The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity 9780231519366

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
PART I - The Dilemma of Diversity
1 The Age of Diversity
2 History of the Dilemma
3 Society as a Multivoiced Body
PART II - The Primacy of Voices
4 Modernism and Subjectivity
5 Postmodernism and Language
6 The Primacy of Voices
7 Communication and an Ethics for the Age of Diversity
PART III - The Political Dimension of the Multivoiced Body
8 The Social Unconscious
9 Globalization, Resistance ,and the New Solidarity
10 Democracy and Justice in the Multivoiced Body
Notes
Index

Citation preview

the multivoiced body

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t he m ul t i vo ic e d bod y

Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity

Fred Evans

Columbia University Press

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New York

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Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York  Chichester, West Susse

Copyright © 2008 Columbia University Press Paperback edition, 2011 All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evans, Fred J., 1944–   The multivoiced body: society and communication in the age of diversity / Fred Evans.     p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-231-14500-8 (cloth : alk. paper)— isbn 978-0-231-14501-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)— isbn 978-0-231-51936-6 (e-book)   1. Mass media—Social aspects. 2. Multiculturalism. 3. Intercultural communication. I. Title.   hm1206.e93 2009   301—dc22 2008033226

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

References to Internet Web Sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for Web sites that may have expired or changed since the book was prepared.

For Barbara

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

Part I The Dilemma of Diversity 1. The Age of Diversity

1

3

2. History of the Dilemma: Cosmos, Chaos, Chaosmos 3. Society as a Multivoiced Body

57

Part II The Primacy of Voices

91

4. Modernism and Subjectivity 5. Postmodernism and Language 6. The Primacy of Voices

20

93 117

144

7. Communication and an Ethics for the Age of Diversity Part III The Political Dimension of the Multivoiced Body 8. The Social Unconscious

169 201

203

9. Globalization, Resistance, and the New Solidarity 10. Democracy and Justice in the Multivoiced Body

225 247

Notes 283 Index 331

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Preface and Acknowledgments

The Multivoiced Body is a philosophy book—a theory of society and communication in an age of diversity. But it was initially inspired by personal experiences that occurred in a place far away from the one in which I eventually wrote it. From 1969 to 1974, I worked in Laos under the auspices of a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, International Voluntary Services. For three of those years, a Lao counterpart and I set up a social worker position at the National Orthopedic Center. The center was filled with civilians and soldiers, children and adults, waiting to receive physiotherapy and prosthetic devices as part of their compensation for being detritus of the struggle for global hegemony between the United States and the Soviet Union. Besides the shattered bodies at the center and the rest of the devastation in Laos and throughout Indochina, both superpowers (like the French before them) attempted to make the Lao over in their own image. This threatened to eliminate or diminish what I had newly discovered to be one of the greatest assets of the Lao and the rest of the world: diversity of beliefs and practices—of “voices”—and the creating of new ones through the interplay among the others. In my own case, ingrained beliefs in technological progress, individuality, and self-reliance were

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disrupted by the Lao ideas of Buddhist serenity, community, and compassion. My exposure to these differences produced a novel voice for me, one within which Lao and Western beliefs continued to contest with each other for increased audibility. Though this transformation often confused me, making me reconsider my ideas on rehabilitation at the center and on development globally, it enriched my life and convinced me that the peoples of the world should welcome and nourish the creative interplay among cultural and other differences. It also allowed me to see that the interplay among diverse voices is always the most salient aspect of any place, including the economically depressed coal mining town where I grew up and the other settings in which I subsequently found myself. Many would agree with what took me an extraordinary experience to understand. Yet the prevalence of capitalistic globalization, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of political and social exclusion suggest that difference is dismissed by many powerful forces as either an encumbrance to their goals or, much worse, as something to be feared and hated. In order to comprehend and respond to this situation, I found that I had to clarify what I now call the dilemma of diversity, that is, the false choice between unity and heterogeneity, identity and difference, and then go beyond this dilemma by elaborating a new view of society, communication, and justice. This new view characterizes society as a multivoiced body, a unity composed of differences, and seeks within it an antidote to the tendency to reduce us to one voice, to one ideology or system. This philosophical response to the dilemma of diversity cannot by itself solve our social and political troubles; but it can help diminish them by contributing to a new way of thinking about ourselves and society, a way that our times are demanding and for which they have prepared us. In addressing this dilemma and developing the notion of society as a multivoiced body, I treat figures and themes central to continental and analytic philosophy, modernism and postmodernism, feminism, postcolonial thought, and other views that concern identity and difference. I also draw upon material from many fields outside my own and specify the concrete implications of my views for justice, citizenship, democracy in society and the workplace, globalization, and collective as well as individual rights. In other words, The Multivoiced Body straddles philosophy and political practice. It is therefore relevant to professionals and lay people concerned with social and political policies as well as to scholars in philosophy, communication, cultural studies, and the social and behavioral sciences. Chapter 1 will serve the reader as a brief but comprehensive

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introduction to the main strategy of the book and the issues and figures it covers. Besides the time I spent in Laos and other countries, a number of friends and colleagues are responsible for much of whatever value The Multivoiced Body may have (its failings are my own). My partner, Barbara McCloskey, to whom I dedicate this book, critically read draft after draft of the manuscript and was a sagacious sounding board for its ideas. Joy has been sharing work and the other facets of our lives these many years. Two of my closest friends throughout my career as a philosopher, Ed Casey and Leonard Lawlor, took time away from their important work and graciously read the entire manuscript. Their detailed advice resulted in a much improved text; their encouragement, in its completion. Although justice is a key theme in this book, I can only list the names of other friends and colleagues who read all or large parts of the manuscript and helped me improve it: David Alexander, Bruce Fink, Nancy Glazener, Juan Carlos Grijalva, Sabine Hake, Lizardo Herrera, Paul Hopper, Greg Nielsen, Kelly Oliver, Ed Pluth, Joanna Polly, Dan Selcer, Dan Smith, Tony Smith, Tom Sparrow, Richard Williams, George Yancy, and Iris Marion Young, whose voice continues to instruct the rest of us about justice despite her untimely passing. Other friends, too many to name here, have discussed my work with me over the years and indirectly contributed to this book. I am grateful for their friendship and their influence on The Multivoiced Body. This gratitude also extends to the graduate students, faculty, and staff of Duquesne University’s philosophy department and to the members of the professional organizations to which I belong, especially the Radical Philosophy Association, Merleau-Ponty Circle, and Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. I also thank Columbia University Press’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. I was fortunate to have an editor, Wendy Lochner, who added great patience to her experience and knowledge in order to take this book through the labyrinth of referees, editorial and faculty boards, and the author’s often clumsy articulations of his manuscript’s purpose and character. My thanks to her must also be extended to Christine Mortlock, Susan Pensak, and other members of the Press who helped put this book into print.

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the multivoiced body

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PART I The Dilemma of Diversity

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1

The Age of Diversity

The Dilemma of Diversity Our age is one of diversity. Not because diversity is new—even the earliest communities included differences in perspective and idiom based on at least age, gender, and work responsibilities. But diversity now has a meaning that transcends a plurality of functions or outlooks. It has become a value to many and a threat to others. It has led to constitutional revisions that favor multiculturalism in some societies and to various forms of “ethnic cleansing” in others. Amy Gutmann, the editor of a seminal volume on multiculturalism, has stated the issue in succinct terms: “What kind of communities can justly be created and sustained out of our human diversity,” especially when this pluralism is accompanied by “a widespread skepticism about the defensibility of any moral principles or perspectives” ? 1 The skepticism to which Gutmann refers is abetted by the categories we have inherited for imagining society. Traditional thought has left us with two unsatisfactory social-political alternatives. One of them asks the diverse groups of society to submit to a universal doctrine, to a single idea of “the good.” This good, however, invariably ends up being the specific

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belief system of one or another of the groups involved.2 It is therefore either unacceptable to the rest or eliminates what is distinctive about them and thus robs society of its richness. All too often, it leads to the violent repression of those who are different from the dominant group. As for the second of these two visions of community, it allows the groups to remain separate, but urges them to agree to “neutral” rules for regulating their mutual affairs. These groups, however, will tend to accept such rules only insofar as they advance their self-interest. As soon as any one of the groups realizes that the rules are no longer to its pragmatic advantage, it will have no reason to continue honoring them.3 In the context of a discussion on European cultural identity, Jacques Derrida has stated the issue in terms that can be extended to any society: On the one hand, European cultural identity cannot be dispersed. . . . It cannot and must not be dispersed into a myriad of provinces, into a multiplicity of self- enclosed idioms or petty little nationalities, each one jealous and untranslatable. It cannot and must not renounce places of great circulation or heavy traffic, the great avenues or thoroughfares of translation and communication, and thus of mediatization. But, on the other hand, it cannot and must not accept the capital of a centralizing authority that, by means of its transEuropean mechanisms . . . would control and standardize.4 To avoid a mere plurality, the participants in society must share a bond that is “translatable” into a common notion of the good. But this notion threatens to eliminate the ideas of the good society harbored by the rest. Traditional thought on society, the alternative of heterogeneity or homogeneity, leaves the new age of diversity impaled on one horn or the other of a dilemma that exacts a price in blood as well as alienation from one’s neighbors. The vision of society that avoids this dilemma of diversity must, on the one hand, valorize the unity that “postmodernists” shun in their penchant for heterogeneity and, on the other, endorse the heterogeneity that “modernists” efface in their embrace of the universal.5 We require, in other words, a notion of unity that affirms the very heterogeneity that would appear to dissolve it. Is such a notion of unity even intelligible, let alone capable of galvanizing diverse groups of people to recognize it as their identity and destiny?

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Korot and Reich’s The Cave We can begin to answer the question of unity in an age of diversity by exploring some works of art and literature that evoke rather than attempt to define the type of unity or identity we are seeking. After taking the counsel of these works, we may assume the task of transforming their suggestions into a philosophical and hopefully politically efficacious understanding of society and ourselves. The success of this undertaking will be measured by the degree to which it allows us to respond satisfactorily to the dilemma of diversity that we have just considered. A recent work of art both dramatizes the dilemma of diversity and suggests an idea of unity that could avoid its two “horns.” This work, The Cave, is a multimedia production or “video opera,” the collaborative efforts of Beryl Korot, a leading video artist, and Steve Reich, a celebrated music composer.6 The production is centered on the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. The cave at Hebron is the burial place of Abraham and his wife Sarah. It is also the place where Abraham’s sons, the half-brothers Ishmael and Isaac, reconcile their differences in order to bury their father. Ishmael (whose mother is Hagar, Sarah’s former handmaid) becomes the progenitor of the Arab Muslims, and Isaac is the first of the Jews. For centuries, this cave has been sacred to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. It is the only place in the world where both Jews and Arabs worship, despite their continuing hostility toward one another. Although The Cave focuses on a particular place in the Middle East, the conflict there is emblematic of similar disputes—religious or secular— elsewhere in the world and throughout human history. The narrative that accompanies the Cave of Hebron also shares in this universality. Abraham is a symbol of unity or origin; his sons, Ishmael and Isaac, portray a split full of distrust and treachery; and the reconciliation of these halfbrothers on the occasion of their father’s death represents a return to unity and the redemption of humanity. But how are we to understand the original unity and its rebirth? What possibilities were destroyed by Abraham’s patriarchy, and which of the half-brothers had to concede his identity in order to make reconciliation possible? Or, again, did the sons agree to regulative rules based on expediency, which then unraveled and revived the estrangement within humanity that continues to this day, with horrific consequences, as bombs fall from the sky or erupt just under the ground?

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The Cave is wrapped in this biblical and actual history. But from within that context it creates an extraordinary effect. Korot and Reich intermingle visual images of the Hebron area and its people, fragments of different forms of music, and the voices of Jews, Arabs, and Americans responding to the questions “Who for you is Abraham? Sarah? Hagar? Ishmael? Isaac?” The audience is able to see and to hear the respondents at the same time that they see and hear onstage musicians doubling each respondent with a specific “speech-melody.” For example, an Arab Muslim answers the question about Abraham/Ibrahim with “the father—he’s a fatherly figure, who actually, left something behind him, that’s never really been resolved.” In his role as the music composer for the work, Reich transcribes the content and melodious quality of this speech into musical notation for the instruments and vocalists. The result is the speechmelody for that particular respondent (see figure 1.1). Indeed, these musically accompanied responses are used to divide The Cave into three acts, one composed of the replies by Israeli Jews, the second by Palestinian Arabs, and the third by citizens of the United States from various ethnic backgrounds. Reich points out that transcribing speech into musical notation often forced him, especially when he wanted to combine certain spoken phrases, to make musical modulations that he never would have come up with on his own. These new modulations then entered his harmonic vocabulary for future work.7 Reich also captured ambient sounds from the cave, for example, an A-minor drone produced by prayers resonating against the walls. This drone was then reinforced by the musical instruments and linked to Korot’s video footage of the cave. By chance, this musically enhanced drone corresponded to the A-minor, noninstrumentalized chanting of the Koran that accompanied one of the three acts of the video opera. The Cave took on a life of its own, far beyond what its initiators originally had in their heads or could have predicted from the elements with which they began. For the audience, the presentation of this work takes the form of five large video screens interspersed among the various groupings of musicians. Some of the video screens show the faces of the respondents while they are talking, others simultaneously display their answers in written script. The musical groupings include thirteen instrumentalists, a string quartet, four singers, and two readers who cite passages from the Bible and the Koran throughout the production. The audience also gets to hear a variety of answers to the questions about Abraham and the other figures.

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figure 1.1

7

Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, The Cave, 1995. (Video opera. Photo copyright

© Andrew Pothecary. Courtesy of Andrew Pothecary.)

The answers reach a level of hilarity in the third act, which focuses on respondents in the United States. Because of their poorer acquaintance with biblical and Koran figures, these respondents often reply to the questions with references to Abraham Lincoln and Moby Dick (“Call me Ishmael”). But even these wild replies are part of the work’s point. Korot says that the visual multiples for the piece are “to be read as one.” But this “one” does not efface the heterogeneous content, because Korot turned to the “ancient programming tool of the loom, and conceived of each channel as representing a thread.” This allowed her “to make non-verbal narrative works by careful timing and juxtaposing interrelated images, and by creating individual rhythms for each channel.” 8 These visuals are integrated into the composer’s musical scores and production. Some general ordering devices, for example, dividing The Cave into three acts, are also employed within the work. Nonetheless, the unity of the whole seems to be generated by, rather than imposed on, its diverse elements and answers. No single medium or voice dominates. Indeed, The Cave’s images, musical fragments, and contrasting interpretations of biblical figures

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sometimes give the impression of a contemporary tower of Babel. But the overall effect of the video opera is a type of cohesiveness, an enigmatic identity or unity that consists in the very diversity of the elements that it brings together. It evokes a “unity composed of differences” or, more dynamically, a unity that holds together and simultaneously separates its heterogeneous elements. It therefore suggests an alternative way in which we, as well as the people who worship at the shrine in Hebron, might be able to understand ourselves and our relation to each other.

Plato’s and Saramago’s Caves Korot and Reich’s video opera invites comparison with two other works that focus on caves. By exploring them, we can enlarge upon the enigmatic whole, the unity composed of differences, evoked by The Cave, see more clearly its promise and its problems, and also gain a glimpse of forces that contest it from within. In The Republic, Plato describes the famous scene in which prisoners are shackled so that they face the back wall of a cave.9 They mistake fleeting shadows on the wall for reality. These shadows have no fixed essences and are therefore impossible for the mind to grasp with any certainty. They are objects of opinion rather than the subject matter of knowledge. More specifically, Plato says of these objects that it “is impossible to conceive firmly any one of them to be or not to be or both or neither.” 10 For example, one and the same thing may appear beautiful in comparison to something that is ugly, and less than beautiful relative to a thing that is more attractive than it. The thing cannot, therefore, be fixed in the mind as beautiful or as not beautiful, neither both nor neither. Everything within the cave shares this equivocal nature. On the basis of Plato’s well-known disparagement of art, the mixture of sights, sounds, and viewpoints that make up Korot and Reich’s The Cave could only be a copy of what the prisoners see. That is, they are a step below the shadows in the cave, mere imitations of imitations of reality.11 Plato presents his prisoners with a way out of the cave. Before becoming incarcerated, they exist in a disembodied state and are able to experience pure Forms, that is, perfect and permanent standards, such as goodness, beauty, justice, and geometrical shapes. The shadows inside the cave are the distorted reflections of these Forms. Because the prisoners can still dimly recollect what was presented to them in their disembodied existence, it is possible for at least some of them to turn away from the

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shadows at the back of the cave and make their way along an upward path until they can finally leave the cave and see the Forms in their pristine glory. Plato’s scenario is an allegory of knowledge and salvation. It assumes that reason is univocal, the same for everyone who uses it without bias, and that each thing in the sensory world, in the cave, is only a pale imitation of the corresponding perfect Form. If everyone adopts this univocal or “dialectical” form of reason, they will all be able to grasp the Good, the only true standard of what is best, and use this knowledge to establish a perfect republic. Thus Plato adds an ontological and an epistemological dimension12 to the first of the two sociopolitical alternatives with which we began: the pure Forms and dialectical reason—the road back to the Forms—provide a basis for political thought, that is, for achieving knowledge of the best and most just kind of society. This basis transcends the cave and the plurality of opinions that we adopt toward the good in our usual flirtation with the shadows dancing on the cave wall. But is Plato’s cave, the world that we live in as embodied creatures, the way he describes it? Is the world a chaotic existence requiring a higher reality to impose order upon it? Or might it not be, like the reality evoked by Korot and Reich’s The Cave, a unity composed of differences, one additionally characterized by chance and the production of novelty? Might not the “imitation of an imitation” actually be an evocation of the reality in comparison with which all others are judged and not a mere image at all? Whichever way one answers these questions, consideration of Plato’s cave shows that any resolution of the dilemma of diversity will have to speak of epistemology and ontology—knowledge and being—as well as of social and political philosophy. We will have to decide, for example, if reason is one or many, whether there might be a number of legitimate ways to think and more than just one reality to confront. The Nobel Prize winner José Saramago also has a penchant for caves. But he wants to find standards of judgment that are immanent in, rather than transcendent of, the reality in which embodied creatures live. Like Korot and Reich’s video opera, his novel is called The Cave.13 And, like their work, his story evokes an enigmatic unity composed of differences. But, we will see, it also adds other aspects to the image of society we are constructing. In his novel, Saramago represents Plato’s realm of Forms as a selfcontained, mall-like complex named the Center. Around it sprawls a city, some outlying slums, an industrial park with chimneys belching toxic

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fumes, a “green belt” composed of hot houses with dead grass surrounding them, and, on the outer fringe, a number of traditional villages. The Center is constantly expanding, substituting an artificial, partly digital reality and consumer heaven for all the natural and traditional settings it supplants—it has everything from aquariums with cyber fish to replicas of historical periods and a variety of artificial climatic conditions and geographical settings, each maintained for the Center dwellers to enjoy and to rely upon for their daily needs. Indeed, when excavators unearth mummified bodies tied to benches facing a wall under the Center, officials ignore the ironic symbolism of this place and immediately change it into a theme park that they name Plato’s Cave. They do not understand that their technologically perfect Center and its Platonic analogue, the realm of pure Forms, are the real prisons, and that the prisoners in the new theme park represent the occupants of the Center. For Saramago, perfection and regulation are emblems of death, not life. The Center, like Plato’s Forms, will attempt to subordinate or even replace the interplay of heterogeneous and multifaceted beings that is the source of life and novelty. Saramago wants humanity to escape his cyberage prison just as Plato wants it to escape the cave of shadows. But Saramago has a destination in mind that stands in contrast to the world of Plato’s Forms. He wants us to return to Plato’s cave, but no longer seen through Plato’s dismissive eyes. Saramago’s protagonist in the novel consists of a family—a father in his sixties, Cipriano Algor, a young daughter, Marta, and her equally young husband, Marchal. Father and daughter work as potters in their house on the outskirts of a village. Marchal is a guard at the Center. There is also the father’s newfound, middle-aged love, Isaura, and a stray dog, Found, that the family adopts. After moving into an apartment in the Center (a “privilege” that Marchal receives as an employee there), the three members of the family come to understand the meaning of the excavated site Plato’s Cave and the implications of “adapting” to the artificial but commodious Center. They therefore leave the Center and return to the village. With the help of Isaura and in the company of Found, they extract from their potter’s kiln three hundred clay figures that they had made previously but been unable to sell to the people in the Center. They place these figures, including some defective ones, in positions facing their beloved village home, with the kiln behind them, as if to symbolize and celebrate a reality opposed to what the Center represents. In the final pages of the novel, the family, Isaura, and Found pile into Cipriano’s old van and set off on a journey with no particular destination

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in mind. The view they now have of life corresponds to Saramago’s long fluid sentences, which are bereft of the usual conventions of punctuation and grammar: Well Isaura, said Cipriano Algor, is of the opinion that we should let ourselves be carried along on the current of events, that there always comes a time when we realize that the river is flowing to our favor, I didn’t say always, said Isaura, I said sometimes, but take no notice of me, it’s just an idea I had, It’s good enough for me, said Marta, besides it fits in very well with what’s actually been happening to us, What shall we do, then, asked her father, Marchal and I are going to start a new life a long way from here, that much we’ve decided.14 Life, that is, the “current of events” that “carries us along,” is fluid and full of surprises. The events composing it overlap and flow into one another, just like the utterances of Saramago’s characters. What Plato feared in his cave, Saramago embraces and takes as reality. His novel and Korot and Reich’s video opera, their form (Saramago’s sentences, Korot and Reich’s multimedia mixture) as well as their content, evoke a reality that is neither a set of pure Forms imposed upon a domain nor a mere collection of individual elements. Rather, this reality is a unity composed of intersecting differences, a world that constantly generates new forms of life. When we apply it to ourselves, each of us appears to be simultaneously part of the identity and the “other” or alter ego of the rest. The interplay among us, among our different ideas of the good, generates new visions and, because we are interrelated to one another, our continual metamorphosis. Saramago’s novel reinforces the type of unity evoked by Korot and Reich’s The Cave. But in conjunction with my comments on Plato, it adds some new aspects to the image of society we are constructing. Plato’s realm of Forms is an example of what I will call an oracle, that is, a discourse that elevates itself above the others by presenting itself as universal or absolute—the “absolute truth,” the “one true God,” the “pure race,” patriarchy, the “free market” system, or any other doctrine that excludes or demotes those who do not consent to its terms.15 If society is a unity composed of differences, it is not only that; it also involves an oracular tendency to override this type of unity and to replace it with a single center of power.

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Plato presents his oracle of justice as founded upon a transcendent reality, a realm of unchanging and perfect Forms. Saramago counters this claim by suggesting that oracles and the realities upon which they claim to rest are our creations and therefore immanent in rather than transcendent of society. More specifically, Saramago’s Center mimics Plato’s pure Forms and reveals them to be poor imitations of reality, rather than existing outside and above the cave. In turn, the reality that the Center and the Forms imitate is the sensory world Plato rejects and entombs. Through Saramago’s eyes, we now see the world as a unity composed of differences and the standard against which we must judge the Center and all oracles that would try to deny its reality, marginalize its many voices, and diminish the creation of new forms of life. The novel The Cave and the video opera The Cave evoke this alternative way of understanding society. Both, but particularly Saramago’s novel, also make us aware of the oracles that threaten and all too often prevail over this generative and heterogeneous form of unity. Saramago’s Center helps to enlarge this picture of society even more than I have suggested. Whereas Korot and Reich’s The Cave is haunted by the specter of religious bigotry, Saramago’s novel concentrates on technocratic capitalism or technological rationality as the main threat to the world as a creative interplay among heterogeneous beings. The Center’s use of advanced technology threatens to replace the natural with an artificial world. Oracles can therefore be secular as well as religious. Saramago, moreover, seems to use Found, the adopted stray, as an indicator of the overlap among the species that make up the world. Similarly, the clay figures made by the potter family and the Center made by technocrats are artificial products with vastly different meanings. The first technological “form of life,” 16 pottery, betokens an accommodation or even a collaboration with nature; the second, the Center, an attempt to dominate natural surroundings. The frontiers between human society, nature, and artificial devices and products are porous and largely uncharted. Any talk of society will therefore also have to consider its relation to the many communities, natural and artificial, that surround and cut across it. Saramago’s book also reinforces an implicit response of Korot and Reich’s video opera to Plato’s claim that a univocal form of reason is the only route to knowledge. Both the novel and the video opera evoke images of reality that have persuasive force. This suggests that formal reason is not the only way in which we can become legitimately convinced of what is and what should be. The very selection of one term over

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another to construct a proposition is made against a background of what one thinks is important. Moreover, this background always has the status of something evoked rather than laid out in terms that are exhaustively translatable into the syllogisms of logic books. Formal reasoning plays an often necessary but not sufficient role in our efforts to persuade ourselves and others of the nature of society or the cosmos. When Plato chases art and poetry out of his republic, he has therefore overstepped his bounds and denied part of what is effective in his own, often poetic, ruminations about reality and the good life. Korot and Reich’s video opera as well as Saramago’s novel have portrayed society as composed and generative of differences. This evoked image of unity, of a bond between us that is neither totalizing nor merely expedient, is encouraging because the age of diversity, the demand for recognition of heterogeneity as a value as well as a reality, requires that we go beyond the two traditional alternative visions of society and hence the horns of diversity’s dilemma. The age of diversity also requires that we understand and challenge the oracles that prevent us from recognizing that society is a unity composed of differences. We must therefore explore and clarify the sort of inclusiveness suggested by the works entitled The Cave and see if it is more than just an invention of art or a dream of philosophy. Only a new social identity, a recognition and embrace of the dynamic intersection of our lives and identities, can provide us with the basis for a social and political unity that escapes the failed paths of totality, on the one hand, and a merely expedient rule-governed plurality, on the other.

Challenge of The Cave: The Argument Ahead Plato and many other thinkers would argue that Korot and Reich and Saramago are evoking chaos and not any kind of unity or identity. In the rest of part 1 of this book, “The Dilemma of Diversity,” I will reply to them by providing an initial but compelling articulation of a unity composed of differences that avoids the two horns of the dilemma of the age of diversity. In chapter 2, this articulation will consist of a history of the dilemma, specifically the ancient opposition between cosmos (order) and chaos. Most important, this history will bring to light the aspects of cosmos and chaos that led to an inversion of their hierarchical order, resulting in the favoritism toward chaos that we find in the work of Friedrich

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Nietzsche and many contemporary thinkers. Indeed, this inversion has produced the concept of chaosmos and the hope that it might take us beyond the exhausted opposition between cosmos and chaos. An analysis of this concept, especially the innovative version of it offered by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, will provide us with a fuller understanding of the kind of unity we seek. But this analysis will also show that society cannot be satisfactorily depicted in terms of forces that are too anonymous and impersonal for us to identify with or to accept as an appropriate description of ourselves and our social setting. From Nietzsche through Deleuze and Guattari, this tendency has marred the otherwise rich ideas they have offered us for grappling with philosophical and social issues. In order to begin at least the partial personalization of these anonymous forces, an overview of the type of society evoked by The Cave (the video opera and the novel) will be required. The modification of standard syntax in Saramago’s novel provides us with an opening idea of the direction this overview will take. That modification allows the voices of his main characters to blend with one another while still maintaining their distinctness and uniqueness. These voices (like the speech-melodies and other elements of Korot and Reich’s video opera) are part of a dialogic exchange that keeps them together and yet does not nullify their heterogeneity. I will argue that something similar is true for participants in society. Thus chapter 3 will introduce the notion of “voices” and the idea that society is what I call a multivoiced body. The notion of voices has the advantage of pointing simultaneously to our bodies as the producers of speech and to the discourses that provide these bodies with social and cultural significance. Earth and heaven, so to speak, are brought together in one concept. Voices also make a necessary reference to each other; they exist as addresses or responses to other personalized social discourses and practices. Indeed, their dialogic interplay both separates and holds them together, constituting them as a body, a multivoiced body. As this brief description suggests, the notions of voice and multivoiced body will push the rigid ideas of purity and univocity to the edge of the political map that they have dominated for so long. More specifically, I will argue that voices are dialogic hybrids, each part of the identity and the “other” or alter ego of the rest, and that their interplay produces new voices and ultimately the metamorphosis of society. The notion of voice, in other words, promises a type of solidarity that promotes heterogeneity and fecundity without any of these three forces diminishing the other two.

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This claim concerning our identity is supported by the observation that whenever we examine our viewpoints we find that they are made up of many strands, many other voices, that continue to contest for audibility within and against the viewpoints they have helped to form. Each voice retains its uniqueness, but each is part of the identity of the rest as well as their other. Many examples, arguments, and other types of considerations will be necessary to clarify this view of ourselves and society and render it compelling. In chapter 3, I will rely heavily on Salman Rushdie’s literary talents and Mikhail Bakhtin’s linguistics and culturology. I will also examine the work of thinkers who contest the idea of society as a multivoiced body (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and G. W. F. Hegel) as well as the thought of those who are more allied to but still distinct from this view (Jean Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, and Adriana Cavarero). I will also consider the positions of some of those who are opposed to the idea that voices are intrinsically hybrid or “impure” (Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger). The importance of the concerns addressed in this chapter and part 1 cannot be overstated: a new understanding of our identity, and not just utilitarian or deontological arguments about how we ought to act, is necessary if we are to begin moving beyond our fear of difference and the tendency to exclude others in our social and political policies—or so I will argue. In order to support the identification of society and each of us as multivoiced bodies, we will have to see if voices have priority over that from which they are otherwise inseparable: subjectivity, language, and social structures. In part 2, “The Primacy of Voices,” I will use the first chapter (chapter 4) in order to examine the modernist notion of the self or “subject.” This examination will include critical reflection on the classical position of René Descartes, the phenomenologically based thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the work of Andy Clark, Paul Churchland, and Daniel Dennett, contemporary analytic philosophers who adopt the viewpoint of cognitive science. These reflections will be followed by others, in chapter 5, on the relation between voice and language. They will concentrate on structuralist (Ferdinand Saussure) and poststructuralist views of language (Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and, in the context of the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn, David Bloor, and Bruno Latour). With respect to voices and social structures, even Saramago’s Center is inseparable from the role played by ideologues in its establishment

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and continuation. We cannot overlook that social structures have linguistic as well as nonlinguistic dimensions and then argue (mistakenly) that discourse is determined by mute forces. Nor can we claim that ideas or words constitute reality, that is, we cannot adopt what some thinkers would call linguistic idealism.17 The challenge, then, will be to see how voices depend upon social structures, yet are the guiding force in the interaction between their linguistic and nonlinguistic dimensions. Moreover, economic systems are social structures. Therefore we will have to consider which system type is most compatible with the interplay and creativity that characterizes the multivoiced body. This task will include assessing the work of Edward Casey on place, Karl Marx and Shoshana Zuboff on economics and the workplace, and Foucault’s novel ideas on power. This engagement with social structures occurs in chapter 6. But the main issue of that chapter will be to follow up on the reflections of chapters 4 (subjectivity and modernism) and 5 (language and postmodernism) and confirm the claim that voices are the primary unit of society. Even if we grant that voices have primacy over the traditional notion of subjectivity, language, and social structures, what is our relation to these clamorous participants in society? If, for example, we are to identify ourselves with voices rather than with the traditional notion of subject, we will need to know the nature of this identification. Are voices anonymous forces to which we conform—are we merely their vehicles—or are we these very voices, and they us, to such a degree that a strict line between the personal and the impersonal is impossible to draw? If the latter is the case, we will require a new way of thinking about identity—the idea of an “elliptical” form of identity between ourselves and these voices—and we will need a new way of talking about agency in society. The claim that society is a multivoiced body also raises questions about our competence to communicate with one another. Voices seem like incommensurable belief systems. But, if they are, how can we understand one another? And if they are not, does this mean that they harbor a common language and are not heterogeneous after all? Moreover, change is an obvious feature of society. We will therefore have to understand how new voices are produced as well as the metamorphosis that society and all its voices seem to undergo when novel ways of thinking about the world and each other are introduced into the flow of dialogic exchange. These are the concerns that will occupy us in chapter 7. In order to address them fully and introduce a novel theory of communication, we will

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examine the work on language and communication by Noam Chomsky, Saussure, Jürgen Habermas, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. With some help form Nietzsche, we will also present an ethics that reflects the solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity of society as a multivoiced body. Meeting the challenge of The Cave also involves inquiries about the nemesis of the multivoiced body. How are oracles produced? Are they an internal aspect of the social body, and why have they been dominant throughout so much of history? Why do we turn so often to narrow values and rigid ideas of our identity, ones that deny or cancel out what I am claiming is our heritage and setting? In part 3, “The Political Dimension of the Multivoiced Body,” I will answer these questions by means of the idea of a social unconscious. This idea, furthermore, promises to help explain senseless forms of violence and terror. But more encouraging is the related question that concerns our resistance to this negative tendency. In what sense do we remain in touch with the roots of our existence, and how do or can we use this immanent recollection of the multivoiced body in order to reclaim as ours the creative interplay among voices, the production of novelty, and the ongoing transformation of society that oracles repudiate? In answering these questions in chapter 8, we will critically engage the psychoanalytic-based theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. These questions about oracles and our resistance to them are a prelude to the others that come up in chapter 9. From the perspective of the claim that society is a multivoiced body, how should we understand globalization? If the multivoiced body is the basis for a new form of solidarity that valorizes heterogeneity and creativity, what form should globalization take? Clearly, the idea of a unity composed of differences rules out the acceptability of globalization’s continued domination by the network of corporations and neoliberal governments that operate “from above” the communities and individuals of the world. The claim that society is a multivoiced body supports the contrary idea that globalization should centrally involve a network of social movements that come “from below” corporate and governmental institutions. Establishing this claim will have to include a new concept of solidarity, one based on the idea of a network rather than hierarchical order. This task will involve extensive treatment and critical appropriation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s critique of Empire as well as of Manuel Castells’s notion of a network society. I will also use this chapter to argue against Samuel P. Huntington and his global theory, the clash of civilizations.

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The issue of globalization is closely related to other vital political questions that must be addressed in this book. We started this chapter with the dilemma of diversity, that is, having to choose between either a monistic or pluralistic conception of society. The former sacrifices heterogeneity and the latter unity, and so neither one is adequate for the epoch we live in. In response to this dilemma, I am proposing that we view society as a multivoiced body and see ourselves as both one and many at the same time, voices shot through with one another. But what concept of democracy and justice should guide a society that is willing to recognize itself as a multivoiced body? It will have to reflect society’s manifold body and yet rule out the voices of injustice and bigotry, for example, white supremacy or male patriarchy, as legitimate positions in determining social policy. Paradoxically, it will have to “exclude the excluders.” Moreover, the emphasis upon the creation of new voices and globalization from below suggests that the multivoiced body view of democracy and justice will have to go far beyond the notions of human rights, self-determination, and fair voting procedures adopted by traditional democracies. Indeed, the view of democracy and justice I am proposing will have to include a novel idea of citizenship, one that is tailored to multicultural societies and the age of diversity. It will also have to be able to play a strong role in motivating just actions and social policies. In short, it will have to avoid the limitations that many think plague the two leading approaches to society and justice, communitarianism and political liberalism. Equally important, this view of democracy and justice will have to include a demonstration that the multivoiced body is not itself an oracle: some might fear that the idea of society as a multivoiced body could be just as totalizing and potentially oppressive as the views it challenges. These tasks will be taken up in the last chapter of the book. Besides addressing the limitations of traditional communitarianism (Charles Taylor) and political liberalism (John Rawls and Habermas), chapter 10 will include criticism of the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt and a discussion of ideas that are closer in spirit if not the letter to my own (those of Iris Marion Young, Derrida, Lyotard, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau). What, finally, is the relationship of the multivoiced body to those realities that Plato and many religions want to place “above” it, and to those animate and inanimate (both natural and artificial) realms that many others want to place “below” it? The video opera of Korot and Reich and the novel by Saramago present themes of religion, nature, and technology, as

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well as of society. Thus we must address them, even if only in the form of a promissory note for future work, and even if we must, in the spirit of the multivoiced body, reject the idea of anything being either “above” or “below” us. These concerns raise the question of what secular and religious groups can retain or will have to give up of their previous self-conceptions in order to accept what I am claiming is our identity as participants in a multivoiced body. Korot and Reich’s The Cave provides the fullest evocation of a unity composed of differences. For convenience, I will use it to stand for the type of unity or identity I wish to clarify and defend in the rest of the book. But the additional ideas in Saramago’s novel will be included within its scope. Appealing to the notion of the multivoiced body as the type of unity invoked by The Cave cannot by itself bring about the valorization of difference. But perhaps it can provide a way of seeing our world that contributes to transforming Hegel’s “life and death struggle”—the battle to the death between “masters and slaves” 18—into a reality that more closely resembles the life-affirming contest among Nietzsche’s “conversing and controverting gods.”19 The idea is not to eliminate what will always be legitimate and often productive conflicts among us; it is rather to reveal the nature of the “us” that participates in these struggles and is brought together beneath and through them. Perhaps the type of unity evoked by The Cave, once it is better understood through the agencies of other works of art and philosophy, can help us to overcome the more destructive dimensions of the discord that surrounds the actual cave at Hebron and similar complex realities around the globe. The optimism of this claim is, of course, tempered by the same world events that have generated it.

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2

History of the Dilemma

Cosmos, Chaos, Chaosmos

The first chapter introduced the main issue of this book, how to think of social and political unity in an age of diversity; how to escape the dilemma of imagining society in terms that either sacrifice heterogeneity for unity or unity for heterogeneity. The chapter also presented an initial response to this dilemma, the idea evoked by The Cave of a unity composed of difference. In the chapter that we are now embarking upon, I will clarify this idea by appealing to the history of the concepts of cosmos and chaos. This history culminates in the notion of chaosmos, which receives its fullest development in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their treatment of chaosmos and related concepts will be important for clarifying the idea of a unity composed of difference and my concretization of this idea into society as a multivoiced body. Nonetheless, the chapter will end with a criticism of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the self. This criticism and some of the other issues raised in the chapter will present a challenge that the concepts of voice and multivoiced body must be able to meet if they are to help resolve the dilemma with which we have started.

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The Struggle Between Cosmos and Chaos Ra and Apophis At the end of each day, Ra enters his sun-boat and descends beneath the horizon in order to fight with Apophis, the god of chaos. The stakes are high: another dawn and the order of the world: the chaos that gave birth to the cosmos and humans could always reclaim its progeny. Ra repeats his struggle against Apophis at each twilight. Meanwhile, the armies of ancient Egypt mimic this battle in their conflicts on the ground. Their priests recite a daily liturgy in Ra’s voice, hoping that he in heaven and their armies on earth will continue to win over chaos: He is fallen to the flame, Apophis with a knife on his head. He cannot see, and his name is no more in this land. I have commanded that a curse be cast upon him; I have consumed his bones; I have annihilated his soul in the course of every day; I have cut his vertebrae at his neck, severed with a knife which hacked up his flesh and pierced into his hide. . . . I have made him non-existent.1 The Egyptians’ portrayal of nature as the repeated victory of cosmic order over chaos, good over evil, is also represented in the ancient Mesopotamian religions of the Sumerians, Assyrians, Akkadians, and Babylonians, and in Vedic Indian, Ugaritic, and Canaanite beliefs. With the Iranian Zoroastrians and the Judeo-Christian traditions of Syro-Palestine, these stories of eternal combat are transformed into the apocalyptic faith of final victory: cosmos and good will eventually win out over chaos and evil. Whether eternal struggle or ultimate salvation is invoked by these religions, chaos is hated and feared. It is also sometimes valorized. For example, the worshippers of Ra thought that chaos, or Nan, was a source of rain and of the annual inundation so important for the fertility of the Nile river valley; they also noted Ra’s rejuvenation in his night passage through Nan.2 Chaos, therefore, presents an ambiguity: it is treated with opprobrium and yet, at least as an afterthought, is praised for having creative powers. This “afterthought” becomes a revolution for Friedrich Nietzsche and those postmodern thinkers, particularly Deleuze and Guattari, who develop his legacy. Besides clarifying the ideas of a unity composed of difference and multivoiced body, an examination of this revolution and the

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history of thought leading up to it will show that these two notions are not equivalent to “chaos” in any pejorative sense of the word. Indeed, we will see that they go beyond the traditional opposition between cosmos and chaos. This examination will also raise two major questions, which I will directly address in chapter 8, on the “social unconscious”: why has there been this hatred of chaos, yet why also a guarded admiration that later becomes an enthusiastic endorsement of it by a number of thinkers?

The Triumph of Cosmos In Timaeus, Plato presents one of the earliest philosophical treatments of cosmos and chaos. He says that the three principles of the world are the invisible Forms or “being,” the sensory objects that depend on and imperfectly imitate these Forms, and the chora, that is, the “receptacle” or “mother,” in which the sensory objects are “born” and located. Whereas the forms can be grasped by the mind and the objects by the senses, the chora can be apprehended only “by a kind of spurious reason, and is hardly real.” 3 When Plato does attempt to describe the chora, he says that it is “formless,” and must be so in order to receive the impress of the sensory objects.4 But he evidently does not intend “formless” to mean that the chora is completely amorphous. For he states that the chora is originally in erratic motion and includes the four elements—fire, water, earth, and air—when “they [are] all without reason and measure,” that is, before the erratic motion has a chance to winnow them like grain and allow them to find their distinct regions during a later stage of the development of the universe.5 Thus Plato thinks of the four elements and hence the chora itself as a hodgepodge of overlapping, intermingled ingredients (“without reason and measure”) and not as a homogeneous mass. After the four elements find their proper regions in the chora or “mother,” a “demiurge” shapes them into sensory objects or “children” in accordance with the model provided by the Forms or “father.” 6 Plato is notorious for vilifying chaos; one need only think of the famous cave analogy that we discussed in the previous chapter, where humans are shackled facing the back wall of the cave and mistake fleeting shadows for reality, or of his depiction in the same text of the soul as a war in which reason and spirit attempt to control the “hydra-headed beast” that symbolizes our bodily appetites. However, Plato’s use of the family term mother for the chora, and his recognition of her necessity in

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the construction of the human setting, indicates that he senses an aspect of chaos that is more laudable than his philosophy can fully permit—just as the ancient Egyptians made occasional positive references to chaos as Nan. Moreover, Plato’s portrayal of chora as intermingled ingredients rather than as a homogeneous mass is also similar to the ancient Egyptians’ description of Nan as populated by timeless “hybrid creatures, monstrous beasts, [and] headless men.” 7 We will see that characterizing chaos in terms of hybridity is crucial for understanding the notion of a unity composed of diversity. Whereas the ancient religions and Plato view chaos ethically as well as cosmologically, the European philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—empiricists and rationalists—reduce chaos to a plurality of experiences that bombard the senses and move the mind to link them together into a coherent totality. The scientists of the same period equate nature with particles in motion that are governed by universal laws.8 Chaos, in other words, is just a problem to be solved. For Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and Karl Marx, however, chaos regains some of its awesome presence. Kant’s association of it with the sublime is particularly poignant. He argues that in the face of something that has overwhelming magnitude or grandeur, for example, the storm-tossed ocean, we experience despair over the inadequacy of our senses and imagination to encompass what is before us. Yet he adds that we also feel joy during the same event, for we realize that our reason can at least grasp the formal idea of this object. We can, that is, transcend the realm of our senses.9 Similarly, Hegel indicates that everything in the sphere of “sense certainty” is in flux. Upon examination, the here, now, and I we think we know with certainty dissolve into a plurality of heres, nows, and Is each time we try to fix them in our gaze; for example, the present moment at which one tries to point is eclipsed in the occurrence of the new now within which the pointing takes place.10 Although Hegel writes a philosophy that is intended to overcome this flux, he, like the ancient Egyptians, Plato, and Kant, nonetheless sees a positive side to it: the uncertainty associated with chaos is the motive for absolute spirit’s movement toward absolute certainty. Marx characterizes chaos in terms similar to Hegel’s, but he emphasizes its material basis and its manifestation as social conflict. The conditions of modernity—“All that is solid melts into air” 11— require social revolution for us to overcome the fragmentation they have produced. Through this revolution, we can unify humanity and nature, self and others, the mind and the senses.

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The sentiments of these modern thinkers are continued in the thinking of many contemporary philosophers. For example, the French existential phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, describes the phenomenal field as one in which initially “contradictory notions jostle each other” and produce “not only the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fills us.” 12 Like Kant, Hegel, and Marx, however, he assigns reason (embodied in perception) the task of taking up and at least provisionally completing the lines of order (logos) immanent in the field of phenomena.13 Chaos is good only as a negative principle—as that which reason must overcome in order to restore order and thereby redeem itself and humanity or as that which can put novelty into the world but only on condition that it does not violate the direction laid down by the single logos of the world. Even in the new scientific field of “chaos theory” thinkers herald certain phenomena, for example, the dripping of a faucet, as completely random and mysterious, only to turn around and gratefully discover mathematically expressible patterns within them: “order within chaos.” 14 In this treatment of cosmos and chaos thus far, we see that most Western thought adopts a fearful or at least irritated attitude towards chaos. We could appreciate the predominance of this attitude even more if we delved into yet another example of it—Sigmund Freud’s sentiments concerning the id and the demands its insatiable urges place on the ego. But I have already presented enough examples to substantiate my claim that traditional religion and thought have tended to condemn chaos and praise cosmos. I have also noted that Western thought sometimes pauses to acknowledge a debt to the more positive aspects of chaos, particularly its association with creativity. Such thought occasionally recognizes as well that chaos is a hybridized mix of beings rather than a homogeneous, formless whole. With Nietzsche and those who follow in his footsteps, however, the traditional hierarchy of cosmos and chaos is inverted and chaos takes on a higher value.

The Valorization of Chaos Nietzsche: From Dionysius to the Will-to-Power In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche discusses the relationship of Greek tragedy to the tension between chaos and order. Specifically, he distinguishes

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between three worlds, the Dionysian, Apollonian, and Socratic. Of these worlds, the Dionysian and the Apollonian share a symbiotic relationship: the Dionysian is a “truly existent primal unity, eternally suffering and contradictory,” which needs Apollonian art or “rapturous vision” and “pleasurable illusion” for its continuous redemption, just as the Apollonian world needs the Dionysian as the source of its being.15 The relationship between these two worlds in Greek tragedy consists in “the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, the conception of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored oneness” (74, see 38.). In contrast with this redemptory alliance between the Dionysian and Apollonian worlds, the Socratic covers over the Dionysian with conscious knowledge. Nietzsche says that the Socratic world is the product of a drive for excessive familiarity and the desire to correct existence (86–87). Within this rationalized realm, drama is epitomized by Euripides’ explanatory prologues, that is, by “aesthetic Socratism” and the claim that “to be beautiful, everything must be intelligible” (83–84). In Nietzsche’s portrayal of the Dionysian, Apollonian, and Socratic, two themes stand out that will be useful for the later characterization of society as a multivoiced body. The first is the reversal that Nietzsche performs on the Western tradition: chaos is the primary nature of reality and cosmos is merely an expedient—that of Apollo—for helping us to acknowledge the Dionysian dimension of our existence. The traditional view of cosmos—in contrast to cosmos as Apollonian—amounts to what Nietzsche designates as the Socratic. This dimension of our existence fears and wishes to deny the Dionysian. The second of the two themes concerns Nietzsche’s characterization of Dionysian chaos. He often describes it as “primal unity” freed from the individuation that appears typical of things in everyday consciousness. But he also says that Dionysian chaos is “eternally suffering and contradictory” and depicts it in terms of dance, music, and intoxication—activities in which bodies intermingle but without effacing the differences necessary for a creative tension among them (36–37). The hybridity of the most fervent Dionysian worshipper, the mythical satyr (half man, half goat), is emblematic of this mutual encroachment of the inhabitants of the realm of Dionysus (62–64). Rather than advocating an escape from this realm, Nietzsche sees redemption in a return to it— but only through the protective medium of Apollonian art. In his later work, Nietzsche portrays chaos in terms that further capture what he probably intended by the “primal unity” of the Dionysian.

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In The Gay Science, for instance, he says that the world is chaos and outside our usual intellectual, aesthetic, and moral categories.16 Nietzsche enlarges this description in The Will to Power, describing chaos “as force throughout, as a play of forces and wave of forces, at the same time one and many . . . a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms . . . as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness.” 17 But Nietzsche is most informative about chaos when he identifies it as the “will-to-power,” 18 that is, a hierarchical arrangement of conflicting “value-creating powers” or conflicting “active” and “reactive forces.” 19 When reactive forces dominate within a community, when the values that guide the construction of cultural codes are empty and amount to mere negations of other forces, Nietzsche says that the will-to-power within that society is “nihilistic”; when active forces are in the ascendancy, he says that the will-to-power is affirmative. For example, Nietzsche describes a society in which priestly aristocrats invent the code of “good and evil” out of their resentment against the more powerful knightly aristocrats and their life-affirming code of “good and bad.” 20 In contrast to the priestly aristocrats, the actions of their knightly counterparts spontaneously affirm life and its chaos. Nietzsche suggests that the nihilistic will-to-power could be reversed when future versions of this affirmative force are once more in the ascendancy. Whether nihilistically or affirmatively ordered, these active and reactive forces interact with one another and exist neither as a homogeneous totality nor as a plurality of separate value-creating powers that only incidentally cross each others’ paths. Nietzsche says that events in this world of contesting value-creating powers do not have essences and that “purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function.” The “entire history of a ‘thing,’ an organ, a custom,” he claims, is “a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes . . . in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion.” 21 In order to investigate the history of these interpretations and adaptations, for example, the imposition of the code of “good and evil” upon society, Nietzsche chooses a method, genealogical critique, that acknowledges its own participation in making history: the goal of this type of critique is not to record but to reverse the nihilistic tendencies that dominate Western civilization, that is, to overcome the value hierarchy of good and evil and

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to convert a nihilistic into a life-affirming will-to-power. Thus genealogy would reveal the nihilistic source of the “fable” of a true world that stands in opposition to an apparent world, of a world that contains God, truth, man and other images of permanence and that implicitly counsels us to escape the realm of becoming in which we reside. In place of this fable, genealogy celebrates the world and chaos as the “eternal fleeing and seeking each other again of many gods, as the happy controverting of each other, conversing again with each other, and converging again of many gods.” 22 Nietzsche’s Postmodern Offspring Nietzsche’s affirmation of chaos is itself a strong value-creating power in contemporary philosophy. Many influential thinkers follow a schema of thought reminiscent of the symbiotic opposition Nietzsche sets up between the Dionysian, Apollonian, and Socratic realms or the conflict between active and reactive forces: Deleuze and Guatarri’s deterritorializations and reterritorializations, Jacques Derrida’s différance and logocentricism, Michel Foucault’s madness and civilization as well as his later resistance and power, Luce Irigaray’s feminine and masculine, Julia Kristeva’s symbiotic and symbolic, Jacques Lacan’s real and symbolic order, and Jean-François Lyotard’s différend versus metanarratives, to name just some of the more well-known examples of this Nietzschean schema of thought. Each of these thinkers attempts to undermine the totalizing force denoted by the second term in the above couples, and does so by opposing to it another term—the first—that is not itself supposed to be totalizing. I will deal with each of these thinkers in the work ahead. To round out this role call of Nietzsche’s offspring, we could add the phenomena of postmodern art, deconstructionist architecture, nonnarrative literature, and even a museum that “is and is not” a museum.23 All these figures and phenomena indicate that a reversal of the ancient attitude toward chaos may be taking place—it is now exalted by many where once it was vilified or considered a nuisance. Nietzsche’s assertion that our usual categories do not apply to chaos is hardly an exaggeration. From within the realm of Apollonian individuation, our perspective is limited to clearly distinguishable, fully determinate objects. When we try to apply categories based on such objects to chaos, we are forced to describe the latter as either an undifferentiated mass or a mere plurality of things. Mestizaje advocates and other postcolonial thinkers help Nietzsche to escape this dichotomy through their elaborations on

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hybrid cultures, mixed-race identity, and other phenomena that capture the idea of a mutual encroachment of different elements. Their elaborations, moreover, can be used to suggest that what I will call “dynamic hybridity” is more basic than the stark opposition between cosmos and chaos. The notion of dynamic hybridity indicates that the participants in the historical battle between these opposing forces have missed a reality in relation to which cosmos and chaos are derivative or even aberrational. In Rabelais and His World, the Russian linguist and culturologist Mikhail Bakhtin, speaks extensively of Rabelais’s image of the “grotesque body.” Rather than depicting the body in terms of classic poses, that is, “the aesthetics of the ready-made and the completed,” 24 Rabelais reveals the body to be a hodgepodge of orifices and protuberances—plugged into the rest of the world—and, like life, never complete: It is not a closed, completed unity; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the mouth open, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose.25 But the Rabelaisian body is more than just a biological entity intermeshed with the world. Bakhtin argues that this body is the “collective ancestral body of all the people”—it is contained “in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed.” 26 Each person is therefore a hybrid formed from all the rest and continually growing from their joint powers. In order to capture this hybridity and growth, Rabelais depicts the bodies of Pantagruel, Gargantua, and many of his other literary characters as grandiose, exaggerated, and gross. The grotesque body and its counterpart, folk carnival celebrations, are affirmations of the “contradictory and double-faced fullness of life,” seeing “abundance and increase” in the unending cycle of life and death.27 Rabelais’s description of mutually encroaching bodies is a precursor of the postcolonial celebration of hybridity—cultures, identities, races, species, discourses and other singularities that are actually a dynamic tension among two or more forces. According to one of its leading advocates, Homi Bhabha, postcolonial designates perspectives that “emerge

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from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South;” “intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples;” and “formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the ‘rationalizations’ of modernity.” 28 This depiction of postcolonial discourse is poignantly illustrated in the work of María Lugones. In her writing, she often testifies to her multicultural heritage by juxtaposing Spanish and English sentences. In a striking passage, she uses a culinary example (making mayonnaise) and her own mestiza (Spanish/Indian) status in order to persuade her readers that hybridity rather than purity is a more appropriate characterization of identity: When I think of mestizaje, I think both of separation as curdling, an exercise in impurity, and of separation as splitting, an exercise in purity. I think of the attempt at control exercised by those who possess both power and the categorical eye and who attempt to split everything impure, breaking it down into pure elements (as in egg white and egg yolk) for the purposes of control. Control over creativity. And I think of something in the middle of either/or, something impure, something or someone mestizo, as both separated, curdled, and resisting in its curdled state. Mestizaje defies control through simultaneously asserting the impure, curdled multiple state and rejecting fragmentation into pure parts. In this play of assertion and rejection, the mestiza is unclassifiable, unmanageable. She has no pure parts to be “had,” controlled.29 Lugones’s endorsement of hybridity, the “curdled multiple state” that rejects both fragmentation and the “categorical eye,” is echoed in postcolonial works that focus on other themes, for example, the double consciousness produced in black intellectuals by the European Enlightenment and one of its products, the black diaspora,30 the interdependence of tradition and modernity in Latin American cultures,31 migrancy as a metaphor for modern societies,32 and exile TV.33 These postcolonial works do not testify to pure singularities that have become sullied by others, nor to completed

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or completable syntheses of different strains; they make the more audacious point that all cultures, identities, races, and discourses are hybrid from the beginning, all the way down, whether their bearers recognize it or not.34 The dynamic aspect of hybridity, however, is overlooked or underplayed in many of these works and has contributed to some disenchantment with the notion itself. Yet hybridity is not a dead synthesis or mere plurality of past cultural strains; these strains, as I will demonstrate, remain alive and competitive within their progeny.35 In developing a historical perspective for the notion of a multivoiced body, we have seen that a revised notion of chaos can replace the traditional renditions of cosmos and chaos as the primary way of describing reality. Moreover, this revision of chaos makes it neither an amorphous, indeterminate mass nor a mere plurality of unconnected elements. Instead, its elements are shot through with one another and remain “alive” within one another. Each of the inhabitants of chaos, in other words, is a dynamic hybrid. The interplay of these elements within one another sets up an order that does not “totalize” them, that is, does not diminish their heterogeneity. But there is still another chapter of the history of cosmos and chaos. Like Nietzsche and his intellectual descendants, the protagonists in this new chapter attempt to go beyond the stark opposition between cosmos and chaos. They introduce chaosmos, mutual immanence and mutual transcendence, and other ideas that bring further precision as well as richness to the dynamic type of hybridity we have been discussing, the unity composed of difference evoked by The Cave and the notion of a multivoiced body that we are developing in this book.

Chaosmos: Joyce and Whitehead In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce uses the word chaosmos for the structure of his book and reality.36 Joyce is inspired by Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, and other medieval sources as well as by Giambattista Vico and contemporary physics. He draws from them the view that everything is penetrated by everything else. This mutual encroachment of elements is equivalent neither to a set of converging nor absolutely diverging elements. Instead, reality as chaosmos involves aspects of both cosmos and chaos but is never reducible to either of them—they are the unattainable “limits” of two tendencies within chaosmos.

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For Joyce, this chaosmosic world is not representable. One can only glimpse its character by repeating it in another medium. Umberto Eco says that Finnegans Wake announces from the beginning what this medium will be: “an epic without clear divisions between the events, so that each event may implicate the others to form an elementary unity that does not exclude the collision and opposition between contraries.” 37 Joyce’s unique use of language allows for a repetition of this “elementary unity” as no other medium can. In order to illustrate how Joyce accomplishes this repetition, Eco contrasts metaphors and puns. A metaphor operates by substituting a vehicle for a tenor—“Her eyes are stars,” where “eyes” is the tenor and “stars” the vehicle. But in a pun the vehicle and the tenor continually refer back and forth to one another, each contained in the other. For example, the word chaosmos itself sets up a tension between its parts, cosmos and chaos. It is both and neither of these two terms. It forms an elementary unity within which the notions of cosmos and chaos rival their progeny, chaosmos, and each other for dominance, as well as help establish one another’s identity.38 The word chaosmos, in short, is a dynamic hybrid. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce produces punlike words and couplings of words that contain indefinitely many allusions. His book, like the particular puns throughout it, attempts to repeat (and not represent) the sense in which the universe is a creative tension of forces shot through with one another and in continual metamorphosis. Joyce’s appreciation of the interpenetration of things, of each thing’s dynamic hybridity, is more systematically articulated in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. In his desire to produce a picture of reality that unites both poetry and physics in one “categoreal scheme,” Whitehead concludes that the world is the product of a primordial “extensive continuum” and a “creative principle.” The first of these, the extensive continuum, does not involve shapes, dimensions, or measurability and yet explains the solidarity of the universe; the second, the principle of creativity, accounts for the universe’s generativity. If we consider the extensive continuum and creativity together, then reality is the continual process of converting the extensive continuum’s potential and indefinite divisibility into a matrix of mutually immanent “actual entities.” 39 This conversion of the potential into the actual is repeated indefinitely, each repetition a metamorphosis of the preceding matrix as well as the further transformation of the infinite continuum into “proper regions of extension,” that is, into actual entities. Prior to each of these conversions, the real but not yet

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actualized regions of the extensive continuum mirror both one another and all the regions thus far actualized.40 Creativity, therefore, differentiates a primordial solidarity into a specific variant of that solidarity, for example, the four-dimensional universe and its various stars, planets, and other inhabitants. For our purposes, I draw upon two of Whitehead’s central points. The first is his formula for the relationship among the basic elements of reality, one that explains the “solidarity” of the universe: the regions of the extensive continuum, as well as the actual entities into which it is converted, are simultaneously “mutually immanent and mutually transcendent in relation to one another.” 41 Each of these elements is unique, yet made up of all the others as well. Each is at once part of the identity and the “other” of the rest. This notion of simultaneous immanence and transcendence therefore lends precision to the idea of dynamic hybridity. We can think, furthermore, of solidarity as cosmos, creativity as chaos, and the two together as chaosmos. The second central point supports the first. This point is Whitehead’s claim that contemporary science at least tacitly endorses the truth of Plato’s chora or “receptacle”: “the individual thing is necessarily a modification of its environment, and cannot be understood in disjunction,” in other words, that reality is an interplay of beings that are at once mutually immanent and mutually transcendent.42 In order to spell out this formula of solidarity and ultimately the type of unity suggested by Korot and Reich’s The Cave, we must go outside Whitehead’s own philosophy. Whitehead defends an anthropocentric panpsychism, that is, each actual entity has a degree of sentience or a moment of experience modeled on the way humans perceive their surroundings. Whitehead does stipulate that sentience in atoms and in other seemingly inanimate beings is of a very low grade.43 Nonetheless, one should search, at least initially, for a naturalism that does not begin by granting animal and human sentience such a central role in what prima facie is a universe in which sentient creatures are just one type of being among others. Whitehead also posits a metaphysical God as a guarantee of both novelty and order in the universe.44 However, his notion of God imposes from without what one should first try to show is generated from within. If successful, this latter strategy would provide a more parsimonious solution to the problems of novelty and order.45 Deleuze and Guattari develop a cosmology that has much in common with Whitehead’s notions of extensive continuum and creativity.46 But their cosmology has the advantage of avoiding Whitehead’s panpsychism

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and his appeal to a transcendent God. It also refers explicitly to the notion of chaosmos and elucidates important aspects of that concept. This elucidation, we will see, contributes to a fuller understanding of the sort of unity invoked by The Cave and Whitehead’s idea of the mutual immanence of mutually transcendent elements. Apart from these concerns, any philosopher today should consider stating where his or her ideas stand in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s work: no less a thinker than Foucault has proclaimed, in a now famous statement, that “perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian.” 47

Chaosmos: Deleuze and Guattari According to Deleuze and Guattari, chaos is “absolute divergence” in the sense of “series” of elements that completely exclude one another, in no sense communicate with each other and in no way compose a unity. As chaosmos, however, these divergent series do communicate with one another and therefore compose a unity. But this unity does not involve the convergence of these series at any point, for example, originating or ending in God, and does not require that the series subordinate themselves to a particular category.48 Deleuze and Guattari therefore refer to chaosmos as a “composed chaos” or “chaos rendered consistent” (TP 6, 313).49 The term consistency means the “consolidating” or “‘holding together’ of heterogeneous elements” without diminishing their difference from each other (TP 323, 328–29). Moreover, the interaction among these series continuously gives rise to new, equally divergent series. In the context of a discussion of Lucretius’s naturalism, Deleuze therefore claims that “nature as the production of the diverse can only be an infinite sum, that is, a sum which does not totalize its own elements.” 50 Too orderly or unified to be chaos, and too internally divergent to be cosmos, chaosmos presents us with a reality that defies the exclusiveness of these two traditional concepts.51 Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of Being and time add a material and a temporal dimension to this logical characterization of chaosmos. Being has traditionally been understood as the One that is eternally the same. For example, it has been depicted as a single, univocal quality possessed by each being, or, like Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” as a substance to which all other beings are related by analogy or imitation. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari make difference primary: they view Being as that

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which differs from itself and “expresses in a single meaning all that differs” (TP 254),52 “a unique cast or roll of the dice for all throws.” 53 But in this differing, Being still retains its univocity. Thus Deleuze says that “Being is voice,” 54 a “single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple . . . a single clamor of Being for all beings.” 55 On this view, Being is not first a “one thing” that then divides, but division, the proliferation of difference, from the beginning. Its oneness is this proliferation. Everything is the same or has the same meaning, but as difference. Because Being is this activity of dividing itself, it is an event or “pure becoming,” that is, “always already complete as it proceeds and so long as it proceeds.” 56 It is complete despite, and because of, its continuing to proceed in the production of differences. For it to be both complete and proceeding at once, it must involve a time that is distinct from our usual conception of temporality. Deleuze and Guattari therefore distinguish between “aeonic” and “chronic” time. In a single-authored text, Deleuze says that “univocal Being is the pure form of the [Aeon]” and defines Aeon in terms almost identical with those used by Guattari and him for Being: it is “the unique cast [of the dice] from which all throws are qualitatively distinguished,” and all these throws are “the qualitative forms of [that] single cast which is ontologically one.” 57 Deleuze and Guattari also refer to Aeon as “the indefinite time of the event.” The term indefinite in this context means that Aeon “continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneously too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened” (TP 262).58 In other words, Aeon, the time of the event, is different from measurable chronic or “clock time”: in chronic time what has just happened must come before what is going to happen rather than being simultaneous with it. Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari hold that Aeon (like Being itself ) is ontologically prior and gives birth to “chronic time” but is not “in” it.59 Indeed, we will see that Aeon is a dimension of a “virtual realm” that is largely responsible for the actual realm with which we are more familiar. Because Being is complete (as a becoming) and the pure form of aeonic time, it is not determined by anything outside itself—there is neither an efficient cause prior to it nor a final cause ahead of it. It provides its own unity, a composed chaos, a composition of all the differences or events into which it divides itself. However, this unity is different from that provided by Hegelian and other teleological accounts of Being. Its end is not

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any kind of convergence, but rather the continuous division of itself into differences, into qualitatively distinct events.60 If Being were complete without continuing to proceed, if it were not a becoming, it would be cosmos; if it were the proceeding without being complete, it would be chaos, that is, a plethora of noncommunicating events; but, as complete in its continuous proceeding or division of itself into events, it is chaosmos and can never undermine itself as or lose itself in the production of difference and novelty. Because it is the pure form of Aeon, Being divides that which transpires into something that simultaneously is going to happen and has just happened. In other words, each of the qualitatively different events into which Being divides itself is, like Being, always and already complete as it proceeds and as long as it proceeds. Moreover, each of these events is always the birth of divergence; their destiny is difference. Even when an event appears to have finished proceeding, it is only transforming itself into another event, that is, continuing with both Being’s and its own becoming (TP 249, 507). Being’s freedom from external causes and its association with difference are reinforced by a second characteristic of Aeon: Aeon is a “roll of the dice,” that is, a purely chance event.61 If it were not a chance event, it, and its pure form, Being, would be determined by something else and carry the sameness imposed upon it by the latter. A third characteristic of Being concerns the interconnectedness of events: Being is the “infinity of the modifications that are part of one another on this unique plane of life” (TP 254) or “the unique event in which all events communicate with one another”—“they all form one and the same Event.” 62 This reference to the intercommunication of these events is similar to Whitehead’s notion of “solidarity” and the formula of “the mutual immanence of mutually transcendent elements.” As I said earlier, however, Deleuze and Guattari differ from Whitehead in that they do not feel that this solidarity requires a transcendent God. Their philosophy is one of “pure immanence”: nothing is imposed upon the universe from the outside (TP 266). Being, then, has three primary characteristics: the primacy of difference, that is, Being’s continuous division of itself into new events that are, like it, complete and yet, as complete, always becoming other than themselves; its status as a chance occurrence, one not determined from the outside; and the intersection within itself of all the heterogeneous events that issue from it. These three characteristics provide a temporal and a

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material meaning for chaosmos to go along with the logical one that we discussed initially, inclusive rather than exclusive differences. If Deleuze and Guattari are right, chaosmos is the nature of Being or reality. In the next chapter, I will show that, with appropriate qualifications, these characterizations also hold for society as a multivoiced body.

Chaosmos and Naturalism Besides the notion of chaosmos, Deleuze and Guattari provide a nonmechanistic form of naturalism. The spirit of this form of naturalism is the backdrop of my view of society as a multivoiced body. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari’s naturalism relies on their notion of events that play a role in shaping their own destiny. I will incorporate a version of that notion as well as their concepts of “reciprocal presupposition” and “doublebecoming” in my own nonmechanistic account of ourselves and society. I am encouraged in this endeavor by Deleuze’s reference, albeit cryptic, to Being and events as “voices” (TP 77, 80, 84).63 Because of these affinities with the view I am developing, I will take full advantage of Deleuze and Guattari’s generous declaration that their works are “tool boxes” from which others can borrow concepts so long as they use them in an experimental manner, as novel responses to problems such as the dilemma of diversity we are addressing.64 This effort, as well as the intense interest in their work today, will require that I give an extensive presentation of their nonmechanistic naturalism. At the end of it, however, I will criticize their notion of the subject and thus show why it is necessary to go beyond their philosophy and into the subsequent chapters of this book.

Assemblages: Virtual and the Actual Dimensions Deleuze and Guattari refer to natural events as “assemblages” (agencements). Although assemblages dynamically intersect with one another, I will begin with a diagram of one in isolation from the others (figure 2.1). This diagram of an assemblage could stand for the becoming of a star, a blade of grass, the feudal age, or any other event. Whatever the event is, it happens all at once. Nonetheless, we can still distinguish phases in the process, some of which are more basic than others, though all are required. The event, moreover, goes from what Deleuze and Guattari will

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Diagram of an Assemblage Plane of Consistency

Plane of Organization

relative deterritorialization

reterritorialization

form: semiotic systems Expression: substance: indexes, icons, or symbols Function molar line of segmentarity: AM* state of overcoding (conjugation) Abstract Machine and Diagram

BwO*

supple line of segmentarity: realm of molecular negotiation line of flight or abstract line: AM state of mutation (connection)

Matter form: physical systems, organisms, or organization Content: substance: bodies, things, or objects

absolute deterritorialization * “BwO stands for “Body without organs,” and “AM” for “abstract machine.”

figure 2.1

Diagram of an Assemblage

call a “virtual” to an “actual” state, from, as we will see, a less determinate though productive phase to a more determinate rendition of itself. In the diagram, the virtual state of the assemblage is represented by the left half of the assemblage, principally the plane of consistency, the abstract machine (with its diagram, function and matter), and absolute deterritorialization. The actual state is represented by the right half of the assemblage, mainly the plane of organization, expression and content, reterritorialization, and the latter’s consequence, relative deterritorialization.

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Both the virtual and the actual states are real, but the latter type of state takes its guidance from the virtual. Nonetheless, the virtual could not exist if the actual state were not already bringing about its determination, were not already “reterritorializing” or actualizing it, converting the original absolute deterritorialization into a “relative” deterritorialization. In the same way, a thought gives rise to the words necessary for its completion, but would fall back into nothingness, disappear, without the actuality of the words. The movement from left to right, that is, the direction pointed out by the arrows in the diagram, is intended to depict this dynamic process of an assemblage’s actualization. The virtual-real and the actual-real call for more elaboration. Any event operates upon the virtual plane of consistency that it simultaneously “draws” (tracer) or creates (TP 511).65 Everything on this plane— time, space, and matter—is “anexact.” Like the sense of a poem, having a thought, the scenes we take in at a glance,66 or the phenomenon of “roundness” (as opposed to the geometrical concept of a circle or a particular round object), anexact things and forces have their own status and are neither exact nor inexact—they are “vague but rigorous” and “essentially but not accidentally inexact” (TP 367, 407–9, 507).67 For example, the distance between the ordinal numbers, “first,” “second,” etc., is radically different than the distance between the cardinal numbers, “one,” “two,” etc.: the ordinal numbers admit of no metric divisions between them, but the cardinal numbers do (one and a half, one and two-thirds, etc.).68 To go from the ordinal first to the ordinal second is like an indivisible “quantum leap” in physics. The ordinal numbers are therefore anexact—though still rigorous—and the cardinal numbers exact. Deleuze and Guattari use the term smooth space to designate the virtual and anexact companion of aeonic time. Smooth space simultaneously motivates and is drawn by an “abstract line,” that is, “[a] line of variable direction that describes no contour and delimits no form,” like those of which Jackson Pollock’s paintings are composed. In contrast, “striated space,” like the time of Chronus, has definite dimensions, permits geometrical and other forms of measurement, and contains countable objects (TP 499). Because Aeon and smooth space are always together, they form an “anexact space-time” (TP 407). This anexact space-time is always being converted into the exact space and time with which things appear to us in our practical or scientific mode of interaction with them. The virtually real “matter” of the plane of consistency—its third constituent, along with Aeon and smooth space—is “impalpable” and consists of

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“relations of movement and rest, slowness and speed between unformed [and infinitely small, non-indefinitely divisible] elements” (TP 266, also 254). Each of these elements is a pure “intensity,” distinguished from the rest only by its relations of movement and rest, slowness and speed (TP 33). These relations are relative to and spring from the absolute movement and rest of the plane of consistency. The relations, like the elements they define, are anexact and nonmeasurable (TP 267). According to their degree of speed or the relation of movement and rest into which they enter, the elements belong to a particular “Individual, which may itself be part of another Individual governed by another, more complex relation, and so on to infinity” (TP 254). The elements therefore form what Deleuze and Guattari call the “longitude” of an Individual and play a role in producing and ensuring the order that we observe in nature (TP 256). Deleuze and Guattari often refer to the Individuals composed from elements as haecceities. Haecceities can be characterized by linguistic phrases involving one or more of the following: an indefinite article, a proper name, or an infinitive verb, for example, the “heat of the day” (“What heat!”) as opposed to an exact temperature; “a long day” (“What a long day!”) as opposed to the day as a set number of hours; “a tree that greens” (“to green”) as opposed to a static state of affairs (“The tree is green”); or, to return to our initial example, “having a thought” as opposed to its delineation in a specific phrase. Depending on the relations of speed and slowness between the unformed elements that make them up, these haecceities have specific “affects,” that is, capacities to affect or be affected by other haecceities. These affects constitute what Deleuze and Guattari call the “latitude” of a haecceity on the plane of contingency (TP 253, 260–63). Haecceities are thus defined by what they can do rather than by an essence and they are “fuzzy aggregates” rather than fully determinate objects.69 Deleuze and Guattari also refer to haecceities as a “machinic phylum,” that is, “the flow of matter in continuous variation” from which things are composed (TP 406–7). To the degree that we encounter haecceities rather than just their transformed presence on the plane of organization, including our own existence as haecceities, they reveal to us the machinic phylum and the anexact realities that make up the plane of consistency.70 These comments on the anexact nature of the plane of consistency— its time, space, and matter—clarify one of the major terms represented on the left side of the diagram, the “plane of consistency.” They also allow us to specify the sense in which an event plays a role in its own destiny.

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Because the material on the plane of consistency is anexact, it can give rise to many different versions of itself. Any event, then, is the creation of itself out of its material—it is a thickness or a “consistency” that the demiurgelike event can shape into the actuality it, the event, is becoming. Chance is still a factor in this activity: the resulting version of the virtual event is not fully determined in advance by the event—several renditions are always possible or, more precisely, many different actual-reals can be produced from the same anexact virtual-real. Moreover, the actual outcome is exact, that is, different in kind from the anexact reality that produced it. Therefore, the actual-reals on the plane of organization do not resemble the anexact virtual-reals from which they receive their initial impetus, despite their isomorphic relation to each other. It is, then, this virtual realm that plays a leading role in producing nature in a nonmechanistic manner and shows how an event, including the voices that we shall deal with in subsequent chapters, plays a role in its own destiny. But this is merely the bare outline of this type of production. We must now take a closer look at the relation between the virtual and the actual as well as elaborate more on the terms in the diagram of the assemblage.

Absolute Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization An event’s plane of consistency does not by itself produce actuality. It operates in conjunction with a “plane of organization” or “transcendence,” represented on the right side of figure 2.1. Indeed, neither of the two planes could exist without the other and both are necessary for the production of “multiplicities” or assemblages.71 The plane of organization is always bringing the activity on the plane of consistency to temporary completion, that is, always transforming the anexact haecceities into determinate, lawful, hierarchically organized beings. Upon this plane appear the subjects and objects that philosophy has traditionally thought to be the basic elements of reality (TP 265–66, 269–70).72 The plane of consistency is also a movement, one that Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “absolute deterritorialization” (TP 56, 508–10; represented at the bottom of figure 2.1).73 From the beginning, absolute deterritorialization is always in the process of accomplishing two related tasks. The first of these tasks is to loosen up the “strata” or determinate entities of an assemblage’s plane of organization so that they will contribute to

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rather than hinder the becoming of an event. The second task is to ensure that events are “always in the process of passing into something else, into other assemblages” (TP 323). In other words, what might look like the completion of absolute deterritorialization’s creation of an assemblage is equally the transformation of the latter into another event—its continuing to proceed. In response to absolute deterritorialization, the plane of organization operates to “reterritorialize” the consequences of the former’s labor or, more precisely, to convert absolute deterritorialization into a more limited “relative deterritorialization” (TP 270; represented at the top of figure 2.1).74 Indeed, the plane of organization and reterritorialization could be said to redeem absolute deterritorialization: they provide it with stratified materials and thereby keep it and the plane of consistency from turning into “pure abolition” or a “regression to the undifferentiated.” 75 Perhaps because of the redemptive as well as restrictive dimension of reterritorialization, Deleuze and Guattari refer hyperbolically and somewhat negatively to it and the plane of organization as the “Judgment of God” (TP 40, 56, 265–66). Despite the necessary role of both dimensions in the becoming of an assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari attribute ontological priority to absolute deterritorialization. They claim that “the cutting edge of deterritorialization” is what “holds an assemblage together” in the very act of taking the assemblage beyond itself (TP 336–37, also 56). Creativity and novelty are favored over stability and sameness, chaosmos over cosmos and chaos. Rather than being a positive creativity in its own right, the work of the plane of organization and reterritorialization is a reaction to deterritorialization’s creative activity.76 Its immediate results are undone as the event transforms itself into a new becoming. Because we focus on those temporary results, we think we are seeing a single enduring substance or thing and overlook the series of becomings, the continuous movement of absolute deterritorialization that has played the primary role in producing the assemblages: flux underlies and belies permanence. We can now summarize the main dynamic depicted by figure 2.1. An event consists primarily of absolute deterritorialization and the plane of consistency. The event fashions itself on the same plane of consistency that it simultaneously draws. On the basis of this fashioning, the event converts “particles,” “forms,” and “functions”—“strata”—from the plane of organization into the haecceities and affects most nearly compatible with what it is becoming. The plane of organization reterritorializes this

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result, but absolute deterritorialization is already on its way to undoing this reterritorialization and creating yet another assemblage out of the former event. Though constrained by the plane of organization, absolute deterritorialization is always one step ahead of it. Being is “complete” because it contains in a virtual manner everything that is going to transpire; but it is also always proceeding, always in the process of having its progeny actualized and sequentially ordered in chronic time—always metamorphosing itself.

Abstract Machines and the Mechanosphere Deleuze and Guattari say that an “abstract machine” works in conjunction with absolute deterritorialization and plays the lead role in constituting an assemblage (TP 510, 141–42). They use the term mechanosphere to denote the intersection of the infinite number of “abstract machines” that populate reality (TP 71).77 According to Deleuze and Guattari, each abstract machine has two simultaneous states. We are already familiar with both of them: one is deterritorialization on the plane of consistency and the other is reterritorialization on the plane of organization (TP 70–71, also 56–57, 223–24, 513–14). More specifically, the becoming of an assemblage involves the “effectuation” or actualization of the abstract machine and its associated plane of consistency into the (temporarily) completed assemblage and its organization on the plane of organization (TP 511). Prior to this effectuation, the abstract machine acts as a “diagram” that holds together and “plays a piloting role” in relation to the development of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “traits of expression” and “traits of content.” In figure 2.1, the traits of expression are referred to as “function,” the traits of content as “matter.” The piloting role of the abstract machine’s diagram consists in placing the traits—“nonformal” functions and “unformed” matters on the plane of consistency—in “continuity” with one another and into “continuous variation” (TP 142, 511–12). These ongoing variations give the matter-function different “affects,” that is, capacities to affect or be affected by other assemblages (TP 260–61). In other words, the abstract machine “constitutes and conjugates” the assemblage’s cutting edges of deterritorialization. The abstract machine is in the process of becoming something that will be superficially similar to what has traditionally been called the form and matter of a substance (TP 141). But at this stage of becoming its function and matter are barely

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distinguishable from each other and are still the anexact “traits” of what is to come (TP 143–44). To revert to an earlier example, the combined function and matter are like an inchoate but active thought still on its way to becoming the definite meaning that the words will give it. Because reterritorialization is in play simultaneously with the becoming of the assemblage and the plane of consistency, the diagram and the two traits are being transformed—effectuated—into what Deleuze and Guattari call the “form of expression” and the “form of content,” which pertain to the plane of organization. These are represented on the right or “actualization” half of figure 2.1. The form of expression is a semiotic system, whether we are talking about the genetic code on the level of genes or the language and coded practices of a group. The form of content is that to which the form of expression is related, whether we are speaking of genetic material, or the members and surroundings of a group. To put this distinction in more familiar terms, speaking or words are an example of the form of expression, and bodies perceiving things an example of content. These forms are further complicated because Deleuze and Guattari say that each of the two forms has its own form and substance. In the end, the effectuation produces the ordered signs and objects upon which we concentrate our attention, ignoring the flux beneath, that is, the movement of absolute deterritorialization already in play and ontologically prior to reterritorialization.

Reciprocal Presupposition What is the exact relation between expression and content? Besides its abstract machine, an assemblage includes what Deleuze and Guattari call the “machinic assemblage.” The machinic assemblage is the phase of an assemblage’s becoming in which an abstract machine and its traits are effectuated into the forms of expression and content that characterize the assemblage’s plane of organization. In this phase, the machinic assemblage differentiates between a form of expression (and thus appears as a “collective assemblage of enunciation”) and a form of content (and thus also appears as a “machinic assemblage of bodies”; TP 71, 145–46). In relation to the machinic assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari introduce a notion that will be especially important for my comments in later chapters concerning the relation between language and perception or words and things. The machinic assemblage places expression and

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content in a relation of “reciprocal presupposition” rather than in relations of signifier to signified (TP 145, also 108, 140–41, 146). Because the diagram of the abstract machine originally links them together, because they are the actualization of function matter or the traits of expression and the traits of content, the forms of expression and content mutually limit one another, “each intervening, operating in the other,” in the becoming of the assemblage (TP 88). Therefore, expression or the “territorial refrain,” as it is called in the organic and anthropomorphic strata (TP 317, 323),78 is not self-sufficient or all-determining: the abstract machine is not an example of linguistic idealism (TP 146). But expression does have an edge over content. Its greater flexibility or “superlinearity,” and also the malleability of the trait of expression from which it is derived, reveal the affinity of expression to the creativity of absolute deterritorialization and to the latter’s priority over stratification and reterritorialization (TP 89).79 Deleuze and Guattari offer an example, the feudal age, that allows for a fuller delineation of reciprocal presupposition. In this example, the form associated with expression (the collective assemblage of enunciation) is the feudal age’s juridical regime of heraldry. This regime is an “incorporeal transformation,” a statement or discourse that is simultaneously a transformative action. Thus the oaths of obedience a knight swears to a lord or the love declared by a courtier to his betrothed establish those who make them as, respectively, vassals or betrotheds. In other words, incorporeal transformations create specific identities for subjects. The substance associated with these forms of expression consists of the signs, for example, words or insignias, that an expression relies on in order to be a transformative speech act. The form associated with the content (the machinic assemblage of bodies) is, in this case, the institutional organization of bodies typical of feudalism. The substance associated with this form consists of the specific bodies and their associated implements: the overlord, vassal, serf, the knight and the horse (as created by the introduction of the stirrup), and the other weapons and tools used by these people (TP 89–90). Expression and content are clearly linked. The loyalty oaths and other instances of the juridical regime of heraldry are attributed to and interpolate (give a particular identity to) the bodies of the feudal system, but are not identical with or fully descriptive of them. For example, the bodies (the content) are not themselves words and can resist or cause revisions in the form of expression even while the latter is establishing them as having a particular social status. We can consider this reciprocal presupposition

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between feudalism’s forms of expression and content (linked and originally guided by the feudal abstract machine and its diagram) as the “horizontal axis” of this assemblage. In contrast, the assemblage’s “vertical axis” consists in the “territorialized sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, that carry it away.” These cutting edges, influenced by the other assemblages that make up the historical context of the feudal abstract machine, transform the assemblage of the feudal ages into another assemblage, for example, the Crusades (TP 88).80 With these comments on the mechanosphere, abstract machines, and reciprocal presupposition in mind, that is, with the main terms presented in figure 2.1 now defined, we can clarify the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari’s “chaosmosology” is neither mechanistic nor vitalistic. More specifically, we can see how some version or another of anexactness is necessary for a nonmechanistic version of naturalism such as the one Deleuze and Guattari as well as I want to defend.

Beyond Mechanism and Vitalism “Universal Machinism” In the history of thought, mechanistic and teleological explanations of natural events have been the main rivals for philosophers’ and scientists’ allegiance. These rivals take both deterministic and indeterministic forms. Mechanistic determinism holds that the reason for an event is an efficient cause, that is, one in which the effect follows the cause without reference to purposes, intentions, or ends. Teleological explanations, in contrast, make these references. Indeterministic versions of mechanistic and teleological explanations allow that events are not completely determined by causes, but, to the extent that they are determined, efficient causes (mechanism) or final causes (teleology) do the determining.81 Deleuze and Guattari develop a form of naturalism that they call “universal machinism” (TP 256, also 330, 333). Machinism escapes the mechanistic form of explanation because it holds that an event, including absolute deterritorialization, plays an irreducible role in its own destiny: an event is not determined exclusively by any external cause, nor is it undetermined, for example, a pure chance occurrence in which the event plays no agentlike role. In an article on Bergson, Deleuze therefore says that an event or “thing” has priority over what we would normally think of as its

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causes: “the thing comes in a sense before its causes. . . . We must indeed start with the thing itself because causes come afterwards.” 82 This notion of the thing coming before its causes conforms to Deleuze and Guattari’s later description of “reverse causality” as the “action of the future on the present, or of the present on the past” (TP 431). As a virtual abstract machine, each event provides an anexact diagram for the way it will be actualized. On the basis of that diagram, the event transforms the particles, forms, and functions on the plane of organization into the “causes” it needs in order to complete its becoming and, with the help of reterritorialization, its actualization. The abstract machine/diagram as “founding” term requires its “founded” term for its realization: the plane of consistency and the plane of organization share a symbiotic relation in which the plane of consistency, the founding term, sets the direction for itself under the limitations imposed by the plane of organization, the founded term, from which it must garner its causes.83 In aeonic time, the event as what is “going to happen” is a founding term that, ontologically, coexists or is simultaneous with itself as that which “has just happened,” the founded term. In chronic time, this ontological founding-founded relation is transformed into the temporal sequence of a prior cause (what has just happened) and a subsequent effect (what is going to happen). In our scientific and everyday practical affairs, we typically record the sequential order and overlook the ontological order. We do not usually see, therefore, that the event is responsible within the limits set by the plane of organization for establishing its own causes. Some examples will make the meaning of reverse causality more concrete. The first one, having a thought, we have already encountered. Phenomenologically, a thought cannot exist, will fall back into nothingness before it fully appears, unless it calls up the words necessary for its realization or completion. If the thought cannot organize the words at its disposal into the cause necessary for its actualization, the cause never takes place and the thought never becomes. Like a flash that was never able to be, it disappears into the night it was supposed to light up. Similarly, Deleuze argues that an animal’s sight, or rather the animal’s seeing as an event, forms the eye necessary for this becoming by “causing scattered diffuse luminous excitations to be reproduced on a privileged surface of its body”—by becoming “bound light.” 84 Seeing (virtual-real) brings about the eye (actual-real) necessary for its existence. Deleuze and Guattari also claim that “territorialization,” the becoming of a territory, transforms (deterritorializes and converts) a bird’s song and its instinct for aggression

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into the ingredients necessary for the establishment of a territorial organism: the instinct of aggression does not cause the bird to establish a territory; rather, the movement of territorialization reorganizes the organism and the ground it fortuitously occupies into a song (a particular form of a “refrain”) and a relatively permanent home that express the bird’s new style of mating, lodging, and fighting.85 Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari divide the multiplicities and assemblages that make up the cosmos into three major strata. On the physicochemical stratum of reality, the combined multiplicities form stars, rocks, and the other inorganic assemblages of the universe; on the other two strata, the “organic” and the “anthropomorphic” or “alloplastic,” the combined multiplicities often form “territorial” assemblages (TP 502). Territorial assemblages consist of animate beings and the environs these beings claim through the use of birdsongs, scent, legal documents, or other markers of ownership (TP 502–5). All three strata coexist virtually with one another. But the ones that are “going to appear” later in chronic time reorganize the ones that “have just happened” in order to become actual themselves. For example, the emergence of the anthropomorphic stratum or human existence is the result of that stratum, as virtual-real, deterritorializing and reorganizing the already actual organic stratum.86 In all three of these strata, the plane of organization and its ingredients place conditions on just how creative the abstract machine and absolute deterritorialization can be. Although these events as virtual-real take place in aeonic time, their actualization places them in chronic time. In chronic time, what the virtual event has brought about for its actualization (words, the eye, the reorganization of instinct, song, or the organic stratum) appears as that which happens first, as something that “has just happened,” and what does the bringing about (for example, the virtual events of seeing or territorialization) appears as that which takes place next, as that which is “going to happen.” But the virtual event has ontological priority over the actual real it helps produce, aeonic time over chronic time, and the plane of consistency and absolute deterritorialization over the plane of organization and reterritorialization. In addition, the priority of absolute deterritorialization means that the event in question is always already going beyond itself, is already the becoming of another assemblage. An event, then, plays a role in its own destiny despite the attention we usually pay exclusively to its end state—its reterritorialization on the plane of organization—and to the temporal and causal order entities exhibit there.

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This exposition shows that Deleuze and Guattari’s machinism is an example of neither deterministic nor indeterministic mechanism: reverse causality involves the actualization of an anexact and virtual abstract machine that sets the direction or “diagram” for its own becoming; therefore the abstract machine plays a role in its destiny and is neither a purely random occurrence nor caused exclusively by events external to itself. Indeed, machinism is like traditional naturalism only in that it rules out a transcendent God—supernaturalism—and mind-body dualism.87 But is Deleuze and Guattari’s cosmology teleological? It is certainly not Aristotelian or any other type of deterministic teleology, because chance is an aspect of every becoming. What of indeterministic teleology then? Because of the chance factor together with the anexact character of the diagram that guides an event’s becoming, Deleuze and Guattari’s naturalism is closer to a form of indeterministic than deterministic teleology. But it is also different from the usual view of that or any other teleology because Being and all other events are, for Deleuze and Guattari, oriented to divergence rather than convergence, that is, to an end that is not an end in the traditional sense of the term, indeed, an end that is equally a counter-end. Can Deleuze and Guattari’s view be accused of vitalism, that is, of postulating a vital energy that sets its own limits? It would merit this charge only if absolute deterritorialization was not always in the process of being curtailed by reterritorialization and the plane of organization, that is, only if it was not always “assembled” or being assembled. Thus machinism escapes vitalism as well as mechanism and resembles only a nontraditional form of teleology, one oriented toward difference rather than convergence.88 “Unnatural Participation” and Involution Deleuze and Guattari hold that every becoming, whether the advent of feudalism or the appearance of a new species, occurs in a “block” with other becomings that influence what each will be (TP 238–39, 293–94). In other words, figure 2.1, with which we began this section, left out the dynamic intersection of an assemblage with other assemblages. Now we can make up for this deficit. Most important, the notion of blocks of becoming allows Deleuze and Guattari to claim that the creation of new forms of existence is much more diverse than traditional views of evolution could permit—that it even involves “unnatural participations.” Deleuze and Guattari designate this view involution to contrast it with the standard

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notion of “evolution.” As we will see, unnatural participations and involution take the notion of hybridity to new heights. They also pave the way for introducing in later chapters how the interplay among voices produces new social discourses. One of the examples that Deleuze and Guattari use to illustrate involution is the “becoming-wasp” of the orchid and the simultaneous “becoming-orchid” of the wasp (TP 306).89 Some orchids display an image of a female wasp on their surface. This attracts male wasps whose attempts at reproduction inadvertently help to spread the pollen of the orchid and thereby assist in the latter’s reproduction. In standard evolutionary theory, this connection between the wasp and orchid would be explained by a combination of genetic variance and natural selection (TP 238–39, 293–94). An orchid with the randomly produced phenotype of the wasp image presumably had greater reproductive success than it would have had otherwise. This increase in the orchid’s probability of survival was due to the extra help of the wasps in spreading pollen, that is, in the natural selection of the orchids with the female wasp image. In challenging this purely evolutionary account, Deleuze and Guattari claim that “an assemblage never contains a causal infrastructure” and therefore the wasp-orchid relationship, like all other events, must ultimately be explained in terms of “an abstract line of creative or specific causality, its line of flight or of deterritorialization.” They add, however, that “this line can be effectuated only in connection with general causalities of another nature [such as natural selection], but is in no way explained by them” (TP 283, also 335 and 507). Thus absolute deterritorialization is the main “cause” of an event, but its effectuation by the machinic assemblage involves the plane of organization and causal circumstances that place some restrictions on the latitude of the assemblage’s becoming. Scientific laws are not dealing with mere appearances, but they are restricted to only one plane of reality. More specifically, Deleuze and Guattari state that the becoming-wasp of the orchid and the becoming-orchid of the wasp involve a “shared deterritorialization” and a “shared reterritorialization”: 1. A deterritorialization of the wasp insofar as the wasp becomes a “liberated piece” of the orchid’s reproductive system in addition to being an agent in its own species’ reproductive system, but therefore also a reterritorialization of the orchid insofar as the wasp transports the orchid’s pollen.

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2. A deterritorialization of the orchid insofar as the orchid forms an image on its surface of the female wasp and becomes the object of an orgasm in the male wasp, but therefore also a reterritorialization of the wasp insofar as the wasp is now attracted to the female wasp image on the orchid (TP 10, 293). The creative involution involved in this becoming has to do primarily with deterritorialization, which runs its line “between” the becoming of the wasp and that of the orchid and carries them away in a shared “zone of proximity” where the “discernibility of points” on their planes of consistency disappear (TP 294, also 272–73, 279). Because of this indiscernibility or blending, the wasp and the orchid become “two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a compound rhizome” and form “relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further” (TP 10).90 In other words, this shared deterritorialization, this loosing up of strata and the intermingling of anexact intensities and haecceities, permits the conjoining of the two becomings’ respective planes of consistency into a new symbiotic relationship with one another, a new assemblage: “a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp” (TP 10). This type of involution holds for events that are as disparate as the aparallel evolution of cats and baboons via a type of C virus, the becoming-white whale of Ahab coupled with the becoming-void of Moby Dick in Herman Melville’s famous novel, and the becoming-bird of a musician coupled with the becoming-celestial of a bird through the musician’s singing (TP 10, 244, 249–50, 304, 306). For Deleuze and Guattari, these becomings are not imitations or identifications but new, irreducible assemblages. Because all becomings intersect on the plane of consistency, these “unnatural participations” (crossing natural species’ divisions) or “contagions” (TP 241–42) are actually multiple joint becomings and guarantee that novel assemblages are inexhaustible and the norm for nature: reality as a sort of carnival. Though inexhaustible, some new becomings are more likely than others: the new blocks of becomings that emerge out of the multiple virtual interconnections among becomings on the plane of consistency, such as the wasp-orchid double becoming, are due to the greater affinity among the latitudes (affects) of the participating becomings’ haecceities—greater than their affinity to the haecceities of the other becomings or assemblages in the universe. Creative involution, despite its name, is not a regression to something less differentiated than that with which it started: the becoming-wasp and

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becoming-orchid block form a new territoriality. But because the shared deterritorialization “snaps up” totally different species, no “wasp-orchid” species can descend or be propagated from it (TP 238–39). Once the virtual block of becoming is formed, the actuality effectuated from it—the orchid with the wasp image and the role of the orchid and wasp in each other’s reproductive behavior—obey the laws of genetics and natural selection on the plane of organization. This development also ensures that the block’s continued movement of deterritorialization will have to struggle with these orchid and wasp strata and partially undo the effects of their laws in order for the assemblage to be carried away into new blocks of becoming, whatever they might be (TP 283). These laws or traditional causalities play a role in the stratified assemblage’s resistance to the scope of subsequent deterritorializations.91 This role contributes to the continuity in the planes of organization of the assemblages in the same series, for example, orchids with the wasp image. But, when their planes of consistency and movements of deterritorialization are taken into account, each assemblage in the series is distinct from the others and each is something new under the sun.92 Thus Deleuze and Guattari offer an account of becoming that incorporates traditional evolution theory. However, it points beyond evolutionary theory to a more basic source of difference and novelty. The view of voices and society as a multivoiced body will do the same. In ending this section on chaosmos and nature, we should note that we are endorsing a number of ideas that are radical: an event that is complete so long as it still proceeds; a principle of solidarity that has each abstract machine shot through with all the rest; and anexactness, a reality that is neither determinate nor indeterminate. But the radicalness of these notions should not lead us to shun their acceptability as helpful concepts for understanding reality. Contemporary physics, after all, offers equally radical concepts, ones that would sound extremely strange to the adherents of Newtonian physics or to any others who believe only in well-formed, fully determinate entities.93 If we can accept radicalness in physics, surely we should not shun it in philosophy.

Chaosmos and Ethics We have seen that Deleuze and Guattari construe assemblages, indeed, Being itself, as “composed chaos.” Each event is always and

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already a divergence into novel becomings. Because these divergences “communicate” with or are inclusive of one another, they do not diverge absolutely. Moreover, their affinity to one another gives rise to new divergences. As events that are complete, this is their destiny only insofar as they are still proceeding into new becomings. Reterritorialization is necessary for such events because it prevents absolute deterritorialization from becoming the absolute divergences of chaos. But reterritorialization can go too far and excessively limit the novel effects of absolute deterritorialization. We can therefore speak of Deleuze and Guattari’s chaosmosology as a naturalistic ethics or a politics: the priority they assign absolute deterritorialization and the plane of consistency valorizes creativity, difference, novelty, and freedom over repetition, identity, stability, and determinism.94 I will argue in a later chapter that emphasizing creativity and heterogeneity overlooks that chaosmos is also a form of ontological solidarity—overlooks that intersection, along with difference and chance, is one of its three characteristics. This ontological solidarity provides a naturalistic basis for a political form of solidarity. In relation to the figures we discussed earlier, we can think of chaosmos or composed chaos as the conjunction of Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian realms: the Dionysian provides the chaos, and the Apollonian the “composure.” The Socratic realm, however, is the success of reterritorialization, a real effect of nature, rather than merely being an error or ego reaction, which is the status Nietzsche assigns to it. In a twist on the traditional view of cosmos, Deleuze and Guattari redefine it (like chaos) in terms that make it equivalent to chaosmos. They identify Cosmos (with a capital C) as “an immense deterritorialized refrain,” a “deterritorializing [force],” and “a plane of consistency” (TP 327, 337).95 Viewing the earth as the site of a struggle between reterritorialization and absolute deterritorialization, they say that “the stakes” are either “the earth girded, encompassed, overcoded, conjugated as the object of a mortuary and suicidal organization surrounding it on all sides, or the earth consolidated, connected with the Cosmos, brought into the Cosmos following lines of creation that cut across it as so many becomings” (TP 510). They appear, then, to equate Cosmos with “composed chaos.” We might even say that they have performed the double movement of a Derridean “deconstruction”: the traditional hierarchy that favors cosmos over chaos is inverted, now favoring chaos, but this chaos is reinscribed as chaosmos, composed chaos or Cosmos with a capital C.96

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Chaosmos and the Problem of Anonymity Despite its innovativeness and usefulness, Deleuze and Guattari’s cosmology raises an issue that I will refer to as the problem of anonymity. Deleuze and Guattari take seriously the limitations that many postmodern thinkers feel are placed on our self-understanding by the traditional and “humanistic” notion of the subject. These limitations are most poignantly expressed by Foucault: By humanism I mean the totality of discourse through which Western man is told, “Even though you don’t exercise power, you can still be a ruler. Better yet, the more you deny yourself the exercise of power, the more you submit to those in power, then the more this increases your sovereignty.” Humanism invented a whole series of subjected sovereignties: the soul (ruling the body, but subjected to God), consciousness (sovereign in a context of judgment, but subjected to the necessities of truth), the individual (a titular control of personal rights subjected to the laws of nature and society), basic freedom (sovereign freedom within, but accepting the demands of an outside world and “aligned with destiny”). In short, humanism is everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power: it prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized. The theory of the subject (in the double sense of the word) is at the heart of humanism, and this is why our culture has tenaciously rejected anything that could weaken its hold upon us.97 Foucault’s appraisal of humanism is by turns devastating and provocative. Many of us would agree that the traditional ideas of humanism and the subject tend to lock us into a univocal identity. This univocity, in turn, can contribute to the notions of purity that abet exclusionary forms of politics and violence between ethnic, religious, and other groups. On the other hand, we want to salvage some of the self-worth that humanism traditionally has seemed to grant us. Deleuze and Guattari themselves are committed to rescuing us from what they see as the limitations of the traditional notion of a subject. In particular, they want to remove the curbs that the idea of a subject might place on the creativity and aleatoric predilection of absolute deterritorialization.

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In order to accomplish this goal, they characterize the conscious self or traditional subject as ephemeral. They take the true agent to be a set of self-less productions or an ownerless desire that occurs on the plane of consistency and is called a “desiring-machine” in one of Deleuze and Guattari’s major works.98 On the plane of consistency, this machine has three “modes”: a set of “conjunctive syntheses” that produce “material flows” or “reality,” 99 a set of “disjunctive syntheses” that “codes or recodes” these flows, interconnecting and multiplying them,100 and a set of “conjunctive syntheses” in which a subject is produced “alongside” or “peripheral to” the machine. This subject “has no personal identity” (though it attributes such to itself ) and it “consumes and consummates each of the states through which it passes, and is born of each of them anew, continuously emerging from them as a part made up of parts, each one of which completely fills up the body without organs in the space of an instant.” 101 In this kaleidoscopic production of the subject, the body without organs that the subject “fills up” is produced as a “whole,” but one that does not unify or totalize the parts alongside which it exists. It differs from the produced subject in that it establishes “aberrant paths of communication between [these] noncommunicating vessels, transverse unities between elements that retain all their differences within their own particular boundaries.” 102 In other words, the body without organs has organs (parts), but these organs are not unified or of a fixed nature, they are not a subject or an organism; instead, they are intrinsically open to being organized and reorganized in many ways (in TP 158). On Deleuze and Guattari’s view, then, the desiring or abstract machine and its syntheses produce reality, a reality of “material flows,” the body without organs brings about “aberrant paths” of communication among the partial objects or parts of the machine, and the conscious ego is simply a product of these two agencies. What we call the subject or “ego,” what we think of as the “I,” what Descartes called the “cogito” and Kant the “I think” that accompanies synthetic activity, is merely a product of these productive, recording, and consummating activities, yet mistakes itself for an agent.103 Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari hold that “humans are made exclusively of inhumanities,” that is, the intensities, speeds, and cutting edges of deterritorialization that are the nontotalized “parts” of the body without organs (TP 190); the ego or subject is produced by social prohibitions that limit the freedom or desire of these inhumanities.104 The purpose of the critical activity Deleuze and Guattari call “schizoanalysis” is “that of tirelessly taking apart egos and their presuppositions; liberating

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the prepersonal singularities they enclose and repress; mobilizing the flows they would be capable of transmitting, receiving, or intercepting; establishing always further and more sharply the schizzes and the breaks well below conditions of identity; and assembling the desiring-machines that countersect everyone and group everyone with others.” 105 But Deleuze and Guattari fail to tell or are not concerned about “who” does the “taking apart [of our] egos” or “who” the “we” is that benefits from it. Indeed, once the prisoner ego is freed from itself, there seems no “who” left, only the anonymous or impersonal “flow” of absolute deterritorialization and the “inhumanities” of which Deleuze and Guattari speak. As the body without organs, the “you” and “I” that have any sense of identity or agency we could call our own is lost in the forces that make up the assemblage of which we are a part. As a subject or ego, on the other hand, we have an identity, but one that is restrictive and lacks any power in the body it is “alongside.” Deleuze and Guattari’s depiction of us captures the sense in which we find ourselves “thrown” into a world, into the “matter flows” of existence, but, at least prima facie, leaves out the sense in which we play a role in and have some responsibility for our destinies, omits a subject that we can recognize as ourselves. Many of us can sympathize with Deleuze and Guattari’s desire to escape traditional humanism and the concept of the subject underlying it. But Deleuze and Guattari’s desire to escape that predicament pushes them to the other side of the abyss. It leads them, and also Nietzsche as well as other postmodern thinkers, to endorse cosmological forces that seem to erase our own contribution to our existence and to society. But it is not enough to rest with this criticism: “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 these debaters and communicators are inspired by ressentiment.” 106 In response to this challenge and the dilemma of diversity, we need to go beyond criticism of Deleuze and Guattari’s view of the self and produce a view of ourselves that captures both our anonymous and our personal sides at once. This view must preserve the postmodernist emphasis upon heterogeneity and the production of novelty and yet allow us a say in what transpires. It must, in other words, remain true to the characteristics of chaosmos that we have just explored and to the social unity, the unity composed of differences or “composed chaos,” enigmatically evoked by The Cave. Because the notion of voice suggests a combination of anonymity and the personal, and because we experience our voices directly and

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thus have first-hand evidence of them and their characteristics, it is time to see if this notion can provide unity or solidarity and, simultaneously, affirm heterogeneity or dynamic hybridity, as called for by the age of diversity. Ironically, this proposed remedy will use a concept, “voice,” that Deleuze and Guattari equate with Being and events but do not go on to exploit to its fullest. The success of this notion of voice cannot be founded on ideas or percepts that claim to be infallible. It must be evaluated by what it brings to us relative to the counteroffers of its contenders during the same historical period. Looked at this way, philosophy is “the rivalry of free men [sic], a generalized athleticism: the agon,” that is, a contest among competing points of view.107 In addition, the absence of an absolute foundation does not mean that all positions are of equal value. Better and worse arguments or considerations can be presented, and positions improved or changed through these means. Philosophy, like life, takes place in the arena of the present rather than in the realm of the eternal.

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3

Society as a Multivoiced Body

Midnight’s Children and Voice In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie represents the ethnic and political diversity of India in terms of 581 children born within the first hour of India’s independence. Each of these children has a special talent. One of them, Saleem Sinai, has the ability to read minds and send thoughts directly to other persons. He is therefore the natural site for communication among the children—for a “national network” through which the voices of the children, the voices of India, “the myriad tongues of Babel,” can speak to one another and argue over the philosophies and aims they might adopt as a group.1 Saleem also recognizes that each “I” in India “contains a similar multitude” and that understanding any of these “I”s requires “swallow[ing] a world.” 2 Despite their initial willingness to hear one another, the children of midnight eventually become more like the adults rearing them. They transform their network of voices, their “Midnight’s Children National Conference,” into a plurality of discourses that exclude others—into racism and other forms of sectarianism, each demanding that it become the new society’s oracle.3 We can think of Rushdie’s novel as a special application of the epoché used by phenomenologists: it temporarily places the nonfictional world

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in brackets the better to reveal its hidden characteristics.4 Even my initial summary of Rushdie’s novel suggests two of these characteristics, ones that will also help make the themes of the previous two chapters—the type of unity evoked by The Cave and the notion of chaosmos—more concrete. The first of these characteristics is that societies are composed primarily of heterogeneous “voices”—the “myriad tongues of Babel” resounding in Saleem’s mind. The second is that the voices heard by Saleem are constituted by their differences from and similarities to one another. More fully stated, each of these voices, and hence society itself, is a dialogic hybrid: each voice is shot through with the rest, each contesting for audibility with the others that have helped to constitute it. My task in this and subsequent chapters will be to elaborate on these two characteristics of society as well as others related to them. It will also be to give a preliminary indication of how the notion of voice responds to the dilemma of diversity and saves us from the problem with which I concluded the last chapter: the anonymity that plagues Deleuze and Guattari’s cosmology and their concrete rendition of chaosmos.

The “Midnight’s Children National Conference” and Two Traditional Concepts of Society The primacy and dialogic hybridity suggested by Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children preclude the two major traditional ways in which social thinkers have portrayed society: as a univocal subject that dominates all the other elements in its domain or as a mere plurality of individuals. Rousseau’s notion of the “general will” is an example of the first of these two traditions. According to it, the general will of the people is directed to a univocal and common good for everyone from the beginning: “the general will . . . always looks to the public good” even though the people, poorly instructed, “do not always see what is good for it.” 5 Hegel provides another example of this tradition: he argues for the existence of an “absolute spirit” that ultimately brings back together under its sovereignty what, in order to gain epistemological certainty, it initially separated and put at a distance from itself. The many different views of human existence are ultimately synthesized in absolute spirit’s satisfaction with and knowledge of itself.6 Hobbes and Locke provide instances of the “plurality of individuals” tradition. According to Hobbes, each individual wars against the others

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in the “state of nature.” Persons collectively and individually can escape this brutish existence only by agreeing to submit to a sovereign power, thereby establishing “civilization.” 7 More sanguine, Locke holds that individuals can obey the law of nature, reason, even in the state of nature. This law teaches “all mankind who will but consult it, that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” 8 Not everyone, however, will obey the natural law. Individuals therefore form civil societies with written laws and majority rule in order to preserve themselves and their freedom, property, and other natural rights.9 For both Hobbes and Locke, then, individuals agree to a “social contract” in order to better preserve themselves as individuals. This agreement is anchored in the pragmatic reasoning of individuals as individuals rather than motivated by a homogenizing Rousseauean general will or Hegelian absolute spirit. In contrast to these unitarian and pluralistic traditions, Rushdie portrays society as much closer to the notion of chaosmos. The dialogically related voices he speaks of are a unity composed of differences. Because of the irreducibility of the heterogeneity of the Midnight’s Children National Conference, the conference is not a univocal subject. And because of the unity formed by the intrinsic intersection or interplay of its voices, neither is it a mere collection of individuals. In other words, Rushdie’s conference embodies two of the three features of chaosmos that we identified in the last chapter: irreducible heterogeneity and the mutual intersection of these differences. We will see that the third feature of chaosmos, chance, also pertains to voices. Both the characteristics of society that Rushdie highlights have also been endorsed by many other writers since the advent of the age of diversity. To limit our survey for the moment to the Americas, Walt Whitman proclaimed that innumerable voices resounded in his own, including “many long dumb voices,” 10 and Herman Melville compared the “blood” of Americans to the Amazon River, “a thousand currents all pouring into one.” 11 In the twentieth century, these sentiments are echoed by two African American writers, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. Despite the racism in the United States, Hughes is still able to say, “You are white— yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That’s American.” 12 Similarly, Ellison’s “invisible man” concludes that “America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain.” 13 South of the border of the United States, a spokesperson for the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas valorizes their political organization as a “network of voices . . . recognizing

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itself to be different in the tonalities and levels of the voices which form it.” 14 These and many other literary and political references to the ideas of voice and a unity composed of intersecting differences reinforce the appropriateness of incorporating these notions into a philosophy of society and politics.

The Appeal of Voices Even before we examine the notion of voices and their dialogic hybridity more closely, we can recognize some of their philosophical and political merits. Phenomenologically, we never encounter ourselves apart from a dialogue, either with ourselves or with others. When we wake, we are already involved in an exchange that will continue throughout the day, switching interlocutors and topics, but always pulling us along in its train. To break from all dialogue would literally mean our disappearance as self-aware beings, as existences “for ourselves.” Much else goes on inside and outside us besides speech, but we register these events in terms of what we can or cannot say about them, whether in poetry or prose. Dialogue, then, is an omnipresent and defining feature of our lives: we are dialogic creatures. We will see later, moreover, that the interplay among voices is the basis of our creativity and freedom. The value of this interplay, therefore, goes beyond even its status as the setting and condition of our existence. The hybridity of our voices or Rushdie’s “multitude in each ‘I’” is, like the primacy of voices and dialogue, also apparent in our experience: we often hear ourselves sounding like our parents or other figures that have been significant for us. We frequently encounter ourselves as a plurality, indeed, as an interplay among many voices. This cacophony, its demands as well as its richness, is brought out by another writer, James Joyce, in his description of the voices that contend for audibility within the mind of his character, Stephen Dedalus: While his mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms and turning in irresolution from such pursuit he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things. These voices had now come to be hollowsounding in his ears. When the gymnasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging him to be strong and manly and

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healthy and when the movement toward national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him be true to his country and help to raise up her fallen language and tradition. In the profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly voice would bid him raise up his father’s fallen state by his labours and, meanwhile, the voice of his school comrades urged him to be a decent fellow, to shield others from blame or to beg them off and to do his best to get free days for the school. And it was the din of all these hollowsounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.15 Stephen, like the rest of us, lives with, indeed is composed of, a multitude of voices—those of one’s parents, country, school, and, most satisfying for Stephen, “phantasmal comrades” who provide an escape from the “hollow sounding voices” of the other figures that dominate his existence. Although Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus hail from different continents and cultures, their minds share the same heterogeneous and agonistic structure. The experience we have of these voices resounding within our own provides direct evidence for the intersection of elements or dynamic hybridity spoken of by Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, and many of the other thinkers we encountered in the last chapter. Voice also has the unique property of pointing simultaneously to the ethereal and the mundane dimensions of our existence. On the one hand, voice is the conveyor of discourse, of our thoughts and dreams. The logic of a discourse, moreover, provides us with a trajectory. On the other hand, voice consists of sounds made by our bodies. It thus allows us to keep one foot in heaven while the other remains on earth. It captures the linguistic and corporeal dimensions of our existence along with our dialogic hybridity or social mode of being. The idea that society is an interplay among voices should also appeal to our political sensibilities. It brings to mind democracy as a “form of life” rather than as simply a set of procedures for a smooth transition of power. This form of life valorizes heterogeneity and the dialogic contest for audibility among the social body’s participants. Once we recognize that this form reflects our social identity, it can have a strong role in motivating us to eliminate the economic and discriminatory barriers that marginalize

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many voices in the public realm and reduce democracy to a mere skeleton of what it should be. These phenomenological and political considerations lend force to Rushdie’s suggestion and my contention that we are primarily voices or creatures of dialogue and that society is a unity composed of diversity—that it is a multivoiced body. But Rushdie’s use of a mind reader as the setting for the Midnight’s Children National Conference is a literary device and requires more philosophical elaboration before we can march from fiction back to actual societies. We can begin this elaboration by examining Mikhail Bakhtin’s thoughts on language and culture. Indeed, Bakhtin’s notion of language, supplemented by other features of discourse from structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers, will provide much of the infrastructure that voices need for earthly ballast beyond the sounds provided by our larynges. Moreover, Bakhtin’s own use of voice is a major inspiration for my adoption of that term as the central constituent of society.

Bakhtin’s Concept of Hybridization In order to assimilate language to the notion of voice that we are developing, we must recognize that language is a dynamic force rather than a static structure. Bakhtin’s linguistic theory helps us achieve this recognition. He claims that language “is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms,” that is, only in grammar books or traditional linguistic theory.16 Outside these artificial realms, language is a plethora of intersecting “social languages” or “‘languages’ of heteroglossia” that represent “the co-existence of socio-ideological contradiction between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given bodily form.” 17 Each of these social languages is a “concrete socio-linguistic belief system” that has a “distinct identity” within a national language.18 Like Rushdie, Bakhtin also refers to these systems as “voices.” 19 He adds explicitly, however, that each social language is a “form” for conceptualizing its surroundings in words and is “characterized by its own objects, meaning and values.” 20 Moreover, each social language is reflexive and evaluative, “a particular point of view on the world and on oneself, the position enabling a person to interpret and evaluate his own self and his

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surrounding reality.” 21 Indeed, any such language is in effect a notion of the good simply because it designates certain things as more relevant, more worthy of comment, than others in a given context. Because social languages are inherently evaluative, they are close in spirit to Nietzsche’s “value-creating powers” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblages,” both discussed in chapter 2.22

Hybridization Bakhtin uses the notion of hybridization to explain the intersecting of these heteroglossic languages. This notion is important for us because it provides a precise portrayal of how voices can be “inside” one another, how each voice is a dynamic hybrid. Bakhtin defines hybridization as “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.” 23 These mixtures take two forms, “intentional” and “nonintentional.” Intentional Hybridization In intentional hybridization, one linguistic consciousness explicitly represents another consciousness and each belongs to a different system of language.24 More exactly, the representing linguistic consciousness is explicitly and simultaneously directed toward a referential object—its subject matter—and toward another’s discourse or speech: “In one discourse, two semantic intentions appear, two voices.” 25 In parody, for example, the representing voice introduces its “semantic intention” into another person’s discourse and forces it to serve the representing discourse’s opposing view of the common subject matter.26 Thus Rushdie represents the Sinai family as socially pretentious when its members speak to their British landlord in an Oxfordian rather than in a vernacular form of English: “‘Tell me, Mr. Methwold,’ Ahmed Sinai’s voice changed, in the presence of an Englishman it has become a hideous mockery of an Oxford drawl, ‘why insist on the delay? Quick sale is best business, after all. Get the thing buttoned up.’ ” 27 Rushdie’s representation of the family members in this manner subordinates their contrived social language—Indians-talking-like-upperclass-Brits—to his own, more egalitarian voice. The family’s pretentiousness is clear just by the words Rushdie has chosen for them to say; he

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barely needs the explicit statement that they change their voice into “a hideous mockery of an Oxford drawl.” The full cost of having to appropriate the voice of the dominant group in order to succeed or even survive is brought out by W. E. B. Du Bois’s description of the “souls of black folk” as he experienced it in his epoch: After the Egyptians and Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.28 Linguistic appropriation or “double voicing” is also illustrated by the manner in which people sometimes confront those who dominate them. For example, Paul Gilroy describes how the double consciousnesses of Du Bois and other black intellectuals also turned European Enlightenment thought to some advantage for blacks oppressed by whites during the black diaspora.29 Similarly, Irigaray prescribes the strategy of “mimicry” for converting the phallocentric subordination of the feminine into an affirmation of “two lips touching,” that is, a plurality of mutually resounding voices.30 In colonial Laos, the full greeting, even among Lao officials, often involved first shaking hands Western style and then, following the Buddhist tradition, bringing the palms of the hands together in front of oneself and inclining the head forward, the degree of the latter depending on the social rank of the addressee. The two sets of “gestural voices,” Western and Lao, stood out clearly in this greeting. The Lao voice in this case could be either one of subservience to the colonial masters or an ironic revelation of their “benefactor’s’” status as an oppressor.31 Bakhtin thinks that intentional hybridization is the hallmark of the novel and links it to what he calls a Galilean perception of language, that is, a perception “made conscious of the vast plenitude of . . . social languages—all of which are equally capable of being [relative] ‘languages of truth.’ ” 32 Because of this “polyphonic” consciousness, Galilean novels

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can, like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, function as an epoché in order to reveal aspects of linguistic interchange in the nonfictional realm that would usually go unnoticed. Bakhtin feels that Dostoevsky is the novelist most responsible for making the active anticipation and the mutual influence of social languages in each other’s formation an object of artistic representation.33 His novels are particularly successful at designing a discourse about the character’s discourse. In constructing the novel, the author therefore speaks with rather than about the character. The author’s discourse and the speech of all the characters are established through their dialogic relation or “address” to one another.34 Both the author’s and the character’s discourses, moreover, are “unfinalizable.” 35 There is always more they could say. Add this addressivity and inexhaustibility to one another, and we wind up with dialogues that are in principle endless. Furthermore, Bakhtin believes that Dostoevsky’s novels point beyond themselves to “the development of the [polyphonic] artistic thinking of human kind,” a mode of thinking that “makes available those sides of a human being, and above all the thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere of its existence, which are not subject to artistic assimilation from monologic positions.” 36 Whereas Bakhtin thinks that Dostoevsky’s books are instances of “polyphonic artistic thinking,” he dubs Tolstoy’s novels examples of “monologic positions” or the “Ptolemaic literary tradition,” that is, “the absolutism of a single and unitary language.” 37 In the short story “Three Deaths,” Tolstoy tells of the demise of an ailing noblewoman, a coachman, and a tree. The three thanatopic beings are linked in the story only slightly: a coachman drives the noblewoman and, during a trip, takes the boots of another coachman who is dying in a roadside station; he then cuts down a tree in order to make a cross for the man’s grave. None of these three subjects enter into real dialogue with one another: the dying coachman sees neither the noblewoman nor the tree; the tree and the dying coachman never enter the ailing noblewoman’s field of vision; nor, of course, does the tree experience the other two dying beings. Their isolated worlds are united only in the vision of Tolstoy, who, in his story, reveals the lie of the noblewoman’s death and the wisdom and truth of the dying coachman’s life. As Bakhtin puts it, Tolstoy enjoys a “surplus” of vision over that of the noblewoman and coachman—he sees what they cannot see. He is able to possess this surplus and to finalize the lives of his characters only because he does not enter into a dialogic relation with them. This domination of “one cognitive subject” over the objects of its gaze also holds in Tolstoy’s great

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novels, even though they contain intricate dialogic relationships among their characters. For none of the fictional figures enter into a dialogic relation with the author himself, who saves the last word—his word, his truth—for himself and the advancement of his ideas.38 In contrast to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky would have placed the three characters in Tolstoy’s story into each other’s consciousness, into a dialogue with one another; we would see them through each other’s eyes. In other words, Dostoevsky would have played a role similar to Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai as the mind reader or intermediary for the Midnight’s Children National Conference. Bakhtin adds that Dostoevsky would have depicted the crises and turning points of the three characters, rather than dwelling on their deaths, so that they could remain unfinalized. Furthermore, Dostoevsky would have retained for himself only the minimum of informational surplus necessary for holding the story together. To have done otherwise, to have withheld any essential surplus of meaning for himself, “would transform the great dialogue of the novel into a finalized and objectivized dialogue.” 39 This doesn’t mean that Dostoevsky is free of social ideology; like Tolstoy, he does have an ideology, one religiously based and demanding that the intelligentsia merge with the common people. But, unlike Tolstoy, he does not allow it to finalize the dialogue in his novels—he does not permit it to transform a polyphony of “battling and internally divided voices” into “a polyphony of reconciled voices” or “homophony.” 40 In the same vein, Bakhtin contrasts Dostoevsky’s unfinalized dialogues with Plato’s tendency to extinguish the multiplicity of voices in the light of the great idea.41 Once Plato’s interlocutors reach a Form and are reconciled in their definition of it, there is no reason for them to continue their dialogue. Even if this goal isn’t always achieved in the Dialogues, Plato’s theory of Forms entails that finalization is theoretically the proper end of speech. For Plato, dialogue only has value as a means to an end. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children National Conference, the “multilogue” within Saleem Sinai’s mind, has more in common with Bakhtin’s depiction of Dostoevsky’s novels, is more Galilean, than Tolstoy’s or Plato’s Ptolemaic monologues. Nonintentional Hybridization Do Tolstoy’s monologic position, the Ptolemaic literary tradition, and, we could add, the “neutral” discourse of science mean that some utterances are not hybridized? According to Bakhtin, these utterances are just as hybridized as polyphonic segments of discourse, but their heteroglossic status is implicit—organic

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or nonintentional—rather than explicit or intentional. We are not aware of this hybridity—we may even use our ideologies to deny this intersection of our discourses—but it is there. More exactly, Bakhtin claims that the nonintentional type of hybridization does not involve the “direct mixing of two languages within the boundaries of a single utterance—rather, only one language is actually present in the utterance,” but this utterance is nonetheless always “rendered in the light of another language.” 42 The other language, the other voice, is tacitly at play in the present utterance. For example, Rushdie never critically discusses the idea of an authentic English language or of a pure Indian culture in Midnight’s Children. But his refashioning of English language and style throughout his book—what he calls his Angrezi—tacitly involves a condemning “side-ward glance” 43 both at the English and Indian ideals of purity. Similarly, a materialist discourse is partially formed by and at least tacitly understood through its difference from philosophical idealism or religions that refer to a supernatural or transcendent god. It therefore necessarily makes reference to idealism and religion even if it doesn’t directly mention them. In these and similar cases, we usually speak directly, and exclusively, of the referential object of our discourse, as if we and it were alone in the universe and as if our view held the truth about the subject matter. We leave to one side the contesting discourses that provide the setting within which our discourse is shaped and to which it owes, at least in part, its meaning or significance. Tolstoy, the literary Ptolemaics, and scientific discourse make at least a “side-ward glance” or implicit reference to other traditions of writing. They are therefore shot through with these other voices whether this is acknowledged or not. Every utterance is at least partly established through other discourses, even, and perhaps especially, those that they would repudiate.44 In its intentional version of hybridization, in the epoché it performs for us, the novel helps us to realize that every utterance is actually—intentionally or organically—a cacophony of voices. The degree to which language is hybridized is particularly indicated by the effects of this double voicing on syntax itself. V. N. Voloshinov, another member of the Bakhtin school,45 shows how the relationship between the speaker and a reported voice is incorporated into the syntactical structure of four types of “reported discourse”: Direct discourse: He protested and cried: “My father hates you!” Quasi-direct discourse: He protested: His father hated her!

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Indirect discourse: He protested and cried that his father hated her. Quasi-indirect discourse: He protested: “His father, he cried, hated her!” 46 In the two forms of direct discourse, the reported speech, “My father hates you!” is kept intact relative to its status in the two forms of indirect discourse. In the indirect forms, the reporter’s speech tends to override the reported speech, transforming it into “content,” that is, diminishing its emotive features and its compositional peculiarities (for example, its interrogative, exclamatory, or imperative form).47 The reporter trumps the reported. The “quasi” version of direct discourse is particularly interesting. As in pure direct discourse, the independence of the reporter’s speech is decreased in relation to that of the reported speech: to a greater degree than the indirect forms, it preserves “the reported character’s accentuation and intonation,” the “evaluative orientation of his speech.” 48 More specifically, Voloshinov points out that the omission of the verb cried in the quasi-direct discourse indicates the identification of the speaker with the speech of the reported person; but the use of the imperfect hated (in contrast to the present tense in direct discourse) and the choice of a pronoun His, similar to that used in indirect discourse, indicate a degree of independence on the part of the reporter or author, in that “he does not utterly dissolve into his character’s experiences.” 49 This inscription of double voicing, the relative independence or dependence of the reported speech, in the syntax of the four speech genres themselves is impressive evidence for the pervasiveness of hybridity and the internal reference to other speakers in utterances.50

Speech Genres In line with Voloshinov’s social linguistics, Bakhtin develops a dialogic syntax that is meant to supplant the traditional, more static grammars that dominate the disciplines analyzing language. He identifies three major constituents of utterances: 1) internal and external locutionary boundaries or the distinctness of an utterance from other speakers’ utterances in the same dialogue; 2) the finalization of utterances, that is, the “referential or semantic exhaustiveness of their themes” as determined not only by that to which they refer, their meaning, but also by the “speech plan” of the speaker of the utterances and by the “speech genres” of which

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utterances are instances; and 3) the “evaluative attitude” of the utterance’s speaker toward the utterance’s theme and toward other discourses in the same context—this “addressivity” includes the “style” and “composition” of the utterance as well.51 The first two constituents, boundaries and finalization, demarcate utterances from within the dialogue of which they are a part; the third, the evaluative attitude, reminds us that participation in linguistic exchange is an inherent feature of the utterances. These constituents, therefore, testify that social languages and utterance are, from beginning to end, dialogic at the same time that they are heterogeneous. Besides contributing to a dialogic syntax, these three constituents of utterances also amount to a theory of communication. I will provide a more complete account of this dialogic syntax and communication in the chapter on communication. For now, we should note that speech genres are a particularly important dimension of utterances. They are “relatively stable typical forms of construction of the whole [utterance]” (78) and encompass everything from “secondary,” more sophisticated types of utterance, such as the novel, oratory, and journalism, to “primary” forms of utterances, such as salon, immediate circle, familiar, family, sociopolitical, philosophical, and other types of everyday oral dialogue. They also include the idioms of doctors, lawyers, business and other professional groups (60, 61–62, 65–66). Because of their stability, these speech genres help shape the speaker’s speech plan on the basis of which they are chosen (78). Speech genres are both the means by which we articulate what we wish to say—by which we prepare our response to other utterances—and the cues for recognizing what another person wishes to say as well as for when we should take our turn in a dialogue (78–79). Bakhtin contrasts speech genres with “language forms,” that is, the lexical composition and grammatical structure of national languages (79–80). Language forms make no essential reference to their dialogic performance and at most only to a single speaker. In contrast, speech genres, as the forms utterances take, cannot be separated from their relation to other utterances or dialogic partners (72–74). Moreover, speech genres are much more flexible and diverse than language forms. Indeed, speech genres are combinations of the language forms. We do not think of sentences and then form an utterance, rather, we select the type of sentence we want (for example, interrogatory or declarative) on the basis of the whole utterance we are in the process of articulating. Because the utterance is an instance of a specific speech genre, and because speech genres have normative significance for us (we conform to rather than

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create them), the utterance is never a “completely free combination of forms of language.” The possible combinations of language forms are determined by the speech genres, and these genres must be mastered before they can be manipulated freely (80–81). Because they account for our ability to speak and comprehend each other with fluency, that is, provide us with a tacit understanding of when an utterance is complete and of the proper type of response we should make to it, Bakhtin claims that “utterances and their types, that is, speech genres, are the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language” (65). Besides their flexibility and primacy, speech genres differ from abstract language forms by always including a typical kind of expressivity that inheres in them, that is, a speaker’s “subjective emotional evaluation of the referentially semantic content [theme] of his [or her] utterance.” Nonetheless, they can be easily reaccented, for example, lawyer talk can become part of a comedy routine. In contrast, the lexical, morphological, and syntactic forms of language are not intrinsically expressive. They serve as the neutral medium for the “possible expression of an emotionally evaluative attitude toward reality” (84, also 87, 90). We will see shortly, however, that no neutral medium is, or should be, possible on Bakhtin’s theory. His referral to a “neutral medium” here must be taken as a heuristic device for the sake of clarifying the notion of a speech genre. The point of these considerations, however, is that the infrastructure of language should be viewed as dialogic rather than monologic in form. The monologic form has been the traditional view and is still dominant in linguistic circles.

Society’s Dialogism When extended, perhaps even past what he intended, Bakhtin’s notion of hybridization amounts to a view of the social body as dialogic. I said earlier that the voices of society are mutually immanent and mutually transcendent in relation to one another. Bakhtin refers to this relation as the responsive relation of utterances to each other: the character of each utterance is determined by its awareness and reflection of the rest, a response to the others that is “filled with [their] echoes and reverberations” (91). Even if I am talking in the same social language to another person, the words of that language reverberate with, and are shaped by, the “accents” of the other social languages in the same sphere of communication: “Our thought itself—philosophical, scientific, and artistic—is born

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and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought, and this cannot but be reflected in the forms that verbally express our thought as well” (92). Because the subject matter of this struggle is embedded in the linguistic community, it reflects these other points of view from the beginning. Thus any new utterance about this subject matter is already partially constituted by and in contest with the other social languages of the community (93). Parody, hidden polemic, reverence, and the other types of double-voiced discourse or citation and accentuation in Dostoevsky’s novels bear witness to the “dialogic overtones” that fill utterances and the themes they articulate. Thus an utterance must always be explained in terms of the speaker’s attitude toward its subject matter and the utterances of others on the same theme. We might think of these intersections of social languages as lateral or paradigmatic. At any cross section in time, each utterance is surrounded and constituted in part by the rest. But each utterance also refers to others vertically or syntagmatically and thus forms a chain among the social languages participating in a dialogue.52 Whereas the paradigmatic relation concerns an implicit relation between utterances that are contemporary with one another, a syntagmatic relation refers to what has come before and what will come after one’s immediate utterance. Specifically, enunciators respond to previous utterances and simultaneously anticipate possible rejoinders to their responses (Speech Genres, 94). Moreover, their responses to these previous utterances (themselves responses to other utterances) are not passive: Bakhtin rightly points out that our understanding of an utterance is inseparable from our anticipation of that utterance and hence from our response to it (68–69).53 The response, we might say, completes one’s understanding of the utterance to which one is responding. More generally, if the utterance or its prototype had no relevance to our orientation to others, to our stock of speech genres and the things we talk about, that is, to our “apperceptive background” (96),54 we would hear it only as noise. Similarly, part of what we anticipate in understanding utterances is their initiators’ own apperceptive backgrounds—their socialcultural background and what they know. Thus we also anticipate their possible rejoinders to the utterance we are about to make in response to their previous utterances. Conversation is therefore a chain of utterances, including the incipient forms of the anticipated ones that have not yet occurred (69, 94). Besides this chainlike structure of utterances, the response involved in our understanding of another person’s utterance, as well as our

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anticipation of their further reply to our response, is a means of making the meaning of that utterance (and hence our understanding of it) more determinate in either the direction of convergence with it or divergence from it. It is impossible to separate the progressively clearer understanding we have of an utterance from the response (in whichever of the two directions) we find ourselves making to it in actual conversation. Thus the meaning of an utterance is established in the exchange rather than in the minds of the interlocutors taken as separate individuals. Because each utterance is intrinsically part of a dialogue, it is as true to say that the dialogue sweeps us along in its train—is ahead of us—as it is to claim that we produce it. Ultimately, the dialogue simultaneously separates its participating voices and joins them together. Voices are inseparable from utterances and speech genres. But that does not mean they are reducible to them. The sense in which we find ourselves pulled ahead by the dialogue in which we participate supports this claim. If we were to take the epoché performed by Rushdie’s novel to an impossible extreme, we could say that his character Saleem Sinai reveals pure voices, ones separate from language. Thus Rushdie has Saleem say that “below the surface transmission—the front-of-mind which is what I’d originally been picking up [telepathically]—language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words.” 55 Perhaps the best way to state the relation between voices and utterances is to say that they are conceptually distinguishable but not conceptually or actually separable from one another. Their relation, in Kantian terms, is more like that found between the subject and predicate in synthetic a priori judgments (for example, “Everything that happens has a cause”) than in analytic (“A is A”) or synthetic ones (“The cat is black”). In the Deleuzian terminology we examined, voices are like virtual and anexact “abstract machines,” “diagrams,” or “traits of expression,” and utterances are like actual and exact “forms of expression.”

The Dialogic World: Words and Things We have been speaking of Bakhtin’s view of language. Thus far we have not explored his idea of the connection between language and the world. He claims that every word and object is overlaid with the “accents” or points of view of the different social languages in the community. Words, for example, are never neutral; they exist in other people’s

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mouths, are overpopulated with other people’s intentions, evaluations, and interpretations, and we must raise the saliency of our stress on them, accentuate them in terms of our particular discursive pattern, to maintain or enhance the audibility of our own social language. The other accents, however, still reverberate in these words and therefore partially shape the voice that is including them in its own discourse.56 For example, when Dostoevsky’s character, Ivan Karamazov, says to himself , “You are not the murderer [of your father],” he hears it accented both in his brother Alyosha’s loving way and in the Devil’s tone of mockery and hopeless condemnation.57 The same words receive these opposing accents in both Ivan’s internal speech and his external speeches to Alyosha and the Devil. Because Alyosha is an insider to his and Ivan’s religious community, and the Devil an outsider, the accents ultimately come from two different social languages. Different accents on the same words also show up when creationists appropriate the discourse of science for their fundamentalist religious program (Genesis as a scientific explanation of the fossil record). The norms for acceptable scientific practice still reverberate in the words (for instance, fossil records) cited by the creationists and, though unacknowledged or unrecognized by them, threaten to undermine their position from within, ultimately revealing that creationism is not science in any reliable sense of the word.58 Stated more generally, each word is multiaccented and reflects the many patterns into which it is or can be incorporated. Because all discourse is made up of these multiaccented words, every utterance involves the enunciator’s voice and the other social languages in which these same words are incorporated. Bakhtin’s theory of words requires one major qualification. He sometimes speaks as if we initially confront a word that carries the accents of others but not our own: “it is from [other people’s mouths, contexts, and intentions] that one must take the word and make it one’s own.” 59 However, if these words are populated with “accents” of the social languages of the community, then they must include my own accent as well. That is, words must exist as polyaccented from the beginning, accented with all the voices of the community. Thus, for one to appropriate a word must mean, more exactly, to raise the saliency of one’s social language, of one’s own accent, in relation to that particular word—an accent that is already part of the word’s social existence. For this to be possible, the notion of a social language must be taken in its broadest, most schematic meaning, an enlarged version of Bakhtin’s notion of a speech genre. Thus a word has to reflect a social language but not the specific way in which each

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interlocutor nuances that language. This topic will be taken up again in chapter 7, on communication, where we will confront the problem of the apparent incommensurability of social languages. For subjects, objects are inseparable from words. Therefore these objects too are never neutral. Bakhtin depicts them as “entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents,” and claims that they appear to us “by the ‘light’ of alien words that have already been spoken about them.” 60 Instead of objects that are independent of us, they are already filled with names, definitions, and values.61 In other words, their objectivity, their independence and inexhaustibility, is constituted at least in part by their existence at the intersection of a multitude of voices; hence they are never simply mine or yours. The world, insofar as it is our world, is dialogic from the beginning, an arena of intersecting voices, and this is reflected in everything that surrounds us. But to what degree are objects constituted by language? Are objects blank slates waiting to be inscribed by language, or do they play a more active role in the way that language constitutes them? A fuller picture of this relationship will require the next three chapters and recourse to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “reciprocal presupposition,” which we discussed in the last chapter.

The Multivoiced Body The epoché performed by Rushdie’s novel introduces us to the idea that society is an interplay among voices, each of which resounds within the rest. The Bakhtinian notions of hybridization and speech genres help make the idea of voice more precise and provide a concrete specification of how voices resound in one another, that is, their dialogic hybridity. More specifically, the notion of hybridization gives a precise and compelling sense to the exclamation by Rushdie’s character, Saleem Sinai, which we noted above: each “I” contains a multitude and to understand any one of them means having to “swallow a world.” Hybridization has also lent specificity to the major versions of “containing a multiplicity” that we considered in the previous chapter: the cave’s unity composed of differences and the notion of chaosmos introduced by Joyce and Deleuze and Guattari. Insofar as each voice cites the others and is at least partly

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established as the voice it is through this citation, these other voices play a role in its identity and are simultaneously its “other.” Because these voices are always “in motion,” that is, exist as responses to one another, their interrelationship is more aptly characterized as “interplay” than “intersection,” though I will continue to use both terms. This interplay among the voices simultaneously keeps them separate and holds them together, that is, constitutes them as a social body. It is for this reason that I refer to society as a multivoiced body and contrast it with society as a univocal subject or a collection of individual subjects. Moreover, each person, as we will see, is his or her dominant voice, but that voice as shot through with and partly constituted by the other voices of the community. In other words, each person as well as society is a dialogic hybrid or multivoiced body; each person is a microcosm of the social macrocosm. In a later section of this chapter, I will introduce yet another aspect of the multivoiced body: its continual production of new voices and its own ongoing metamorphosis. In order to clarify further this view of society, I will contrast it with a more reductive view of voices and some nonlinguistically based versions of communal solidarity that otherwise have much in common with it.

Univocal Voices: Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger My view of the dialogic hybridity of voices stands in sharp contrast to a number of traditional views of voice. For example, David Appelbaum identifies voice with a unique noise produced by our bodies. He defends assigning primacy to voices as coughs, laughter, breath, and other bodily noises and elaborates this view in the context of the history of philosophy.62 But he overemphasizes the subject side of voice and underestimates the importance of voice’s linguistic dimension. A noise, like a fingerprint, may be unique in the sense of marking the irreducible individuality of a person. But it, as much as our feelings and passions, counts for little apart from what we say and do. In abstraction from our words and actions, noises, feelings, and passions fade quickly, shrink to a bare impact, and constitute or indicate an authentic self to only an extremely limited degree. Nonetheless, Applebaum is correct to maintain that voices involve a type of uniqueness. I will show in chapter 6 how the social history of hybrid voices and their social languages—not bodily

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noises—permit us to attribute uniqueness to them. Additionally, Bakhtin has already made clear for us that words and actions are laden with emotion from the beginning. Emphasis upon language, therefore, does not rob us of our bodies and their passions. This discussion of Appelbaum’s claim concerning the uniqueness of a prelinguistic voice helps to reemphasize an advantage of identifying ourselves and society with voices. Voice refers to the body, on the one hand, and to discourse, on the other. It covers both poles of our existence and therefore is less one-sided than views that would identify us with either our bodies or language. The hybridity of voices helps us escape another sort of one-sidedness. Immanuel Kant and the rationalist tradition laud a universal “voice of reason,” 63 Husserlian phenomenology alleges the production of “pure expressions” of meaning in solitary mental life,64 and Martin Heidegger thinks voice is a medium for a language that is “the house of the truth of Being” and that the “[strife among thinkers] assists [them] mutually toward a simple belonging to the Same, from which they find what is fitting for them in the destiny of Being.” 65 This identification of voice with a univocal and universal type of reason or with a vehicle for the “Same” overlooks what we have found to be most outstanding about the concept of voice—that, from Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children National Conference,” Melville’s “thousand currents flowing into one,” and the Zapatistas’ “network of voices,” to the cacophony of voices in the mind of Joyce’s character, Stephan Dedalus, and Dostoevsky’s novels, each voice is always shot through with other ones, and their multiplicity is not constricted by an encompassing force. Voices are never pure; they are always dynamically hybrid, a clamor of all in all. In the political context, I am claiming that those who would preach ethnic cleansing and other doctrines of exclusion do not see that their own identities are dialogic hybrids rather than the pure essences they take them in principle to be; they misunderstand what it is to be a linguistic, cultural being from the start.

Community as Mutual “Exposure”: Nancy, Agamben, Levinas, and Cavarero The view of society as a multivoiced body has another virtue: it takes us as we are, that is, as social and cultural beings, and does not claim that a more denuded version of our existence constitutes our virtue

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or distinctiveness. For example, Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben agree, in effect, with Rushdie and Bakhtin that society is a unity composed of differences and that these differences or “singularities” are intrinsically linked to one another. More specifically, Nancy and Agamben claim that these singularities are primordially “exposed” to one another. Their powerful presentation of these two points bolsters my own endorsement of intersecting differences. But I think that Nancy and Agamben do not emphasize enough the importance of the active involvement of language, and hence culture, in the basic constitution of these singularities. Nancy identifies community as a clinamen, that is, “an inclination or an inclining from one toward the other, of one by the other, or from one to the other.” 66 This clinamen or “love” is an “existing in common” of inherently “multiply dispersed, mortally fragmented existences” (xxxix–xl). More precisely, these existences are singularities that are mutually “exposed” to one another: “a community that is nothing but this exposure” (26). In no way does this commonality or community derive from “the will to realize an essence” (xxxix–xl). Nor does it end up being an “operative” or technocratic collectivity or any other sort of homogeneous totality (22–23, 27–28). Indeed, Nancy claims that prior to linguistic voices is a “sharing that divides and that puts in communication bodies, voices, and writings in general and in totality” (6–7, 25). The priority of this “exposing-sharing” over language is made even more emphatic in the following statement: “This exposure, or this exposing-sharing, gives rise, from the outset, to a mutual interpellation of singularities prior to any address in language (though it gives to this latter its first condition of possibility)” (29).67 Nancy’s view of community remains too esoteric when he declares that its mutual exposure of singularities is transcendentally prior to any address in language. The divorce of these singularities from language leaves them with little content.68 In contrast, the notion of voice I am advocating achieves Nancy’s recognition of the primacy of interacting differences—of what I have been calling dialogic hybridity—and yet keeps it within the realm of the accountable by emphasizing the inseparability of voice and discourse. Voice is not only inseparable from language; the hybridization of social languages provides the interconnection or mutual exposure— the clinamen—of voices from the beginning. Because of this intersection of voices, content (the primary social language associated with a voice) does not commit us to the essentialism or univocal identity that Nancy eschews.

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Agamben’s view of community is similar to Nancy’s. Agamben speaks of a singularity or, rather, “whatever singularity,” that is, something which is neither a universal nor a particular in a series.69 A singularity is more like an exemplar—a particular case that cannot serve in its particularity and yet is not a universal either; a case, moreover, that is defined only by its “being-called” this or that, for example, being-called-red (rather than “being-red”). The emphasis on being-called rather than being such and such means that the singularity is not defined by any property. Because it is defined only by its being-called, Agamben says its “life in the word” is “undefinable and unforgettable.” 70 The “coming community” consists of the communication between persons as singularities, that is, between these exemplars of that community. Because they are singularities, no common identity binds them together, only their status as singularities.71 Their true communication arises only when, as singularities and because they are singularities, they “enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable,” that is, without any One or totality that would impose a unity upon them.72 The greatest enemy of this communication, of this “pure exposure” each of these singularities constitute for one another, is, for both Nancy and Agamben, the State and its aim to provide a convenient identity for what would otherwise be the subversive “belonging,” the “co-belong[ing of singularities] without representable condition of belonging.” 73 Although Agamben includes language as an aspect of singularity, it is only as the purposely empty “being-called” and not as any sort of active saying on the part of the singularity itself. As in Nancy’s inoperable community, this notion of singularities places the participants of society in a neverland, an Eden of pure exposure and an indefinable otherness that seems paradoxically to render everything the same in the name of an all too “pure” or empty difference.74 In contrast, voices and their hybridized social languages provide the participants of society with a specifiable interconnection—their linguistic or cultural clothing—and thereby keep them down to earth. This interconnection involves voices that are as much the other of one another as they are part of each other’s identity. It therefore does not succumb to the sort of homogeneity that Nancy and Agamben rightfully resist. This type of criticism also holds for Emmanuel Levinas’s distinction between “saying” and the “said.” Levinas holds that saying is “prior to the said,” though it also “states and thematizes the said,” that is, what one

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subject might say to another in ordinary or formal conversation.75 This saying takes place “otherwise” than between subjects. Bound to “an irrecuperable, unrepresentable, past,” prior to any intentionality on the part of the subjects involved, and as a “condition for all communication,” saying is “exposure” of oneself to the other: “Saying is a denuding of the unqualifiable one, the pure someone, unique and chosen; that is, it is an exposedness to the other where no slipping away is possible. In its sincerity as a sign given to another, it absolves me of all identity, which would arise again like a curd coagulating for itself, would coincide with itself.” 76 Not only is each of us valorized in our nude, identity-less form, but we are linked from the beginning with an inexorable “responsibility” to the other for whom we are an “exposedness.” This other is idealized as equally nude, equally prior to language (the “said”) or culture, and exists as the one for whom we have a primordial responsibility. The other, in short, establishes us as this exposedness, this “vulnerability,” and submission to the other.77 Levinas shares Nancy’s and Agamben’s eschewal of our cultural garb, but adds to it his claim that we exist as a relation of asymmetrical obligation and exposure to the other. However, our status as voices inseparable from and infrastructurally characterized by social languages repudiates this eschewal of cultural content, and our intersection with other voices (each being part of the others’ identity and also their other) belies the asymmetrical obligation to the other. There is a basis for valorizing one another, but not for conflating the other with a “master” and justice with “recognition” of and submission to this mastery.78 Even if we serve as each other’s master, this reciprocity still sanctifies the asymmetrical master relation. Indeed, this conflation, this “saying,” replaces dialogue with the absolute, unilateral command of the “master.” One of the tasks of this book, then, is to show that society as a multivoiced body avoids going into a realm beneath linguistic dialogue and yet provides us with the same balance of heterogeneity and solidarity that at least Nancy and Agamben, if not Levinas, wish to represent. Another contemporary thinker, Adriana Cavarero, has developed a notion of exposure that appears to build language into the latter in as strong a way as one could wish and still avoid essentialism. Cavarero holds that each existent “coincides” with “the uncontrollable narrative impulse of memory that produces a text.” 79 Moreover, we have an “unreflective knowledge” or “sense” of this existent as narratable. The existent as narratable is unique, and this uniqueness promises a unity or identity in the form of a narrative or story, a unity that we desire (37–41, 86–88). The

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unique existent cannot attain this unity on its own, however. Autobiographical memory cannot include one’s birth. It is therefore “necessary to go back to the narration told by others, in order for the story to begin from where it really began; and it is this first chapter of the story that the narratable self stubbornly seeks with all of her desire” (39). Thus the desire for unity, the desire to make up for this lack in memory, requires that the existent look for someone external to narrate their story—biography rather than autobiography. But Cavarero emphasizes that the narratable self always refers to who one is rather than what one is (72–73, 135). Thus the focus is on having a unity that can be revealed by a narrative and not the particular text that is produced by any specific external narrator. We recognize our unity of self as a who and the necessity of an external other providing this unity for us, but we will never receive a final narrative. Cavarero therefore captures something that is at least true for many of us—belief in our uniqueness and a desire to hear our story—and avoids the charge of advocating a homogeneous identity for existents. Because being an existent requires another to provide narration, Cavarero says that “the existent is the exposable and the narratable: neither exposability nor narratability, which together constitute this peculiarly human uniqueness, can be taken away” (36, also 71, 86, 89, 90, 136). She therefore joins Nancy, Agamben, and Levinas in claiming that we exist exposed to one another. But, unlike them, she hitches this exposability to the necessity of narrative by an external other. She emphasizes the externality of the other to avoid not only the loss of uniqueness but also the ineffability that would be implied by the other residing within us (89, 91). Although Cavarero’s view provides a stronger role for language and culture (the what) than do the other three thinkers reviewed in this section, it meets with two problems. First, the desire for narratives of ourselves may be a cultural rather than defining desire on our part. For example, Francis Bacon admits the difficulty of escaping narrative in his painting, but desires to do it nonetheless: “The moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you.” 80 Similarly, the phenomenologist David Carr starts off his work by claiming that sensory experience, let alone storytelling, has a narrative structure (past, present, and at least an implicit future). But at the end of one of his major books he admits that the existence of cultures in which people do not tell stories with linear plots about themselves may mean that his thesis holds only for “our,” that is, Western, culture.81 Voice, in contrast, allows for social languages that can be the basis for

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either a narrative or nonnarrative account of us. Moreover, the impetus to narration is not as basic as the inescapable dialogues in which we always find ourselves. Each of us is, therefore, a voice before being a narratable who. What, that is, voice, trumps who, but this what is shot through with other voices and hence never homogeneous or possessing of an essentialist form of identity. My response to this first problem in Cavarero’s notion of narratability is still deficient. I agree with her that each articulated voice, each of us, is unique. I accepted this uniqueness in my above discussion of Applebaum as well. Thus the effectiveness of my objection to Cavarero as well as to Applebaum in favor of voice will still depend in part on the success of the alternative account of uniqueness that I present in chapter 6. The second problem for Cavarero concerns the relation between narration and the ethical-political sphere. Following Hannah Arendt, she views the political sphere as a “plural and interactive space of exhibition” (57). But she goes beyond Arendt’s formulation. She adds that social-political community is based irrevocably on the reciprocal need to narrate our existence for each other (87).82 Indeed, she says, “put simply, I tell you my story in order to make you tell it to me” (62). This, however, reduces the other to a resource—the other who will recite my story—even if a resource that is unique in the sense of also being a who rather than a what. In order to avoid this implication, we must seek a sense in which we already share an identity, a link, prior to mutual narration and narratability. The multivoiced body view provides this assurance by insisting that each voice, and hence each of us, is part of the identity and simultaneously the other of the rest. The former, the identity part, ensures the reality of social solidarity, whatever the tendency to violate it in practice, and the latter, our mutual otherness, ensures what Nancy, Agamben, Levinas, and Cavarero emphasize: the singularity or difference of each existent. What remains for the multivoiced body to provide in this regard is the promised account of uniqueness. The specificity that we have been able to give to “voice” through these contrasts and via Bakhtin’s notions of social languages, speech genres, and hybridization permit me to point out yet another advantage that voices have over other claimants for the title of “main unit of society.” The notion of voice is both more precise and more flexible than any other designation we have for ourselves and the basic forces that make up society. We can characterize each particular voice in terms of the logic of its dominant social language (though, again, a voice always exceeds the logic

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of the discourse associated with it). Moreover, we can use voice to stand for whole civilizations or cultures and also for greetings, songs, dances, artworks, stereotypes, and other more particular idioms or practices. This flexibility in combination with the demand for specificity makes voice a more useful and less cumbersome unit than civilization, culture, nationality, or individual. Its hybridity also prevents us from mistakenly treating it as if it were a self-enclosed subject. The dangers of that mistake are particularly obvious in the work of those who see global politics as a “clash” among univocal “civilizations,” a topic we will rejoin when we discuss globalization in chapter 9.

Challenges for the Concept of Voice The above comments point to some of the advantages of identifying society as a multivoiced body. More generally, this chapter has provided us with an overview of the notion that society is a multivoiced body and a specification of the sense in which it exhibits the three characteristics of chaosmos: difference, dynamic intersection among the basic units of reality, and chance. It has also indicated (but not yet substantiated) that voices avoid the anonymity of the types of abstract forces that Deleuze and Guattari and many other thinkers posit as society’s basic units. But there remain some apparent problems the identification of society with a multivoiced body will have to solve if it is to win acquittal from philosophical juries. The rest of this chapter will serve to introduce these problems. The task of the subsequent chapters will be to solve them and further clarify the idea of society as a multivoiced body.

The Relation of Voices to Subjects, Language, and Social Structures One of the most important of these problems is our relationship to voices: in which sense are we the voices of society? Traditionally, this question has involved the relation between subjects and language. In his discussion of hybrid social languages, Bakhtin avoids attributing autonomy to either subjects or language. He criticizes the view that language is a mere instrument used by subjects to express their thoughts and equally rejects the claim that language is a set of universal forms to which

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subjects must always conform. In attempting to avoid these extremes, however, he seems merely to skate back and forth between them. For example, he says that dialogue is “a struggle among socio-linguistic points of view, not an intra-language struggle between individual wills or logical contradictions.” 83 But then he claims that “the speaker’s speech will is manifested primarily in the choice of a particular speech genre” (Speech Genres, 78). Bakhtin therefore presents us with subjects that both are and are not subordinated to language, that both choose and do not choose their linguistic format. He does not explain how this prima facie contradiction can be understood or escaped. Perhaps Bakhtin’s point is that subjects are subordinated to social languages but, within these forms, can willfully pick out the speech genres they wish to use. But, if that is his claim, then we are back to the question of the relation between subjects and their social language: does agency reside in subjects (and language is merely their instrument), or does it reside in the language (and the subject is just the vehicle for a social language that fully determines it)? Whereas Deleuze and Guattari ended up with anonymous forces in order to avoid the essentialist notion of the subject supporting humanism, Bakhtin seems to jump back and forth between these two alternatives. The importance of resolving this problem is highlighted when we note that the relation between subjects and language is a key arena of contention in contemporary philosophy and is at the heart of the tension between modernism and postmodernism as well as between phenomenology and structuralism.84 As we will see, we must go beyond the traditional way of stating the issue in order to address this tension in a productive manner and to reveal the type of identity we share with voices. Only once we have clarified this identity will we be able to say with full confidence that the notion of voice overcomes the problem of anonymity. A second issue concerns the number of social languages that are participating in a voice at any given time—how many are tied to it, either paradigmatically or syntagmatically? Bakhtin never explicitly replies to this question, and usually speaks only of “double voicing.” Yet he also says that words and things are overlaid with the voices of the community and are cited in many different discourses. I will contend that there is a sense in which all the voices of a society—even all possible voices— participate in each other’s identity. A third issue is closely related to this one. Bakhtin says that a social language is a “form” for conceptualizing its surroundings in words and is “characterized by its own objects, meaning

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and values.” 85 But if we treat each social language as a self-contained “worldview,” then the multiplicity of such languages entails the thesis that there is a plurality of actual worlds.86 This would contradict Bakhtin’s notion of hybridization and his citational view of words and things. It also raises grave problems concerning communication across incommensurable worlds or social languages. A fourth problem concerns the relation of voices to social structures that are not completely linguistic. Many thinkers feel that the machinations of the economy, government bureaucracies, and other sorts of impersonal social structures determine what we say and do. Bakhtin makes few comments on this topic.87 But voices cannot be the main unit of society if social structures determine discourse. On the other hand, any attempt to show that social structures are voices or subordinate to them will have to reply to the charge of linguistic idealism, that is, discourse completely determining the structures of society. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “reciprocal presupposition” has already indicated a possible way to escape this dilemma, and we will make use of it to address this issue in chapter 6.

Voices and Society The next three chapters will be devoted to the problems we just reviewed, that is, the issues concerning the relation of voices to subjects, language, and social structures. The rest of the book will build on this work in order to address larger-scale conundrums involving the production of new voices and oracles as well as the nature of globalization, democracy, and justice. These conundrums are indicated directly or indirectly by Rushdie and Bakhtin. I will introduce them now and at the same time complete our discussion of Rushdie and Bakhtin. The first conundrum concerns the production of new voices and the metamorphosis of society. An example of this creative activity is provided by Rushdie’s desire to represent the broken Hindi of a battlefield scavenger. It forces him to produce a new version of English: “I sell many so-fine thing. You want? Medicine for constipation, damn good, ho yes. I have. Watch you want, glowing in the dark? I also have. And book ho yes, and joke trick, truly. I was famous in Dacca before. Ho yes, most truly. No shoot.” 88 Both standard English and Indian multilingual culture play a constitutive role in this new social language; they also remain alive

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within it and contest each other and their progeny, Rushdie’s Angrezi or hybrid literary language, for audibility. We will have to explain more fully how such new voices are produced. We will also have to confront another problem that is related to this phenomenon: if all the voices of society are interconnected, then doesn’t the production of a new voice entail that all the voices of society undergo changes as well? Doesn’t the very being of the multivoiced body involve its continuous metamorphosis? Like Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of chaosmos, the multivoiced body appears to involve novelty or a chance factor as well as solidarity and heterogeneity, in short, all three of the characteristics of chaosmos that we delineated in the last chapter. But it is this last characteristic, chance or novelty, that we have addressed the least thus far in this chapter and for which I have reserved chapter 7. Another conundrum that must be approached is the exact opposite of explaining the creation of new voices: the production of what would limit this creativity, the absolute doctrines that we have been calling oracles. Solidarity (dialogic hybridity) and metamorphosis, along with heterogeneity, constitute the positive side of the multivoiced body. But this body is always threatened by a negative tendency that is part of society as well. In Rushdie’s novel, this tendency is exposed when the children of midnight begin to take on the prejudices of their parents. But it is embodied even more strongly by Saleem’s chief nemesis, Shiva, a member of Bombay’s criminal class. Shiva, like Saleem, is born at the stroke of midnight. When Shiva and Saleem encounter each other years later at one of Saleem’s telepathic get-togethers, Shiva tells him that the Midnight Children National Conference can never function as a “third principle” between “money-and-poverty”: the “endless fight between money-and-poverty is all there is.” 89 Shiva has the special ability to crush enemies with his huge knees and proclaims that the Midnight’s Children National Conference should be run on the basis of the rule that he uses to control the members of his street gang: “Yah, little rich boy: one rule. Everybody does what I say or I squeeze the shit outta them with my knees!” (263). So central is this conflict to society that Rushdie has Saleem comment near the end of the novel: “Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain an understanding of the age in which you live” (515). But Shiva is only an adjunct to a far greater power confronting Saleem and the children of midnight: the Widow, that is, Indira Gandhi, her National Congress Party and oppressive emergency decree of 1975–77, and, at least in the novel, her sterilization of the children of midnight and

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destruction of their special powers. Rushdie’s Saleem realizes that the Widow can only see the multiplicity and dialogic hybridity of the children’s voices as a threat to her centralism and unitary voice: Indira is India, India Indira (501). Not only are the children of midnight and their composed chaos destroyed, Saleem himself, this person who has been “so-many too-many persons,” sees clearly that the Widow and her cohorts will “trample [him] underfoot,” reducing him and the hundreds of millions of voices resounding in his head to “specks of voiceless dust” (552). For “it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace” (552). Rushdie, then, believes that India is in the grip of two forces. On the one hand, there are Shiva and the oracle of the Widow—her reduction of multiplicity and creative tension to her own homogeneous image. On the other, there are the Midnight’s Children National Congress and the dialogic hybridity they represent. Bakhtin shares Rushdie’s view of society and speaks of societies in terms of a struggle between two opposing “forces.” He calls the first force “monoglossia” and associates it with the development of a “unitary master language” and “the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization.” 90 This language is not a system of abstract categories; it is a “worldview” that ensures “a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life.” 91 It would presumably include national languages such as Chinese or Swahili, a lingua franca of diplomacy and international meetings, the literary language of a culture, universal languages such as mathematics, logic, and computer programs, Orwell’s Newspeak in the novel 1984, and the Widow’s identification of India with herself and her ideology. Bakhtin names the second and opposing force heteroglossia. He associates it with the stratification of social languages and the ongoing development of generational, professional, and other forms of social differentiation.92 Heteroglossia is therefore like the many social languages of Rushdie’s children of midnight. The centrifugal movement of heteroglossia stands in constant tension with the centripetal and homogenizing movement of monoglossia. Bakhtin sometimes uses the term dialogized heteroglossia to refer to hybridization and, more particularly, to the permanent resistance of heteroglossia to monoglossia. As an example of this more specific meaning, Bakhtin points to the struggle for audibility by

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the lower social-economic groups of the Renaissance period in Europe against the hegemony of the language of the officials and upper classes.93 Despite the contrariness of heteroglossia and monoglossia, Bakhtin claims that utterances participate in both forces at once, that is, in the dialogized heteroglossia between a master language and the always proliferating social languages of the community.94 Nonetheless, Bakhtin, like Rushdie, clearly favors heteroglossia over monoglossia. In Rushdie’s case, this favoritism is indicated despite the victory of the Widow. For the tone of Rushdie’s book suggests that the “third principle,” symbolized by the children of midnight, might be a possibility for the nonfictional world as well. In the language of Bakhtin’s hybridization, Rushdie appears to introduce his “semantic intention” into the events and outcomes that take place in the novel and to suggest that we should affirm the children’s conference or, in my terms, society as a multivoiced body. This speculation is reinforced by the opprobrium with which he treats totalizing views in other parts of Midnight’s Children. For example, he has Saleem Sinai concede that he can’t rate any one of the children of midnight’s different magical skills as better than the others. But Saleem, with the help of another one of the children, Parvati-the-witch, argues that his mind-reading power is necessary for the Midnight’s Children Conference to take place and that therefore the rest of the children should at least acknowledge him as a “big brother” (272–73). Rushdie’s tacit reference to Orwell’s 1984 is no accident: the older Saleem Sinai worries that his attempt to write about his life and times is an example of the “Indian disease . . . to encapsulate the whole of reality” (83–84). In avoidance of this disease, Rushdie suggests throughout his novel that there are many different perspectives on any event rather than one truth or voice from nowhere.95 Bakhtin’s own preference for heteroglossia over monoglossia is reflected in his contrast between “polyphony” and “homophony.” In the polyphonous world of the novel, and unlike homophony, voices are combined, but without subordinating any of them to the others: “a will to the event.” 96 As we have already seen, Bakhtin shows us that the main thrust in Dostoevsky’s novels is not evolution—a dialectical synthesis—but the simultaneous interplay between different voices.97 Because the identity of this community of voices is its dialogic polyphony, it suggests an ethics in favor of dialogized heteroglossia over monoglossia. Moreover, the polyphonic novel favors a notion of plurivocal, as opposed to univocal, truth. Rather than a single limit toward which different voices converge, truth

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in the novel amounts to the passing of nominally the same ideas through many unmerged voices, allowing them to sound different in each.98 Rushdie’s and Bakhtin’s portrayal of the symbiotic conflict between heteroglossia and monoglossia poses two problems for the multivoiced body version of the same conflict. First, what is the source of the tendency toward monoglossia or, as I have termed it, the production of oracles? If the primary characteristics of the multivoiced body are its diversity and the generation of new voices, then why this tendency to suppress them? We will see that explaining this must involve the notion of a “social unconscious.” But it will be equally important to show how that unconscious is also the source of the counterresponse to oracles. Once society is recognized to be a multivoiced body, it is necessary to see if this calls for a revision of the traditional notions of democracy, justice, and citizenship. Besides addressing these issues, we will have to rescue the multivoiced body view of society from two possibly devastating criticisms. If the dynamic intersection of voices means that the affirmation of any one of them is the valorization of them all, then how can citizens legitimately prevent racism, sexism, and other exclusionary doctrines from becoming policy-making voices within society? How can we justifiably and paradoxically exclude the excluders? The second problem is equally threatening to the very idea of society as a multivoiced body: how can we avoid what Rushdie calls the “Indian disease”? How, that is, can we escape the retort that the multivoiced body view of society is itself an oracle?

The Immanence of the Multivoiced Body Bakhtin often states that utterances are always addressed to someone. But he also speaks of a “superaddressee,” that is, “an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue” or “an absolutely just responsive understanding” (Speech Genres, 126). For example, Dostoevsky describes his “underground man” as always addressing himself or some other person at the same time that he is addressing a third party as well, “squinting his eyes to the side, toward the [unseen] listener, the witness, the judge.” 99 On the view of society as a multivoiced body, this “third party” could be an oracle that has infiltrated the other voices of the community and presented itself as the final court of appeal about reality and morality. But

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it could also be—and the rest of the book is an argument that it should be—a reference to the multivoiced body itself, to its interplay of heterogeneous voices and its unfinalizability about truth. We sense that we are always more than our immediate selves—that our existence radiates into the reaches of space and time. Although this “oceanic feeling” 100 shares an affinity with religion, it does so without appealing to a God or to any other transcendent being that has sovereignty over subjects. Instead of worship, it calls only for a continuation of dialogue as well as for the novelty and metamorphosis the latter produces: spontaneous celebration rather than prayer. The third party is therefore to be taken as fully immanent, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the word. The third party or multivoiced body does not promise immortality either; but it does imply that the voices we articulate will maintain their place and interplay with one another in the linguistic community long after we of the present generation cease to exist.101 What Bakhtin says of meanings is therefore also true of our voices: There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)—they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival. (Speech Genres, 170) The immanent status of the multivoiced body also requires a statement of our relation to the other communities—both animate and inanimate—of the universe. This statement will return us once more, and at the end of this book, to the notion of chaosmos and Deleuze and Guattari’s cosmology.

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PART II The Primacy of Voices

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Modernism and Subjectivity

A Deconstructive Strategy In the last two chapters, I criticized other views for their inability to capture our status as agents in society. For example, Deleuze and Guattari equated us with anonymous forces that seemed distant from the sense we have of ourselves as contributors to our own destinies. Bakhtin, in contrast, oscillated back and forth between the notion of an autonomous subject and the idea of ourselves as subordinate to language or discourse. The dilemma these alternatives have presented to thinkers is captured succinctly by Manfred Frank: How can one, on the one hand, do justice to the fundamental fact that meaning, significance, and intention—the semantic foundation of every consciousness—can form themselves only in a language, in a social, cultural, and economic order (in a structure)? How can one, on the other hand, redeem the fundamental idea of modern humanism that links the dignity of human beings with their use of freedom, and which cannot tolerate that one morally applaud the factual threatening of human subjectivity by the totalitarianism of systems of rules and social codes? 1

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In chapters 4, 5, and 6, I will show that the notion of voices comes closer to capturing our individual and social existence than do views that uphold the primacy of either subjects or language. I will also clarify the sense in which we are participants in a multivoiced body and how that identity avoids reproducing the problem of anonymity. In order to accomplish these goals, I will show first that neither the modernist view of the subject nor the postmodernist (or poststructuralist) position on language escapes the dilemma posed by Frank. In this chapter, I will deal with modernist views of the subject. These views assume that subjects have priority over language in determining what we are. I will focus on the modernist views of the subject offered by René Descartes, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and cognitive science. Merleau-Ponty will reveal aspects of our relation to the world that I think any view of the subject and ultimately voice must include. More specifically, I begin by showing how Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology supplants Descartes’ position on perception and knowledge, shares an affinity with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of virtual reality and anexactness, and reveals deficiencies in cognitive science. We will see, however, that even Merleau-Ponty’s notion of subjectivity is afflicted by some of the problems that limit Descartes’ and cognitive science’s adequacy to portray us. We will therefore have to go beyond it as well as the positions of Descartes and cognitive science. Part of my argument against the modernist notion of the subject will appeal to the poststructuralist view that language unilaterally determines how we perceive and think about the world. This appeal will fully take shape in chapter 5. In chapter 6, I will take the further step of showing that voice has priority over language and that my position does not commit us to the linguistic idealism of which poststructuralists are often accused. In short, I will perform something like a Derridean “deconstruction”: first I will invert the traditional hierarchical relation between subject and language and transfer priority to language; second, I will “reinscribe” language as voice and, through it, reattribute a kind of agency to ourselves, though no longer us understood in terms of the traditional notion of subject. This deconstruction will have the effect of establishing the priority of voice over its two constituents, subjects and language, converting the traditional images of society into that of the multivoiced body. Ironically, we will see that this deconstruction also replaces Derrida’s formalist différance with the more concrete notion of the interplay among voices.2

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Merleau-Ponty’s Overturning of Cartesianism Descartes is famous for his view of mind-body dualism and the problem it entails: if mental substance is indivisible and defined as thinking and physical substance is divisible and defined as extension,3 how can the two substances interact causally? For example, how can a substance that is not in the same spatial system as our bodies (a neurologist can locate a brain cell but not a thought) explain the ability to move our body from one place to another or, alternatively, the body’s capacity to warn our mind of the searing heat of the stove we’ve just accidentally touched? A reconceptualization of causality, one that does not equate it with the actual physical touching of one object or force by another, can logically sidestep the mind-body problem, but not without incurring the charge of mysticism or at least extreme implausibility.4 Contemporary cognitive science, as we will see, leaps away from dualism and its baffling implications either by eliminating the mental altogether or by adopting a mindlike “functionalist” form of materialism. But cognitive science and much of the rest of philosophy of mind is Cartesian despite their rejection of mind-body dualism. Although this claim will call for some qualifications, these thinkers retain Descartes’ ideas that mental life involves “representations” and that seeing and other mental activities are primarily “judgments.” According to Descartes and cognitive science, different perceptions of the same object at the same time are understood as the result of different circumstances in the varying cases, for example, the disparate locations of our bodies in relation to the object or the myopia from which some people suffer. The effect of these circumstances is different sensations or perceptions that are said to “represent” the object.5 As David Hume gleefully pointed out, this means that, contrary to our experience, we are not directly acquainted with our surroundings; instead, we immediately experience only the contents of our minds, our “representations” of the world and of our bodies. How, Hume insinuates, could anyone accept as true a position that is so contrary to our experience? 6 In experience, our perceptions simply are the direct presence of objects. Even if the representational view of perception and knowledge saves us from saying that an object is both x and not-x at the same time, for example, both square (as one person sees it) and round (not-square, as another person might see it), many thinkers, for example, phenomenologists, feel that the representationalists’ discounting of the testimony of sensory experience is just as difficult to accept as Descartes’ mind-body dualism.

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Descartes uses his famous melting piece of wax example to show that perceiving an external object is really an act of judging.7 Because the wax, sitting near the heat of a fireplace, is continuously melting while we look at it, all its sensory qualities are qualitatively different at each moment. Yet, as Descartes points out, we still say we see the piece of wax as the same body throughout the melting process. Because this information can’t be coming through our senses (the sensory qualities of the wax have all changed as it melts), we must grasp what is unchanging about the wax through the “mind’s eye” and then judge that what we are seeing is still the same body. Descartes argues that the unchanging aspect of the wax is the spatial extension of its body: not this or that shape or size, for the sensory forms that extension takes are changing too, but pure extension or the power to take on different forms of extension.8 Moreover, the nonsensory status of pure extension means for Descartes that the mind’s eye or “light of reason” must have access to an idea of pure extension that we already possess—an “innate idea” that the mind does not learn but with which it comes equipped. On the basis of this innate idea, plus the sensory information coming to us from the wax out in the world, we judge, not see, that the wax is the same body—a physical substance whose essence is extension—despite its qualitative changes. More generally, this idea allows us to judge and hence perceive that all perceptual objects are extended substances that endure throughout time’s passage and the changes of their qualities. Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the Cartesian tradition, as well as of empiricists and other rationalists, includes a criticism and an alternative explanation of perception and our other mental activities. The criticism has two parts. The first is simply that we always experience objects as wholes initially and their individual qualities only secondarily. For example, I see my desk and only then note its exact number of drawers or the scratches and differing shades of walnut that contribute to its surface. Experientially, therefore, rationalists and empiricists are wrong to say that our primary contact is with discrete sensory qualities. Moreover, we not only experience objects but, at the same time, the background against which they appear to us. As the Gestaltists and Merleau-Ponty are fond of saying, the primary and irreducible datum of sensory experience is an object (as a whole) against a background.9 The second part of the criticism concerns the concepts—innate or acquired—that Descartes and many other thinkers assume are necessary

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for us to recognize or otherwise identify sensory objects. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of this notion is decisive: either the sensory object presents its identity to us directly or it doesn’t; if it doesn’t, then there is no basis for why the sensory inputs should solicit one concept rather than another—an input would lack any initial connection for us to a concept that would specify the whole of which it is presumably a part; but if the sensory object does present its identity directly, then we have no need of a concept in order to recognize what the object is; the major role of the concept would consist only in refining our identification of the object. If we revert to context as a means of matching the inputs with the proper concept, then we have the new problem of recognizing the context itself; the dilemma of perception and knowledge extends its two horns once again.10 For Merleau-Ponty, these criticisms indicate that, contrary to Descartes, our relation to our surroundings is direct and not initially mediated by concepts or other representations and judgments. But how then do we characterize this direct, unmediated relation to the world? Merleau-Ponty responds to this request via the phenomenological method. Putting into brackets our standard beliefs, he allows the things themselves, “phenomena,” to tell their own story. By describing the unmediated presence of these phenomena, Merleau-Ponty believes we will understand them more adequately than by the accounts of Descartes and the major philosophical and scientific traditions. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be a place for the methods and findings of the traditional sciences; just that phenomenology, rather than they, will give us the truth about our most basic relation to things and hence the ultimate meaning of the results of science. Merleau-Ponty takes this relation to be perception, and his phenomenological labors produce an understanding of perception that contrasts greatly with the traditional theories of that activity. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception reveals that subjects and objects are inseparable from one another and in a perpetual state of becoming. This is completely different than the view offered by most traditional thinkers. According to these thinkers, subjects either construct the objects of perception (for example, Kant’s transcendental idealism), objects are fully responsible for perception by impacting themselves on the senses (for instance, Locke’s empiricism), or the relation is causally reciprocal in the sense that objects impact upon the sensory system and then subjects modify that impact (Descartes’ appeal to judgment or cognitive science’s reliance upon information processing). In particular, Descartes and cognitive science assume that the nature of a subject and of an object

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can be specified independently of one another. Moreover, this mutual independence of subject and object permits psychologists to establish the initial separation of independent from dependent variables necessary for proving a hypothesis through laboratory experiments.11 If the subject is the cause of an aspect of perception, then it is the independent variable and the aspect is the dependent variable; the situation is reversed if the environmental inputs are the cause of a change in the subject’s perceptions. But it is just this abrupt independence of subject and object that Merleau-Ponty thinks phenomenology proves wrong. The inseparability of subjects and objects of perception is brought out most clearly in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological description of what he calls the “subject-object dialogue.” 12 Perception is never a state; it is always an ongoing activity with momentary resting places. When we perceive an object, we draw together the meaning diffused throughout it; at the same time, the object solicits and draws together our intentions in its direction. The less than fully determinate object is rendered more exact, and our aim is made more definite relative to what it was before it achieved a full focus upon the object. In this act of “physiognomic perception,” therefore, the object and the subject are simultaneously responsible for the perceptual event. More fully stated, their mutual involvement is both simultaneous and an internal relation: the subject cannot be specified apart from its opening onto this or some other object, and the object cannot be specified without reference to a subject’s perception of it. This internal relation has the same status as a hand, taken as part of an active body, in relation to objects, and objects in relation to bodies: a hand is just that which grasps things and objects are just those things that are graspable. Each, unlike Descartes’ minds and bodies, makes a reference to the other that is essential for its being what it is. The hand and the thing it grasps are distinguishable but not separable from one another. In contrast, items that are merely “externally” related to one another, for example, “two objects five feet apart,” make no such mutual reference to one another directly: each is what it is whether or not that relation obtains. In his description of the subject-object dialogue, Merleau-Ponty adds that the perception of an object takes place in a world or surrounding “horizon” that both “speaks to us of ourselves”—reflects our body’s ability to engage it and is thus “immanent” in relation to us—and yet is the situation in which we find ourselves and therefore “transcends” us at the same time. Both subjects and objects are what they are in relation to the horizon, and the horizon cannot be a horizon without objects as their foreground

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and without subjects having a perspective upon those objects. The three elements—subject, object, and horizon—are therefore internally related to one another. Moreover, the horizon includes the new possibilities that the object has for us now that we are focused upon it: the horizon recedes as we approach its objects, revealing new possibilities that were not available to us until then. These possibilities motivate us to realize their meaning, and thus each subject can be characterized as essentially a “movement of transcendence” (152–53). Our existence, in other words, is the activity of perpetually making explicit and determinate the world’s latent and relatively indeterminate meanings. As a consequence, the internal relation between subjects and the world is only a “quasi-internal relation”—it does not completely determine in advance the outcome of the dialogue or the exact meaning that the relatively indeterminate objects of perception and knowledge will temporarily become. Moreover, time is not something independent of this creative activity. It is an integral aspect of the dialogue between the subject and the object, of the world’s unfolding, and transcends this activity only insofar as it always points us beyond where we’ve momentarily ended up. Several further points are contained in this description of MerleauPonty’s version of “being-in-the-world.” First, we are our bodies, and each body is an “I can” rather than an “I think.” Whereas traditional philosophy treats the subject as first something that exists and then acts, MerleauPonty shows that we are our engagement with—our opening onto—things in the world. Similarly, objects are not first “mute” things that then causally interact with us; they “call forth” our engagement with them from the beginning. Place bodies such as ours in a world of things, and both subjects and objects are transformed into, respectively, the activity of realizing the meaning of things and the things’ solicitation of that activity (137, 408). Second, objects and subjects are becomings and hence never fully determinate, only momentarily appearing so. The “indeterminate is a positive phenomenon” (6), and thus perception simultaneously discovers (responds to the object’s solicitations) and creates (makes more determinate) the objects that we encounter. In short, subject agency and freedom have a place in the subject-object dialogue: we play an active role in bringing about the particular form that the object or situation will become. Because this type of perception is our primary relation to things, causal analyses of this relation are abstractions and can receive their full meaning only in relation to the phenomenologically clarified relation between ourselves and the world (350). Such causal analyses are highly useful, but

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their complete meaning depends on our fundamental, unfolding relation to the world. Merleau-Ponty’s view, in other words, is close in spirit to the “reverse causality” of Deleuze and Guattari discussed in chapter 2: on both views, a relatively indeterminate situation is transformed into a new version of itself. As a third point, Merleau-Ponty’s subject-object dialogue implies that perception of things, contrary to what Descartes says, is not mediated by representations. Rather, our existence is a direct opening onto the world. Because the objects of perception exist as the power to solicit perspectives from subjects, they are simultaneously in-themselves and for-us, each an “in-itself-for-us” (71). One can therefore say that a table is both round and square at the same time without appealing to different sensations or representations: the object is round in its relation to perceiver x and her circumstances, and is, at the same time, square in its relation to perceiver y and her circumstances. These relations are as much a part of the object as its power to give rise to further relations. This way of understanding perception does not lead to relativism: the object, as an in-itself, places limits on what it can be for us, even though it cannot be separated from its “for-us” status. Merleau-Ponty also holds that the body’s fullest grasp of things appears as the optimal balance between the maximum clarity and richness of the thing as it is present to us (250, 318). Thus we find that we will draw something closer to us or right its orientation if it appears obscure. The subject-object dialogue always aims at this temporary and “quasi-teleological” (its outcome is not fully determined in advance) equilibrium.

Organic Versus Analytic Discourse The difference between Descartes’ and Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception can also be expressed in terms of the discourses the two thinkers articulate. Besides adding more clarity to their differences, this expression of their positions will provide an example of the primary “logic” that each discourse or “voice” embodies and follows. The two voices are “organic discourse” and “analytic discourse.” 13 Their differentiation will also help us characterize the framework within which cognitive psychology operates. Although each of these voices encompasses a mode of perception as well as a mode of language, I refer to them as “discourses” for brevity’s

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sake and because, as we will see, language ultimately has priority over perception. The two types of discourse also constitute the framework for reflection upon the topics which their enunciators engage. Each discourse consists of two “procedures” and two “ideals.” In analytic discourse, the first procedure involves the decomposition of a domain into a set of discrete units that can then be described in terms of their external relations to one another. Thus Descartes decomposes our perception of an object into the reception of sensory inputs abetted by the judgment that the inputs come from an extended substance. The judgment itself, as we have seen, is based on the innate idea that the essence of physical substance is extension. The second procedure of analytic discourse is the use of language to label and specify each of the separate units produced by the decomposition procedure. Indeed, language within analytic discourse typically amounts to no more than an instrument for naming, describing, and communicating the results of the decomposition procedure. The two ideals of analytic discourse are transparency and control. According to the ideal of transparency, each sign or word in analytic discourse should refer univocally to a discrete entity or collection of them. According to the ideal of control, these transparent terms pin down elements in the discourse’s domain so that they can serve in the achievement of preestablished goals. Examples that involve both the procedures and ideals of analytic discourse are laboratory experiments (the specification and manipulation of independent and dependent variables in order to test a hypothesis) and computer programs with their unambiguous symbols, exact rules of operation, and specific purposes. In organic discourse, the two operations and ideals are diametrically opposed to those of analytic discourse. With respect to the two procedures, organic discourse distinguishes, but does not separate, the elements of its domain of operation. Moreover, it describes the relationships between these elements in terms of a totality that each element at least partially reflects, modulates, or otherwise participates in as a condition of being what it is. The first ideal of this discourse, understanding, concerns grasping the discourse’s domain in terms of the holistic descriptions rendered by the first procedure. Along with its eschewal of explanations that assume elements are only externally related to one another, this type of understanding is not primarily concerned with transparency and control. Rather, it brings about—and this is organic discourse’s second ideal—transformation through its insight into the structure or meaning of the whole. Understanding, in other words, involves mutual accommodation

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between the goal of the discourse and the domain of the discourse. This accommodation changes both the goal and the domain. Thus MerleauPonty’s phenomenology of perception reveals that perceiving an object is always an act of simultaneous discovery and creation—a deeper realization of the world horizon and a temporarily more determinate version of what the subject and object were before this act of perception. Corresponding to the analytic and organic discourse are ways of perceiving—analytically or holistically. Although I described the analytic and organic voices as ways of talking about things, it is obvious that one could have also spoken about an “analytic perceiver” or a “holistic perceiver.” We should also note that analytic and organic discourse include an evaluative appraisal of themselves, one another, and any other social discourses that make up the milieu of their operation in any given situation; in particular, they stipulate, by their procedures and ideals, what should count as relevant or meaningful for us. Moreover, each discourse is established as what it is in light of the other: we cannot understand analytic discourse without making at least tacit reference to organic discourse and vice versa. For example, to speak of decomposition is to refer to a whole that one is going to show as being no more than the sum of its parts, and to speak of understanding something holistically is to refer to its parts as being more than related externally to one another. There are also various ways of being analytic or organic. The cognitive scientists we will examine, for example, work within analytic discourse as nondualists, whereas Descartes thinks within the same framework as a bifurcator of mind and body. Similarly, phenomenologists, hermeneuticists, structuralists, and poststructuralists are organicists, but in different manners: some, like Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, emphasize the unity or pattern of the whole, whereas others, like Deleuze and Guattari, valorize the heterogeneity of the whole’s parts and show that from the beginning an event has always been a proliferation of differences. Another way of putting this point: analytic and organic discourses are voices that can either be independent or ensconced within other voices, as, for example, when organic discourse is part of the religious worldview of the Middle Ages or of the view of society as a multivoiced body. We will see in the next few chapters that voices have social discourses for their infrastructure. Analytic and organic discourses are detailed examples of this sort of infrastructure. Moreover, the notion of voice itself is captured more fully by an organic discourse of the difference type than by analytic discourse. In contrast, cognitive psychology and its form of

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Cartesianism—which we will now examine—conform to the strictures of analytic discourse. At a technical level, then, the rivalry between the notion of voices and the Cartesian idea of subjectivity is also a contest between versions of organic and analytic voices that have contended with one another since the beginning of philosophy.

Cognitive Science Andy Clark argues convincingly that cognitive science has passed through three stages: classical cognitivism, connectionism, and complex interactionism.14 This progression indicates that cognitive science is approximating the sort of holism advocated by Merleau-Ponty. But we will see that cognitive science’s analytic understanding of holism is more restrictive than Merleau-Ponty’s organic comprehension of totalities. Moreover, some of the most recent work in cognitive science recognizes a strong role for language in relation to cognition. Indeed, it inadvertently suggests that language should be assigned an even greater role than Merleau-Ponty or the cognitive scientists would give it.

Classical Cognitivism The first stage of the progression, classical cognitivism, equates the mind with symbol manipulation or information processing. According to this view, the mind consists of a finite set of rules that operate over discrete symbols in order to achieve preestablished goals. The symbols are representations of external and internal inputs to the “central processing unit” of the organism and carry information about these inputs. The rules are algorithms, that is, step-by-step procedures for manipulating the symbols, each step following deterministically from the preceding step with no unexplainable jumps, until they achieve the goal for which they were designed. Alan Turing formalized this mechanized, computational version of “reason” in his Universal Turing Machine and claimed that it could successfully imitate all instances of intelligence.15 This computational depiction of the mental activity fits well with the philosophy of mind called functionalism. Rather than speaking of a computer or a mind in terms of the materials from which they are made, silicon and flesh respectively, one conceptualizes them in terms of the

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function—information processing—they presumably share in common. We can understand the computer in terms of its software rather than in terms of its hardware (we can think about it as computer programmers rather than as electronic engineers) and think of the brain in relation to the mental functions it permits rather than in terms of its cells and their neuronal exchanges. More specifically, we can omit reference to the brain and explain behavior in terms of how beliefs, desires, and purposes—or their computational analogues on the information processing model of mind—function in relation to one another, that is, their respective causal roles in the total mental system (“Sam went to the store because he desired nourishment and because he believed he could get food there.”). These “mental types” are not identical to “physical types” (we describe them functionally), and yet the “tokens” in which they are instantiated, for example, neurophysiological processes in the brain or electronic sequences in the computer, are all physical. Functionalism is therefore a bona fide materialist philosophy of mind. But the distinction between functions and the material embodying them allows functionalists to claim that psychology is a “science of mind” and that it is not in principle reducible to neurophysiology.16 Following the computational version of functionalism, Descartes’ account of perception is still correct, but needs to be revised. The inputs coming in from an object are “coded” by the “mind” or computational system into symbols; these symbols are then matched with higher level symbols for objects.17 This second matching process is the computational equivalent of the judgment that Descartes thinks is at the heart of perception. Adherents of classical cognitivism disagree among themselves about which concepts or symbols are innate in Descartes’ sense of the term. In linguistics, for example, Noam Chomsky and transformational grammarians postulate a rich set of nativist rules specific to language, whereas other linguists think language is based only on general rules or constraints that hold for perception, memory, and other areas of cognition as well as for linguistic exchanges.18

Connectionism The intellectual character of classical cognitivism’s rule-following architecture of mind is reminiscent of Descartes’ definition of mind as

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thinking. Thus Miller and Johnson-Laird say that they want their computational model to represent the mind as a “proto-theorist”—“doing daily at a simpler level what scientists try to do with sophistication.” 19 The second stage of cognitive science veers in the other direction—to an architecture that is more congruent with our bodies. Indeed, the impetus behind connectionism or “artificial neural networks” is the desire to model the brain more directly than does classical cognitivism.20 The adherents to this stage of cognitive science therefore utilize massive parallel-processing computation to approximate the workings of the brain. Just as the brain involves billions of synaptic connections among neuron cells, so its artificial counterpart uses nodes that are interlinked by large numbers of weighted excitatory or inhibiting connections. Connectionists say that face recognition, phoneme recognition and reproduction, and a number of other connectionist networks that have been constructed are fair replicas of what the brain goes through when it accomplishes these recognizing and producing activities. Philosophers like Paul Churchland even drop the functionalism of classical cognitivism and declare that these networks depict causal interactions among brain cells rather than among functional types that are distinct from the material implementing them: the mind is nothing more than the brain.21 How exactly is the connectionist architecture different from that of classical cognitivism? Both architectures are representational: they involve entire systems of inner states that carry specific types of information about external or physiological states of affairs; this information or “code” can then be “read” by other inner systems in order to fulfill the goals of the organism.22 Classical cognitivism holds that the inner states are symbols, syntactically ordered much like a grammatically refined sentence, and that the mind operates on (reads and transforms) these ordered symbols in accordance with internally represented rules. For example, “red (spot)” is the symbolic representation of a sensation caused by some object out in the world. This syntactically complex symbol can then be “manipulated” in accordance with two “production rules” in the mind for checking the veracity of this representation or for finding an object that satisfies it: i) find a three-dimensional object and assign it to x; if none is found, exit; ii) test “now, Red (x)”—if test succeeds, exit; if not, go back to (i).23 To be useful, moreover, “red” and “spot” have to be connected to a lexical memory that provides the meaning and related information for both of these symbols.

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In contrast to classical cognitivism’s discrete symbols that stand for specific inputs such as a red spot, connectionism deals with input patterns that are “distributed” over many nodes and the connections of these nodes to other nodes.24 These connections are assigned different excitatory and inhibitory “weights.” The variability of the weights allows the same nodes to play a role in registering many different input configurations. For an artificial neural network registering a red spot, the network’s first layer of nodes is sensitive to different wavelengths of light and to other inputs associated with shapes and colors. After these nodes register the inputs specific to a red spot, each is further connected to the smaller number of nodes of a “hidden” layer. The connection weights between the nodes on the first layer and those on the second are represented by input vectors of numbers, say, .96, .23, .1, .5 for one of the first layer node’s connections to nodes on the second layer, the numbers .03, .42, .85, .11 for another first layer node and its connections to those of the second layer, and so forth for each of the connections between a first layer node and the smaller number of nodes on the second layer. The desired output vector, the “red spot,” is assigned, say, the vector .46, .05, .33, .02. Through a computational procedure called error backpropagation, the initial weights for each of the input vectors are readjusted until the difference between them and the output vector is more or less bridged. The measure of this difference is obtained by taking the numerical values of the four weights of one of the input vectors and subtracting them from the corresponding weights for the output vector, for example, .03, .42, .85, .11 from the output vector .46, .05, .33, .02. The result is called an error vector, and the value of its derived weights are squared and averaged to produce the “mean squared error.” One of the weights of the input vector is then changed and checked to see if this modification reduces the mean average of the error vector, and so on for each of the weights of that vector. The process is repeated for the other input vectors until the error is made as small as possible. The final values for each of the input vectors are stored in the artificial neural network’s “memory” along with the desired output vector so that the network automatically imposes these weights on the next reception of the wavelengths and other inputs corresponding to, for example, a red spot. It can thereby “recognize” or label any new inputs of that sort as constituting a red spot. Another set of connections and their weights correspond to “green spot,” and so forth for other initial inputs. In effect, the “brain cells” have grown connections to other brain cells—“traces”

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for red spots and other inputs have been etched into the brain and it can now discriminate between the different inputs, that is, can recognize them as red spots or some other entity depending on the computational matches it performs. In the laboratory, the “supervisor” that oversees the weight adjustment or backpropagation process and knows the desired output vector—the overseer who “trains” the network—is a person or a serial computer programmed by a person.25 In real organisms, this supervisor is presumably some very basic, evolutionarily established innate “knowledge” possessed by the brain in relation to some of the things it might perceive. As the organism grows up, its society becomes the supervisor. As stated, connectionism differs from classical cognitivism in that it deals with input patterns that are “distributed” over many nodes and their weighted connections to other nodes rather than with symbols that stand for specific inputs such as a red spot. More succinctly, connectionist rules operate over numerical weights or vectors rather than syntactically complex symbols. Connectionism further differs from classical cognitivism in that backpropagation and the other connectionist rules for information processing are very general compared to the specific and syntactically complex rules in classical cognitivism.26 Besides a closer fit with neural interactions in the brain, this difference in rules and representations between connectionism and classical cognitivism gives connectionism some advantages over the latter, especially versatility and generalizability. For example, red spots and almost any other perceptual array are never presented to us unambiguously. But because a partial set of vectors for an input can still approximate the vectors established for a given output vector, a neural network can complete a partial or ambiguous pattern presented to it, that is, can recognize it despite its incomplete presentation. Classical computation, in contrast, approaches such a goal only by adding on an endless number of special rules for all the exceptions to the strict or “brittle” rules the classical system must follow. Presumably this “adding on” could overwhelm any system’s computational capacity. The versatility of artificial neural networks also allows them to generalize to new cases—to recognize such cases as partial or new versions of its prototypical output vectors—and thus to grow.27 All things considered, the basic role of an artificial neural network is to transform its initial activation into a stable pattern, that is, to complete a partial pattern.28 At least superficially, it shares the Gestaltists’ tradition of holism with Merleau-Ponty.

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Complex Interactionism Clark thinks that both these two phases of cognitive science are necessary for a successful computational model of mind. He accepts that connectionism captures the interaction of our brain and the environment at the level of sensation and of other basic instances of pattern recognition and completion. But he feels that classical cognitivism is necessary to represent how we deal with an object that is absent, extremely complex, or varies widely in the way it manifests its identity. In these “representationhungry” cases, systems “create some kind of inner item, pattern, or process whose role is to stand in for the elusive state of affairs.” 29 However, Clark also thinks that “the body and local environment are literally built into the processing loops that result in intelligent action.” 30 In other words, he is committed to the third phase of cognitive science, complex interactionism. More specifically, developments in robotics have led him to recognize that the brain is “embodied,” that is, perception is immediately connected with action in many cases. Perception does not always require that we first have a representation of what is perceived and only then compute what is to be done. For example, a robot can be programmed so that its registration of a wall in its path is directly connected with the subsequent action of turning to the right. This direct linkage between perception and action presumably holds for much of behavior. Furthermore, we often design our environment so that it provides immediate cues for action (a stop light) or representations of what is absent (a monument). The brain is embodied, and the body is embedded in and oriented toward its environment. Thus Clark declares that the intuitive notion of the mind should be extended, past the province of the brain, to “encompass a variety of external props and aids.” 31 In this regard, Clark says that he feels an affinity between his view and the existential-phenomenological notion of being-in-the-world championed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Gibson’s concept of the affordances (the uses that things present to us directly in perception), and Varela’s idea of enaction or nonmediated interaction with one’s surroundings.32 The interactionist phase of cognitive science involves two interesting further developments. One consists of a seemingly complete move away from rules and representations: “dynamic cognitivism” or the hypothesis that “cognitive agents are dynamical systems.” 33 According to this view, the mind or brain is part of a system that includes its environment and

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can be treated adequately as “a set of quantitative variables changing continually, concurrently, and interdependently over quantitative time in accordance with dynamical laws described by a set of equations.” 34 The output of these equations consists in a geometrical description of the system, utilizing attractors and other notions associated with chaos theory. While enthusiastic about this approach, many cognitive scientists feel that it lacks the decompositional or “reverse engineering” strategy necessary for satisfactory explanations in psychology.35 Dynamic cognitivism lends itself well to the ends of prediction and control via its equations, but fails to provide an in-depth understanding of the organism whose behavior is being forecast and shaped. The second interesting development of the interactionist phase concerns the role of language in relation to cognition. For Clark, language is primarily a tool that “complements but does not profoundly alter the brain’s own basic modes of representation and computation.” 36 It permits us cognitively to exploit external resources more fully as when we write down a grocery list or construct computer programs. As inner speech (talking things over with oneself ), language provides an “inner loop” that aids the brain in using its more silent computational resources.37 Most important, Clark points out, is the “mangrove effect” of language: thinking about thinking (speech making an object of other speech) builds layer upon layer of codified thought, in the same way mangrove seeds sink the roots of their fledgling trees deep into a mud flat, gathering silt and debris around those roots, and eventually creating an island that is extended by other mangrove trees going through the same process. Language, in short, allows us to create new objects upon which we may offer further comment, that is, it brings about “a second-order cognitive dynamics.” 38 Although these are the major points Clark makes concerning language, he adds some comments on the linguistic work of another philosophical supporter of cognitive science, Daniel Dennett. Dennett’s work, however, will take us beyond Clark, Dennett himself, cognitive science, and Merleau-Ponty; it will contribute to a direction that will take us back to the primacy of voices, but now supported by more arguments and further insights. Before we deal with Dennett’s view of language, however, we must first examine some of cognitive science’s limits as an account of mental activity, particularly perception.

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The Limits of Cognitive Science Although cognitive science and its three phases approximate the “being-in-the world” of Merleau-Ponty and other existential phenomenologists (embodiment coupled with embeddedness in the world), there is nonetheless an abyss between them. Cognitive science attempts to “decompose” the mind-world relation into computational processes and components (classical and/or connectionist), plus external artifacts, and thereby remains thoroughly within the type of discourse that I called analytic. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological description of the “subject-object dialogue” reveals a quasi-internal or “organic” relation between subjects and objects. More specifically, cognitive scientists construe the discrete symbols (classical cognitivism) or nodes (connectionism) of a computational system as definable independently of what they come to symbolize or register: they are “architectural” or purely “syntactical” entities first, “semantic” later. For Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, a subject is from the beginning a body that is an opening onto its surroundings, and the surroundings are from the start a solicitation of responses to them from “body-subjects.” On his view, neither subjects nor objects are first “in themselves” or independently existing beings that only then connect up with their relata.39 Cognitive scientists cannot accept Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “the indeterminate is a positive phenomenon.” Even if they could construe a way in which computational systems are inseparable from the inputs they receive, they could not characterize these inputs in the partially indeterminate way they so often present themselves to us. The inputs may be determinate things that become other determinate things, say, an unnamed thing that is then labeled as this or that type of thing, or they may be a set of alternative determinate possibilities (the series “x or y or z”), but for cognitive science they cannot be things that 1) have an inherently and relatively indeterminate status, 2) are identical with the power to give rise to specific versions of themselves in relation to subjects, and 3) are never exhaustibly definable, even in principle. Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the indeterminate is a positive or irreducible phenomenon means that the computational system of cognitive science would first have to convert the phenomena we perceive into discrete and well-defined entities, such as symbols or vectors of numbers, in order to process them algorithmically. This concession, in turn, would entail that the primary characterization of perception and our existence is like Merleau-Ponty’s subject-object dialogue and

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that computations play only a secondary and derived role in this activity. The organic discourse of Merleau-Ponty, then, portrays embodiment and perception in stark contrast to the analytic discourse of cognitive science, despite a surface resemblance between the two accounts. But which of these accounts, the analytic or the organic, is the more defensible? We have seen that Clark, Churchland, and Dennett portray connectionism as involved in pattern completion—as identifying a partially complete phenomenon as a whole phenomenon. But we also saw that Merleau-Ponty had a convincing argument against any account of pattern completion that doesn’t first accept at least a quasi-internal relation between subjects and their surroundings: either we already know what the object is or we don’t; if we do, then computations are not required for the recognition to take place, whatever other role they might play in refining the identification of the object; if, on the other hand, we do not already know what the object is like, then the computations have nothing to guide them and would only arbitrarily select an identifying concept or output vector. The incomplete patterns of the connectionists must either directly indicate what patterns they are without computational mediation or no computation is possible. As we saw earlier, an appeal to context doesn’t help the situation, because the same problem arises in relation to it. If one should propose that a context is “hard-wired” in the system, then the system is stuck within a specific “micro world” and loses a capacity that actual minds enjoy: the ability to entertain with flexibility almost any context at any time. In support of this last point, Dreyfus and Dreyfus argue that connectionist systems are limited by the knowledge of the system’s designer: the network exhibits only the knowledge built into it by its designer, avoids all else by architectural fiat, and thus cannot generalize to new contexts in the way that human minds do.40 If, on the other hand, the wired-in context is very general, say automatic recognition of a straight line or a y-juncture of lines (a corner), it will not be of much help in recognizing whether the line or lines are of a chair or of some other object or even of a physical object. Furthermore, if something is wired in, whatever it is, then it’s as external to us as any other object, and its recognition puts us once more back on the horns of the dilemma with which we started (either we already know what we seek or we do not . . .). Cognitive science has a ready reply to this criticism: it only works if the “system” is a conscious activity already directed toward its objects (à la Merleau-Ponty). For it is true that such an activity must already know the

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kind of thing for which it is looking or it will not be able to get started or continue as an activity. But a mechanism is a different matter: it doesn’t have to be conscious at all, let alone of what it is looking for. It just has to be “set” to look in the right direction and be provided with the right computational processes. Could it have the flexibility to “look in as many directions” as conscious agents do? Although such technical conundrums as the “frame problem” suggest that there are real problems in answering this question affirmatively,41 it is difficult to say “no” without building one machine after another and seeing if one reaches criterion, that is, if one of the machines will be able to simulate human intelligence under all conditions. But the notion of such a criterion raises a larger issue: to know when a system has simulated us adequately, we would first have to agree on what or who we are independently of what the system says. Indeed, to even state the issue of reaching criterion in this manner indicates that we already have at least a tacit idea of what we are. Because that tacit idea is based on the special situation that we are the object of our own investigation (unlike the other objects we examine), then cognitive scientists must bow to this tacit idea as a reasonable basis for monitoring the picture they paint of us. This claim cannot be countered by pointing out that we are not aware of many of the processes that make us up, such as our blood circulation, brain cell interactions, or subpersonal cognitive processes: for it’s the whole to which they add up—them as a whole—that we presumably are and directly know.42 That whole is the cohesion and direction these processes possess as our engagement with the things surrounding us. Cognitive science deals with the details and arrives at very useful abstractions about us as well as an idea of some of the constraints placed on the subject’s defining engagement with the world; persons, on the other hand, grasp the whole, however vaguely, which in turn tells them about the relevance and usefulness of the details provided by cognitive science. If phenomenology or organic discourse is better suited in revealing the object of this tacit knowledge (ourselves), as it appears to be, then it wins out over cognitive science in providing access to the primary relation between us and our surroundings. Additionally, these phenomenological findings are stronger evidence for an alternative to cognitive science than the arguments provided by such analytic thinkers as Searle (the “Chinese Room” argument) and Nagel (the “what’s it like to be a bat” argument).43 Those important arguments turn on examples that show the counterintuitiveness of

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mechanistic construals of the mind or self. But Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological findings go further in that they show and presumably provide direct evidence for what the mind or self is: an opening onto the world that is simultaneously the realization (discovery and creation) of the latent meaning of the situations in which we find ourselves. Furthermore, phenomenology provides a systematic, replicable, and fecund qualitative method for exploring and substantiating this view of perception and the subject. On any but the narrowest outlook, it qualifies as a science fit to compete with cognitive science and its experiment driven methods. Ironically, Daniel Dennett, a philosophical defender of cognitive science and its methods, provides an argument that can be extended to criticize those who would exclude phenomenology and other qualitative approaches from the halls of science or making any other claim to respectable knowledge. Dennett accuses those who resist neo-Darwinism (natural selection coupled with genetic theory) and his engineering perspective on biology (decomposition as a principle of explanation) as fearful that neo-Darwinism makes humans less than human.44 This accusation of fear is particularly interesting in light of Dennett’s discussion of Nietzsche. Dennett assumes that Nietzsche’s primary notion of nihilism is the sort of meaninglessness that comes when one can no longer accept that God or some other transcendent principle guarantees a purpose or meaning for human existence.45 Thus Dennett claims that Chomsky and others who do not accept the engineering principle of biology are afraid of nihilism. But Nietzsche’s primary notion of nihilism is actually leveled against those who deny the ineliminable role of chance and strife in reality and cannot live with the idea of the eternal return of this state of affairs.46 The true and reprehensible nihilists for Nietzsche are those who do believe in God or some other absolute foundation for human existence. Because Nietzsche feels that European science makes a god out of the unquestioning belief in absolute truth, he places it alongside monotheistic religion as a prime example of nihilism.47 Dennett’s use of Darwin’s natural selection as the ultimate principle of biological order would not escape this charge. Indeed, Nietzsche sees creative forces at the base of nature and thinks that Darwinian notions such as natural selection, selfpreservation, and adaptationism are important yet only secondary forces: “Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of selfpreservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; selfpreservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.” 48

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Thus one could extend Dennett’s form of Nietzschean “genealogical critique” to cognitive science itself, at least to its paradigmatic status in psychology.49 Despite current waves of religiously based ressentiment, modern societies are dominated by technocrats and a technocratic form of rationality, abstractly epitomized by the Turing Machine. The welcoming reception given to the computational model of mind, in either the classical, connectionist, or interactionist mode, could therefore be as much due to the model’s reflection of society as due to the model’s strictly scientific value. If technocapitalist societies are nihilistic because of their fear of chaos, consequently reducing everything to data and measurable economic value, then the same would follow for the psychology made in the image of those societies. The discourse of cognitive psychology could then be said to be a nihilistic voice. This at least shows that the pointed finger of genealogical critique can be turned back on its cognitive science initiators. The main point, however, is that we resist our fear of chaos and not canonize our approaches to knowledge, including science.

Language and Subjectivity There are further limits to cognitive science, but these come from considerations of language and also reveal limits to phenomenology, including Merleau-Ponty’s. Moreover, they point in the direction of the next chapter and the second stage of my deconstructive strategy. Clark is critical of those who, like Churchland, view language as a pale reflection of preverbal computation.50 Indeed, Clark valorizes language as the “ultimate artifact . . . so ubiquitous it is almost invisible, so intimate it is not clear whether it is a kind of tool or a dimension of the user.” 51 Despite this praise, Clark endorses only the “tool” view of language and argues against Dennett’s claim that language involves “some profound but subtle reorganization of the brain.” 52 According to Dennett, the massive parallel-processing architecture of the brain, when coupled with the use of language it permits, simulates (produces as a “virtual” machine) the serial form of processing and the full rules and syntactically complex representational architecture favored by the classical cognitivists; that is, new software and consciousness are added to the “hard-wired” original, connectionist architecture.53 Once this new software is installed, children can engage in a “semiunderstood self-commentary” on their activities, often adopting their

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parents’ voice.54 This tendency leads to the practice of turning labels or other discursive fragments into objects of further commentary. We are, in other words, able to embed these fragments of language in metastatements and to do the same with the latter, and so on. When we recall one of our labels, it then carries along with it our commentary, which we no longer have to produce from scratch.55 Dennett also uses this self-reflexive feature of language to distinguish linguistic animals from nonlinguistic ones: a chimp may have a concept of a dog or of its own species, but, unlike us, it can’t consider those concepts as concepts.56 That ability requires a syntactically complex medium—fragments of speech or writing—in which one part can be the object of comment for another part. This reflexive ability, Dennett further speculates, allows us to conceive ourselves as selves and thus consider pain as our pain rather than simply feeling it in a nonattributive fashion.57 Dennett agrees with the standard version of Darwinism: genes whose phenotypes are favored by nature through the selection process are passed on to future generations. Besides using this process to explain the appearance of language, he follows Richard Dawkins in claiming that it sets up a form of cultural evolution involving memes. Memes are “the sort of complex ideas that form themselves into distinct memorable units.” Examples of these self-replicating cultural units include everything from words such as arch and deconstructionism to the “first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.” 58 They replicate themselves by jumping from one brain to another, just as genes pass from bodies of this generation to those in the next.59 We are simply the vehicle of the memes (345). Indeed, Dennett claims that “a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes” (365).60 Memes valorizing education, for example, “reinforce the very process of meme implantation” in the mind. The earliest memes inhabiting us determine who we are, and subsequent memes add to or subtract from that original colony. What makes each of us a specific person is the coalition of memes that “govern” us, that “determine the decisions” we make (367–68). Moreover, memes “compete” with one another for “entry into as many minds as possible” (349). Because many memes can congregate in the same mind, they are influenced by each other and are often passed on to other minds in altered form: even clichés are “modest moment[s] of creativity,” “mixture[s] of serendipity and appreciation, distributed over several minds, no one of which gets to claim the authorship of special creation” (355). Although the particulars of a meme usually change in this

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process, the central idea or theme—“the story, not the text”—remains the same (356–57). Clark is right to be fearful of Dennett’s robust treatment of language and memes: not because Dennett claims that language involves a reorganization of the brain; but because his emphasis upon language in the guise of memes suggests that the latter might dictate our characterizations of what we perceive, including the scientific evidence used to verify the claims of cognitive science. Dennett’s view of language, in other words, encourages what cognitive science and many of their philosophical allies find most unacceptable: poststructuralist or social constructionist views of the relation between language and the world.61 Nor would Merleau-Ponty accept such a strong view of the role of language. Like most of the cognitive scientists, though from his organic rather than their analytic perspective, he believes that perception has primacy over thought, memory, imagination, communication, and the rest of our mental activities (that these activities are “intentionalities of act” in relation to perception’s more fundamental “operative intentionality”).62 Language makes thought complete (without words, our thoughts would fall back into indeterminacy)63 and provides things with a more definite identity,64 but only as part of the task of making our situation more determinate, only as subordinate to the perceptually based subject-object dialogue. Merleau-Ponty, too, would therefore fear the poststructuralist movement, just as he did the structuralist.65 Thinkers have long been tormented by the question concerning the relation between language and subjects: is language or discourse, for example, the analytic and organic discourses we have discussed, a pattern to which subjects and their mental activities conform (are subjects merely passive vehicles for words), or is language just a malleable tool that subjects use in order to express their thoughts and to communicate with one another (are subjects active agents)? In order to support the priority of voice over the notion of a prelinguistic subject, we must now swing to the side of language and examine the position of those who champion the primacy of discourse. But then we will also have to show that consideration of language actually promotes the primacy of voice over both subjects and language—that language must be “reinscribed” as voice, and society as a multivoiced body, to allude once again to the deconstructive strategy of this and the next two chapters.

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5

Postmodernism and Language

In chapter 3, I used some of Bakhtin’s ideas on language to clarify what Rushdie might mean by the voices to which he alludes in Midnight’s Children. We saw that Bakhtin described social languages as determining the identity of their enunciators and objects as well as the value that either of these might have for us. This description was reminiscent of the creative dimensions of Nietzsche’s notion of a “value-creating force.” But in each case the relation between language and its products was left cryptic. Many postmodernist or poststructuralist theorists of language fill out this relation and argue for the primacy of language over the modernist notion of subjects. I want to demonstrate that their contributions, as well as the implications of Dennett’s comments in chapter 4 on language and memes undermine the primacy that modernists assign to the prelinguistic subject. This chapter will therefore fulfill the inversion phase of what I am calling a deconstructive strategy and give language priority over subjects. But I will also show that the postmodernist treatment of language points beyond itself to an agency that is neither mere discourse nor the traditional subject. In other words, we have to go beyond both the modernists and the postmodernists and reinscribe language as “voice.” This reinscription will be the task of the next chapter and will help solidify the claim that society is a multivoiced body.

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Saussure and Poststructuralism Saussure’s Linguistics Postmodernist views of language both appropriate and criticize Ferdinand Saussure’s theory of language. His theory is therefore a helpful place to begin a discussion of postmodernism and language. Saussure holds that the expression of thought is inseparable from the language in which it is conveyed: sound and thought, both of which are initially amorphous, transform one another into clearly demarcated “thought-sounds” or “signs” composed of “sound images” (“signals”) and “concepts.” Thus “tree” involves both the sound we recognize and the idea of the tall, leafy flora associated with it. These two components of a sign (sound image and concept) are like the two sides of a piece of paper: you can’t cut one side without cutting the other.1 Whatever they were before their union, they have now become the two dimensions of signs. The identity of each sign, furthermore, is determined by the “diacritical” system that the signs collectively constitute. Rather than referring to some external object or other entity that exists independently of it, each sign is established as what it is on the basis of its difference from or “opposition” to the others.2 In short, signs are “a complex of terms holding one another in mutual juxtaposition.” 3 Saussure’s full treatment of language as a diacritical system is complex, consisting of a distinction between la langue (language as a synchronic and scientifically investigable system) and la parole (language as spoken). Within la langue there is a further division between a “syntagmatic” dimension (the syntactical or sequential order of signs, for example, in a sentence) and an “associative” dimension (the semantic or paradigmatic order of signs). Each of these dimensions is a diacritical system. The easiest way to characterize a diacritical system is to think of how each of our color concepts, for example, green, is established by its contrast with red, white, and our other color concepts or male and female by their contrast with one another. Add a new but related concept to either of these two sets of oppositions and the meanings of all other elements in the set change. That is to say, the unity or whole of the system is determined by the interrelationship (the differences) among its terms rather than by one term subordinating and including the others within its scope—a diacritical or differential as opposed to a totalizing form of unity.

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We communicate about our surroundings within the constraints imposed upon us by the diacritical system of our common language. We never exist outside such a system. Because our desire for or perception of something is always a specific, nongeneric desire for or perception of that kind of thing, and because the diacritical relation of the thing’s name to the other names in its system of concepts determines its meaning for us, it follows that the system shapes our desires, cognitive modes, and ultimately our selves.4 Moreover, this system is socially produced and “is never complete in any single individual, but exists perfectly only in the collectivity.” 5 This summary of Saussure’s linguistic theory helps bring home two points that are compelling. First, we always find ourselves thinking or performing other mental activities within the framework of a language. Even when we accomplish cognitive-based tasks we are unaware of undertaking, we register, reflect upon, and elaborate them and their results within discourse. Moreover, many of our unconscious forms of cognition were originally learned on the basis of discursive exchanges with others or with oneself and only then incorporated into the level of habit. Second, the terms of a language are at least partially determined by their differences from the other terms in the same linguistic system, that is, they are diacritically related to one another. Saussure does not qualify his notion of a diacritical system with the idea of an only partial determination. We will later see why this qualification must be added to a full account of diacritically structured discourse.

Poststructuralism and La Langue Many poststructuralists accept the diacritical and thoughtdetermining aspects of Saussure’s view of language. But they revolt against what they take to be the fixity of la langue. They argue, instead, that discourse is dynamic and open to ruptures that permit the emergence of new discourses that are qualitatively and often drastically distinct from what they are replacing. In order to gain a better idea of the notion of discourse and its radical generativity, we will begin by examining the views of three poststructuralists, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault (in his “archaeological” period), who largely confine their remarks to the powers of language. This will help deepen

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our understanding of language as a determining form. But we will then look at the broader claims of the later, “genealogical” Foucault and Judith Butler. Both see that nonlinguistic as well as linguistic practices determine the status of subjects and the objects of perception and knowledge. We will also enter the debate between realist and social constructionist philosophers of science. Whereas Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, and Butler will help us focus on the relation between language and subjectivity, the philosophers of science will help highlight the relation between language and objects and ultimately the relation between voice and science. More generally, each of these thinkers and positions bring up an aspect of discourse that I will want either to appropriate or to challenge in order to clarify the infrastructure of voice and to make the idea of the primacy of voice more compelling relative to the modernists’ penchant for subjects and the postmodernists’ preference for language.

Language and Agency Derrida and Différance Derrida holds that everything takes place for us within the “text” of language. But this text is the dynamic movement of différance and its two dimensions, difference and deferral. Like Saussure, Derrida thinks that each element of a text is determined by its difference from the other elements—by “the trace within it of the other elements”—so that no element is “present in and of itself, referring only to itself.” 6 This spacing of elements is complemented by their temporization, that is, by their reference to past and future versions of themselves, “the detour and postponement by means of which intuition, perception, consummation—in a word, the relationship to the present, the reference to a present reality, to a being—are always deferred.” 7 This deferral is inherent in the being of an element of a text, because representation or iterability is a necessary characteristic of a sign.8 The sign table, for example, doesn’t work as a sign unless it is repeatable. But this means that it is divided from itself, for its occurrences take place in different diacritical settings. In these different settings, its meaning will differ (tables to put things on, tables that display data, water tables, etc.). Thus no sign can ever be univocal even though it retains its outward phonetic or “signifier” identity and is thereby recognizable in different contexts.9

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Différance, then, is the endless play of the signs of a text, their spacing and temporization, their difference and deferral. Because différance is nothing more than this play, it is “unnamable,” a “nonspecies,” a “terrifying form of monstrosity” and hence not a metaphysical entity whose identity would be compromised by the action of endless deferral.10 Nonetheless, différance’s “[erasure of ] itself in presenting itself,” 11 its hiding of its “monstrosity,” does provide an opening for self-deception and the adoption of a “transcendental signified” that can assuage our fear of an endless chain of signifiers and fulfill our reactionary desire for a “Kingdom.” 12 Derrida’s différance also entails that language is not a function of the speaking subject. Instead, one’s presence to oneself, one’s identity as a subject, is also always deferred: the “subject is constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporizing, in deferral.” 13 At its most hyperbolic, this deferral means that our death—the indefinite repeatability of the form of the living present beyond the presents that we actually do inhabit or will—is included within the iterability of signs: death is contained in life and required by it.14 Derrida thinks the play of différance is particularly evident in relation to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and its assumption of a “pure voice.” Husserl understands truth to be the complete and apodictic fulfillment of an intentional act, the full self-presence of the intentional object to the consciousness that intends it.15 Derrida points out that this selfpresence, the “founding concept of phenomenology,” takes place in the “living present” and involves “the absolute proximity of self-presence,” a “being-in-front of the object available for repetition.” 16 In order to ensure that this absolute proximity between our consciousness and its object, the pure self-presence of the object of knowledge, remains undivided, Husserl compares it to “solitary mental life.” In that “monologue” internal expressions “are themselves experienced by us at [the] very moment [in which we experience what is expressed, the intentional object],” and so the “imaginary” signs involved in this soliloquy indicate nothing that is absent from that moment: the iterable unity of the object can be grasped by us fully and with certitude despite its repeatability.17 Derrida refers to this soliloquy as a “phenomenological voice” that “continues to speak and be present to itself—to hear itself—in the absence of the world.” 18 But he points out that this “auto-affection” occurs necessarily within a present, within a “now” of consciousness. Every such moment requires a reference to a past and a future in order to be a present moment: subtract these dimensions from the present and the moment reduces to nothing.

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But these past and future dimensions of the present are also absent, else they would be present in the same way as the present and hence not its past and future dimensions. The present and its “pure” object of knowledge therefore point to these dimensions as something “outside” and hence to a world that infects with difference what would like to pretend to be pure and complete.19 By necessarily “supplementing” the voice of phenomenology, différance ensures the failure of Husserl’s dream of epistemological purity. More generally put, différance guarantees that presence cannot have priority over signs and language.20 Derrida’s notions of the “spacing” and “temporization” of language— différance –add a welcome dynamic dimension to Saussure’s la langue. As was demonstrated in the previous chapter’s discussion of MerleauPonty’s account of subjectivity, we are an activity rather than a subject that first exists and then acts. If we are subordinate to the machinations of language, then language must be primarily responsible for this dynamic agency. But the differing/deferral that Derrida attributes to signs is a formal structure; similarly, the temporizing and spacing he speaks of are a formal version of time and space respectively. Both formalities determine the structure of experience, of lived time and space, rather than the other way around. This formalism falls to the same sword that Terry Eagleton levels against Derrida’s allied notion of the “undecidability” of meaning. The meaning of something is undecidable, that is, never legitimately resolvable into one or another of its iterations, only if, in Eagleton’s words, one accepts Derrida’s “contemplative” perspective and views “language as a chain of signifiers upon a page” instead of “as something we do, as indissociably interwoven with our practical forms of life.” 21 In the social and historical setting, not all contexts are equal, and hence the meaning of a sign is neither completely undecidable nor only arbitrarily decidable. Once we exchange history for formal time and space, once we recognize that Derrida’s dynamic version of la langue, différance, does not do the deciding or provide agency, we are once again faced with the question, who or what does? Saussure and Derrida, as well as the other poststructuralists we are about to consider, make a strong case for replacing the modernist pre- or extralinguistic subject with a linguistically determined subject; a case for moving from an active subject who uses language to one that is primarily a vehicle for the determining forms of language. If Eagleton’s criticism of Derrida is compelling, then the type of agency in which we participate must be something other than either Derrida’s formalist rendition of language or the modernist subject.

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Before considering other poststructuralist responses to the issue of agency, a parenthetical note on Derrida’s criticism of Husserl is appropriate. Derrida is right to reject Husserl’s idea of a pure voice. But the “outside” of this pure voice is not primarily the absence indicated by a sign, as Derrida would have it. Rather, the outside and refutation of a pure voice is, I will want to claim, simply other voices. According to the notion of hybridization that we examined in chapter 3, each voice is inhabited by and partially constituted by the other voices to which it is dialogically related: each is, as I have put it, both a dynamic part of the identity of the rest and, simultaneously, their other. If we end up accepting this, then hybridized or dialogic voices, their relative indeterminacy as well as their mutual intersecting, will be the basis for the equivocity of signs and language as well as for the ongoing production of new forms of discourse. The contest for audibility between these voices would then be the basis both for bringing about contextual resolutions of this equivocity and for ensuring that such resolutions would always be only temporary. Différance would no longer be needed for determining this impermanence since it and temporization would be artifacts of the ongoing contestation among the voices of society. Moreover, Derrida’s claim that the subject is divided would still be correct. The reason for this division, however, would be the many voices resounding and contesting for audibility in each voice and not because of différance’s movement of deferral. The further clarification of voices, their interaction, and the elliptical relation between them and subjects in the next two chapters will add force to the above claims.

Lyotard and Genres Derrida uses what he thinks is a general property of language— the dissolution of strict identity involved in a sign’s iteration—to assert the primacy of discourse (as différance) over subjects and other presumptive unities. In contrast, Lyotard and Foucault appeal to the specificities of discourse in order to accomplish the same goal as Derrida. These specificities will be useful in developing a fuller notion of the type of social discourse that provides voices with a logic or infrastructure. But we will also see that both Foucault and Lyotard feel compelled to reintroduce a type of subject agency. This, once again, will point to the need for a type of agency that goes beyond the alternatives of modernist subjects and the postmodernist construal of language.

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Lyotard refers to the specificities of language as “phrases,” “genres,” and the “differend.” Phrases are the basic elements of the social body and are “happenings” or events rather than the “substances” and “subjects” of traditional philosophy. More specifically, phrases are prescriptive, cognitive, evaluative, and interrogative sentences, but also silences, feelings, and even the wagging of a dog’s tail. Each phrase is the presentation of its universe and instances, that is, of its addressor, addressee, sense, and referent, and each phrase is constituted according to its “regimen,” the set of rules that determines its appropriate occurrence. Moreover, no phrase is first, each necessarily calls forth another—each indicates that something more can be said about itself, that other phrases can “link on” to it.22 Although phrases are the basic elements of the social body, Lyotard indicates that they are inseparable from “genres of discourse” and from the conflict among these genres. Genres provide diverse phrases with common “stakes” or purposes, for example, the ethical concerns of a prescriptive code, the explanatory stakes of a cognitive theory, or the playful aims of a game. The modes of linking phrases that stem from genres of discourse are “strategies” in relation to the more rigid “constitutive rules” of a phrase’s regimen. Lyotard concludes that genres can override the narrower dictates of a phrase’s regimen and incorporate the latter into its own plan. One can, for example, cheat at chess. Each genre, then, inclines the instances presented by a phrase, including the addressor, toward certain linkings, or at least steers them away from linkings that are not suitable with regard to the end pursued by the genre.23 Because genres impose different stakes upon the same phrases, the social body and its phrases are marked by conflict. Lyotard says that this genre conflict always involves what he calls a differend: “[A] differend [différend] would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for a lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.” A “wrong,” Lyotard adds, “results from the fact that the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres or discourse.” 24 We can illustrate the notion of a differend by considering its operation in the case of two different types of genres. In the case of the first type, which we can call genres of judgments, Lyotard holds that there is an absolute abyss between, for example, cognitive genres such as scientific judgments and prescriptive judgments such as ethical claims. A cognitive phrase linked to the stakes of cognitive explanations requires ostensive verification of its descriptions of the phrase’s referent.25 In contrast, one cannot (Lyotard believes)

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appropriately derive prescriptions from descriptions of reality; one cannot conclude an “ought” from an “is.” In obligating us to their terms, moreover, prescriptions “befall” us rather than proceed from us, concern us as their addressees and never as their addressors. Lyotard even claims that these events of obligation must take place without identifying the addressor of the prescriptive phrase and genre. To attempt to identify the addressor would presumably taint the prescription with a third party descriptive phrase (that is, the addressee reporting the event to someone) and thus transform it into a cognitive genre.26 Because Lyotard thinks that these two types of judgments are incommensurable and one cannot be used legitimately as the basis for a decision about the other, their difference serves as an example of the differend. We can call the second type of genres “metanarratives.” In his earlier work, Lyotard defined metanarratives as determining “criteria of competence” for participating in “language games” and for the correct application of these criteria. Metanarratives also define “what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question.” 27 This type of genre and its associated differend are illustrated by the clash between liberal and Marxist ideas of society. The liberal or bourgeois genre of social and economic law doesn’t recognize that the extraction of surplus value from workers is exploitation, doesn’t recognize what the Marxists proclaim, that one possesses “labor-power” as one’s essence. It can see labor power only as a commodity. The liberal genre therefore judges the phrase and its instances, that is, the addressor (the workers), the addressee (the bourgeoisie), the referent (labor power), and the sense of the referent (the meaning of work) in terms that cannot provide the phrases of the Marxist genre with a fair hearing. The liberal genre, in other words, ignores the differend and “wrongs” workers, making them no more than mere plaintiffs within a setting not of their choosing.28 Given this notion of genres and differends, Lyotard declares that it is our intellectual and political duty—the duty of “philosophical politics”—to “bear witness” to differends “by finding idioms for them.” 29 These idioms will safeguard the integrity and heterogeneity of the genres separated by differends. When, for example, the bourgeois courts decide against workers’ complaints of exploitation, an idiom is required to articulate the silence or the feeling of suffering (these are also “phrases”) on the part of the workers and to acknowledge the differend that separates liberal from Marxist views of human nature and society—to show, in other words, that the liberal court has committed a “wrong” in its inability to hear the other

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side.30 Indeed, Lyotard feels that respecting these differends and attempting to provide idioms for them when necessary is the primary meaning of justice and is a prescription that he feels we are obligated to fulfill.31 Lyotard is emphatic that these genres determine the identity of subjects. For example, he describes the intentions of subjects or addressors as subordinate to genres: “Our ‘intentions’ are tensions (to link in a certain way) exerted by genres upon the addressors and addressees of phrases, upon their referents, and upon their senses.” Although we believe that we want to persuade, to be upright, or to fulfill any other such intention, this is only because a genre of discourse “imposes its mode of linking onto ‘our’ phrase and onto ‘us.’ ” 32 We can “be” only as the instance of a phrase; our identity as subjects, like the identity of our referents and our addressees, is determined entirely within the genre that governs that phrase, establishing us as moralists, scientists, philosophers, bureaucrats, or any other subject role one may care to mention. Despite his insistence on the priority of genres over subjects, Lyotard adopts Kant’s notion of a “reflective judgment” in relation to “regulative ideas” that “exceed everything that can be presented” to the senses, for example, “emancipated humanity.” 33 Reflective judgments are indeterminate and follow no rules other than those they provide for themselves; they invent concepts, such as the idea of emancipated humanity, for the phenomena that concern them. Because the political judgment that goes with the regulative idea of justice is a reflective judgment and involves no rules, it itself is not a genre by Lyotard’s definition and cannot therefore be viewed as a genre that contains all genres nor as a metanarrative that unifies all narratives.34 When, therefore, Lyotard claims that this judgment renders a verdict in favor of the prescription to witness differends and the de jure inviolable heterogeneity of all genres, he believes he cannot be accused of prescribing one genre over another, cannot be charged with violating the differend and upholding a philosophical politics that is not genre free. If, because of their indeterminacy, reflective judgments are not genres, they presumably do not determine the identity or status of subjects that articulate them.35 But then Lyotard is stuck with a pure subject, an absolute creator of concepts. This is contrary to the spirit of Lyotard’s work and the otherwise compelling case that postmodernism makes for the powerful role of language in determining subjectivity, now delineated in Lyotard’s precise notion of the establishment of the identity of addressors, addressees, sense, and referents. On the other hand, canceling this

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seemingly autonomous subject places us once again in the quandary of seeking an agency that is neither the modernist subject nor the postmodernist notion of a language that determines subjects. Michel Foucault is the next poststructuralist thinker we will consider. His view of discourse and of “power” will help expand our recognition of the specific way in which language and related practices play an infrastructural role in social agency. But, despite these gains, we will see that his view doesn’t help us resolve the conundrum concerning social agency.

Foucault and Power In his later work, Foucault passes from archaeology to genealogy. Because his archaeology is pertinent to our current topic, language, we will start with it and then move to the genealogical period. The latter will also be important for our examination of the relation between voices and social structures in chapter 6. In stating the relation of archaeology to science, Foucault says that he wants to “reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge: a level that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse, instead of disputing [the latter’s] validity and seeking to diminish its scientific nature.” 36 The positive task of archaeology is to uncover the “rules of formation” that constitute this unconscious and produce the “discursive formations” or “epistemes” of knowledge. The negative task is to undermine the notion of subjects as the source of knowledge and the idea of progressive epistemological change toward a final truth. In The Order of Things, Foucault argues that in each of three periods— the Renaissance, Classical Age (1650–1800), and Modern Age—the academic topics of “living things,” “wealth,” and “language” are ordered up by entirely different rules of formation: in the Renaissance by an inherent, but often hidden, resemblance between signs and things, in the Classical Age by representing things via neutral and transparent signs incorporated into tables and charts, and in the Modern Age by hidden or transcendental sources of constitutive power, for example, teleology or evolution in biology and economics, the manifestation of a people’s will in language, and the Kantian noumenal self in epistemology. Each of the three periods and the topics that concerned them, therefore, are ordered up by a distinct episteme and its rules of formation. According to Foucault, an episteme’s rules of formation establish its objects, types of statements, concepts, and thematic choices.37 The rules

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relate, for example, criminality, sexuality, life, wealth, and language to, respectively, the discourses of medicine, psychiatry, biology, economics, and linguistics (48). “Statements” are particularly important in Foucault’s idea of a discourse. Whereas a sentence belongs to a text and is defined by the laws of language, and a proposition pertains to an argument and is ruled by the laws of logic, a statement in Foucault’s technical sense of the term belongs to and is defined by a discursive formation and thus “cuts across” structures such as grammar and logic and possible unities such as subjects and objects (86–87). Parenthetically, Deleuze and Guattari based their idea of the “incorporeal transformations” involved in “forms of expression” (see chapter 2) on Foucault’s notion of statements. The subject enunciating the statement is determined by rules governing who can make such a statement. For example, only a judge can legally state a judicial sentence. Such a statement can exist and be repeated only within the formation where it in fact occurs and not in isolation—it is not legally binding and is therefore something different if made by someone outside the official institutions of law. Most important, this “repeatable materiality” is part of the constitution of a statement: the same sentence is a different statement in a conversation or in a novel, but repeatable in each (104–5). For Foucault, moreover, these properties of statements entail that they pertain to discursive formations (are “exteriorities”) rather than to the intentions of subjects (“interiorities”; 122, 200, 229). Foucault’s position on statements implies that language and logic must themselves be subject to the rules of formation of the discursive formations within which those notions appear, that is, linguistics and logic respectively. Noam Chomsky, for example, may be right about the generative source of language, but not about discourse, including the discursive formation of which his own theory is a part (cf. 207). Indeed, Foucault’s discussion of discourse supports linguists who argue that grammar is not an innate cognitive structure à la Chomsky but an epiphenomenon or artifact that emerges out of and changes with discursive practices.38 In his work after The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault begins to see that nonlinguistic practices play just as important a role as linguistic ones in the determination of subjects and objects. He therefore embeds the notions of “discursive formations,” “epistemes,” and “statements” into more inclusive notions of “power” and “genealogy.” Whereas power has traditionally been equated with domination, that is, with a “juridico-discursive” or “power-sovereignty” model, Foucault characterizes it as a “multiplicity of force relations” that are “immanent in the sphere in which they operate

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and which constitute their own organization.” 39 These forces or power relations produce the inhabitants of the domains in which they operate: We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes,” it “represses,” it “censors,” it “abstracts,” it “masks,” it “conceals.” In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.40 When Foucault says that power produces the individual, he means that bodies are always already shaped in one way or another by the linguistic and nonlinguistic practices they support. There is never a preexisting body then shaped by these practices; rather it is always the case that a body already shaped in one power regime gets reshaped in another: bodies are, as Foucault is fond of saying, “docile.” 41 Although these power relations are primarily creative, they can give rise to relations of domination, but only as a secondary albeit important effect. Similarly, the State and other large-scale institutions are the effects, and not the sources, of these “micro” relations of power.42 Foucault’s genealogical method involves tracing universal pronouncements back to the specific micro relations that are their real source and significance despite their pretensions to be universal truths. Foucault also highlights the anonymity of power. He uses the term nonsubjective intentions to describe the force relations that constitute power. These relations are not subjective or subject centered—they are not the immediate products of individual or group decisions, yet, like intentions, they involve “calculation,” that is, “a series of aims and objectives.” Because they involve calculation, Foucault often refers to these intentions as “strategies” and says that they provide direction for the “tactics” that simultaneously shape them from within.43 For example, the strategy of the complete administration of society, “biopower,” is reciprocally related to the tactics of anatomopolitics (training and organizational schemas that operate on the body) and biopolitics (regulation of population growth and health). The disciplinary techniques employed separately by the military, schools, factories, and other institutions, along with the State’s methods for regulating the health and other biological aspects of the population, set up an overall tendency in modern societies toward complete administration and distributing living beings in the domain of value and utility, that

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is, in the direction of the “complex strategic situation” that constitutes the form of power typical of modern social formations.44 This strategic situation reinforces the disciplines on the tactical or institutional level of society that originally gave rise to the (nonsubjective) goal of complete administration. In other words, power involves direction without a director, and disciplinary societies operate without discipliners as their primary impetus. Foucault argues that power is reciprocally related to knowledge or the discursive formations of his archaeological period. More specifically, he claims that psychology, biology, and the other sciences related to anatomopolitics and biopolitics are interior rather than exterior to power, as much power’s condition as its product. Sexuality, for example, is an area of knowledge because biopower establishes it as an object of investigation, but biopower can equally target sexuality and hence be a power only because “techniques of knowledge and procedures of discourse [are] capable of investing [sexuality].” 45 Thus power is not a “base-structure” and knowledge a “superstructure,” as mechanistic varieties of Marxism would have it, instead, power and knowledge work in tandem with one another. Moreover, each power/knowledge regime, like Lyotard’s genres, is incommensurable with the rest: each establishes different criteria of knowledge.46 What we have said about Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge might make it appear that everything is always dominated by one or another power/knowledge regime—biopower, for instance. However, Foucault insists that power and “resistance” are symbiotically related, that power requires resistance to it in order to persist as power, and resistance is always resistance to power. For example, biopower must encounter different types of bodies and pleasures in order to continue its process of placing them at the intersection of anatomopolitics and biopolitics, thereby transforming them into the proper objects of its “analytics of sexuality.” Moreover, bodies and pleasures are never fully independent forces—they exist only in the context of the specific power formations that they resist.47 For Foucault the structure of the social body is always “power resistance” and never simply “power.” Like Lyotard, Foucault also oscillates between describing the subject as subordinate and free. He claims that free subjects are those “faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behavior are available.” 48 On this level, that of individual subjects, power refers to the way in which certain actions modify

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other actions, present or future, that is, the way they affect the possible field of action of other people.49 Insofar as they are not completely dominated by another subject, subjects on both sides of power resistance are free.50 Their freedom, however, is not “self-subsistent”; it operates only in relation to the reciprocal and “permanent provocation” of power and resistance. More specifically, freedom occurs within the context of the permanent provocation of those on the side of power to limit the possibilities of those who resist and of the subjects on the side of resistance to increase their own possibilities for comportment despite the forces arrayed against them.51 Foucault sometimes speaks of subjects creating their own identities, and of the “new claims” of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges.” 52 Contrary to what we have just stated, this makes it appear as if he is referring to an absolute form of freedom. But he also asserts that even the practices of a subject who “constitutes [himself ] in an active fashion . . . are not something invented by the individual himself”; these practices are based on “models that he finds in his culture and [that are] proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group.” 53 Even in the period of Foucault’s late ethical works, then, subjects are free only after they have been produced within the context of power resistance, and this freedom is limited to modifying their possibilities for comportment as determined by the available social and cultural “models.” 54 In his archaeological period, Foucault’s endorsement of successive epistemes suggests that he did not acknowledge the existence of epistemes that contested one another at the same time. His later notion of power resistance rectifies this deficiency in that now one or more forces are always resisting the dominant power. His notion of power is also an improvement over his archaeology because it clarifies that nonlinguistic as well as linguistic practices play an important role in producing subjects, objects, and norms of truth and goodness. Indeed, we can view this as an improvement over Derrida and Lyotard. Foucault’s struggle with the role of subjects suggests that he feels the need to provide some sort of subjective agency. When he looks down from the heights of power, all that awaits him is the traditional notion of subject that he has already and rightfully subordinated to the practices that constitute power. He needs, we can claim, to look up toward the contesting “powers”—the resisting and the resisted—that make up the social body. But he has already declared that these powers are “nonsubjective,” that is, anonymous machinations. Thus Foucault places us, perhaps against his own intention, in a

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world that is not enough ours. Once again, then, we must note the need for an alternative to the modernist notion of subject, the postmodernist idea of discourse, and, now, anonymous “power,” as determinative of agency in society. The notion of social discourse, as we have clarified it up to this point via Saussure, Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault (and previously through Deleuze and Guattari and Bakhtin), permits us to return to the notion of memes that was discussed in the last chapter. Dennett presented memes as if they are initially isolated fragments of speech or writing that circulate in society and “stick” in various brains, for example, an advertising jingle. Once arrived at this destination, the memes coalesce with and influence other memes, govern the mind (“restructure the human brain”), and, through communication, are passed on to other brains in slightly altered form. We now see that memes always exist as “statements,” as part of a social discourse; they never exist, even initially, as isolated or isolatable fragments. Even when they enter the primary voice of a subject, they become part of another discourse—the subject’s dominant one—and usually carry with them, however faintly, the social discourse in which they were delivered to us. They are always, contra Dennett’s suggestion of the mind as a collection of memes, part of a social discourse and ultimately a voice.

Butler and Performativity Judith Butler uses the central ideas of Derrida and Foucault in her account of discourse, but candidly endorses a subject that she feels has an agency in excess of the power of language. Moreover, this account provides strong support for women’s resistance to patriarchy and gay and lesbian resistance to homophobia. Her view will take us further along our path to an alternative to the modernist subject and the postmodernist use of discourse. But, as we will see, it omits certain dimensions of this “excessive agency” and points to the need for the notion of voice. Butler replaces Derrida’s notion of text with the Foucauldian idea of power. But she also treats the practices that make up power as iterable in Derrida’s sense of the word. Indeed, she brings these notions together in what she calls performativity. According to this concept, power precedes and constitutes our recognizability as gendered bodies, and it also exceeds the identities or subjects it has created. Performativity is therefore not

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reducible to a series of performances by an autonomous subject or, to say the same thing, by a subject that precedes power. For example, the term queer marks “a kind of discursive performativity that is not a discrete series of speech acts, but a ritual chain of resignifications whose origin and end remain unfixed and unfixable.” 55 On the one hand, the iterability or “citationality” of a performance can stabilize over time and produce “the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter.” 56 Thus the long-standing prejudicial use of the label queer has “materialized” a pejorative and seemingly inescapable identity for many people. On the other hand, this same open-ended citationality permits people (gays or straights) to give a name such as queer a new and positive sense. Over time, this change in meaning could lead to a new and more flexible identity for those who have been designated by this term.57 In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler summarizes her idea of power by noting that it acts on the subject in two ways: as the condition of the subject’s possibility and as “what is taken up and reiterated in the subject’s ‘own’ acting,” thus “eclipsing power with power.” 58 This conditioned agency of the subject permits the subject to “will” or “assume” a purpose or effect unintended by the power that initially conditioned the subject’s existence. In clarifying this “ambivalent subjection by power,” Butler says that we must go beyond Foucault and trace out the notion of subjection (“the simultaneous subordination and forming of the subject”) in reference to the turns of psychic life (7, 18–19). Only on the basis of the psyche, she feels, can we explain resistance to the subordination side of the power that simultaneously constitutes us and makes it possible to resist the current direction of that power (86–87). The “turns” of the psyche that Butler has in mind begin with a passionate attachment of children to those on whom they primarily depend and consequently love. This attachment or “vulnerability” is ultimately based on the role of the parent(s) in the child’s survival and the child’s desire to survive or “persist” in his or her “being.” The formation of the child through this attachment is the basis for the political formation and regulation of the subject by power: it predisposes the child to a passionate attachment to the power or social discourse that subordinates him or her as a subject (7, also 9, 28, 112–13, 128–29). But the child could not emerge as an individual being if it did not also at least partially deny this attachment and subordination to the parent (8). Because it both desires the object of its primary attachment and wants to escape it, the subject is simultaneously “inaugurated” and turned against itself, desiring its

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own dissolution and its persistence at once (9, 23). The price of this selfconflict is the traumatic repetition at the unconscious level of what it has “foreclosed” (the primary love object) and still desires (9). More generally, the subject is turned against the (Foucauldian) power that subordinates it and yet is responsible for its existence (20). The child’s initial attachment to and denial of this subordinating power, the interiority and “the voice of conscience” that this turn creates, is the psychic dimension Butler adds to Foucault’s notion of power and claims is the precondition of resistance (170–71, 196, 197–98). Butler provides a more specific speculation of that which is most primordially resisted by subjects in relation to power. She believes that children initially identify with parents of both sexes. This identification, one that is simultaneously the children’s coming into being, determines that they initially desire the parent of the same sex as well as that of the opposite sex (136, 162). Indeed, Butler suggests that a taboo against homosexuality forecloses the desire for the parent of the same sex even before it actually takes place and thereby “produces a domain of homosexuality understood as unlivable passion and ungrievable loss” (135, 139–40). In order to preserve what it can of this love object, the child incorporates the identity of the same-sex parent into his or her own bodily style, thus gendering the body and establishing the subject as well as its ego (147, 161, 169–70). Because this desire for the lost object is never completely eliminated, it acts as a source of resistance to the power of heterosexuality (169). Butler does not see this resistance as necessarily culminating in a power formation that favors homosexuality; rather she sees it as breaking down the rigid boundaries of all exclusionary identities and thus inaugurating the possibility of a new openness to one another across sexual, racial, gender, and other identities (148, 149–50, 163–64).59 Butler overcomes Derrida’s formalism and Foucault’s minimalist subject by appealing to a psychic dimension of resistance. On her view, the original attachment of the child to the parent is a prelinguistic form of sociality, at least in the sense that the loss of the love object or attachment is “prior to speech and declaration” (170, 196–97). Like Lyotard and Foucault, then, Butler acknowledges the need for stepping back from linguistic idealism and attributing a type of agency to something like a subject or a condition, for example, attachment and identification, that is not completely linguistically determined. But we have already seen that once the subject enters the linguistic realm, once it becomes what I have been

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calling a voice, it is always already shot through with the other voices of the community and is thus a dialogic hybrid. The openness to one another across otherwise rigid boundaries that Butler wants to establish on the basis of a prelinguistic condition—attachment and identification—is, on the multivoiced body view, there from the beginning of the subject’s linguistic form of existence as a voice and becomes repressed or marginalized only as a result of the emergence and hegemony of exclusionary voices (“oracles”). Thus, even if Butler is right about what happens prelinguistically, the agency and performativity she adopts takes on the form of voice and an interplay among voices once the subject becomes a linguistic being. This dialogic dynamic would then determine the sociallinguistic meanings and articulations of the prelinguistic dynamic that Butler postulates. Indeed, Butler’s own view of the prelinguistic dynamic she depicts is one of these articulations. At least this is the position for which I will provide further arguments in the next chapter. In the meantime, Butler has helped us acknowledge the need for a type of agency that is “in excess” of language. This section of chapter 5 has concentrated on language and subject agency. In it, we have elaborated the notion of social discourse and encountered the need to go beyond the postmodernist notion of language as well as the modernist concept of a subject. The next part of this chapter will explore the relation between language and the entities that make up the world of perception and science. As we will see, these new considerations will also push us toward a form of agency that exceeds the subject and discourse.

Science: Social Constructionism and Realism Nowhere has the role of language in determining knowledge and reality been debated more vociferously than in the context of science. Moreover, this debate often focuses on the issue of the independence of objects from discourse and other practices. We will look at Thomas Kuhn’s and David Bloor’s support for the primacy of social discourse and Richard Boyd’s realist response to all such claims. The clash between these views will lead us beyond their alternatives to the position of Bruno Latour and the reintroduction of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “reciprocal presupposition.” This will pave the way for a return to the notion of voice.

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Kuhn, Bloor, and the Primacy of Paradigms Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ushered in unprecedented attention to the thesis that history and society determine the justification as well as the discovery of scientific theories. According to Kuhn, scientific perception, thought, and knowledge always take place within particular “paradigms” such as Newtonian mechanics, Copernican astronomy, or Darwinian natural selection. These paradigms are like “world-views” for communities of scientists and specify what counts as legitimate problems, methods and instrumentation for solving these problems, and solutions to these problems.60 Paradigms involve four major elements: 1) symbolic generalizations (for example, formulas like “f = ma” or expressions in ordinary language such as “elements combine in constant proportion by weight”), 2) models and their metaphysical commitments (for instance, a universe furnished with particles or, alternatively, with wave/particle dualities), 3) values (accurate and quantitative predictions, simple but potent theories, solutions to many puzzle formations, or some other prized attribute), and, most important of all, 4) shared exemplars.61 Shared exemplars are the sorts of problem applications that textbooks use to illustrate particular laws and methods of science. According to Kuhn, we cannot understand laws apart from their applications to problems. For example, “force = mass x acceleration” (f = ma) cannot have any more than schematic meaning in separation from situations that involve accelerating bodies. We intuit the “family resemblance” 62 or “immediate similarity relations” of these problem applications and are therefore able to see the relevance of the associated law “f = ma” for new and even more complicated situations, for example, the swing of a pendulum, a pair of harmonic oscillators, or a gyroscope.63 Because of the intuitive status of these shared exemplars and their constant capacity to give rise to fuller understandings of the terms scientists use to talk about them, they and their associate paradigms are always richer than and irreducible to the laws they illustrate and support. Kuhn emphasizes, in consort with what the poststructuralists say about discourse, that shared exemplars and paradigms are inseparable from the language used to talk and learn about them.64 Kuhn expresses how tightly scientists are ensconced within paradigms by noting that although “the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterwards works in a different world.” 65 One of the leading post-Kuhnian social constructionists, Bloor, holds a similar view. According to his “strong programme in the sociology of knowledge,”

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knowledge is “collectively endorsed belief” rather than “justified true belief.” 66 More specifically, Bloor argues that both true and false beliefs have the same type of cause: a true, as opposed to a false belief is not due to some direct, undistorted apprehension of the way reality is; rather, both types of belief are caused by a mixture of collective belief and experience.67 Experience can lead to a change in belief only insofar as it is amalgamated with an efficacious prior belief: experience always takes place within a collective pattern of thought.68 For both Kuhn and Bloor, an external stimulus plays a role in knowledge, but it always appears and is provided with a meaning according to the paradigm or belief system in play. The external stimulus cannot be experienced or known independently of the paradigms and beliefs with which it is compounded, thus it cannot determine the truth or falsity of a theory apart from these paradigms or beliefs. “Correspondence” between a theory and an external stimulus or “fact” always means correspondence within our requirements for what counts as a workable theory, and “there are as many forms of correspondence as there are requirements.” 69 Knowledge, then, is always a matter of selecting among amalgams of social belief and experience; experience by itself determines nothing. At one level, Kuhn’s and Bloor’s belief that we think within social frameworks seems unassailable: we can never step outside our frameworks (paradigms or sets of collective social beliefs), see the object of our investigation in some pristine manner, and then compare the latter with that same object’s appearance within our framework. Furthermore, Bloor presents convincing arguments for his claim that mathematics and other forms of presumably a priori thought vary with and are the product of socially institutionalized discourses. They do not capture truths existing independently of social reality. The ancient Greeks, for example, thought that the numeral one was the “measure of plurality” and of odd and even—the origin or generator rather than an instance of numbers. It therefore contradicts Peano’s first axiom that one is a natural number. One cannot say that the Greeks’ view of one is metamathematical and Peano’s notion of it mathematical, as if the Greeks obscured the truth that Peano latter captured. Both are equally mathematical (or equally metamathematical). Each achieves its status as absolute because of the unquestioned acceptance of the different social discourses within which they appear.70 Of course, pragmatic reasons can always favor one mathematical system over another; thus computers have dictated the almost universal acceptance in technologically advanced societies of Boolean algebra over

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Aristotelian syllogistics. Bloor’s treatment of mathematics helps consolidate a broader point: a priori knowledge—beliefs that present themselves as universally and necessarily true—cannot take us beyond the discourses that frame the claims we wish to make. Such knowledge is a priori only within a discursive formation. But Kuhn and Bloor suggest they feel the need to give a stronger role to at least some elements that are usually supposed to be outside discursive frameworks. Bloor, for example, distinguishes between “knowledge” and “truth.” What he calls the “materialist function of truth” is the affirmation of an “ultimate schema with which we think.” This schema is our “instinctive assumption” that “we exist within a common external environment that has a determinate structure” and is “the cause of our experience, and the common reference of our discourse.” 71 This schema is general enough that the world to which it refers can be identified with invisible spirits, atomic particles, or a host of other types of entities, depending on one’s culture. Because the schema refers to a world that is distinct from the collective beliefs or knowledge that a group might hold about it, Bloor feels that what we call our collective knowledge at any given time can always be challenged on the basis of the truth, that is, on its possible noncorrespondence to the world. Even though reality can never be encountered apart from one set of beliefs or another, the “gap” between knowledge and truth, stipulated by the schema, always allows for dissent from the dominant set of social beliefs.72 Kuhn also suggests a stronger role for extraparadigm forces when he discusses the role of “anomalies” in scientific revolutions. An anomaly is a violation by nature of “normal science,” the paradigm-induced background expectations that govern the dominant scientific practices of a given period. This anomaly counts as a “scientific discovery” when the normal science of the period manages to accommodate it or a rival paradigm replaces normal science and allows us to see nature in a new, “revolutionary” way. In either case, the anomaly becomes an “anticipated phenomenon” or “scientific fact” of a paradigm.73 Anomalies can only occur against the background of a paradigm (the one they resist), and they count as a counterinstance to a current paradigm only when another paradigm that can resolve the anomaly has appeared.74 For example, the traditional theory of combustion held that an invisible substance, phlogiston, was released into the air during the burning of materials. When the theory encountered what might have been an anomaly, that metals increase their weight upon calcination by heating, it simply postulated that phlogiston

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had “negative weight.” But the phlogiston theory was overthrown, and the increase in weight of the metal became a counterinstance to it, when Lavoisier developed the new oxygen theory of combustion (materials absorb oxygen) that explained combustion and the weight gain without the contrivance of negative weight. The proponents of phlogiston later found a way to explain the weight gain without alluding to negative weight, but it was then too late for a resurgence of their point of view. For Kuhn, Lavoisier’s and other paradigm changes signify 1) that conceptualization as well as observation are necessary for such a change to take place, 2) consistency with experimental evidence (e.g., heating and weighting metals) is never enough to ensure a theory’s acceptance, and 3) a rival paradigm is required to change an anomaly into a counterinstance of the dominant paradigm. Lavoisier’s “discovery” was also part of a new way of seeing things: an atmosphere and world that contained possibly unlimited types of substances and gases rather than the traditional “four elements” of earth, fire, water, and air.75

Boyd’s Realism Bloor and Kuhn are opposed to the realist view that scientific progress consists in a progressively closer match of theory to a reality that exists independently of the observer. They acknowledge that science can increase its prediction and control of events, its ability to solve puzzles, but do not believe that this is because one paradigm provides a truer representation of reality than another: there is no theory-independent way to say what “reality” is.76 Realists such as Boyd think that the notion of an anomaly and the phenomenon of the increasing power of prediction are grounds for overturning social constructionism as a theory of scientific knowledge. In particular, Boyd says that a philosophy of science must be able to explain the “instrumental reliability” of scientific methodology and its theories, that is, their past and future predictive success, strong projectability, and degree of confirmation.77 Boyd argues that the best explanation must be the realist one: theories that license successful predictions do so because they correspond, at least approximately, to reality as it is independently of us. Any other hypothesis would be magical. Boyd feels that his strategy of “inference to the best explanation” is bolstered by the inability of social constructionists, particularly Kuhn, to explain the occurrence of anomalies in terms of “a fully paradigm dependent world.” 78

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But Boyd can hardly be right about this. First, theories may give us a better predictive hold on reality not because they correspond to reality but because they give us access to the manipulatable aspects of reality. The proverbial three blind men touch three different parts of the elephant and think that they are dealing with three different types of things. Their theories may work well in relation to the parts of the elephant they explore, but hardly correspond to the creature as a whole. There is no way for them, or for us, to ever know what we are dealing with apart from the range of meanings it can have for us. In other words, the unwitting elephant explorers are working within specific paradigms that dictate what they think reality is. The “instrumental reliability” of their theories and methodology only holds within their paradigms. They can switch paradigms for good reasons, but not necessarily because they have revealed the truth of the whole. Contra Boyd, then, the explanation of their success is not the dictates of reality per se; rather, it is the conformity of their theories to the limits placed on reality by their paradigms—theories work because paradigms at least partially produce a world in which they may do so. To prefer one paradigm over another is to speak within a new paradigm that provides reasons for that preference, and not because nature has whispered paradigm-neutral secrets in our ears. In other words, the well-known issue in the philosophy of science concerning the inability of observational data or evidence alone to select among rival theories—the “underdetermination” of theories by data—applies to the relation between paradigms and nature as well.79 Second, Boyd misrepresents the social constructionists. They are not claiming that the world is “fully paradigm dependent.” As we saw, Kuhn and Bloor are at pains to insist that stimuli (including anomalies) do impact upon us and play a role in knowledge. The stimuli are just never present to us apart from our paradigms or beliefs. Kuhn’s paradigms and Bloor’s collective beliefs are like linguistic versions of Merleau-Ponty’s horizons, within which all experience receives a meaning for us. In the following section, Bruno Latour and Deleuze and Guattari will help clarify the relation between these stimuli and paradigms.

Beyond Social Constructionism and Realism Latour’s “Body Corporate” Although Boyd’s argument for realism fails, he has alerted us to the limits of social constructionism. Just

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as the modernist view ran afoul of the formative role of language, so the postmodernist language-centered view must be tempered by the return of some sort of subject agency and “assertive” objects. With respect to the latter, philosophers of science like Latour have jettisoned the boundary between scientific theory and objects and made both humans and nonhumans full-fledged actors or “actants” in the production of “factishes.” A factish, like a fetish, is real (autonomous, independent) because it is constructed.80 An object solicits and modifies thought, is affected by the thought or scientist (becomes a “fact”), and alters its mode of existence in response (282). Indeed, once a new fact is constructed, it has the status of having been there all along, even though it has just been constructed: Pasteur’s “discovery” of airborne germs took place in 1864; in 1865 and after, these germs, even though they are constructed, count as having been there forever until a new, contrary fact demands to be, and is, constructed by this sort of interaction between humans and nonhumans (173). The hybrid reality of the factish, combining both subject and thing traits, duplicated on the level of technology as well: a technique for decreasing car speed—a “speed bump made from concrete”—involves some characteristics of pavement becoming policemen, and some characteristics of policemen becoming speed bumps (the speed bump is “full of engineers and chancellors and lawmakers, commingling their wills and their story lines with those of gravel, concrete, paint, and standard calculations”; 180, 190). The outcomes in science and technology emerge from the interaction of human and nonhuman actors, that is, from a collective “event” (126). Because the human input in this event is really that of an institution, for example, the laws or bureaucracies that inculcate humans, Latour says that we and our artifacts have become a “body corporate.” Purposeful actions and intentionality are therefore properties of these body corporates rather than of subjects or of objects (192–93). Latour is right to assign objects a more active role in the production of facts and knowledge than traditional thought allows. In chapter 4, we saw that Merleau-Ponty spoke of a subject-object dialogue. This dialogue, however, was perception- rather than language-based. Latour commits a different form of error: his objects are just as active as human subjects in the production of facts and knowledge. With this symmetry between subjects and objects, language loses whatever special powers it might be thought to bring to this production. Is there a way to acknowledge a forceful contribution to perception and knowledge by objects and still acknowledge the primacy of human agency and language in this activity?

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Deleuze and Guattari’s “Reciprocal Presupposition” Deleuze and Guattari provide a more balanced view of the relation between subjects and the world, language and perception, words and things. As we saw in chapter 2, they call this relation reciprocal presupposition, but also attribute priority to language. On this view, an event or, in Latour’s terms, a body corporate involves both “expression” (for example, language) and “content” (for example, material objects). Using the example of Latour’s concrete speed bumps, the event is the construction of the latter artifact; expression is the social institutions (the laws, organization, and policies of the roads’ department ) that constitute the social significance or meaning of a speed bump; the content is the concrete and other materials involved in making a speed bump. Expression and content are separable from one another: the same laws can dictate the construction of stoplights and other safety devices, the same concrete can be used to make the foundation of a house. But neither of this pair is what it is apart from the other within any given event: within the event of constructing speed bumps, the laws must speak of things, speed bumps in this case, and concrete cannot be a speed bump outside the social institutions involved in their construction. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, the relation between expression and content is neither one of mere correspondence nor conformity. Instead, the two levels are “isomorphic” in that the internal orders of expression and content can relate to one another: concrete can be ordered up by laws for making speed bumps, and laws can be given content by concrete. Moreover, each can give rise to effects in the other: concrete can suggest new laws and procedures (the installation of car bomb barriers around public buildings) and new laws can elicit new uses of concrete (the barriers). In more poignant terms, perceiving (as content) can move ahead of saying (as expression) in what it reveals of our surroundings—even disrupting or transforming the particular discourse in play at the time; discourse can affect what we do and are able to perceive, often opening up a space for new perceptions. An experience, for example, twists the poet’s idiom into new expressions; a new way of speaking about things reveals dimensions of reality we had not previously noted. Clearly, both expression and content play strong roles within the events that include them. But, as we saw in chapter 2, Deleuze and Guattari assign priority to expression because of the latter’s “superlinearity” or flexibility and versatility relative to content. Because of this superlinearity of expression, we can say that Deleuze and Guattari reject Latour’s

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assignment of equal actor status to both the subjects and objects involved in a body corporate. Subjects, with their versatility of expression, can play more of an agent role than can the objects with which they interact. In the next chapter, I will provide a stronger reason for favoring expression over content. For now, we must note that voice will have to do double duty in relation to our discussion of language and poststructuralism in this chapter. It will have to provide a form of agency that is reducible to neither language nor subjects: it will have to be a reinscription of language that converts language into an agency that is both us and not us, anonymous and personal at once, in perpetual interplay with other voices having these same characteristics. As its second duty, voice will have to replace Latour’s body corporate and accommodate Deleuze and Guattari’s reciprocal presupposition by holding expression and content, ourselves and things, together within its anexact or relatively indeterminate but creative form of existence. We should, then, move on to the reinscription phase of this deconstructive strategy and see how these duties might be fulfilled.

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The Primacy of Voices

In the last two chapters I have argued that neither the modernist notion of the subject nor the postmodernist concept of language fully captures the type of social agents that we are. From Descartes through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and the three stages of cognitive science, the modernist view has underplayed, and yet been driven toward, the self as we know it most immediately: a subject surrounded and formed by language, at least to a far greater degree than the modernists are usually willing to admit. But we have also seen that many of those who privilege language as the ultimate source of subjectivity are forced inconsistently either to reinstate the traditional, autonomous subject or to indicate tacitly a sense in which language is itself an agent—an agent, however, that in some sense is us rather than merely expropriating us as its passive vehicle. In the terms of my deconstructive strategy, language must now be reinscribed as the “voices” that were introduced to us in chapter 3. In particular, I must show that these voices avoid the anonymity of the forces in terms of which Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, and many other thinkers have characterized society. Otherwise, we will not be able to identify these voices as ourselves and ourselves as them.

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Voices and Elliptical Identity Voices are inseparable from but not reducible to subjects or language. We do not merely talk with each other. In speaking, we transform the abstract patterns of language into dialogic voices. These voices, however, immediately establish the parameters of our existence—our identities—as well as our status as participants in the dialogic movement that characterizes the social body. Language becomes dialogue and subjects become voices. As we saw in chapter 3, whatever we may have been prelinguistically, we start our existence as reflective beings within a dialogue that simultaneously separates and binds together voices, forming a multivoiced body.1 Within this dynamic body, we share what I call an elliptical identity with voices. As participants in the interplay among voices, we are already thrown “ahead of ourselves” and thus find that we always have more to say or see than our immediate utterances and perceptions suggest. We are too much the voices that we articulate for one to say that they are anonymous or that we are fully subordinate to them; but they are too much ahead of us, bound up with one another and their exchanges, for one to claim that we are in complete control of these voices or that we could ever know them, and hence ourselves, exhaustively. The elliptical character of our identity with voices therefore lends them a personal dimension that makes their anonymity ours and our personality theirs. Unlike the forces to which Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari allude, we can recognize ourselves “in” these voices. And yet this recognition does not require us to deny the anonymous depth that voices bequeath to our existence—the sense that, as them, we are always more than we can immediately articulate. By way of this elliptical identity, then, and like the two sides of a coin, we and our voices share the same anonymity and personal intimacy.2 In terms of the deconstructive strategy of the last two chapters, the postmodernist notion of discourse has now been converted into the voices of the social body, and the modernist notion of the subject has been transformed into we who are elliptically identical with these voices. These vestiges of postmodernism and modernism are like the “ideal limits” of calculus, which can be approached but never reached. To the degree that voices are similar to the expression of personal sentiments or thoughts, they approximate, but can never become, prelinguistic creatures of feeling and autonomy. To the degree that voices are like anonymous, abstract

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patterns, they can approximate, but never be, language in separation from its dialogic role in the multivoiced body. As voices, we tend to one or the other of these two limits, shifting now to a generalized version of the social discourse that we articulate, now to a more personalized version of it. The more personalized version, as we will see, reflects our bodily existence and the particular nuances of a social discourse at the site where one begins his or her history. The more generalized version breaks free of those particularities, rendering itself accessible within a greater variety of communities. This preliminary statement of the primacy of voices and our elliptical identity with them requires further refinement and substantiation. In particular, I must clarify the priority that voices have over place, that is, the location in which our existence is rooted. But I must go in the opposite direction as well and show how these bodies, once converted into enunciators of voices, assert themselves within these voices, as part of our elliptical identity with them. For, if such agency is impossible, we lose all claims to the personal side of voices. We would be eclipsed by the anonymity of the voices’ social discourses and the relentless contestation among them.

Voices and Place Edward Casey creates an imaginative and compelling characterization of place as well as providing a “philosophical history” of views on place.3 He grants place priority over other aspects of the human setting. To those who marginalize place and emphasize, for example, mind in its stead, Casey replies, “we are always, at all times, out there in places; most prominently on journeys, but even, and sometimes most especially, when we summon up places in mind and memory. The net of place encompasses the maw of mind.” 4 In stricter terms, Casey says that place is “phenomenologically” and “ontologically” prior to space, time, body, and mind. It has priority phenomenologically, or “in the order of description,” because we only experience things, including space and ourselves, as already placed. The refined concepts we possess of things are based on our concrete experiences, no matter how far removed from these things our concepts may seem to be. This experienced priority is, moreover, something we feel “by and in our bodies” rather than think with our minds. Beyond phenomenology, place has ontological priority in that sentient

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beings can “make use of [things]” only insofar as they are “always already in place.” 5 Said otherwise, place cannot be encompassed “by anything other than itself, is at once the limit and the condition of all that exists.” 6 Casey adds that each place has its “spirit,” in the sense of the familiar phrase, “the spirit of a place.” This spirit of a place, what makes a place special, enters oneself and others “as its witnesses or occupants” and eliminates “the binarism of Self and Others.” 7 We can contrast Casey’s position with Bakhtin’s statement that we “hear voices in everything and dialogic relations among them.” 8 This statement invites the question: which has priority, places or voices? Casey’s own remarks about the spirit of a place suggest that voices and places may have at least equal status. To say that the spirit of a place enters us as its “witnesses and occupants” seems equivalent to saying that we articulate the voice of a place. A place without such a voice would not be a place in Casey’s sense of the term. Thus voices and places would seem to have at least equal status, equal “priority.”

Reciprocal Presupposition In our earlier discussions of the work of Deleuze and Guattari, we saw that the notion of reciprocal presupposition captures the relation between two dimensions that cannot exist apart from, yet can interrupt and bring about revision in, one another. This notion also pertains to the relation between voices (“spirits”) and places. Place includes bodies and their sensory systems, desires, and other cognitive modes. Voices are inseparable from these bodies, but they also include a discursive dimension and participate in dialogic exchanges with the other voices of society. Because of their discursive dimension and the intrinsic interplay among voices, voices are anchored in places that they have already transformed into the malleable yet continually intrusive arena of their contestatory bids for audibility. We are the bodies embedded in these places, we are these unique personal beings, but only as the voices that already have transformed us into dialogic creatures and thrown us ahead of ourselves into their fecund interplay. Although voice and place reciprocally presuppose one another, the discursive dimension of voices gives them priority over places. To support this claim, I will further elaborate on how voice and place reciprocally presuppose one another and then show that the reflexivity of language

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ensures voice’s privileged position. We can begin this task by noting again that voices have a constituting role in our bodily modes and their relation to our surroundings or emplacement. Desires, needs, feelings, thoughts, perceptions, reminiscences, as well as the things around us would not be what they are for us apart from the discursive frameworks within which we engage the world and each other. We never simply desire, we always desire something: a cup of coffee, a moment’s rest, a lover, writing a book. Desire is intrinsically tied to the thing for which it is a desire. Even if this desire is self-renewing as opposed to only wanting to fill a lack of something, it renews itself as a desire for this or that, or a new rendition of this or that, and thus shares the character of that for which it is a desire. The “something” to which desire is related has for us an identity and is recognizable only insofar as we posses terms for it already or a discourse in which we can create these. As the poststructuralists have taught us, we desire, see, etc. with our language as well as with our bodily modes. Because desire and our other bodily modes are inseparable from objects and situations, the identity of the latter are also overtly or tacitly caught up in language. Because the words used in language are diacritically related to each other, the identities of these bodily modes and their objects are established for us at least in part through their differences from one another; that is, each is “captured” and formed for us within the meshwork of language. But, of course, our words and the ways we use them are just as tied up with our bodies and things as the latter are with language. Because of this involvement, a word or other verbal element of social discourse is only partially determined by its diacritical relation to the other verbal elements of that discourse. We cannot separate the meaning or use of a word from its engagement with things. This includes the ability of these encountered things to cause the emergence of new verbal elements and thereby transform the prior diacritical arrangement of words. To indicate this power of the bodily realm to affect the linguistic realm, we need only recall our example of the possible emergence of a third sex, the resulting name that would be required for it, and the triadic diacritic system that would come to replace the previous dyadic one. Moreover, language carries the emotional charge often associated exclusively with nonlinguistic behavior. Poetry, drama, songs, and everyday speech are as emotional as they are informative. Even the “coldness” of scientific prose is an expression of the discipline’s feeling for its surroundings—a studied detachment. Thus Martha Nussbaum is correct

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to argue that emotions are “judgments of value and importance,” that they are about objects as we see them in relation to our beliefs and values.9 Even with its constituting role, then, language does not rule absolutely over its corporeal setting, nor does voice over place; the two are intertwined from the beginning for us, reciprocally presupposing one another. Because of the reciprocal presupposition between voices and place, we feel the vitality of things, the “weight of the world,” from within the vocal arena in which we live. But there is also a sense in which place haunts us from the outside and indicates the closest we can come to recognizing an absolute limit to voices. When our dialogic exchanges threaten to go slack, when we are literally and tragically at a loss for words, place threatens to swallow us up, transform itself and us into nothingness, and mark the death of the multivoiced body. Thus we know that the last word is not ours and have all the more reason to appreciate our life within the mutlivoiced body. To summarize these points, our bodies anchor voices in a geographical place and provide them with a desire “to persist in their being,” as Spinoza put it.10 The voices and their social discourses, in turn, give our bodies an identity and transform geographical locations into cultural settings: our bodies, so to speak, hold voices to the earth, but the voices simultaneously pull us and our surroundings up into the more ethereal orbit of their discourse. We lend voices our sense organs, needs, desires, and feelings, and they convert these bodily modes into our social identity, expanding their latitude and permitting a wider array and subtlety of sentiments than are presumably possible without language. All “voicings” occur somewhere, then, but that somewhere is nowhere for us unless it is positioned within the interplay of voices. The multivoiced body is an event—the interplay of voices—that helps establish the place in which it occurs.

Reflexivity Despite the apparent equality of voice and place in the relation of reciprocal presupposition, voice’s discursive dimension possesses a quality that affords it priority over place. As we saw earlier, Deleuze and Guattari appeal to the superlinearity of expression as grounds for the latter’s priority over content. We can go a step further and add self-reflexivity to this superlinearity, at least in the realm of linguistic beings.11 The complexity of the syntactical structure of language allows us to embed one set

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of words within another, to make an object of the first through another, for example, embedding a description of the industrial revolution within the evaluative prose of an Adam Smith or a Karl Marx. This syntactical structure of language is at the heart of the freedom of linguistic beings qua linguistic beings. It permits these creatures to invert their world, imagine it otherwise, and then abandon the results or bring them to bear on their actual existence. Because of the versatility this syntactical structure provides us, we must favor discourse in the characterization of voices and their interplay with each other. Once we recognize the special relation between language and voice, we can acknowledge that the priority voice enjoys over place is both ontological and axiological. It is axiological because of the value that we give to freedom and hence to the syntactical complexity and reflexivity of language that makes this freedom possible. Our finest moments as linguistic beings are our recastings of the world through the twin movements of holding our surroundings before us in speech and then imagining them other than they are. But this axiological priority is also ontological. We identify ourselves with our freedom. We often say it is our essence. On this view, then, language, and hence voice, as the basis and structure of reflexivity and freedom, has ontological priority over place and our nonlinguistic modes of engaging the world. Rather than place having the status of “first among equals,” 12 the honor must go to voice.

The Open Texture of Voices For the reflexivity of voices to lead to new ideas or social discourses, voices must have a degree of indeterminacy. If, for example, the social discourse associated with a voice were a fixed set of rules, and if the content it addresses were fully determinate, then the most we could do would be equivalent to manipulating symbols in accordance with the dictates of computer software. But voices have a relative indeterminate or “open texture” that rescues us from the fossilized existence to which Descartes, cognitive science, and other rule-bound views would consign us. Voices provide us with an identity, but that identity does not rigidly prescribe our articulations, perceptions, and other modes of existing in advance. Rather, voices are always actualizing or articulating their “anexact” form of existing and temporarily transforming it into more determinate versions of their open agenda. Their mode of existence is comparable to

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the vague but creative idea we have for a book and its eventual transformation into the pages that open before us. As Merleau-Ponty said of the relation between our thoughts and language, language completes the vague idea that gives rise to the words without which it would fall back into the inchoate form that initially pushed for determinacy. This anexact idea, this “virtual-real,” to revert to Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, is not equivalent to any possible self-articulation or “actual-real”; it has a trajectory of becoming that limits the number and kinds of actualizations it can produce in interaction with other voices. But these actualizations are not determinable in advance; they do not preexist their actualizations like fixed forms awaiting release. They are more like free-verse poems than the preestablished versifications to which traditional poetry conforms. Free-verse poems have a pattern, but this pattern is progressively determined by the interplay between language and content rather than being imposed on the poem from outside. The openness of voices extends to all that they encompass. Both what we perceive and desire as well as what we say is therefore always becoming more determinate until the next moment of vocal exchange repeats this movement, from anexact to relatively exact, once more. Each new cycle carries what it has gained from the previous cycles; but what has been gained is renewed differently, rendered determinate in a new manner, in each subsequent cycle. These considerations, both the open texture of voices and the earlier comments on their self-reflexivity, reinforce the sense in which voice has its axiological and ontological priority over the language, bodies, and places to which voices and their interplay are nonetheless tied. My rendition of the openness of voices shows them to share an affinity with Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract machines. This is especially the case with respect to their anexactness. But voices also differ from abstract machines and the plane of consistency that accompanies those machines. As we saw in chapter 2, the interplay of elements on the plane of consistency give rise to the organism and the conscious ego as epiphenomena, that is, beings lacking an appreciable degree of agency. I therefore claimed that on this view we amount to no more than a play of anonymous forces—that we are ourselves anonymous beings. As voices, however, we are as much the personal dimension as the anonymous dimension of the voices we articulate and, elliptically, are. For this reason, voices, and thus ourselves, escape the anonymous status to which Deleuze and Guattari seemed to assign us.

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My reference to the personal dimension of voices still requires showing how we are agents, the sense in which we assert ourselves within the voices and their dialogic interplay, the sense in which our identity with voices is elliptical. Reflexivity and the open texture of social discourse contribute to but do not constitute this goal. The factor that makes it attainable is our hybridity. Some examples and elaborations beyond those given in earlier chapters will reacquaint us with the notion of hybridity prior to my using it in the current endeavor.

Voices and Hybridity Virginia Woolf describes her famous novel character, Orlando, as having “a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.” 13 In a moment of confusion, indeed, this character calls upon herself hesitantly, “Orlando?” “as if the person she wanted might not be there” among all the others. Moreover, each of these selves has “attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own,” each one coming to the fore in the particular type of situation that suits it.14 What we call the conscious self is just the one that is “uppermost.” It has the power to desire and sometimes, “for some unaccountable reason, wishes to be nothing but one self.” That self is what people call the “true self,” and it, this “Captain self, the Key self,” locks up and “amalgamates and controls them all.” 15 But it is nonetheless only one among many. For Woolf, each of us is what the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, calls a “dramatic ensemble of heteronyms.” 16 But Pessoa’s entertainment of these selves is more elaborate than Woolf’s. He isn’t content to portray a character with many selves. He lets each of his selves write in a very distinct style, gives each of them a different name, and uses that name for the author of the book of “their” poems. He even has them criticize one another in Portuguese literary journals. Though each of these selves issues from the same source, Pessoa, he himself is just another voice as well as the collection of them all. He is a site whose being is to become many from the beginning, a unity consisting of differences. The different selves are therefore “heteronyms” rather than “synonyms” for what we might errantly think is a univocal Pessoa. However hyperbolic Pessoa’s treatment of hybridity, he and Woolf agree that subordinating our many

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selves to just one of their number, indulging the wish “to be nothing but one self,” is more a matter of trying to impose univocity than discovering a “true self.” Nietzsche’s understanding of our hybridity is very close to Pessoa’s heteronymic self: we wear “masks,” but these masks are us, are the forces of which we are composed rather than facades that cover over a true self.17 Besides masks, Nietzsche often refers to these forces as “drives.” 18 As Graham Parkes makes clear, Nietzsche thinks of these drives as involving passion, thought, and will, that is, as personlike.19 In other words, these drives are actually close to our notion of voices, and we can legitimately argue, after what has been said above, that a relation of reciprocal presupposition holds between “expression” (their linguistic dimension) and “content” (their nonlinguistic bodily modes). Like voices and the interplay among them, these selves are also a microcosm of the social macrocosm: “We have transposed ‘society’ into ourselves, in miniature, and to retreat into oneself is thus no kind of flight from society, but an often painful dreaming-on [Fortträumen] and interpreting of our experiences on the schema of earlier experiences.” 20 Parkes also elaborates how Nietzsche stresses the importance for acknowledging one’s “falseness” or “multiplicity,” the need for a temporary leader among the “person-like drives” struggling within oneself and the ego’s fear of the chaos this contesting multiplicity represents.21 Indeed, Parkes concludes his book by showing how Nietzsche fluctuates between advocating that one personlike drive should dominate the rest, on the one hand, and valorizing an “intense multiplicity” and open interplay of such drives, on the other.22 Mary Watkins reveals that the choice between these two alternatives is central to thought on child development.23 She rejects the traditional emphasis on identifying maturity with the emergence of a single dominant voice in the child’s life (similar to Kant’s equating maturity with the acquisition of a univocal voice of reason). In place of this tradition, Watkins proposes that we should encourage children to maintain the “invisible guests” with which they surround themselves in solitary play. The presence of such characters is similar to the situation of novelists when they write short stories and books. Rather than teaching children to silence these voices as they grow older and to replace them with the single voice that would be the mark of their maturity, we should recognize the richness that this community of voices grants to their and our internal lives; we should acknowledge that the interplay among these “guests” is just as healthy for children and grown-ups as it is for

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novelists in their creative work. This acknowledgment doesn’t need to undermine the often necessary role of a lead voice. But it can contribute to the enrichment of that voice’s perspective on itself (and thus we who enunciate it), others, and the world and also to its openness to changes in its discourse and itself. Indeed, Cornel West links this type of enrichment with a “new cultural politics of difference” that involves “persons from all countries, cultures, genders, sexual orientations, ages and regions with protean identities who avoid ethnic chauvinism and faceless universalism.” 24 The views of Woolf, Pessosa, Nietzsche, Watkins, and West on the hybridity of the soul are in concert with our earlier discussion of Rushdie, Joyce, and Bakhtin and their emphasis upon voices resounding within one’s own. Indeed, this recognition of the voices that constitute us can be carried to the extremes of two of Germany’s most creative minds in the twentieth century, the novelist Thomas Mann and the painter George Grosz: they were able to see even the Hitler that they utterly detested as a “brother,” as another, albeit unwanted, side of themselves.25 For them, Hitler is a voice that they have rejected but with which they are inescapably caught up.

Hybridity and Elliptical Identity This characterization of hybridity allows us to return to the claim that we play a role as agents in our elliptical identity with voices. We are elliptically identical with our “lead voice,” that is, the social discourse upon whose basis we tend to evaluate our surroundings and direct our actions, whether or not we are fully aware of the existence or logic of this discourse. Because this lead voice is shot through with the other voices of society, we are elliptically identical with them as well. This allows us, in conjunction with the reflexivity of our voices, to make an object of our discourse and incorporate aspects of the others’ discourses into our own. The same combination also permits us to take up our own position from the point of view of another voice—to “gain perspective” on ourselves—or even to become another voice. Whether we are enunciating our lead voice or becoming another voice, this is part of the ongoing interplay among the voices that make up the social body. Any force we assert happens within that interplay. Does this

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mean that the anonymous interplay determines whether we remain with our primary voice or adopt a new one? In the latter case, for instance, does it imply that the trajectory of the interplay increases the saliency of a voice other than our primary one and thereby brings into play our reflexivity and its linguistic apparatus of embedding one discourse within another? In order to answer this question and thus further clarify our elliptical identity with voices, we need to note that the syntactical structure of most languages distorts the issue. It allows the direct construction of only the active or passive voice (“We did ‘x’” versus “‘x’ was done to us”). Hence it gives the impression that either we are the absolute authors of society’s voices or the mere vehicles of their dialogic exchanges. But a moment’s reflection on how most changes occur in our lives makes clear that these two alternatives distort the way we exist and the role we play in enunciating social discourses. We usually persist in being our lead voice, unreflectively “going along with it.” Sometimes we intensify it, “becoming it fully,” “getting into it deeper,” asserting ourselves in accordance with the logic of its discourse. Other times we temporarily “slide into” or “give ourselves over to” one of the other voices inhabiting and often contesting with our lead voice for audibility. Under this second set of circumstances, we are either “influenced” by the other voice to a greater degree than before—it modifies but does not replace our dominant discourse—or we become it to the point that we find it difficult to recognize ourselves any longer as the person we once were, as the primary voice we once articulated most familiarly: an executive for a logging company becomes an environmentalist, a Marxist a neoconservative, or a Kaf ka character a beetle. Although we are switching voices in these cases, there is no moment when we are a voiceless subject, no moment when we are not asserting ourselves within one or another voice of the social body. The locutions I have cited indicate that we need a new vocabulary and logic to fully capture the relation between the anonymous and personal dimensions of our existence. Nonetheless, the above examples allow us to see that we assert ourselves within the anonymous interaction among the voices of the social body. In the case of becoming another voice, its saliency has increased only because we have made an object of our present discourse and, via the other voice and the linguistic basis of reflexivity, imagined another way of seeing things; we have, however, accomplished this because simultaneously the other voice was being called forward by the ongoing and changeable trajectory of the dialogic interplay among the voices

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of the social body. It is therefore as true to say that being a certain voice, or becoming another one, happens to us as it is to say that we do it. Our assertions and their effects take place within this interplay and not as an agent outside or under them. It is as a particular voice, and not as a subject beneath or beyond voice, that we persist in being that voice or becoming another voice. Because of our elliptical identity with voices, we exist within the anonymous interplay between these voices, and they become personal because of it. Before closing this exposition of our elliptical identity with the voices of the social body, we need to note that these voices exist both “inside” and “outside” us at once. Depending on the circumstances, however, they will often have different saliencies in these two locations. The voice of democracy, for example, may have a greater saliency internally or externally in relation to us, depending on the saliency of other voices in the community. In totalitarian societies or in more conservative periods of U.S. history, democracy will have little audibility publicly, but much more privately, in certain pockets of resistance or in individual minds. All voices are initially social, but the ones that are spoken overtly in society are “public” and the ones that are not, “private.”

Identity and Singular Voices Despite our hybrid identity, it is still possible to speak of a “singular existence.” Our lead voice is singular in that it is neither a pure universal idiom nor a particular instance of a social language. It is neither of these because one’s lead voice reflects the relative saliencies of the other voices at that site—it is always a nuanced idiom and shares only a family resemblance with the other instances of that idiom; in other words, each such instance as that idiom is different. For example, the idiom of international development that I spoke and practiced as a member of International Voluntary Services (IVS) in Laos during the Vietnam War period emphasized grassroots’ initiative and Lao independence from the policies of the U.S. government. In contrast, the idiom of global development practiced by the United States Aid to International Development (USAID) was primarily aimed at making the Lao conform to U.S. global political aims. Members of IVS and USAID spoke of “development,” but in different senses because of the hierarchical order of the other discourses that influenced their conception of development in Laos, for

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example, the self-determination of peoples (IVS) and anticommunism (USAID). Even when we become one of our other voices over time, that voice will still be marked by its particular history at the spatiotemporal site where the change took place. It will be, for example, a person’s adoption of Marxism as an awakened bourgeoisie or as an exploited worker or as an ex-priest. We can speak of the relative constancy of subject identity only because the emergence of a new lead voice is “colored” by the lead voices that sequentially preceded it at that site. If the surrounding voices are significantly different at the site from the ones now in play, then it is possible that the new lead voice will be a significant rupture with one’s past. This radical difference is testified to in such phrases as “You can’t go home again” and provides another strong reason why a blanket (or any) death penalty is illegitimate (the person we execute may no longer be the one who committed the crime). Because we are these many voices, and not a lead voice in isolation from them, we can also escape the possible tyranny of our dominant social discourse. Members of a minority may find it appropriate to identify with the social discourse of their group during given periods, for example, black Americans who are uniting to resist white racism. But because the lead voice of any of us consists of many other social discourses as well, we are not permanently consigned to any one particular identity and can assert other or new dimensions of ourselves when appropriate. For this reason, Kwame Anthony Appiah mentions entrapment within an identity as a problem for members of minorities resisting racism.26 In general, then, whichever voice we are becoming, it is always influenced by the voices within it according to their comparative saliency. The notion of hybridization and dynamic hybridity—that each voice is at once part of the identity and the other of the rest—dispels the myth of purity, of a univocal identity. No tears should be shed for this myth’s passing; the notion of purity has been a support for the many versions of ethnic cleansing that haunt history. In My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk’s character, Enishte Effendi, speaks of the hybridization of Turkish, Persian, Mongol-Chinese, and “Frankish” art. He concludes that “To God belongs the East and the West. . . . May He protect us from the will of the pure and unadulterated.” 27 We also need to remind ourselves that hybridity is dynamic. No voice is a mere synthesis of other voices: the social languages that are constitutive of a voice continue to struggle within and often against the voice that

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is the strongest component of a subject’s identity. Like the advocates of ethnic or cultural purity, those who champion a voice that synthesizes and simplifies other social languages overlook the dynamic plurivocity of our existence and the contestation among the many linguistic strands that constitute a voice. A particularly dramatic example of this dynamic hybridity, as opposed to a synthesis, stands out for me. An annual ostracizing of destructive ancestral phi or spirits took place in a Lao village where I lived for a year. The villagers had been told by a moh phi or spirit doctor with whom they consulted that the unusually large number of recent deaths in their village had been due to the anger of the ancestral phi for some fault on the villagers’ part. Spirit cult beliefs and rituals, such as this one of ostracism, were doctrinally anathema to Lao Theravadan Buddhism, the official religion of Laos. Nonetheless, someone had tied a ceremonial string of cotton to the house or hoh phi of the village spirits. The other end of the string, I discovered, was held in the hand of a Buddhist monk sitting with other members of his order on the floor of a nearby school house that hid them from public view. The monks wanted to add their power to that of the moh phi who had come to perform the yearly ostracism. The Lao religion, as lived by its Lao adherents, was a continually negotiated partnership between the voices of the traditional spirit cults and the historically more recent Theravada Buddhism.28 But this dynamic hybridity is also the case for the spirit cults, Theravada Buddhism, and, indeed, any belief system whatsoever. Hybridity holds all the way down. Besides the endless empirical examples one can provide of this dynamic syncretism, we can refer to one of Alfred North Whitehead’s ideas for a more general reason why any belief is dynamically constituted by other beliefs, in this case, by those that it excludes. Whitehead’s notion of “negative prehensions” captures the role of these exclusions in the formation of systems of feelings and beliefs: “The negative prehensions have their own subjective forms which they contribute to the process [of self-constitution]. A feeling bears on itself the scars of its birth; it recollects as a subjective emotion its struggle for existence; it retains the impress of what it might have been, but is not.” 29 Thus, for secular as well as religious beliefs, practices, and texts, purity is never a reality except for those suffering from cultural myopia. In chapter 8, we will see that the reasons for this myopia run deeper than a mere lack of curiosity.

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Voices and Social Structures We often feel that we are controlled by economic, governmental, civil, and other social institutions. In order to maintain that voices are the primary units of society, and that the social body is the interplay among them, I must demonstrate that voices incorporate social structures as part of their corporality. To carry out this task, I will have to avoid the charge of linguistic idealism, on the one hand, and epiphenomenalism, on the other. Linguistic idealism is the claim that language or voices, exclusively, determine the identity and order of things for us. Epiphenomenalism is the opposite view: voices are fully determined by anonymous social structures.

Marx and “Personification” The most mechanistic reading of Marx’s historical materialism is contained in his preface to Critique of Political Economy.30 According to that document, history is a dynamically evolving sequence of societies. The direction of this evolution is from socioeconomically class-divided societies to a society without classes: from social fragmentation to communism. Each of these societies consists of a “mode of production,” a “superstructure,” and a “contradiction” built into the heart of the mode of production and society. The mode of production involves “material forces of production” and “social relations of production.” The material forces consist of three elements: materials, tools or technology, and workers’ labor power coupled with the mode of “cooperation” or organization of this power. Producing cars, for example, involves sheet metal and other materials, an assembly line and related instruments, and foremen who direct workers in an orderly fashion. Following Burowoy, we can refer to the mode of cooperation as “relations in production,” that is, relations within the workplace itself.31 These relations are particularly important because they reflect the social “relations of production.” For example, the foremen represent and safeguard the interests of the owners of the means of production—the bourgeoisie—in capitalist societies. The workers are members of the other major socioeconomic class, the proletariat. Thus the relations in production at the workplace are the microcosm of the social macrocosm or relations of production: the relations between the

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producers in this microcosm mirror the power relations of society, the struggle between society’s two major classes.32 These two sets of relations reflect Marx’s view that economic relations are always social relations. According to Marx, the contradiction that leads from one mode of production to another—from, for example, feudal to capitalist and then to communist society—is built into the relation between the material forces of production and the social relations of production. Specifically, the unrelenting growth of the material forces pushes against and eventually tears asunder the social relations that “fetter” it. In the feudal era, for example, a growth in manufacturing and changes in other material conditions led to the industrial age and the replacement of the social system of lords and serfs with one of owners and wage workers. This transformation of the mode of production also entailed the replacement of the ideology and State apparatus supporting feudalism with new political ideas and governmental structures that reflected and abetted the new capitalist mode of production. In short, the ever increasing tension internal to the previous mode of production, coupled with the merely epiphenomenal status of ideology and the State apparatus, produced a social revolution. Marx’s description of historical materialism in the preface of the Critique is thoroughly mechanistic. Ideas and human consciousness are merely effects of machinations within the mode of production: “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.” 33 Indeed, the ideological and governmental aspects of society are so tied down to the mode of production and, more specifically, to the material forces of production, that “[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.” 34 Despite this mechanistic tendency, Marx’s inclusion of the mode of cooperation within the material forces of production allows for a more humanistic reading of his theory. Labor power and the mode of cooperation or relations in production can include the workers’ consciousness of their situation and their desire to change their situation in society. In traditional terms, this means that people can play a more voluntary role in revolution and counterrevolution than the mechanistic reading of Marx’s theory would permit. It means also that ideology and government as well

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as counterideas and social movements contesting government policy can play an influential and active role in determining the course of history; they are not merely epiphenomena. One might say, indeed, that the material forces of production are ideational or cultural as well as social. But the introduction of this more humanistic reading of Marx reproduces the problem we have addressed in the last three chapters: the stark alternative between representing people as subordinated to other structures, for example, language or economic systems, or as fully autonomous agents. Marx seems to be indulging a form of subordination when he speaks of the capitalist as functioning “only as personified capital, capital as a person, just as the worker is no more than labour personified,” and thus of “the rule of the capitalist over the worker” as “the rule of things over man, of dead labor over the living, of the product over the producer.” 35 Despite Marx’s apparent intentions, his portrayal of the captains of industry as “personified capital” and workers as “labour personified” can be used to indicate an understanding of social structures that is much closer to the notion of voices. This conversion involves three steps. First, economic systems, like technology, are extensions of our bodies. Thus Freud refers to “Man” as a “prosthetic God” who is “magnificent” when “he puts on all his auxiliary organs.” 36 Indeed, some thinkers see technologies as “forms of life” that both extend and change human activity and its meaning.37 Like voices, these technologies and systems play a role in establishing the identities of the subjects who “articulate” them. Second, technologies and systems do not exist in a vacuum: they contest other technologies and systems for a place within the social body. They are therefore shot through with one another, are dynamic hybrids, in their concrete existence. For example, capitalism is never a pure economic system.38 It is always U.S., Chilean, Japanese, French, or some other national—or global—form of capitalism. In each of these incarnations, capitalism involves State-run entitlement programs, national transportation systems, and other economic structures that are not strictly profit oriented. U.S. and other forms of capitalism are also established in part through their negating sideward glance at the various forms of socialism. This rejection has shaped a form of capitalism that, at least in the U.S., virtually prohibits the development of universal health insurance and other economic programs that would benefit society. The hybridity of economic systems leaves open at least the possibility that capitalism, like the former Soviet Union’s nondemocratic form of communism, might eventually be trumped by one of the other economic voices that clamor

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within it or by a new system that would emerge from the interplay of these different economic languages. Recognizing economic systems as hybrids rather than pure structures might help their participants to bring about deeper changes within them. This is even more obvious when we remember that an economic system is inseparable from the State and other noneconomic institutions that help make up a social body. Moreover, these institutions are embedded in and crisscrossed by national and worldwide social formations that help determine what they are. The third sense in which Marx’s notion of personification helps to identify social structures as a dimension of voices concerns the relation between discourse and nonlinguistic practices. Any social structure is an interweaving of linguistic and nonlinguistic practices. For example, the formal and informal justifications of capitalism as a national economic policy intertwine with the nondiscursive practices and structures that make up that economy. So long as alternative policies are available (and they always are, at least to the imagination), the presence of feudalism, capitalism, Soviet communism, or any other economic system requires the justificatory discourse that accompanies it in the national or global setting. The debates within the World Trade Organization and protest against it from those who favor “globalization from below” rather than the “above” of corporations and their governmental allies, attest to this in our own time. Thus social structures always involve both discursive and nonlinguistic dimensions. But what is the exact relationship between the discursive and nondiscursive sides of a social structure? Marx’s occasional claim that capitalists and workers are merely personifications of, respectively, the capital and labor sides of capitalism, and that ideology is determined by the mode of production, suggests that the nondiscursive structures outweigh discourse in directing history. But this overlooks the self-reflexive dimension of language that we have discussed in previous chapters. The complex syntax of a linguistic system permits a social language to take itself and the social structures associated with it as objects of further commentary. For example, Marx was able to convert the institutions within which he was embedded—those of the industrial period of Europe—into an object of critical reflection; he was able to imagine their transformation into communism or a classless society and, on that basis, to make his famous prescription, “Workers of the world unite!” Because of this reflexivity and the freedom associated with it, the social structure as a whole, that is, the linguistic and nonlinguistic dimensions

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taken together, is converted into a self-reflexive voice. Within this voice, the specific relation between its linguistic and nonlinguistic dimensions is reciprocal presupposition. Language has priority because of its self-reflexivity, but the nonlinguistic dimension of a social structure can disrupt its linguistic dimension and vice versa. The example of Marx’s imaginative inversion of industrial capitalism has already shown how the self-reflexivity of language can disrupt the nonlinguistic dimension. Indeed, emphasis on self-reflexivity slips us over into a Gramscian reading of Marx and an emphasis on the role of “organic intellectuals” in social change. According to Gramsci, organic intellectuals help new social groups, such as the proletariat, gain “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields.” 39 With this awareness, the structure of society “ceases to be an external force which crushes man . . . and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethico-political form and a source of new initiatives.” 40 Because of the role of organic intellectuals and the self-reflexive dimension of language, Gramsci usually speaks of a group obtaining “hegemony” within society via civil society rather than domination over society via the State.41 But the reverse is also true: the nonlinguistic aspects of social structures can lead to new ways of speaking about these structures. For example, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident had a tremendous impact on antinuclear discourse in the U.S. Such nonlinguistic developments, however, are part of a social structure that, as voice, comments on the effects to which the developments have given rise within it. That is, voices respond by way of their reflexive language to their nonlinguistic dimensions and events. One cannot say, therefore, that voices are strictly determined by something outside themselves: the inclusion of social structures within voices escapes the chasm between the superstructure and the base structure that has plagued mechanistic versions of Marxism.

Computerized Workplaces Another example of the relation between the discursive and nondiscursive dimensions of social structures will help clarify the above conclusion in relation to the contemporary workplace. Many thinkers have speculated that information technology and “computer mediated work” are ushering us into an era of “knowledge-based societies” and

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can eliminate much of the separation between intellectual and routine labor—between managers and workers—that has characterized the traditional workplace. Shoshana Zuboff supports these claims through field studies she has undertaken and a judicious use of theory derived from Foucault and other contemporary thinkers on technology and society.42 At the heart of her argument is the claim that information technology creates an important distinction between “automating” and “informating.” In the case of automating, a skill is translated into a computer program that allows one to mechanically reproduce the original skill simply by running the program. The worker’s embodied knowledge is replaced by an abstract version of it. Unwavering precision and uniformity in production is gained by this substitution, but the worker is now limited to monitoring the screen displays of computerized machines. Moreover, the device that automates these activities also registers data about them. A numerically controlled machine tool, for example, both utilizes programmed instructions to perform a task and records the current state of the equipment, product, and process as data or information. Zuboff refers to this type of registered data as the workplace’s “dimension of reflexivity” or “transparency” (9). The dimension of transparency converts conventional workplaces— pulp mills, automobile parts factories, banks, insurance companies, and other “blue-collar” and “white-collar” jobs—into “electronic texts.” According to Zuboff, such a text 1) provides comprehensive and systematic information concerning an organization, 2) incorporates logical procedures and informal knowledge that provide the text with more “depth,” 3) permits reconstitution of itself at any place or time, and 4) is authorless in the sense that it consists of bits and pieces from many different sources rather than from a single person who pulls all the information into one definitive statement (179–80). Because of the surveillance this text gives to management over the workplace, Zuboff borrows from Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault and refers to the electronic text as an “information Panopticon” (319–23). In contrast to automating, informating gives workers free access to the electronic text of the workplace and “reskills” rather than “deskills” them. This allows workers to participate in a larger share of the hypothesis making, that is, in manipulating data and directly adding value to the products of the information technology system (57). The “intellective skills” involved at this level of data manipulation require that the workers develop a theoretical conception of the total work process, the capacity

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to imagine the real-world referents of the abstract symbols that appear on video screens, and the ability to employ explicit, inferential reasoning in symbols (96). In the case of machinists, for example, the automating strategy limits them to monitoring the progress of a computerized numerical control machine. Management, moreover, can monitor their work through the information that the machine records about the work process. In contrast, the informating strategy permits workers to program the machine as the immediate need arises and grants them access to the company’s data on inventory, material costs, time constraints, and other information contained in the electronic text. Conception is therefore no longer kept in the heads of management and “execution” pushed into the hands of labor. Both moments are reunited in the tasks of each of the participants in what is now supposedly a democratic workplace. Because the informating strategy permits workers to make managerial-like judgments and suggestions about the best way to proceed on their part of the job, Zuboff feels that workers will gain a sense of empowerment, discover a dimension of playfulness in their work, and thus achieve a higher level of commitment and accountability in relation to their assigned jobs (69). For our purposes, Zuboff’s work illustrates how a nonlinguistic structure and set of practices, information technology, can disrupt the discourse that depicts managers as in charge of “conception” and workers as in charge of “execution.” The informating strategy threatens this distinction and the power structure it embodies. Indeed, managers are stuck with the choice between using the informating strategy and gaining in productivity, but ceding power to workers, or using the automating strategy and losing some productivity from workers, while maintaining their identity and power (288–89). In other words, Zuboff’s use of information technology illustrates reciprocal presupposition: the relatively nonlinguistic dimension of the computerized workplace moves ahead of and interrupts the usual presuppositions about the division of labor, but discourse and its reflexivity also allow for two ways of conceptualizing, automating and informating. Thus, the two dimensions of a social structure, discourse and nonlinguistic equipment and practices, presuppose and can interrupt one another. Once again, this sort of observation effaces the mechanistic bifurcation and hierarchical relation between the so-called base structure and superstructure of society. This portrayal of reciprocal presupposition in relation to social structures also fits with our claim that subjects are “elliptically” identical with voices. A voice involves a linguistic or “expressive” dimension (reflexive

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language) and a content dimension (the nonlinguistic modes of our bodies and of their extensions, that is, the technologies, systems, structures that surround us). We and our technologies are these voices, but they also throw us ahead of ourselves into their ongoing contestation for “audibility” within the social body. Moreover, the hybridity of these voices permits us and our technological extensions to become new voices, for example, the transformation of capitalism into socialism or vice versa. Our voices are therefore not wholly identical to us. This elliptical form of identity captures the sense we have of ourselves as both the center of our existence and as outside ourselves; as both personal and anonymous beings at once. It therefore avoids the abrupt alternative between deterministic and voluntaristic conceptions of our relation to social structures. This recognition of social structures as a dimension of voices sheds light on another aspect of Marxist thought. Marx and many contemporary Marxists claim that the mode of production hides the social and exploitative nature of production from workers. For example, Marx holds that the opposition between capitalist and worker appears as the opposition between two commodities—the capitalist’s money and the worker’s labor power. Furthermore, this opposition is upheld, and the underlying social relations obscured, by the ideology and political system that aids in the reproduction of these same relations.43 However, this distinction between appearance and reality, between the social forms of production and commodities, between labor and valorization processes, is not as absolute as Marx and others express it. Rather, workers are well aware that the profits they have produced go to destinations other than their own pockets. But they differ on how to evaluate this effect and what, if anything, they want to do about it. Put otherwise, the voices of Marxism and liberalism contest with one another in the milieu of the relations in production as well as in the milieu of the relations of production. But the voice of liberal capitalism, its set of discursive and nondiscursive practices, is today much more audible than that of Marxism and socialist workers’ parties. It has even managed, in the U.S., to identify itself with democracy, progressively reducing the latter to “free enterprise” and the market fundamentalism of neoliberalism. The challenge for progressive forces is to increase the audibility of an opposing voice both inside and outside the workplace. A point that Marxists make and could assert in relation to Zuboff’s claims is pertinent to the notion of a multivoiced body as well. A fully democratic society requires that control of the means of production must ultimately reside in the hands of the people. Zuboff thinks that the

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informating strategy will blur the conceptual and execution sides of work and eventually transform the traditional “two-class system” of the workplace into a group of professionals that are separated from one another by the degree, rather than the kind, of knowledge they possess, that is, into “a vision of organizational membership that resembles the trajectory of a professional career” (399). But control through private ownership of the workplace means that power on the level of the social relationships of production—class relations—will always trump any arrangement at the level of relations in production. The managers, in the name of the owners’ desire for profit, will still have the legal right to determine who works and who doesn’t, the product to be created, the site of its production (including which country), the amount of time that should be devoted to work by each worker, and the technological apparatus used for producing the commodity, including whether to continue with an informating strategy or to replace it with an automating strategy. In chapter 10, I will present “the interplay of equally audible voices” as the principle of justice for the multivoiced body. Clearly, control of the means of production by the managerial class limits this equal audibility. But it is also obvious that equal audibility entails something like Zuboff’s informating strategy as well as broad-based control of the means of production. If equalization of the skills of workers and managers and equal access to the electronic text—if democratization of the workplace—does not take place, then a new class of technocrats could develop and use their specialized knowledge as a bargaining chip for more power over the direction of society at the expense of the participatory potential of the other members of society. The equal audibility of voices as a normative political principle therefore requires a “classless society” at the level of both the social relations of production and the social relations in production. This does not mean that all workers have to have the same expertise at the point of production; only that they have enough of an overview of the production process and its place in their communities that they can participate in democratic decision making about the running and purpose of their production unit.44 By showing how social structures are voices, by emphasizing the relation of reciprocal presupposition between their linguistic and nonlinguistic dimensions, we have avoided the extreme alternatives of linguistic idealism and epiphenomenalism. Discourse and nonlinguistic structures and practices intertwine via reciprocal presupposition and, as a unit, participate as voices in society. The reflexivity of language—as involved in

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the interplay among society’s voices—still allows us to grant priority to discourse. It is therefore appropriate to refer to the combination of human bodies and social structures as voices.

Postmodernist Views of Social Structures If Marx exemplifies a modernist view of social structures, then what of some of the important views of social structures that postmodernists offer? Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, for example, eschew what they see as the essentialism associated with Marxism: the identification of human beings with labor power, of society with definite classes, and of history with a teleological tendency toward unification. Instead, they emphasize what they see as the operations of chance, difference, and heterogeneity in society. They also deny the division between base and superstructure that typifies mechanistic readings of Marxism. In chapter 5, for example, we saw that Foucault views society in terms of power relations that create the identity of subjects and objects. Moreover, his declaration of a reciprocal relation between knowledge and power, like Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of reciprocal presupposition between expression and content, breaks firmly with the bifurcation between base and superstructure and brings him closer to the notion that social structures are voices. Indeed, Foucault’s insistence that power is inseparable from resistance bears some similarity to the notion that society is a contestation among voices. On the negative side, we saw that Foucault oscillated between the anonymity of power relations (and the subordination of subjects to them), on the one hand, and an autonomous form of subjectivity, on the other, though he seems finally to have adopted the former rather than the latter view. Now that we are clearer on the sense in which we are voices, and understand how social structures are voices, we can deny his reduction of the social body to power relations and replace it with the notion that society is a contestation for audibility among the voices that participate in that body. But we also saw that Foucault emphasized the creation of new bodies or subjectivities, knowledges, and pleasures. To incorporate this strand of his thought into our own and further develop the idea of voices and society as a multivoiced body, we must first understand how this interplay among voices produces new voices as well as its nemesis, oracles—the topic, respectively, of the next two chapters.

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7

Communication and an Ethics for the Age of Diversity

Now that voices are established as having primacy within the arena of linguistic beings, we need to determine the implications of this for the meaning of communication. This meaning will include communication as a mechanism for the creation of new voices and ultimately for the metamorphosis of society. Moreover, it will provide the basis for an innovative ethics. The chapter will begin with Nietzsche on communication and end with him on an ironic “gift-giving virtue.”

Nietzsche on Communication Nietzsche links language, communication, and consciousness together: “Consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication. . . . Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings. . . . The development of language and the development of consciousness . . . go hand in hand.1 On the one hand, Nietzsche is derisive of this development of consciousness and language. Besides deriving from the need for “help and protection,” consciousness (and hence linguistic communication) is “only the smallest part” of the thinking in which we engage. It belongs to our social or “herd” nature

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rather than to our “incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual” existence. Indeed, it limits us to knowing “only of what is not individual but ‘average.’” On the other hand, Nietzsche says that communication is “a capacity that has gradually been accumulated and now waits for an heir who might squander it.” He adds that artists, orators, preachers, and writers are the “late borns” who already engage in squandering this capacity.2 Nietzsche is both right and wrong in these sentiments. He is right to emphasize that language is primarily bound up with communication. This point will be reinforced in a moment. But Nietzsche is wrong to belittle communication just because it is social or “herdlike.” It has lifted us onto a new plane, the plane of voices and the multivoiced body. It is there that the squandering of which he speaks takes place and allows for the development of the feelings and actions that he thinks are “incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual” prior to their second life in language. Without this development, these feelings and actions have intensity, but not subtlety or expansion. Moreover, they can acquire a new individuality within their herd milieu. Poetry, but also the unique way each of us has of expressing ourselves, including Nietzsche’s own poignant phrasings, testify to this new acquisition. Language not only generalizes, it singularizes. Nietzsche’s first point, that language is communication, has been supported frequently in this book. To reiterate, we never encounter ourselves or language outside dialogue. We wake up to the continuation of yesterday’s conversations, and we do not break with them until sleep claims us at night. Even then they can continue in the other forms they take on in our dreams. Whatever we may have been prior to communication, we have since been pulled up into the interplay of the voices that make up society. We are reminded of predialogic existence with every ache and pain, or burst of joy, but these reminders are already inseparable from the plethora of words or other signs we have for noting or elaborating them. If there is something lost in this, much is surely gained. Language, it must be admitted, is often employed to kill the diversity of thoughts, perceptions, and actions that populate our setting; but bureaucracies can be compensated for by our poetry, drama, or other expressive modes and can even be constructed to serve these modes. This would require, of course, that the political use of language be turned more effectively in that direction.

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Language as Communication In the discussion of Merleau-Ponty in chapter 4, I emphasized his crucial point that we do not first exist as subjects and act subsequently; instead, we are an engagement with our surroundings from the very beginning. I added that this activity is primarily dialogue, an interplay among voices. We can never escape our involvement in dialogue, and this comes as close to a defining trait of us as we can get. This claim is challenged by Chomsky, other cognitive scientists, and structuralists. They hold that language is a set of mechanistic or structuralist rules first and only communication second. We must see if the views of these thinkers point beyond themselves to the theory of language and communication that I have been advocating and will clarify further in this chapter.

Chomsky’s Universal Grammar Chomsky claims that it is a mistake to ask if language is designed for communication: this “natural approach” overlooks that “the use of language for communication might turn out to be a kind of epiphenomenon.” 3 He argues that language is instead designed to provide information to other cognitive systems, specifically the sensory-motor system and the system of thought.4 The language system accomplishes this information service by supplying us with innate knowledge of a universal grammar. This knowledge helps us to recognize and generate syntactically ordered strings of sound or other linguistic signs, that is, to understand and speak English, Lao, or whatever language is typical of our particular social environment and is derivable from the universal grammar that all human beings presumably possess. Because the universal grammar is just a set of innate rules for deriving “surface structures” or specific languages, Chomsky believes that language is social only incidentally: “you can use language even if you are the only person in the universe with language.” 5 This nonsocial language would provide that person with an adaptive advantage in relation to organizing thought. Indeed, Chomsky thinks that “the essential core of language” is the “mechanisms” it provides “for formulating thought in internal linguistic expressions.” 6 Linguists strenuously debate whether universal grammar or other innate linguistic structures exist. For example, Geoffrey Sampson systematically challenges the “poverty of children’s linguistic data” and other

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arguments that Chomsky and other linguists have appealed to in support of “nativism.” 7 Sampson argues that children and adults can understand and acquire language on the basis of empirically tested hypotheses about the organization of the sounds directed to us by others. The biological factors necessary for accomplishing this—ears, larynges, and perhaps an engrained, general tendency to order information in nested hierarchical subunits—are minimal.8 He also makes the point that if every person did possess a universal grammar, a “Mentalese,” from birth, “one might wonder why separate human communities would have developed separate spoken languages.” 9 Whatever the merits of these arguments, we can pass over them by simply holding that we are concerned with language as communication. More specifically, we can allow that the relation between language as innate mechanism and as communication places some constraints on the latter. Biology and linguistics play an important role in determining what those constraints are. Whatever they are, communication is an interplay among social discourses. These discourses, as we have seen, are made up of discourse-specific “statements” rather than transdiscourse “sentences,” play a necessary role in establishing the identities of subjects and objects, and are unintelligible apart from the social contexts they help to constitute. Because these discourses are social, they cannot be acquired by Chomsky’s “only person in the universe.” We have shown, moreover, that social discourses are voices and thus inherently interactive with one another. In other words, language as communication is a level of linguistic reality illegitimately demoted by Chomsky and other adherents of language as an innate mechanism. Our task is to clarify this level of linguistic reality.10

Saussure’s Structuralism Like Chomsky, Saussure also subordinates communication to language. But, as we saw in chapter 5, he represents language as a diacritical system in which each sign is determined by its differences from the others. Despite this system, his theory is vulnerable to the sorts of arguments that have been put forward in the past two chapters. In particular, signs are not fully determinate as to their meaning, and interlocutors are not constituted by a single language. Rather, “language” is a plethora of

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intersecting social discourses, often competing with one another for audibility within the community composed of them. In this interplay among the social discourses, their anexact subject matter and their statements are continually rearticulated and redetermined. Nonetheless, these social discourses do bear a relationship to one another that is somewhat like a diacritical relation among signs: each social discourse is established at least in part by its differences from the other social discourses in its milieu. Moreover, the terms within each social discourse are also diacritically related to one another as well as having significance in terms of the purpose, rules, or orientation of their social discourse. To put this claim in relation to some of the thinkers on language we have covered, Saussure’s “signs” are converted into Bakhtin’s “social languages,” and the latter are transformed into the more expansive poststructuralist-inspired notion of social discourses that determine their subjects and objects. These social discourses, in turn, are diacritically related to (intersect with) and in dialogical interplay with each other: they are voices. Indeed, we can think of the multivoiced body both synchronically and diachronically. Synchronically, society is the diacritically determined intersection of its voices. Diachronically, it is the interplay among these voices and, as we will see, the continuous production of new voices or differences as well as the metamorphosis of society.

Three Dimensions of Communication I have been referring to communication as interplay among voices. This interplay forms a social body by keeping the voices of the community separate and simultaneously holding them together. In other words, it is the dynamic version of the static diacritical system of which I have just spoken. It also involves each voice moving from a less to a more determinate version of itself and then back again to relative indeterminacy, ready to become yet another rendition of itself. To clarify this further, we can specify three dimensions of communication. The first is the interpersonal or “vertical” dimension. Communication always takes place between interlocutors; the face-to-face exchange is the epitome of this dimension. The interlocutors can be speaking to one another within the same social discourse or in distinct voices. Either way, they will also be accomplishing something by communicating to one another. They may,

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for example, be engaging in a pro-forma social practice, such as greeting one another, or they might be carrying out a deliberative goal-oriented action or talking about something together. This “dialogic trajectory” is the second dimension of communication. It and interpersonal exchange are usually accepted as the two major constituents of communication: two or more persons talking together in order to achieve some goal.11 Our earlier treatment of Bakhtin’s notion of hybridization tells us that there is also a third dimension. The social discourses within which the interpersonal exchanges of the vertical dimension take place are inseparable from their “lateral” relation to the many other voices that help constitute but are not explicitly articulated in those exchanges. A favorable discourse on religion, for example, is partially constituted by the atheism it rejects even if the latter is not explicitly mentioned. Similarly, the bare legal statement of affirmative action will be surrounded by—will be shaped “laterally” by—current and historical voices that receive no direct mention in its phrasing: the fairness-oriented discourses and actions in defense of blacks, women, and other groups currently economically disenfranchised in the U.S.; the protests of white conservatives who ignore the fairness claim and the fact that affirmative action policies are intended to benefit any disadvantaged group at any time in history, including whites who might someday find themselves as a group in need of such legal protections for the good of themselves and of society, and the importance of such a policy to ensure diversity as a resource in educational and other institutions. The meaning or significance of every statement we make includes—using Bakhtin’s terms—an implicit citation or “hybridization” of all the other voices logically or contextually related to it. Even if individuals are not aware of these other voices, they are part of their statements’ meaning insofar as the statements and individuals are participants in society’s interplay of voices. Thus communication involves a lateral dimension as well as those of vertical exchange and dialogic trajectory. Although this theory of communication is radical relative to the standard information-sharing models, there is a much deeper meaning of communication still to come. In order to present it effectively, however, we must first discuss those views that think communication is centered on the achievement of “mutual understanding.” They are more adequate than the mechanistic and structuralist theories we have discussed, but I will argue that they underplay heterogeneity and overlook the priority that divergence has over convergence in our dialogic exchanges. Because any

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view of communication must address the issue of incommensurability, we will also tackle that issue before presenting a meaning of communication that is fully congruent with society as a multivoiced body.

Communication as Mutual Understanding Communication involves understanding among interlocutors. If we don’t understand what another person is saying, how could we reply? Even a misunderstanding seems to require a partial understanding just to get started. At the very least, some connection between my statement and your response is required to ward off the absurd possibility that responses to utterances are purely arbitrary. Whatever that connection is, its explication must avoid the extreme of an absolutely common language, that is, one voice of which all the rest are variations, and the other extreme of voices that have nothing in common at all. The first extreme cannot satisfactorily explain the acute difficulty that people of different cultures, and even within the same culture, often discover in trying to understand one another. The second extreme, absolute incommensurability, seems to deny that communication even takes place. In order to begin discussing the relation between communication and understanding, we can examine the theories of two influential thinkers, Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Like the interplay of voices view of communication, they absorb language into communication and accept that the members of society are established as agents in and through linguistic exchange.12 But they go beyond saying that communication involves interlocutionary understanding of the terms used in linguistic exchange. They valorize mutual understanding as the goal of language. Habermas, for example, declares that “reaching [mutual] understanding is the inherent telos of human speech”; and Gadamer echoes this declaration when he says that “language has its true being only in dialogue, in coming to an understanding.” 13 Moreover, both thinkers take mutual understanding to mean consensus or agreement. Thus Habermas states that “processes of reaching understanding are aimed at a consensus,” and Gadamer declares that “understanding is, primarily, agreement.” 14 By examining these views, we can assess the relation between communication and mutual understanding as well as gain a preliminary glimpse of its implications for ethics and for a principle of political justice—topics treated more fully in chapter 10.

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Habermas and Universal Rationality In identifying communication with mutual understanding as a goal, Habermas and Gadamer presuppose that there is some nonarbitrary basis for consensus and that other uses of language in communication have only a secondary status. Habermas, for example, says that consensus “depends on the intersubjective recognition of validity claims.” 15 He believes that even the literal meaning of a sentence cannot be understood independently of these validity claims, that is, the “condition of [the sentence’s] communicative employment” and of its “acceptability.” 16 Because communication involves validity claims, because it is oriented toward their redemption, Habermas echoes Kant in thinking that human existence is inherently rational.17 Of course, he also recognizes that money and power or infrastructural systems often derail this rational telos. His critical theory is therefore aimed at emancipating us from these forces and their distortion of communicative rationality. In delineating the rationality of communicative action, Habermas claims that these actions are linked to five forms of “argumentation,” each of which is in its turn tied to a specific type of “problematic expression” and a “controversial validity claim.” Thus, theoretical discourse (science, philosophy, technology) involves “cognitive-instrumental” expressions, whose validity claims concern the “truth of propositions” and the “efficacy of teleological actions”; practical discourse (ethics) involves “moralpractical” expressions, whose validity claims concern the “rightness of norms of action”; aesthetic criticism (art and cultural values) involves “evaluative” expressions, whose validity claims concern the “adequacy of standard of values”; therapeutic critique (psychological self-analysis) involves “expressive” expressions, whose validity claims concern the “truthfulness or sincerity of expressions”; finally, explicative discourse (logic, grammar) concerns the “comprehensibility or well-formedness of symbolic constructs” of any type of expression.18 Our understanding of these validity claims in relation to their different types of expression form the background knowledge necessary for communicative interaction and mutual understanding. Each type implicitly contains a demand for redeeming the relevant validity claim if the need should arrive. Habermas thinks that aesthetic criticism is less important than theoretical and practical discourses. He claims that art and cultural values can be defended only within the context of particular “forms of life” or cultures, whereas theoretical and practical discourse make “universal

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validity claims that can be tested in discourse.” 19 But his distinction creates a problem for the primacy he wishes to assign to consensus. Is not his valorization of consensus itself the product of a “particular form of life” or cultural context, perhaps that of the Enlightenment? Habermas admits that communication can be used for “strategic” reasons as well as for achieving consensus, for “success” as well as for reaching understanding or communicative action. But he argues that communicative action has precedence over the strategic uses of language because the latter presuppose that the interlocutors first understand the language being used in these exchanges.20 Here, however, Habermas is clearly conflating understanding one another’s utterances with communicating in order to achieve consensus. When foremen of construction jobs direct their workers to carry out a particular task, they are not always appealing to the workers’ tacit or overt acknowledgement of the efficacy of the task, just that they do it. No aim at consensus is involved. More generally, much of our everyday discourse is simply connective tissue between us. Our “hellos,” “goodbyes,” and other greetings, the linguistic rituals that we use to begin a class, open up the store for business, or carry out other institutional aspects of our lives, the jokes we tell and exclamations we use to vent our feelings, all these and many other fragments of communication create and reproduce the bonds among us that we call society. These utterances are not intended to produce a mutual understanding or consensus among interlocutors; they are just continuations of social life.21 One might take this idea of continuation, or the creation of poetic visions, or the celebration of God as aims of communication—aims that do not necessarily ask for rational consensus or the redemption of validity claims. It takes a special effort to make mutual understanding the goal of communication. That is, it is a goal only within certain communicative contexts. It is not, contra Habermas, “the inherent telos of human speech.” Thus Habermas’s valorization of communicative action reflects the values of the form of life he represents rather than a universal structure of communication. This implies also that his distinction between aesthetic criticism or culturally bound evaluation, on the one hand, and theoretical or practical justificatory discourses, on the other, does not seem to hold up under scrutiny. The inseparability of communicative acts from their cultural contexts is also reinforced by an issue that arises when one attempts to apply presumably universal ethical norms to particular situations. Habermas accepts that norms sanctioned by justificatory discourses also require

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“discourses of application” in order to determine which of them is appropriate in a concrete situation.22 But Georgia Warnke shows that this brings particular cultures to at least coprimacy with universal, justified norms in determining the meaning of a communicative action in a concrete situation.23 For instance, the morality status of abortion involves the presumably justified principles of life, liberty, and equality. We can think of abortion as an issue of how to apply these principles or as a matter of which principle has priority. If we view abortion as an issue of application, then we might fairly say that all relevant aspects of the concrete situation must be taken into account. But then “pro-life” adherents will think that the most relevant aspect is the sanctity of life, whereas “pro-choice” people will point to the quality of the woman’s or child’s life as at least of equal importance. Similarly, the cultural values of pro-life persons might lead them to apply the justified norm, “the means must be proportionate to a given end,” differently from one another, depending on whether the person thinks that viewing abortion as the “ungodly killing of innocent life” is more important than allegiance to the “rule of law.” In the former case, bombing abortion clinics might seem appropriate; in the latter case, legal, democratic means would be the route to follow in order to eliminate the clinics. If we think of the abortion case as an issue in which one of two principles, life or liberty, has priority, then the question of application extends to the very meaning of the norms. Pro-lifers might understand the principle of life as the biological status of the fetus; pro-choice people might take it to mean the quality of the existence of the women and future children involved. Similarly, the first group might equate the principle of liberty with the rights of fetuses to live, whereas the second group would identify it with the right of women and families to choose if or when they should have children (note too that most people in this second group would not agree with the pro-life group’s claim that the fetus is a person). Given the pro-lifers’ understanding of the principle of liberty, they will not be able to appreciate how the pro-choice person could favor the woman’s rights over that of the fetus. The opposite will be true for the pro-choice advocates. As Warnke asserts, “these principles [of application] appear themselves to be tied to a hermeneutic starting point from which forms of evaluative orientation cannot be eradicated.” 24 If, as seems the case, Habermas’s justificatory principles cannot be separated from principles of applications, then they too suffer the same fate as the principles of life and liberty in the context of the debate over abortion. For both my and Warnke’s

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reasons, therefore, Habermas’s division between justificatory discourses and culturally based evaluations does not hold.

Gadamer and “Hermeneutical Conversation” Habermas equates language with its role in communication and feels that all important linguistic expressions involve validity claims, at least some of which (those bound to theoretical, practical, and explicative discourses) are not tied to any particular form of life or culture, that is, could in principle be redeemed universally. We have just seen, however, that principles based on these validity claims are irredeemably “contaminated” by culture from the very beginning. But Habermas’s arguments for a rational basis of communication can still have the same effect that he assigns to aesthetic objects: they can “guide perception” and make the “authenticity” of an art work or the necessity of a rational basis for discourse “so evident that this aesthetic experience can itself become a rational motive for accepting the corresponding standards of value.” 25 Thinking along with Habermas’s theory makes us feel the importance of striving for consensus in experience and hence the need of a rational basis for consensus, even if we do not agree with the specifics of his own way of getting there. Gadamer’s theory of communication attempts to give us both—both culturally bounded thought as well as a rational basis for privileging some communications over others. Like Habermas, Gadamer identifies language with communication and holds that the latter, indeed, the human community, “fully realizes itself only in the process of coming to an understanding.” 26 He refers to this process as “hermeneutical conversation.” He adds that this conversation involves finding a “common language” in order to arrive at a mutual understanding of the subject matter under consideration. Subjects are subordinate to the direction that this language provides for them and that their exchanges sustain (388). But Gadamer departs from Habermas when he identifies this common language and the subject matter of hermeneutical conversation with “tradition”: all understanding “is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition” (290). He describes tradition as both a regulative idea and an ongoing activity; it both guides us, addressing us from the past, and requires our usually automatic and continual attempts to complete tradition by understanding it:

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Our historical consciousness is always filled with a variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard. Only in the multifariousness of such voices does it exist: this constitutes the nature of the tradition in which we want to share and have a part. Modern historical research itself is not only research, but the handing down of tradition. We do not see it only in terms of progress and verified results; in it we have, as it were, a new experience of history whenever the past resounds in a new voice. (284) Because we are addressed by tradition from the beginning, it is responsible for the “belonging together” of the subjects whose attention it solicits as well as for the internal connection between these subjects and the objects that they encounter. Tradition also entails that “hearing” has primacy over the other senses with respect to grasping the “logos” of experience. Indeed, Gadamer claims that “the structure of the question is implicit in all experience,” a question posed by “a voice that speaks to us from the past,” and demands that we understand the subject matter under consideration from the point of view of tradition (362, 374, 456). All interpretation, in other words, is guided by the implicit or preunderstanding of tradition that we have as participants in tradition and that interpretation makes explicit within the interpreter’s language in the present (389, 398, 472). Interpretation is also related to truth and to being. In his discussion of aesthetic experience, Gadamer says that the presentation of the work of art is its “transformation into structure” (Gibilde), that is, into the repeatable “truth” or “true being” of itself (110–12). The claim that the experience of the work of art is the transformation of the work into its truth is premised on Gadamer’s belief that our encounter with an art work is 1) an encounter with an unfinished event and 2) is part of this event (99). The art work as a whole is repeated in each experience of it, but always as different in that it is always and essentially an unfinished event (the event of its being experienced). Its truth is our continual and never final completion of it, but of it, that particular art work (including its incompleteness) and not of something else. Because its essence includes its repeated completion (and hence incompletion), Gadamer can say without paradox that each presentation or realization of the work’s possibilities, each transformation of it into its truth, is “contemporaneous” with the work’s identity, that is, as “original as the work itself.” The event of the art

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work, which includes our experience of it, has, as he says, “its being only in becoming and return” (121–23). What Gadamer says of the work of art is for him equally true of our relation to tradition: our perpetual engagement in hermeneutical conversation is the continual transformation of tradition into its truth. Like the event of art, the event of tradition, which includes our interpretive relation to it, is inherently unfinished. Thus each of our interpretations of it is a transformation of it, of tradition as a whole, into its truth or being. Gadamer uses the notion of a “fusion of horizons” in order to show how we bridge the temporary chasm between the tradition that addresses us from the past and that comes to expression in the present when we interpret it (306–7). This fusion of our present perspective with tradition is itself part of tradition’s movement, its dynamic form of being. It also has the epistemological advantage of allowing us to put at risk our more local and limited prejudices, including those brought about too hastily through the hopes and fears of the present (298–99, 305, 388). More specifically, the force of the horizon of tradition in relation to our own present horizon upon it (and as part of it) permits us to interpret a text, historical event, or any other aspect of tradition on its own terms, in the way it has come down to us, and to allow our interpretive concepts “to disappear behind what they bring to speech in interpretation” (398). Because Gadamer holds that Being does not exist for us apart from its coming into language (nor does Being or the world exist apart from what comes into it), hermeneutical conversation and tradition are ultimately Being’s conversation with itself—a conversation that takes place through the interpretive interlocutors simultaneously established by it (443, 450, 474–75). Insofar as tradition is comparable to a culture, Gadamer’s notion of hermeneutical conversation is opposed to Habermas’s theory of communicative action and his claim that theoretical, practical, and explicative discourses involve expressions and validity claims that are not culture bound. Even if Gadamer’s notion of tradition is inherently expansive, it is still always a particular tradition. On the other hand, rationality still has a basis because the fusion of our current horizon with that of tradition weeds out, as we saw, the less adequate interpretations of tradition. Moreover, the acceptable interpretations are rational in the sense that they fulfill possibilities that are part of tradition’s always unfinished being. One might say, indeed, that tradition allows us to go beyond it without ever leaving it. Gadamer’s hermeneutical conversation would appear, therefore, to be

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both culture bound and yet provide a rational basis for interpretations or expressions that is as strong as that given to us by Habermas’s theory of communicative action and its accompanying notion of redeemable validity claims. What I have been calling a voice is closer to the notion of a culture, form of life, or Gadamer’s tradition than it is to Habermas’s culturally transcendent expressions and their associated validity claims. Nonetheless, Gadamer’s ideas of tradition and hermeneutical conversation fall short of what is meant by voice. The first flaw in Gadamer’s hermeneutical account concerns the homogeneity of tradition. Although tradition is an “unfinished event,” all linguistic exchanges or interpretations are anchored in it and must conform to the trajectory it has always already set.27 Even when we converse with people from a culture radically different than our own, their voice must merge with the tradition of which we already have a preunderstanding. That tradition must be ours, theirs, or a master tradition that encompasses both but is still the historical voice of some particular group. Even if Gadamer were to jettison the permanently unfinished nature of tradition and hermeneutical dialogue and adopt something like Hegel’s “absolute spirit” as the master tradition, that is, a tradition that by definition encompasses any possible tradition, he would have to recognize that it would give tradition a particular slant, a particular voice or social discourse, for example, Hegel’s type of reason that strives for certainty about itself via a return to itself and for the absolute unity and univocity of all the positions it includes. What we find in fact, as I have insisted, is heterogeneous voices whose interplay is not guided by a univocal tradition. The second problem that Gadamer’s view faces is one that he shares with Habermas: exchanges aimed at mutual understanding are simply a subset and not the be-all, end-all of communicative practices. When modern artists or poets borrow techniques from other artists or poets, their aim is more likely to disrupt tradition or validity claims than to obtain consensus as a goal. Even Habermas accepts that works of art could institute new criteria of evaluation, as, for example, surrealism or Cubism did in the early twentieth century.28 Artists and poets also aim to enrich their own style and products. This enriching does not call for the elimination of the other voices. Moreover, the productivity of their interruption of consensus is valuable—one might say as worthy as consensus— because it introduces novelty into what otherwise would be a monotonous society.29

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Gadamer’s valorizing of mutual understanding, and to some degree Habermas’s, adopt the phenomenological and hermeneutical identification of language with the activity of “revealing” the heart of a phenomenon.30 But language has many other uses besides revealing (or concealing) phenomena: greetings, legal contracts, and, in general, the connection it provides between the members of society. We will return to this point in the next section. But there still remains a more important criticism of Habermas’s and Gadamer’s emphasis upon mutual understanding.

Convergence and Divergence Gadamer’s emphasis on tradition can be understood more fully as a preference for convergence over divergence. Even though convergence can never be achieved because of the permanently unfinished nature of tradition, hermeneutical conversation automatically eliminates “aberrant” interpretations or transforms and merges them into the trajectory of tradition. But the subject matter confronting interlocutors can serve either as a basis for their convergence into mutual agreement about the subject matter or as a spur for divergent and perhaps novel developments of it. Both eventualities are valuable and, contra Gadamer and Habermas, neither, at first blush, is more “natural” than the other. Subject matter, in its relation to interlocutors, does not have the fixity or determinacy that would make divergence aberrant and convergence the ultimate destination of discourse. Similarly, the meanings of words only become relatively fixed when they are made so in response to the exigencies of a particular stage of dialogue. There is no neutral meaning or use of a word; meaning and use are always determined by context, and no employment of a word, including its use in a dictionary, is context free. Nonetheless, the “open identity” of meanings are different one from the other; the meaning of rock (the word or the object) and how it allows itself to be nuanced is different than the meaning of water and the variations it encompasses; otherwise meanings would collapse into one indeterminate mass. These terms, moreover, are established in part through their differences from one another. For these two reasons (difference as separator and difference as linkage) plus the exigencies that often demand settling on a common meaning for a term, interlocutors can communicate with each other despite the different ways in which they use the “same” terms—despite the tendency of their communication to be interrupted by these differences.

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If the view of society as a creative tension among heterogeneous voices is correct, divergence rather than convergence of interpretations is the more “natural” situation. But we will see that my view requires some temporary moments of consensus if society is to reproduce itself. For now, however, we have seen that Habermas’s and Gadamer’s equation of communication with the inherent aim of mutual understanding is not sustainable. At the same time, these two thinkers have reinforced the claim that language is communication and that subjects and objects are established within the dialogues they simultaneously make possible.

Communicative Competence andIncommensurability Hybridity and Mutual Access of Voices Emphasizing divergence suggests a plurality of incommensurable worlds. Given such a plurality, communication among them would seem impossible. Each social discourse determines the notion of the “good” on the basis of which everything is measured. At the very least, social discourses determine what is important in relation to any topic. These discourses therefore stipulate explicitly or implicitly what can fall within the scope of the ethical or nonethical good. We saw in chapter 5, for example, that liberals and Marxists understand “labor power” as a good in two incommensurable and opposed ways—as a commodity and as the essence of humans. Similarly, we just noted in relation to the abortion issue that pro-life advocates understand the principle of “the sanctity of life” as the biological life of the fetus, whereas pro-choice people take it to mean the quality of life of the women and future children involved. Alma Guillermoprieto provides an example of incommensurability that concerns nonlinguistic discourse. She describes how the Cuban students she was training could not understand Merce Cunningham’s vision of stillness—“an absolute quietude, like an animal’s, growing out of the harmonious position of the body”—as the heart of dance.31 They seemed able to grasp only a version of Cunningham’s choreography that emphasized technique and modern innovation. Guillermoprieto felt that this was because they had been raised under the Cuban revolution and were set to think in terms of conscious goal-oriented activity, that is, activity useful for fulfilling the needs of society. Whatever the merits of Guillermoprieto’s speculations on the nature and effects of the Cuban revolution, her example and the other two illustrate how each social discourse, like the analytic and organic ones presented in chapter 4,

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determine what counts as relevant or good, and often does so in ways that contrast starkly with the stipulations of other social discourses. Given the value-incommensurability of many of these discourses, how can one judge between them? How can one go beyond the differends of Lyotard that we discussed in chapter 5? The reality of incommensurability seems even stronger when we move from values to meanings. The meaning of each term in a social discourse is established at least partly by its differences from all the other terms in the same discourse. In a discourse on color, for example, the meaning or identity of each color term is determined in part by its difference from the other ones. Similarly, chair is inseparable from table, body from place, and so on. But the meaning of color and of other terms is also determined by the purpose (good) of the discourse in its use of them. For example, the meanings of color terms are nuanced one way in scientific tracts and another in discourses on art. Furthermore, the meaning of a color term, like the significations of all other terms, is always nuanced in one manner or another: terms do not exist apart from social discourses nor social discourses from their internally determined purposes or notions of what is best; there is no neutral discourse that gives us the pristine meaning or use of a term and thus there is no pristine meaning or use.32 One might say that things are the referents of terms and give those terms their pristine meanings. It is true, as pointed out several times in this book, that things have enough independence from language to disrupt discourses that would try to encompass them too exclusively. This allowed us to depart from Saussure and say that each voice or each term is at least partially, rather than completely, established by its differences from the other voices or terms in its domain. But these referents never exist for us apart from one discourse or another, including new ones that they help bring about. The relation between discourse and things, in other words, is what we have been calling “reciprocal presupposition.” If the evaluations and meanings are all “self-referential,” that is, are understandable only within the social discourse of which they are a part, then how is communication possible across social discourses? 33 How can we possess communicative competence? It is as if we were hermetically sealed within the social discourses that establish us as subjects at any given time and what we take to be our understanding of someone else’s position simply amounted to our translation of their words into our own discourse. Significant heterogeneity would be impossible for us to register; any nonhomogeneous social solidarity would be out of the question.

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When Thomas Kuhn faces this question in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he proposes that we might be able to translate some sentences from another paradigm into that of our own. We could possibly translate the Newtonian’s idea of the conservation of mass into Einstein’s language about the conversion of mass into energy (e = mc2). But we could not do so without considerable distortion of the translated position.34 To really understand Newton’s mechanics (or Einstein’s), to do more than merely learn how to manipulate its abstract formulas in an effective manner, those of us who don’t start with it have to “slip into the new language without a decision having been made.” 35 Kuhn does not think that translation or even good reasons are sufficient for effecting this “conversion” or “gestalt-switch.” One has to enter and give oneself over to the discourse or mind-set of the adherents of the other paradigm in order to really understand it. But even if this type of conversion is possible, it leaves us in a bind: if I see the other’s world through the “eyes” of her social discourse, then I and my discourse no longer “see” anything, for I have become her and her words; but if I persist within my own discourse, if I only translate her words into mine, she and her viewpoint, as hers, are lost to me. We exist on separate islands with only ourselves for solace. But, of course, this consignment to self-referentiality cannot be true. We do in fact communicate—and across great cultural divides. Furthermore, thinkers on language as diverse as Davidson and Merleau-Ponty have pointed out that the very idea of misunderstanding another person only makes sense against the background of having already understood others.36 There must, then, be a way in which the plurality of “worlds” are interrelated and allow us access to one another; there must be a way of escaping the trap of self-referentiality and incommensurability. I have already indicated how this escape is possible. The notion of a multivoiced body means that each voice is a hybrid: each voice is shot through with all the rest, each is at once immanent and transcendent in relation to the others, part of their identity and yet their other at the same time. Gadamer, too, has an appreciation of this aspect of the multivoiced body. For example, he says that “each [verbal worldview] potentially contains every other one within it—i.e., each worldview can be extended into every other,” each of their horizons can be “fused” with our own. Therefore, each verbal worldview “can understand and comprehend, from within itself, the ‘view’ of the world presented in another language.” In entering “foreign language-worlds,” he adds, we “overcome the prejudices

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and limitations of our previous experience of the world.” Moreover, we still “return home” to our own world and enjoy the other ones from the perspective of our own.37 Even if we become expatriates, our new way of living is profoundly influenced and permanently colored by the world we have left. But my claim is still different than Gadamer’s. For him, the other worlds are “potentially” ours, can be “fused” with ours, because they are ultimately each part of the continuous movement of an ultimately common “tradition” that subordinates them while living off of them. Their otherness, as we saw, is sacrificed for what is finally the one, albeit differently nuanced, voice of tradition. In contrast, participation in the multivoiced body means that our identity is constituted by a dynamic version of Saussure’s notion of “diacritical unity.” Rather than tradition, absolute spirit, or some other form of “totalizing unity,” rather than one element of a set subordinating the others to it, each element or, in this case, each voice, is at least partially established by its differences from the others, and thus each voice is part of the identity of the rest as well as their “other” from the very beginning. This type of unity is diacritical rather than totalizing. Voices may be, and usually are, arranged hierarchically, but this is due to one of them asserting hegemony over the rest and thus partially supplanting their diacritical unity. Insofar as the voices resound in one another, insofar as each is “flesh of our flesh,” the enunciators of any particular voice always already know and have access to the others. This diacritical unity ensures that we can anticipate the range of social discourses we might encounter and thus maintain our communicative competence. Even when we encounter people whose language we do not know, we can anticipate their possible social discourses and successfully, but more minimally, communicate through hand and other gestures as well as learn bits and pieces of their language as applied to the immediate situation. Social discourses appear to be incommensurable and mutually exclusive only when we separate them from one another and formalize their logics. Otherwise they share a “chaosmosic” existence in which each is both part of the identity and the other of the rest. Because the other voices are part of our identity, we know them and can, to a degree, see through the “eyes” or think through the “mind” of their discourse, yet, because they are also our other, we never fully merge with or become them in the same sense that we are our primary voice. We always see through their eyes, to one degree or another; but always

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this seeing takes place in the idiom of our lead voice, though it is continually contested and disrupted by the other voices, by our simultaneous but less absorbed seeing and listening on the basis these other voices provide for us. The view of society as a multivoiced body, a body within which each voice is a hybrid involving the rest, thus avoids the two horns of the dilemma that afflicts most other theories of intersubjectivity: we are condemned neither to self-referentiality, to solipsism, nor to the loss of ourselves when we attempt to speak in another’s voice. The Schema of Voices This notion of the voices’ hybridity can be better understood by using the technical notion of a schema. Each voice is both itself and also a schema of all the other voices that can be heard by any participant in the multivoiced body. Following Deleuze and Guattari, we can say that the “organic stratum” was transformed into an “anthropomorphic stratum.” As we saw in chapter 3, virtual reality gives rise to this rendition of itself as a new “plane of consistency” and its accompanying “plane of organization.” This new stratum can be thought of as the schema of voices. The schema contains the initial prototypes of the most basic social discourses that will be developed and diversified in the dialogic interplay among the voices of society. Each of these minimally structured social discourses is formed from the beginning through its contestation with the others for audibility. To think of society as a multivoiced body, for example, is to find oneself already elaborating it in contrast to two other major theories of society, monism and pluralism. The schema of voices is repeated at each “site” where dialogue takes place. It is “elastic” in the sense that as different determinate versions of the initial vocal prototypes are produced, and, as we will see later, new voices are created, the schema “makes room” for these “differences” and transforms itself. This metamorphosis is due to the diacritical relation among these voices: each one changes in light of the changes in the others. This description is a bare outline of the schema of voices, or, to say the same thing, the multivoiced body. Even so, it showes how the schema provides an account of communicative competence, solves the problem of incommensurability, and clarifies the ontological solidarity and mutual access of the voices of society. These accomplishments constitute an argument in favor of the claim that all voices resound in one another and for the view that society is a multivoiced body. The outline of the schema, however, must be filled in further and made more compelling. While still

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in the present section, we can begin this task by explaining how the diacritical unity of these voices does not consign them to a static or already completed form of existence and how misunderstandings are possible despite the schematic inclusion of the voices in one another. There are two parts to explaining the issue of stasis. The first concerns the anexact character of each voice. As we have seen, a voice is the continual movement from an anexact or relatively indeterminate version of itself to a more determinate version, then the repetition of this movement once more. This movement takes place as part of the ongoing dialogue with other voices. By the very nature of a voice, then, it cannot have a static or already completed form of existence. Each event, as Deleuze and Guattari said, is “always already complete as it proceeds and so long as it proceeds.” The second part of the reply to the charge of stasis will have to be postponed until we reach the section on communication as the metamorphosis of society. For now, we can anticipate the conclusions of that section and note that the fortuitous production of a new voice brings about a creative adjustment in all the other voices. One can say, then, that the schema of voices or multivoiced body is always complete (as having already reserved a place for the new voices to come via its elasticity) and never complete (as always changing upon the arrival of the new voices), always the same and never the same, always old and never old. It would therefore be futile to suppose that one could even in principle do a complete architectonic of the voices that constitute the social body. The schema of voices can also help deal with the second explanation we sought: how misunderstandings take place. The prototypes of all other voices are included in the schema of each voice. In exchanges among interlocutors, these prototypes can become charged with a personality and passion that they lacked in their prototypical form. This is basically what coming to know another person amounts to: she was a Lao national before (the prototype), but now is Bounheng (the personalized version of the prototype). In other words, the prototype of a voice is less or more definite depending on its degree of concretization within one’s dialogic history. When it is relatively indefinite, a dialogic exchange with a person enunciating that voice leaves room for greater misunderstandings than when we have come to know them and the nuances of their prototypical voice. On the other hand, less than fully definite prototypes often leave more room for the production of new ideas and discursive adventures. Thus consensus as an ideal is only of limited value and desirable as an actuality only under certain conditions.

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The schema of voices also permits us to make an assertion about the public and private existence of voices, consonant with what I said of these two aspects of voices in the last chapter. The voices of society, having borrowed from our bodies that impetus called life, transform us into the enunciators of their social discourses and throw us ahead of ourselves into the interplay among them. Thus each of the nuanced exchanges between particularized voices we call individuals is equally the communication of society, of the multivoiced body, with itself. The microcosm is at the same time the macrocosm of society. Although always singularized in nuanced exchanges, the logic of each voice sustains a social discourse that, depending on its degree of saliency in enough of these particularizations, reflects what we usually take to be the general tendencies of a society. The Syntax of Dialogue In the discussion of “responsive understanding” in chapter 3, we saw that the reception or understanding of an interlocutor’s utterance is inseparable from our response to it and even our anticipation, in outline, of our further response to the interlocutor’s reply to our previous response. Dialogue, in other words, is a continuous chain of utterances and responses, each link looped into the next one. The chain, however, is not completely predetermined: each response and anticipation of further responses is relatively indeterminate or anexact. The response is made determinate, and the anticipation of a rejoinder made more exact than it was before, as the response is uttered and accomplishes its part in the dialogue. For example, I write this paragraph partially ahead of myself, having a vague idea of where I’m headed, and am somewhat surprised as the words pouring onto the page make that direction specific. The dialogue calls upon us to complete it and casts us out ahead of ourselves into the voices and the ongoing interplay that they, and hence we, are. Given this unrelenting flow of dialogue, how do we ensure that the participants are not fused into one vocalizer? Is there a special syntax for demarcating one turn from another? In response to this question, I can summarize some of what was said about Bakhtin’s linguistics in chapter 3. Bakhtin develops a syntax that eschews as abstract the traditional grammar with the isolated sentence as its main unit. He focuses instead on “utterances”: on units that exist only as part of dialogic exchanges.38 Within this orientation toward interaction, the main syntactical question

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is how we demarcate the change from one speaker to another. The external aspect of these “boundaries” is simply the beginning of an utterance marked by the termination of another person’s words that preceded it and the end of that same utterance marked by a response to it.39 The internal aspect of the boundaries concerns the knowledge of “speech genres” or social discourses. Interlocutors typically recognize both the social discourse they are enunciating as well as the social discourses articulated by their dialogic partners. In Bakhtin’s terms, they recognize the “speech plan” or “subjective aspect of an utterance” as well as the speech genre of which the speech plan is a concrete expression. The speech plan includes the particularities of the current context and is therefore a more specific realization of the appropriate speech genre of social discourse.40 Speech genres, and hence speech plans, also convey an intrinsic “emotional evaluation” of its theme—the “cold eye” of science or the stylized exuberance of an advertisement on TV—and are directed toward others.41 Bakhtin refers to these elements of the internal aspect of dialogic boundaries—speech plan, speech genre, and the theme of an exchange—as “finalization,” the basis for understanding when an utterance is complete and thus another participant’s turn to respond to it.42 These dialogic boundaries make clear how voices, via their social discourses, ensure the type of knowledge required on the individual level for communication’s interpersonal exchanges. In recognizing the social discourses of others, we also have access to how they perceive the world. A voice includes both language and perception in their relation of reciprocal presupposition. When we recognize a voice, we at least dimly recognize how the world is captured by it. In special circumstances, we are aware of the many different perceptual worlds that make up each one of us as participants in the multivoiced body. For example, we will sometimes see almost side by side the world as alive with colors and sounds and the world as an alien, anonymous structure. The pressure to “have our act together” in order to cope with immediate tasks usually restricts our awareness to the way the world is for our primary voice. We therefore think of the world as existing in only one way, occasionally permitting distortions of itself. Similarly, we tend to think of the other voices resounding in our own as merely occasional aberrations of our minds rather than as essential parts of ourselves. In both cases these are not distortions or aberrations; they are the way we exist, as many worlds reverberating in one another.

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Communication as the Metamorphosis of Society Communication and the Reproduction of Society I have argued that communication is not exclusively the transfer of information (cognitive science), nor conformity to and the repetition of a structural form (structuralism), nor mutual understanding (Habermas and Gadamer), nor phenomenology’s and hermeneutics’ idea of revealing phenomena. I have also shown, by way of Bakhtin’s linguistics, that communication involves a “lateral” dimension of implicit voices along with the more usual “vertical” or face-to-face dimension and the trajectory of the dialogue, that is, the treatment of subject matter, use of pro forma speech acts, and the achievement of goals. But the nature of communication is more profound than any of these views might suggest: it is the reproduction and metamorphosis of society. With respect to reproducing society, communication is an end in itself as well as the means to many particular ends. Moreover, these two, end and means, are interrelated. The dialogues in which we are always involved are also the interplay that simultaneously separates and holds together the voices of the social body. The interplay between these voices establishes our identity and our status as participants in the multivoiced body. Because this interplay precedes us and carries us along with it, it is as much an impetus for the more particular dialogues in which we take part as they are the sustainers of the global, dynamic structure; communication as this interplay is not reducible to these specific dialogues, to communication as a means for more specific ends, though it does not exist apart from them either. Thus communication allows us to achieve specific goals but is also the unintentional reproduction of the multivoiced body, that is, a self-perpetuating end in itself. In this sense, the view of society as a multivoiced body starts where most so-called continental philosophy also begins: we find ourselves already part of a scene larger than ourselves and, from within it, we try to fathom its character.

Communication and the Creation of New Voices Communication is far more than reproducing society; it is intrinsically the creation of new voices and the metamorphosis of society, the vehicle of novelty and heterogeneity as well as the bedrock of social

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solidarity. How are new voices produced? When we respond to other persons’ utterances, the saliency of their social discourses increases and takes on greater force within the hierarchical arrangement of the voices contained in the schema of our lead voice. The ascending social discourses therefore have more effect, at least temporarily, on our own than they did previously. This effect is registered in several ways. In responding to others’ utterances, we often incorporate fragments of their discourses within our own. If I am speaking with a U.S. neoliberal about democracy, I will have to say more about “free enterprise” than I might normally. Even in arguing that free enterprise is really a sugarcoated word for highly inegalitarian capitalism and thus anathema to democracy, I have to include the term within my own social discourse and “bend” the latter to respond effectively to my addressee’s discourse. While in Laos, I had to incorporate the idea of compassion into my notion of rehabilitation as increased selfreliance: Buddhist ideas of life dominated at the Lao National Orthopedic Center, and they entered my vocabulary and attitude while working there with my Lao counterparts. In the same vein, the influence of feminism has led me to avoid the use of the third-person masculine singular he when referring to a person that could be of either gender. In other words, we find ourselves patterning our words, gestures, or practices somewhat differently than before, perhaps bringing certain words or practices to the center of our discourse, as part of engaging an interlocutor who speaks a social language different than our own. Our primary voice is the one with which we most immediately and pervasively identify and the one the other voices within us have to “speak to.” Similarly, the dominant voice in society is the one we have to take into account more than other public voices—whether in conformity or resistance to it. These fluctuations in saliency take place even when we deliberately try to avoid conversation with another person. This avoidance often includes the omission of certain terms and references in our own discourse or in the under- or overstatement of particular ideas. Dialogic exchanges therefore almost always bring about modifications in the participating discourses. Most important, these fluctuations in saliency and changes in discourse frequently go beyond modifications in the participating discourses and produce a new voice. When a new voice is produced, it incorporates particular elements from the discussion that gave rise to it. In other words, the new voice is a hybrid product of the voices that were participating in that discussion. Like all such hybrids, it is never a mere synthesis of the participating voices. Instead, it stands in dialogic tension

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with the discourses from which it emerged, with voices that simultaneously help constitute it, still resound within it, and contest it for audibility from within as well as from without. The concept of society as a multivoiced body is an example of the production of a new voice. The two voices that help constitute it and simultaneously struggle within it and outside it for audibility are modernism and postmodernism. The creative tension between them has marked the development of the notion of a multivoiced body. The production of new voices can also be illustrated by the history of a people, for example, by the past and present of Mexico. The Mayans of the sixteenth-century Yucatán wished to convince the king of Spain that everyone’s interest would be better served by giving Franciscan fathers, and not the hated “secular clergy,” exclusive rights to evangelize the Mayans.43 The Mayans therefore wrote a series of official letters to the king. In these letters, they incorporated the Franciscans’ depiction of themselves, the Mayans, as savages or children who were in need of being saved from their “devilish past” by the forces of civilization. This incorporation of the Franciscan’s paternalistic discourse served the short-term goals of the Mayans: the reduction of the secular fathers’ power. But it also contributed to the domination of the Mayans by the Spaniards, to the colonization of their voice, and eventually, and more positively, to the production of a “mixed” race and a novel voice, that of the Mexican mestizo. Within the mestizo voice, the Mayan and Spanish strains still exist in dialogic tension with one another as two often conflicting discourses, simultaneously constituting and splintering their progeny, the source of mestizo richness and mestizo anxiety. The recent events in Chiapas suggest that Mexico’s indigenous populations have increased their audibility in relation to the now modernized mestizos. These events even indicate that another new voice is being produced. The Mexican historian Adolfo Gilly points out that modernity repudiates the traditional idea that a community’s social relations are part of a natural and sacred order. For modernity, the world is disenchanted, quantified, and mechanized; similarly, societies are rationally rather than naturally ordered bodies and consist of legal individuals rather than communal and hierarchically constituted beings.44 But Gilly emphasizes that this “substitution” of the modern for the traditional is not entirely successful. Instead, there is a “relentless hybridization” and mutual subversion of both worlds, the modern disintegrating the traditional world and

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the traditional world performing a “practical and silent” critique on the modern world that has interiorized it: The modern world subverts and disintegrates traditional societies. But, in the process of doing so, it interiorizes them as well, unknowingly receiving their practical and silent forms of critique, and this presence alters the modern world’s manner of being. Combat, conflict, and suffering preside over this blind, unequal, and (today) universal process.45 Gilly and the Zapatistas emphasize that within this mutual hybridization, the peoples of Chiapas “do not rise up against modernity; they demand a place within it with their own identity.” 46 In attempting to achieve this place, their hierarchically and patriarchically organized societies progressively take on forms of democracy and gender equality. For example, the Zapatistas emphasize their allegiance to democracy over the traditional, hierarchical modes of Chiapan group decision making,47 and they frequently intone the demands that indigenous women make concerning their role in domestic and political affairs.48 Moreover, the Zapatistas have supplemented their traditional forms of communication by successfully employing the Internet, video, and other forms of sophisticated technology internationally. At the same time that modernity is bringing about these changes, the traditions of the Chiapan Indians exert their influence on the modern ways of the mestizos. For example, Gilly argues that the “peculiar and hybrid rationality” of Mexicans, their entire “manner of giving reason to the world and sense to life,” has “been shaped by the persistent presence of the enchanted world below and across the modernity that we all live and want.” 49 He claims that this presence partially explains why the Mexican people are so attracted to the Zapatistas. In summarizing his view of the mutual subversion of the traditional and the modern, Gilly compares the Zapatista rebellion to an obsidian mirror that, for those looking into it, transforms the world into the possible or “not-arrived” rather than into the nostalgia of the “come-and-gone”: Perhaps this mirror reflects the anguished and inflamed conscience of Mexican modernity, a conscience that wants to be modern while preserving its world, that wants to be society and at the same time to

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be community. But isn’t this (nothing more, and nothing less, than) the tormented conscience of the modern world, where what was to be the end of a lineal and finite history turned out to be the starting point of unending and innumerable arborescent histories? 50 These two forces in Mexican society, the mestizo and the Indian, may therefore produce a new voice—a modernity that includes and promotes, rather than destroys, “innumerable arborescent histories.” 51 This voice would be close to what we have been calling chaosmos and would amount to a tacit valorization of the multivoiced body. What has just been said about the Mexican mestizo voice and the new voice holds for all voices, including those of the Spanish and the Maya taken individually. Each of them is a hybrid of other cultural strains; hybridity operates “all the way down.” Voices began as dynamic hybrids and will forever be such. Contemporary technology is also contributing to the process of cultural hybridization. One of the most direct ways in which this occurs concerns a special use of the World Wide Web. The Internet permits the construction of “prosthetic egos” or “mechanized subjectivity.” 52 A prosthetic ego is a cyber agent that learns one’s tastes for music, artworks, or other cultural productions and then augments them further. A person enters the World Wide Web and rank-orders the sites the cyber agent has already designated as frequent choices of the person; after a number of further site visitations in which the user adventitiously “trains” the cyber agent, the latter is able to deliver progressively more Web sites that expand upon the user’s tastes. In order to ensure that this technology does not undermine the cross-pollination that comes from dialogue in the actual world, one can “breed” hybrid prosthetic egos. That is, one can splice the program code from one cyber agent or prosthetic ego with that of a prosthetic ego that has been trained to learn a very different taste in the same field; the resulting hybrid would then introduce the users of the originally two separate prosthetic egos to radically new alternatives. These alternatives might then produce modifications in the social discourses of the prosthetic egos’ users.53 It is even possible that new prosthetic egos could be generated mechanically, on the model of natural selection, and enrich culture beyond the limitations imposed by the dominant human tastes in a given epoch.54 Ultimately, of course, the reception of such hybrid products, as well as the generation of them by the mixing of human users’ prosthetic egos, will be more prolific in actual societies that are open to heterogeneity and less so in cultures that are closed to innovation.

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Whatever the pros and cons of prosthetic hybrids, they indicate that hybridity has become respectable against the backdrop of a history that was usually captivated with purity. The production of a new voice is also the modification of all the rest, the metamorphosis of society’s multivoiced body. This follows logically from what we have said about the diacritical relation among voices: each voice is what it is in relation to the rest, and therefore the addition of a new one means that all the rest are now different than they were before. In order to understand this in dynamic terms, we can appropriate Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the “virtual-real” once again. When new voices are produced from virtual voices that have become actualized over time, they register a change in the ones that have produced them, for example, the effect of the mestizo voice on its producers, the Mayan and Spanish voices of the Conquest; but new voices also affect what will be the actualized identity of the voices that still have only a virtual presence in the multivoiced body, for example, the new modernity that Gilly hopes will include and promote, rather than destroy, “innumerable arborescent histories.” The multivoiced body, therefore, is always the same and yet always different. The voices to come are already implicit in the multivoiced body, but they are also always changing as what they will become in light of their actualized siblings. In this sense, then, the multivoiced body metamorphoses with each new voice. Because the creation of new voices is inherent in communication, in the interplay among the voices of the social body, communication not only reproduces society, it transforms it as well. The very being of the multivoiced body is its metamorphosis. In other words, the multivoiced body’s solidarity (the intersection of its voices), the heterogeneity of its voices, and the fecundity of the interplay between these voices give us what we have been seeking since the beginning of this book: a concrete understanding of The Cave’s “unity composed of difference” and a more “personalized” version of “chaosmos.”

Communication and Nietzsche’s “Gift-Giving Virtue” This chapter began with a discussion of Nietzsche’s notion of communication. We can finish it by using a motif from Nietzsche in order to elucidate the value-dimension of communication and establish an ethics for the multivoiced body. Nietzsche describes what he calls “the

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gift giving virtue” as “forcing all things into yourself that they may flow back out of your well as the gifts of your love.” 55 Hearing other voices, voices partly responsible for our own as well as resounding within it, allows one’s own voice to “flow back” with a “gift” for the community. This gift for the community has two aspects. The first is our spontaneous affirmation of the multivoiced body in which we participate. This affirmation consists in openly hearing other voices. This type of hearing is in itself a valorization of the solidarity or hybridity that joins us to the other voices of society from the beginning. In other words, this hearing affirms our “roots” in the multivoiced body. The second aspect is both a risk to ourselves and a benefit for the community. The risk is that we place the stability of our own discourse in jeopardy when we really hear, as opposed to merely “record,” other voices. To really hear another voice is to be open to the possibility of its extensive influence on one’s own social discourse and the temporary or long-term disorientation this might bring about. As we will see in the next chapter, the possibility of disorientation can provoke undue anxiety: the many voices resounding in our own always pose at least a low-level threat of overwhelming us. But openly hearing and responding to others also promises to enrich the community through its role in the production of new voices. A marvelous illustration of this takes place in the movie Shakespeare in Love. The young Shakespeare is shown taking notes on street and marketplace talk and then incorporating it into his plays. His works are created through the hybridization of a playwright’s idiom and the voices of everyday life. This introduction of novelty into society is the “flowback out of your well” that Nietzsche emphasizes. The value of communication, therefore, involves a risk that is related both to solidarity and novelty. When we hear others, what we take into ourselves flows back out “as the gifts of an unspoken love” or as an autochthonous celebration of the multivoiced body, its metamorphosis, and hence our life. Because solidarity and novelty are the characteristics of chaosmos, the generous form of hearing others— engaging in the risk that this involves—is also the enactment and simultaneous valorization of chaosmos. We will see in the next chapter that the risk involved in hearing is at the heart of a struggle that defines our existence within historical societies: the tension between the multivoiced body’s fear of itself and its desire to be itself. The Shakespeare example also indicates that viewing society as a multivoiced body is not elitist: the fragments of discourse that disturb our speech and lead to the production of new voices can come from

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“common” as well as “sophisticated” talk. We may prefer to spend time with people who share our specific interests—philosophy, baseball, raising a family, dropping out, or any of the other myriad indulgences that make up an existence; but our life and our largess is composed from an orchestra of many pieces and we need to “really hear” them if we are to play our own instrument, be our own voice, well. The chief virtue for participants in interplay among voices, then, is this fecund hearing or Nietzschean generosity—it constitutes the “virtue ethics” of the multivoiced body. We will see in the last chapter that it is also directly linked to democracy, citizenship, and justice. In part 1, we presented the dilemma of diversity—the seeming mutual exclusion of the concepts of unity and diversity—and outlined a response to it, the multivoiced body. In part 2, we conducted a deconstructive strategy in favor of the primacy of voices over subjects, language, and social structures. This consolidated the claim that society is a multivoiced body and culminated in the idea that communication is the continuous metamorphosis of that body and the basis for an ethics of generosity. In part 3, we will explore the implications of these conclusions for political thought and action.

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PART III The Political Dimension of the Multivoiced Body

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8

The Social Unconscious

In chapter 2, I asked why traditional and even modern societies often expressed extreme fear and hatred of chaos—why they, in effect, equated difference with the biblical threat of the Tower of Babel. More specifically, I asked why we had failed to recognize or affirm the hybrid form of unity and identity invoked by The Cave and, in chapter 3, by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. We are now in a position to reformulate these questions in terms of my theory of society: why is it so difficult to accept that society is a multivoiced body? Why have people throughout history tended to reject the creative tension among the voices in favor of totalizing unities and homogeneous identities? Why have they continually raised one or another of the voices of society to the level of an oracle and proclaimed themselves in favor of a “pure race,” the “one true God,” the “patriarch,” “capital,” or any of the other doctrines that attempt to diminish or eliminate heterogeneity and the proliferation of new social discourses? In the previous chapter we clarified the creativity of communication. Now we must ask why it is almost always accompanied by the countertendency to produce oracles that curtail the metamorphosis of the social body. To reconnect with chapter 3, an answer to these questions would help explain why it seemed inevitable that Rushdie’s character,

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Saleem Sinai, and the Midnight’s Children National Conference would be confronted by a fascistic Shiva and a tyrannical Indira.

The Three Forms of the Social Unconscious The Preconscious In order to answer these questions about the production of oracles and the repression of the multivoiced body, we can appeal to a “social unconscious.” The view of society as a multivoiced body actually entails three distinct forms of the social unconscious: a preconscious, productive unconscious, and repressive unconscious. The preconscious refers to our lack of awareness of the full meaning of the voice we are enunciating at any given moment.1 A complete awareness of this meaning would require that we could know in advance all the twists and turns that the logic of a social discourse might demand of its enunciators. But social discourses are inseparable from the voices for which they are the infrastructure. They are therefore ultimately anexact (as opposed to exact or inexact) and lack the determinateness of the formal logics or other fixed renditions of themselves that often emerge in the interplay among the voices of society. They give direction, but more like pointing to the horizon or “yonder” than like a road map. Therefore, a complete knowledge of them is theoretically impossible. Moreover, the voices resounding in our own—each one as part of our identity and as our other at the same time—are also a dimension of our preconscious. When conditions permit or demand, their social discourses increase in saliency within our discourse and we find ourselves sounding like our parents or other figures and institutions that now remind us of their sometimes unwanted, sometimes welcome hold on us. Because the voice with which we primarily identify is partially constituted by these contesting social discourses, a complete awareness of its meaning or logic would also entail that we have full knowledge of our relationship to these other voices. They, however, are not completely transparent to us—their logics are as anexact as that of our primary social discourse—so that we feel their weight but not their full intent. We may always be able to have or to acquire an at least temporary “working knowledge” of our own and these other social discourses, but we will never be able to plumb their depths and know ourselves exhaustively.

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The oracles of a society are a particularly important variety of these preconscious social discourses. Their tendency to infiltrate our primary social discourse, or even to subordinate it to their logic, constitutes one reason why critique will always remain a necessary practice for those who support creative interplay between the voices of the community. Moreover, we will see that oracles have an important relation to the repressive dimension of the social unconscious.

The Productive Unconscious The productive unconscious refers to the often serendipitous production of new voices and the ongoing metamorphosis of the multivoiced body. As we saw in the last chapter, the vertical and lateral dimensions of communication ensure that dialogue regularly produces new voices as well as changes within the participating social discourses. More specifically, we saw the means through which the mestizo voice in Mexico was historically produced by the impact of the Spanish conquest on Mayan people and culture and a new voice is evolving as the indigenous people of Chiapas challenge their domination by the contemporary mestizos. Similarly, we have been noting throughout this book how the idea of a multivoiced body has emerged from the interplay between modernist and postmodernist social discourses. In both cases, and in all the other examples we have examined, the voices remain alive inside the new voices they help produce and contest for audibility. Moreover, the creative adjustment of the preceding voices to the new ones amounts, as we saw, to a metamorphosis of society’s multivoiced body. The production of new voices often happens “behind our backs” and, along with social solidarity and heterogeneity, constitutes the life of society. It is therefore similar to the productive unconscious of which Deleuze and Guattari speak.2 They claim that this unconscious is at work throughout nature. Although their view has much merit, I am showing how unconscious production also takes place on a level they and the rest of philosophy have overlooked, the level of voices. Many of these other views, as we will see, search “beneath” the level of the traditional notion of the individual to explain psychological and social phenomena. In contrast, I am looking “above” that level in order to accomplish the same feat. Indeed, one of the main gains of the previous chapters was the establishment of the primacy of voices and the creative interplay among them as the

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defining characteristic of the social body, one irreducible to the traditional idea of subjects or to the nonlinguistic dimension of social structures.

The Repressive Unconscious The “repressive unconscious” is directly related to the questions we raised earlier concerning the hatred and fear of chaos and the multivoiced body. These negative reactions to the creative interplay among voices, the production of new voices, and metamorphosis are reflected in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. This story not only attempts to explain the diversity of languages upon the earth; it also expresses horror, as well as moralistic satisfaction, at the linguistic chaos produced by the punishment against those who tried to build a stairway to heaven. The Tower of Babel, moreover, is the epitome of traditional myths and modern works of literature, film, and art that have exuded both fascination and trepidation in relation to metamorphoses over which we have no control.3 This horror is so pervasive and tenacious that it seems to demand a psychodynamic explanation rather than an appeal to conscious decision making. The idea of society as a multivoiced body provides a social version of this psychodynamic explanation. According to it, the horror expressed by the Tower of Babel concerns the possibility of being overwhelmed by the clamor of voices resounding in each subject’s primary voice and in the social body. This possibility threatens the loss of oneself as well as of society’s ability to maintain itself. It therefore manifests itself as a constant anxiety inherent to those who participate in the multivoiced body of society. On the level of the individual, T. E. Lawrence expresses this anxiety in his comment on the different cultural selves he developed during his sojourn in the Middle East: “Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near to the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, and two environments.” 4 Eugene Minkowski’s report of the experience of one of his schizophrenic patients echoes the anxiety expressed by Lawrence: “In the street, a kind of murmur completely envelops him . . . and when the voices are particularly frequent and numerous, the atmosphere round him is saturated with a kind of fire, and produces a sort of oppression inside the heart and lungs and something of a mist round about his head.” 5 Although

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constant, the anxiety of being overwhelmed by the voices resounding in our own exists initially in a low-grade form and is far removed from Lawrence’s culture shock and the experience of Minkowski’s schizophrenic. But it can and often does become exacerbated. On the level of society, this is due to defeat in war, epidemics, economic depressions, terrorism, large-scale immigration, or any other condition that a community thinks will threaten its sustainability. The intensification of this anxiety inclines a society to repress its identity as a multivoiced body and deny the hybrid nature of its members. As part of this repression, the social body raises one of its voices to the level of an oracle, that is, to a special type of the voices that I identified as making up the social preconscious. The term oracle has several meanings within the history of its use, particularly forecasting the future. But I intend it to convey the idea of coming from everywhere and nowhere, of claiming the future (and often the past) for itself, and remaining impervious to criticisms that others might have of it. Those supporting an oracle tend to accept other social discourses only insofar as they function in some technocratic or other way that helps reproduce the society and its dominant discourse. The adherents of the oracle also designate certain other voices as “evil enemies” and thereby perpetuate a negative representation of them in the society. This contributes to the repression of any positive recognition of society as a multivoiced body and increases the acceptability of the oracle’s dominance of society. Much like Nietzsche’s “priestly aristocrats,” the oracle presents itself as “pure” and other social groups as “impure.” 6 On the level of an individual such as Minkowski’s schizophrenic patient, the voices clamoring in one’s head become repetitive, monotonous, and often vindictive against the lead voice of their possessor, like the “furies” feared by the ancient Greeks. These oppressive pursuers are the opposite of the rich, continually varying, and proliferating voices that populate the minds of novelists. Oracles promote a univocal identity for their enunciators and those that they can eventually entice to repeat their message through fear or co-optation. A society’s adoption of an oracle’s narrow identity further increases the fear and hatred of whatever is different from it. The increase of these negative sentiments augments the intensity of the original anxiety of being overwhelmed by the clamor of our voices and brings about an even greater narrowing of the privileged identity and so on in a downward spiral. While society continues in this spiral, ethnic cleansing, lynching, and other forms of violence and political exclusion become the order of

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the day. Even when the exacerbating conditions and the spiral end, an oracle’s social discourse often remains as a less strongly felt but still effective regulator of thought and social interaction. Inherited routine takes over from passionate adoption. Fortunately, throughout this process we possess the “countermemory” of our hybrid status, of our other voices, their solidarity, and the creative interplay that takes place among them.7 This memory is aided by the oracle’s necessity of using other voices as its “evil enemy.” These caricatured or vilified voices thereby remain alive and, contrary to the intentions of their detractors, ready for reinterpretation and reactivation as positive forces in society.8 More generally, the countermemory can help us see that the oracular identity foisted upon us is restrictive and forces us to repress our identification with the multivoiced body. The countermemory, then, is a possible source of resistance to the oracle and reflects a desire to return to the multivoiced body’s affirmation of itself. It is also the basis for the version of genealogical critique that I will introduce in the last section of this chapter. Now that we see how oracles and resistance to them originate, we can note that oracles are two types of power rolled into one. Insofar as they take part in the repression of our positive identification with the multivoiced body, they are examples of what Foucault calls the “juridico-discursive” or “power-sovereignty” model of law and order: they operate only as a force of domination or elimination.9 But, like every other voice, oracles are also examples of the productive type of “power” that Foucault favors as the most pervasive and important: they are discourses or sets of practices that at least partially produce “domains of objects,” “rituals of truth,” and “the individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him.” 10 With respect to this type of creativity, and apart from their restrictiveness, oracles are also examples of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the productive unconscious and “desire.” 11 Furthermore, they, like other voices, perpetually respond to the rest of the social discourses that make up their milieu. In the case of oracles, however, the response is never a real hearing of the other voices, never one that puts the oracles at risk of revision: [Neo-Nazi] groups like the one I was part of watch their enemies from a distance. They are afraid getting near might defuse their hate, or at least corrupt it with first-hand knowledge and second thoughts. This is what distinguishes a true ideological hate: the way members of the group carry it so carefully, keeping it sealed against

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all corruption. And this is also why bombs are a perfect weapon for terrorist groups: they allow them to maintain a cleansing distance from the target, and the violence is sudden; there is no time for arguments or counter blows.12 When adherents of an oracle do hear others, it is only so that they may better dominate, co-opt, or eliminate them. More generally, their glorification of and demand for purity, the univocality of their identity, leads them to diminish the creative interplay among the voices of society, slow the production of new voices and metamorphosis, and contribute to the repression of any positive identification with the multivoiced body. Nonetheless, oracles are always haunted by the whispers of the other voices that remain within them and that promise to contest them for audibility more forcibly. Some thinkers present certain oracles as if they were inescapable, at least by the efforts of ourselves—as if oracles were omnipresent frameworks within which we are destined to operate. For example, Martin Heidegger’s notion of modern technological society as “Enframing” reduces everything, including ultimately ourselves, to a “standing reserve,” that is, to the status of things to be manipulated in a quest for mastery of the earth.13 According to Heidegger, enframing is so omnipresent that we have great difficulty in seeing that it is the essence of modern technology and a danger to our existence (17). More important, enframing conceals from us the “poiesis” that would reveal a meaning of existence beyond the mere “challenging-forth” of things and relegation of them to the status of standing reserve (27). Heidegger claims that any direct human action aimed at saving us from the engulfment of enframing could only be, by its calculative nature alone, part of enframing (33). However, he declares that art is also a dimension of technology, albeit one that is both hidden within modern technology and, at the same time, “fundamentally different from [technology]” (35). The experience of this art would amount to the freeing up of poiesis and the “bringing-forth” as opposed to the “challenging-forth” mode of revealing reality. But Heidegger does not hold out much hope that this experience will occur in the present, and it takes on “mysterious” proportions for him (35).14 The multivoiced body view of society suggests another interpretation of modern technology. This technology may be, as Heidegger says, characterized by enframing. But enframing is an oracle, and other voices, therefore, reside within it and contest it for audibility: what will save us

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from enframing might not be the art to which Heidegger refers. Rather, it could be understood as the idea of another type of technology, for example, one that valorizes working cooperatively with nature rather than attempting to dominate it. This discourse is harbored within enframing as at least one of the opposing voices that it implies. We can take the antidote to enframing, then, as other social discourses about technology, ones that differ from the stance of challenging-forth. Bringing them to the foreground is therefore as much a political issue, a “human action,” as it is a matter of the “mysterious experience” to which Heidegger appeals. Art as such can play a sensitizing or suggestive role in this endeavor, but it is not the sole source for the emergence of a new view of technology. “Whiteness” is another example of an encompassing framework that can be reinterpreted in terms of oracles. Many of the philosophers of race who have examined whiteness point out that it is a more omnipresent form of white racism than that promulgated by self-conscious white supremacists.15 Whiteness consists in the usually unconscious attitude that “being white” is the standard against which all other groups are to be measured. But resistance to white norms by blacks, other people of color, and even many whites reveals that the formidable oracle of whiteness has chinks in its armor. Indeed, the sanctity of whiteness is increasingly doubted by whites; they often react violently or legislatively to their vague realization of whiteness’s limits by taking up unreasonable positions against affirmative action and similar attempts to achieve the equality and full democracy that most citizens, hypocritically or not, declare to be the hallmark of the United States. These observations indicate that whiteness is not an omnipresent enclosure, but rather an oracle that furtively carries within itself the increasingly strident voices of opposition to it. We will examine the oracles of patriarchy and global capitalism later in this chapter and the next. The dynamism of the social unconscious, then, explains the ascendancy of oracles and the simultaneous repression of our identity as participants in the multivoiced body. We should note, however, that an account of the particular content of an oracle, for example, racism or patriarchy, as opposed to the general tendency toward oracularity, would require help from race, feminist, Marxist, and other theories. Moreover, the repressive dimension of the social unconscious, particularly the exacerbation of the social body’s endogenous fear of being overwhelmed by the clamor of its voices, aids us in accounting for some of the irrational aspects of oppression that Marxism and other nonpsychoanalytic

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theories cannot fully explain. Examples of these aspects are mutilation of bodies (alive or already dead), systematic rape, genocide, lynching, and other types of “gratuitous violence,” that is, those going far beyond what would be required for oppression in the name of economic interests or survival alone. Thus fear of the possible dissolution into fragments—into a din of uncontrollable voices—and hatred for whatever would contribute to that situation are strong candidates for explaining the sorts of excessive reactions associated with the worst atrocities in human history. As we will see, this explanation gains some support from Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory. Indeed, an understanding of the full meaning of the social unconscious requires that we explore its relation to some leading psychoanalytic theories of the psyche.

Freud and Lacan on the Unconscious What is the relation between the multivoiced body version of the unconscious and traditional concepts of the unconscious? The notion of voices may be able to make contributions to clinical phenomena such as “split personality,” “hearing voices,” and “repression” at the level of the individual. But the main aim in this and the next section is to reinforce the claim that the theory of the social unconscious is irreducible to other theories of the unconscious, especially in relation to the social phenomena of oracles and gratuitous violence.

The Biological Version of Freud’s Unconscious The first of these competing theories of the unconscious is the biological interpretation of Freud’s idea of a dynamic unconscious.16 According to it, the id instincts are prelinguistic physical energies. More specifically, Freud thought of Eros and the death instinct or Thanatos as biological drives (Triebe) and even as physical forces. In The Ego and the Id and elsewhere, he describes Eros as the natural tendency to compose things, even particles, into greater and greater unities. Thanatos, in contrast, is the continual undoing of these unities, ultimately entropy.17 Along with his “structural model” of the psyche, that is, the id, ego, and superego, Freud uses the unrelenting struggle between Eros and Thanatos to explain everything from pathological symptoms to civilization itself.

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Melancholia, for example, is due to the death drive’s vengeful turn upon the ego’s incorporated representations of lost love objects.18 Similarly, civilization is a product of the erotic compounding of individuals into larger groups, though this tendency would destroy itself if Thanatos, through the agency of the superego and the ego ideal, did not curb Eros’s insatiable appetite as well as blunt Thanatos’s own externally directed wrath.19 Eros makes the world go round, but Thanatos, in the guise of constant guilt and the admonitions of the superego, holds it together. As forces in the subject’s body, these two drives play themselves out as our romances, sublimations, and aggressions. But we have seen in chapter 6 that the desires and other forces of the body stand in reciprocal presupposition to expression, that is, the discursive dimension of the voices enunciated by individual subjects. These forces or drives can disrupt our ideas about what controls us, and we can, through our way of talking about them and their objects, increase, diminish, or direct their efficacy. Biological drives are therefore inseparable from the voices that transform them and their bodily hosts into participants in the ongoing dialogue between the voices of society. These same drives may therefore disturb and provoke revisions in the discourses of the voices that incorporate them, but they neither provide a full explanation of the interplay of voices nor of the type of anxiety that is endogenous to the multivoiced body, that is, the fear of being overwhelmed by the multitude of voices. On this view of Freudian drives, Thanatos is what I have been calling an oracle, and the Eros that Thanatos struggles against and often curtails is no longer the demand for the presumably homogeneous form of unity that Freud assigned to it—now it is simply the desire of heterogeneous voices to continue their interplay with each other. The relation of reciprocal presupposition helps to avoid another problem that plagues Freud’s psychodynamic theory of the psyche. Freud depicts Eros and Thanatos as virtually autonomous drives. In other words, he makes them appear as if they are outside of us as well as in control of us—as if they are like any other force external to us and thus, contrary to what Freud says or implies, not “part of us,” let alone the center of our being. On the other hand, if they are described in a way that makes them more clearly part of us, they lose their purely biological character; they become reciprocally related to a social discourse and hence are transformed into a dimension of voice. They are, in effect, “pulled up into” the struggle among voices that I have depicted and become more susceptible to a hermeneutical rather than a biological reading of their role in our

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psyches. Given the strength of these remarks, it is difficult to reduce the social unconscious to the work of biological drives. Once the notion of voice has transformed the biological interpretation of Freudian drives, it allows us to redefine the Freudian concepts of ego, superego, and id. The ego, id, and superego now refer to voices within us struggling for audibility. The dominant voice of a society often acts as a superego on the individual level and censors the other voices in the struggle for audibility. As an effect of the interplay between these voices, the censored voices sometimes achieve a higher level of audibility once again or for the first time. We can then speak of them as the previously repressed but now ascendant clamor of the id and its drives. Similarly, Freud’s idea of the ego now becomes a “technocratic” or “reality-oriented” voice that aims at preserving the organism’s existence—but it is not necessarily the lead voice of an individual. On this view, the superego, id, and ego are different social voices that contest with one another for audibility.20

Lacan’s Linguistic Unconscious If our biological drives are inseparable from social discourses though not reducible to them, if “expression” and “content” are reciprocally related, as I have been saying, then Lacan’s linguistic orientation to the unconscious is a tempting alternative for us to consider in relation to the social unconscious of the multivoiced body. Indeed, Lacan states flatly that Freud’s concepts take on their full meaning “only when oriented in a field of language, only when ordered in relation to the function of speech.” 21 More specifically, Lacan claims that the entrance of subjects into a transindividual “symbolic order” cuts them off from a prelinguistic reality that nonetheless continues to play a shadowy and determining role in their lives. Lacan’s symbolic order is very close to the view of language held by the structuralists and poststructuralists we have discussed: it is a transindividual network of signifiers that produce meaning through their diacritical relations to one another as well as through metonymy and metaphor, that is, respectively, the displacement of one signifier by another (“twenty sails” for “twenty ships”) and the condensation of signifiers (“Man is a wolf to man”). This network of signifiers also determines the identity of subjects and their surroundings.22 Rather than providing anchors for signifiers, meanings or signifieds are said to “insist” in a chain of signifiers

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and to “incessantly slide under the signifiers.” 23 The impression we have of permanent and independent meanings is illusory: psychic life is always in motion. Lacan also refers to the symbolic order as our “unconscious” and “Other.” More specifically, he says that the unconscious “is structured like a language”—that it is “the discourse of the Other.” 24 For Lacan, this means that we conform to the symbolic order, that our “desire is the desire of the Other”—it is as the Other that we desire, bestowing upon us the identity we possess within the symbolic order.25 Whereas Freud saw our psychological behavior as determined by the machinations of the drives, Eros and Thanatos, Lacan vests this power in the symbolic order. In this sense, his psychoanalytic theory is linguistically oriented relative to Freud’s emphasis upon the drives, their biological energy, and teleological aims as the main determinants of our psychic life. Not only are subjects the “effects” of signifiers on this view, they are represented to one another as signifiers.26 More precisely, each subject is “born divided” in the symbolic order: the “subject of the statement,” the subject as “solidified into a signifier,” which is the way we are for other signifiers and normally for ourselves on the level of self-consciousness, is paralleled by that same subject as “the subject of the enunciation,” that is, the subject of the unconscious. In this connection, Lacan speaks of aphanisis, of the self-conscious subject continually “fading” into the subject of the enunciation and the autonomous play of signifiers that operate on that level.27 This division and the fading of the subject of enunciation reflect the evanescence of a subject that cannot escape its location in a world of signifiers or, as we will see, “fantasies.” Once we enter the symbolic order, once what Lacan calls the real is overwritten by signifiers, there is no returning to the nonlinguistic reality that preceded these two dimensions of the subject and the symbolic order.28 For the subject to enter the symbolic order, Lacan says that it initially must be separated from its prelinguistic “all.” Lacan often speaks of this all as a child-mother unity as well as a jouissance or satisfaction associated with that unity.29 He uses the term castration for the separation of the child from this unity.30 Castration guarantees that the symbolic order always involves a “lack,” the lost mother-child unity. This lack or “hole” in the symbolic order is associated with objet a (“a” for autre or “other”).31 Lacan refers to objet a as “the cause of desire” and as the “impossible” or nonsensical “real.” 32 More specifically, objet a refers to the four “drives” (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory) and their “partial objects” (breasts, feces,

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gaze, voice) as well as corresponding erogenous zones of the body (lips, anus, eyes, ears) that were sites of struggle in the child’s maturation and now provide a concrete embodiment of the real that is still irrevocably lost in the sense of having already been written over by the symbolic order.33 Although it is ultimately unrepresentable in the symbolic order, objet a operates like an algebraic equation: different “fantasies,” associated with the drives, can be substituted into the ‘a’.34 These fantasies, moreover, cover up castration and the lack in the Other or symbolic order.35 No one of these fantasies is more accurate than any other as a substitution for objet a. Even the idea of the “mother-child unity” is ultimately only a metaphor for the unrepresentable real that causes the algebralike substitutions in objet a. This idea could have no other status than that of mere substitute once the real is overwritten by the symbolic order to the absolute degree that Lacan suggests.36 Lacan uses the term “desire” in order to refer to the relation between the subject and the fantasies that substitute into objet a and cover up the lack in the Other.37 This desire is its own end, and objet a, as the cause of desire and the algebraic representation of the real, is the so-called efficient rather than the final cause of these substitutions: subjects do not have finding the child-mother unity or any other object as their inherent and ultimate goal; rather, they are impelled or pushed by desire to entertain the fantasies that are substituted into the ‘a’ of the algebraic equation that constitutes their lives.38 The subject, specifically, what was called above “the subject of the enunciation or unconscious,” wants its “all” or primordial jouissance, wants to make the Other complete, but this real and the knowledge of its identity is forever closed to the subject after castration occurs. The subject can therefore only obtain fantasies that in principle will never accomplish this obscure desire or do anything more than ineffectively cover over the lack in the Other. Moreover, the subject, though “fascinated” by the object the fantasies suggest, equally fears obtaining this impossible real—to do so would make the subject disappear back into the mother-child unity from which castration and the Law of the Father have presumably freed it. As Philippe van Haute’s states, “We thus cannot understand human existence in terms of an exclusive reference to the order of signifiers, and even less can we do so in terms of an exclusive reference to jouissance. We live out our existence, rather, in terms of an essential tension between these two poles.” 39 Because objet a is ultimately behind these substitutions, because it provides the impetus for the fantasies that cover up the lack in the Other, Lacan says that it is “the real that

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governs our activities more than any other” and “it is psychoanalysis that designates it for us.” 40 Although no fantasy intrinsically corresponds to objet a, each subject is tied to a “fundamental fantasy” that links together what would otherwise be the free floating signifiers that initially make up the unconscious or Other.41 This fantasy is ultimately “a phantasmatic sense of wholeness” or some other reference to the lost mother-child unity, but is more immediately associated with the oral and other specific drives that have played an important role in the subject’s maturation.42 Because objet a has no intrinsic meaning, the “traversal” of the fundamental fantasy in therapy, along with the “dialectization” of the “master signifiers” that are blocking the “analysand’s” progress, can allow the real to give rise, as cause of desire, to other fantasy forms and thus provide the subject some escape from the previous one or, more positively, “secondary jouissance” in his or her life.43 These new fantasies and the signifiers associated with them are necessary if there is to be any stability in our lives. For Lacan, a pure slide from signifier to signifier, a constant slippage of the signified under the signifier without any stops, would be akin to psychosis.44 Better to remain with the typical neurosis that ties us to the fantasies that we would like to be, but which can never be, our “all.” Certain aspects of Lacan’s view are similar to the social unconscious of the multivoiced body view. Both views maintain that we cannot speak of ourselves as subjects legitimately until we have been incorporated into a linguistic community. On the Lacanian view, that community is the symbolic order; on my view, it is the multivoiced body. The two positions also converge with respect to what I called the preconscious in the opening section of this chapter: voices’ social discourses and Lacan’s fantasies are frameworks that guide mental activity even though their enunciators may not be fully aware of it. This is particularly true for Lacan’s fundamental fantasy and for the oracles that often dominate the multivoiced body. The two views converge once more with respect to what I have referred to as the productive unconscious: objet a and the lack in the Other ensure the possibility of new fantasies being produced by desire, and the creative interplay among the voices of society continuously gives rise to new voices and the metamorphosis of society. Despite these convergences, the two positions diverge on at least two important factors. First, Lacan’s portrayal of us as subjects suffers from the problem that I associated with Deleuze and Guattari on the same topic: we end up as either congealed egos or anonymous forces. More

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specifically, we seem to play no role that is both personal and active at the same time in our passage from signifier to signifier, fantasy to fantasy. As we saw above, the subject of the statement is the self-conscious subject as “solidified into a signifier” for other such signifiers; the subject of enunciation, on the other hand, is mechanically driven by algebraic substitution into object a, the “real,” and thus completely at the whim of autonomous fantasies. It’s not clear that Lacan conceives of the therapist’s intervention in the subject’s fantasies as bringing about anything other than another mechanical movement within the chain of signifiers, even if it brings secondary jouissance and establishes a new moment of stability. To the degree that we are either of these subject positions, statement or enunciation, we appear as passive, evanescent, rather than as agents playing active, personal roles within our fantasies and the flow of signifiers. In contrast to Lacan’s portrayal of subjectivity, we have seen that the multivoiced body view holds us to be “elliptically identical” with the voices of society. None of us are ever absolutely “solidified” into the discourse of our lead voice. First, that discourse itself is an “open texture” or trajectory (rather than a fixed set of rules) and is self-reflexive (can comment on itself ). Second, this open texture and reflexivity, in conjunction with our hybridity, permits us to restrain or provide further impetus to our lead voice as well as, upon occasion, “slide into” one of the other voices that help constitute and still resound within the hybrid voice that we call our own. However, an anonymous dimension is still present along with the personal and active role we play in our existence: the voices of the social body always throw us ahead of ourselves into their ceaseless interplay. Our existence as elliptically identical with voices, therefore, is both anonymous and personal. Some Lacanians thicken the role of the subject beyond at least the letter of Lacan himself and may provide a credible response to my criticism.45 But my view would still differ from Lacan’s with respect to the repressive dimension of the unconscious. For Lacan, primary repression refers to the mother-child unity, to the unrepresentable “all” that is lost when “castration” takes place and the subject enters the symbolic order.46 On the multivoiced body view, in contrast, exacerbation of the endogenous but initially low-intensity anxiety described above can push us to repress any identification of ourselves with the dialogic hybridity of our voices. As we saw, however, this repression also brings into play the countermemory of our identity as participants in the multivoiced body. This countermemory leads to the consequent struggle against our heightened anxiety and the

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oracles that have been established in reaction to it. Although Lacan’s position and mine differ on what is repressed, they share at least one aspect of repression in common: the simultaneous presence of anxiety and countermemory on the multivoiced body view is similar to Lacan’s claim, as stated by van Haute above, that the subject unconsciously fears as well as desires the original jouissance attending the mother-child unity. The differing treatments of the repressive unconscious by Lacan and myself lead to two other contrasts. The Lacanian tendency to speak of the otherwise unrepresentable real as a mother-child unity suggests a homogeneous totality (even though diverse fantasies are substituted for it within the symbolic order) as opposed to the heterogeneity of the multivoiced body’s “unity composed of difference.” From the perspective of the multivoiced body view, then, the Lacanian subject’s in principle dissatisfaction with anything less than the mother-child unity is reinterpreted as the presence of an oracle accompanied by the strict identity that occurs when the subject feels overwhelmed by the voices resounding within its own. Indeed, the dissatisfaction with any fantasy that is substituted into the algebraic equation of objet a is actually due, on the multivoiced body view, to the many voices at play in each voice, to our status as dialogic hybrids: there will always be second thoughts on the part of a subject open to the urgings of its other voices, always the possibility of other voices increasing their saliency within our own. Furthermore, the multivoiced view embodies an attitude toward contestation that is more positive than that taken by Lacanian therapy. Whereas the Lacanian therapist alerts analysands to the unobtainability of the real and its jouissance, the multivoiced body view invites us to valorize, as a crucial part of our identity, the unending interplay among the voices of society. Despite these major differences between the two views on the repressive dimension of the unconscious, they come back together again on aggression and its cause. According to Lacan, aggressivity involves what he calls the imaginary level of existence—unlike the real and the symbolic, the imaginary is more oriented to nonverbal images and is also more rigid than the sliding signifiers in the symbolic order. The imaginary is not so much a mental act as it is a framework within which subjects and their surroundings coexist. Lacan holds that one type of anxietyprovoking event concerns anything that suggests the disintegration of the subject’s imaginary “ideal ego” and hence its independence—anything that threatens sending the body back to its original lack of coordination (its preimaginary stage)47 or the subject back to its absorption into the

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original child-mother unity (its presymbolic order stage).48 In the face of the anxiety generated by these conditions, the subject can become aggressive to the point of indulging fantasies that include ripping apart bodies and committing other atrocities. Indeed, Richard Boothby illustrates Lacan’s treatment of aggressivity in terms of a historical period in Colombia known as La Violencia. During this period, countless persons and corpses were mutilated in ways that defy the imagination, rape was legion, and burning people alive was common.49 The descriptions of these atrocities bring to mind the rape, mutilations, and mass murders that were part of the recent “ethnic cleansing” campaigns in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, misogynous violence against women, and a litany of other examples from most if not all societies and periods of history. Although I am not as sure as Boothby that Lacan wants to project his theory of aggressivity to this social-historical level, Lacan’s theory does support the general fear of dissolution—heralded by the Tower of Babel story—of which I have been speaking. There is always within the multivoiced body the danger of exacerbating the fear of dissolution and producing rigid oracles and identities in response to it. This rigidity can then lead to the atrocities against anything that reminds their perpetrators of their hybridity and rootedness in the multivoiced body. We see, then, that many aspects of Lacan’s linguistically oriented psychoanalytic theory share much in common with the multivoiced body view of the unconscious. But the latter, in contrast to Lacan, avoids attributing a powerful role to pre- or nonlinguistic factors, such as the real, and thus remains on a linguistic-social plane. It also translates Lacan’s notion of fantasies, including the idea of a fundamental fantasy, into the idiom of oracles and voices. Furthermore, the multivoiced body’s notion of our elliptical identity with voices avoids the anonymity and algebraic mechanism that appears to dominate in Lacan’s idea of “the divided subject.” There is another comment, perhaps the most important, that I want to make on the relation between Lacan’s theory and the multivoiced body view. But it is best delivered after we have discussed Kristeva and Irigaray on the unconscious.

Kristeva, Irigaray, and the Unconscious The philosophies of the French feminists Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray are centered on “the feminine difference” or the “maternal.” Both

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Kristeva and Irigaray reject what they feel is the secondary role that Lacan assigns the feminine. For example, Kristeva goes underneath Lacan’s symbolic or “masculine” order and argues that a “maternal function” precedes his “paternal metaphor” of the “Law of the Father.” The mother’s body provides a measure of order for the simultaneously assimilating and destructive “energy charges” or “drives” that make up the “semiotic chora” shared by the mother and child while the child is still fused with the mother inside the uterus and later during weaning.50 This motherchild dyad is prior to the later formation of a clear division between child and mother as well as between subject and object. Whereas Lacan assumed that this mother-child dyad is unrepresentable, Kristeva believes that it and the drives associated with it are indicated in the mother’s transference of her experience of this unity onto her relationship with her child. The pre-symbolic realm also reveals itself in instances of an unusual “semiotic” language, for example, avant-garde poetry, that disrupt the symbolic order.51 Thus Kristeva thinks that we must acknowledge the existence of a representable productive realm that is neither effaced by nor completely absorbable into the symbolic order. In effect, Kristeva’s semiotic is a representable version of Lacan’s “real.” 52 According to Kristeva, the mother-child dyad is not static: the child from the beginning is on its way to becoming separate from the mother. The child and mother are therefore both identical with one another and yet separate from one another at the same time. They are “the other within” for one another. More specifically, Kristeva says that the mother has an ambiguous status for the child: she is sublime and “abject,” nurturing and smothering, a uterus back into which the child could be horrifyingly sucked.53 This ambiguous and threatening status has two important consequences. The first of these is that the abject status of the mother for the child, in conjunction with the pleasure of expelling objects, including the mother, allows “castration” to occur, that is, for the child to desire its separation from the mother and to enter the symbolic order.54 Once the child is part of the symbolic order, it becomes a subject and the mother becomes a possible object of love. The separation is not complete, however, because the child-subject still identifies with the mother, including her status as an abject object. The child-subject is thus abject for itself as well. Most importantly, the mother remains at once both part of the identity and the other of the child. The second consequence is that the experience of this ambiguous condition, of the other within us, prepares us for the

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recognition and acceptance of the otherness of people and multicultural society.55 The intrapsychic relation between mother and child, their mutual separation and identity, is the basis for the social relation between self and others. Like Kristeva, Irigaray rejects what she takes to be the Lacanian notion that woman functions primarily as a “hole” in Lacan’s symbolic order. This subordination to the masculine symbolic order forces women to forego their own language or type of unconscious.56 In countering this masculinized viewpoint, Irigaray claims, in effect, that woman is properly the Other of the Other and not the “Other of the Same,” that is, not the lack in Lacan’s symbolic order.57 But she does not follow Kristeva and go beneath Lacan’s symbolic order by appealing to the pre-symbolic mother-child dyad as the basis for social relations or feminism.58 Instead, she argues that there is an irreducible contrast between the feminine and masculine. Whereas the masculine designates the presumed homogeneity of Lacan’s symbolic order, the feminine is described by Irigaray in analogy with the two lips of the mouth or of the vagina, or, for that matter, a kiss exchanged between two persons, which, in each of these cases, are one, yet still two, a unity composed of plurality: “Between our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of speaking resound endlessly, back and forth. One is never separable from the other. You/I: we are always several at once. And how could one dominate the other? Impose her voice, her tone, her meaning? One cannot be distinguished from the other; which does not mean that they are indistinct.” 59 As one commentator states, Kristeva uses the concept of difference “to designate the difference internal to each subject, Irigaray uses it to refer to the difference between one sex and another.” 60 The notion of the interplay among voices has a strong affinity with Kristeva’s semiotic chora and Irigaray’s feminine or “two lips” analogy. Kristeva and Irigaray support the idea that identity is radically hybrid from the beginning. In Kristeva’s case, one can grant that pre-symbolic processes may play a role in the inauguration of the child’s entrance into the symbolic order and in the creation of specific psychological disorders or other effects that intrude on subjects within that order. But the primacy of voices means that once the child enters the socio-linguistic order, it enunciates a voice that participates in the social body. Kristeva’s “other within us” therefore becomes the fully linguistic and social voices that help constitute our primary voice and remain our other at the same time, whatever residue may remain of the mother-child relationship. Moreover, this cacophony of contesting voices is another way of speaking of

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Irigaray’s “two lips” analogy and its affirmation of a unity composed of differences. We must also note that Kristeva’s distinction between the “semiotic” and the “symbolic” can be understood in terms of sociolinguistic voices. As we saw, the semiotic is the activity of the drives. After “castration,” it takes on the syntactic and semantic type of order typical of the symbolic. But the semiotic also continually disrupts the symbolic order, introducing new types of language, such as poetry. On the multivoiced body view, however, these unusual modes of expression are understood as voices that compete with the others for audibility. Hip-hop music, break dance, and e. e. cummings’s poetry, for instance, were at one time new voices within the traditions, respectively, of music, dance, and literature. The irruptions of the semiotic within the symbolic, then, can be understood as new voices that are produced by the interplay among voices that are already part of society and on the same level as the voices whose social discourse Kristeva terms symbolic. They are not part of a subsocial or sublinguistic order. They are different rather than more (semiotic) or less (symbolic) primary. Whether Kristeva and Irigaray have understood Lacan correctly on the status of the feminine in his theory, the multivoiced body view can second their challenge to “masculinist” interpretations of the linguistic realm.61 Such interpretations are what I have been calling oracles, in this case, patriarchical discourses. They are a repudiation of what Irigaray in particular identifies as “the feminine.” In contrast, the feminine on my view is equivalent to the interplay of heterogeneous voices, their simultaneous unity or solidarity and difference, the unity composed of differences indicated by Irigaray’s “two-lips” metaphor. Indeed, we could also identify the multivoiced body with the “postcolonial,” “third world,” “South,” “multitude,” or any other term indicating voices that are marginalized by the dominant society because they affirm creative interplay among heterogeneous elements (hybridization) and produce new social discourses that oppose the “masculine” and other oracles.62 The multivoiced body view, then, shares Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s emphasis upon heterogeneity. As in its dealing with Lacan, however, it reinterprets some of their key terms (Kristeva’s “semiotic” and “symbolic,” Irigaray’s “feminine” or “two-lips” analogy) into the idiom of voices. It is able, thereby, to avoid resting its view of the unconscious on an appeal to pre-linguistic “reals” or “dyads.” But most important, the psychodynamic effects of these and all other pre-linguistic relations—whether on Freud’s,

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Lacan’s, Kristeva’s or any other psychodynamic theory—are absorbed into and receive their full meaning only within the voices of society and their interplay. At least this would seem to be the implication of the primacy that I have assigned to voices and the reciprocal presupposition relation between their discursive and bodily dimensions.

Genealogical Critique I have clarified the social unconscious, its role in the production of oracles, and the countermemory it gives rise to in response to oracles. A major tool of countermemory is genealogical critique. It consists of a critical and an affirmative task.63 The first of these two tasks has been developed and practiced by the psychoanalytic thinkers we discussed as well as by the figures we treated in chapter 2 and 5, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari. It involves showing that what people or institutions present as universal truths or values are invariably the products of, and retain the meaning of, worldly value-creating powers. Once the pretentiousness of such a truth or value code has been revealed, one is in a position to undertake the second step involved in the critical task and evaluate the code in question. Nietzsche, for example, tries to show that the value code “good and evil” is ultimately a “slave morality,” the product of the impotence or ressentiment of “priestly aristocrats.” According to the multivoiced body view, the critical task of genealogy is first to examine the social discourse of a voice. The dissection of such a discourse may reveal that the voice articulating it is of a different sort than we first thought—a particular discourse on democracy may, upon closer examination, end up being no more than an apology for a capitalist economic system, or a plea for the preservation of the traditional family a covert desire for patriarchy. In order to evaluate the examined voice, we must next see if it is ultimately in service of the denial or affirmation of the multivoiced body. For example, we can now see that the history of the idea of cosmos, including its hatred of and yet fascination with chaos, is a form of nihilism—the denial of one’s being, that is, of the hybrid form of unity hinted at in The Cave and captured in the notion of chaosmos, both avatars of the multivoiced body. This critical task of genealogy, the two steps of revealing and evaluating, is the product of the countermemory that we discussed in the first section of this chapter. The persistence of this countermemory of

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the multivoiced body, of its creative interplay, helps to explain how active resistance to oracles takes place time and again despite its frequent failure. These comments also indicate that in the name of which genealogy undertakes its critique and valorizes: the multivoiced body itself and the open form of hearing other voices that its being implies—in other words, the Nietzschean ethics of generosity outlined at the end of the last chapter. Ultimately, critique is the affirmation of the chaosmos characteristics of the multivoiced body: solidarity (the intersection among society’s voices—the status of each one as a dialogic hybrid involving the rest), heterogeneity (the status of each voice as also the other of the rest), and fecundity (the production of new voices and the metamorphoses of society). Humanity’s strange fascination with the chaos it also feared and condemned was its dim recognition of itself and reality as the composed chaos of the multivoiced body. This picture of genealogy introduces two questions that will have to be answered: how can the valorization of society as a multivoiced body avoid affirming all of the body’s voices, including those of racism, sexism, homophobia and others that repudiate society’s multivoiced body; and how can the idea of the multivoiced body avoid being another totalizing doctrine, another oracle? Before addressing these questions in chapter 10, we must first put genealogical critique to use on the global level. Capitalism or neoliberalism has become the oracle of globalization. More recently, a rival view of globalization has appeared. According to this view, the world is a “clash of civilizations.” 64 In the one case, capital is god; in the other, particular cultures or civilizations play that role. We must show that each of these oracles is a reaction against a world that harbors a nonoracular version of itself—one that a genealogy can champion.

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9

Globalization, Resistance, and the New Solidarity

In chapter 8, I showed how the social unconscious produces totalizing forces or oracles, repressing our identification with society as a multivoiced body. The countermemory harbored in this body, however, keeps resistance to oracles and their genealogical critique alive. We now must see how this form of critique can assist in addressing the oracle of globalization.

Nations and the Clash of Civilizations In his book on nationalism, Benedict Anderson argues that imagination plays a powerful role in connecting people to other people they have never seen, to “imagined communities.” More specifically, it helps to establish “a deep, horizontal comradeship” among these peoples, confines that comradeship to a distinct group, and appeals to the legal idea of sovereignty (rather than religion or dynasty) in order to hold together the diversity that characterizes the new national body.1 Imagination is aided in this construction of nations by such devices as language, the census, maps, and museums.2 Moreover, this imagining places a “halo” around

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the sovereign body (people are linked to one another because of a “natural” rather than a chosen tie—the nation is our “homeland”), attributes “purity” to the nation, on the basis of which citizens are prepared to make sacrifices such as military service in time of war, and bequeaths “unisonance” to it, that is, patriotic verses and melodies that citizens repeat over and over again across time and space.3 In other words, the nationalist imagination raises itself to the level of what we have been calling an oracle: it presents the nation as natural rather than as constructed and as the court of final appeal on most matters. Establishing nations also involves a conflict between the monoglossia and heteroglossia of which we heard Mikhail Bakhtin speak in chapter 3: a national or master language attempts to make the ongoing proliferation of social discourses conform to its dictates. In response, one can perform a “genealogical critique” that reveals the master language to be only a particular voice that has raised itself to the level of an oracle. The oracle is then in a position to be evaluated as affirmative or nihilistic depending on whether it ultimately serves or undermines the creative interplay of society’s voices. For example, an important part of the imagination that helped establish Mexico as a nation involved its appeal to Mexico’s Mayan, Aztec, and other indigenous roots. But this appeal is ironic in that it primarily reflects not the social discourse of the Indians of Mexico but the voice of the socially and economically dominant mestizos. The Mexican historian Guillermo Bonfil therefore comments that “it even gets to the point of the paradoxical relation between nationalism and indigenismo in which all Mexicans are descendants of Cuauhtémoc except for the Indians, who must “integrate” themselves (which is to say, stop being Indians) in order to also be legitimate children of Cuauhtémoc.” 4 In the United States, the national imagination that spoke of “One nation under God,” “We the people,” and “All men are created equal” initially referred to only transplanted Europeans. Slaves and Indians were not included. If we turn from the national to the global level, the conditions for genealogical intervention and the exposure of oracles are also propitious. Here, though, the main units can be more inclusive than nations. Samuel P. Huntington, for example, takes civilizations as the primary units of the world and characterizes past and contemporary history as a “clash of civilizations.” 5 More specifically, he argues that people always need identity and that living up to this identity has priority for them even over “interest politics,” that is, rational calculation as a tool for supporting one’s economic self-interest.6 Moreover, each identity is defined over against other

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identities. This exclusivity combined with what Huntington assumes as a truism, “It is human to hate,” ensures “the ubiquity of conflict.” 7 Huntington holds that the West is in a life and death struggle with Islam. He says, moreover, that the United States and the West are currently besieged from within and weakened by those who promote multiculturalism: “They wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core.” 8 He insists that standing up to Islam or other civilizations that would challenge the West involves “rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism” and the internal fragmentation produced by them.9 Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis involves several crucial problems. First, he assumes, in effect, that civilizations are “pure” and not hybrid entities.10 The divisions in the Western response to terrorism by Islamic extremists, and the differences within Islam itself, including condemnations of terror and extremism, indicate that Huntington’s assumption is hasty. It overlooks the point that has been made throughout this book: that all cultures or voices are dynamic hybrids and therefore lack intrinsic fixity. His assumption precludes in advance the possibility that those from different civilizations who respect heterogeneity as well as exchange within and among civilizations can divert the tides of hatred. Moreover, Huntington’s diatribe against multiculturalism suggests a fear of society’s multivoiced body and its ongoing metamorphosis. Genealogically, then, his social discourse is a nihilistic oracle, that is, a reactive denial of its own and every discourse’s roots in the multivoiced body, a repudiation of unities composed of diversity. In contrast, interpreting multiculturalism as a multivoiced body means that it can signify a creative interplay between voices rather than just a plurality or a United Colors of Benetton tokenism. The oracles established by fundamentalist strains of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, neoliberalism, or any other creed are ultimately forces that react against the body of their birth and are resisted by voices that valorize the multivoiced body. Huntington’s thesis faces a third problem. Many contemporary thinkers see capitalism rather than a clash between cultural units as the major force in the world today. They view globalization or globalized capital as a process that overrides even individual nations in importance. The main conflict for many of them is between two types of globalization—between the worldwide “globalization from above” of corporations coupled with their governmental allies, on the one hand, and the “globalization from below” of workers, peasants, and communities concerned about human

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rights, living wages, and environmental standards, on the other. To be aware of this conflict, one need only think of the mass demonstrations against the World Trade Organization that have been taking place in the new millennium. Moreover, many contemporary thinkers equate globalization with “postmodern society” and the problem this equation presents for locating ourselves within a globalized world. We will explore this problem and see if a genealogical critique of globalization can contribute to a solution of it. This genealogy will involve Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s critique of global capitalism, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work on “empire” and “the multitude,” and Manuel Castells’s notion of “network society.” 11 The goal of this effort will be to show how society as a multivoiced body can incorporate important aspects of these thinkers’ work but also overcome problems that they leave unanswered.

Postmodern Society and Cognitive Mapping Many thinkers believe that globalization of the economy has contributed to the production of a “postmodern” society that has no center—a society that is paradoxically “everywhere and nowhere.” Fredric Jameson, for example, portrays such a society as a spatial and social labyrinth and feels that we require a new “cognitive map” in order “to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.” 12 In apparent league with the difficulty of finding a cognitive map for the “world space of multinational capital” is the postmodern idea that humans have no fixed nature or identity.13 As a consequence, the notion of liberation no longer entails regaining an authentic mode of existence or fulfilling a universal human essence. Nor does it reduce to the simple elimination of exploitation. Instead, liberation now emphasizes the continual creation of new forms of existence, for example, Michel Foucault’s valorization of “the undefined work of freedom” and “the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance” that we discussed in chapter 4. But this valorization spawns a question: can globalized capital be resisted, let alone overturned, if societies have no center, persons no identities, and liberation no purpose beyond the endless production of new forms of existence? To answer this question we will take a close look at thinkers who

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provide a fuller characterization of global capitalism and who suggest how the more deleterious dimensions of its hold on us might be challenged.

Deleuze and Guattari: Axiomatic Capital and Nomadic War Machines Deleuze and Guattari provide a genealogical critique of capitalism. Capitalism presents itself as the final stage of economic and social progress. Although Deleuze and Guattari agree that capitalism is different than the two other forms of society that have preceded it, the primitive and despotic, they argue that it and these two other forms are reactions to a more anarchic type of existence. In other words, these forms of society are “reterritorializations” that attempt to limit the full sweep of “deterritorialized” movements within the social body. Capitalism, then, is not the final stage of economic and social progress; it is only the most recent form of reaction to the decentralized forces of the social body. These forces challenge capitalism; many of them are now generated by capitalism itself. This general picture of Deleuze and Guattari’s genealogy of capitalism can be put in some of their more specific terminology.14 They equate deterritorialization with what they call a “war machine” and reterritorialization with the State. The war machine and the State exist simultaneously with one another and in a perpetual state of interaction.15 The war machine and its “nomadic” agents are primarily a movement of constant “metamorphosis,” resist the State with all their might, and do not have war as their primary objective. The State apparatus, in contrast, is a movement of strict identity and can “capture” the war machine and convert it into an apparatus for war (TP 360–61, 415–20, 437, 446, 513). The symbiotic relation between the war machine and the State is even characteristic in the case of “primitive peoples.” Although they lack an actual State, it is present among them, but only virtually, as part of a horizon to be “warded off.” In turn, the war machine threatens even the most State-regulated society (TP 430–31). Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a “despotic society” and the “Imperial archaic State” that goes with it is an obvious example of what we have been calling an oracle. The despot “overcodes” or imposes a new system on the marriage alliances and lineage filiations of primitive society. More

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specifically, he places himself in direct filiation with the deity and subordinates the other alliances and filiations to himself; he transforms primitive society’s circulation of goods into a debt that his minions owe him.16 However, the overcoding and reterritorializing of primitive society into a despotic society with an imperial State inadvertently create some vectors of deterritorialization. For example, some wealth of the merchants and landed gentry becomes homogeneous and independent capital, that is, money used to get more money rather than just to buy consumer goods; some slaves and serfs become free laborers, that is, their labor becomes a commodity that they can market; some property formerly used only as a means of production becomes the ownership of a “convertible abstract right” (TP 448–49). When these flows of money, labor, and property conjoin with one another as the extraction of surplus value from exploited labor, they participate in the ongoing deterritorialization of despotic society and permit the formation of a new society/State combination, capitalism (TP 452–53). Unlike despotism, capitalism is not tied primarily to territory or to a people; its major concern is with these new flows and of aiding in their conjuncture as a means of simultaneously augmenting and regulating them (TP 453–54). Deleuze and Guattari mark the difference between despotism and capitalism by saying that capitalism operates as an “axiomatic”—a “production for the market”—rather than as a system of codes (TP 436). The despot subsumes or overcodes the primitive alliances and filiations by transcending them. The axiomatic, in contrast, is immanent to its sectors of production, States, and other domains of operation. That is, these domains, and particularly States, are its “models of realization” or instantiations. States do not subordinate capital to their dictates, nor are they canceled out by capital; they become the “models of realization for a worldwide axiomatic that exceeds them.” Because “there is but one centered world market, the capitalist one,” socialist as well as free market States are models for the axiomatic, each a “neighborhood” in the axiomatic’s “single City” (TP 434–36). More specifically, these models constitute a “denumerable set,” and within them everything is equivalent in the sense of being measurable as monetary exchange value. Moreover, the capitalist axiomatic operates by creating new axioms for flows that initially escape it, for example, the integration of previously resistant trade unions into its system (TP 468). The most disturbing aspect of the capitalist axiomatic concerns what Deleuze and Guattari call “machinic enslavement” and “subjection.”

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Machinic enslavement is the conversion of traditional workers-using-tools into “human-machine systems.” Workers are merely constituent parts of these mechanical systems. Because of the internal, mutual communication between humans and machines in these systems, the proportion of the organic composition of capital made up by human variable capital (our labor power) is lessened and that of constant capital (machines) is increased. This “enslavement” includes “subjection”: for example, we are enslaved to TV insofar as we are an intrinsic component part of it, that is, insofar as we form part of a feedback loop with the TV set, and we are subjected to TV insofar as we think we make TV what it is and do not see its role in making us what we are (TP 458–59). The same form of enslavement and subjection holds for our other major production and technological systems. Although the capitalist axiomatic is worldwide, Deleuze and Guattari claim that it gives rise to flows that escape it as it “continually sets and then repels its own limits.” The flows it “conjoins” gather speed so as to “connect” with one another and constitute “nondenumerable sets” and a “war machine” that disrupt the axiomatic’s models, becoming a revolutionary movement (“neither the war of extermination nor the peace of generalized terror . . . but the connection of flows, the composition of nondenumerable aggregates, the becoming-minoritarian of everybody/ everything”). For Deleuze and Guattari, the ultimate source of the conflict at the heart of capitalism (or any other social body) is cosmological: the symbiotic conflict between destratification and stratification, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and the plane of consistency and the plane of organization (TP 472–73). Indeed, they say that a social field is defined more by the “line of flight” or movement of deterritorialization running through it than by Marxist “contradictions” or by “base”[-] and “super-structures” (TP 90, 435). Because nothing escapes the opposition between these cosmological movements, because capitalism will always repel its own limits, Deleuze and Guattari can say that capitalism may give way under its own momentum to “a new earth and people that do not yet exist.” 17 But where do we fit if society is ultimately determined by this interplay of cosmological forces? Granted, these forces do not exist independently of assemblages, or, in this case, social bodies, and are therefore not vitalistic urges, but they do make it appear that everything happens of its own accord, with our role in social change as mere vehicles. Indeed, we saw in chapter 3 that Deleuze and Guattari’s view of subjectivity subordinates

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us to the (creative) machinations of forces in which we cannot recognize ourselves. Hardt and Negri accept Deleuze and Guattari’s dynamic framework. They feel that the two cosmologists provide the vital element that thinkers like Foucault leave out in their efforts to depict biopower. But they also hope to rectify what they think is Deleuze and Guattari’s too “superficial or ephemeral” articulation of global capitalism.18 We must see if their rectification overcomes the pervasive anonymity that Deleuze and Guattari assign to global capital and resistance—if it allows people a role in undermining global capitalism and provides the new cognitive map that Jameson seeks.

Hardt and Negri: The Two Heads of Empire Hardt and Negri begin their rectification of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of global capitalism by describing the latter in terms of what they call “Empire.” According to them, Empire is “a universal republic, a network of powers and counterpowers structured in a boundless and inclusive architecture” (168–69). Because of its decentralized ubiquity, this universal architecture is a “non-place” or “ou-topia,” literally “everywhere and nowhere” (190, 345–46). It therefore expands by including other powers within the “open-space” of its network rather than by annexing or destroying them (168–69). Hardt and Negri also refer to this universal architecture or Empire as a “two headed imperial eagle.” The first head is the axiomatic of Empire and consists of an international juridical form and a “constituted power” of corporations and governmental institutions “constructed by the machine of biopolitical command.” This head is like Deleuze and Guattari’s movement of reterritorialization; it exists as a reaction to the second head of the imperial eagle, what Hardt and Negri call the multitude and claim is ontologically prior to the first head. This second head consists of “the plural multitude of productive, creative subjectivities that have learned to sail on [the] enormous sea [of Empire].” The multitude is like Deleuze and Guattari’s “absolute deterritorialization” or “war machine” and “nomads” in that it continually creates new forms of existence, resists full capture by the first head of the nonlocatable republic, and plants the seeds of Empire’s fated destruction (60–61). I will fill in this outline of Hardt and Negri’s Empire by elaborating on these two heads.

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First Head of the Imperial Eagle: The Axiomatic and Castells’s Network Society The first head or capitalist axiomatic consists of a juridical form and a machine of biopolitical command. The juridical form of Empire’s axiomatic is called into being by globalization, involves a notion of right that transcends specific times and nation-states, and can “present force as being in the service of right and peace” (14–15).19 Hardt and Negri have in mind international courts and codified international trade agreements and their regulatory agencies, for example, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. The second aspect of the first head, its “constituted power” or machine of biopolitical command, involves most notably the “real subsumption of society under capital,” that is, “globalized productive power” (364–65). This amounts to a “society of control” (a term they borrow from Deleuze)20 in that now power is exercised through communication systems, information networks, and other machines that “directly organize the brains [of persons].” It is also enacted through welfare systems, monitored activities, and various means that directly organize these same person’s bodies, herding them “toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity,” extending “well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks” (23). Rather than possessing the multiple but clearly differentiated identities of Foucault’s “disciplinary society,” Empire produces hybrid subjectivities that are simultaneously constituted by the logics of these former identities: “a factory worker outside the factory, student outside school, inmate outside prisons, insane outside the asylum” (331–32). In describing this “society of control,” Hardt and Negri discuss globalized “network enterprises,” “finance capital,” and “informationalism,” showing how each contributes to the “non-place” of Empire. With respect to globalized production, Hardt and Negri refer at one point to Manuel Castells’s notion that the vertical industrial and corporate model of production is now subordinate to one “organized in horizontal network enterprises” (296n24). Like Hardt and Negri, Castells describes the new economy as informational, global, and networked.21 But his treatment of networks provides a more specific and clear delineation of global capitalism and postmodern society than that offered by Hardt and Negri. Castells sees networks as the central feature of globalization and speaks of a “network society,” “network economy,” and “network enterprises.” 22

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According to him, productivity in the new global economy is “generated through and competition is played out in a global network of interaction between business networks.” 23 Business networks of this sort are different than nationally based corporations with global reach. They are “decentralized internal networks, organized in semi-autonomous units, according to countries, markets, processes, and products.” These semiautonomous units are linked up with the semiautonomous units of other multinationals, forming “ad hoc strategic alliances.” These alliances, in turn, become “nodes” in the networks of small and medium firms. Production is therefore an activity of international networks rather than of individual, national units that reach across the globe.24 Finance capital is equally ubiquitous, dispersed, and interconnected, thus adding to the global quality of capitalism. More specifically, international trading of currency conditions the exchange rate between national currencies. This conditioning has undermined the independence of national governments in monetary and fiscal policies.25 The globalization of production and finance capital has been made possible by what Castells dubs informationalism. Castells clarifies his use of this term by comparing it with the meaning of industrial society. He declares that the latter term never meant merely the presence of a large number of industries—there were numerous individual manufacturing units even in the Middle Ages; instead, it indicated that the social and technological forms of industrial organization permeated all of society, for example, the schools and military as well as factories. Similarly, informationalism does not refer just to the communication of knowledge; it means that “information generation, processing, and transmission become the fundamental sources of productivity and power because of new technological conditions emerging in this historical period.” We have, in short, learned to use our “capacity to process symbols” as a “direct productive force.” 26 Now that all nations depend on the performance of their globalized financial, productive, and informational core, they are themselves effectively globalized even if the majority of their economic transactions happen to take place within their own borders.27 Castells therefore defines the global economy as one “whose core components have the institutional, organizational, and technological capacity to work as a unit [that is, as a network] in real time, or in chosen time, on a planetary scale.” 28 More expansively, he relates this global economy to an “ethical foundation” that he calls, in analogy with Weber’s spirit of capitalism, the “spirit

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of informationalism.” This spirit does not consist of a common code but is rather a “multi-faceted, virtual culture” that involves “many cultures, many values, many projects, which cross through the minds and inform the strategies of the various participants in the networks, changing at the same pace as the network’s members, and following the organizational and cultural transformation of the units of the network.” 29 Given the ephemeral quality of this network, Castells feels that the traditional space of places and historical times is becoming subordinate to a space of capital, cultural and other “flows” and to “timeless time.” 30 Indeed, even the capitalists no longer form a class; rather, the “integrated, global capital network” is a “faceless collective capitalist, made up of financial flows operated by electronic networks.” 31 Finally, the original experience of nature as indomitable by culture, and later, during the industrial age, as masterable by culture, has changed into an experience of nature as “artificially revived”—preserved as a “cultural form” by the environmental social movement and their attempts to protect our surroundings.32 The depictions of globalization by Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, and Castells share a similar bent. Whether it’s the worldwide axiomatic, the first head of the imperial eagle of Empire, or network society, globalized capital seems absolutely dominant, autonomous, and anonymous: it is everywhere and nowhere and would seem to defy the cognitive map that Jameson calls for. But the second head of the imperial eagle is supposed to ameliorate this numbing state of affairs.

Second Head of the Imperial Eagle: The Multitude According to Hardt and Negri, the multitude consists of “indefinite” persons (a “plane of singularities”) who bear an open set of relations to one another and “an indistinct, inclusive relation to those outside of [them].” The axiomatic system of Empire attempts to “exploit” and “corrupt” the multitude, that is, to transform its indefiniteness and autonomy into its opposite, the strict identity and exclusionary relations of “the peoples” formed by sovereign structures (Empire, 103).33 But the multitude is inherently antagonistic to any form of domination and resists these attempts at exploitation and corruption (90, 218). Indeed, the authors of Empire conceptualize the multitude along the lines of Deleuze and Guattari, thinking of it as a movement of absolute deterritorialization that globalized capitalism attempts to reterritorialize

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into an axiomatic or hierarchical system of administration. The multitude is therefore equally required and feared by Empire: “The deterritorializing power of the multitude is the productive force that sustains Empire and at the same time the force that calls for and makes necessary its destruction” (61, also 344, 350, 360–61, 392). More specifically, Empire must construct an intelligent, competent, and autonomous labor force as a necessary complement to its productive network. But combining this type of competency with the inherent creativity and desire to revolt of the multitude constitutes a “materialist teleology.” This telos is not a trajectory toward a specific future; it is an always contextualized force that, given the requisite weapons, undoes from within any structure of sovereignty that attempts to limit its creativity (66).34 Thus crisis and decline are internal to Empire and pertain to “the production of subjectivity itself” (386). Hardt and Negri acknowledge that many people buy into the illusion that capitalism is “eternal and insuperable” and into the “mysticism” that only a “blind anarchic” response to capitalism is possible (386–87). But they feel that these people overlook the fundamental productive powers of being and the ability of the multitude to both “invert the ideological illusion that all humans on the global surfaces of the world market are interchangeable” and to realize that technologies and production can be directed toward the multitude’s “own joy and its own increase in power” (395–96). More specifically, they feel that what they dub communism will overcome these illusions about capitalism because it speaks “from the perspective of a humanity that is constructed productively, that is constituted through the ‘common name’ of freedom” (350). They hold that the multitude’s resistance to imperial government is not a “being-against” but rather a “being-for” that “becomes love and community” (361). They use the term virtual in this context to refer to the “set of powers to act (being, loving, transforming, creating) that resides in the multitude” and that constitutes a “new place” in the “non-place” of Empire (357). Not only does this power reside in the multitude, it is self-valorizing and flows over into others thereby constituting an “expansive commonality” or hybridized “multicolored Orpheus of infinite power” (358, 362). Its very being, and not the ressentiment of which Nietzsche speaks, ensures that it will always try to liberate itself from the regulations of Empire (360–61, 363). This liberation and the multitude’s materialist telos consist in achieving a “future of metamorphoses,” including “hybridizing with the machines that the multitude has reappropriated and reinvented” (366–367).

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Hardt and Negri believe that the form of communism they champion can be achieved or at least begun if the multitude gains three rights. The first of these is the right to global citizenship, that is, “the general right [of the multitude] to control its own movement” (400). The actions of the multitude become political when they “confront directly and with an adequate consciousness the central repressive operations of Empire” in order to gain their autonomy (399). In other words, people should have the right to work or live wherever they want in the world. The second of these rights concerns a social wage for everyone because “the entire multitude produces, and production is necessary from the standpoint of total social capital” (403). Production, in other words, includes everything and everyone, even the unemployed, that biologically or culturally reproduces society. This “new proletariat” (as opposed to the narrower “new industrial working class”) is the “entire cooperating multitude” (402). The cooperating multitude experiences collectively an immeasurable time that “lives” in their movements and labor (401). Because this time is immeasurable, it cannot be converted into the surplus value of which capitalism is so fond. The third and last right that Hardt and Negri discuss is that of reappropriation, of “having free access to and control over knowledge, information, communication, and affects—because these are the primary means of biopolitical production” (406–7). The multitude constitutes itself through the struggle for and practice of these three rights, and is not formed by any dialectically mediating institutions such as political organizations, institutional workers’ organizations, or the State (307–9, 405). According to Hardt and Negri, the multitude in its self-constituting activity can be called a “posse” or “power,” that is, “the machine that weaves together knowledge and being in an expansive, constitutive process.” This posse “self-valorizes bodies in labor, reappropriates productive intelligence through cooperation, and transforms existence into freedom.” As opposed to the “mass worker” under the Fordist and Taylorist regimes of industry, Hardt and Negri propose the “social worker” whose project is “constitution,” which today means the “self-valorization of the human” (the equal right to global citizenship), “cooperation” (the right to control communications networks), and “political power” (a society in which the basis of power is defined by the expression of the needs of all). But Hardt and Negri add that we are still awaiting the construction of a “powerful organization” to bring about this posse and communism; experimentation is still necessary to discover which “models” might best fulfill this “absolute democracy” (407–11).

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Anonymity and Mediating Institutions The genealogical critiques of globalized capital by Deleuze and Guattari and Hardt and Negri indicate that capitalism ends up as a nihilistic reaction to the deterritorializing activity that gave rise to it in the first place. But these thinkers have also inadvertently added to this oracle by granting it mythological proportions and unintentionally caricaturing their own hero, the multitude, as an ineffectual hydra-headed mass. They describe globalized capitalism as an anonymous movement of reterritorialization and as an all-inclusive, labyrinth network of forces. Castells’s “faceless collective capitalist,” “timeless time,” and, by extrapolation, “natureless nature” add to this mystification of global capital. These descriptions do indeed express the complexity of globalization and indicate that it possesses a high degree of anonymity and autonomy. But they succeed too well: such a structure, even with the intervention of the multitude, seems to defy any construction of the cognitive map for which Jameson calls. How could we possibly convert the all pervasive network of global capital, its characteristic of being everywhere and nowhere, into the “somewheres” that would allow us to confront it and set up an opposing and successful globalization from below? 35 We need to bring down to earth the capitalist oracle portrayed by Deleuze and Guattari and Hardt and Negri. This task doesn’t have to abandon what these thinkers have said about the tendencies of deterritorialization and reterritorialization and the aspects of the first head of the imperial eagle. It need only point out that, like all social structures, global capitalism consists of both linguistic and nonlinguistic practices.36 That is, we are required only to specify more fully the voice that has been raised to oraclehood. Besides the nonlinguistic practices and structures of global capital, this voice includes the eminently localizable theorists, governmental policy makers, and corporate CEOs who champion neoliberalism, that is, State-aided, unregulated capitalism with free markets and free trade.37 Whatever the complexity of postmodern society and global capitalism, then, those who oppose it can locate its spokespersons and technicians and attempt to call them and their apparatus to accounts. They do exist “somewhere,” and the notion of voice helps to keep that foremost in our minds. The task of confronting global capital is neither easy nor short-term; but it is also not the impossible undertaking suggested unwittingly by much of the rhetoric surrounding globalization.

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But it is here that a more subtle difficulty presents itself. We have already been made aware of this difficulty in our earlier discussion of the work of Deleuze and Guattari and Hardt and Negri. Labor unions and other types of organization that have traditionally confronted capital and its governmental allies are geared to the national level and are thus usually ineffectual at the global level, that is, at the level where the national policies concerning capital are determined. Castells notes this problem of the increasing gap between the global network of capital and the local character of labor: At its core, capital is global. As a rule, labor is local. . . . Capital tends to escape in its hyperspace of pure circulation, while labor dissolves its collective entity into an infinite variation of individual existences. Under the conditions of the network society, capital is globally coordinated, labor is individualized. The struggle between diverse capitalists and miscellaneous working classes is subsumed into the more fundamental opposition between the bare logic of capital flows and the cultural values of human experience.38 The ready reply to this problem is the globalization of labor and allied organizations. But this introduces another problem: the hierarchical form of these organizations mimic that of the axiomatic they oppose. Organizing the multitude, therefore, would be to destroy its hybrid and heterogeneous character—would destroy the multitude as the multitude. The resulting organizations would advance the cause of global capital in the name of defeating it.39 In order to avoid “axiomatizing” the forces of globalization that come from below, Hardt and Negri must preserve the multitude’s quality as an “indefinite” and hybridized “multicolored Orpheus of infinite power.” But this just produces another, equally serious problem: the amorphousness of this body, as suggested by their descriptions of it, would preclude or at least make very difficult the construction of the “powerful organization” of which they speak and that they claim is necessary to overcome the axiomatic as well as to bring about the “absolute democracy” they desire.40 Fortunately, the notion of intersecting voices that we have been exploring permits a more exact definition of hybridization. As we have seen, much can be said about the logic of social discourses and, more particularly, about the discursive and nonlinguistic practices of capitalism as well

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as the particular social movements that oppose them. Moreover, we have seen how the Bakhtinian notions of citation and hybridization permit us to clarify the sense in which these voices are “shot through with one another.” Most important, this ontological intersection of voices provides the basis for a type of social solidarity that also valorizes the heterogeneity prized by postmodern thinkers. Whereas traditional ontologies tend to cancel out either solidarity or heterogeneity in the name of the other concept, we have seen how these two dimensions of society intrinsically support one another so long as our fears do not induce us to create oracles. We can use the work of Castells and other sociologists to show how these intersecting voices often do constitute concrete instances of the sort of nontotalizing organization that Hardt and Negri require but cannot provide. These instances or “mediating networks” will also help address the stream of criticism that Hardt and Negri have received because of their dismissal of the currently existing “mediating institutions” that are necessary for the construction of the powerful organization they want. For example, labor unions, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the student antisweatshop movement, and environmentalists are at the forefront of resistance and, in concert, have been confronting the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. This sort of joint action and mediating organization suggest a solution to Hardt and Negri’s problem and a new notion of solidarity.

Networks and the New Solidarity Networks and the Multivoiced Body Castells argues that the constitution of subjects’ identity in modernity is different than during postmodernity. In modernity, subjects were constituted by civil society, for example, the development of a socialist identity on the basis of the labor movement. In contrast, the subjects of global network society are constructed through a “prolongation of communal resistance.” 41 This communal resistance takes three forms. First, there are the now failing “legitimizing identities” that grew out of the labor movement of civil society. With the global bypass of nation-states, these movements are rendered irrelevant. The second form of communal resistance consists of social movements that are based on pure resistance rather than on civil society. Castells calls them “resistance identities,” and

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claims that they take both reactive and proactive forms. Refusing to be “flushed away by global flows and radical individualism,” religious fundamentalists and other identities that are reactive in form build their communes around “the traditional values of God, nation, and the family, and they secure the enclosures of their encampments with ethnic emblems and territorial values.” In contrast, the women’s, environmental, and other nonconservative movements are proactive and have to secure new spaces of freedom on the local level. Whereas the global elites in the space of flows are “identity-less individuals (‘citizens of the world’),” the resisters in both the reactive and proactive groups are “attached to communal identity.” 42 The third form of communal resistance is any social movement composed of “project identities.” These identities grow out of resistance identities and look beyond their own particular communities or “space.” They aim at eventually transforming civil society and perhaps even the State in ways that conform to their communal confrontation with the “dominant interests enacted by global flows of capital, power, and information.” One thinks of the right-wing, god and guns, religious evangelism that makes up part of the political base of the Republican Party in the United States. Afghanistan’s Taliban party is another example of a project identity that emerged from a reactive type of resistant identity. The women’s and environmental movements are examples of project identities that are emerging from proactive resistant identities insofar as the women’s movement is successful in degendering social institutions and the environmentalists in integrating humankind and nature.43 For these project identities to prevail, they will have to change the standard cultural codes into symbols that favor their values and identity.44 Castells is anxious to point out that the main agency of the project movements is a “networking, decentered form of organization and invention . . . mirroring, and counteracting, the networking logic of domination in the informational society.” It is these networks that ultimately are “the actual producers, and distributors, of cultural codes.” Moreover, these networks produce and distribute these codes not only through explicit symbols but also their “multiple forms of exchange and interaction.” In expressing his hopes for the proactive version of these project identities, Castells says that “it is in the back alleys of society, whether in alternative electronic networks or in grassrooted networks of communal resistance, that I have sensed the embryos of a new society, labored in the fields of history by the power of identity.” 45

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Castells’s three forms of communal resistance and types of identities— legitimizing, resisting, and projective—are voices. Any of them could turn itself into an oracle, in which case their network structure would then just be a means to an end. This end would involve establishing an exclusionary discourse and a strict identity for the individuals or groups involved. In contrast, those voices whose activities are affirmative of the multivoiced body and the production of new social discourses would see Castells’s networks of social change as an end in itself as well as a means toward that goal. As an end, they would mimic the meaning of democracy, but democracy as reflective of the idea of a creative interplay of voices. Because the network structure is also the means by which the more specific goals as well as democracy is to be achieved, its expansion is all that is required. This claim is important, because social movements that start out with a hierarchical form of organization usually end up supporting a hierarchical and totalizing final system. A network structure does not preclude some hierarchical nodes. Efficiency often demands such nodes just as it requires special experts. But in social movements affirming the multivoiced body, including that of the network itself, these nodes are always in the service of the network and not the other way around. Because it is an open network, moreover, the groups that make up the nodes are not completely merged into a monster that would swallow them up. Some social research illustrates the effectiveness of the sorts of networks we have been discussing. In an article on transnational workers networks, Kidder and McGinn distinguish networks from hierarchical organizations and coalitions.46 Hierarchical organizations, such as labor unions and academic institutions, tend toward a homogeneous identity by way of common ownership or a contractual framework. Similarly, coalitions focus on a common goal to be achieved by a single strategy or centrally coordinated sets of actions. In contrast, networks are made up of laterally organized groups of independent individuals and organizations that share a common but general vision, work on various campaigns for a period of time, and pursue a variety of tactics on separate time lines. They engage in a dense exchange of information and services, insert new ideas in international and local debates, frame and attract attention to issues, and encourage action.47 Besides unions, international labor networks often involve foundation, church, academic, or other nonunion conveners, groups, and funders. These networks also emphasize empowerment, consciousness raising, changes in the norms and policies of institutions,

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community development, gender and racial equality, health and the environment, and other concerns that are not directly economic. There are advantages and disadvantages to networks like these. Some of the advantages are flexibility on issues and methods of dealing with them. The networks’ dense exchanges of information allow their participants to disseminate news, interpret information, and make decisions rapidly. The mutual reciprocity of the different nodes in the network means that any gain in information or services for a particular node is a gain for all the participants in the network. Kidder and McGinn point out that this mutual indebtedness links the members together more strongly and encourages each to forego the right to pursue their own interests at the expense of the other members.48 Because of the diversity of their nodes, networks “encourage reframing of issues and of our understanding of ourselves in relationship to others in the global economy.” 49 The network, in other words, both supports innovation and reflects and reinforces the solidarity among the nodes of the network.50 It is the type of organization most congruent with the intersecting social discourses of society’s multivoiced body. The disadvantages of networks are that they have a weaker financial base and less accountability than do many unions and other hierarchical or centralized organizations. Nor can networks rival hierarchical organizations in producing uniform and high-quality results repeatedly, for example, union labor contracts and mass political mobilization for elections.51 However, Kidder and McGinn point out that combining networks and hierarchical organizations can be very effective. They give the example of Guatemalan Coca Cola workers in the late 1970s. These workers used both large international unions and the networks among the unions, students, and religious organizations to win recognition for their union and force parent companies to take responsibility for the illegal actions of their subsidiaries. The international unions allowed for rapid mobilization of large numbers of people and resources, and the networks “broadened the campaign and increased its strength in influencing government and stockholder actions at Coca Cola.” 52 Kidder and McGinn are right that networks and hierarchical organizations are effective in combination with one another. But the relationship between the two types of organization is key. Because networks are a reflection of the diversity and innovativeness of the multitude as well as the positive side of postmodernism indicated by Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt

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and Negri, and Castells, they have priority over hierarchical forms of organizations. As I stated, hierarchical organizations should always serve the functioning of networks and ultimately society’s metamorphosing multivoiced body—but never the production of oracles.

The New Solidarity In the 1980s, the anarchist Living Theater of New York staged a production of Prometheus at the Winter Palace.53 Near the end of the play, the audience was invited to join the actors in reenacting a key moment in the Russian Revolution of 1917: the storming of the czar’s winter palace. We all rushed on stage, overpowered the “guards,” and piled our bodies atop the replica of the edifice that had marked the end of the czar’s power and the beginning of a new social-political experiment, Soviet Russia’s Marxist-Leninist society. This experiment and the understanding of Marxism that inspired it involved a concept of solidarity. Many of us took this concept to mean allegiance to the working class in its world-historical role as the vehicle of human emancipation and the overcoming of exploitation and alienation. To be progressive entailed promoting actions and policies that advanced the working class’s struggle against the bourgeoisie; to be reactionary meant that one was going in the other direction, retarding the hesitant movement of history toward a classless society. The concept of solidarity, in sum, designated unity with others in the name of the working class and the progressive direction of history. Women and minorities were right to question the narrowness of this notion of solidarity. There was no guarantee that a working-class victory would entail their freedom once social economic classes were eliminated. Because the world-historical role of the working class or of any other group seemed only partial, women and minorities placed more emphasis on the distinctive aims of their own movements. Working-class issues were not forgotten by these groups, but they were no longer at the top of the agenda or at least were not accepted without qualification. The proliferation of these and other alternative movements—for example, environmentalism and lesbian and gay rights—has increasingly challenged any homogeneous meaning of solidarity. Although the role of women’s and other social movements is of tremendous importance in relation to the changing concept of solidarity, it is part of the broader transformation from modern to postmodern society

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of which I have been speaking in this chapter. The postmodern character of society and the age of diversity have allowed us to see that social solidarity based on homogeneity does violence to the heterogeneity of the social body. In contrast, the notion of social movements as networks of many different identities better reflects society’s multivoiced body, its production of new voices, and its continual metamorphosis. Solidarity will therefore always have two meanings at once. On the one hand, the diverse voices involved in a network will be unified by their goal at the moment. Because they are diverse—women’s movements, minority groups, labor unions, environmentalists, academics, and dozens more—each will also be mindful of and usually fully engaged in the activities central to its identity. This means that they will not be glued to any one common goal beyond their specific interests and will be ready to shift to a new common project as the occasion arises. The network is like a computer that can be programmed with new software and yet still retain its more basic “machine program”—the one that allows it to translate the varied projects that come its way into its heterogeneous form of existence. On the other hand, the network has a deeper meaning than fulfilling specific goals: it mimics, valorizes, and advances the creative interplay among the voices that constitute society. Besides being a microcosm of the multivoiced body, this type of open network struggles against the oracles that would limit the productive interplay of social discourses and social movements on the macrolevel, and even against its own temptations to collapse into a homogeneous master language. In order to distinguish the type of solidarity that pertains to it from the older notion of solidarity (a notion that in its time served many well), we can call this new version network solidarity. In this chapter, we have explored a genealogical critique of the oracle of globalization. We have seen that this oracle is a voice and not a destiny. In particular, it is the voice of reaction against the multivoiced body. Its axiomatic, its status as Empire would reduce everything to the language of monetary equivalence and limit or eliminate the wild strains that escape it and promise to eventually undermine it. The critique of empire given here is intended to contribute to the undermining of empire as well as to aid in the struggle against racism, sexism, religious fundamentalism, and other oracles—ultimately oracularity itself. Indeed, the social and economic justice promoted by network solidarity dovetails with the desire to confront terrorism. To the degree that terrorism is fed by broader social

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and economic inequality, the diminution of the latter contributes to the lessening of the former. The even greater hope, of course, is that the recognition of society as a multivoiced body, of our own voice or identity as shot through with other voices, will help increase the power of globalization from below and simultaneously encourage the enunciators of more restrictive discourses to listen to others. This genealogical critique of empire has profited from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Hardt and Negri, and Castells. But we have also seen that their notions of the axiomatic and nomads (or Empire and multitudes) must be reinterpreted in terms of voices and oracles in order to escape the problems of anonymity and mediating institutions. Moreover, Castells’s efforts have helped us to replace the orthodox idea of solidarity with a new one that is more compatible with society’s multivoiced body, network solidarity. Now we must specify the type of justice and democracy that pertains to society as a multivoiced body and that the new solidarity is to champion.

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10

Democracy and Justice in the Multivoiced Body

The last chapter established the notion of network solidarity and clarified its relation to liberating and oppressive forms of globalization— the globalization from below of labor, environmental, community, and other progressive groups versus the globalization from above of multinational corporations and their government allies. But we still need to shed light on the political dimension of local and global society and the meaning of democracy, citizenship, and justice. If the multivoiced body view of society is to accomplish this task, it will also have to deal with two related issues that were left over from an earlier appeal to Salman Rushdie and his fictional Midnights’ Children National Conference as a means of introducing society as a multivoiced body. The first of these two issues focused on the status we should grant to the fascistic Shiva, that is, to the character Rushdie presents as Saleem Sinai’s nemesis and stand-in for racism, patriarchy, homophobia, capitalism, religious bigotry, or any other voice that willingly or unwittingly works to undermine society’s interactive heterogeneity and replace it with a monological oracle. If each voice is immanent as well as transcendent with respect to all the rest, then isn’t affirmation of the multivoiced body or of any of its particular voices the immediate affirmation of all its voices? If so, how can we legitimately exclude from such affirmation the oracular

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social discourses represented by Rushdie’s Shiva? How can the idea of a multivoiced body, presumably the antithesis of exclusionary doctrines, ostracize these nihilistic oracles—and how can it not? This dilemma of ostracism reintroduces the second issue: how can the view of society as a multivoiced body avoid being accused of what Rushdie’s Saleem labeled the Indian disease, that is, the desire to encapsulate the whole of reality in a homogeneous system? How, in other words, can the view of society as a multivoiced body itself avoid being an oracle—the very thing it condemns? If the multivoiced body view of society can address these two issues successfully as well as provide a compelling view of democracy and justice, then what we have been considering as a viable construction of social reality and communication will also have given birth to a political philosophy that is especially appropriate for an age of diversity.

Carl Schmitt and the Political According to Sheldon Wolin, “the political” is “what concerns society as a whole” and must provide the basis for “a common rule in a context of differences.” 1 In order to understand how the multivoiced body view addresses this definition of the political, we can contrast it with Carl Schmitt’s famous view that the political is a people’s determination of the distinction between “friend and enemy.” This distinction indicates that a group has taken its “form of existence” seriously enough to go to war against its opponents if that should prove necessary.2 That is, the political involves a permanent horizon of the possibility of war as a condition of the seriousness Schmitt prizes. Schmitt contrasts this seriousness with the deadening proceduralism and depolitization to which he feels liberalism and its concepts of universal rights and the free individual reduce us.3 Indeed, he feels that liberalism’s identification of itself with humanity goes a step beyond his own version of the friends and enemies distinction: it turns its opponents into “outlaws of humanity.” Thus liberalism’s claim to represent all of humanity in terms of apolitical ethical and economic rules hides its ultimate version of the friend-enemy distinction— humans versus those who lack humanity.4 Schmitt’s concept of the political is reminiscent of Samuel Huntington’s idea of civilizations and the “clash” among them. Both assume distinct, univocal forms of existence surrounded by a horizon of war or a

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situation like Hegel’s “life and death struggle.” 5 But Leo Strauss adds yet another dimension to Schmitt’s friends-enemies distinction, one that also captures Huntington’s clash of civilizations. Strauss argues that Schmitt grants priority to the concept of enemy over that of friends: “One may say: every ‘totality of men’ looks around for friends only—it has friends only— because it already has enemies.” 6 If this “looking around for friends” includes forming the “identity” of this “totality of men,” then Nietzsche’s distinction between reactive and active forces comes into play: “the political” is founded on a group that first reacts to its enemies and only on that basis establishes and affirms its proper “form of existence”—a form that exists primarily as a negation of these enemies.7 Schmitt’s political, then, is composed of univocal forms of existence generated first of all by their reaction to enemies and surrounded by a horizon of war. In contrast to Schmitt’s notion of the political, the multivoiced body exists as a spontaneous valorization of itself through the ongoing creative interplay between its voices; it is not a reaction to enemies. Moreover, none of the voices participating in this body are the univocal forms of existence upon which Schmitt focuses. As we have seen, each is shot through with all the rest, each is simultaneously both the other and part of the identity of the rest. Each enunciator may be characterized by its most audible voice, its “dominant” or “lead” voice, but that voice is inseparable from the others that resound within it. An affirmation of our dominant voice is therefore an affirmation of the others. Within this social body, enemies become adversaries, and antagonism is transformed into agonism.8 Hegel’s “life and death struggle” of friends against enemies is replaced with Nietzsche’s more inviting though still often conflictive “controverting gods.” 9 The horizon of war gives way to a horizon of civic adversaries (as opposed to enemies) contesting with one another for increased audibility and, in many cases, for the role of “lead voice” or representative of the multivoiced body. War may still be a possibility, but is no longer the horizon of society. Instead the horizon is the creative interplay between the voices of society. As such, it neither nullifies the agonistic nature of society nor lessens the seriousness with which one takes one’s form of existence or the social contest for audibility. Among these contesting voices, the Nietzschean generosity I spoke of in chapter 7 is the condition for the “seriousness” of the dialogic exchanges among the participants of society: what one takes from these exchanges comes back out as a gift for the rest, that is, the continuation of their dialogue and hence their vocal lives.

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But there is another side to this story. We saw in chapter 8 that the multivoiced body involves a low-grade fear that it will be overwhelmed by the voices resounding within it. When this fear is exacerbated, society produces an oracle or a univocal identity that seeks to limit the creative interplay among voices. Under these conditions, Schmitt’s idea of friends versus enemies and the horizon of war come into play. The multivoiced body becomes a nihilistic rather than a self-affirming interplay. Because the creative interplay among voices is the primary form of the multivoiced body’s existence, this nihilism is an aberration, the social body’s reaction against rather than spontaneous affirmation of itself. The broader situation within which this nihilism occurs includes a countermemory and thus resistance to oracles in the name of the multivoiced body. This memory impels us to overturn the oracles and once again free up the creativity, solidarity, and heterogeneity of society. We must now examine the relation between this freeing up and the meaning of democracy and justice.

Liberal Views of Democracy and Justice Many thinkers would agree that John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas offer two of the strongest formulations of the liberal version of democracy and justice. By examining the strengths and weaknesses of their views, we can show how the multivoiced body idea of democracy and justice avoids their weaknesses and incorporates and provides a firmer basis for their strengths. We will also see how the multivoiced body view adds significant new meaning to the notion of democracy and justice.

Rawls and “Political Liberalism” Many contemporary views of justice are variants of “deliberative democracy.” The proponents of deliberative democracy argue that their view promotes justice because all affected members of society are included in decision making and have the opportunity to influence the outcome of that process.10 They also believe that deliberative democracy ensures well-informed decisions and solidarity among the citizens who participate in this process.11 They hold, in short, that it promotes both justice and effective “collective problem-solving.” 12 More broadly, deliberative democracy is thought to combine the liberal emphasis on freedom of

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speech, conscience, and other individual rights (the “liberties of the moderns”) with popular sovereignty or the democratic will of the majority (the “liberties of the ancients”).13 The liberal emphasis on individual rights is intended in part to prevent the feared “tyranny of the majority.” Most would agree that John Rawls provides the theoretical foundation for contemporary democracy, particularly its deliberative version.14 In Political Liberalism and elsewhere, Rawls develops a “political conception of justice” that he calls political liberalism and within which his earlier view, “justice as fairness,” has a focal place.15 Like justice as fairness, political liberalism involves a principle of liberty and a principle of difference. According to the principle of liberty, “Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all.” This scheme includes freedom of thought, conscience, association, equality before the law, and many of the other basic liberties and rights included in liberal constitutions and “The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The principle of difference, besides being fair itself, lends material support to the principle of liberty: any social and economic inequalities that may exist “are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity” and “are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.” Part of the intent behind the principle of difference is to ensure that the less advantaged will always have enough material assets to carry out their formal basic liberties and rights.16 Rawls believes that political liberalism can solve a version of the problem with which we started this book and that he states as follows: “How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?” This way of stating the problem is a reflection of Rawls’s awareness that society consists of diverse “comprehensive doctrines” on what people consider good. These doctrines are considered “reasonable,” however, only if they can obtain what Rawls calls an “overlapping consensus” with one another in favor of political liberalism and its two principles as their “political conception of justice” and in this way achieve political and social unity for the society they share. More specifically, society’s comprehensive doctrines must be compatible with the “intrinsic (moral) political ideal” of political liberalism, which Rawls calls the criterion of reciprocity. This criterion is in effect when “free and equal” citizens, not “dominated or manipulated, or

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under pressure of an inferior political or social position,” can mutually agree and stick to “fair terms of social cooperation.” Fair terms of social cooperation, in turn, are expressed by “principles that specify basic rights and duties within society’s main institutions” and must be reasonably acceptable to each participant, “provided that everyone else likewise accepts them.” 17 In sum, political liberalism is based on the intuition or assumption that justice occurs when political deliberations involve free and equal participants who are desirous of reciprocity.18 Because of the moral status Rawls gives to the criterion of reciprocity, he says that the liberal conception of justice is not merely a modus vivendi or social expedient and therefore cannot be legitimately violated as soon as one group sees an advantage.19 Insofar as it is more than a modus vivendi, the liberal conception of justice itself may seem like a comprehensive doctrine. But according to Rawls, a conception is unlike a religion or any other comprehensive doctrine, indeed is not a comprehensive doctrine, insofar as it holds only for “the ‘domain of the political’ and its values.” 20 This distinction between a comprehensive doctrine and a conception allows Rawls’s view of justice to appear neutral in the sense that it can encompass all reasonable comprehensive doctrines without violating their notions of the good for religious, personal, and other nonpolitical domains. In Will Kymlicka’s words, it assumes that it can allow people to be “communitarians in private life, and liberals in public life.” 21 Indeed, Rawls even proposes a “law of peoples” that can include nonliberal though “decent” groups, for example, theocracies that respect their citizens’ human rights but restrict who can hold high political office, so long as these groups agree to a liberal political conception of justice in international forums. Peoples rather than individuals become the primary citizens on this global political arrangement.22 Rawls’s theory has considerable influence on contemporary political thought. Moreover, his distinction between political conceptions and comprehensive doctrines is ingenious. Despite its ingenuity, however, I do not think his political liberalism, including its heart, the criterion of reciprocity (free and equal citizens socially cooperating with one another), successfully escapes the dilemma of being either a doctrine or a modus vivendi. It is true that his political liberalism is not heavy-handed with respect to ethical content in the family or other private spheres. But it does require that the doctrines pertaining to those spheres subordinate their ideas of the good to political liberalism when they conflict with the latter in the political domain.23 Indeed, Rawls says that a society is not

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“well-ordered,” and is thus presumably “immoral” on at least one major count (violation of reciprocity), if it does not commit itself to this form of subordination.24 For example, political liberalism supports the separation of Church and State, and thus political parties are prohibited from imposing their religious values on society when they take power.25 Moreover, a politically liberal society requires that groups traditionally prohibiting such possibilities as apostasy, heresy, proselytization and gender equality surrender these inclinations even in the private sphere.26 Given the importance of the political sphere to the doctrines excluded from it by political liberalism, calling the latter a conception rather than a doctrine is a difference that makes no difference to anyone but those of us who already accept the criterion of reciprocity.27 This criticism leaves Rawls with two alternatives, neither of which he presumably would want to adopt. One of them is simply to say that political liberalism is a particular communitarian good, its moral status holding only within its community, and that the best relation between it and nonliberal “peoples” is of the modus vivendi sort. Or, proclaim that his doctrine is universal and founded on reasons binding for everyone, whether they realize it or not. Although Rawls does not seem to want to follow this second direction, another leading proponent of deliberative democracy, Jürgen Habermas, does.28 We should see, then, if his view can provide a basis for justice and democracy that is stronger than Rawls’s.

Habermas and “Procedural Justice” Habermas’s view of justice shares with Rawls’s a high regard for reciprocity between free and equal citizens. Unlike Rawls, however, Habermas thinks this reciprocity, and hence his view of justice, is a universal value and can be supported by reason, whether or not this is recognized by all groups.29 In other words, Habermas adopts the second of the above two alternatives that Rawls would presumably shun but with which he seems stuck if he wants to provide a strong defense for his political liberalism. The universalism of Habermas’s view is embodied in what he calls his discourse principle: “Just those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses.” 30 Although this principle explains “the point of view from which norms of action can be impartially justified,” it does not specify the

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norms and discourses of which it speaks. Habermas’s “morality principle” and his “democracy principle” are his way of “operationalizing” the discourse principle and delivering the required specificity.31 For example, Habermas’s moral principle limits itself to the type of rational discourse in which only universalizable moral argumentation counts. That principle states: “For a norm to be valid, the consequences and side effects that its general observation can be expected to have for the satisfaction of the particular interests of each person affected must be such that all affected can accept them freely.” In contrast, his democracy principle, that is, “only those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent (Zustimmung) of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted,” 32 limits itself to legal norms but involves more types of rational discourse than just that of morality. In short, Habermas’s discourse principle is neutral with respect to the distinction between law and morality, but acts as the basis for each of them.33 Habermas’s discourse principle is directly related to his idea of justice. He states that justice is neither “something material, nor a determinate ‘value,’ but a dimension of validity.” 34 It concerns, that is, the validity claims that pertain to normative statements about what is just. Because fulfillment of such validity claims involves “reciprocal recognition” of others’ perspectives in order to test the acceptability of the norm for everyone, Habermas says that “justice and solidarity are two sides of the same coin.” 35 In effect, the discourse principle is a procedure, and justice is carrying it out with free and equal others (“solidarity”) in those situations that involve people’s rights.36 His emphasis on reciprocal recognition, moreover, is similar to Rawls’s insistence that the criterion of reciprocity or social cooperation is at the center of political liberalism. But is Habermas’s procedural notion of justice really universal? As we saw in chapter 7, Habermas assumes that all true communication is guided by the teleological goal of achieving mutual understanding and redeeming the validity claims related to that goal.37 Moreover, this goal requires “the reciprocal recognition of persons capable of orienting their actions to validity claims”; Habermas therefore says that the basic meaning of justice and solidarity as well as morality is already implicit in communicative action.38 But we noted in chapter 7 that one cannot successfully claim that communication involves mutual understanding as an intrinsic goal. Some mutual understanding may be necessary as a means for communication to take place, but it is not an intrinsic end of communication.

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As Habermas himself points out, communication can also serve the end of strategically manipulating others or establishing a modus vivendi. There are good reasons for wanting mutual understanding or consensus as an end, but it is not an intrinsic aim built into all communication. Thus Habermas cannot legitimately appeal to such an aim as the formal basis for his claim that it is a universal norm of justice to carry out the discourse principle in deliberations on norms concerning rights. In other words, he cannot claim that his notion of justice, specifically the notion of equal reciprocity, is any less a reflection of a particular “comprehensive doctrine” (perhaps that of the Enlightenment) than is Rawls’s political liberalism. Both thinkers, therefore, can argue only pragmatically for why those outside their immediate framework should adopt their versions of justice, and justice ends up being what neither would desire, a modus vivendi rather than a moral principle.39 As I pointed out in chapter 1, if the sole operative bond is a modus vivendi or principle of expediency, it is likely to hold only so long as no one sees an advantage in breaking the agreement. Do the weaknesses of these two leading modernist positions on justice—that they, against their wishes, end up as either “doctrines” or modus vivendi—mean that we must turn to something like Lyotard’s postmodern identification of justice with what he calls witnessing the differend? As we saw in chapter 5, Lyotard believes that all speech genres are mutually incommensurable and that a “wrong” is to judge one of them by the lights of another. Justice as witnessing the differend means acknowledging this incommensurability and thus foregoing wrongs. But Lyotard leaves us with no way to specify what a just adjudication among conflicting genres or, to use Rawls’s word, “comprehensive doctrines,” would be.40 Even if Lyotard argues that we can adjudicate outside of any genre, he provides no understanding of how adjudicators could choose among the incommensurable genres involved in the dispute without automatically committing a wrong. We are therefore back to seeking terms for a temporary modus vivendi. Because most other postmodern views are loath to risk any hint of constructing a totalizing doctrine, they, like Lyotard, have great difficulty in going beyond their important critical services and providing us with a positive conception of justice. These expositions and criticisms of liberal views of democracy and justice invite us to ask two questions in the context of clarifying and justifying the multivoiced body understanding of democracy and justice. First,

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can the multivoiced body model incorporate and supply needed support for the more laudatory aspects of liberalism? Second, what ways does this model go beyond liberalism in specifying the meaning and implications of justice?

The Multivoiced Body View of Democracy and Justice The multivoiced body view holds that “voices,” not individuals, the State, or social structures, are the primary participants in society. As we have seen, voices are in constant interplay with one another. Their dialogic exchanges are their mode of existence, constitute the social body, and continually produce new social discourses as well as the metamorphosis of society. Moreover, the mutual immanence and mutual transcendence of these voices, the existence of each as simultaneously the other and part of the identity of the rest, establishes their solidarity as well as their heterogeneity. As stated earlier, but now repeated in relation to Rawls, Habermas, and Lyotard, the multivoiced body view of society satisfies both the modernist penchant for social unity and the postmodernist emphasis on difference and fecundity.

The Principle of Justice I call the principle of justice associated with my view of society the interplay of equally audible voices. It agrees with the Rawlsian and Habermasian views of justice—with the more inclusive and deliberative forms of liberalism—in valorizing the liberties of both the moderns and the ancients. More specifically, the emphasis on equal audibility and heterogeneity encompasses the moderns’ concern for the equality and freedom of individuals, for human rights, and the notion of interplay in the justice principle captures the ancients’ enjoyment of majority will through dialogic exchange. On the multivoiced body model, however, an “individual” amounts to a voice, with all the nuances brought about by the spatial and historical location of each one of its enunciators. In other words, an individual is a “nuanced voice” or the unique convergence of the voices of society at the particular site we call a person—a point delineated in chapters 6 and 7. Individual rights, therefore, are not irreducible properties of abstract beings; rather, they are derivative from our affirmation

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of the mutual hearing of voices that constitutes the concrete multivoiced body and that, as an ideal of justice, enjoins participants not to give in to the tendency to establish oracles and thereby restrict interplay and heterogeneity. This injunction, moreover, discourages the tendency of populist sovereignty to impose the feared “tyranny of the majority” upon society. It would be a glaring inconsistency for the same society to celebrate creative exchange and heterogeneity and then eliminate or diminish these two values in the name of an oracle that requires society to adopt a narrow identity. Thus the multivoiced body’s principle of justice supports both individual and democratic liberties while, in the same breath, guarding against either one of these weakening the other. It thereby captures the core of progressive forms of liberalism, but on a new basis: voices and their creative interaction. Linking justice and liberties to the multivoiced body changes the meaning of these concepts in other ways as well. We have seen that the very being of the multivoiced body goes beyond the solidarity and heterogeneity of its voices: it includes the creation of new voices and the metamorphosis of society. With respect to the first part of this statement, that is, the values of solidarity and heterogeneity, pursuing justice does not mean simply that interlocutors respect and avoid violating the rights of others; it means that they engage in and promote programs that seek to increase the audibility of the other voices in society as well as their own. Unlike traditional views of justice and their emphasis on “freedom from” coercion, the multivoiced body endorses “freedom for” greater audibility, that is, the empowerment of voices and the encouragement rather than mere tolerance of dissent. This activist orientation holds even though the voices of society are continually contesting with one another for audibility and, in many cases, for the role of “lead” voice in society. The second part of the principle of justice goes even further than the commendation to be activists about equal audibility. It reminds us that the engaged form of hearing and speaking (openness to revision of one’s own social discourse in light of other discourses), valorized on the multivoiced body view, involves the creation of new voices and hence the metamorphosis of society. This creativity is therefore also part of society’s good and part of what is meant by doing right by ourselves and society, that is, by being just. On the multivoiced body view, then, justice includes creating new voices and metamorphosis as well as promoting the audibility of and interplay between the voices in society. Justice is a way of life and not just a series of don’ts.

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Understood in this way, the principle of interplay of equally audible voices is a radical notion of justice. It urges us to embrace the values of solidarity (interplay and mutual immanence), heterogeneity (mutual transcendence), and creativity (production of new voices and metamorphoses). Moreover, its equal emphasis on these three values discourages us from eliminating one of them in the name of another, for example, sacrificing individual voices (heterogeneity) for the promotion of creativity, fascism in the service of novelty. These observations on justice allow us to sum them up as follows: justice is the orientation of the multivoiced body—the creative interplay among voices—when it is not dominated by an oracle. When the social body is dominated by an oracle, the creative interplay of equally audible voices still remains as its latent demand. Moreover, the multivoiced body is another name for the most basic sense of democracy. Therefore, the principle of justice is no more and no less than the performance of democracy. Our earlier discussion on communication in chapter 7 carries further ramifications for understanding democracy and its deliberative form in particular. Many political thinkers see deliberative democracy as a means to an end. Iris Marion Young, for example, allows that democracy has intrinsic values, but then adds that “most honest folk must admit . . . that if democracy is valuable at all, it is for instrumental reasons primarily.” She stipulates that “under ideal conditions of inclusive political equality and public reasonableness, democratic processes serve as the means of discovering and validating the most just policies.” 41 I agree with Young that democracy does aid justice, but because the multivoiced body is the basic sense of democracy, and because communication is the creative interplay between this body’s voices and is, if my arguments in chapter 7 are convincing, an end in itself, then so too is democracy: it exists as the reproduction and continual metamorphosis of society. Just as justice is the orientation of the multivoiced body when the latter is not dominated by oracles, so democracy is the character of that body under the same conditions. Although my view differs with Young on some important aspects of the meaning of democracy, it endorses the innovations she makes with respect to deliberative democracy and that end up as part of her own notion of “communicative democracy.” First, she increases the degree of inclusion by emphasizing that participants should accept a more open norm of “reasonableness” than that usually advocated by deliberative democracy, which tends to equate acceptable democratic exchange with speech that follows a syllogistic pattern or otherwise reflects an elite, often

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masculinist and dispassionate form of argumentation. But figurative and emotional speech are just as legitimate and often as or more effective than literal and deliberative speech in moving a discussion forward.42 Second, Young condemns effacing difference in the name of a common good or the ideal of consensus. Such effacement gains consensus by ruling out parties, for example, the poor, whose viewpoint is indispensable if we are to deal justly and effectively with society’s problems.43 Young’s third innovation is to insist that political discussion should be complexly mediated as opposed to centered on one major deliberative body that takes society as a whole to be its object of deliberation. This “decentered” view of democracy refuses to reduce the latter to face-to-face meetings in civic and legislative forums. Instead, it “gives more prominence to processes of discussion and citizen involvement in the associations of civil society than do most theories of deliberation.” 44 On the global level, the importance of this decentered process was brought home to many of us by the effectiveness of diverse groups of protestors in the streets of Seattle in 1999 and the “associated civil society” they constituted. Their demands that the World Trade Organization be more democratic and transparent reverberated around the globe. Young’s last modification of deliberative democracy is the requirement that “agonistic” or contestatory processes of political deliberation not be eliminated in the name of assumed “norms of order.” While accepting that hate speech is uncivil and counterproductive with respect to solving collective problems and promoting justice, she points out that street and other forms of demonstrations that have the purpose of disrupting exclusionary bureaucratic or parliamentary routines are appropriate modes of political expression.45 Indeed, Young explicitly endorses Mouffe’s “agonistic pluralism” at this juncture. The multivoiced body view expands on Young’s and Mouffe’s underwriting of agonistic pluralism by emphasizing that the disruption of one’s ideas and the serendipitous creation of new social discourses keep the interplay among voices continuing and creative and thus are important aspects of democratic interaction. They do not displace the need for mutual understanding and consensus, but they are as indispensable as these for the life of the multivoiced body. Indeed, if consensus were the only value of discussion in political or nonpolitical contexts, the infrequency of its occurrence probably would have stopped us from speaking to one another long ago. The multivoiced body view of justice also goes beyond the different views of democracy we have covered in chapter 6: it explicitly endorses

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economic democracy in general and democratization of the workplace in particular. This endorsement is not based just on the support that workplace democracy might give to equal exchange in the political sphere; it reflects the fact that dialogic exchange is definitive of human existence. To refuse such democracy is therefore a violation of what we are as human beings. There are some specific situations, of course, when democratization is not possible in actual practice. But these situations should be the exception, not the rule, and are only legitimate if they can be shown to support the interplay of equally audible voices at another level or in other sectors of society. Both Rawls and Habermas fall short of this criterion: Rawls says what he calls liberal socialism is neither prohibited nor required by political liberalism, and Habermas implies that democratization is neither necessary nor advantageous in the workplace, though for both Rawls and Habermas democracy is necessary in the explicitly political sphere of society.46

Citizenship and Ethical Motivation The multivoiced body view of justice and democracy, then, reinterprets and goes beyond Rawlsian, Habermasian, and other forms of deliberative democracy. In particular, it reveals that democracy and justice are ends in themselves, involve the creation of new voices and the metamorphosis of society, entail workplace democracy, and encourage an activist agenda of individual and democratic liberties. But how does this view compel adherence to democracy and justice? Why should we be just or engage with others as equals in formulating public policies? We have already seen that Rawls, Habermas, and Lyotard—modernist and postmodernist views—fail at providing strong support for the claim that justice is anything more than a modus vivendi arrangement. It is not that intuitions of justice or appeals to the nature of something as basic as the structure of language supply no support at all; it is rather that they are not as convincing as their proponents would like to think. The intuitions and language structures to which many thinkers appeal receive their urgency only within a particular “comprehensive doctrine” or tradition. In the Western Enlightenment tradition, for example, freedom and equality in combination with reciprocity and social cooperation seem obvious components of justice. But within theocracies or other systems where a hierarchical or authoritarian order is considered ordained by higher powers,

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justice is acting in accordance with the social or gender roles specified by those societies. Can the multivoiced body view of justice add to the Enlightenment tradition so as to make its notion of justice, with the crucial amendments discussed, more compelling to a broader constituency? The notion of motivation is relevant to this endeavor. Many thinkers feel that political liberalism and the discourse principle are too abstract, intellectual, or “thin” and thus will have great difficulty in motivating people to accept and act upon them as dictates of justice, especially at the global level.47 The breadth gained by taking justice as a universal political principle or procedure, one that holds across all individuals, loses its appeal because of the generality and abstractness of these principles, especially when placed in competition with the solidarity of groups that put their specific identity and desires above the concerns of other people.48 It is one thing to rationally motivate someone to accept a proposition on the basis of a sound validity claim for it, but another for that person to care enough to listen in the first place or act upon the rationality of such a claim subsequently.49 In contrast, communitarian doctrines, with their appeal to a common good or identity, provide the strongest motivation or solidarity.50 But they tend to encompass only a limited community, for example, religious celebrants or self-consciously conservative or liberal citizens.51 If the considerations advanced for the multivoiced body view have been compelling, we must acknowledge that the voices of society, local and global, do share an identity: each voice (and hence its enunciators) participate in the identities of the rest and at the same time are their other, thus reconciling solidarity and heterogeneity without sacrificing either for the other. Each voice is a dynamic hybrid and not the purity or univocality so many thinkers thought to be the essence of identity. Once this is realized, we must acknowledge that our identity runs much deeper and is more complex than a truncated understanding of our dominant voice.52 We must accept that we are the dominant voice that we enunciate, for example, a national identity, but also and simultaneously all the other voices that intersect with ours, indeed, the multivoiced body itself. Affirmation of one’s own primary identity or voice is therefore an affirmation of the others and hence of the multivoiced body itself. Whereas liberalism lacks the factor of concrete solidarity, and most communitarian positions gain it only by excluding other views of the good, the identification of society as a multivoiced body provides a form of solidarity that affirms heterogeneity and includes all voices within its scope.

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If we come to recognize more fully that we share an identity with the multivoiced body, then the power of this recognition, especially when coupled with the traditional pragmatic and ethical reasons for justice, will help create an allegiance to the equal audibility principle across the diverse groups that make up the social body. As Kymlicka says, “a society founded on ‘deep diversity’ is unlikely to stay together unless people value deep diversity itself, and want to live in a country with diverse forms of cultural and political membership.” 53 Because the identity of each voice includes those of the rest, it works against limiting our allegiance to our more immediate or dominant voice and excluding others from political or ethical standing. The universality attributed to ethical norms such as justice and also the idea of more emphatic care for others are now seen to reside in the hybrid identity that the voices of society share as members of the multivoiced body.54 Increased recognition of our identity as participants in a multivoiced body will also help us persevere against a tendency to establish oracles in face of an exacerbated fear of being overwhelmed by the voices resounding within the social body. Thus Rawls’s “social cooperation of free and just persons” and Habermas’s “reciprocity” or “rational cooperation” are given a stronger basis to the degree that they approximate the equal audibility principle of the multivoiced body. Recognition of our participation in a multivoiced body can also be stated in terms of citizenship. The issue of citizenship brings us to the heart of the debate between liberals and communitarians, for citizenship “is intimately linked to liberal ideas of individual rights and entitlements on the one hand, and to communitarian ideas of membership in and attachment to a particular community on the other.” 55 The multivoiced body view is communitarian in the sense that it claims we share an identity and hence a “good” as hybrid participants within this body. It militates against the “atomistic” form of individualism and political proceduralism embraced by many liberals.56 But, as we just saw, the multivoiced body view differs from traditional communitarian views in that it claims a kind of universality and sponsors a polyvocal rather than a univocal view of community. Our double identity, our double allegiance to a national voice and to the worldwide, time-indefinite multivoiced body of which we are all a part, should, once this identity is more fully recognized, incline us against the exclusionary tendencies of traditional communitarianism.57 At the same time, the heterogeneity of the multivoiced

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body provides a basis for increasing the audibility of minority groups and for supporting the type of individual rights celebrated by liberals. This dual form of citizenship, therefore, supports solidarity and difference simultaneously. In light of our double identity, then, we should note that we are citizens of the world, citizens of the multivoiced body in its fullest extent, as well as of the legal entities and “imagined communities” called nations. Indeed, the multivoiced body view of society supports the cosmopolitan citizenship advocated by David Held, Iris Marion Young, and other contemporary political thinkers. According to Held, the members of a cosmopolitan democratic community are “committed to upholding democratic public law both within and across their own boundaries.” 58 These members would be citizens of both their own nations and of “the wider regional and global networks which [impact] on their lives.” 59 Despite the global scale of some of these networks, they would come into play only when local levels of decision making “cannot satisfactorily manage and discharge transnational and international policy questions.” 60 In the context of the United Nations, moreover, a people’s assembly could be created in which “individuals all over the world would elect representatives directly” and enjoy global citizenship plus support beyond the nation-state for their basic human rights.61 Cosmopolitan citizenship and democracy, in other words, are an extension of the network solidarity that I advanced in the last chapter. Critics of this form of democracy argue that it lacks the identity upon which nationstates base their political inclusiveness.62 We can now see, however, that recognition of local and global society as multivoiced bodies provides the double identity that can support this multiple citizenship. Our identification with this body militates against the tendency of our more particular identity to provide a basis for a politics of exclusion. Supporting this form of multiple citizenship, furthermore, is particularly important because some brand of cosmopolitan democracy is necessary for dealing successfully with the growing number of economic, environmental, and security issues that are global in nature.63 But what do we do when not everyone recognizes or affirms their double identity? What if, for example, fundamentalist groups of whatever stripe refuse to accept any but their own idea of a new and very narrow world order? We will address this problem after we have specified it further by considering multiculturalism and the issue of collective rights.

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Multiculturalism and Collective Rights I began this book with the statement that “ours is an age of diversity.” Besides all the illustrations of diversity that I have given in this and the preceding chapters, there is still another indication of the appropriateness of this statement: the number of political thinkers who now believe that freedom of expression, conscience or religion, and the other human or individual rights are not sufficient for a just society. In particular, these thinkers feel that collective rights are needed as well. Kymlicka dramatizes the issue by presenting a litany of specific issues involved in recognizing minority rights, ones that go from which languages to use in international bodies to whether political offices should be assigned proportionately to the different groups in a society.64 Another leading writer on multiculturalism, Charles Taylor, puts the issue of minorities in terms of the tension between what he calls “a politics of universal dignity” and “a politics of difference.” The politics of universal dignity concerns the human rights of individuals, and the politics of difference emphasizes the heterogeneous identities that make up a society.65 The politics of dignity focuses on what we share universally, and the politics of difference emphasizes what distinguishes and possibly separates us.66 As both Taylor and Kymlicka point out, the key political issue in multicultural societies concerns the conflict between these two politics and how to reconcile them. Taylor, Kymlicka, and most other thinkers who favor accommodation between these two types of rights agree that the devil is in the details and go to great lengths to strike the right balance between collective and individual liberties. In particular, they are usually careful to ensure that the recognition of collective rights does not limit freedom of speech, conscience, and the other activities included in our most basic human rights. Of the attempts to formulate criteria for accomplishing this balance, Amy Gutmann’s “two-way protection” thesis, Kymlicka’s “dialectic of nationbuilding and minority rights,” Nielsen’s “two-sided answerability,” and Young’s “differentiated solidarity” are some of the most compelling. All four emphasize dialogue rather than preestablished, draconian laws as the means of finding the best balance between collective and individual rights in concrete situations.67 This emphasis coheres well with the valorization of dialogic interplay by the multivoiced body view. For our purposes, we can put aside the details of many of these thorny issues and concentrate on the general meaning of justice in a multicultural society. We can begin

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this by further exploring Taylor’s ideas on the topic, then seeing how the multivoiced body view of society accords with and differs from them. In agreement with the multivoiced body view, Taylor holds that cultural and other identities are established dialogically, that is, in reference to one another. Because of this, the dominant culture in a society can reflect a derogatory picture of minority cultures, damaging the self-esteem of their members as well as causing them public harm.68 The politics of equal dignity, of universal individual rights, must therefore accommodate itself to the politics of difference, to the recognition of a group’s racial, religious, ethnic, or gender identity.69 Taylor illustrates this accommodation with the example of the Canadian province of Quebec, where the institutionalization of the politics of difference requires the children of Quebecers (Québécois) and immigrants to attend schools in which French is the language of instruction. The politics of equal dignity would prescribe that all individuals be allowed to continue enrolling their children in public educational institutions of their choosing, whether English or French was the language of instruction. However, such a policy coupled with the economic realities of the province threatened the flourishing and perhaps even the survival of French-Canadian culture and language in Canada. Taylor therefore thinks that in this particular case it was legitimate for collective rights to win out over the individual right of choosing the language in which one’s children will be instructed. The Indians of Chiapas, Mexico and their rebellion constitute another example of the importance of instituting collective as well as individual rights. Under the leadership of the Zapatistas, these Indians have demanded that the Mexican government grant them collective rights, respecting their “rights and dignity as indigenous peoples . . . taking into account their cultures and traditions” as well as showing greater respect for the individual rights they already possess under the Constitution.70 As the Mexican historian Aldofo Gilly puts it, “In the [Zapatista] rebellion, Indians reclaim the right to be citizens [of Mexico] (which supposes a sort of republican equality in the context of a single collective identity) and at the same time different (which supposes a plurality of collective identities within a republican equality).” 71 The demands for collective rights by the Zapatistas include that the government recognize and protect or reestablish the indigenous peoples’ traditional collective use and ownership of agriculture land in Chiapas, mandate the instruction of their languages in the national educational system, and establish radio stations operated and controlled by indigenous peoples. Like the French Canadian collective

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rights or politics of difference, those of the Chiapan indigenous peoples would foster cultural flourishing and would not affect adversely any basic individual rights such as freedom of speech or conscience. Despite the relative compatibility of the two sorts of rights of the Québécois and the Chiapan indigenous people, basic individual rights would be violated by giving political recognition to some groups, for example, white supremacists or religious collectives that prohibit apostasy, heresy, or proselytization. Taylor recognizes this problem and replies that his view, a communitarian version of liberalism that he calls “liberalism as a fighting creed,” endorses neither an “unauthentic and homogenizing” demand for recognition of the equal worth of all cultures nor “selfimmurement within [particular] ethnocentric standards.” 72 Instead, he proposes the “midway point” of the “presumption of equal worth.” According to this presumption, we should grant the equal worth of different cultures until, on the basis of a Gadamerian “fusion” of the other cultural horizons with our own, we are able to derive reasons for either rejecting or affirming the norms of a particular culture.73 Taylor considers this test fair because our decision to reject or affirm other cultures takes their points of view into account (via the “fusion”) in arriving at that decision. The cultures that pass the test can qualify for receiving certain collective rights, but the others, such as white supremacist groups, cannot. The multivoiced body view is in agreement with Taylor’s conclusion that a society must have both individual and collective rights, must practice both a politics of difference as well as a politics of equal dignity. But it also differs with Taylor on this topic in a number of ways. One difference is very general: the multivoiced body view of society speaks of voices rather than cultural identities. The notion of voices includes cultural identities, but also encompasses ones that are often thought of as noncultural, such as occupation, nationality, race, gender, and sexual orientation. Because individuals are nuanced voices, moreover, individual rights are a subset of collective rights. Another difference with Taylor concerns the motive for acknowledging that voices have a right to flourish as well as to survive. For example, Taylor and liberalism see rights as a means to prevent people from being harmed—neither the government nor others should transgress our individual liberties or our cultural identity. Although the multivoiced body view endorses this reason for supporting the politics of difference, it provides a reason that is much stronger than either cultural enrichment or preventing harm through tolerance of other cultures: we are

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the multivoiced body as well as our dominant voice, and therefore our affirmation of ourselves is a celebration of the open interplay among the voices of society. For this reason, we can agree with Susan Wolf’s criticism of Taylor’s thesis of the presumption of mutual worth. She points out that the value of the politics of recognizing particular cultures is not simply to come up with a “fused horizon” that allows us to determine which cultures in our society are worthy of protection. Cultures are not just resources. Rather, this recognition permits us to see those who share our society, that is, to recognize the community we already are and have been all along.74 To take some liberty with her words, Wolf acknowledges and affirms that we and our voices are part of the multivoiced body. That, and not a merit exam, is the reason why we must have both a politics of difference and a politics of dignity. Despite the strong interconnection between the different cultures that make up a given society, the multivoiced body version of the politics of difference does not attempt to guarantee that cultures will survive. It grants them instead the equal audibility they require in order that their enunciators can help them and themselves to develop as part of the ongoing and creative interplay among the voices of the world in a historic period of delimited duration. It is not necessarily an occasion for sadness that some cultures have disappeared as separate entities through the changes in them brought about by interaction with other cultures. This type of disappearance is itself a characteristic aspect of the creative interplay among voices. Furthermore, the “vanished” cultures still live on as “vocal strands” within the new voice that has emerged from their interplay. It is a tragedy, however, when people play little role in the destiny of their culture, that is, when a voice is muted because of conquest or the economic and media power of another culture. The multivoiced body’s principle of justice enjoins us to prevent this form of cultural death from occurring. Clearly, this has important implications for media design, management, and law that go beyond the limits of the present book.75 The most general policy implications of the multivoiced body construal of multiculturalism have to do with rewriting statements concerning human rights and the self-determination of peoples. In particular, I agree with Taylor, Young, and others that significant revisions are needed in the notion of the self-determination of peoples and the meaning of human rights. Traditionally, the notion of “self-determination of peoples” has been defined in terms of sovereign independence and nonintervention.76 In light of our discussion, this notion should be changed from

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“nonintervention” to “nondomination” or “relational autonomy” and then extended to groups like the indigenous people of Chiapas or the Québécois who exist within the national borders of a country. As Young points out, the notion of nondomination allows for the interdependence among groups that exist within the same boundaries. More specifically, Young’s account stipulates that relationships should be structured so that they support the maximal pursuit of the acceptable ends of the different groups in a society. Moreover, governing agents should be able to interfere in actions to promote institutions that minimize domination while taking into account the interests and voices of affected parties.77 Whatever the details and negotiations between the competing situations of these parties, the ultimate aim is to promote justice, that is, the interplay of equally audible voices. For, once again, justice is the multivoiced body, the interplay among its voices, when it is not dominated by an oracle.

Politics and Nihilistic Voices The multicultural examples I have used, the collective rights of the Canadian Québécois and the Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, pose no major threat to basic individual rights. When I mentioned white supremacists in the context of Taylor’s “fusion of horizons,” however, I did not deal with the threat they pose to the rights of others. What, then, is the position of the multivoiced body model when a group might pose such a threat? In other words, how are we to respond to the first of the two problems with which we began this chapter: doesn’t valorization of our own voice mean the affirmation of all the other voices that make up society, including racist, sexist, and other exclusionary social discourses? And if so, how can we justify excluding voices that seem to transgress the entire spirit of the multivoiced body’s principle of justice? The answers to these questions are difficult but result in a resounding “no” to the inclusion of exclusionary voices as policy makers for society. This “no” also introduces “the paradox of excluding excluders.” But racist and other exclusionary voices do much more than attempt like other voices to increase their audibility and be heard over the din of the rest. In their penchant for purity, these voices even go beyond denigrating other groups and attempting to exclude them from political standing; they condemn the very idea of a multivoiced body and deny their own hybrid status and roots in that body. In this condemnation, they also contribute to

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undermining the creative heterogeneity of society and hence the production of new social discourses and the metamorphosis of society—in other words, they deny justice itself. As we saw in chapter 8 on the social unconscious, at least part of the meaning of these exclusionary discourses is their existence as a fear of and reaction against being overwhelmed by the many different voices resounding within their own voices and society. In other words, these exclusionary voices are “nihilistic” in the Nietzschean sense that I presented earlier. Because these nihilistic doctrines undermine the multivoiced body, the other members of society can neither valorize nor ethically cede political power to them. Although it is unacceptable to exclude the voices of others from policy-making power on the basis of a contest for audibility with them, it is legitimate to exclude them from such power if they systematically undermine the multivoiced body and its principle of justice. Only on this basis, the flourishing of the multivoiced body, can we justly exclude excluders who would convert the multivoiced body into a univocal polity. Only on this basis, to revert back to Schmitt’s definition of the political, can we declare that the multivoiced body has “enemies” as well as “friends.” Because it differentiates between those who affirm the multivoiced body and those who would undermine it, this explanation renders “excluding the excluders” nonparadoxical. Despite their exclusion as policy makers, the nihilistic voices will still remain as participants within the multivoiced body. Their enemy status is much less exclusionary than it would be within Schmitt’s “horizon of war.” There are several reasons for continuing to include them as participants. The first is simply a structural or internal consideration: the nihilistic voices resound in all the other voices of society and play a role in the constitution of their social discourses, if only because they are rejected by these voices. Even if we did all we could not to hear them, they would therefore still have audibility, at least as concepts. The second reason is pragmatic and has several branches. First, silencing nihilistic voices would very likely have a dampening effect on discourse within the multivoiced body. The means of eliminating them might well diminish the frequency and openness of dialogue out of fear that one’s own social discourse could contain some strains of nihilism.78 Second, the definition of a nihilistic or politically exclusionary voice is vague. Determining its meaning in general as well as in any particular case would require extensive discussion with the enunciators of the particular social discourse in question—something like the Gadamer/Taylor’s fusion of horizons.

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Silencing what one might think are nihilistic voices would prohibit or at least retard this discussion. The multivoiced body view of society, therefore, tends toward liberalism in its free-speech policies, but does so in the name of the multivoiced body and its principle of justice and not merely as an instantiation of an abstract doctrine of rights. If the arguments I have just presented are compelling, then we are justified in limiting the political status of nihilistic voices within a society that valorizes hearing all its interlocutors. But this is only the first of the two problems with which we began this chapter. Now we must address the issue of the multivoiced body view’s own status: is it an oracle despite its own commitment against oracles? In Schmitt’s terms, is it its own enemy? This question, like the previous one, was raised in the first chapter, and again in the third, and now it is time to see if the multivoiced body model of society is prepared to answer it.

Oracle and Anti-oracle We have seen that the identification of society as a multivoiced body does not lead to the endorsement of nihilistic voices or oracles. But this exclusionary aspect of the identification of society, no matter how legitimate, suggests that the notion of this body might itself be what we have been calling an oracle. Having discredited its nihilistic contenders for the role of lead voice in society, might not the multivoiced body view become the new oracle? We must therefore face the second problem that Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children presented to us: does this identification suffer from the “Indian disease”? Is it a totalizing oracle, one that we have been warned against by a plethora of postmodernists and by most of what I have said in this book? Before answering this question, I want to note that the identification of society as a multivoiced body includes the principle of justice, the interplay of equally audible voices. When we refer to one, then, we refer to the other as well. With this qualification in mind, I claim that the identification of society as a multivoiced body is an oracle and an anti-oracle simultaneously, utopian, in the totalizing and hopeful sense of that term, and anti-utopian.79 The identification is utopian because it indicates a promising direction for political critique and action: the interplay of equally audible voices. It is anti-utopian for two reasons: it makes an impossible demand upon us and is committed to the demise of any of its particular versions. These two anti-utopian aspects call for elaboration.

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First, what is the demand that the multivoiced body view makes of us? It demands that all the voices be equally audible at once—a condition that amounts to Babel and under which we would not be able to hear any of them. But this demand can be reduced to the more reasonable one that asks us only to approximate the ideal of equal audibility. We must do everything in our powers to demarginalize excluded voices and to encourage the flow of exchange on issues of importance. But that requires that we never reach the din of Babel, where equal audibility becomes radical inaudibility. The details of how to avoid this catastrophe must always be worked out locally, but in accordance with the equal audibility ideal as the criterion of good governance. The commitment to the interplay of equally audible voices requires that we hear the other voices of society. This does not mean a flat registration of them; rather, it involves encountering them in a way that opens our own social discourse to possible revision or even its possible replacement if it should happen to already be the leading governmental voice— the chief articulation of the idea of the multivoiced body and its ideal of justice—in society. The multivoiced body commits us, in other words, to valorizing the very conditions that maintain it as a lure for new articulations of itself and thus for the unending contestation over which particular voice will represent society at any given time. This commitment to the demise of any given version of the notion of a multivoiced body is therefore the second reason it is anti-utopian: it intrinsically undermines any finalized version of itself, because it is the continual production of new versions of itself. This second reason for the anti-utopian character of the multivoiced body is stronger than it may at first appear. The multivoiced body not only acts as a lure for articulations of itself; it invites divergent rather than convergent versions of itself, new voices rather than closer approximations to old truths. It differs, then, from the convergence-orientation implicit in Kantian regulative ideas and phenomenological horizons. In operational terms, this anti-utopian aspect of the multivoiced body acts as a disrupter of any pretender to the throne, of any oracle that would attempt to give that body a final destination. Although the identification of society as a multivoiced body encourages divergent versions of what this identification means, it still retains its utopian or directional side in that these articulations or versions are always versions of it, the multivoiced body, and not of something else. However one may try to characterize the multivoiced body, one is always attempting to articulate chaosmos, a

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unity composed of differences, a body whose voices are mutually immanent and mutually transcendent with respect to one another—as is done in Bakhtin’s concept of hybridization, the enigma of The Cave, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children National Conference, or any of the other portrayals that have been given of the multivoiced body in this book. There is no essence upon which these articulations would converge, only a body that gives rise to different articulations of itself and that share at most an unspecifiable “family resemblance.” Interpretations of the multivoiced body that fail are also those that concentrate on its oracular side—the specific direction it provides—and that deny its anti-oracle character. Indeed, these misdirected interpretations are themselves oracular and often result from fear of the multifaceted character of the social body. The other type of failed interpretations are those that err in the opposite direction and attempt to produce worlds that would have absolutely no bearing on one another or for which anything would count as a multivoiced body. We can put the oracular and anti-oracular sides of the idea of the multivoiced body into a formula: the articulations to which this body gives rise about itself are always, as these articulations and as about the multivoiced body, different from one another. The status of the multivoiced body as simultaneously oracular and anti-oracular, as both providing political direction and preventing any privileged specification of that direction, can be clarified further by comparing and contrasting it with several other recent attempts to avoid totalizing identifications of society and justice. I have in mind what Jacques Derrida has called “the messianic without messianism” and what Judith ˇ izˇ ek understand, in different ways, Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Z as an inherently incomplete form of “universality” or, in Laclau’s terms, a form of “hegemony.” 80 I would agree with all these thinkers regarding the validity of the antitotalizing idea of a unity composed of differences. The main question concerns only the most appropriate albeit always provisional way of articulating this kind of political unity.

Derrida’s Messianic Without Messianism Derrida’s most systematic comments about the messianic without messianism are contained in his book Specters of Marx as well as in a reply to critics of that book. In the latter work, Derrida says that “messianicity” is “a universal structure of experience” and “cannot be reduced to

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religious messianism of any stripe,” to any “Utopian” vision. Indeed, this structure of experience is at the same time an “apprehension,” a “straining forward toward the event of him who/that is coming,” and “a waiting without expectation [une attente sans attente].” 81 Negatively, the messianic operates to “interrupt” any attempt at designating the true “son” of Marx or the ultimate International—any attempt, that is, to reduce heterogeneity to a totality.82 Some thinkers take this negative operation of interrupting totalizations to be the whole of the notion of messianicity (and of Derrida’s method of deconstruction),83 in effect equating it with the Nietzschean reactive or nihilistic forces we have already discussed. This impression of Derrida’s position is not lessened when he stresses that an epokhé, or suspension of any content, is “essential to the messianic in general, as thinking of the other and the event to come.” Moreover, he often describes the messianic as a purely formal and anonymous structure wherein what is to come (Marxism, the International, democracy, justice) cannot be “a modality of the living present” or a “future present” and is instead “an experience . . . of the non-living present in the present, of that which lives on . . . beyond all presentation or representability.” 84 Thus “[Marxism as a deconstructive form of critique] belongs to the movement of an experience open to the absolute future of what is coming, that is to say, a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and the event.” 85 Said otherwise, “undecidability” is the very condition for any decision or interpretation that we might make.86 In the face of the messianic, therefore, Derrida limits thought and even his New International to the role of critique in relation to the despised totalizing tendency. The “son” that Derrida favors is the one that engages in selfcritique and does not, for example, exercise himself too much over the core issues of labor and the mode of production, let alone class.87 Thus Derrida says that “the New International belongs only to anonymity.” 88 At this point one might think that Derrida has in fact crowned deconstructive critique as the heir of Marx. But Derrida explicitly denies this idea and claims that he is not concerned with the issue of “legitimate descent.” 89 Then the problem becomes how we can distinguish legitimate descendants from Stalinist and other descendants whom many of us, including Derrida,90 would reject as legitimate heirs of Marx. This issue is exacerbated when Derrida adds that “we would have to do with a waiting for an event, for someone or something that, in order to happen or ‘arrive,’ must exceed and surprise every determinant anticipation.” 91 If this

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indeterminacy is as absolute as Derrida suggests, just how are we to distinguish acceptable and unacceptable sons? How are we to have any idea of what Marxism is “promising” us under this condition? 92 Derrida’s wellplaced fear of totalizations seems to have forced him, against his wishes, to the opposite extreme, the unintentional acceptance of every son. We are therefore forced to fill in the blanks of this descent in our own way. Perhaps this is Derrida’s aim: to keep us vigilantly open to whatever may come and let us decide its acceptability on another level of analysis. But Derrida’s undecidability or messianicity, like his method of deconstruction, is supposed to be universal, is supposed to apply to any level of analysis, including the specific ones on which we find ourselves in practice. Once again, then, we are thrown back on our own resources for selecting among the possible heirs to Marx. In contrast to Derrida’s notion of messianicity, the multivoiced body view is able to take our experience of the open and creative interplay of voices as a partially determinate content for its ideal of justice, for its favored “son (or daughter) of Marx.” We live within this interplay, but, as I have stated, it exists for us as that which is always different as what it is, as divergent expressions that are both about what it is and are it, its constitutive interplay. These expressions or voices vie with one another for increased audibility and, in some cases, to be the most audible voice of society. Unless they are overwhelmed by oracles, they know of what they speak and how their vocalizations of it will always differ—but differ as extensions of that about which they speak, about that which gives rise to their voices in the first place, the multivoiced body, their body. This view preserves Derrida’s antimessianism, that is, it celebrates heterogeneity, but it does not forfeit solidarity, that is, it provides a concrete idea of the type of unity composed of differences that we have been speaking of since first introducing it through reference to a piece of video opera, The Cave. If Derrida should reply by indicating the type of sons he favors, as he seems obligated to do when he rightfully excludes Stalin from their ranks, then the messianic without messianism would have the same status as the multivoiced body and its principle of justice, utopian and anti-utopian at once, and there would be no disagreement between us: the messianic as the structure of experience would also becomes a modality of the present, of experience. But Derrida’s emphasis on a “necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience [of what is to come]” would probably compel him to find too much of the taint of “presence” in my

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insistence that we experience, albeit divergently, what we are part of, the always metamorphosing multivoiced body.

Mouffe and Laclau’s “Hegemony” The multivoiced body’s simultaneous incorporation of solidarity and heterogeneity shows an affinity and a crucial difference with another view of the political that has been influential since its debut in the 1980s. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, provided a “radical democratic strategy” that challenged and presented an alternative to both Western capitalism and the Soviet Union’s nondemocratic form of communism. Today it would, and does, challenge the specter of religious fundamentalism. In his most recent statements, Laclau identifies the notion of hegemony as “an emancipatory discourse which does not dissolve into mere particularism but keeps a universal dimension alive.” 93 This universal dimension, sometimes referred to by Laclau as a “concrete abstract” or an “empty signifier,” emerges out of the interaction of particular groups or “demands.” 94 These demands, “particularities” that are incommensurable with one another, become a “chain of equivalences insofar as all of them are bearers of an antisystem meaning,” that is, insofar as they share a common enemy, for example, the opposition by students, liberal politicians, and other sectors (demands) of society to the Russian tsarist regime. Apart from their common reaction against a “system,” the “equivalence” of these particularities is the “universalization of [their] demands.” Because this universalization is not reducible to any one of the particularities, because, for example, students and farmers nuance “freedom” differently, the universalization is an “empty signifier” or “general equivalent,” unfulfillable by any particularization or representation. As unfulfillable, the empty signifier is a “quasi-transcendental” condition and ensures the “hegemonic” or never finalized structure of society. Concretely, however, one of the particularities must “assume the representation of the chain as a whole.” This representative helps to establish a clear “frontier separating the oppressive regime from the rest of society.” 95 My view shares with Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of hegemony an emphasis upon interplay between heterogeneous positions or agonistic pluralism. It also accepts that any lead voice must simultaneously affirm

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itself and the multivoiced body. It can therefore only be “hegemonic,” in their sense of the term, and not oracular. But my model differs from Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of the hegemonic with respect to solidarity. For Laclau and Mouffe, solidarity is constructed through the formation of the chain of equivalence. But this formation, and the “general equivalent” that emerges from it, is the result of a reaction against an enemy common to all the other particularities of the society.96 Indeed, the term empty signifier for the universal that ensures hegemony rather than totalization may be more apt than one might think: what can it be, if it is truly “empty,” other than pure negation, that is, not-the-enemy or not-the-system? In other words, the empty signifier and the constructed bond or equivalence between the particularities seem to approximate the purely reactionary forces of which Nietzsche speaks. But even if this critique should prove unfounded, the solidarity of the hegemonic group is far more tenuous than the type of solidarity offered by the multivoiced body view. According to this view, the voices are both mutually immanent and mutually transcendent to one another, part of one another’s identity as well as another’s other. For these voices, then, there is a dimension of solidarity (as well as heterogeneity) from the very beginning: it may have to be reinforced or emancipated, but it does not have to be constructed from scratch. The multivoiced body and its “impossible” principle of justice ensures the type of open interplay among positions, as well as the rejection of oracles, rightly prized by Laclau and Mouffe. But it also provides a much stronger sense of solidarity than their view appears to offer.

Immanence and the Promise of The Cave Before summarizing our findings and concluding this book, we need to consider briefly two important topics, ecology and religion. Clearly, the multivoiced body is just one among the many animate and inanimate communities that make up the universe. An ecologically sensitive idea of democracy has to take into account the just or ethical way in which participants in the multivoiced body should interrelate with these other communities. Similarly, there are long established religious traditions that refer to a being or beings that transcend the universe. What should the status of these beliefs be within the multivoiced body, given its ideas of democracy, citizenship, and justice? Although a detailed discussion of these topics would take us far beyond the scope of the present

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book, we need to at least indicate how we might approach them in light of the claim that society is a multivoiced body. In chapter 2, we examined Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of chaosmos and many other aspects of their philosophy. We have seen that our elliptical identity with voices allows the multivoiced body model to overcome the problem of anonymity that I associated with their position, but also that this model shares in the spirit though not the letter of their philosophy: both views emphasize the solidarity, heterogeneity, and creativity of reality—the dynamic whole composed of differences, chaosmos. I also stated that my multivoiced body view is compatible with Deleuze and Guattari’s broader nonmechanistic and nonvitalistic naturalism or “universal machinism.” In particular, it adheres to their principle of immanence— that nothing is imposed upon the universe from the outside, nothing is supernatural. This allows us to make the questions I introduced above more specific: in light of this immanence, how should we understand our relation to ecology and religion? Moreover, how might these fields lend further credibility to the idea of society as a multivoiced body?

Ecology and the Multivoiced Body Ecology concerns the relation between the multivoiced body and the rest of nature. In its strongest form, the ecological viewpoint emphasizes that all beings, sentient or nonsentient, must be given equal ethical standing. For example, the renowned naturalist, Aldo Leopold, holds that “[a] thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” and “is wrong when it tends otherwise.” 97 Some other thinkers fear that this “deep ecology” might inadvertently be a form of “environmental fascism” in that it appears to subordinate the good of rocks, cows, persons, and the other participants in nature to the good of the biosphere as a whole—to its “integrity, stability, and beauty”—in the same way that political fascism sacrifices the wellbeing of the individual for the aggrandizement of the State.98 In contrast to deep ecology, other environmentalists advocate what we might call a differentiated holism. They think of it in ways that are similar to the unity composed of differences or chaosmos that characterizes the multivoiced body. According to differentiated holism, each participant is granted value along with the biosphere taken as a whole.99 This differential evaluation is based on the sense that everything is intrinsically related

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to everything else and yet each part preserves its integrity. Thus “integrity, stability, and beauty” or, to pick other terms, “diversity, fecundity, and spontaneity,” can be affirmed of any animate or inanimate part of the whole as well as of the whole itself. Indeed, if we follow Deleuze and Guattari and allow that nature is shot through with “unnatural participations” or “double-becomings,” fecundity will include the production of new ensembles just as the multivoiced body is always giving rise to new voices and repeated metamorphoses of society. Of course, these affirmations or valorizations will carry different weights according to the value of any part (or the whole) in relation to the other participants in its context. Although both would have value, a person might be worth more than a tree. And what of a rare botanical ecosystem: would it have more value than a person? These considerations show that ecology as differentiated holism adheres to the principle of immanence: the multivoiced body is just one community among others and intermingled with them. It is neither above nor below them; it is different and yet joined to them. But the question that I just raised about a rare ecosystem compared in value-terms with persons shows the difficulty posed by considering the multivoiced body’s ecological status and its relation to the other communities that make up the universe. I will not attempt to provide an answer to that question here. Suffice it to say that participants in the multivoiced body must find ways to listen more attentively to the “voices” of the rest of nature. That will at least increase our sensitivity to these others with which we share a broader identity outside of the multivoiced body itself.100 In other words, it will help us extend our principle of justice beyond the affairs of human voices.

Religion and the Multivoiced Body In the cosmological context, immanence means that there are no gods that transcend the multivoiced body—there is nothing “above” it anymore than there is anything “below” it. The implications of immanence concerning religion are important. Not only do many people understand their lives at least partly in religious terms, but religion has come to play a salient and sometimes overbearing role in local and global politics. In terms of Schmitt’s concept of the political, many religious leaders and

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groups have taken to defining their congregations as friends and everyone else as enemies. On the multivoiced body view, religious voices are just as legitimate, just as worthy of hearing, as secular voices. But, as participants in the multivoiced body, they must acknowledge their dynamic hybridity and that consequently an affirmation of themselves as particular social discourses—religious ones—is also an affirmation of the other voices that intersect with them. This means that religious voices must always hear other voices, allow that their own doctrines can be revised in light of what they hear, and understand that any leadership role they may play in society is necessarily provisional. In short, religious voices must give up the illusion of purity and the absoluteness of their values, that is, they must eschew the pretension of being oracles. But even if they participate in the multivoiced body in the way I have stipulated, many religious discourses will still proclaim the existence of a transcendent God. So long as these beliefs do not violate the creative interplay among the voices of society, they can pass as legitimate policymaking voices within society and as possible interpretations of the multivoice body. But, on the utterly immanent view that I am championing, the multivoiced body itself and the intersecting animate and inanimate communities in which it is involved are God. This God is nothing more than the creative interplay of these communities and that of their participants. We do not worship such a God; we spontaneously celebrate it, and hence ourselves, through participation in the creative exchanges that constitute its being and by resisting the oracles that this “divinity,” perverse as well as fecund, all too often throws up in the way of the voices that resound within it. This immanent God, in other words, is also an anti-God, in that it does not recognize transcendent beings. This God (or anti-God) does not offer immortality or heaven to the members of the multivoiced body. But the contributions we make to voices, either by keeping them in circuit or by creating innovations, will remain so long as these temporal voices continue the interplay among themselves. The enjoyment of our role in these dialogic exchanges is reward enough for life; knowledge of our vocal legacy is at least some compensation for a death that involves no afterlife—but only if we can help ensure that this enjoyment and knowledge is also the case for all those others who, as other, resound within our voices and help make up that second dimension of identity we share as participants in the multivoiced body.101

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Of Every Hue and Caste Diversity has an equivocal meaning in our age: it is viewed as the enrichment of the world and as an impetus for hatred and war. Traditional social and political thought offers only two responses to this dilemma: the envelopment of heterogeneity by a univocal oracle or the establishment of a tenuous modus vivendi among the different groups of society. At the beginning of this book, we saw that a video opera, The Cave, evoked a type of unity composed of differences. This type of unity or identity promised an alternative to the traditional imaginings concerning society and polity. It offered something distinct from the one true religion, the pure race, capital, or other oracles of social and political exclusion and yet did not seem to leave us with chaos or fragmentation. The rest of part 1 and of this book has been an attempt to clarify this type of unity and to fulfill its promise by showing that society is a multivoiced body and then tracing out the consequences of this view. Neither a collection of individuals nor a group spirit, the multivoiced body is a dialogic interplay that simultaneously separates and holds together its participating voices. These voices, in turn, are more than the production of sounds or the expression of ideas: each of them is a social discourse that establishes the identity of those who articulate it and each is always, from the very beginning, interacting with the other voices that make up society. Indeed, the dialogic intersection of these voices means that they are dynamic hybrids, each at once part of the identity and the other of all the rest; each contributing to the constitution of the others and, at the same time, contesting with them for audibility. In part 2, the effort to make these claims transparent and compelling included a deconstructive strategy that established the priority of voices over the subjects, language, and social structures these voices nonetheless require for their existence. In other words, voices constitute an irreducible and unique dimension of society that philosophy has overlooked. This strategy then culminated in the demonstration of the elliptical form of identity that we share with these voices: they are us, and we them, yet they enfold us in a dialogic movement that throws us ahead of ourselves; they capture both the anonymous and personal dimensions of human existence. Part 2 concluded by introducing a novel theory of communication and revealing the latter’s relation to the creation of new voices and the metamorphosis of society. This theory also provided a basis for an ethics influenced by Nietzsche’s ironic idea of the gift-giving virtue. Part 3

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continued the substantiation of the basic claims of part 1 and part 2 by developing a theory of the social unconscious and demonstrating its role in the production of oracles as well as in the continuous attempt to undermine them in the name of the creative and open interplay between the voices of society. It also proposed a concept of network solidarity as the basis for globalization from below, that is, a movement and form of interinvolvement that resists the globalization from above imposed upon us by multinationals and their government allies. In the current and concluding chapter of part 3 and of this book, we saw that the multivoiced body model reveals democracy to be an end in itself, provides a principle of justice, the interplay of equally audible voices, and directly entails workplace democracy. This model also incorporates both individual and collective rights. More specifically, our double identity or citizenship as a particular voice and as a member of society’s multivoiced body justifies and motivates our allegiance to these rights as well as the affirmation of multiculturalism. Moreover, the notion of a multivoiced body and its principle of justice preclude racist, sexist, and other nihilistic social discourses from determining official policy for society and yet is itself as much an anti-oracle as an oracle. Indeed, we have seen that democracy and justice amount to the multivoiced body itself, to the creative interplay among its heterogeneous voices and their resistance to oracles. In the penultimate section of this chapter, I traced out the implications of these thoughts on democracy and justice for our relation to the animate and inanimate communities that intersect with our own and the status of religion in society. But these remarks were kept brief and intended as no more than a promissory note for future work. The argument for the claim that society is a multivoiced body takes heed of postmodernism’s eschewal of a foundationalist epistemology. Rather than appealing to clear and distinct ideas—to principles considered unassailable—or to sense data that are supposed to be self-evidently true, I have marshaled “witnesses” from literature, the arts, science, and, most of all, philosophy, in combination with phenomenological and formal arguments, in order to make my case within the arena of and always relative to contesting views. Indeed, my text is an example of the dialogism it valorizes, and it is also part of a more extensive outpouring among those who value creative interplay between the participants of society and oppose the tradition of oracles that has held sway throughout most of human history. The din of these dissident voices has been growing in audibility and urgency,

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particularly during the last fifty years, that is, during what I have been calling the age of diversity. Their voices, as much as what I have argued overtly, lend evidential weight to my work, to what it has evoked about the character of society, and to its force in engaging opposing discourses. It is appropriate, then, to end this book with the words of the poet Walt Whitman. He preceded the contemporary epoch of this outpouring, but has contributed mightily to it, poignantly acknowledging the dialogic and hybrid character of his own voice as well as that of others: A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons, Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest. I resist any thing better than my own diversity, Breathe the air but leave plenty behind me, And am not stuck up, and am in my place.102

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Notes

1. The Age of Diversity 1. Amy Gutmann, preface and acknowledgments, in Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Roots of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), xiii. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xviii, refers to this problem as “the problem of political liberalism,” and Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108, as the “false dichotomy.” I will discuss the views of Rawls and Young on this topic in chapter 10. 2. Cf. Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 259. 3. Ibid., 253, 257, 285, 311. 4. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Ann Brault and Michael Nass (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 38–39; cited in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 170–71. Despite representing different approaches to philosophy— so-called continental and analytic philosophy, respectively—Derrida and Gutmann both state the problem of diversity and society in similar terms. Moreover, a nonphilosopher, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, director of UN peacekeeping operations, in his The End of the Nation State, trans. Victoria Elliot (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), criticizes laws based only on expediency (138) and is

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equally skeptical of the notion of a universal vision of the good (140). He concludes that “having lost the comfort of our geographical boundaries, we must in effect rediscover what creates the bonds between humans that constitute a community” (139). 5. Modernism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism are difficult to define. But if we refer to these as theories, then modernist theories tend to valorize the notions of unity, identity, and permanence, even when they are skeptical of their actual possibility; postmodernist theories, in contrast, tend to celebrate heterogeneity and novelty. I will use the terms poststructuralism or poststructuralist when I want to emphasize the linguistic side of postmodernism and the historical break that a number of French thinkers made with structuralism. For a comprehensive though partisan treatment of these and related terms, see Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford, 1991). 6. Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, The Cave (London: Boosey and Hawkes/Hendon Music, 1993. 7. Ibid., 17. 8. Ibid., 10. 9. Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1961), 514a–21a. 10. Ibid., 479c. 11. Ibid., 596a–603b. 12. “Ontological” pertains to something’s nature. “Ontologically precedes” or “ontological priority” means that an entity determines the nature of another thing and not the other way around. Thus the “shadows” in Plato’s cave depend on the Forms for their existence and their specific nature. “Epistemology” or “theory of knowledge” has its usual meaning of discovering what constitutes knowledge. 13. José Saramago, The Cave, trans. Margaret Jill Costa (New York: Harcourt, 2002). 14. Ibid., 304–5. 15. The term oracle has several meanings within the history of its use, particularly forecasting the future. But it is here intended to convey the idea of coming from everywhere and nowhere, of claiming the future (and often the past) for itself, and remaining impervious to criticisms that others might have of it. 16. See Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 3–18. 17. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 287, charge at least the “more extreme versions” of postmodernism with linguistic idealism. 18. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1977), 113–14. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), 309. Note that where Nietzsche is often taken as having an elitist idea of who these “gods” might be, I take them to be all the participants in a multivoiced body not plagued by oracles.

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The “controverting relations” among these “gods” are nonetheless often serious and for high stakes.

2. History of the Dilemma 1. Quoted in Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 22. The comments on religion in the next paragraph are based on Cohn’s book. 2. Ibid., 21. 3. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Bollingen, 1961), 52a–b. 4. Ibid., 50c–e. 5. Ibid., 52d–53b. 6. Ibid, 50d. 7. Cohn, 22. Cohn indicates, however, that sometimes the ancient Egyptians understood chaos as an “undifferentiated, unitary state” (6). 8. See Ernest Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F. Koellen and J. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 22–23; and Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), 7. 9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 114–15. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 62–64. 11. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 224. 12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962, repr., 1989), 6, 254. 13. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Northwestern University Press, 1964), 10. For Hegel and Merleau-Ponty on reason, see Christopher P. Nagel, Merleau-Ponty’s Hegelianism (Ph.D. diss., Duquesne University, 1996), chaps. 4, 5. 14. Stephen H. Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), ix. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 44–46. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 168. 17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and Richard Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 550. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 48. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 36–40, 74–79. Cf. Gilles

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Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), chapter 2. 20. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 31–34. 21. Ibid., 77. 22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), 309. 23. Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (New York: Random House, 1995), 95. 24. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 25. 25. Ibid., 26. 26. Ibid., 19. 27. Ibid., 62. For changes in Bakhtin’s treatment of Rabelais’s on carnival and the self, see the contrasting accounts by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 89–96; and Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 181–95. 28. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 170. 29. Maria Lugones, “Purity, Impurity, Separation,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (2): 460. For other work on the idea of mestizaje, see Linda Alcoff, “Mestizo Identity,” in Naomi Zack, ed., American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 1995); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2d ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999); and Rita De Grandis and Zilá Bernd, eds., Unforseeable Americas: Questioning Cultural Hybridity in the Americas (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 30. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London: Verso, 1987), 48, 127. 31. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López, foreword by Renato Rosaldo (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 9. 32. Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994), 27–28. 33. Hamid Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 34. This does not mean that all types of hybridity or all kinds of exile status are the same: the meaning of hybridity or exile is shaped by the political, social, and economic circumstances in which it occurs. Naficy’s exile from Iran and Lugones’s mestiza status in the United States carry meanings that are additional to the meaning of the hybridity and exile that I am claiming is a constituent part of the existential condition of all linguistic beings. 35. See my review of the articles in De Grandis and Bernd, Unforseeable Americas, Symposium 8(1): 168–73. 36. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1939), 118. 37. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans. Ellen Esrock (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 62; cf. Philip

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Kuberski, Chaosmos: Literature, Science, and Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), chapter 2. 38. Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, 65. Contrary to Eco, I think metaphors set up the same sort of general tension that he attributes to puns. See my chapter “Cognitive Psychology and Metaphor” in Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 39. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free, 1978), 66, and The Adventure of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 153–54. Whitehead, Process and Reality, also compares this primordial solidarity with Plato’s notion of the “Receptacle” or “chora” (66). Jorge Luis Nobo, Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), argues convincingly that Whitehead implicitly includes the extensive continuum among the “formative elements” of his philosophy he cites explicitly: “creativity,” “the primordial nature of God,” and “eternal objects” (54). More specifically, Nobo claims that creativity is not the ultimate reality posited by Whitehead’s organic philosophy—it is one aspect of that reality, and the extensive continuum is the other (54, 207). 40. Whitehead, The Adventure of Ideas, 198–99. 41. “Any set of actual occasions are united by the mutual immanence of occasions, each in the other” (ibid., 199); “Every item in the universe, including all the other actual entities, is a constituent in the constitution of any one actual entity” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, 148). I take the precise phrase “the mutual immanence of mutually transcendent elements” from Nobo’s discussion of Whitehead’s notion of “the extensive continuum” (Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 21–23, 51–52). 42. Whitehead, The Adventure of Ideas, 158. 43. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 245–47. 44. Ibid., 244–47. Unlike the traditional notion of God, Whitehead’s God is partially established as what it is by its relations to the rest of reality. Its transcendence is qualified but still imposes itself in an omnipotent manner on the rest of reality. 45. Tim Clark, “A Whiteheadian Chaosmos? Process Philosophy from a Deleuzian Perspective,” in Catherine Keller and Anne Daniell, eds. Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 192, contrasts Deleuzian immanent order (“generated from within’) and Whiteheadian transcendent order (“imposed from without”). He argues correctly that Deleuze’s endorsement of Whitehead’s God in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) only works because Deleuze misinterprets Whitehead’s God as being able to hold together “incompossibles” without placing any limitations on them, that is, Deleuze mistakenly believes Whitehead to have achieved a “synthesis of total affirmation [of heterogeneity]” (Clark, “A Whiteheadian Chaosmos? ” 196, 202). 46. Although Deleuze and Guattari have separately and together presented different versions of their cosmology, I will focus primarily on one of their joint

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works, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), hereafter TP. 47. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al., Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2 (New York: New, 1998), 343. 48. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 174–76, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 123–24, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 118, 207. 49. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 204–8; Deleuze, Logic of Sense, xiii, 111, 176, 264; Deleuze, The Fold, 81, 137; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 57, 123, 199, 219. 50. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 267. 51. “It is no longer the Platonic project of opposing the cosmos to chaos. . . . It is indeed, the very opposite: the immanent identity of chaos and cosmos, being in the eternal return, a thoroughly tortuous circle” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 128). 52. See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 179. 53. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 180. See also Difference and Repetition, 199, 219. In this latter book, Deleuze characterizes Being in terms of difference and repetition. Being is the repetition of difference rather than of the same; what is the same or oneness of being is only the repetition of difference: repetition is “the peculiar power of difference” (300, 301). Parenthetically, the notion of “Idea” (not to be confused with ideas in the mind) in this earlier work becomes in the later work an “abstract machine,” “repetition” becomes the “movement of absolute deterritorialization,” and “difference” the continual “drawing” or “construction” of planes of consistency and the assemblages that issue from this activity. 54. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 179. 55. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 304. 56. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 382. Deleuze and Guattari are speaking here of what they call “desiring production.” But desiring production is the key event in Anti-Oedipus. Like Being, it is the production of differences. Remembering that any event is always a happening, that is, temporal, each of them, like desiring-production, “is always and already complete as it proceeds and as long as it proceeds.” 57. Ibid., 180, 64, 59. 58. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 64, 165. 59. Thus Deleuze and Guattari say that a becoming “does not stand outside history but is instead ‘prior’ to history” and that “all history does is translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession” (TP 142, 430).

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60. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes Aeon as “the hinge” or “the form of empty time” through which “pass the throws of the dice” (284). This is the same description he gives of the “third [and most basic because groundless] synthesis” of time, the “eternal return.” He says that the latter makes a “condition” out of the past (a past that never “was present”) and an “agent” out of the present or “imminent future.” But this empty form of time also “effaces” the latter two determinations—the past and present—in its and the event’s becoming, so only a new becoming or difference “returns” (ibid., 88–91, 93–94, 298–99, 301). This is exactly what Being does to itself as a becoming—it effaces itself as Being, that is, as something already completed. 61. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 180. 62. Ibid., 180. 64. 63. See the discussion in “Chaosmos: Deleuze and Guattari.” I provide a thorough treatment of Deleuze’s use of “voice” in “Deleuze, Bakhtin and the ‘Clamour of Voices,’” Deleuze Studies 2(2): 178–200. 64. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 111. 65. Deleuze and Guattari also refer to the plane of consistency as “the plane of Nature,” “the plane of life,” or “plane of immanence.” 66. For the difference between the glance and other modes of perception, see, Edward S. Casey, “The World at a Glance,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 67. The original discussion of this topic (“morphological” versus “ideal” essences and concepts), to which Deleuze and Guattari refer, is in Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 207–21. Descartes and most philosophers have traditionally thought of the elements of nature as fully determinate, that is, fully complete except for the causal, spatial, or other external relations that they might then enter into, or except for the necessary, intrinsic stages through which they then must still pass. The notions of a plane of consistency and its anexactness challenge this tradition. 68. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 233. 69. A fuzzy aggregate is a “synthesis of disparate elements” that is “defined only by a degree of consistency that makes it possible to distinguish the disparate elements constituting that aggregate (discernibility)” (TP 344). 70. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze distinguishes between the “empirical” and “transcendental” exercise of our “faculties.” In the latter case we “encounter” (rather than “recognize” or represent) the anexact dimension of reality (139). See also TP 282–84. 71. A multiplicity is composed of heterogeneous elements and is the most basic organization in the Deleuze and Guattari cosmology; it can be either a hierarchical, “aborescent” arrangement of elements or a “rhizomatic” (and chaosmosic) arrangement in which the togetherness of the elements is not due to any “One” or totalizing element. These two types of multiplicities always exist together, aborescent multiplicities as “knots” in the rhizomatic ones, and rhizomatic multiplicities

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as “offshoots” in the “roots” of the aborescent ones (TP 20–21, 32–33). Ultimately, however, the rhizomatic multiplicity always prevails—nature, in other words, is chaosmos. Sometimes Deleuze and Guattari speak as if assemblages are the basic reality (TP 22). But elsewhere they claim that assemblages are only the kind of multiplicities called “territorial,” and are “extracted” from the milieus of organic strata (TP 323, 406, 503). For brevity’s sake, I will usually speak as if assemblages are the basic multiplicities in nature and society. 72. In Difference and Repetition, actuality arises directly from the virtual; in TP the plane of organization assists in the actualization of the virtual plane of consistency. 73. Deleuze and Guattari refer to deterritorialization and reterritorialization (a movement reacting against absolute deterritorialization) as “dimensions” or “directions in motion” (TP 21). As one of their comments about territorial assemblages indicates, the assemblage itself is motion (TP 55). Strictly speaking, Deleuze and Guattari designate “destratification” and “stratification” instead of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” as the terms appropriate for speaking about sandstone formations, crystallization, and other inanimate multiplicities (TP 502–3). But they often use the latter two terms generically, and I will adopt that practice here for convenience’s sake. 74. For “absolute,” “relative” and other forms of deterritorialization, see TP 56, 508–10. The term line of flight is contained in the diagram, along with two other types of “lines.” These three lines are more specific ways in which deterritorialization and reterritorialization play out their dynamic roles in reorganizing the “organs” of the assemblage’s “body.” Typically, the molar line assists the plane of organization and reterritorialization, and the line of flight favors deterritorialization; the supple line sometimes aids the one, sometimes the other line (TP 222–23). 75. Deleuze and Guattari say that the plane of consistency always overcomes this oblivion (TP 508; 285, 503). This would imply that Being itself could never become a line of oblivion. This implication also coheres with the primacy assigned to the plane of consistency and absolute deterritorialization. 76. Deleuze and Guattari say that a “concrete line,” which is associated with “striated space” and the plane of organization, tries to subordinate the “abstract line” and “smooth space” in order to “ward off anxiety” over composed chaos. The abstract line, in contrast, is both presupposed by the concrete line and is motivated by creativity rather than anxiety (TP 496–97). 77. As if to emphasize its importance, the very last sentence in TP is the single word, “Mechanosphere” (514). Deleuze and Guattari also suggest that the mechanosphere is itself an “immense Abstract Machine” and “the plane of consistency of Nature,” even Being itself, in which all forms intersect and all assemblages are interconnected as parts of it. Deleuze and Guattari also hold that the plane of consistency is the intersection of all multiplicities, forms, and becomings (TP 252, 254). This seems to make the plane of consistency and the mechanosphere equivalent. 78. Deleuze and Guattari define refrains as rhythms or melodies that have become expressive and are self-movements as well as simultaneously territorialized

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and territorializing. A bird song is an example of a refrain when it functions as part of a mating ritual and converts a tract of land into the bird’s territory. 79. TP 91: “[Superlinearity is] a plane whose elements no longer have fixed linear order”; see also TP 62. 80. In Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand and Paul Bové (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), Deleuze uses the work of Foucault to provide another example: modern, “disciplinary” society consists of a) the form of expression or “sayability” as “penal law or the statement of delinquency” (a new form of criminality), and the substance of expression as the “delinquent” established by the new criminal code, and b) the form of content or “place of visibility” as “prison and the panopticon,” and the substance of content as “prisoners” (67). Note that the collective assemblage of expression in this example (penal law/delinquent) and in the example used in the main text (the juridical regime of heraldry/words, insignias) could also serve as instances of the “territorial refrain.” 81. See Wesley C. Salmon, Causality and Explanation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 37. 82. Gilles Deleuze, “Bergson’s Conception of Difference,” in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 62. 83. My use of founding and founded in this context is based on Merleau-Ponty’s version of the Husserlian idea of fundierung. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 127, 394. 84. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 96. 85. See TP 315–16, 320–21, 332. See also Ronald Bogue, “Art and Territory,” in Ian Buchanan, ed., A Deleuzian Century? (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 85–102; and Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 1999), 170–79. 86. This account of the emergence of new orders avoids the torturous and unconvincing attempts to show how, for example, life is mechanistically caused by self-replicating crystals in combination with “protein fragments.” Cf. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 155–63. Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the becoming of a new stratum is similar to Nietzsche’s claim that the emergence of “bad conscience” and socialized humanity was a “leap” rather than a “a gradual or voluntary . . . organic adaptation to new conditions” (Genealogy, 86). 87. Because they “tie back to one another,” the movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization do not constitute dualism, for example, Descartes’ absolute division between a substance whose essence is thinking and a substance whose essence is spatial extension (TP 9). 88. Sometimes Deleuze and Guattari equate deterritorialization with desire, and add that desire does not exist in abstraction from assemblages; it is thus “tied” to reterritorialization and, hence, not “vitalistic” in the pejorative sense of a force that creates without constraint (TP 399, and Anti-Oedipus, 285). This constitutes a reply to Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006) and his charge of vitalism against Deleuze, that is, a reply to his incorrect claim, at least in relation to Anti-Oedipus and TP if not Difference

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and Repetition, that change, time, and history are in no way mediated by actuality (Hallward, Out of This World, 162). 89. Deleuze and Guattari discuss this example in three places in their text, each of which must be read to get all the details of orchid-wasp becoming: TP 10–11, 238–39, 293–94. 90. For an extended discussion of current biology theory and these mergers across species, see Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 161–68, 178, 179–85. See his work also for Deleuze and Guattari’s convergence with and divergence from the innovative physics/biology theory of “autopoiesis” or “complexity” and “selforganization” (168–79). According to Ansell Pearson, the self-organizing assemblages of Deleuze and Guattari have a built-in disequilibrium (deterritorialization) and are dedicated to the production of novelty, whereas the autopoiesis of Stuart Kaufmann, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); or of Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991) remain tied to the ideas of survival and self-maintenance. 91. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari argue that innate mechanisms and learning are partially undone in the initial territorialization of organisms and their surroundings (TP 331–33). 92. Parenthetically, the notion of blocks of becoming also squares with Deleuze and Guattari’s “reverse causality” account of becoming. The “unnatural participation” of the orchid’s becoming with that of the wasp’s gives rise to and is simultaneously “piloted” by the diagram of the orchid-wasp assemblage that is coming into being. This new block of becoming (the “going to happen”) transforms the wasp and orchid assemblages (the “has just happened”) into the causes necessary for its own actualization, that is, into the orchid-with-the-wasp-image and the evolutionary laws to which it will now be subordinate on the plane of organization. This actualization of the event’s “diagram,” however, is already the new assemblage’s undoing, its passage beyond itself to yet another realization of the becoming it just was and is still going to be, but always differently. 93. Some of Deleuze and Guattari’s radical notions parallel those found in contemporary physics: the anexactness of “haecceities” or “intensities” on the plane of consistency are akin to elementary particles without mass, charge, size and to so-called superstrings and fractals; see Brian L. Silver, The Ascent of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 391–92, 407, 410; Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar (New York: Freeman, 1994), 178–79, 140; and Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos, 73–75; and chance and the interconnectedness of becomings, their mutual containment and entanglement with one another, is shared by the particles of quantum physics—David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (New York: Routledge, 1980), 177; Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar, 140, 367; Peter Kosso, Appearance and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 139–50, 159; and Silver, The Ascent of Science, 378–400.

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94. For a systematic and powerful statement about Deleuzian ethics and politics, see Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2000), 9, and the entire “Introduction.” Deleuze and Guattari sometimes refer to their ethics as an “ethology” (TP 257, 336) as well as speak of the possible advent of a new “cosmic people” and a “cosmic earth” (TP 346). 95. They also say that certain phenomena, such as the pilgrimages among salmon or supernumerary assemblies among locusts, “are no longer territorialized forces bundled together as forces of the earth; they are the liberated or regained forces of a deterritorialized Cosmos” (TP 336). 96. I will discuss Derridean deconstruction further in chapter 4. For now, note that Derridean deconstruction always terminates in one version or another of Derrida’s key concept of différance. Chaosmos can be thought of as a substantive version of Derrida’s formalistic différance. 97. Michel Foucault, “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 221–22. In Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1 (New York: New, 1997), Foucault identifies two important characteristics of the Enlightenment: humanism and critique. He repudiates the former but praises the latter. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), castigates what he calls the postmodern attack on humanism (10), but then equates the latter with critique (22, 43) and not univocal subjects. Thus one must be careful in using this extremely important term. 98. Deleuze and Guattari’s explicit argument concerning the ego and self is presented in Anti-Oedipus rather than in TP. The “desiring machine” is roughly equivalent to the “abstract machine” in TP. 99. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 26, 36–37. In these connective syntheses, the machine “breaks” into a “material flow” and produces a new flow that will be cut into by other machines. Each machine or desire comes into being at the same time as it breaks the flow and produces the new one. It therefore produces “reality,” a reality of flows. 100. Ibid., 38–39. 101. Ibid., 40–41. The body without [fixed] organs refers to the malleability of an assemblage’s plane of consistency: “The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism” (TP 158; see also TP 61, 159–61, 171–72, 285). We are primordially the nonvoluntary forces that reside beneath the conscious ego: “You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects” (262; see also 269). 102. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 43. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze speaks of “thousands” of “little contemplative selves” that “underlie,” are “adjacent to,” and make possible the so-called active subject—“it is always a third party who says

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‘me’” (75; 218, 258–59). For a helpful exposition of these three modes, see Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1999). 103. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 88. For the contrast between Deleuze’s theory of the subject as presented in Difference and Repetition and that of Kant, see Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality,” in Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996). 104. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 70–73. 105. Ibid., 362. 106. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 28–29. 107. Ibid., 4. Nietzsche contrasts “the activity of fights which are contests” with the “activity of fights of ambition.” In a contest or “agon,” the activity is honored as much as or more than the outcome: “That is the core of the Hellenic notion of the contest: it abominates the rule of one and fears its dangers; it desires, as a protection against the genius, another genius” (“Homer’s Contest,” in The Portable Nietzsche, 371.)

3. Society as a Multivoiced Body 1. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin, 1980), 271–74. 2. Ibid., 458. 3. Ibid., 306. 4. In performing an epoché, one suspends or places within brackets one’s accepted beliefs about the world. These beliefs are suspended so that the world can be interrogated on its own terms. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 156; 110–11. 5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Willmoore Kendall (Chicago: Regnery, 1954), 38, 55. 6. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 491. For different ways of understanding Hegel’s notion of absolute spirit, see David Kolb, The Critique of Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 242–44; for the view that “absolute spirit” does not refer to a “metaphysical supersubject” and that Hegel allows for divergence much more than he is usually given credit for, see Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx’s Capital: Replies to Hegelian Criticisms (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), chapter 1. 7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 76. See also 16. 8. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. J. W. Gough (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), chapter 2, section 6. 9. Ibid., chapter 9, secs. 123, 124, and chapter 8, section 96. 10. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in The Oxford Book of American Verse, ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 308.

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11. Herman Melville, Redburn (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 169. 12. Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Random House, 1995), 410. 13. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 577. 14. Subcomandante Marcos, transcribed in Chiapas 3:112, quoted in John Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” in Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, ed. J. Holloway and E. Peláez (London: Pluto, 1996), 77. Marcos’s and the Zapatistas’ emphasis on hybridity echoes the thoughts of a host of Latin American figures who have seen cultural hybridity as a virtue and characteristic of their continent. 15. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in The Portable James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (New York: Penguin, 1946), 332–33. 16. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 288. 17. Ibid., 291. See also 364–65. 18. Ibid, 356. Presumably, Russian, English, and other “national languages” are as much social languages as the more specific discourses that borrow from them and fill them out from within (288–91). 19. For a discussion of Bakhtin’s notion of voice relating it to current studies of language by psychologists, see James V. Wertsch, Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). In his Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), Bakhtin speaks of voice as involving “personality” and defines it as including “height, range, timbre, aesthetic category (lyric, dramatic, etc.) . . . [and] a person’s worldview and fate” (293). 20. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 291–92. 21. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 47. 22. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), Deleuze and Guattari make use of Bakhtin’s linguistic notions (82–84). 23. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 358; see also 304–5. 24. Ibid., 358–60. Bakhtin works through a litany of subtypes of intentional hybridization that I will omit here. He also emphasizes that in the novel the “individual element” in hybridization is always merged with the “socio-linguistic element,” so that “two socio-linguistic consciousnesses” rather than just two consciousnesses are at play (360). 25. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 185, 189. 26. Ibid., 193. 27. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 110. 28. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, 5th ed. (Chicago: McClurg, 1904), 3. 29. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London: Verso, 1993), 48. 30. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 76, 209.

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31. See the preface and acknowledgments for my involvement in Laos. 32. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 366–67. 33. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 270. 34. Ibid., 18, 63–64, 68. See also Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 99. 35. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 63. 36. Ibid., 270. 37. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 366–67. 38. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 71–72. 39. Ibid., 73. 40. Ibid., 21, 249–50. 41. Ibid., 279–80. 42. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 362; see also Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 92. 43. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 196. 44. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 272. 45. See Katrina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) for contrasting positions on the authorship of texts written by the school’s members. 46. V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 141. The forms are given in French. 47. Ibid., 129. 48. Ibid., 155. 49. Ibid., 151. 50. Voloshinov provides a historical materialist explanation for why different forms of discourse predominate in particular historical periods (Marxism, 123). In the case of quasi-direct discourse, he emphasizes how it allows both the speaker’s speech and the reported speech to approach equal audibility. He then argues that its dominance in contemporary times is due to the “general, far-reaching subjectivization of the ideological word-utterance” (158). This phenomenon amounts to the subordination of responsible social positions, implemented in an utterance’s ideational core, to the relativity of opinions. This subordination itself is due to the “alarming instability and uncertainty of the ideological word” that marks the bourgeois culture and their political-economical standing in the West during the first third of the twentieth century (158–59). In contrast, the works under Bakhtin’s signature take indirect discourse, or double voicing, as emblematic of language (see Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, 124–25). 51. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 71–84: “style,” see 96–97, “composition,” 64. 52. “Paradigmatic” and “syntagmatic” come from Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986), 121–22. 53. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 282.

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54. Ibid. Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, 204, say that this background is the “totality of the dialogues within us” and is an analogue to Voloshinov’s notion of “reported speech”: because of our apperceptive background, we in effect “report on,” and receive in the manner provided for by that background, every speech utterance we hear and understand. I will have more to say on this issue in the chapter 7. 55. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 200. 56. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 276–78, 293–94. 57. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 256–58. 58. See Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). 59. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 293–94. 60. Ibid., 276. 61. Ibid., 278. 62. David Appelbaum, Voice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), x, 133–35, 137–40. 63. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 111: “The mind listens to the voice of reason within itself, which demands totality for all given magnitudes, even for those that we can never apprehend in their entirety.” 64. For the distinction between “expression” and “indication,” see Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, vol. 1 (New York: Humanities, 1970), 280; Jacques Derrida’s, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 43, 45n4; and Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2002), chapter 7. For the position that Husserl later indicates a possible repudiation of the priority of expression over indication, see Anthony J. Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 211–12. 65. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, trans. and ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 213, 216, see also 193, 199, 241; and Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 39, 65. In Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1992), 114, Heidegger specifically subordinates voice to Being: “We must note that the essence of saying does not consist in vocal sound but in the voice [Stimme] in the sense of soundless attuning [Stimmenden], signaling, and bringing the essence of man to itself, bringing it, namely, into its historical destiny [Bestimmung]: in its way of being the ‘there,’ i.e., as the ecstatic clearing of Being.” In light of such passages and other considerations, Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity, 244–48, 252–55, finds Heidegger emphasizing unity at the expense of difference. But other commentators would dispute this conclusion or hold that Heidegger is conflicted on the issue—see Christopher Fynsk’s comments in his “Foreword,” in Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xii–xxv, xxx. The

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subtlety of Heidegger’s philosophy prevents me from making a final judgment on what he meant by the “same” until I have an opportunity to write an essay on his use of “voice.” 66. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 3. 67. Nancy even equates speech primordially with opening of the mouth—like the kiss—a knowledge that is prior to “recognition,” especially that found in the Hegelian tradition, rather than with the involvement of social languages (30–31). 68. Fynsk, “Foreword,” xxx, shares my view that voices cannot be prior to language, but he does so from a Derridean point of view. 69. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1. 70. Ibid., 10. 71. Ibid., 10.1, 64. 72. Ibid., 64–65. 73. Ibid, 84–85; and Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 4. Agamben’s characterization of singularities as “pure exposure” and “pure exteriority” (66) is similar to Nancy’s (xxxvii–xxxviii). 74. Agamben, The Coming Community, 64–65: “[If humans could be] a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity—if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable. Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that allow for survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only itself—this is the political task of our generation.” 75. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), 45–46, 49. 76. Ibid., 50. 77. Ibid., 54, 143–44. 78. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 72: “Justice consists in recognizing in the Other my master.” 79. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London: Routledge, 2000), 35. 80. David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 65. 81. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 183, 181–95. 82. Cavarero says that she “transgresses” Arendt’s political criteria when she, Cavarero, claims that “the exhibitive action coincides here with a self-narration” (Relating Narratives, 59); autobiography is, contrary to Arendt, effective, because it leads to the possibility of another narrating the story back to the self-narrator (ibid., 62–63). 83. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 273.

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84. For a critical discussion of postmodern figures from a Bakhtinian perspective, see Michael Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1992). 85. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 292. 86. Andrew L. Blais, On the Plurality of Actual Worlds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), argues that Foucault in his archaeological period and Quine, Putnam, Goodman, and other analytic philosophers at least inadvertently support the plurality of worlds thesis. Blais himself presents an argument for the claim that there are as many actual worlds as there are distinct purposes and associated sets of representations and representing beings. In contrast, I will argue that heterogeneity does allow for a sort of common “uncommon world.” 87. Bakhtin does state that “dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return again to dialogue on a higher level (a dialogue of personalities)” (Speech Genres, 162), but provides no details as to what exactly he means. 88. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 445. See also Michael Gorra, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 137–38. 89. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 306–7. 90. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 271. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., 271–72. 93. Ibid., 273. 94. Ibid, 272. Bakhtin explicitly uses the term dialogized heteroglossia in only two passages (ibid., 272–73), each concerning the opposition between “heteroglossia” and “monoglossia.” But one would be correct, following Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, 143, to use this term to cover all utterances; for Bakhtin clearly holds that all utterances involve a contestation among different voices or languages. 95. See Gorra, After Empire, 121, 141–42. 96. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 21. 97. Ibid., 228. 98. Ibid., 265; cf. Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, 236–37, 254. 99. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 237. 100. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 11. 101. For a similar view of “immortality,” see Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 91, 95.

4. Modernism and Subjectivity 1. Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism? trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 6. 2. Jacques Derrida outlines these steps of deconstruction in “Signature Event Context,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 329. He uses the example of inverting the hierarchical order of

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“speech” and “writing,” then “displacing” or reinscribing “writing” with a meaning that is a new concept of writing, one equivalent to his concept of différance and one that emphasizes meanings of writing that he feels were hidden in the traditional use of that term. 3. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 56. 4. See Owen Flanagan, The Science of the Mind, 2d ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 21–22, for a summary of objections to mind-body dualism. 5. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 49. 6. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 104–6. 7. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 21–22. 8. Ibid., 22. 9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge/Humanities, 1962), 4. 10. Ibid., 28. This is a variant of the well-known dilemma of knowledge that Plato presents in the Meno, which Merleau-Ponty recapitulates (ibid., 371). 11. This separation is necessary for avoiding circular explanations. For example, explaining radio static on the basis of magnetic storms on the sun requires that I verify the latter independently of the radio static. See Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), 43–44. 12. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 132: “This subject-object dialogue, this drawing together, by the subject of the meaning diffused throughout the object, and by the object, of the subject’s intentions—a process which is physiognomic perception—ranges round the subject a world which speaks to him of himself, and gives his own thoughts their place in the world.” 13. This distinction is influenced by Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 14. Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 83–84. 15. Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59:433–60. 16. See Flanagan, The Science of the Mind, 216–24. 17. For a model/application of classical cognitivism, see George A. Miller and Phillip N. Johnson-Laird, Language and Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 18. See Geoffrey K. Pullum, “Generative Grammar,” in Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, eds., The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 340–42. 19. Miller and Johnson-Laird, Language and Perception, 290. Thinking of cognition as proto-natural science is pervasive among cognitive scientists. See Paul M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 114, 277; and Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 380.

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20. Clark, Being There, 54. 21. For a clear presentation of connectionist networks, see Churchland, The Engine of Reason. Churchland advocates “eliminative materialism,” the claim that our usual categories for talking about our mental activity, “folk psychology,” amount to a discredited theory and can be replaced, in principle, by theories that speak only of the brain and its interaction with the physical-chemical environment. On this view, the mind is reducible to the brain and psychology to neurophysiology (203–8). 22. See Clark, Being There, 147. 23. See Miller and Johnson-Laird, Language and Perception, 44. 24. J. L. McClelland, D. E. Rumelhart, and G. E. Hinton, “The Appeal of Parallel Distributed Processing,” in D. E. Rumelhart, J. L. McClelland, and the PDP Research Group, eds., Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, vol. 1 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 10. 25. I have followed Churchland’s example of vector processing in face recognition (The Engine of Reason, 42–55). 26. Andy Clark, Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 72–73. 27. Ibid., 73–82. 28. William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen, Connectionism and the Mind: An Introduction to Parallel Processing in Networks (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 2; Churchland, The Engine of Reason, 114; Clark, Being There, 179–80. 29. Clark, Being There, 168. 30. Ibid., xii. 31. Ibid., 215. 32. Ibid., 148, 172–73; J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1979); Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). 33. Tim Van Gelder, “Dynamic Approaches to Cognition,” in Wilson and Keil, The MIT Encyclopedia, 244–46. 34. Ibid., 45. 35. Clark, Being There, 101–2, 120–23. 36. Ibid., 198. 37. Ibid., 202. 38. Ibid., 207–8. 39. Despite appearances to the contrary, Gibson’s realist view (The Ecological Approach) also assumes separation between the subject and its surroundings. See Fred Evans, Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 122–24. 40. Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus, “Making a Mind Versus Modeling the Brain: Artificial Intelligence at a Branch Point,” in Stephen R. Graubard, ed., The Artificial Intelligence Debate: False Starts, Real Foundations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 38.

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41. See Eric Lormand, “Frame Problem,” in Wilson and Keil, The MIT Encyclopedia, 326–27; and, for an exhaustive treatment that claims this problem is unsolvable by artificial intelligence techniques, see Larry J. Crockett, The Turing Test and the Frame Problem: AI’s Mistaken Understanding of Intelligence (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1994); see also Evans, Psychology and Nihilism, 111–24. 42. In Evans, Psychology and Nihilism, 115–17, I have applied this argument against the “mental model” account of self consciousness that Philip N. JohnsonLaird presents in his Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). From a different angle, the distinction between “phenomenal consciousness” (what we are knowingly aware of ) and “access consciousness” (what we are unknowingly aware of ) has received solid experimental verification. For example, the experimentally controlled behavior of sightless people exposed to visual cues indicates that they register the latter even though they are not consciously aware of them. See Martin Davis, “Consciousness,” in Wilson and Keil, The MIT Encyclopedia, 190–92. According to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body, the difference between these two consciousnesses would amount only to the difference between focal and peripheral consciousness: the body’s “hold on” or “opening onto” the world is global, but some aspects are focal and others not. Sightless people thus “pick up” the visual cues in a conscious but peripheral manner, sufficient for them to register their presence but not directly report them. Unlike the situation for sighted persons, visual cues are permanently peripheral for sightless persons. 43. John R. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3.3:417–24; and Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83 (October 1974): 435–50. 44. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 182, 187–90. 45. Ibid., 182. 46. Nietzsche speaks of at least three different stages of nihilism in Will to Power, book 1, notes 12–15. The most basic of these appears to be an inability to value chaos and thus to substitute another, more permanent world, for it (though belief in this permanent world ends up undermining itself and giving rise to a second form of nihilism, the one Dennett concentrates on). Nietzsche then ironically proclaims a healthier form of nihilism: one that embraces chaos and should therefore be called antinihilism. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 147–48. 47. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 148–56. 48. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 21. See also Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 25–27, and The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 292. We could say that Nietzsche subscribes to a “transfigurative naturalism”: “When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to ‘naturalize’ humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature”? (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 169).

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49. See Evans, Psychology and Nihilism, also “Genealogy and the Problem of Affirmation in Nietzsche, Foucault, and Bakhtin,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 27(3): 41–65. 50. Clark, Being There, 211. In The Engine of Reason, 264–71, Churchland argues that human, like animal, consciousness and computation is connectionist all the way up. He does allow, however, that the content of human consciousness is vastly increased over that of animals: language allows humans to have a form of “extrasomatic memory” (we can write things down and pass them on to new generations) and “collective cognition” (we can combine our intellectual forces in order collectively to solve problems). Apart from the extent of the role of massive parallel-processing in human cognition, then, Clark and Churchland do not seem to be as far apart as Clark suggests. 51. Clark, Being There, 218. 52. Ibid., 198. Like Clark, Dennett acknowledges language is a tool and plays a role in designing portions of the external environment that then inform our “inner environment,” helping it to cognize problems and their solutions—an artificial landmark, laundry list, or labeling in general endows as well as results from intelligence, for through it we can make clever moves. See Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 377–78, and Kinds of Minds: Toward and Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic, 1996), 99–101, 134–35. 53. Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 165–66. Dennett differentiates the full developmental odyssey of the mind into several successive stages or “creatures,” each added onto its predecessors: Darwinian (possesses largely genetically determined behavior), Skinnerian (acquires environmentally conditioned behaviors), Popperian (develops an internal environment of alternatives for action that the organism can review, making it a “virtuoso preselector”), and Gregorian (designs their external environment in order to help in the preselection process, e.g., scissors and books) (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 376–80). 54. Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 149–50. 55. Ibid, 151. 56. Ibid., 159. 57. Ibid., 163–64. 58. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 344; Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (Oxford: Freeman, 1982). 59. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 345. 60. “Our selves have been created out of the interplay of memes exploiting and redirecting the machinery Mother Nature has given us” (ibid., 367). 61. See Steven Pinker’s ill-informed diatribe against postmodernism, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Hamondsworth: Viking Penguin, 2002), 198, 411–20. 62. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xvii–xviii. For a concise statement, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception,” in James M. Edie, ed., The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 25. In Phenomenology of Perception, 127, 394, Merleau-Ponty says that perception and language share a fundierung relation: perception requires language

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for its completion, but guides language in its activity of fulfilling the direction or “intentionality” that perception provides. For criticism of this latter claim, see Fred Evans, “‘Solar Love’: Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and the Fortunes of Perception,” Continental Philosophy Review 31(2): 171–93. 63. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 177. 64. Ibid., and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 43. 65. See Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 39–45.

5. Postmodernism and Language 1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986), 111. 2. Ibid., 115. More exactly, concepts and signals considered independently of one another are defined negatively, that is, by their contrast with or “differences” from other concepts or signals. When they are considered together as signs (and this is the only way they can actually exist), Saussure refers to their “differences” as “oppositions” (119). 3. Ibid., 120. 4. There is not “desire,” and then also “desire for love,” “desire for sleep,” etc. Desire is inseparable from its object, though all desirings share a family resemblance that distinguishes them from, e.g., “hating x or y”: each act of desiring, as an act of desiring, is different according to its object, and no single characteristic or set of characteristics can be a necessary and sufficient definition of desire. 5. Saussure, Course, 13. 6. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 26. 7. Ibid., 29. See also Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 88. 8. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 50. 9. Ibid., 50. 10. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 293. 11. Derrida, Positions, 23. 12. Ibid., 29. 13. Ibid. 14. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 54. Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), has written rigorously and eloquently on this aspect of Derrida’s thought (see 182–83, 200, 205–8). 15. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), 63. Cf. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 4–5, 97–98.

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16. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 99; see 9 for the definition of presence. 17. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, vol. 1 (New York: Humanities, 1970), 279–80. Cf. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 43–44, 56. 18. Ibid., 16; see also 22. 19. Ibid., 85–87. 20. Ibid., 87–89. 21. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 146–47. Presumably Eagleton would hold that Derrida transfers this “on the page” formalism to experience and the presence of undecidability in that context. Although Lawlor might not agree with Eagleton’s criticism of Derrida, he too says that “‘writing’ [différance] implies that Derrida’s thought, deconstruction, is a kind of formalism” (Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, 154). 22. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xii, 29, 59–60, 70–71. 23. Ibid., 84, 129, 136–37. 24. Ibid., xi. 25. Ibid., 41. 26. Ibid., 108, 110–11. 27. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 23. 28. Lyotard, The Differend, 9–10. Lyotard does not explicitly distinguish these two types of genres, “genres of judgment” and “metanarratives”; he usually restricts “genre” to the genres of judgment. But in his Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 72, he identifies Marxism as a “genre” and discusses it in terms of the conflict among incommensurable genres. 29. Lyotard, The Differend, xiii, 3. 30. Ibid., 171. 31. This equation of justice with witnessing differends is stated in JeanFrançois Lyotard, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 100. But it is implied everywhere in The Differend. 32. Lyotard, The Differend, 136; see also 67, 71. 33. Ibid., 166. 34. Ibid., 139. 35. In Lyotard’s The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 111, 116, he speaks of a “receptivity” to the “sublime feeling” that accompanies our recognition of differends—a “passibility”—and is prior to and different from the “activity” and “passivity” of which we usually speak. 36. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. unnamed (New York: Vintage, 1970), xi. 37. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans, A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 38, 72–73, 91–92.

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38. See, for example, Paul J. Hopper, “Emergent Grammar,” in Michael Tomasello, ed., The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Linguistic Structure (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998). 39. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 92. 40. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), 194. 41. Ibid., 136. 42. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 92. 43. Ibid., 94–95, 101–2. 44. Ibid., 93, 139–41, 144–45; Discipline and Punish, 136–39. 45. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 98. Foucault probably should have used the term sex instead of sexuality in this sentence. Though he treats the two terms as closely related historical constructs, he uses sexuality to refer to the methods for studying and disciplining sexual behavior (106–7) and sex to refer to a complex concept, a construct, “that was formed inside the deployment of sexuality” (152, 157)—the idea of a hidden cause that can always be investigated further, exists at the center of all our other behavior, and marks our salvation as “liberation from repression” (130–31, 159). The thesis of The History of Sexuality is well known: the “repression hypothesis,” that is, the claim that our sexuality has been repressed and that we should liberate it and hence ourselves, has only served to subjugate us to the deployment of sexuality and biopower—our desire for liberation in this case constitutes our chains to a more insidious master, biopower. 46. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 28; see also Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 118, 133. We will discuss Marx and Foucault on the issue of base- and superstructure in chapter 6. 47. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 95–96, 157. 48. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al., Essential Works of Foucault, 1954– 1984, (New York: New, 2000), 3:342. 49. Ibid., 340–41. 50. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., Essential Works of Foucault, 1:292. 51. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 342. 52. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 157; Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 336; “What Is Enlightenment?” Essential Works, 1:314. In Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” Essential Works, 1:262, he states: “We have to create ourselves as a work of art.” David M. Halperin, SaintFoucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), sites several sources where Foucault valorizes the transformative possibilities of new experiences (73,105). In the context of speaking about the “undefined work of freedom,” Foucault praises “the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking

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what we are, do, or think,” indicating that the work of freedom is connected to bringing about novel forms of existence (“Enlightenment,” 315–16). 53. Foucault, “The Ethics,” 291. 54. See also Michel Foucault, “An Aesthetics of Existence,” in Foucault Live: Interviews (1966–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 313. Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward Pile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); and Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2005), explain in documented detail the problems associated with the notion of a free subject in Foucault’s work. 55. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 14; see also Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2–3. 56. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 9. See also Butler, Excitable Speech, 25–28, and Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 144. 57. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 15–16. 58. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 14. 59. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 103–4, 113–17. 60. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 40–43. 61. Ibid., 183–85. 62. Ibid., 45. Kuhn borrows this term from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 32. Wittgenstein uses it to refer to “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” that cannot be reduced to a set of separable and univocal properties; for example, we can only give instances of “games,” but not a definition of the latter that encompasses them all. 63. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 188–89. 64. Ibid., 191. See also Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xxii–xxiii. 65. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 121. 66. David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 5. 67. Ibid., 16. 68. Ibid., 31–32. 69. Ibid., 40; Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 126–27, 192–94, 206. 70. Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 110–11, chapters 5–8 passim; and Richard C. Jennings, “Alternative Mathematics and the Strong Programme: Reply to Triplett,” Inquiry 31:93–101. 71. Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 41–42. 72. Ibid., 43–44. 73. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 52–53, 62. 74. Ibid., 77–79. 75. Ibid., 53–56, 71–72.

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76. Ibid., 205–7; Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 39–40. Bloor points out that these instrumental criteria of progress are themselves social conventions concerning what is important in relation to science and knowledge (45). 77. Richard Boyd, “On the Current Status of Scientific Realism,” in Richard Boyd, Philip Gasper, and J. D. Trout, eds., The Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 215. 78. Ibid., 207–8. 79. See Robert Klee, Introduction to the Philosophy of Science: Cutting Nature at Its Seams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 63–81. 80. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 275.

6. The Primacy of Voices 1. Via a “just so story,” we can speculate that the need for communication plus our speech apparatus transformed us into linguistic animals now “covered” with the diacritical and reflexive net of language. This net transformed prelinguistic adult/child, female/male, hunter/gather and other such differences into dialogic voices. Whatever our story, it is constructed only after we are social-linguistic beings. We can’t recover our prelinguistic existence, but we can recognize where it has brought us. 2. Our relation to voices is like that between the two aspects of a “performative statement,” that is, an utterance that has the grammatical form of a statement but is also an act, transforming the status of a person or thing, as in “I (a judge) pronounce you guilty.” We can distinguish but not separate the statement from the act within the appropriate context. Similarly, we can distinguish but not separate our utterances from the voices that they enact and that transform us into social beings. See John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 3. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) and The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 4. Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 312. 5. Ibid., 313; 10, 31. 6. Ibid., 15. See also, The Fate of Place, 337. 7. Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 314. 8. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holguist trans. Vern W. McGee, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 169. 9. Martha Nussbaum, “Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance,” in Robert C. Solomon, ed., What Is an Emotion? Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 275–77. 10. Benedict De Spinoza, The Ethics, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1955), 136–37.

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11. Linguistic reflexivity includes sign languages and other gestural means of communication. It is also related to the notion of “meta language”—see Alfred Tarski, “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics” (1944), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4:341–75. 12. Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 13, refers to place as “a first among equals” in relation to time and space. In The Fate of Place, Casey shows that place is freely and diversely expressed in paintings and maps. My claim is that this expression can occur because it is linked to the syntactic structure of language (its ability to free us from our immediate “emplacement”) and is thus part of the discursive dimension of voices. 13. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1928), 309. 14. Ibid., 308. 15. Ibid., 310. 16. Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove, 1998), 3; 137. Pessoa also says, “My heart is the rendezvous of all humanity,” 148. 17. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 228–29; and Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 336, 339–40, 345. 18. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 31–32. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Sudienausagabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Walter de Gruyter 1980), 9:70; cited in Parkes, Composing the Soul, 292. 20. Nietzsche Sämtliche Werke, 9:80; cited in Parkes, Composing the Soul, 325–26. Parkes points out that dreams “offer a picture of the psyche as a play of drives appearing spontaneously as persons” (327). 21. Parkes, Composing the Soul, 350–59, 368–69. 22. Ibid., 378. 23. Mary Watkins, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic, 1986). 24. Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in John Rajchman, ed., The Identity in Question (New York: Routledge, 1995), 171. 25. See Barbara McCloskey, “Hitler and Me: George Grosz and the Experience of German Exile,” in Helmut Koopmann and Klaus Dieter Post, eds., Exile: Transhistorische und Transnationale Perspektiven (Paderborn: Mentis, 2001). 26. K. Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 149–64. 27. Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red, trans. Erdag M. Göknar (New York: Vintage, 2001), 160–61. 28. See Marcel Zago, Rites et Ceremonies en Milieu Bouddhiste Lao (Rome: Università Gregoriana, 1972), 377–83; and S. J. Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults of North-east Thailand (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 252–62.

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29. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free, 1978), 226–27. See also Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 2: Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 185–86: “A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. . . . The final verdict is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion.” 30. Karl Marx, “Preface to a Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 388–91. 31. Michael Burowoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism (London: Verso, 1985), 14. 32. Karl Marx, Capital, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 1:391. 33. Marx, “Preface,” ibid., 389. 34. Ibid., 390. 35. Karl Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” in Capital, ed. Ernest Mandel (New York: Vintage, 1976), 1:989–90. 36. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 43–44. 37. Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 6. 38. Capitalism is “the transformation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back into money, or buying in order to sell” (Marx, Capital, ed. Engels, 1:164). 39. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. Q. Hoare and G. Smith (New York: International, 1971), 5. 40. Ibid., 367. 41. Ibid., 262–63. 42. Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (New York: Basic, 1988). 43. Marx, Capital, ed. Engels, 1:195, 391. See Burowoy, The Politics of Production, 32n29. 44. The type of workplace and society I have in mind approximates what David Schweickart, Against Capitalism (Boulder: Westview, 1996) calls “Economic Democracy,” a democratic form of market socialism (67–77); and what Tony Smith, Globalization: A Systematic Marxian Account (Boston: Brill, 2006), calls “democratic socialism.” See also John Beverley, “After Communism,” Boundary 2 26(3): 39–46, who argues for a “postmodern communism” that champions a radical form of multiculturalism and is compatible with market socialism but not capitalism.

7. Communication and an Ethics for the Age of Diversity 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 298–99. 2. Ibid.

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3. Noam Chomsky, On Nature and Language, ed. Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 107. 4. Ibid., 108–9. 5. Ibid., 148. 6. Ibid., 159. 7. Geoffrey Sampson, Educating Eve: The “Language Instinct” Debate (London: Cassell, 1997); In support of nativism, see Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Morrow, 1994). 8. Sampson, Educating Eve, 119. 9. Ibid., 101. 10. In chapter 4, I argued that cognitive science accounts of mental activity run afoul of a problem raised in Plato’s Meno and end up presupposing what is in question: our basic noncomputational relation to the world around us. This same argument applies to cognitive science theories that, unlike Chomsky’s, make communication primary but then interpret it in mechanistic terms. For example, Martin J. Pickering and Simond Garrod, “Toward a Mechanistic Psychology of Dialogue,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27(2): 169–90, claim that speakers cannot make a relevant response until a previous utterance by their interlocutor has activated in the speakers a “situation model” (“comprehension”) that dictates the relevant response (“production”). By the terms of the argument in chapter 4, however, this mechanistic “alignment” between a speaker and her interlocutor presupposes a precomputational “common ground” between them before the activation (“priming”) of the model could take place. 11. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984), 275–76. 12. Jürgen Habermas, “An Alternative Way Out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative Versus Subject-Centered Reason,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 295–97; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2d ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989), 490. 13. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:287; Gadamer, Truth and Method, 445. 14. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:136; Gadamer, Truth and Method, 180. 15. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:136. 16. Ibid., 1:297. 17. Ibid., 1:17–18, 302, 316. Habermas defines “truth” as the redemption of validity claims, that is, the promise to attain a rational consensus (318). Because redemption of a validity claim is presupposed in communicative action, the possibility of such action also entails commitment to the equal audibility of all participants in the dialogue, that is, to an “ideal speech situation” (25, 305). See also Jürgen Habermas, “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” in Justification and Application, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 55–56. 18. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:10–23.

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19. Ibid., 42. 20. Ibid., 293–96. 21. See John B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 295–96; and Joseph Campisi, “The Morals of Language: Habermas, Levinas, and Discourse Ethics,” chapter 2 (Ph.D. diss., Duquesne University, 2005). 22. Habermas, “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” 37–38. 23. Georgia Warnke, “Communicative Value and Cultural Values,” in Stephen K. White, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 24. Ibid., 131–32. 25. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:20. 26. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 446. 27. See Jürgen Habermas, “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” in Brice R. Wachterhauser, ed., Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 270–71. Habermas also accuses Gadamer of linguistic idealism and ignoring the role of production systems and other extralinguistic factors in determining language (272–74). 28. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:20. 29. Cf. Hans Herbert Kögler, The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics After Gadamer and Foucault, trans. Paul Hendrickson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 140–41, 149. 30. Habermas’s fulfillment of validity claims involves revealing the conditions under which, for instance, a proposition is true. See John Stewart, Language as Articulate Contact: Toward a Post-Semiotic Philosophy of Communication (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), for comprehensive treatment of language as revealing. We have already shown that Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer are committed to language as revealing; Heidegger also accepts this position— see, for example, Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 123: “The essential being of language is saying as showing.” See also, David R. Koukal, “The Question of Expression: Toward a Phenomenological Rhetoric,” chapter 4 (Ph.D., diss., Duquesne University, 1999). 31. Alma Guillermoprieto, Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, trans. Esther Allen (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 94. 32. Although some research suggested that colors are fixed preculturally, recent research and conceptual clarification discredits that claim. See B. A. C. Saunders and J. van Brakel, “Are There Nontrivial Constraints on Colour Categorizations?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20:167–228. 33. Cf. Kögler, The Power of Dialogue, 6. 34. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 101–2. Even if we translate Newtonian mechanics into Einsteinian mechanics, the former is still alien. Logical deduction is one form of translation. But if we consider Newton’s notion of conserved mass as

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false and yet preserve it in our deduction from Einsteinian mechanics, then, logically, the latter must be false too. If, on the other hand, we transform conserved mass in order to make it compatible with Einsteinian mechanics and the concept of a mass that is convertible into energy, then we are no longer talking about Newtonian mechanics and mass. Thus our translation must preserve Newtonian mechanics as something alien to the terms in which we now attempt to comment on it. For Kuhn’s many formulations of the incommensurability problem, see John H. Summit, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chapters 3–5. 35. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 204. 36. Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 192; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge/ Humanities, 1989 [1962]), 361. 37. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 448. 38. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 74. 39. Ibid., 71. 40. Ibid., 77–79. 41. Ibid., 84. 42. Ibid., 76–77. 43. This example comes from William F. Hanks, Language and Communicative Practices (Boulder: Westview, 1996), 278–90. 44. Adolfo Gilly, “Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World,” in Daniel Nugent, ed., Rural Revolt in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 318. 45. Ibid., 319. 46. Ibid., 332. 47. CCRI-GC (Comité Clandestino Revolutionario Indígena, Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, trans. Frank Bardacke, Leslie López, and the Watsonville, California Human Rights Committee (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 85. See Gilly, “Chiapas and the Rebellion,” 280–82, for warnings against overromanticizing the Indian’s traditional culture and their communitarian notion of dignity. 48. CCRI-CG, Shadows of Tender Fury, 96–98. 49. Gilly, “Chiapas and the Rebellion,” 326. 50. Ibid., 327. 51. Ibid., 312. 52. Jon Ippolito, “Trusting Aesthetics to Prosthetics,” Art Journal 56(3): 69. 53. Ibid., 73. 54. Ibid., 73–74.

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55. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), 187.

8. The Social Unconscious 1. I borrow preconscious from Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1969), 5–6, but use it similarly to Michel Foucault’s notion of positive unconscious discussed in chapter 5. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 284. 3. See Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, “Metamorphosis as Fantasy of the Hybrid: Postmodern Horror and the Destiny of the Human Body in The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986),” in Rita De Grandis and Zilà Bernd, eds., Unforeseeable Americas: Questioning Cultural Hybridity in the Americas (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 4. T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Oxford: Jonathan Cape, 1935), 31–32. Quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, ed. Forrest Williams and David Guerrière, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge/Humanities, 1989 [1962]), 187–88. 5. Eugene Minkowski, Le Problème des hallucinations et le problème de l’espace (Paris: Évolution psychiatrique, 1932), 69; quoted in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 286. 6. See the discussion of Nietzsche in chapter 2, this volume. See also Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Routledge, 1969). Julian Jaynes argues, in an imaginative work, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), that early people obeyed the hallucinated voices of their leaders in order to act urgently in situations of conflict. The flux of voices in the Iliad indicated the breakdown of this “bicameral mind” and the beginning of individual consciousness. I am arguing that the flux is primordial and the “hallucinated voices” are oracles of the sort I describe. 7. “Counter-memory” is borrowed from Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, vol. 2, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New, 1998), 385. 8. The oracle can also depict these others as simply less pure versions of itself: “everyone in the U.S. is American, but whites most of all.” For a fuller treatment of this inclusive as opposed to exclusive form of discrimination and domination, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 178. 9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 88–91. 10. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), 194. 11. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 154–57.

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12. Ingo Hasselbach with Tom Reiss, “How Nazis Are Made,” New Yorker, January 8, 1996, 55. 13. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. and trans. William Lowitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 18–19. 14. See Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of Californian Press, 1985), 145–46. 15. For comprehensive treatment of “whiteness,” see George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). 16. This biological version is suggested by Freud’s frequent use of terminology from physics and biology in order to explain his theory of the psyche, particularly in relation to Eros and Thanatos. I am not claiming, however, that Freud’s theory is reducible to biology or physics. For the contrast between biological and hermeneutic readings of Freud’s theory, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 17. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 37–9. 18. Ibid., 23–24, 50n2. 19. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 82–84. 20. Cf. V. N. Voloshinov, Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, trans. I. R. Titunik (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 76–81. 21. Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 39. 22. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 198, 203. 23. Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” Écrits, 145. 24. Ibid., 203; 130–31. 25. Ibid., 158, 235. See also Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Écrits, 294, 300. 26. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 157, 207, and “The Subversion of the Subject,” 304. 27. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” 288–89, for the distinction between “the subject of the statement” and “the subject of the enunciation”; for the notion of aphonisis or “fading,” see Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” 301, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 199, 207–8, 210–11, 218, 221, and “Position of the Unconscious,” trans. Bruce Fink, in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Marie Jaanus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 265, 269. My reading of Lacan on these two topics has been influenced by: Philippe Van Haute, Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion” of the Subject, trans. Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk (New York: Other, 2002), 39–40, 43–44, 46–47, 50–51, 55–57, 140n21; Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 44–46, 61; and Edward M. Pluth, “Towards

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a New Signifier: Freedom and Determination in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject” (Ph.D. diss., Duquesne University, 2000). 28. Cf. van Haute, Against Adaptation, 25n21. 29. Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious,” 275, suggests that the breast is an example of “the lost object of desire.” See also Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 195 and “The Subversion of the Subject,” 306–7. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 53–61, 93, 94, provides helpful expositions of the linkage between the real and objet a and the role of the presymbolic mother-child unity. He refers to jouissance as “excitement,” which may involve either pleasure or pain. For an exhaustive account of the mother-child unity in Lacan, see Shuli Barzilai, Lacan and the Matter of Origins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 30. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” 311. 31. Lacan says that objet a symbolizes this “phallus,” “not as such, but in so far as it is lacking” (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 103, 105). 32. For the identification of object a with the real and with the cause of desire, see Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 83, 168; and Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 102. 33. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” 302–3, and The Four Fundamental Concepts, 167–68, 179–80, 198, 257; cf. van Haute, Against Adaptation, 124, 140–62. 34. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 41, 179–80, 198. 35. Ibid., 59–60. 36. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, book 7, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 67; cf. Barzilai, Lacan and the Matter of Origins, 160–65. The attribution of a causal role in human behavior to an entity, the “real,” that is described as “impossible,” raises epistemological issues and even the charge of mysticism. Moreover, the Lacanian account is not fully social to the degree that the real is outside the symbolic order and hence outside the social sphere of interlocutors. Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 102–3, 150–51, 170, suggests that Lacan’s later use of the notion of drive does bring the real and the symbolic into greater proximity with one another. In that case, however, the relation between the real and the symbolic order seems little different than the relation of reciprocal presupposition between discourse and objects/social structures we have discussed, which is thoroughly assimilable to the view of ourselves as voices. Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 22–23, 25, 292–94, also points out that Lacan is ambiguous on the status of the subject. 37. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 186. 38. Cf. van Haute, Against Adaptation, 135. 39. Ibid., 280; see also 267, 269n100, 279, 288; and Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” 310–11. 40. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 60. 41. See Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” 292–93; Richard Feldstein, “The Phallic Gaze of Wonderland,” Reading Seminar XI, 150–51, and van Haute, Against Adaptation, 69, 132, 136. According to Fink (personal communication),

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“transcendental function” in Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” 311, is synonymous with “fundamental fantasy.” 42. See Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 59–60, 62, 96. 43. For therapy in relation to fundamental fantasies and master signifiers, see Lacan’s early statement in “Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits, 8–9. For a comprehensive presentation of Lacanian therapy, including “traversing the fantasy” and the subject as “breach” or “creative spark,” see Fink, The Lacanian Subject, xiii, 41, 61–68, 69–70, 76–79, and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 237. Although Lacan holds that the presymbolic order type of jouissance is unrecoverable, he allows in his later work that therapy, besides freeing up the analysand, may provide a form of postsymbolic or second-order jouissance associated with fantasies related to objet a—see Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 59–61, 111. Analysts must in particular be adept at preventing analysands from identifying with them and thereby fixating once more on a particular fantasy (Lacan, TheFour Fundamental Concepts, 268, 273–76). 44. Psychosis occurs when the “Name of the Father” is not integrated into the symbolic order created for a subject through castration. The father exists for such a subject only as an image in what Lacan calls the imaginary and not as the symbolic father; see Dylan Evans, Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), 61–63, 154–56. 45. For example, Fink argues that the aim of therapy is to have subjects “subjectify” objet a as the cause of desire, to make “the Other’s desire” their own (The Lacanian Subject, 65, 79). This also means that the encounter with the Other’s desire—which is a “traumatic experience of pleasure/pain or jouissance”—is then subjectified (62–63). In A Clinical Introduction, 208–212 and 237n4, Fink adds that the aim of therapy is to allow the (postsymbolic) “drives” to have their jouissance or satisfaction despite the linkage between the subject of desire and objet a; desire continues but no longer inhibits the subject from obtaining satisfaction. 46. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 217–19. Lacan says that what is repressed is “the representative of the representation” (217); his clarification of this phrase suggests that the child’s separation from the mother is ultimately what is repressed in the sense of being structurally overwritten by the symbolic order when the Name of the Father or castration occurs. See also Fink, Lacanian Subject, 74–76, 114–15. 47. Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Écrits, 13, 22–23. For Lacan, children initially experience themselves as sunk in motor incapacity and infantile dependency. But when they encounter their reflection in a mirror (either an actual mirror or an adult), they “misidentify” (méconnaissance) themselves with an “ideal image” on the basis of this “other.” The image they now have of themselves presents them as a permanent, well-formed Gestalt-like unity, an “ego”; the ego’s characteristics of stability and unity are also projected onto the things that make up the subject’s surroundings. The newly acquired imago, or “ideal ego,” therefore provides subjects with a “fictional direction” for their development,

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promising them eventual mastery of their world, yet simultaneously “alienates” them from the bodies they would be outside the imaginary order (ibid., 20, and Lacan, “Mirror Stage,” 4–5, 7). 48. Evans points out that whereas Freud thinks that separation from the mother causes anxiety, Lacan thinks that “a lack of such separation . . . induces anxiety” (Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 10; see also Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 53). Kelley Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 9–11, 61–71, provides a criticism of Lacan’s account of the generation of the subject based on the abjection or exclusion of the mother. 49. See Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (New York: Routledge, 1991), 37–45, 176–77. Boothby interprets Lacan differently than I do here. He holds that the aggressivity just described is due to “a will to rebellion against the imago” or “ideal unity of the self” on the part of the body’s preimaginary stage drives (39). In contrast, I, in accord with most commentators (see for example, Evans, Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 6, 67; and van Haute, Against Adaptation, 246, 266), view the aggressivity as a defense of the subject’s ideal unity against the forces that would disintegrate it. This view of aggressivity is also close to the fear of dissolution that Klaus Theweleit claims helped drive the German Freikorps men in their fantasies and actual practice to demolish the “dreaded engulfing bodies” of women (and of communists and Jews). See Male Fantasies, vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 203–5, 215–18, 427–29). 50. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 27–28, 102–3, 132, 241nn21, 23, and Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 22–25. See also Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 19, 67–68. 51. Julia Kristeva, “Place Names,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 276–78, 281–82, and Revolution in Poetic Language, 29–30, 49–50, 62, 101, 132 See also Oliver, Reading Kristeva, 19, 65–68. The transference phenomena indicate the drives or attachments of love that once related incipient subjects to partial objects, for example, the mother’s breast. 52. See Oliver, Reading Kristeva, 38–39. 53. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 10–13, 54, 157, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 62, and Black Sun, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 15. See also Oliver, Reading Kristeva, 56–57, 60, 86–87. In Witnessing, Oliver proposes an understanding of the mother-child relation that rejects the negative “abjection” of Kristeva’s theory and replaces it with an emphasis on a

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positive, prelinguistic interpersonal connection of “love” from which she derives a more hopeful politics. 54. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 46–47, 150–51, Powers of Horror, 70–72. 55. Kristeva, Desire in Language, 10, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 192, 194–95, “Stabat Mater,” The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 182–83, 185, and Tales of Love, 262. See also Georganna L. Ulary, “Tales of Recognition: A Kristevan Reading of Hegel” (Ph.D. diss., Duquesne University, 2001), chapter 5. 56. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 71, and “Cose Van Tutti,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 89–90, 96–99. 57. Irigaray, “Cose Van Tutti,” 101–3. See Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1991), 104. 58. Whitford, Luce Irigaray, 75–89. 59. Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, 209. 60. Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1989), 104; quoted in Oliver, Reading Kristeva, 179. 61. For controversy concerning Irigaray’s interpretation of Lacan, see Whitford, Luce Irigaray, 14–15, 85–89. 62. For the relation between Irigaray’s notion of feminine difference, on the one hand, and race, social class, and other differences, on the other, see Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995). 63. For a detailed treatment of genealogical critique, see Fred Evans, “Genealogy and the Problem of Affirmation in Nietzsche, Foucault, and Bakhtin,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 27(3) (May 2001): 41–65. 64. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

9. Globalization, Resistance, and the New Solidarity 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6–7. 2. Ibid., 163–64. 3. Ibid., 143–45. 4. Battalla Guillermo Bonfil, “Historias que no son todavía historia,” in Carlos Pereyra et al., ed., Historia ¿Para Qué? (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1980), 232–33, quoted in Adolfo Gilly, “Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World,”

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in Daniel Nugent, ed., Rural Revolt in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 278. 5. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 54. Huntington lists the major contemporary civilizations as Sinic (China and Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and elsewhere as well as Vietnam and Korea), Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Western, and Latin America (45–46). 6. Ibid., 97, 125, 226. 7. Ibid., 130. 8. Ibid., 306, 318. 9. Ibid., 307. 10. See, for example, criticism of Huntington’s univocal notion of civilization in Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 187–88n2. She argues that Huntington speaks of the porosity of civilizations but then treats them in an essentialist manner when he uses them as an explanation “for global conflict and international realignments.” Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006), 10–12, gives a similar criticism of Huntington’s essentialism. 11. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), hereafter TP; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004); and Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2d. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) The Power of Identity: The Information Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). 12. Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 54. Castells complains that most people view the new global society as “a meta-social disorder,” that is, “an automated, random sequence of events, derived from the uncontrollable logic of markets, technology, geopolitical order, or biological determination” (The Rise of the Network Society, 508). Similarly, Hardt and Negri speak of “the widely propagated illusion that the capitalist market and the capitalist regime of production are eternal and insuperable” (Empire, 386). 13. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 150. 14. See chapter 2 for details of their philosophy. 15. Deleuze and Guattari, TP 352, 359–61. One implication of this primordial status of the State is that the development of production and differentiation of political forces presuppose the State rather than vice versa, contrary to Marxism (358–59; note that in the English translation of part of the passage I am paraphrasing here, “it [the State] presupposes,” should be “presupposes it [the State].” 16. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 192–93.

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17. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 108. 18. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 27–29. Unfortunately, their criticism is not any more specific than these few words. 19. Thus Hardt and Negri claim that role of the U.S. in world affairs is “imperial” rather than “imperialist,” that is, a function of “global right” or an answer to a “compelling call” in the name of “peace and order” rather than a function of “its own national motives” (180). The U.S. constitution, moreover, implicitly advocates “rearticulating an open space and reinventing incessantly diverse and singular relations in networks across an unbounded terrain” rather than the imperialist project of spreading “its power linearly in closed spaces” (182). 20. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscripts on Control Societies,” in Negotiations, 1972– 1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177–82. 21. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 77. Cf. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 40–41. Like Hardt and Negri, Castells holds that cultural and other factors considered “superstructural” on the mechanistic version of Marxism are just as important causally as “base-structural” factors (The Rise of the Network Society, 100, 188–89, 209). 22. Castells, The Rise of Network Society, 445. See also 206, 501 for technical definitions of network. Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), reveals how states are disaggregated into global networks or lattices of regulators, courts, and legislators that provide a level of governance alongside sovereign states and international governance institutions such as the United Nations. She prophesies the eventual disaggregation of sovereignty itself. 23. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 77. 24. Ibid., 122. Cf. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 150–54, 236, 294–97, 308–10, 335–36. 25. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 104–6. Cf. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 308–9, 338. 26. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 21n31, 100. See 70–72 for the “five characteristics” of the new informational paradigm: act on information, pervasiveness of the effects of the informational technologies, networking logic of systems using these technologies, flexibility, and integration. Cf. Hardt and Negri Empire, 285, 293–94, 298. For concrete examples of this infrastructure, see the discussion of automating and informating in chapter 7. 27. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 101–2. See also 115–16, 121–22, 131–32. In The Power of Identity, 354, Castells argues that nation-states are forced to intervene strategically in globalization at the cost of their ability to represent their “territorially rooted constituencies”—they have to give up welfare and other aspects of the social safety net, nationally owned enterprises, and the contract between capital, labor, and the State.

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28. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 101–2. 29. Ibid., 214. 30. Ibid., 507. Castells claims that “space organizes time in the network society” (407). For “space,” “flows,” “space of flows,” the effect of the space of flows on the relationship between architecture and society, and the space of places, see 441–42, 449–59. For Castells’s characterization of “timeless time” in network society and his emphasis upon perturbing or eliminating “sequencing,” see 494–98. Similarly, Hardt and Negri view the empire as “lacking place” and “fixed time” (Empire, 380). 31. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 505. 32. Ibid., 508. 33. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, 113, 316, 344, and, for a definition of exploitation and corruption, 385, 391–92. 34. In The Rise of the Network Society, Castells agrees that informationalism, as the mode of development (and capitalism as the mode of production), is producing and requiring “autonomous, educated worker[s] able and willing to program and decide entire sequences of work” (257). Unlike Hardt and Negri, however, Castells does not argue that this transformation of the worker is the seed of capitalism’s overthrow. 35. Cf. Kam Shapiro, “The Myth of the Multitude,” in Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean, ed., Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (London: Routledge, 2004), 297. 36. In chapter 6, I argued that all social structures involve both linguistic and nonlinguistic dimensions—in short, that they are voices in the sense of the term that I have been defending in this book. 37. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 167, 279–80; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 143–44. 38. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 506–07. 39. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 307–9; 405. 40. See Shapiro, “The Myth of the Multitude,” and Stanley Aronowitz, “The New World Order (They Mean It),” Nation, July 11, 2000. Aronowitz states: “Lacking an institutional perspective—except with respect to law—Hardt and Negri are unable to anticipate how the movement they would bring into being might actually mount effective resistance” (27). Hardt, in an interview with Thomas Dumm in Empire’s New Clothes, states that not understanding the multitude in “social and sociological terms” is “the most significant shortcoming of our [Hardt and Negri’s] book” (173). In their later book, Multitude, Hardt and Negri go some distance in answering these criticisms (217–27). But then they describe “political decision-making” as simply emerging out of “distributed networks,” in analogy with the interaction of brain cells (338–39). This helps them avoid centralism, but mystifies and makes anonymous the process of decision making, throwing them back into the clutches of their critics. 41. Castells, The Power of Identity, 11, 354. 42. Ibid., 356–58; see also 7–11. 43. Ibid.

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44. Ibid., 361. Castells’s definition of social movement makes it virtually synonymous with his characterization of project identities: “[A social movement is] purposive collective actions whose outcomes, in victory as in defeat, transforms the values and institutions of society” (3). He defines the identity of social actors as “the process of construction of meaning on the basis of a cultural attribute, or related set of cultural attributes, that is/are given priority over other sources of meaning” (6); and “meaning” as “the symbolic identification by a social actor of the purpose of his/her action” (7). 45. Castells, The Power of Identity, 362. 46. Thalia Kidder and Mary McGinn, “In the Wake of NAFTA: Transnational Workers Networks,” Social Policy 6 (Summer 1995): 14–21. 47. Ibid., 15–16. 48. Ibid., 16. 49. Ibid., 20. 50. Allen Hunter, “Globalization from Below? Promise and Perils of the New Internationalism,” Social Policy 6 (Summer 1995): 7, claims that “the new internationalism does not seek to infuse people everywhere with a single identity, but to draw out those aspects of diverse identities that are compatible with the struggle for global equity and sustainability.” 51. Kidder and McGinn, “In the Wake of NAFTA,” 16. 52. Ibid., 20–21. 53. Some of the material in this section and the preceding one draws on an article by Fred Evans and Barbara McCloskey, “The New Solidarity: A Case Study of Cross-Border Labor Networks and Mural Art in the Age of Globalization,’” in Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt, eds., Toward a New Socialism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 483–96. In that paper, we linked the discussion of network solidarity to the Pittsburgh Labor Action Network for the Americas (PLANTA), with which we were both affiliated. We also showed how the labor murals in a cross-border exchange reflected and reinforced the “unity composed of diversity” of the network itself.

10. Democracy and Justice in the Multivoiced Body 1. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Vision in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 60–61. 2. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 33–37. 3. Ibid., 70–73. 4. Ibid., 61, 79. 5. Cf. Tracy B. Strong, “Foreword,” in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, xx. 6. Leo Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, ibid., 88. 7. Strong equates friends in this context with “identity” or “form of existence” and makes a point similar to Strauss’s on the priority of enemies (Strong, “Foreword,” xx). See chapter 2 for a discussion of the Nietzschean terms I use here.

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Interestingly, Huntington states that the cohesiveness of U.S. identity relies on external enemies in his book, Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 17–18, 24, 28–29, 110, 113, 144, 259. 8. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 101–2. Mouffe refers to her own view, one to which mine is close in spirit, as “agonistic pluralism,” and says that “the aim of democratic politics is to construct the ‘them’ in such a way that it is no longer perceived as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an ‘adversary,’ that is, somebody whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend these ideas we do not put into question. . . . Antagonism is struggle between enemies, while agonism is struggle between adversaries.” See also William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), x–xi, for his similar notion, “democratic agonism.” 9. See chapter 1. 10. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5–6, 17, 52. 11. Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 291. 12. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 6, 24, 27, 43, 110; and Seyla Benhabib “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 69–74. 13. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 388, and Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 84–85. 14. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 84, for example, cites Rawls and Habermas as the leaders of the “two main schools” of deliberative democracy. 15. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded version (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xvii, 11, 164, 167–68, 450–51. According to Kymlicka, the major difference between political liberalism and the earlier justice as fairness concerns the status of “autonomy” as a central value: Rawls now allows that arguments for basic liberties do not necessarily have to appeal to autonomy, though the latter must remain as a political, if not a private, value. Kymlicka argues that this leads Rawls into inconsistencies that undermine the supposed neutrality of political liberalism (Contemporary Political Philosophy, 232–36, 243). 16. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 5–7, 329. 17. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xvi–xvii, xlii, xlv, 11, 16–17, 38–39, 43–44, 94, 134, 387, 450. Note that the ideal conditions for deliberation mentioned in this sentence are equivalent to Rawls’s famous “original position” and “veil of ignorance.” Under these circumstances, participants in the decision making would be granted no knowledge of what their beginning status might be in the society resulting from their deliberations on social justice. They would therefore have a strong incentive to create social systems that treat everyone fairly (22–28). 18. Kymlicka emphasizes that autonomy is not taken by liberalism as something to be “pursued for its own sake, but as a precondition for pursuing those

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projects that are valued for their own sake” (Contemporary Political Philosophy, 222). For Rawls, the central project is fulfillment of the criterion of reciprocity or “a fair system of social cooperation over time” (Political Liberalism, xliv, xlv, 43). 19. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xli, 147–48, 168, 392. 20. Ibid., 38; see also xxvii–xxviii, 42, 175, 376. 21. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 236. 22. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples—with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 17–19, 62–68, 75–76, 83. 23. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 138, 146, 155–58, 243–44, 253, 392–94, 460–62. 24. Ibid., 35. 25. Ibid., 477–78. 26. Ibid., 468–68; cf. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 236–41, 243–44. 27. William Rehg, Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), argues that Rawls’s political liberalism excludes other conceptions of justice and society, assumes a general conception of the good (“a stable cooperative social system” as well as the just and equal status of the participants), and therefore should do what he does not, provide a justification for the moral intuition that is presumably behind this good (123–34). See also Stephen K. White, The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, Justice, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 22; and Janna Thompson, “Community Identity and World Citizenship,” in Daniele Archibugi, David Held, and Martin Köhler, eds., Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 183, for the claim that Rawls thinks his theory of justice is valid only within modern democratic societies. 28. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 94–95, thinks that Rawls does endorse the same sort of universality as Habermas. Rehg, Insight and Solidarity, 134, indicates that Rawls sometimes vaguely gestures in this direction. But the opposite view— that Rawls’s justice as fairness is either a communitarian notion of the good or a universal moral assumption lacking explicit justification—seems to reflect the dominant assessment of Rawls’s position. Rawls is at least clear that the “political constructivism” by which justness as fairness is shown to be “reasonable” involves neither knowledge of “an independent order of values” nor a concept of truth (Political Liberalism, 95, 87, 126–27). In contrast, Jürgen Habermas, as we will see, postulates a telos of language that founds his idea of justice. For a fuller, though perhaps still inconclusive, understanding of this issue, see Habermas’s criticism of Rawls and Rawls’s reply: Jürgen Habermas, “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’sPolitical Liberalism, Journal of Philosophy 92 (3): 170–74; and John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 372–434, and 110–12, 119, for a statement of the type of objectivity that fits his constructivism. 29. White, The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas, 72–73; and Rehg, Insight and Solidarity, 138.

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30. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 107. 31. Ibid., 108–9. 32. Ibid., 110. 33. Ibid., 459–60. 34. Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 152. 35. Ibid., 154. 36. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 445, Justification and Application, 50, and “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” in Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, 26. 37. See also Rehg, Insight and Solidarity, 152–54. 38. Habermas, Justification and Application, 50, Between Facts and Norms, 296–97. 39. For one of these pragmatic arguments, see Rehg’s development of what he calls Habermas’s “no alternative to rational cooperation” argument (Insight and Solidarity, 158–67). 40. See Axel Honneth, “The Other of Justice: Habermas and the Ethical Challenge of Postmodernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K.White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 294–95. 41. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 16–17. 42. Ibid., 37–40. 43. Ibid., 40–44. 44. Ibid., 46. 45. Ibid., 47–51; cf. Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model,” 82–83. 46. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 298. Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” in Toward a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 92–94, suggests that the sphere of production and administration, as a condition of its efficiency, must continue to be characterized by purposive-rational actions and not by communicative actions, the latter being the basis of democracy and operative in the political sphere of society. For the relative importance of redistributing wealth and recognizing identities, see the debate between Nancy Fraser and Iris Marion Young: Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” New Left Review 212 (July-August 1995): 68–99; and Iris Marion Young, “Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory,” New Left Review 222 (March-April 1997): 147–60; and further comments on this debate by Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 68–71; Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 23; and Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 92–120. 47. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, comprehensively surveys these claims and replies to them. In particular, he reviews the issue of motivation in relationship to Rawls’s principle of justice (136–37), citizenship theory (310–12), communitarianism (212, 252–61), and nationalism (268–70).

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48. See Thompson, “Community Identity,” 184; cf. Rawls, Law of Peoples, 112–13. 49. Cf. Rehg, Insight and Solidarity, 183; and White, The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas, 74–76. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), exclaims that “morality on its own is not motivation enough to overcome the mindless inertia of our indifference toward the faceless other” (34) and argues that “care” for others is more basic. But this caring itself, I will claim, requires recognition of others first; this comes through our shared identity as members of the multivoiced body. 50. See Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), and Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 505–15. 51. See Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 209–10. 52. My use of the concept of identity partly follows that of Gutmann, Identity inDemocracy. She contrasts identity with interest groups. An interest group consists of individuals who coalesce around “a shared instrumental goal that preceded the group’s formation”; an identity group involves “the mutual identification of individuals with one another around shared social markers” (13). I would simply replace “shared social markers” with the “shared social discourse” of a voice. However, interest groups are also “voices,” albeit less cohesive and often less enduring ones. 53. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 191. 54. My view of society and justice therefore provides an answer to a central question raised by Seyla Benhabib in her The Claims of Culture: “Can there be a politics of recognition that accepts the fluidity, porosity, and essential contestability of all cultures?” (68). Benhabib points out that social patterns based on narrow conceptions of identity can “be transformed through an acknowledgement of the fluidity of group boundaries, through the telling of stories of the interdependence of the self and the other, of ‘we’ and ‘them’” (70). She argues for the “enlarged mentality” or “empathy” that comes through seeing “the perspectives of others in and through political and moral struggle” (142). In a similar vein, Amy Gutmann argues that individuals who “perceive that their own interests are bound up with living in a more just society” will identify with others in that society and “want to contribute to making [their] society more just (without undue sacrifice)” (Identity in Democracy, 145–46). I am arguing that Benhabib’s empathy and Gutmann’s identification are motivated in part by our recognition of and mutual participation in society’s multivoiced body. 55. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 284. 56. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 196–97, 255, 505. 57. The double identity of which I am speaking avoids the liberal criticism that communitarianism might constrain “individuals’ own judgments about the good life” (Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 299). Greg M. Nielsen, Norms of Answerability: Social Theory Between Bakhtin and Habermas (Albany: State

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University of New York Press, 2002), attempts to reconcile ethnos (particular viewpoint) with demos (universal viewpoint), Bakhtin with Habermas. Whereas I do this through our double identity, Nielsen appeals to a “two-sided answerability” between cultural viewpoints and abstract, universal norms. The mediating dialectic between the two expands the former and constricts the latter, thus preserving a livable but “unfinalizable” political space (143–50, 163). 58. David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 229. Held also defines cosmopolitan democracy as “the legal basis of a global and divided authority system—a system of diverse and overlapping power centres, shaped and delimited by democratic law” (234–35). See also Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 266–71; and compare Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 312–15. 59. Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 233. Held allows that nation-states would “wither away” and “would no longer be, and would no longer be regarded as, the sole centres of legitimate power within their own borders” (ibid.). 60. Ibid., 235–36. See also Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 268. 61. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 273. 62. See Roland Axtmann, “What’s Wrong with Cosmopolitan Democracy?” in Nigel Dower and John Williams, eds., Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 106. For a view contrary to Axtmann’s and compatible with my own, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006), 97–99. 63. See Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 312; Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 271–75; and the articles in Dower and Williams, Global Citizenship. 64. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 4–5. Rights pertaining to collective identities are not mentioned in the “Rights of Man,” the “Bill of Rights,” or in “The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” 65. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 37–40. Taylor notes that the “politics of equal dignity” replaced the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aristocratic emphasis on blood and honor. 66. Ibid., 38, 43; Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 6. 67. Gutmann, Identity in Democracy, 64–73, 187–91, Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 340–43, 362–65, Nielsen, Norms of Answerability, 143–65, and Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 141–53, 221–28, 236–76. See also Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 114–32. 68. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 25, 36–37. 69. These harms are especially attenuated when one’s rights are violated on a number of scores at once. See, for example, Celina Romany, “Black Women and Gender Equality in a New South Africa: Human Rights Law and the Intersection of Race and Gender,” in Celina Romany, ed., Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Human Rights in the Americas: A New Paradigm for Activism (Washington, DC: American University, 2001). 70. CCRI-GC (Comité Clandestino Revolutionario Indígena, Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army

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of National Liberation, trans. Frank Bardacke, Leslie López, and the Watsonville, California Human Rights Committee (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 159. For the relation of the Zapatistas’ claim to the Mexican constitution and various United Nations’ declarations, see Laura Mues, Derechos Indígenas: El Caso de México (Col. Copilco Universidad: Academia Mexicana de Derechos Humanos Filosofía y Letras, 1998). 71. Adolfo Gilly, “Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World,” in Daniel Nugent, ed., Rural Revolt in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 316. We discussed Chiapas in chapter 7. 72. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 62, 72. 73. Ibid., 69–72. See chapter 7 for Gadamer’s fusion of horizons. 74. Susan Wolf, “Comment,” in Gutmann, Multiculturalism, 81, 85. 75. See Fred Evans, “Cyberspace and the Concept of Democracy,” Studies in Practical Philosophy: A Journal of Ethical and Political Philosophy 4(1): 71–101. 76. See United Nations’ General Assembly resolution 1541. It is mainly concerned with protecting the sovereignty of nation-states and not the status of minorities within those states. 77. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 237, 258–65. 78. But some speech, for example, hate speech, can operate as an inhibitor of the expression of others, usually in contexts where a majority is oppressing a minority. Because such speech then works against the interplay of equally audible voices, society can legitimately place curbs upon it. 79. Most of the examples of oracles that we have noted, for example, “the pure race,” are both totalizing and negative. Utopias (or “utopian oracles”) are totalizing but positive in character, for example, communism as Marx portrays it. The multivoiced body is utopian in this sense, but simultaneously anti-utopian and anti-oracular. 80. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 73, 167–68; Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zˇizˇ ek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso, 2000). 81. Jacques Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx,” ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), 248–49. See also Derrida, Specters of Marx, 168. 82. Ibid., 231–32, 242, 249; Derrida, Specters of Marx, 37, 75, 87. 83. See, for example, Aijaz Ahmad, “Reconciling Derrida: ‘Specters of Marx’ and Deconstructive Politics,” Ghostly Demarcations, 104–5. For deconstruction and différance, see chapter 5. 84. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 59, 64–65, 73, 90, and “Marx and Sons,” 254. 85. Derrida, ibid., 90, 92. 86. Ibid., 75, 87, 169. Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” 240. On Specters of Marx, 75, Derrida says that “at a certain point promise and decision, which is to say responsibility, owe their possibility to the ordeal of undecidability which will always remain their condition” (my emphasis). On 169, however, he says that the messianic “grants [decision, any affirmation, any responsibility] their elementary condition”

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(my emphasis). At least in this context, “undecidability” and “messianic” seem interchangeable. 87. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 85–86, 87–88. Which does not mean that Derrida throws out the concept of class—see Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” 236–40. 88. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 90. 89. Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” 232. 90. Ibid., 241, 243. 91. Ibid., 251; my emphasis. 92. Ibid., 249. Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 216–25, insightfully discusses Derrida’s messianic, and hence Marxism, as a “promise.” But as Lawlor himself states about this promise, “there is not even something like an inchoate sense at the origin that could be made explicit” (219). 93. Ernesto Laclau, “Structure, History, and the Political,” Butler, Laclau, and Zˇizˇ ek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 207. 94. Ibid., 191. 95. Laclau, “Constructing Universality,” Butler, Laclau, and Zˇizˇ ek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 302–6. Cf. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 143–44, 144–45, 167, 181, 183. 96. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 143-44; Laclau, “Structure, History and the Political,” 185, and “Constructing Universality,” 302. 97. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 262. 98. See Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 372. 99. John Rodman, “The Liberation of Nature?” in Richard A. Wasserstrom, ed., Today’s Moral Problems, 3d ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1985), 330–62. 100. In Michel Tournier’s novel Friday, trans. Norman Denny (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), Robinson Crusoe poignantly, if extremely, finds words from the Bible to give voice to the literal and fecund lovemaking between him and his “wife,” the island, Speranza (125–28). 101. Margalit expresses a similar attitude: “the problem is how to devise a notion of a trace [of ourselves] that does not commit us to a metaphysical belief in an afterlife but still satisfies our yearning to avoid oblivion” (Ethics of Memory, 91). See also William F. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 79–88. 102. Walt Whitman. 1950. “Song of Myself,” in F. O. Matthiessen, ed., The Oxford Book of American Verse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 299.

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Index

Abortion, 178 Absolute deterritorialization and reterritorialization, 40–42, 289n71, 290nn72–76; see also Chaosmos and naturalism/Deleuze and Guattari Abstract machines, 42–43, 290n77; see also Chaosmos and naturalism/ Deleuze and Guattari Accents, 72–73 Action, and perception, 108 Aeon: Being and, 34, 35, 288n59, 289n60; Deleuze and, 34, 35, 288n59, 289n60; Guattari and, 34, 35, 288n59 Agamben, Giorgio, 15, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 298nn73, 74 Agency, language and subject, 120–35 Agent: language as, 144; see also Social agents Age of diversity, 264; dilemma of diversity and, ix, 3–19, 280, 283nn1, 4; new citizenship and, 18; oracles and, 13; primacy of voices and communication/ethics for, 169–99; society and

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communication in, ix; unity and, 4, 5, 284n5; unity of differences and, 13 Aggressivity, 218–19, 317n47, 318n49 Agonism, 249, 324n8 Ahmad, Aijaz, 329n83 Alcoff, Linda, 286n29 Analytic discourse, 116; organic discourse vs., 100–3, 111, 112 Analytic philosophy, 299n86; cognitive science and, 15; dilemma of diversity and, x; society as multivoiced body and, x Anderson, Benedict, 225 Anexact, 39, 40, 50, 150, 173, 189, 190, 204; Deleuze and, 38, 42, 45, 46, 48, 72, 94, 143, 151, 289n67, 70, 292n93 Anexactness, 51, 94, 151, 289n67, 292n93 Anonymity/globalization/mediating institutions, 238–40, 246, 322n36, 322n40 Anonymity problem: chaosmos and, 53–56, 293n97, 98, 99, 101, 102,

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index

Anonymity problem (continued) 294n103, 107; multivoiced body and, 94; voices and, 83 Anonymous forces, 93; society and, 14, 144; voices and, 16, 82, 144 Antagonism, 249, 324n8 Anti-oracles: democracy and justice of multivoiced body/oracles and, 18, 270–76, 281, 329n79; multivoiced body and, 272; society as multivoiced body and, 270, 272, 329n79; see also Oracle and anti-oracle; Oracles Anti-utopian: society as multivoiced body as, 270, 271, 329n79; see also Utopian Anzaldúa, Glorida, 286n29 Appelbaum, David, 75, 76, 81 Apperceptive background, 71, 297n54 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 157, 309n26, 328n62 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), 128 Arendt, Hannah, 81, 298n82 Aristotle, 33 Aronowitz, Stanley, 322n40 Art, 180–81, 182 Artificial intelligence, 112, 302n41 Assemblages/virtual and actual dimensions, 36, 37, 38–40, 289nn65, 67, 69, 70; see also Chaosmos and naturalism/ Deleuze and Guattari Austin, John, 308n2 Axtmann, Roland, 328n62 Bacon, Francis, 80 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 15, 28, 77, 89, 93; on accents, 72–73; communication and, 69, 192; on culture, 62; dialogic syntax of, 68–69, 190–91; on dialogue, 299n87; on double voicing, 83; heteroglossia of, 86, 87, 88, 226, 299n94; hybridization of, 62–74, 240; on language, 62–63, 65, 68–70, 72–73, 82–83, 86, 117, 295n18; on language forms, 69–70, 83; linguistics

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and communication, 192; monoglossia of, 86, 87, 88, 226; notion of voice of, 62, 295n19; on objects, 74; social languages and, 62–63, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 82–83, 86, 295n18; “unitary master language” of, 86, 87; utterances and, 68–70, 71–72, 87, 89; on words, 72–73, 76, 83; see also Hybridization of Bakhtin Barzilai, Shuli, 316n29, 36 Bechtel, William, 301n28 Being: Aeon and, 34, 35, 288nn59, 60; chaos and, 34–35; chaosmos and, 35–36; Deleuze and, 33–36, 288nn53, 56, 59, 60; dilemma of diversity and, 9; Guattari and, 33–36, 288nn56, 59; voice and, 297n65 Being-in-the-world, 99, 108, 110 Beliefs: of Buddhist serenity/community/compassion, x; diversity/creation of, ix; interplay of, ix–x; of Laos, x, 158; in technological progress/individuality/self-reliance, ix; voices as, ix, 14, 16; Western, x Benhabib, Seyla, 320n10, 327n54 Best, Steven, 284nn5, 17 Beverley, John, 310n44 Beyond mechanism and vitalism: universal machinism and, 45–48, 291nn83, 86–88; see also Chaosmos and naturalism/Deleuze and Guattari Bhabha, Homi, 28 Biology, engineering principle, 113 The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), 24 Blais, Andrew L., 299n86 Bloor, David, 15; paradigms and, 136–38, 139, 140; science and, 136–38, 139, 140, 308n76 Body: subject and, 110; voices and, 75, 76 Body corporate, 140–41 Bogue, Ronald, 291n85 Bohm, David, 292n93 Bonfil, Guillermo, 226, 319n4 Boothby, Richard, 219, 318n49

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index Borradori, Giovanna, 283n4 Boyd, Richard: paradigms and, 139–40; realism of, 135, 139–40, 308n77; science and, 139–40 Brain, 108–9, 301n21; language and, 114, 116 Bruno, Giordano, 30 Buddhism, 158, 193 Burowoy, Michael, 310n31 Butler, Judith, 15; language and, 132–35; performativity and, 132–35; power and, 132–34; sexuality and, 132–34 Campisi, Joseph, 312n21 Canadian Quebecers, 265–66, 268 Canclini, Néstor García, 286n31 Capitalism, 161, 162, 163, 166, 275, 310n38, 322n34; Deleuze/Guattari genealogical critique of global, 228, 229–32, 238, 320n15; as oracle of globalization, 224, 238, 322n36; social movements vs., 239–40; see also Globalization Carr, David, 80 Cartesianism: cognitive psychology and, 102–3; Merleau’s overturning of, 95–100 Casey, Edward, 16, 146, 150, 309n12 Cassirer, Ernest, 285n8 Castells, Manuel, 17, 239, 240, 320n12; Hardt and Negri on network society and, 233–35, 321n21; on informationalism, 234, 321n26, 322n34; network society of, 228, 233–35, 240–41, 246, 321n21, 22, 27, 30, 34, 44 Cavarero, Adriana, 15, 79–80, 81, 298n82 The Cave: challenge of, 13–19; identity and, 203; multivoiced body and, 19; nature and, 18–19; religion and, 18–19; society and, 18–19; technology and, 18–19; unity and, 33, 203; unity of differences and, 19, 30, 272, 274; see also Plato’s cave The Cave (Korot and Reich): dilemma of diversity and, 5–6, 7, 8; reason and,

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333

12; Saramago’s The Cave and, 11, 12; society and, 13; unity and, 5–6, 7, 8, 32; unity of differences and, 8, 9, 13, 19, 280; voices of, 14 The Cave (Korot, Reich, Saramago), see The Cave The Cave (Saramago): the Center in, 9–10, 12, 15–16; dilemma of diversity and, 9–13; Korot and Reich’s The Cave and, 11, 12; oracles and, 12; Plato’s cave and, 9, 10, 11, 12; reason and, 12; society and, 12, 13; unity of differences and, 9–13; voices of, 14; see also Saramago’s Center CCRI-GC (Comité Clandestino Revolutionario Indígena, Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), 313n47, 328n70 Chambers, Iain, 286n32 Chance, 113; chaosmos and, 82, 85; multivoiced body and, 85 Change, and society as multivoiced body, 16 Chanter, Tina, 319n62 Chaos, 114; Being and, 34–35; chaosmos as beyond opposition between cosmos and, 14, 30, 32, 33; contemporary philosophers/scientists on, 24; and cosmos struggle, 21–30; Deleuze and, 21, 33, 288n51; dilemma history/ inversion of cosmos and, 13–14, 25; dynamic hybridity and, 30; Egyptians on, 21–22, 23, 285n7; fear/hatred of, 203, 206; Guattari and, 14, 33; history of, 20–30; multivoiced body and, 21; Nietzsche and, 13–14, 21, 24–27, 30, 113, 302n46; Plato on, 22, 23; repressive unconscious and, 206; seventeenth- /eighteenth-century European philosophers/scientists on, 23; society and, 203; unity of differences and, 21; valorization, 24–30; see also Chaos valorization; Cosmos/chaos struggle; Dilemma history

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334

index

Chaosmos, 20; Being and, 35–36; chance and, 82, 85; as beyond cosmos and chaos opposition, 14, 30, 32, 33; Deleuze and, 20, 32–51, 85, 89, 277, 287nn45, 46, 288nn51, 53, 56, 59, 60; difference and, 82; dynamic hybridity and, 31, 32; dynamic intersection of reality’s basic units and, 82; Guattari and, 20, 32–51, 85, 89, 277, 287n46, 288nn56, 59; heterogeneity and, 85; Joyce and, 30–31; novelty and, 198; society and, 59; society as multivoiced body and, 20, 82, 272, 277; solidarity and, 85, 198; three characteristics of, 82; unity and, 14; unity of differences and, 20; Whitehead and, 30, 31–33, 35, 287nn39, 41, 44, 45; see also Dilemma history Chaosmos and anonymity problem, 53–56, 293n97, 293nn98, 99, 101, 102, 294n103, 107 Chaosmos and ethics, 51–52, 293n94, 95, 96 Chaosmos and naturalism/Deleuze and Guattari: absolute deterritorialization and reterritorialization and, 40–42, 289n71, 290nn72–76; abstract machines and mechanosphere and, 42–43, 290n77; assemblages/virtual and actual dimensions and, 36, 37, 38–40, 289nn65, 67, 69, 70; beyond mechanism/vitalism and, 45–51, 291n83, 86, 87, 88, 292nn89–93; nonmechanistic naturalism and, 36; reciprocal presupposition and, 43–45, 290n78, 291n80 Chaos valorization: Greek tragedy and, 24–27; Nietzsche/from Dionysius to Will-to-Power and, 24–27; Nietzsche’s postmodern offspring and, 27–30 Chiapas, 194; Zapatista rebels of, 59–60, 195–96, 265–66, 268, 295n14 Chomsky, Noam, 17, 104, 113, 128; language as communication and universal grammar of, 171–72, 311n10

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Churchland, Paul, 15, 105, 111, 114, 301n21, 303n50 Citizenship, x; democracy and justice of multivoiced body/ethical motivation and, 260–63, 326n47, 327nn49, 54, 57, 58, 328n59, 62; see also New citizenship Clanclini, Néstor García, 286n31 Clark, Andy, 15, 103, 108, 109, 111, 114, 116, 300n14, 301nn20, 22, 26, 28, 303n50, 52 Clark, Katrina, 296n45 Clark, Tim, 287n45 Clash of civilizations, 248, 249; globalization vs., 224, 227–28; nations and, 225–28, 320n5, 10; oracle of, 224; political dimension of multivoiced body and, 225–28, 320n5, 10; theory of, 17 Classical cognitivism, 103–4, 105–6, 107, 108, 110, 114 Classical computation, 107 Cognition, 300n19; language and, 103, 109 Cognitive mapping/globalization/ postmodern society, 228–29, 320n12 Cognitive psychology, Cartesianism and, 102–3 Cognitive science, 94, 97, 102, 116, 144, 300n19; analytic philosophy and, 15; classical cognitivism and, 103–4; communication and, 192; complex interactionism and, 103, 108–9; computational system of, 110, 111, 311n10; connectionism and, 103, 104–7; dynamic cognitivism and, 108–9; limits of, 110–14, 302nn41, 42; mind-body dualism and, 95 Cognitivism, see Dynamic cognitivism Cohn, Norman, 285n1, 7 Collective rights, x; democracy and justice of multivoiced body/multiculturalism and, 264–68, 281, 328nn64, 65, 69, 329n76 Communal resistance forms: legitimizing identities as, 240, 242; oracles

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index as, 242; project identities as, 240–41, 242, 323n44; resistance identities as, 240–41, 242, 323n44; voices as, 242 Communication, 17; Bakhtin and, 69, 192; cognitive science and, 192; consciousness and, 169; creativity of, 203; new view of, x, 16; Nietzsche and, 169–70, 197–99; novelty and, 198; oracles and, 203; phenomenology and, 192; primacy of voices/age of diversity ethics and, 169–99; society as multivoiced body and, 16, 192; and society in age of diversity, ix; solidarity and, 198; structuralism and, 172–73, 192; voices interplay and, 173; see also Language as communication Communication and ethics for age of diversity: communication as metamorphosis of society and, 192–97; communication as mutual understanding and, 175–91; language as communication and, 171–75; Nietzsche on communication and, 169–70; Nietzsche’s “gift-giving virtue” and, 197–99 Communication as mutual understanding, 175; communicative competence/ incommensurability and, 184–91, 312n34; convergence/divergence and, 183–84; Gadamer/Hermeneutical conversation and, 179–83, 312nn27, 30; Habermas/universal rationality and, 176–79, 182, 183, 311nn17, 312n30 Communication as society metamorphosis: communication/new voices creation and, 192–97, 280; society reproduction and, 192 Communication dimensions: dialogic trajectory, 174, 192; interpersonal/vertical, 173–74, 192; lateral, 174, 192 Communicative competence and incommensurability: dialogic syntax and, 190–91; hybridity/mutual access of voices and, 184–88, 312n34; schema of voices, 188–90 Communism, 161, 162, 275, 329n79

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Communitarianism, 18, 261, 262, 266, 327n57 Community: clinamen as, 77; gift for, 198; hearing and, 198; imagined, 225, 263; multivoiced body and, 198; mutual exposure as, 76–82; new voices creation and, 198; singularities and, 77, 78, 298n74; voices and, 198 Complex interactionism, 103, 108–9, 114 Computational model of mind, 105–7, 108, 114 Computational systems, 112; of cognitive science, 110, 111, 311n10 Computation, classical, 107 Computerized workplaces/voices/social structures, 163–68, 310n44 Connectionism, 103, 104–7, 108, 110, 111, 114, 301n21, 303n50 Connolly, William E., 324n8, 330n101 Consciousness, 112, 302n42, 303n50; communication and, 169; language and, 169–70 Context, 111 Continental philosophy: dilemma of diversity and, x; society as multivoiced body and, x Control, 101 Convergence: communication as mutual understanding and, 183–84; over divergence and tradition, 183 Conversation, hermeneutical, 179–83 Corporations, and globalization, 17 Cosmos: chaosmos as beyond opposition between chaos and, 14, 30, 32, 33; Deleuze and, 33, 288n51; dilemma history and inversion of chaos and, 12–13, 25; Guattari and, 33; history of, 20–30; multivoiced body and, 22; order as, 13; Plato on, 22, 23; unity of differences and, 22; see also Dilemma history Cosmos/chaos struggle: cosmos triumph in, 22–24; Egyptian Ra and Apophis in, 21–22; valorization of chaos in, 24–30; see also Chaos valorization

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336

index

Countermemory: genealogical critique and, 223; of multivoiced body, 223–24; oracles and, 223, 225, 250; resistance and, 225; social unconscious, 223; society as multivoiced body and, 225 Critique of Political Economy (Marx), 159, 160 Crockett, Larry J., 302n41 Cultural differences, creative interplay between, x Cultural hybridization, and technology, 196 Cultural identity, European, 4, 283n4 Culture, Bakhtin on, 62 Cunningham, Merce, 184 Darwin, Charles, 113 Darwinism, 115, 303n53; see also NeoDarwinism Davidson, Donald, 186, 313n36 Davis, Martin, 302n42 Dawkins, Richard, 115, 303n58 Decomposition, 113 Deconstructive strategy, 93–94, 114, 116, 117, 144, 199, 280 De Grandis, Rita, 286nn29, 35, 314n3 Deleuze, Gilles, 14, 27, 61, 63, 84, 93, 94, 100, 102, 144, 278; Aeon and, 34, 35, 288n59, 289n60; anexact and, 38, 42, 45, 46, 48, 72, 94, 143, 151, 289nn67, 70, 292n93; axiomatic capital/nomadic war machines and, 229–32, 229n15; Being and, 33–36, 288n53, 56, 59, 289n60; chaos and, 21, 33, 288n51; chaosmos and, 20, 32–51, 85, 89, 277, 287nn45, 46, 288nn51, 53, 56, 59, 289n60; cosmos and, 33, 288n51; global capitalism genealogical critique of, 228, 229–32, 238, 320n15; immanence and, 277; nonmechanistic naturalism and, 36; reciprocal presupposition of, 43–45, 74, 84, 142–43, 147–49, 168, 185, 290n78, 291n80; reverse causality of, 46, 48, 100, 292n92; see also

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Chaosmos and anonymity problem; Chaosmos and ethics; Chaosmos and naturalism/Deleuze and Guattari Democracy, 273; deliberative, 250–51, 253, 258–59, 260; ecology and, 276; economic, 260, 310n44; in society, x, 61–62, 166; in workplace, x, 167, 281, 310n44 Democracy and justice liberal views: democracy/justice of multivoiced body and, 250–56; Habermas/procedural justice and, 253–56, 260, 326n39; Rawls/political liberalism and, 250–53, 256, 260, 324nn15, 17, 18, 325nn27, 28, 326n46 Democracy and justice of multivoiced body, 281; citizenship/ethical motivation and, 260–63, 326n47, 327n49, 54, 57, 328n58, 59, 62; democracy/justice liberal views and, 250–56; immanence and, 276–79; justice principle and, 256–60; multiculturalism/collective rights and, 264–68, 281, 328n64, 65, 69, 329n76; new citizenship and, 18; oracle/anti-oracle and, 18, 270–76, 281, 329n79; political dimension and, 247–83; politics/nihilistic voices and, 268–70, 281, 329n78 Dennett, Daniel, 15, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 132, 303n52, 53 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 15, 18, 27, 52, 94, 283n4, 293n96, 299n2; différance and, 120–23; language and, 120–23, 305n21; messianic without messianism of, 272–75, 329n86, 330n92; poststructuralism and, 120–23, 305n21 Derridean deconstruction, 52, 94, 293n96, 299n2 Descartes, René, 15, 94, 95, 96–97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 144 Desire, 119, 304n4 Deterritorialization, see Absolute deterritorialization and reterritorialization Dialectics, 299n87

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index Dialogic hybridity, 58, 76, 86; solidarity as, 85; of voices, 14, 60–61, 75, 77, 280 Dialogic syntax: of Bakhtin, 68–69, 190–91; communicative competence/ incommensurability and, 190–91 Dialogue, Bakhtin on, 299n87 Dialogues (Plato), 66 Différance, 94, 299n2; Derrida and, 120–23 Differences: chaosmos and, 82; creative interplay between, x; dilemma of diversity and, x; dismissal of, x; identity and, x, 15; intersecting, 77; multivoiced body and, 19; principle of, 251; society as multivoiced body and, x; unity and, 8; see also Cultural differences; Unity of differences Differends, 124, 125, 126, 255, 305nn31, 35 Dilemma history, 13–14, 20; chaosmos/anonymity problem in, 53–56, 293nn97–99, 101, 102, 294n103, 107; chaosmos/Deleuze and Guattari in, 32–36, 287n46, 288n51, 53, 56, 59, 289n60; chaosmos/ethics in, 51–52, 293n94, 95, 96; chaosmos/Joyce and Whitehead in, 30–33; chaosmos/ naturalism/Deleuze and Guattari in, 36–51; cosmos/chaos struggle in, 21–30; inversion of cosmos and chaos in, 13–14, 25; see also Chaos; Chaosmos; Chaosmos and naturalism// Deleuze and Guattari; Cosmos; Cosmos/chaos struggle Dilemma of diversity, 18; age of diversity and, ix, 3–19, 280, 283nn1, 4; analytic philosophy and, x; being and, 9; continental philosophy and, x; difference and, x; epistemology and, 9; feminism and, x; identity and, x; introduction to, x; knowledge and, 9; Korot and Reich’s The Cave and, 5–6, 7, 8; meaning of, x; modernism and, x, 4, 284n5; multivoiced body and, 199; ontology and, 9; Plato’s cave and, 8–13;

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political philosophy and, 9; postcolonial thought and, x; postmodernism and, x, 4, 284n5; Saramago’s The Cave and, 9–13; social philosophy and, 9; society as multivoiced body and, x, 57–89; unity and, 4, 5, 199, 284n5; unity of differences and, 13 Dilemma of diversity history, see Dilemma history Discourse: four types of reported, 67–68, 296n50; voice and, 76, 77; see also Social discourses Discrete symbols, see Classical cognitivism Divergence: communication as mutual understanding and, 183–84; tradition and convergence over, 183 Diversity, 280; ethnic cleansing and, 3; multiculturalism and, 3; neutral rules and, 4; society and, 3–4, 283n1, 4; universal doctrine and, 3; and universal vision of the good, 3, 4, 283n4; see also Age of diversity; Dilemma of diversity Diversity age, see Age of diversity Doctrine, see Universal doctrine Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 65, 66, 71, 73, 87, 89 Double voicing, 83 Douglas, Mary, 314n6 Dreyfus, Hubert, 111 Dreyfus, Stuart, 111 Du Bois, W. E. B., 64 Dynamic cognitivism, 108–9 Dynamic hybridity, 28, 61, 157–58; chaos and, 30; chaosmos and, 31, 32; of voices, 76, 196 Eagleton, Terry, 122, 305n21 Ecology: democracy and, 276; multivoiced body/immanence and, 276, 277–78, 330n100 Economic democracy, 260, 310n44 Economics, 16 Economic systems: multivoiced body and, 16; as social structures, 16, 161–62

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Eco, Umberto, 31 The Ego and the Id (Freud), 211 Egyptians: on chaos, 21–22, 23, 285n7; cosmos/chaos struggle of, 21–22 Einstein, Albert, 186, 312n34 Elliptical identity: voices/hybridity and, 154–56; voices/primacy of voices and, 145–46, 280, 308n1, 2 Ellison, Ralph, 59 Empire: 1st head/axiomatic and Castells’s network society, 233–35, 321nn19, 21; 2nd head/the multitude, 235–37, 238, 322n34; genealogical critique of, 17, 228, 232–37, 245, 246, 321nn19, 21; globalization and two heads of, 228, 232–37, 321nn19, 21; Hardt and Negri on two heads of, 228, 232–37, 321nn19, 21 Empiricism, 96, 97 Enemies: antagonism/agonism and, 249, 324n8; the political/friends and, 248, 249, 250, 269, 323n7 Enframing, 210; modern technological society as, 209; as oracles, 209 Epiphenomenalism, 159 Epistemology, 281; dilemma of diversity and, 9; Plato’s cave and, 9, 284n12 Epoché, 57–58, 72, 74, 294n4 Equal audibility, 270, 271, 274, 281 Ethical motivation, democracy and justice of multivoiced body/citizenship and, 260–63, 326n47, 327nn49, 54, 57–59, 62 Ethics: chaosmos and, 51–52, 293nn94–96; and communication for age of diversity, 169–99; of generosity., 199; for multivoiced body, 197, 199; society as multivoiced body and, 17 Ethnic cleansing, x; diversity and, 3 Evans, Dylan, 318n48 Evans, Fred, 289n66, 301n39, 302nn41, 42, 303nn49, 62, 319n63, 323n53, 329n75

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Exclusion: nihilistic voices of, 268–69, 329n78; political/social, x; society as multivoiced body and, 88 Exile, 286n34 Existent, 79–80 Exposure, community as mutual, 76–82 Extension, 96 Fascism, 258, 277; Oracle and, 204, 247 Fear/hatred: of chaos, 203, 206; oracles and, 207; society and, 203, 206; of society as multivoiced body, 203, 206, 250 Fecundity, 278; voices and, 14 Feldstein, Richard, 315n27, 316n41 Feminism: dilemma of diversity and, x; of Irigaray, 219, 221–22; of Kristeva, 219–23; society as multivoiced body and, x Fink, Bruce, 316n29, 41, 317n45 Finnegan’s Wake (Joyce), 30, 31 Flanagan, Owen, 300nn4, 16 Forces, see Anonymous forces Foucault, Michel, 15, 16, 27, 33, 53, 123, 228, 293n97, 299n86; language and, 127; on power, 127–32, 168, 208, 232, 306n45, 52; on sexuality, 130, 306n45 Frame problem, 112, 302n41 Frank, Manfred, 93, 94 Fraser, Nancy, 326n46 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 24, 161; social unconscious vs. dynamic unconscious theory of, 211–13, 214, 222, 315n16, 318n48 Friends/enemies and the political, 248, 249, 250, 269, 323n7 Functionalism, 103–4, 105 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 17, 175, 176, 186–87, 269; communication as mutual understanding/Hermeneutical conversation and, 179–83, 312n27, 30; on tradition, 179–80, 181, 182, 183 Gandhi, Indira, 85, 86 Gardiner, Michael, 299n84

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index Garrod, Simond, 311n10 The Gay Science (Nietzsche), 26, 302n48 Gell-Mann, Murray, 292n93 Genealogical critique: countermemory and, 223; of Empire, 17, 228, 232–37, 245, 246, 321n19, 21; of globalization, 228, 245, 246; social unconscious and, 223–24 Generosity ethics, 199 Genres, 123–27, 305n28 Gestalism, 107 Gibson, J. J., 108, 301n39 Gilly, Adolfo, 194–96, 265 Gilroy, Paul, 64 Global capital, 238–39 Globalization, 18, 162; anonymity/mediating institutions and, 238–40, 246, 322nn36, 40; from below, 238, 246, 281; capitalistic, x; clash of civilizations vs., 224, 227–28; corporations and, 17; genealogical critique of, 228, 245, 246; Hardt and Negri/Empire’s two heads and, 228, 232–37, 238, 321nn19, 21; of labor, 239; multivoiced body political dimension and, 225–40, 246; neoliberal governments and, 17; networks/ New Solidarity and, 240–44; network solidarity and, 247, 281; oracle of, 224, 225, 238, 245; oracle of capitalism and, 224, 238, 322n36; postmodern society/cognitive mapping and, 228–29, 320n12; social movements and, 17, 239–40; society as multivoiced body and, 17, 245; unity of differences and, 17; see also Capitalism God, 113, 279 The good: diversity and universal vision of, 3, 4, 283n4; plurality and translatable common notion of, 4 Gorra, Michael, 299n88, 95 Government, see Neoliberal governments Gramsci, Antonio, 163 Gregorianism, 303n53 Grosz, Elizabeth, 319n60 Grosz, George, 154

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Guattari, Félix, 14, 27, 61, 63, 84, 93, 94, 100, 102, 144, 278; Aeon and, 34, 35, 288n59; axiomatic capital/nomadic war machines and, 229–32, 229n15; Being and, 33–36, 288nn56, 59; chaos and, 14, 33; chaosmos and, 20, 32–51, 85, 89, 277, 287n46, 288nn56, 59; cosmos and, 33; global capitalism genealogical critique of, 228, 229–32, 238, 320n15; immanence and, 277; nonmechanistic naturalism and, 36; reciprocal presupposition of, 43–45, 74, 84, 142–43, 147–49, 168, 185, 290n78, 291n80; reverse causality and, 46, 48, 100, 292n92; see also Chaosmos and anonymity problem; Chaosmos and ethics; Chaosmos and naturalism/Deleuze and Guattari Guéhenno, Jean-Marie, 283n4 Guillermo Bonfil, Battalla, 226, 319n4 Guillermoprieto, Alma, 184 Gutmann, Amy, 3, 264, 283nn1, 4, 327nn52, 54 Habermas, Jürgen, 17, 18, 175, 181, 250, 253, 312n27, 325n28; communication as mutual understanding/universal rationality and, 176–79, 182, 183, 311n17, 312n30; democracy and justice liberal views/procedural justice and, 253–56, 260, 326n39 Hallward, Peter, 291n88 Halperin, David M., 306n47 Han, Béatrice, 307n49 Hanks, William F., 313n43 Hardt, Michael, 17, 240, 320n12; on Empire’s axiomatic and Castells’s network society, 233–35, 321nn19, 21; globalization/Empire’s two heads and, 228, 232–37, 238, 321nn19, 21; the multitude and, 228, 235–37, 238, 239, 322nn34, 40 Hasselbach, Ingo, 315n12 Hate speech, 329n78 Hatred, see Fear/hatred

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340

index

Hearing: community and, 198; multivoiced body and, 198; new voices creation and, 198; voices interplay and, 199 Hegel, G. W. F., 15, 23, 34, 102; “absolute spirit” of, 58, 59, 182, 294n6; “life and death struggle” of, 19, 249 Hegemony: multivoiced body and, 275–76; oracle/anti-oracle and Mouffe/Laclau’s, 275–76 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe), 275 Heidegger, Martin, 15, 76, 108, 209, 210, 297n65 Held, David, 263, 328nn58, 59 Hermeneutical conversation, 179–83 Heterogeneity: chaosmos and, 85; common “uncommon world” and, 299n86; homogeneity vs., 4; modernism and, 4, 284n5; multivoiced body and, 85; postmodernism and, 4, 284n5; unity vs., x, 4, 284n5; voices and, 14 Heteroglossia: of Bakhtin, 86, 87, 88, 226, 299n94; dialogized, 86, 87, 299n94; hybridization as dialogized, 86; monoglossia vs., 86–87, 88, 299n94; social languages and, 86, 87; utterances and, 87, 299n94 Hierarchical organizations: networks and, 242, 243–44; oracles and, 244 Hirschkop, Ken, 286n27 History: of people and new voices creation, 194–96; see also Dilemma history Hitler, Adolph, 154 Hobbes, Thomas, 15, 58–59 Holism, 103, 107, 277, 278 Holland, Eugene W., 293n102 Holloway, John, 295n14 Homogeneity, heterogeneity vs., 4 Homophobia, 132; oracle and, 224, 247 Homophony, 87 Honneth, Axel, 326n40 Hopper, Paul J., 306n38 Horizons, 98–99; as creative interplay of voices, 249; of war, 249, 250, 269

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Horkheimer, Max, 285n8 Hughes, Langston, 59 Humanity, 248 Hume, David, 95 Hunter, Allen, 323n50 Huntington, Samuel P., 17, 226–27, 248, 249, 320n5, 10, 323n7 Husserl, Edmund, 15, 76, 121, 123, 297n64 Hybrid: multivoiced body and voices as, 186–87, 188; see also Dialogic hybridity Hybridity, 28, 29, 30, 286n34; communicative competence/incommensurability/mutual access of voices and, 184–88, 312n34; prosthetic egos and, 197; see also Dialogic hybridity; Dynamic hybridity; Voices and hybridity Hybridization: intersecting voices and, 239–40; see also Cultural hybridization Hybridization of Bakhtin, 62, 240, 272; dialogic world/words and things and, 72–74, 84; as dialogized heteroglossia, 86, 87, 299n94; intentional, 63–66, 67, 295n24; nonintentional, 66–68; society’s dialogism and, 70–72; speech genres and, 68–70, 72, 83 Identity: The Cave and, 203; difference and, x, 15; dilemma of diversity and, x; excluding others and, 15; hybridity/ singular voices and, 156–58, 310n29; multivoiced body and personal, 15; new understanding of, 15; oracle’s univocal, 207, 250; purity and, 29, 157, 209, 261; society as multivoiced body and, x, 261, 262, 327nn52, 54; subjects and, 16, 240; voices and, 15, 16, 83, 203; see also Cultural identity; Elliptical identity; Social identity Imagined communities, 225, 263 Immanence: Deleuze/Guattari and, 277; democracy and justice of multivoiced body and, 276–79; multivoiced body and, 88–89, 272, 276–79, 330nn100, 101; multivoiced body/ecology and,

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index 276, 277–78, 330n100; multivoiced body/religion and, 276, 278–79, 330n101; society as multivoiced body and, 276–79 Incommensurability, see Communicative competence and incommensurability Individual rights, x, 281 Indochina, ix Informationalism, of Castells, 234, 321n26, 322n34 Institutions, see Mediating institutions/ globalization/anonymity Interactionism, see Complex interactionism International Voluntary Services (IVS), ix, 156, 157 Internet, 196 Interplay of voices, see Voices interplay Involution, see Unnatural participation and involution Ippolito, Jon, 313n52 Irigaray, Luce, 17, 27, 64; feminism of, 219, 221–22; social unconscious vs. unconscious theory of, 219, 221–22 IVS, see International Voluntary Services Jameson, Fredric, 228, 232, 238, 320n12 Jaynes, Julian, 314n6 Jennings, Richard C., 307n70 Johnson-Laird, Philip N., 105, 300n17, 19, 301n23, 302n42 Joyce, James, 30–31, 60–61 Justice, xi, 126, 273, 305n31; new view of, x; see also Democracy and justice liberal views; Democracy and justice of multivoiced body; Procedural justice Justice principle, 256–60 Kant, Immanuel, 15, 23, 76, 97, 176, 297n63 Kaufmann, Stuart, 292n90 Kellert, Stephen H., 285n14, 292n93 Kidder, Thalia, 242, 243 Kitcher, Philip, 297n58 Klee, Robert, 308n79

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Knowledge: dilemma of diversity and, 9; dilemma of perception and, 97, 300n10; Plato’s cave and, 9; representations of, 95; univocal reason and, 12 Kögler, Hans Herbert, 312n29 Kolb, David, 294n6, 297n65 Korot, Beryl, 5–6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 32, 280 Kosso, Peter, 292n93 Koukal, David R., 312n30 Kristeva, Julia, 17, 27; feminism of, 219–23; social unconscious vs. unconscious theory of, 219–23, 318n51, 53 Kuberski, Philip, 286n37 Kuhn, Thomas, 15, 186, 312n34; paradigms and, 136–39, 140, 307n62; science and, 136–39, 140, 307n62 Kymlicka, Will, 252, 264, 324n15, 324n18, 326n47, 328n64 Labor, 240, 242; globalization of, 239; networks, 242–43 Lacan, Jacques, 17, 27, 211; on aggressivity, 218–19, 317n47, 318n49; social unconscious vs. linguistic unconscious theory of, 213–19, 220, 221, 222, 223, 316n29, 31, 36, 41, 317n43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49 Laclau, Ernesto, 18; hegemony of, 275–76; oracle/anti-oracle and, 275–76 La langue: poststructuralism and, 119–20; Saussure and, 118, 122 Language, 16, 17; as agent, 144; Bakhtin on, 62–63, 65, 68–70, 72–73, 82–83, 86, 117, 295n18; brain and, 114, 116; Butler and, 132–35; cognition and, 103, 109; consciousness and, 169–70; Derrida and, 120–23, 305n21; Foucault and, 127; Lyotard and, 123–27, 305n31, 35; memes and, 115–16; national, 69; objects and, 74; perceptions and, 101, 303n62; postmodernism and, 94, 117–43, 144; poststructuralism and, 15, 94, 116, 117, 119–20; primacy of voices and, 117–43, 199, 280; primacy

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342

index

Language (continued) of voices/postmodernism and, 117–43; Saussure and, 118–20, 122, 304nn2, 4; the self and, 144; self-reflexive feature of, 115; singularities and, 77, 78; structuralism and, 15, 116; subject agency and, 120–35; subjectivity and, 114–16, 144, 303n50; subjects and, 82–83, 94, 116, 117, 144; as tool, 116, 303n52; voices and, 15, 16, 77, 82, 84, 94, 116, 117, 144, 280, 298n68; see also Master language; Postmodernism and language; Social languages Language and subject agency: Butler/ performativity and, 132–35; Derrida/ différance and, 120–23, 305n21; Foucault/power and, 127–32, 306n45, 52; Lyotard/genres and, 123–27, 305n31, 35 Language as communication, 169, 170; Chomsky’s universal grammar and, 171–72, 311n10; communication’s three dimensions and, 173–75; Saussure’s structuralism and, 172–73 Language forms: Bakhtin on, 69–70, 83; social language as, 83 Laos, ix, xi, 64, 156, 193; beliefs/religion of, x, 158 Latour, Bruno: body corporate of, 140–41; science and, 140–41 Lawlor, Leonard, 297n64, 304n14, 305n21, 330n92 Lawrence, T. E., 206, 207 Leopold, Aldo, 277 Levinas, Emmanuel, 15, 80, 81; on “saying” and “said,” 78–79 Liberalism, 248, 262, 266, 327n57; see also Democracy and justice liberal views; Political liberalism Liberty, principle of, 251 Linguistic idealism, 16, 84, 94, 159; postmodernism and, 284n17 Linguistics, of Saussure, 118–19, 122, 304nn2, 4 Locke, John, 15, 58, 59, 97 Lormand, Eric, 302n41

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Lucretius, 33 Lugones, María, 29, 286n34 Lyotard, Jean-François, 15, 18, 27, 256, 260; differends and, 124, 125, 126, 255, 305n31, 35; genres and, 123–27, 305n28; language and, 123–27, 305nn31, 35; phrases and, 124–25; poststructuralism and, 123–27, 305nn31, 35 McClelland, J. L., 301n24 McCloskey, Barbara, 309n25, 323n53 McGinn, 242, 243 Machines, see Abstract machines Machinism, see Universal machinism Mann, Thomas, 154 Marcos, Subcomandante, 295n14, 313n47, 328n70 Margalit, Avishai, 327n49, 330n101 Marxism, 125, 157, 163, 166, 168, 210, 244, 273, 274, 305n28, 320n15, 330n92 Marx, Karl, 16, 23, 166, 168, 273, 274, 329n79; historical materialism of, 159, 160; voices/social structures/personification and, 159–63, 310n38 Master language, 87; monoglossia and unitary, 86 Materialism, historical, 159, 160 Mayans, 194, 196, 197 Mechanism, see Beyond mechanism and vitalism Mechanosphere, 42–43, 290n77 Mediating institutions/globalization/anonymity, 238–40, 246, 322n36, 40 Megill, Allan, 315n14 Melville, Herman, 59 Memes, 115–16, 132, 303n60 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 15, 24, 94, 103, 107, 108, 109, 111, 171, 302n42; overturning of Cartesianism, 95–100; phenomenology of perception of, 97, 98–100, 102, 110, 113, 114, 116, 144, 300n12, 303n62 Messianic without messianism: of Derrida, 272–75, 329n86, 330n92; multivoiced body and, 274

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index Mestizaje, 27, 29 Mestizo voice, 194–96, 197 Mexico, 194–96, 265 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 57–58, 65, 67, 72, 74, 87, 117, 203, 270 Midnight’s Children and Voice, 57; appeal of voices and, 60–62; “Midnight’s Children National Conference”/ two traditional society concepts and, 58–60; society as multivoiced body and, 57–62, 87, 247–48 Midnight’s Children National Conference, 57, 58, 59, 62, 66, 85–86, 87, 204, 247–48, 272 Miller, G. A., 105, 300n19 Mind, 108–9, 115, 303n53; mechanistic construals of, 113 Mind-body dualism, cognitive science and, 95 Minkowski, Eugene, 206, 207 Modernism, 16; dilemma of diversity and, x, 4, 284n5; heterogeneity and, 4, 284n5; postmodernism and, 83; primacy of voices/subjectivity and, 93–116; the self and, 15, 144; society as multivoiced body and, x, 194; subjects and, 15, 94, 144; unity and, 4, 284n5 Modernism and subjectivity: cognitive science and, 103–10; deconstructive strategy and, 93–94, 114, 116; language/subjectivity and, 114–16; limits of cognitive science and, 110–14; Merleau-Ponty’s overturning of Cartesianism and, 95–100; organic v. analytic discourse and, 100–103 Modernist views of the subject, 94 Modernity: subjects and, 240; tradition and, 194–96 Modern technological society: as enframing, 209; society as multivoiced body and, 209–10 Monoglossia: of Bakhtin, 86, 87, 88, 226; heteroglossia vs., 86–87, 88, 299n94; unitary master language and, 86; utterances and, 87

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Morson, Gary Saul, 286n27, 296nn45, 50, 297n54, 299n54 Mouffe, Chantal, 18, 259, 324n8, 325n28; hegemony of, 275–76; oracle/antioracle and, 275–76 Mues, Laura, 328n70 Multiculturalism: democracy and justice of multivoiced body/collective rights and, 264–68, 281, 328nn64, 65, 69, 329n76; diversity and, 3 Multicultural societies, and new citizenship, 18 The multitude: Hardt and Negri and, 228, 235–37, 238, 239, 322nn34, 40; organizing the, 239 Multivoiced body: “above”/”below” realms and, 18–19; anonymity problem and, 94; anti-oracles and, 272; The Cave and, 19; chance and, 85; chaos and, 21; community and, 198; community as mutual exposure and, 76–82; cosmos and, 22; countermemory of, 223–24; differences and, 19; dilemma of diversity and, 199; economic systems and, 16; ethics for, 197, 199; hearing and, 198; hegemony and, 275–76; heterogeneity and, 85; immanence and, 88–89, 272, 276–79, 330n100, 101; immanence/ecology and, 276, 277–78, 330n100; immanence/religion and, 276, 278–79, 330n101; as interplay of voices, 14, 249, 250, 274; messianic without messianism and, 274; oracles and, 17, 18, 88, 204, 247–48, 270–72, 274–76, 329n79; personal identity as, 15; philosophy and, x; Plato and, 18; political practices and, x; preconscious and, 206; religion and, 18, 19, 276, 278–79, 330n101; repressive unconscious and, 206; as schema of voices, 188, 189, 190; secularism and, 18, 19; society as multivoiced body and, 74–82; solidarity and, 85; vs. traditional concept of unconscious,

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Multivoiced body (continued) 211; univocal voices of Kant/Husserl/ Heidegger and, 75–76; voices as hybrid in, 186–87, 188; see also Democracy and justice of multivoiced body; Political dimension of multivoiced body; Society as multivoiced body Mutual access of voices, 184–88, 312n34 Mutual exposure, community as, 76–82 Mutual understanding; see also Communication as mutual understanding Naficy, Hamid, 286n34 Nagel, Christopher P., 285n13 Nagel, Ernest, 300n11 Nagel, Thomas, 112 Nancy, Jean Luc, 15, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 298n67, 73 Narration: ethical-political sphere and, 81, 298n82; mutual, 81; of self, 79–81, 298n82 National Orthopedic Center, ix Nations: clash of civilizations and, 225–28, 320n5, 10; as imagined communities, 225, 263; political dimension of multivoiced body and, 225–28, 320n5, 10 Naturalism, 33, 113n48; see also Chaosmos and naturalism/Deleuze and Guattari; Nonmechanistic naturalism Natural selection, 113 Nature, and The Cave, 18–19 Negri, Antonio, 17, 240, 320n12; on Empire’s axiomatic and Castells’s network society, 233–35, 321nn19, 21; globalization/Empire’s two heads and, 228, 232–37, 238, 321nn19, 21; the multitude and, 228, 235–37, 238, 239, 322nn34, 40 Neo-Darwinism, 113 Neoliberal governments, 17; see also Globalization Networks: advantages/disadvantages of, 243, 323n50; hierarchical

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organizations and, 242, 243–44; labor, 242–43; meanings/goals of, 245; multivoiced body political dimension and, 240–44; social movements and, 242, 245 Network society, 17; of Castells, 228, 233–35, 240–41, 246, 321nn21, 22, 27, 30, 34, 44; subjects of global, 240 Network solidarity, 17, 245, 246, 323n53; globalization and, 247, 281 New citizenship, 18; age of diversity and, 18; democracy and justice of multivoiced body and, 18; multicultural societies and, 18 New Solidarity, 17; multivoiced body political dimension and, 244–45, 246, 323n53 Newton, Isaac, 186, 312n34 New voices creation: community and, 198; hearing and, 198; history of people and, 194–96; interplay of voices and, ix, x, 14, 85, 168; oracles and, 85; productive unconscious and, 205; society as multivoiced body and, 194, 197; society metamorphosis and, 14, 84, 85, 192–97; society metamorphosis/ communication and, 192–97, 280 Nicolas of Cusa, 30 Nielsen, Greg M., 264, 327n57, 328n67 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17, 63, 114, 117, 144, 153, 207, 276, 294n107, 302n48; chaos and, 13–14, 21, 24–27, 30, 113, 302n46; chaos valorization and postmodern offspring of, 27–30; communication and, 169–70, 197–99; communication and “gift-giving virtue” of, 197–99; “conversing and controverting gods” of, 19, 249, 284n19; nihilism of, 113, 302n46 Nihilism, 113, 114, 250, 302n46 Nihilistic voices: democracy and justice of multivoiced body/politics and, 268–70, 281, 329n78; of exclusion, 268–69, 329n78 1984 (Orwell), 86, 87

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index Nobo, Jorge Luis, 287n39, 287n41 Nodes, see Connectionism Nonmechanistic naturalism: Deleuze and, 36; Guattari and, 36; society as multivoiced body and, 36; see also Chaosmos and naturalism/Deleuze and Guattari Novelty: chaosmos and, 198; communication and, 198; society and, 198; solidarity and, 198 Nussbaum, Martha, 148 Objects: Bakhtin on, 74; horizon and, 98–99; language and, 74; perceptions and, 98–100; subjects and, 98–100, 110, 111, 300n11, 301n39 Oksala, Johanna, 307n54 Oliver, Kelly, 318n53 Ontology: dilemma of diversity and, 9; Plato’s cave and, 9, 284n12 Oracle(s): age of diversity and, 13; of clash of civilizations, 224; communal resistance forms as, 242; communication and, 203; countermemory and, 223, 225, 250; democracy and justice of multivoiced body/anti-oracles and, 18, 270–76, 281, 329n79; enframing as, 209; fascism and, 204, 247; fear/ hatred and, 207; of globalization, 224, 225, 238, 245; of globalization/capitalism, 224, 238, 322n36; hierarchical organizations and, 244; homophobia and, 224, 247; meanings of, 11, 207, 284n15; multivoiced body and, 17, 18, 88, 204, 247–48, 270–72, 274–76, 329n79; new voices creation and, 85; Plato’s cave and, 11, 12; power and, 208; preconscious and, 205, 207; purity and, 209, 226, 279; questions about, 17; racism and, 210, 224, 245, 247; repressive unconscious and, 207–10, 314n6, 8; resistance to, 17, 208; Saramago’s The Cave and, 12; secular vs. religious, 12; sexism and, 224, 245; social discourses and, 205, 207,

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208; social unconscious and, 88, 204, 205, 207–10, 211, 223, 225, 281, 314n6, 8; society as multivoiced body and, 18, 88, 207, 225, 248, 250, 270–72, 274–76, 329n79; society metamorphosis and, 203; society’s voices and, 203, 207, 208, 209, 314n6, 8; as universal doctrine, 11; univocal identity of, 207, 250; voices interplay and, 168; of whiteness, 210 Oracle and anti-oracle, 18, 270–71, 329n79; democracy and justice of multivoiced body and, 18, 270–76, 281, 329n79; Derrida’s messianic without messianism and, 272–75, 329n86, 330n92; Mouffe/Laclau’s hegemony and, 275–76; see also Anti-oracles Order: cosmos as, 13; see also Cosmos Organic discourse, 116; analytic discourse vs., 100–103, 111, 112 Orwell, George, 86, 87 Pamuk, Orham, 157 Paradigms: Bloor and, 136–38, 139, 140; Boyd and, 139–40; four elements of, 136, 307n62; Kuhn and, 136–39, 140, 307n62; science and, 136–39, 140, 307n62 Parkes, Graham, 153, 309n20 Patton, Paul, 288n48, 293n94, 294n103 Pearson, Keith Ansell, 291n85, 292n90 Perceptions: action and, 108; dilemma of knowledge and, 97, 300n10; language and, 101, 303n62; Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of, 97, 98–100, 102, 110, 113, 114, 116, 300n12, 303n62; objects and, 98–100; physiognomic, 98; representations of, 95, 100; subjects and, 98–100, 113 Performativity, 132–35 Personification, 159–63, 310n38 Persons, as singularities, 78, 298n74 Pessoa, Fernando, 152, 309n16 Phenomenology, 15, 76, 80, 95, 112, 121, 122, 297n64; communication and,

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Phenomenology (continued) 192; existential, 94, 110; of perception of Merleau-Ponty, 97, 98–100, 102, 110, 113, 114, 116, 144, 300n12, 303n62; structuralism and, 83 Philosophy: multivoiced body and, x; of science, 15, 139, 140, 141; see also Political philosophy; Social philosophy Pickering, Martin, 311n10 Pinker, Steven, 303n61, 311n7 Place, 146–47; see also Voices and place Plato, 8, 13; on chaos, 22, 23; chora (“mother” “receptacle”) of, 22, 23, 32, 287n39; on cosmos, 22; Forms of, 8, 9, 10, 12, 22, 66; multivoiced body and, 18 Plato’s cave, 22; dilemma of diversity and, 8–13; epistemology and, 9, 284n12; knowledge and, 9; ontology and, 9, 284n12; oracles and, 11, 12; reason and, 9, 12; Saramago’s The Cave and, 9, 10, 11, 12; society and, 9; unity and, 8–13; unity of differences and, 8–13 Pluth, Edward M., 315n27 Politics, democracy and justice of multivoiced body/nihilistic voices and, 268–70, 281, 329n78 The political: friends and enemies and, 248, 249, 250, 269, 323n7; Schmitt and, 248–50, 269, 323n7 Political dimension of multivoiced body, 17; democracy/justice and, 247–83; globalization/resistance/New Solidarity and, 225–46, 323n53; nations/clash of civilizations and, 225–28, 320n5, 10; social unconscious and, 17, 203–24 Political liberalism, 18, 261; democracy and justice liberal views/Rawls and, 250–53, 256, 260, 324n15, 17, 18, 325nn27, 28, 326n46 Political Liberalism (Rawls), 251, 324n15, 17 Political philosophy, 18; dilemma of diversity and, 9 Political practices, and multivoiced body, x

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Political sphere, and narration, 81, 298n82 Polyphony, 87 Popperianism, 303n53 Postcolonial thought: dilemma of diversity and, x; society as multivoiced body and, x Postmodernism, 16; dilemma of diversity and, x, 4, 284n5; heterogeneity and, 4, 284n5; language and, 94, 117–43, 144; linguistic idealism and, 284n17; modernism and, 83; primacy of voices/language and, 117–43; society as multivoiced body and, x, 194, 281; voices/social structures and, 168 Postmodernism and language, 117; language and agency and, 120–35; Saussure/poststructuralism and, 118–20, 122, 304nn2, 4; science/social constructionism/realism and, 135–43 Postmodern society/globalization/cognitive mapping, 228–29, 320n12 Poststructuralism, 102, 284n5; Derrida and, 120–23, 305n21; la langue and, 119–20; language and, 15, 94, 116, 117, 119–20; Lyotard and, 123–27, 305nn31, 35; Saussure and, 118–20, 122, 304n2, 304n4 Poststructuralist, 284n5 Power, 16; Butler and, 132–34; Foucault on, 127–32, 168, 208, 232, 306nn45, 52; oracles and, 208 Preconscious: multivoiced body and, 206; oracles and, 205, 207; social discourses, 204, 205; as social unconscious form, 204–5, 314n1 Primacy of voices, 15, 109, 116, 144; communication and, 169–99; communication/ethics for age of diversity and, 169–99; language and, 117–43, 199, 280; modernism/subjectivity and, 93–116; postmodernism/language and, 117–43; subjects and, 199, 280; voices/elliptical identity and, 145–46, 280, 308nn1, 2; voices/hybridity and,

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index 152–58, 309nn16, 20, 29; voices/place and, 146–52; voices/social structures and, 158–68, 199, 280, 310n38 Procedural justice, democracy and justice liberal views/Habermas and, 253–56, 260, 326n39 Productive unconscious: new voices creation and, 205; as social unconscious form, 205–6 Project identities, social movements as, 240–41, 323n44 Prosthetic egos, 196; hybridity and, 197 Proust, Marcel, 310n29 The Psychic Life of Power (Butler), 133 Pullum, Geoffrey K., 300n18 Purity, 14, 53, 67, 158, 197, 268; epistemological, 122; identity and, 29, 157, 209, 261; oracle and, 209, 226, 279 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin), 28 Racism, 57, 59, 88, 157; oracle and, 210, 224, 245, 247 Rajchman, John, 309n24 Rationalism, 96; technocratic, 114; see also Universal rationality Rawls, John, 18; democracy and justice liberal views/political liberalism and, 250–53, 256, 260, 324n15, 17, 18, 325nn27, 28, 326n46 Realism: beyond, 140–43; of Boyd, 139–40, 308n77 Reason: formal, 12–13; knowledge and, 12; Korot and Reich’s The Cave and, 12; Plato’s cave and, 9, 12; Saramago’s The Cave and, 12 Reciprocal presupposition, 43–45, 74, 84, 185, 290n78, 291n80; voices/place and, 147–49, 168; see also Chaosmos and naturalism/Deleuze and Guattari Reflexivity/voices/place, 149–50, 309n11, 309n12 Regan, Tom, 330n98 Rehg, William, 325n27, 28, 326n39 Reich, Steve, 5–6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 32, 280

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Reiss, Timothy J., 300n13 Religion: The Cave and, 18–19; monotheistic, 113; multivoiced body and, 18, 19, 276, 278–79, 330n101; multivoiced body/immanence and, 276, 278–79, 330n101 Religious fundamentalism, 275 Representationalism, 95 Representations: of knowledge, 95; of perceptions, 95, 100 Repressive unconscious: chaos and, 206; multivoiced body and, 206; oracles and, 207, 210, 314nn6, 8; as social unconscious form, 206–11; society as multivoiced body and, 206, 207, 210–11 The Republic (Plato), 8 Resistance: countermemory and, 225; multivoiced body political dimension/ globalization/New Solidarity and, 240–46; three forms of communal, 240–42; see also Communal resistance forms Resistance identities: proactive, 241; reactive, 241; social movements as, 240–41, 323n44 Reterritorialization, see Absolute deterritorialization and reterritorialization Reverse causality, 46, 48, 100, 292n92 Ricoeur, Paul, 315n16 Rights, see Collective rights; Individual rights Rodman, John, 330n99 Romany, Celina, 328n69 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15; “general will” of, 58, 59 Rushdie, Salman, 15, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 77, 84, 85; Midnight’s Children National Conference of, 57, 58, 59, 62, 66, 85–86, 87, 204, 247–48, 272; Midnight’s Children of, 57–58, 65, 67, 72, 74, 87, 117, 203, 270 Said, Edward W., 293n97 Salmon, Wesley C., 291n81

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348

index

Sampson, Geoffrey, 171, 172, 311n7 Sánchez-Biosca, Vicente, 314n3 Saramago, José, 9–13, 14, 15–16 Saramago’s Center, 9–10, 12; voices/ social structures and, 15–16 Saunders, B. A. C., 312n32 Saussure, Ferdinand, 15, 17, 187; la langue and, 118, 122; language and, 118–19, 122, 304nn2, 4; language as communication and structuralism of, 172–73; linguistics of, 118–19, 122, 304nn2, 4; poststructuralism and, 118–20, 122, 304nn2, 4 Schema of voices: Communicative competence/incommensurability and, 188–90; as multivoiced body, 188, 189, 190 Schmitt, Carl, 18, 270; the political and, 248–50, 269, 323n7 Schweickart, David, 310n44 Science: Bloor and, 136–38, 139, 140, 308n76; Boyd and, 139–40; Kuhn and, 136–39, 307n62; language and, 135; Latour and, 140–41; paradigms and, 136–39, 140, 307n62; philosophy of, 15, 139, 140, 141; see also Cognitive science Science/social constructionism and realism, 135; beyond, 140–43; Boyd’s realism and, 139–40; Kuhn/Bloor/primacy of paradigms and, 136–39, 140, 307n62, 308n76 Searle, John R., 112 Secularism, and multivoiced body, 18, 19 The self, 303n60; language and, 144; mechanistic construals of, 113; modernism and, 15, 144; narration of, 79–81, 298n82; subject and, 144; voices and, 144 Sen, Amartya, 320n10 Sexism, 88; oracle and, 224, 245 Sexuality, 130, 306n45; Butler and, 132–34 Shakespeare in Love, 198 Shapiro, Kam, 322n35, 40

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Silver, Brian L., 292n93 Singularities, 298n73; community and, 77, 78, 298n74; language and, 77, 78; persons as, 78, 298n74; society as unity of, 77 Skinnerism, 303n53 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 321n22 Smith, Daniel W., 294n103 Smith, Tony, 294n6, 310n44 Social agents, 144 Social constructionism, 116, 136, 139; beyond, 140–43 Social discourses, 102, 135, 187; oracles and, 205, 207, 208; preconscious, 204; as voices, 172 Social identity, 13 Socialism, 166 Social languages: actual worlds and, 84; Bakhtin and, 62–63, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 82–83, 86, 295n18; heteroglossia and, 86, 87; as language forms, 83; subjects and, 83; voices and, 80–81, 83 Social movements: capitalism vs., 239–40; globalization and, 17, 239–40; networks and, 242, 245; as project identities, 241, 323n44; as resistance identities, 240–41, 323n44; society as multivoiced body and, 17; solidarity and, 244 Social philosophy, 9 Social practices: diversity/creation of, ix; interplay of, ix; voices as, ix, 14; see also Political practices Social structures: as economic systems, 16, 161–62; linguistic/nonlinguistic dimensions of, 16, 322n36; Saramago’s Center and, 15–16; see also Voices and social structures Social unconscious, 22, 203; biological theory of Freud’s dynamic unconscious vs., 211–13, 214, 222, 315n16, 318n48; countermemory and, 223; forms of, 204–11; genealogical critique and, 223–24; Irigaray unconscious theory vs., 219, 221–22;

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index Kristeva unconscious theory vs., 219–23, 318n51, 53; Lacan’s linguistic unconscious theory vs., 213–19, 220, 221, 222, 223, 316n29, 31, 36, 41, 43, 317nn44–47, 318n48, 49; multivoiced body political dimension and, 17, 203–24; oracles and, 88, 204, 205, 207–10, 211, 223, 225, 281, 314n6, 8; other theories of unconscious vs., 211–24; society as multivoiced body and, 225 Social unconscious forms: preconscious, 204–5, 314n1; productive unconscious, 205–6; repressive unconscious, 206–11 Society: anonymous forces and, 14, 144; Bakhtin and dialogism of, 70–72; The Cave and, 18–19; chaos and, 203; chaosmos and, 59; and communication in age of diversity, ix; communication/new voices creation and, 192–97, 280; diversity and, 3–4, 283nn1, 4; as dominating univocal subject, 58; fear/ hatred and, 203, 206; as interplay of voices, 14, 61, 74–75; Korot and Reich’s The Cave and, 13; natural vs. artificial communities and, 12; new view of, x; novelty and, 198; oracles and voices of, 203, 208, 209, 314nn6, 8; Plato’s cave and, 9; as plurality of individuals, 58–59; Saramago’s The Cave and, 12, 13; technocapitalist, 114; technology and, 209–10; unity of differences and, 11, 13, 77; voices and, 14, 16, 61, 74–75, 81–82, 84–88, 203; see also Modern technological society; Network society Society as multivoiced body, 14, 18, 94, 116, 117; analytic philosophy and, x; anti-oracles and, 270, 272, 329n79; as anti-utopian, 270, 271, 329n79; Bakhtin’s hybridization and, 62–74; change and, 16; chaosmos and, 20, 82, 272, 277; communication and, 16, 192; conclusion of, 280–82; continental

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philosophy and, x; countermemory and, 225; difference and, x; dilemma of diversity and, x, 57–89; equal audibility and, 270, 271, 274, 281; ethics and, 17; exclusion and, 88; fear/hatred of, 203, 206, 250; feminism and, x; globalization and, 17, 245; identity and, x, 261, 262, 327n52, 54; immanence and, 276–79; introduction to, x; Midnight’s Children and Voice and, 57–62, 87, 247–48; modernism and, x, 194; modern technological society and, 209–10; multivoiced body and, 74–82; new voices creation and, 194, 197; nonmechanistic naturalism and, 36; oracles and, 18, 88, 207, 225, 248, 250, 270–72, 274–76, 329n79; postcolonial thought and, x; postmodernism and, x, 194, 281; repressive unconscious and, 206, 207, 210–11; social movements and, 17; social unconscious and, 225; society metamorphosis and, 85, 197; thinkers contesting, 15; thinkers on, 15; unity of differences and, 280; as utopian, 270, 271, 329n79; voice concept challenges and, 82–89 Society metamorphosis: communication as, 192–97; communication/new voices creation and, 192–97, 280; communication/society reproduction and, 192; interplay of voices creation of, 14; new voices creation and, 14, 84, 85, 192–97; oracles and, 203; society as multivoiced body and, 85, 197 Solidarity: chaosmos and, 85, 198; communication and, 198; dialogic hybridity as, 85; multivoiced body and, 85; network over hierarchical order and, 17; novelty and, 198; social movements and, 244; two meanings/types of, 245, 246; see also Network solidarity; New Solidarity Soviet Union, ix Specters of Marx (Derrida), 272, 329n86

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index

Speech, 298n67; free, 270; hate, 329n78 Speech genres: Bakhtin and, 68–70, 72, 83; voices and, 72 Spinoza, Benedict De, 149 Steinbock, Anthony J., 297n64 Stewart, John, 312n30 Strauss, Leo, 249, 323n7 Strong, Tracy B., 323n7 Structuralism, 102, 284n5; communication and, 172–73, 192; language and, 15, 116; language as communication and Saussure’s, 172–73; phenomenology and, 83 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), 136, 186, 312n34 Structures: narrative, 80, see Poststructuralism; Poststructuralist; Social structures; Structuralism Subject(s): agency and language, 120–35; body and, 110; of global network society, 240; horizon and, 98–99; identity and, 16, 240; language and, 82–83, 94, 116, 117, 120–35, 144; modernism and, 15, 94, 144; modernity and, 240; objects and, 98–100, 110, 300n11, 301n39; perception and, 98–100, 113; primacy of voices and, 199, 280; the self and, 144; social languages and, 83; voices and, 16, 82, 84, 94, 280; see also Modernist views of the subject Subjectivity, 16, 94; language and, 114–16, 144, 303n50; mechanized, 196; primacy of voices/modernism and, 93–116; voices and, 15, 16, 82 Subject-object dialogue, 98–100, 110, 111, 300n12 Superaddressee, 89 Sylvester, David, 298n80 Syntax of dialogue, see Dialogic syntax Tambiah, S. J., 309n28 Tarski, Alfred, 309n11 Taylor, Charles, 18, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 328n65

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Technology: The Cave and, 18–19; cultural hybridization and, 196; society and, 209–10 Theweleit, Klaus, 318n49 Thompson, Janna, 325n27, 327n48 Thompson, John B., 312n21 Timaeus (Plato), 22 Tolstoy, Leo, 65–66, 67 Tool, and language, 116, 303n52 Tournier, Michel, 330n100 Tower of Babel, 203, 206, 219 Tradition: convergence over divergence and, 183; Gadamer on, 179–80, 181, 182, 183; modernity and, 194–96 Transcendental idealism, 97 Transformation, 101 Transparency, 101 Turing, Alan, 103 Turing Machine, 103, 114 TV, 231 Ulary, Georganna L., 319n55 Unconscious: biological version of Freud’s dynamic, 211–13, 214, 222, 315n16, 318n48; Irigaray on, 219, 221–22; Kristeva on, 219–23, 318n51, 53; Lacan’s linguistic, 213–19, 220, 221, 222, 223, 316n29, 31, 36, 41, 317n43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49; multivoiced body vs. traditional concept of, 211; social unconscious vs. other theories of, 211–24; violence and, 211, 218–19, 317n47; see also Social unconscious Understanding, 101; responsive, 190; see also Communication as mutual understanding Unions, 239, 242, 243 Uniqueness of voices, 75–76, 81 United States, ix United States Aid to International Development (USAID), 156, 157 Unity: age of diversity and, 4, 5, 284n5; The Cave and, 33, 203; chaosmos and, 14; diacritical, 187; dilemma of diversity and, 4, 5, 199, 284n5;

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index heterogeneity vs., x, 4, 284n5; Korot and Reich’s The Cave and, 5–6, 7, 8, 32, 280; modernism and, 4, 284n5; voices and, 203 Unity of differences: age of diversity and, 13; The Cave and, 19, 30, 272, 274; chaos and, 21; chaosmos and, 20; cosmos and, 22; dilemma of diversity and, 13; globalization and, 17; Korot and Reich’s The Cave and, 8, 9, 13, 19; Plato’s cave and, 8–13; Saramago’s The Cave and, 9–13; society and, 11, 13, 77; society as multivoiced body and, 280 Universal doctrine, and diversity, 3 Universal machinism, 45–48, 291nn83, 86–88 Universal rationality, 176–79 Univocal identity of oracle, 207, 250 Unnatural participation and involution, 48–51, 292n89, 90, 91, 92, 93 USAID, see United States Aid to International Development Utopian: society as multivoiced body as, 270, 271, 329n79; see also Anti-utopian Utterances: Bakhtin and, 68–70, 71–72, 87, 89; heteroglossia and, 87, 299n94; monoglossia and, 87; voices and, 72 Van Gelder, Tim, 301n33 Van Haute, Phillipe, 215 Varela, Francisco, 108 Vico, Giambattista, 30 Vietnam War, 156 Violence, and unconscious, 211, 218–19, 317n47 Virtual reality, 94 Vitalism, see Beyond mechanism and vitalism Voice concept challenges: multivoiced body immanence and, 88–89; voices relation to subjects/language/social structures and, 82–84; voices/society and, 84–88 Voices: anonymity problem and, 83; anonymous forces and, 16, 83, 144;

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351

Bakhtin on notion of, 62, 295n19; Being and, 297n65; as beliefs, ix, 14, 16; body and, 75, 76; communal resistance forms as, 242; community and, 198; creation of new, ix, 14; dialogic hybridity of, 14, 60–61, 75, 77, 280; discourse and, 76, 77; dynamic hybridity of, 76, 196; elliptical identity and, 145–46, 280, 308n1, 2; ethereal and mundane properties of, 61; fecundity and, 14; heterogeneity and, 14; as hybrid in multivoiced body, 186–87, 188; hybridization and intersecting, 239–40; identity and, 15, 16, 83, 203; Korot and Reich’s The Cave and, 14; language and, 15, 16, 77, 82, 84, 94, 116, 117, 144, 280, 298n68; linguistic dimension of, 16, 75, 84; Mestizo, 194–96; nonlinguistic dimension of, 16, 84; notion of, 14; place and open texture of, 150–52; Saramago’s Center and, 15–16; Saramago’s The Cave and, 14; schema of, 188–90; the self and, 144; as social discourse, 172; social languages and, 80–81, 83; social practices, ix, 14; society and, 14, 16, 61, 74–75, 81–82, 84–88, 203; of society and oracles, 203, 207, 208, 209, 314n6, 8; speech genres and, 72; subjectivity and, 15, 16, 82; subjects and, 16, 82, 84, 94, 280; thinkers on, 15; uniqueness of, 75–76, 81; unity and, 203; univocal, 75–76; utterances and, 72; see also Multivoiced body; Mutual access of voices; New voices; Nihilistic voices; Primacy of voices Voices and hybridity: hybridity/elliptical identity and, 154–56; identity/singular voices and, 156–58, 310n29; primacy of voices and, 152–58, 309n16, 20, 29 Voices and place, 146; open texture of voices and, 150–52; primacy of voices and, 146–52; reciprocal presupposition and, 147–49, 168; reflexivity and, 149–50, 309n11, 12

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352

index

Voices and social structures, 15–16, 82, 84, 280; computerized workplaces and, 163–68, 310n44; Marx and personification and, 159–63, 310n38; postmodernist views of social structures and, 168; primacy of voices and, 158–68, 199, 280, 310n38; Saramago’s Center and, 15–16 Voices interplay, 60, 94; communication and, 173; creating new voices, ix, x, 14, 85, 168; creation of society metamorphosis, 14; hearing and, 199; horizon as creative, 249; multivoiced body as, 14, 249, 250, 274; oracles and, 168; society as, 14, 61, 74–75 Voloshinov, V. N., 67–68, 296n50 War, horizon of, 249, 250, 269 Warnke, Georgia, 178 Watkins, Mary, 153 Wertsch, James V., 295n19 Weschler, Lawrence, 286n23 West, Cornel, 154 Western beliefs, x Whitehead, Alfred North, 30, 31–33, 35, 61, 158, 287nn39, 41, 44, 45, 310n29 Whiteness, oracle of, 210 White, Stephen K., 312n23, 325n27, 29, 326n40, 327n49 Whitford, Margaret, 319n57, 61

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Whitman, Walt, 59, 282 The Will to Power (Nietzsche), 26, 302n46 Winner, Langdon, 284n16, 310n37 Wittengenstein, Ludwig, 307n62 Wolf, Susan, 267 Wolin, Sheldon, 248 Woolf, Virginia, 152 Words: Bakhtin on, 72–73, 76, 83; Bakhtin on things and, 72–73, 84 Workplaces, 16; democracy in, x, 167, 281, 310n44; voices/social structures and computerized, 163–68, 310n44 Worlds: Bakhtin hybridization and dialogic, 72–74; dialogic, 72–74; heterogeneity and common uncommon, 299n86; permanent, 302n46; plurality of actual, 84, 299n86; social languages and actual, 84 World Wide Web, see Internet Yancy, George, 315n15 Young, Iris Marion, 18, 258–59, 263, 264, 267 Zago, Marcel, 309n28 Zapatista rebels of Chiapas, 59–60, 195–96, 265–66, 268, 295n14 Zizek, Slavoj, 316n36 Zuboff, Shoshana, 16, 164, 165, 166, 167

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