such that they do not follow a trajectory of simultaneity, but rather are punctuated, like staves of a musical score, at a variety of different temporal levels, interacting in highly complex ways. Here it is worthwhile to recall Freud's famous description of the topology of the mind in Civilization and Its Discontents. There Freud writes,

...[L]et us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past-- an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beaitufl statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand-- without the Palazzo having to be removed --the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero's vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we would find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other.

Where in space one thing can only occupy one place at a single time, mind, claims Freud, is such that all these different periods or strata co-exist together exactly as they were, continuing their processes just as they did in the past. Thus, in the present, I can simultaneously be frustrated with my boss for perfectly legitimately work related and administrative reasons, while also reliving a childhood drama with my father for which he is an effigy, stand-in, or surrogate. It is not that one meaning of the strata is the true meaning of the other meaning (the past version being the truth or the real meaning of the first version), but rather that these two temporalities are tangled together, intertwined, unfolding together simultaneously in this present.

The case would be the same with social formations. Rather than a space of simultaneously structure that overdetermines all social relations, perhaps instead we have different levels of temporality, different temporal rhythms, that form a temporalized structure playing itself out at different levels. This point can be illustrated with reference to the current democratic primary elections in the United States. As has often been noted, older and middle aged women have disproportionately broken for Clinton, while younger women seem to be breaking for Obama. It is not unusual to hear these older women complain, claiming that these younger women are betraying sisterhood and the feminist cause. Indeed, it is not at all unusual for younger women to abjure or reject the title "feminist" (much to my dismay) altogether.

Could it be that the explanation of this difference has to do with different rhythms of intertwined temporality governed by very different problematic spaces? On the one hand, the feminism of the older women seems to revolve around gender inequality, victimhood, and a pressing desire to break or undermine certain boundaries. Yet on the other hand, when we look at popular culture, we see a very different image of the feminine that speaks to an entirely different set of issues. Battlestar Gallactica depicts women as commanders and fighter pilots that bunk with the men, compete with them vigorously in sports, and who seem to recognize no marked difference between masculine and female characteristics. Quentin Tarantino's recent films (Kill Bill and Death Proof, as well as Rodriguez's Planet Terror) depict women as entirely capable of handling themselves, or depict women who shift from positions of dependence on men (Planet Terror) to leadership and confidence. We have had an entire slew of female super-heroes such as Electra and Lara Croft.

A recent series of Cadillac commercials depicts Kate Walsh (Grey's Anatomy) sardonically repeating a variation of Julie Andrew's list of her favorite things from The Sound of Music. On the one hand, Julie Andrews' character in The Sound of Music is an iconic image of woman as caregiver, while on the other hand, Walsh's character on Grey's Anatomy is an intelligent, attractive woman in command of her own career and who does not draw her identity primarily from caring for children or men. The slogan of the commercial asks "when you turn your car on, does it turn you on?" When she arrives at a stop light she looks over and sees a couple of men driving a sports car. A satisfied smile crosses her face, she hits the gas, and she leaves them in the dust. She competes directly with men, rather than being a victim of men or subordinate to men.

Perhaps, within this universe of symbols and meanings, something like the presidential race is no longer conceived as a gender issue or as a gender struggle. Yet nonetheless, these different problematic fields or spaces, these different temporalities, co-exist together in the present and weave themselves in a variety of ways, forming something like a temporalized structure or a structure composed of different time-space vectors ("space-time worms"). Paradoxically, they are both present and past, preventing us from arguing that they are strictly synchronous. An adequate social theory would have to think these complex forms of temporality, their structures of meaning production, and their tangled interrelations.

Increasingly I am coming to feel that Continental social and political theory-- especially in its French inflection coming out of the Althusserian, Foucaultian, Lacanian, and structuralist schools --woefully simplifies the social and therefore is led to ask the wrong sorts of questions where questions of political change is concerned. The problem here is that these theories are often so abstract, in the Hegelian sense, that they end up with overly simplistic schema that then make any change seem like it is either an all or nothing proposition, or in the worst cases impossible and hopeless altogether. This point can be made clearly with reference to Althusser's famous essay "Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus". In reading Althusser's essay, we get the impression that the individual, the social subject, is completely formed by the ideological state apparatus to such a degree that his thoughts, beliefs, bodily attitudes, and so on are simply iterations of that social structure. As Althusser writes,

Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar as they are endowed with an ideal or spiritual existence), to the precise extent that it has emerged that their existence is inscribed in the actions of practices governed by rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus. It therefore appears that the subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following system (set out in the order of its real determination): ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, describing material practices governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief.

Although their theoretical positions are very different, similar observations could be made about Foucault's conceptions of power and subjectivization, Bourdieu's conceptions of power and habitus, and even Lacan's conception of the agency of the signifier (during his middle period, at any rate). It is clear that if we accept this thesis, issues of social and political change become extremely problematic and we immediately find ourselves in a nearly impossible situation. On the one hand, if change takes place, it takes place through agents. On the other hand, agents themselves, according to Althusser, are simply products or iterations of social formations or the ISA's. As a result, any change that a group of agents attempts to produce is itself already predelineated by the social structure such that it is no real change at all. The consequence of this conception of how agents are individuated and social formations is that we have to engage in all sorts of theoretical contortions to explain how change might be possible. No doubt it is for this reason that the Lacanian conception of the subject as a sort of void or lack in the symbolic chain has become so attractive, or that thinkers like Badiou have had to imagine an event, a rupture, to explain how any sort of change takes place.

Read on!

At the heart of what I will call the "Althusserian model", is the old Aristotlean conception of individuation based on the distinction between form and matter. While Althusser's social structures are historical in the sense that they come to be and pass away and are thus unlike Aristotle's forms which are eternal and unchanging, social structure is nonetheless conceived as forms imposed on passive matters, giving these passive matters their particular form or structure. The passive matters in question, of course, are human individuals. I am formed by social structures tout court and without remainder. In response to this conception-- and I realize that I am unfairly simplifying matters --we should ask if this is an accurate conception of either agency or the social. Does not Althusser and other structuralist inspired Marxists severely simplify both social dynamics and the social itself? When Badiou speaks of the "state of the situation" "counting-multiplicities as one", has he not severely simplified how the social is in fact organized, creating the illusion that there's a monolithic structure at work in social formations? Do not Lacanians and Zizekians severely simplify the social by reading all social phenomena through the lens of the symbolic and formations of sovereignity (Lacan's masculine sexuation)? Perhaps, in these simplifications, we create the very problems we're trying to solve and end up tilting against monsters of our own creation.

Given that questions of change are today the central question of Continental social and political philosophy, I am stunned that most social and political thinkers have not paid more attention to evolutionary theory. Indeed, it is not unusual to find Lacanians disparagingly rejecting evolutionary theory, claiming to be "creationist", and denouncing evolutionary theory for being teleological and premised on harmonious relations with the world, thereby revealing their tremendous and shocking ignorance of what evolutionary thought actually argues (Alexandre Leupin and more recently A. Kiarina come to mind). No doubt this hostility, in part, is probably motivated by a superior and arrogant hostility (phobia?) many Continental philosophers have towards all things pertaining to the natural sciences (there seems to be a similar and unwarranted rejection of neurology and cognitive psychology, closing ourselves off to vast bodies of findings, coupled with a deep hostility towards hard sciences like physics). Often this hostility is motivated by well-founded political concerns (in the case of neurology and cognitive psychology worries over the medicalization of mental disorders), and perhaps the influence of Heidegger's famous meditations on technology. On the other hand, it is likely that there is a well founded suspicion of biology and evolutionary science due to inflated claims coming out of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and, of course, theses surrounding natural selection (with the way in which Social Darwinism odiously picked up and distorted Darwin's thought).

I certainly have no wish to "biologize" social and political thought or adopt a socio-biological standpoint. Nor am I making a case for applying the principles of natural selection to social formations. Rather, what interests me about evolutionary theory is that it provides a robust and well developed theory of change which might provide fertile analogies for thinking social formations. Moreover, evolutionary theory might also provide far more nuanced ways of thinking about social formations, allowing us to side-step crude oppositions between agents and social structures premised on an implicit opposition between form and matter. In his brilliant (and lengthy) Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Stephen J. Gould provides a sorting of the different levels at which natural selection takes place that I believe provides useful analogies for thinking the nature of the social. There Gould remarks that,

Selectionist mechanics, in the most abstract and general formulation, work by interaction of individuals and environments (broadly construed to include all biotic and abiotic elements), such that some individuals secure differential reproductive success as a consequence of higher fitness conferred by some of their distinctive features, leading to differential plurifaction of individuals with these features (relative to other individuals with contrasting features), thus gradually transforming the population in adaptive ways. But the logic of this statement implies that organisms cannot be the only biological entities that manifest the requisite properties of Darwinian individuality-- properties that include both vernacular criteria (definite birth and death points, sufficient stability during a lifetime, to distinguish true entities from unboundable segments of continua), and more
specifically Darwinian criteria (production of daughters, and inheritance of parental traits by daughters). In particular, by these criteria species must be construed not only as classes (as traditionally conceived), but also as distinct historical entities acting as good Darwinian individuals-- and therefore potentially subject to selection. In fact, a full genealogical hierarchy of inclusion-- with rising levels of genes, cell lineages, organisms, demes, species and clades --features clearly definable Darwinian individuals, subject to processes of selection, at each level, thus validating (in logic and theory, but not necessarily in potency of actual practice in nature) an extension and reformulation of Darwin's exclusively organismal theory into a fully hierarchical theory of selection."
(Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 71-72).

Now what I find interesting in this passage is Gould's postulation of different levels at which natural selection occurs, each with their own immanent organization. According to Gould, the various processes by which evolutionary change take place occur not only at the level of the individual organism-- many variants of evolutionary theory are "organism-centric" in the sense that they take organisms as the basic units of selection --but rather selection processes take place at a variety of levels, including genes, cells, organisms, demes (local populations of organisms of one species), species, and clades (taxonomic groups sharing a common ancestor). Gould proposes to treat all of these levels as individuals, with a history, functioning as a constellation.

To draw the parallel to Althusser and similarly minded theorists-- emphasizing once again that I am not seeking to apply natural selection to social formations, but to think the organization and levels of social formations --where the Althusserian form/matter social model postulates two thing (social structure and individuals), where one thing, the social formation, hierarchically imposes form on another (individuals), Gould's model envisions a number of different levels in which distinct processes take place. As Gould goes on to say, "...[A]djacent levels my interact in the full range of conceivable ways-- in synergy, orthogonally, or in opposition" (73). That is, among the different levels processes taking place can reinforce one another, they can be independent of one another, or they can be in conflict or opposition with one another. Were such a nuanced and multi-leveled conception of the biological carried over into social theory, we would no longer engage in endless hand-wringing as to whether or not agency is possible, nor would we need to postulate theoretical monsters like the Lacanian subject or subjects of truth-procedures. If such moves would no longer be necessary, then this is because we would no longer postulate hierarchical and hegemonic relations among the various strata or levels of social formations. Instead, we would engage in an analysis of these various levels and strata, examining the relations of feedback (positive and negative) that function within them, their relations of synergy, orthogonality, and antagonism, and the various potentials that inhabit these relations. Here we would need to look at the variety of different social formations from individuals, to small associations like groups (the blog collective for instance), to larger groupings and institutions, to global interrelations, treating none of these as hegemonizing all the others, but instead discerning their varying temporalities, organizations, inter-relations, points of antagonism, and so on. This, I think, is far closer to Marx's own vision-- or at least the spirit of his analyses in texts like Grundrisse and Capital. Neo-Marxism, it seems, has abjured any empiricism, instead adopting theoretical a prioris that ignore situations. The entire constellation of questions and problems would change, and we would no longer employ abstract reifications like "structure" or "capitalism" ("structure does x", "structure is x", "capitalism does x", "capitalism is x"), instead approaching structure as dynamic and ever changing structure like an ecosystem, and capitalism as a heterogeneous multiplicity with a variety of different levels, often at odds with itself, spinning off in a variety of different directions, calling for nuanced and local analyses and strategies. That, to me, is a breath of fresh air with respect to a number of debates that strike me as, I hate to say, academic.

When we asked you, the readers, what you were happiest about having back now that the TeeVee Writer's Strike was over you answered:

16% (1 vote) were happiest about having Jon Stewart back in their lives
16% (1 vote) were overjoyed at the possibility of watching Jack Bower explode something
16% (1 vote) just wanted to watch Grey's Anatomy, which I assume is an educational program for Med Students
50% (3 votes) said that they didn't care about Television, or the state of anyone's strikebeard because they claimed they read books.

All you people you claimed to read books, you should be ashamed of yourselves. I don't need to know what kind of sick habits you have, but if you have to cover them up by claiming that you read books, then honestly I don't want to know.

Perverts.

Even in its best moments, philosophy perpetually abstracts the philosopher from the world the philosopher describes. The philosopher surveys the whole as a view from nowhere, as an impassive and independent look, without itself being implicated in that upon which it gazes. When discussing contradiction or antagonisms, for instance, these antagonisms are set side by side and investigated by the philosophical subject, as if the philosophical subject were a neutral onlooker that is itself outside or independent of these antagonisms. Yet if, as Deleuze argues in the 16th chapter of The Logic of Sense, "...the individual is inseparable from a world" (109), determined by a distribution of pre-individual singularities, how could such a gaze fail to be a point of view. However, here I must take care in how I express myself, for as Deleuze remarks in The Fold, "To the degree that it [a site or point of inflection] represents variation or inflection, it can be called point of view. Such is the basis of perspectivism, which does not mean a dependence in respect to a pregiven or defined subject; to the contrary, a subject will be what comes to the point of view or rather what remains in the point of view" (19). Just as Einstein observed with the constancy of light, it is not subjects that individuate points of view, but rather points of view that individuate subjects.

There are brief moments where philosophy approaches a form, a writing, that would be equal to this content. Perhaps Nietzsche's use of the aphorism as a method expresses such a form. As Deleuze argues in Nietzsche & Philosophy,

Understood formally, an aphorism is present as a fragment; it is the form of a pluralist thought; in its content it claims to articulate and formulate a sense. The sense of a being, an action, a thing-- these are the objects of the aphorism... Only the aphorism is capable of articulating sense, the aphorism is interpretation and the art of interpreting. In the way the poem is evaluation and the art of evaluating, it articulates values. But because values and sense are such complex notions, the poem itself must be evaluated, and the aphorism interpreted. (31)

We look in vain for a unifying philosophy behind the aphorisms; but if this is the case then it is because the aphorisms are mandibles that grasp, articulate, or render a fragment of a world. The aphorisms are heterogeneous universes of value or interpretations. Or better yet, they are ways of being in a world that no longer exists as an irreducible unity within which a plurality of agents exist. It is in this sense that the aphorisms form a properly pluralistic thought, where we no longer have a world as such, but rather fragments or competing points of view in which agents are individuated and where a clamor of voices, filled with antagonisms, fill our ears... Our ears which are also among and within these fragments. Perhaps we also find a similar writing in Blanchot's Writing of Disaster, or Adorno's Minima Moralia and Prisms. These are moments in the history of philosophy where form strives to be adequate to the content, and the form of the sovereign subject is itself shattered, such that it can only enter into the work as one voice among others.

Describing the literature of Roger Vailland, Lefebvre writes,

In this book [325,000 francs], as in Vailland's earlier novels, the author appears as such. He says: "I". He intervenes as a witness, designating the characters and situating them, entering into dialogue with them, inviting the reader to decide what attitude to adopt towards them: what judgment to make. Here judgment is inseparable from event; it is rigorously included in the story. This authorial presence has various meanings, and not simply on the level of technique. It is Roger Vailland's way-- and a very simple way it is --of resolving a difficult literary problem, that of novelistic consciousness or of consciousness in the novel. Who is speaking? Who is seeing, who saw the actions in the story? Who bridges the gap between the lived in the true. How has the speaker seen or heard about the things he narrates? How has he been able to foretell or sense what will happen next? Who has detected the character' motives (hidden even to themselves)? And as he is drawn on by the great movement called 'reading', with whom does the reader identify, in whose consciousness does he participate? (Critique of Everyday Life, Volume I, 26)

In Vailland's literature the author is no longer a sovereign onlooker outside the events narrated, but is there amongst the events as a point of view. Nor are we confronted simply with a first person point of view or a stream of consciousness, but rather a heterogeneity of points of view. In this way, the reader is implicated or participates in the novel as yet another point of view in a manner similar to how Brecht strives to implicate the audience in the spectacle. Antagonisms are thereby able to reveal themselves as antagonisms, blind spots as blind spots as blind spots, points of hesitation and indecision as points of indecision. The author is no longer transcendent to the novel, but immanent to the novel, and the reader is no longer a voyeur... Or rather, perhaps the reader becomes aware precisely of his voyeurism by being implicated in the events.

Would it be possible to write philosophically in a way adequate to this form? Would it be possible to write philosophically in a way that no longer posits a meta-theory in this way? Plato sometimes seems to be a joker of this sort.

Throughout its history, philosophy seems particularly prone to three interrelated errors-- or perhaps they would be better referred to as "transcendental illusions"? --that it shares with doxa or common sense and that plague thought.

First, in approaching the explanation of phenomena in the world, philosophy perpetually has recourse to the primacy of the Concept, the Form, or Essence, to the detriment of the individual or actually existing entity. Perhaps the most famous example of this primacy is to found in the opening sections of Hegel's Phenomenology, entitled "Sense-Certainty". There Hegel begins with the epistemological thesis that all knowledge originates in the immediacy of sense-certainty or the sensible given. Taking this thesis at its word, Hegel goes on to show how our attempt to say the sensible immediate or given always fails insofar as language is only composed of general terms that are unable to grasp the individual given presented within the sensible field. I say that the individual given is this given, here, at this time, yet these same terms can apply indifferently to any number of other objects, such that I am only apply to express the universal, never the individual. The outcome of this contradiction or deadlock within sense-certainty is that Spirit comes to recognize that the individual given was never the object of knowledge, that it is always-already mediated by the universal, and that these universals are the true object of knowledge.

A similar moment occurs in Plato's Phaedo. Seeking to defend his thesis that knowledge is recollection and therefore hoping to demonstrate that the soul existed prior to birth, Plato evokes our knowledge of the Form of the Equal or the Identical to show that this knowledge could not have been derived from experience.

Now see if this is true, he went on. Do we not believe in the existence of equality-- not the equality of pieces of wood or of stones, but something beyond that-- equality in the abstract? Shall we say that there is such a thing, or not?

Yes indeed, said Simmias, most emphatically we will.

And do we know what this abstract equality is?

Certainly, he replied.

Where did we get the knowledge of it? Was it not from seeing the equal pieces of wood, and stones, and the like, which we were speaking of just now? Did we not form from them the idea of abstract equality, which is different from them? Or do you think that it is not different? Consider the question in this way. Do not equal pieces of wood and stones appear to us sometimes equal and sometimes unequal, though in fact they remain the same all the time?

Certainly they do.

But did absolute equals ever seem to you to be unequal, or abstract equality to be inequality?

No, never, Socrates.

Then equal things, he said are not the same as abstract equality? No, certainly not, Socrates.

...

Then we must have had knowledge of equality before we first saw equal things, and perceived that they all strive to be like equality, and all come short of it. (74a - 75a)

If, according to Plato, we must have knowledge of absolute equality prior to knowledge of equal things, then this is because all equal things differ from one another in certain respects. Between two equal pieces of wood, there will always be differences in grain, slight differences in shape, etc. If we approach the issue phenomenologically, attending to the noetic pole of our experience, we will notice that as we move about the pieces of wood observing them, their shape and size undergo variations as a function of perspective, now such that one appears longer than the other, now where one stick of wood disappears behind the other, now with a constantly shifting play of colors like a harliquin's cloak. In the phenomenological fly of experience, the "erlebnis" of perception, the sticks of wood are encountered as constantly differing not only from each other and constantly differing from themselves.

To see this, it is necessary to think the perceived object as unfolding in time like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. Yet if the erlebnis perpetually varies in this way both from the object to which it is compared and in itself, it follows, according to Socrates, that Equality cannot be learned from experience. Rather, I must already have the concept of Equality to recognize things as equal, for the things of the world perpetually differ. Already, in larval form, we encounter the beginnings of transcendental philosophy in this passage. Later, in the Second Meditation, Descartes will repeat precisely this argument with respect to the famous wax, pointing out that the identity of the wax as a substance is something that cannot be drawn from experience or sensation, but requires an act of intellection so as to grasp the identity of the substance beneath its changes.

The outcome of this move is clear. On the one hand, difference is effectively banished from the world and reinscribed in the concept itself. On the one hand, the differences that compose the world themselves contribute nothing to being. The differences between the pieces of wood and in the piece of wood itself are literally no-thing-- or nothing for the philosopher, at any rate --but are filtered out in relating to the wood. All that matters is what is invariant. As a result of this move, we get the strange bestiary of philosophical ontology that is led to posit a priori essences, Forms, universals, categories, etc. Why? Because these things cannot be found in the world or experience itself. As Nietzsche will point out later, the world becomes denigrated to mere appearances. Difference is precisely that which philosophy all too often seeks to eradicate. Perhaps it could even be said that the philosophical will par excellence consists in the desire to either eradicate or tame difference in the name of the Same and Identical.

On the other hand, as a result of this decision in favor of Form over the individual in time, being itself now becomes Moral. Having subordinated the individual entity to the Form, all beings now come to be measured in terms of their proximity to the invariance of the Form. In a variety of places Aristotle will speak of monsters and the monstrous. When is it that something appears as a monster? Something is monstrous when it deviates from its proper Form. The platypus is a monster because it the junction of opposed forms. The giant and the dwarf are monsters because they respectively represent and excess and deficiency in the ideal Form of Man. Individual entities are only measured in terms of whether they con-form to the differences inscribed in the self-identical form, such that any differences in the individual outside this form are monstrous.

In short, the differences contributed by the individual entity are only relevant in terms of how proximally they con-form to the differences prescribed by the Form. Anything else will be folly, deviation, and no-thing from the standpoint of onto-morality. This premise will pervade all branches of philosophy, whether we are speaking of "laws of nature", where violations of these principles are routinely overlooked, or whether we're talking about moral philosophy where the universality of moral principles demands that everything pertaining to the individual be abolished (Kant's Categorical Imperative, Mill's Greatest Happiness Principle). It is not until Kierkegaard, with his passion for the absurd or all that lies outside of the Universal, that the singular and difference will again assert itself-- But only in the form of the monstrous (Abraham). Nor is it until Darwin and Complexity Theory that difference will again be awarded its rights. Judging by the practices of our Anglo-American colleagues and their ways of posing questions, these rumblings have not yet been heard by many philosophers. The question with regard to this first error would be that of how it might be possible to accord difference its right, how it might be possible to escape onto-morality or the extrinsic measure of beings, so that being might become self-measuring, self-positing, self-differentiating.

The second great error of philosophy lies in naturalization. A human body explodes and turns into ice if it is released into space. A human body implodes if it descends too deeply into the ocean.

The lesson to learn from these simple and facile observations is that bodies are always framed. Yet all too often the philosophers approach the world as if it were without frames. Practices that result from a history and a genesis are treated as natural and innate. Ways of feeling, ways of experiencing, ways of seeing, are seen as perfectly ordinary and universal. Certain types of enunciations are seen as universal and without any dependence on a context or position of enunciation. The philosopher all too often takes it for granted that the object of knowledge consists of the measurable spatio-temporal properties of objects, overlooking that this way of encountering objects, this aesthetic or givenness to sensibility, itself emerged at a particular point in history, in a particular part of the world. What were the mutations that had to take place for the world to become visible in these terms? Following Bourdieu, what social institutions have to be in place and functioning, for academics to view themselves and their role in the way that they do? Along these lines, in an astonishing chart, Bourdieu will correlate the political stances of academics towards May of 68 with the positions of prestige they occupy with respect to the French university system. The jaw dropping result is that those at the most prestigious institutions also had the most reactionary politics, suggesting that one's position of enunciation within a social system is determinative of ones politics, not principled intellectual positions (which are, no doubt, retroactively projected onto these positions as rationalizations). Deleuze, in Nietzsche & Philosophy, will argue that all enunciations, even when syntactically and semantically identical, are inhabited by a distribution of forces that determines their sense such that one and the same identical expression can have entirely different senses.

Yet all too often these dimensions of situatedness and genesis are completely occluded in philosophy, naturalizing ways of seeing, forms of practice, affects, and norms of evaluation as natural properties of "human nature". Rawls, for instance, will propose his "veil of ignorance" as a way of determining justice. Here we are asked by Rawls to imagine ourselves behind a veil of ignorance: we are to imagine that we do not know our gender, or ethnicity, our health, our economic status, our social position, and so on. Under such circumstances, what sorts of institutions would we want in society? The assumption is that the answers to these questions will be universal premised on a ubiquitous human nature that is shared by all and all alike. Yet who is it that thinks of themselves in such unmarked terms? Who is the subject that erases all of these differences? It is precisely that subject that already has power, that moves fluidly through the world, that is free of those marks pertaining to ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, etc. Formulations such as those we find in Rawls end up becoming an apologetics for the reigning order by virtue of how they cover over or clothe antagonism, rendering it invisible, and thereby preventing it from speaking. While the philosophers might engage in "transcendental analysis" after the fashion of Kant or Husserl, reflecting on the a priori structures of the transcendental ego, they cover over the historical and social factors that underly their position of enunciation, ignoring, after the fashion of Aristotle, the manner in which this very position of enunciation is dependent on the system of slavery so that the philosopher Aristotle might posit the aims and goals of his moral philosophy as if they were "natural".

Closely related to this second error is a third error: abstraction. Abstraction, it seems, is the constant enemy of thought and perpetually haunts engagement with the world in its everydayness. Abstraction is not the mathematical notation of category theory that is difficult for the ordinary person to understand. Rather, abstraction lies in that mode of comportment towards the world that approaches the objects comported towards in isolation from their horizon or background. Thus, drawing on Hegel's example, we hear tell of a man who robbed a store and, if we think abstractly, we judge the man as an intrinsically immoral man without attending to the horizon under which this action was committed. That is, we treat the action and the man as discrete entities and events hanging in a vacuum without investigating the context or milieu in which this action took place. Or again, noting the decline in school performance among students in the United States, we judge that students must have become stupid or teachers must be incompetent, without raising questions as to how the developmental milieu in which the development of cognition takes place in children might have changed in the last twenty years. Or perhaps we are zoo keepers and we receive a new polar bear that soon dies in its cage. We investigate the dead body of the polar bear, cutting it open, looking at its cells under the microscope, thoroughly baffled as to why it died, all the while forgetting that polar bears exist in a particular milieu or field that was absent in the zoo's cage.

Essentialism, naturalization, and abstraction form the three figures of Identity and onto-morality, each grounding itself in a specific form of spatio-temporal relations that occlude difference. Each is a figure of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. The question is that of what it would mean to depart from these figures, to articulate an ontology that moves not from the abstract to the individual, losing the individual in the process, but from the individual to the abstract.

On the other hand, I've found myself haunted by this passage from Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

If it happen, from a defect of the organ, that a man is not susceptible of any species of sensation, we always find that he is as little susceptible of the correspondent ideas. A blind man can form no notion of colours; a deaf man of sounds. Restore either of them that sense in which he is deficient; by opening this new inlet for his sensations, you also open an inlet for the ideas; and he finds no difficulty in conceiving these objects. The case is the same, if the object, proper for exciting any sensation, has never been applied to the organ. A Laplander or Negro has no notion of the relish of wine. And though there are few or no instances of a like deficiency in the mind, where a person has never felt or is wholly incapable of a sentiment or passion that belongs to his species; yet we find the same observation to take place in a less degree. A man of mild manners can form no idea of inveterate revenge or cruelty; nor can a selfish heart easily conceive the heights of friendship and generosity. It is readily allowed, that other beings may possess many senses of which we can have no conception; because the ideas of them have never been introduced to us in the only manner by which an idea can have access to the mind, to wit, by the actual feeling and sensation.

What I find particularly troubling in this passage is Hume's reference to the man of mild manners and the man with a selfish heart. Hume's thesis, of course, is that all ideas arise from experience. As a consequence of this thesis, the limits of our imagination are defined by the limits of our experience. Should the man with a selfish heart witness an act of genuine generosity or friendship, it would not, according to Hume, even register as such an act, for the associative web characterizing the thought of this man would immediately interpret the other man's act according to his own universe where selfish motives are treated as axiomatic. As Lacan liked to say, "all communication is miscommunication". Here we have Hume's own version of this Lacanian thesis. Where thought is always situated or attached to a field of experience and where ideas are related by principles of association, it follows that no two people will exist in the same universe. Each event that occurs in the field of experience-- hearing another's words, for instance --will evoke different associations and relations, such that the relation between two people is a sort of babble or chaos rather than a communication. There are, of course, all sorts of problematic assumptions here about the nature of communication-- namely the assumption that to communicate is to send a signal that is the same for both the sender and receiver --yet it is worthwhile to state the issue in the starkest terms possible.

While not endorsing Hume's position, I do think that he is able to explain a good deal about about human formations of thought and interactions with one another with his sparse epistemology. Do we not daily see the results of this phenomenon in the way we judge others, detaching their words and actions from the context in which they occur, speaking of issues as if there were some abstract reason or common sense against which their actions could be measured, and transforming actions into acts based on abstract motives that we can then judge? This phenomenon is especially attenuated in the blogosphere, where the field in which we encounter the other person is restricted largely to words and images, sans their daily life, their work, their obligations, their passionate engagements, and so on. Divorced from all context-- and no writer could ever be equal to writing context --words and phrases instead dangle for whomever might come along, actualizing all sorts of associations in readers without necessarily having anything to do with the context that first led the author to generate them as a series of 0's and 1's that appear on ones monitor.

The consequences that follow from Hume's simple and straightforward observation are rather bleak. If he is right we are collectively doomed to a comedy of errors. Yet where the literary comedy of errors usually ends with the rise of the prince or love fulfilled, our comedy of errors seems to be one that ends only in cruelty, conflict, and war. This cruelty is all the worse in that it is seldom even aware of itself for the same reason that the mild mannered man cannot even recognize the intense passions of others. Like Derrida's analysis of the gift in Given Time, where the condition for the possibility of the gift paradoxically consists in a complete unawareness of giving a gift coupled with no unconscious surplus-value drawn from the gift, this would be a situation in which we would be completely unaware of others by virtue of perpetually being trapped in our own networks of associations when relating to others. However, where Derrida shows how this is a condition of the gift-- a sort of regulative ideal, as Kant would say --this would be a circumstance fulfilled each and every day in our relations to others. If we like, we can engage in a lot of hand-waving about the formation of shared horizons of meaning, the production of shared contexts, etc., but the situation would still be essentially the same. The question, then, is whether this is the circumstance in which we find ourselves, or whether there is no some minimal transcendence that allows us in certain circumstances-- not all --to surmount the limits of our embeddedness in context to encounter some minimal otherness of the other. In encountering others, do we only ever see our own reflection in the mirror?

In order to determine the effects of this rejection, they had the students do word games on a computer, filling in the missing letters of words that would appear on screen. Thus, for example, a word such as "m r" or "s b" would appear on the screen and the student would be asked to fill in the first letters that came to mind. Not surprisingly, those students who had been rejected were more likely to turn the words into violent words like "murder" or "stab", rather than say "slab". As an additional level of this experiment, groups of two students would then do sound testing together, where they had the ability to raise the volume of their partner's earphones to painful levels. Again, not surprisingly, those students who had been told they were rejected by everyone often raised the volume to the highest possible levels. The conclusion of the experiment, of course, is the rather obvious point that rejection generates violent and murderous thoughts that actively seek to negate the supposed "rejecters".

What I find interesting in this experiment is not the light it sheds on spree killers, but on certain rhetorical encounters. Those familiar with Lacan will readily recognize the conflictual nature of the dimension of the Imaginary at work in this experiment, where two people enter into a struggle for recognition that can spiral out of control. Of course, Lacan's imaginary is more sophisticated than what the experiment assumes, as the Lacanian would point out that in order for rejection to produce this sort of effect there must be a prior identification with the rejecter. That is, I must already recognize myself as either being like the person rejecting me or as desiring the recognition of the person rejecting me for these results to ensue. I do not, for instance, find myself upset if I'm rejected by members of the Ku Klux Klan or members of the Hal Bop cult. It is only those I already identify with who instill these violent impulses in me. Perhaps this is what Freud had in mind when referring to the "narcissism of minor differences" in Civilization and its Discontents, where the two groups are very much alike (Simpsons fans will think of the rivalry between Shelbyville and Springfield), yet find some minor difference to fight over that seems blown out of all proportions.

When I am rejected by those with whom I consciously or unconsciously identify at some level, my ego or specular identity is itself cut to the core, as like an onion I have constructed this identity or ego from out of my identification, thereby rendering it dependent on those who reflect me, such that my very being is endangered when it is rejected. I seek to strike back to destroy the gaze from which I see myself as myself, thereby hoping to re-establish or re-ground my identity. However, as Lacan points out, this dialectic is doomed to failure for if I am successful in destroying the other through whom I reflect myself I am not longer reflected and thereby cease to exist as well. It is a catch-22. In being rejected I cease to exist. In destroying my rejector, I cease to exist. Yet, I am dependent on my other in order to exist. (Here I am making a highly condensed allusion to Lacan's dialectic of the forced choice between being and thinking in his account of alienation and separation. This, of course, would only refer to the alienation portion of that dialectic).

It seems that we encounter these rhetorical situations primarily in discussions about politics, academic debates about theoretical positions, interpretations, ownership of master-theoreticians, etc., and religion. In these cases, both groups involved seem to experience themselves as being marginalized and rejected, and then strike out to destroy their opponents. It is at this point that we get the cascade of rhetorical effects, where the opponent's being is severely simplified and they are reduced to a malignant, evil other without any other possible merit, where ad hominems come into play, and where we strike out to completely obliterate the person we're engaged in debate with. For the most part, I do not think the abusive rhetorical fallacies result from a conscious desire to willfully deceive, but rather they are almost like computer programs that are activated when certain conditions in the imaginary are ripe. Just as a strong gravitational field around a massive celestial object like the sun will produce an aberration in [Newtonian] bodies for closely orbiting planets (the famous shift in the planet Mercury), so too will these distortions of thought ineluctably emerge under certain ripe conditions in the imaginary. Similarly, a number of the other psychological fallacies will emerge when dealing with issues around which our libido, our desire, is tightly bound, leading us to either ignore certain things, turn other things into strawmen, be overly optimistic, etc.

I do not know what, if anything, can be done about this. It seems to me that there is a bit of an antinomy at work here at the place of sites of contestation. Politics, religion, and theory are all sites of struggle and conflict. They require taking positions and rejecting other positions. Yet by the same token, they are sites of dialogue. For me, the question is how these two things can be thought together in such a way as to minimize the antagonism that so commonly emerges around them. I suppose there's a parallax here. I do not at all have the answers, though I continuously find this phenomenon frustrating, mystifying, and exceedingly painful.

The 'state formalism' which bureaucracy is, is the 'state as formalism'; and it is as a formalism of this kind that Hegel has described as bureaucracy. Since this 'state formalism' constitutes itself as an actual power and itself becomes its own material content, it goes without saying that the 'bureaucracy' is a web of practical illusions, or the 'illusion of the state.' The bureaucratic spirit is a jesuitical, theological spirit through and through. The bureaucrats are the jesuits and theologians of the state...

Since by its very nature the bureaucracy is the 'state as formalism', it is this also as regards its purpose. The actual purpose of the state therefore appears to bureaucracy as an objective hostile to the state. The spirit of the bureaucracy is the 'formal state spirit.' The bureaucracy therefore turns the 'formal state spirit' or the actual spiritlessness of the state into a categorical imperative. The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state. Because the bureaucracy turns its "formal" objectives into its content, it comes into conflict everywhere with 'real' objectives. It is therefore obliged to pass off the form for the content and the content for the form... The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived.

The bureaucracy is the imaginary state alongside the real state-- the spiritualism of the state. Each thing has therefore a double meaning, a real and bureaucratic meaning, just as knowledge (and also the will) is both real and bureaucratic... The bureaucracy has the state, the spiritual essence of society, in its possession, as its private property. The general spirit of the bureaucracy is the secret, the mystery, preserved within itself by the hierarchy and against the outside world by being a closed corporation. Avowed political spirit, as also political-mindedness, therefore appear to the bureaucracy as treason against its mystery. Hence, authority is the basis of its knowledge, and the deification of authority is its conviction. Within the bureaucracy itself, however, spiritualism becomes crass materialism, the materialism of passive obedience, of faith in authority, of the mechanism of fixed and formalistic behaviour, and of fixed principles, views, and traditions.

Kafka can be read as a cartogropher of these jesuitical or theological illusions. A couple more passages:

The fact is that the state issues from the multitude in their existence as members of families and as members of civil society. Speculative philosophy [Hegel's system] expresses this fact as the idea's deed, not as the idea of the multitude, but as the deed of a subjective idea different from the fact itself

Marx argues that the State is constituted from the multitudes, not the multitude from the State. Here there are strong resonances with Deleuze's theory of individuation and Badiou's ontology of multiplicities. Deleuze's theory of individuation pertains to the process by which individuals are individuated or produced, not what allows us to distinguish one substantial individual from another. Like Badiou, identity, for Deleuze, is always a product come second, an effect, a product, a result. Identities must be constituted. Similarly, for Badiou, the Same is only ever constituted through the operation of the count-as-one. As such, these two accounts of entity provide fertile ground for an ontology of historical materialism, as historical materialism rejects any idealistic thesis of ahistorical essences-- viz., an essential human nature, for instance --underlying being. We also encounter one of the major problems with Luhmann's social systems theory here. Insofar as Luhmann places individuals outside social systems, he reproduces the optical illusion whereby the State is an entity in its own right over and above those that constitute the state. More on this in a moment. Marx makes a similar point regarding individuation a moment later in his Contribution, when he writes:

If Hegel had set out from real subjects as the bases of the state he would not have found it necessary to transform the state in a mystical fashion into a subject. "In truth, however," says Hegel, "subjectivity exists only as subject, personality only as person." This too is a piece of mystification. Subjectivity is a characteristic of the subject, personality a characteristic of the person. Instead of conceiving them as predicates of their subjects, Hegel gives the predicates an independent existence and subsequently transforms them in a mystical fashion into their subjects.

In short, Hegel fails to attend to the manner in which individuals are individuated or produced; or as Marx will much later put it in the Preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness... Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

The network of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption will each produce its own specific social organizations and forms of subjectivity. For instance, production is not just the production of goods, but also requires the production of subjectivities. For instance, there is a qualitative difference between a Greek or Roman slave, a Serf, and an Industrial Laborer, such that all these forms of subjectivity must be produced or individuated. To discern this it will be necessary to analyze the network within which these forms of embodiment and affect emerge. In Grundrisse, Marx will go so far as to say that production is immediately consumption and consumption is immediately production. In this connection, he is speaking of the manner in which the body and tools are consumed in producing. However, he also alludes to how forms of art must produce their audience so that they might be "consumed". Here, already, Marx anticipates Baudrillard's critique in For a Critique of the Political Economy of Signs.

Returning to Contributions to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx goes on to remark that,

Democracy is the truth of monarchy; monarchy is not the truth of democracy. Monarchy is necessarily democracy inconsistent with itself; the monarchial element is not an inconsistency in the democracy. Monarchy cannot be understood in its own terms; democracy can. In democracy none of the elements attains a significance other than what is proper to it. Each is in actual fact only an element of the whole demos [people]. In monarchy one part determines the character of the whole. The entire constitution has to adapt itself to this fixed point. Democracy is the genus Constitution. Monarchy is one species, and a poor one at that. Democracy is content and form. Monarchy is supposed to be only a form, but it falsifies the content.

In monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its particular modes of being, the political constitution. In democracy the constitution itself appears only as one determination, that is, the self-determination of the people. In monarchy we have the people of the constitution; in democracy the constitution of the people. Democracy is the solved riddle of all constitutions. Here, not merely implicitly and in essence but existing in reality, the constitution is constantly brought back to its actual basis, the actual human being, the actual people, and established as the peoples own work. The constitution appreas as what it is, a free product of man.

In this passage Marx plays brilliantly on the two senses of the signifier "constitution". On the one hand, constitution, of course, refers to a political document. Yet on the other hand, "constitution" is a verb signifying "to constitute", "make", or "produce". In constitution we make, set up, or establish a structure. Marx is here drawing on Feuerbach's critique of religion and applying it to Hegel's political philosophy. If democracy is the "truth" of monarchy, then this is because that which is veiled in monarchy becomes clear in democracy. Monarchy is premised on an optical illusion in which the monarch rules by virtue of power that flows directly from his being. However, the monarch only has power as a monarch insofar as he is recognized as a monarch. It is the multitudes-- in this case multitudes that have been counted or individuated as subjects --that recognize the monarch as a monarch. Yet these subjects experience themselves as subjected and do not recognize that the power of the monarch issues from them. By contrast, in democracy, this optical effect disappears and the multitudes constitute themselves through themselves or their own action.

I realize all of these thoughts are very scattered and disjointed, but I thought I would throw them up here anyway. It seems to me that Marx's remarks here are an important reminder of the aims of any sort of revolutionary practice. Increasingly, in works of political theory and about the blogosphere, we have heard heroic flirtations with strong State forms as necessary for political intervention. This comes especially from the Zizek camp. We have also heard dismissals of certain forms of politics surrounding feminisms, queer movements, various minority movements, etc., as if the principles of historical materialism have been entirely forgotten, i.e., that while we should engage in ruthless critique we must nonetheless ask why these political forms are emerging in precisely these circumstances and what truly revolutionary potentials they might contain. The Marx of Contributions to a Critique of Hegel, of course, is the humanist Marx, well preceding the Marx of Grundrisse and Capital. Nonetheless, it seems to me that this conception of multitudes, of the demos, remains. The question is how it might be thought. I would cautiously suggest that we have never seen democracy.

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari write,

...[P]hilosophers have very little time for discussion. Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say, 'Let's discuss this.' Discussions are fine for roundtable talks, but philosophy throws its numbered dice on another table. The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as 'communicative rationality,' or as 'universal democratic conversation.' Nothing is less exact, and when philosophers criticize each other it is on the basis of problems and on a plane that is different from theirs and that melt down the old concepts in the way a cannon can be melted down to make new weapons. It never takes place on the same plane. To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy. All of these debaters and communicators are inspired by ressentiment (Deleuze's emphasis). They speak only of themselves when they set empty generalizations against one another. Philosophy has a horror of discussions. (28-29)

Deleuze and Guattari must have been thinking of exchanges like this one with the lawyer Daniel, when writing the passage above. It is too much to even refer to such events as exchanges because nothing is exchanged. Those who participate appear to be talking to one another and to be talking about the same things, but are in fact talking about entirely different things. If this is the case, then it is because meaning is not in words, but is always the result of the relations a word shares with those other signifiers that are not present.

Read on

Lacan makes this point nicely with regard to citation. Speaking in the context of truth as always being half-said, Lacan asks,

What does a citation consist in? In the course of a text where you are making more or less good progress, if you happen to be in the right places, of the class struggle, all of a sudden you will cite Marx, and you will add, 'Marx said.' If you are an analyst you will cite Freud and you will add, 'Freud said.' This is fundamental.

An enigma is an utterance-- you do what you can abut the statment. A citation is like this. I make a statement, and for the remainder, there is the solid support you will find in the author's name for which I hand responsibility back to you. This is how it is, and it has nothing to do with the more or less shaky status of the author's function.

When one cites Marx or Freud-- I haven't chosen these names by chance --one does so as a function of the part the supposed reader takes in a discourse. The citation is in its own way also a half-said. It is a statement about which someone is indicating to you that it is admissible only insofar as you already participate in a certain structured discourse at the level of the fundamental structures that are there on the blackboard. This is the one point-- could I have explained it before now?-- That makes it the case that the citation, the fact that one cites an author or not, can have second-order importance...

Suppose that a second moment someone cites a sentence indicating where it comes from-- the author's name, Mr. Ricoeur, for instance. Suppose someone cites the same sentence, and that they put it in my name (my emphasis). This can definitely not have the same sense in the two cases. (Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 37)

Lacan's point here is that the sense of the citation changes depending on the name of the person attached to the utterance. Suppose, for example, we take the following proposition:

In the beginning was the word.

This proposition will have a very different sense depending on whether we say,

John said, "In the beginning was the word." (John, 1:1)

Or we say,

Lacan said, "In the beginning was the word."

Why is it that these propositions have an entirely different sense despite being identical? If these propositions take on a different sense, despite being identical, then it is because these propositions are inhabited by different virtual fields that do not themselves appear in the utterance. Suppose we represent the utterance using the diagram of a hyperbola:

Treat the utterance itself-- "In the beginning was the word." --as being the blue point at the center of the two lines. In the communicative situation, all that is present or encountered is the blue point, the utterance. By contrast, the virtual lines wound throughout the utterance themselves remain absent, outside the utterance. If the utterance "Lacan said, "in the beginning was the word" and the utterance "John said, "In the beginning was the word" are entirely different, then this is because they emerge out of entirely different virtual fields. Lacan's utterance virtually refers to his theory of language, the nature of the signifier, his accounts of alienation and separation, the name-of-the-father, and all of the consequences that follow from our initial entrance into language with respect to desire and drive. In the case of a citation from John, by contrast, we are evoking the history of the Christian church, other texts in the Bible, a particular theology, and so on. We can imagine Peter the Christian nodding his head vigorously in agreement when Paul the Lacanian says "Lacan said, 'In the beginning was the word.'" However, we here have a comedy of errors, for Peter and Paul are talking about entirely different things despite appearing to use the same words. It could be said that Peter's virtual web for "In the beginning was the word" looks like this:

Whereas Paul's looks like this:

It is, no doubt, this characteristic of language, its virtual dimension, that led Lacan to endlessly repeat that "all communication is miscommunication". In evoking the theme of citation, Lacan isn't simply hoping to acquaint his audience with sound principles of scholarly citation. No. If Lacan finds it necessary to underline that all citation is half-said, then this is because all speech is citational and because the symptom is itself a form of citation. To say that all speech has these characteristics of citation is not to say that we are literally quoting another author in all we say. Rather, it is to say that all speech has its inherited and virtual background from which it draws its sense. This speech will always come from elsewhere, though will be lived more as a paraphrase or a creative translation, than as a direct quotation. As Deleuze and Guattari put it elsewhere,

If language always seems to presuppose itself, if we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic point of departure, it is because language does not operate between something seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to saying. We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to you. Hearsay. (A Thousand Plateaus, 76)

Anyone who follows a variety of different news shows and papers regularly will be familiar with this phenomenon, or the way in which certain doxa are self-referentially repeated until they become reality.

"Don't assume you understand what your analysand is saying," councils Lacan.

Commenting on a text is like doing an analysis. How many times have I said to those under my supervision, when they say to me-- I had the impression he meant this or that --that one of the things we must guard most against is to understand too much, to understand more than what is in the discourse of the subject. To interpret and to imagine one understands are not at all the same things. It is precisely the opposite. I would go as far as to say that it is on the basis of a kind of refusal of understanding that we push open the door to analytic understanding. (Seminar I, Freud's Papers on Technique, 73)

The analyst must make an active effort not to understand if anything is to take place in analysis. And if this is the case, then it is because understanding is a bit like integrating one hyperbole to another. That is, when I too quickly believe I've understood, what I am really doing is simply integrating the other person's utterances into my virtual web or hyperbole. Yet at this point, the citation takes on an entirely different sense and the original sense is lost. Rather, I must become attentive to the virtual network of the person I'm listening to, to learn their web, to learn what it is that their discourse is citing in their acts of speech and in their symptoms. It is for this reason that analysis so often takes so many years. Genuine understanding, genuine hearing, is not something that occurs overnight or at a glance.

All of this underlines the futility of discussion. There is a whole genre of philosophy textbooks that deal with the so-called "problems of philosophy". A more advanced version of these texts would be Robert Audi's Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction. Audi has kindly taken it upon himself to outline, for us, the problems of epistemology. Thus, for Audi, we can array Plato's theory of knowledge right there beside Descartes' theory of knowledge and Quine's theory of knowledge. For Audi there are the problems of philosophy and every philosopher takes a stab at solving theproblems. In short, the problems are always the same such that each of the solutions can be seen as varied attempts to solve the same problem. As a result, one can ignore anything specific about Plato or Descartes or Hume or Quine, because anything specific to the context in which these philosophers developed their concepts and arguments is irrelevant a priori as the problems are always the same. One can only imagine the sort of evolutionary biology philosophers who have this view would give us.

No, in discussion, especially dispute, it seems that everything is leveled out, reduced to the same, such that the positions themselves are distorted beyond recognition. It appears that an exchange is taking place, when in fact those involved, as one my patients used to say, are only "making noises at one another". None of this, of course, is to say that the philosopher ought to become a hermit, engaging only in his own thought. Rather, it is to say that the form of the round-table, of the public dispute, doesn't accomplish much of anything apart from providing the opportunity for testosterone to flex its muscles as it resists, under any conditions, under conditions that are willing to engage in the most profound contortions and distortions of phenomena, language and concepts, being bested by the other person.

There are productive encounters. In these encounters those involved don't understand one another any better than in the case of a dispute. Why bother speaking to someone who shares your same parabola? Rather, in these encounters you instead get something closure to what Deleuze referred to as a "disjunctive synthesis". That is, you get a synthesis of difference that is productive of new forms of life. Seeking to thematize learning, Deleuze writes:

The movement of the swimmer does not resemble that of the wave, in particular, the movements of swimming instructor which we reproduce on the sand bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping the former in practice as signs. That is why it is so difficult to say how someone learns: there is an innate or acquired practical familiarity with signs, which means that there is something amorous-- but also something fatal --about all education. We learn nothing from those who say: 'Do as I do'. Our only teachers are those who tell us to 'do with me', and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. In other words, there is no ideo-motivity, only sensory-motivity. When a body combines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the principle of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other-- it involves difference, from one wave and one gesture to another, and carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted. To learn is indeed to constitute this space of an encounter with signs, in which the distinctive points renew themselves in each other, and repetition takes shape while disguising itself. (Difference and Repetition, 23)

In many respects, this simple example contains the very core of Deleuze's entire philosophy. The connective synthesis of the distinctive points of the body with the distinctive points of the waves are what Deleuze refer to as a problem (here and here and here), Idea, or virtual multiplicity. The style of swimming that emerges would be the process of actualization and individuation. No being can here be thought as independent from its world, but rather all beings are perpetually becoming-Other in encountering various fields of distinctive points with which their distinctive points connect, producing yet new multiplicities and organizations. In learning to swim I become-wave, forming a new body than the one I hitherto possessed. The point to notice with respect to this type of problem, as opposed to Audi's conception of a general problem, is that it is a singular constellation, specific to the singular points characterizing a unique field of relations, and is productive of new constellations and singular points. This, too, is what takes place in an encounter. In an encounter we become-Other such that a weaving of language and thought takes place, not producing the same, but rather producing a difference for all those involved... A new speciation.

ANTAGONISTS

Antagonistic Stars - The underlying assumption of the game is that the stars are more than just the balls of flaming gas they seem to be. So the stars can have their own “motivations”, and those motivations might not always jibe with our star explorers. This probably encompasses a number of other subsets: Maybe they are fearful of humans, maybe they are “socipathic” (or whatever the equivalent would be for a star), maybe they want to destroy all animal life in the universe.

Antagonistic Humans - If there are humans swinging around the universe, there are bad humans swinging around the universe. Again, this would encompass a number of other possibilities: religious zealots who think that star-siphoning or firmament-hunting is sacrilegious, rival gangs, exploitative humans who seek to siphon resources for their own selfish needs, fugitives escaping to the stars.

Antagonistic Xenomorphs - We’ve decided this won’t be like Star Wars (or Dawning Star for that matter), in that there won’t be an alien-of-the-week phenomenon going on. However, the universe is vast and almost certainly contains sentient life of some sort. What form these xenomorphs take and their motivations bears further rumination.

Elusive Firmament - If the underlying goal of the game is discovery of the fundamental shards of the firmament, maybe these shards don’t want to be found? The game isn’t just hide-and-seek but cat-and-mouse, which offers another layer of conflict entirely.

HAZARDS

Getting Lost - We’ve already touched on this some, but obviously navigation -- and, by extension, getting lost -- will be a key component of the game.

Gravity Traps - Strong gravity fields will interfere with star-swinging, maybe some so strong they act as an analog for quicksand to would-be explorers.

Starvation - If star explorers subsist on the power of stars, interference with that process might result in the equivalent of starvation.

Germs - Inspired by a recent discovery, microbes will still pose a threat even in the deep recesses of space.

Exotic Celestial Bodies - Black holes, nebulae, comets, etc., etc. Each of these exotic bodies can pose unique story-based obstacles for the PCs.

One of Heidegger's central contributions to philosophy was his concept of truth as aletheia. Ordinarily truth is understood as a correspondence between a proposition and a state-of-affairs. For instance, the proposition "the sun is shining" is true if, in fact, the sun is shining. A key feature of this conception of truth is that the state-of-affairs to which the proposition refers is transcendent to the proposition, independent of the proposition, and exists in its own right regardless of whether or not the proposition is enunciated. The proposition in no way effects the thing itself. Another theory of truth treats truth as coherence. A proposition here is true if it coheres with a body or web of propositions as in the case, perhaps, of Hegel's system.

For Heidegger, by contrast, truth is aletheia or the disclosedness or revealing of being. Lest I earn the condemnation of the Heideggarians, I will say upfront that I will not here do Heidegger's conception of truth as aletheia justice, nor is it my intention to give a careful analysis of his claims. Rather, I wish to indicate how it might be of use in thinking certain rhetorical phenomena.

To claim that truth is aletheia or disclosedness is to claim that an entity must first disclose or reveal itself as a particular sort of entity prior any statements we might make about it. Perhaps this idea can best be elucidated by way of the human body. In encountering the body as a seat of action, an object of medical intervention, a sexual object, and so on, is the body disclosed or revealed in the same way? In living my body, there's a way in which its physicality, its nature as a volume, flesh, a surface, disappears. Far from being an object like other objects in the world, there's an invisibility about my lived body, a specific bodily intentionality, such that it is not my body that is the focus of engagement, but rather the destinations towards which I move and the objects with which I am engaged. My hand is not this geometry of flesh, bone, and sinew, but rather is a grasping that is entirely exhausted in this act of typing or this grasping of my coffee cup. To say that my lived body is "exhausted" in this act of typing or in taking hold of the coffee cup and drinking is not to say that it is fatigued, but rather that it disappears in these acts by virtue of the very activity of revealing the world that it is engaged in. It is the coffee cup that is disclosed, the words on the screen, the destination towards which I am moving, not the lived body itself. As such, the lived body is more a collection of vectors, trajectories, directions, illuminating the world independent of it, rather than a geometrical shape and configuration of flesh, bone, and sinew.

Read on

Indeed, this can be seen with great clarity in the case of very young children, prior to the mirror stage. Often, as the child is learning how to crawl, it will attempt to enter spaces too small for its body to pass. In frustration the child will bang its head against the narrow opening, unable to get through, and more importantly, unable to understand why it cannot get through. This is because the young infant does not yet have a physical body, but only vectors of movement. It will only acquire a body gradually through encountering the many resistances of the world, the various breakdowns of the body, but also the gaze of others. When Deleuze and Guattari speak of the "facialization" of the body, of parts of the body, part of what they're referring to is the way in which the body as a surface is constituted in the gaze of others. That is, the body only discloses itself as a surface, a volume, the flesh in and through experiences of fatigue, sickness, the gaze, and resistance that gradually generate a sort of mental map of the body as a surface in contrast to the body as a set of vectors. The more the vectors of my body break down, the more my body as a surface, as brute meat, begins to reveal itself. Thus there is a coefficient of revealing and concealing, an alethetics, of the body. The more the vector nature of my body is enacted, the less my body as meat appears. We experience this, for instance, in moments where we are entirely involved in what we are doing, such as when we are at the top of our game when running or involved in a sporting event or when writing. Duchamp captured this well with his famous painting "Nude Descending a Staircase":

The body descending a staircase disappears as meat, is concealed as meat, and instead reveals or discloses itself as pure vector in motion. It is only when my vectors fail, when I break my leg while running, when I'm seen (Sartre and the look) that my body is disclosed as meat, as a foreign substance at odds with me that isn't entirely under my control.

The case is similar with the medical body. When I grasp another person in sexual embrace, I simultaneously encounter them as meat and as vector while simultaneously encountering myself as meat and vector. Yet in the case of the medical gaze, the body is disclosed as meat; or better yet, as machine. The surgeon operating on a body does not encounter that body as person, but rather as a machine. Here the body is disclosed as being closer to a car engine, than as an other. Consequently, the body as other, the other's body, is concealed in medical practice. It could be said, in this regard, that the first body of medical practice is the body of the autopsy.

A central element of the Heideggerian discovery (pardon the pun) was thus the discovery that beings disclose themselves under various modalities, and that in disclosing themselves they also conceal something at one and the same time. Thus, for example, if I encounter a hammer as a hammer, its material and geometric properties such as wood, iron, its shape, etc are simultaneously concealed. In encountering the hammer as a hammer, it is disclosed in its "handiness". All of its properties come to refer to this handiness. Its spatial properties are disclosed in terms of its fitness for the job at hand. Its mass is disclosed only in terms of the job at hand, i.e., is it too heavy or light for the job? In order to encounter the hammer as a material object the handiness of the hammer needs to be made to disappear so that it might appear as a brute object composed simply of physical properties such as those described by the chemist and the physicist. That is, the hammer needs to appear under a new modality of being similar to the modality under which a rock discloses itself to the geologist.

Petraeus or Betray Us