the project was to conduct a “cultural analysis” using your fav theorists. a kind of choose your own adventure. arbitrary, yes. i hear you. but it was more fun than comparing derrida’s concept of the archive with benjamin’s dialectic. if you’re anything like me, you always try to overdo it the first time you encounter something / face an injunction. this was the first time i was asked to do a “cultural analysis” (always in quotes) and it was the first time i tried to be like mr. t eagleton.
i am not a philosopher!
Back to the Symbiotic Struggle!
How to Save Cultural Studies with French Continental Philosophy
Any unlimited actualization of imperative forms amounts to a negation of humanity as a value that depends upon the play of internal oppositions. – Georges Bataille
‘Traditional’ theory is always in danger of being incorporated into the programming of the social whole as a simple tool for the optimization of its performance; this is because its desire for a unitary and totalizing truth lends itself to the unitary and totalizing practice of the system’s managers. ‘Critical’ theory, based on a principle of dualism and wary of synthesis and reconciliations, should be in a position to avoid this fate. – Jean-François Lyotard
1. Preamble
Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it.[1]
In this day and age of Žižekian rock star theorists (Camille Paglia anyone?) and overly abstruse philosophers, the institutional study of culture is firmly entrenched in two camps. The former, pandering to the leftovers of the MTV generation and readers of Totem Books’ Introducing series, are engaged in what can be called a type of theoretical bricolage; why shouldn’t one be able to reference Lacan’s borromean knot in a discussion of early 90s Norwegian black metal (from a Heideggarian perspective, of course)? The other camp, who often adhere to a strict nomenclature so esoteric that only those at the graduate level can penetrate their meaning, enjoy a certain performativity of the text; the form of their work, unlike the relatively straightforward and at times journalistic style of the former group, attempts to structurally mimic the logic of their thought. You could call it a type of philosophical, meta-textual ekphrasis. These two camps, not contrary to popular belief, exist on two sides of an invisible line that can be called the continental/analytic divide. In the discipline of philosophy one merely has to read the first page of any given text by Derrida (see The Truth in Painting for a superbly frustrating example) alongside moral analytic philosopher Derek Parfit’s presumptuously titled, and extensively outlined, table of contents for Reasons and Persons. In sociology the same divide is recognizable between, say, Giddens’ The Constitution of Society and Marc Augé’s Non-Places. In both cases the dichotomy is clear and if we push this sensible difference further we can justifiably say that, in the last analysis, the difference is one of positive and negative thought; between a positivist thought founded on the necessity of presuppositions (the logic of word games, game theory, etc.) and a thought that is intrinsic, parasitic even, to thought itself; between a need for answers and a need to identify problems. This difference has been and might always be one of contentious debate, and it is certainly the locus of one of the chief frustrations permeating this ubiquitous thing we call “cultural studies”.
At the institutional level many of these frustrations emanate from the now classic divide between the British and American schools of cultural studies.[2] Where cultural studies came “crashing through the windows” for the Brits it was not, it can be argued, such an antagonistic force for the Americans.[3] One might say that the impetus behind the cultural studies explosion in America came from a tendency to cull each and every popular topic under cultural studies’ blindingly bright sun. Thus, legitimate material for cultural analysis included not only research on the social effects of new technologies such as television but also the popular programs that appeared long after the medium was created. This is not to say that television programming in general is not worthy of study; relatively new phenomena like reality TV and interactive programming deserve to be addressed. There is in the current discussion, however, an altogether different type of cultural analysis that is qualitatively different from the work that is done in cultural studies immediately after the arrival of an as-yet-unknown object of study. In the American school in particular there is a tendency to combine not different forms of inquiry but already established cultural phenomena, the product of which then masquerades as a theoretical undertaking. We are hardly shocked, today, to see titles like The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I Am littering the “Culture and Philosophy” sections of popular bookstores like Chapters/Indigo and Barnes & Noble.[4]Note that these texts do not problematize philosophical concepts or even the nature of television technology and programming; their sole function is to explain one given with another in a type of cultural exegesis. The current work on television is just one example of the ongoing commodification of cultural theory which posits presuppositions in place of original concepts in order to avoid new forms of thought. But these are only the most obvious cases. The same tendency toward presuppositions can also be found in what might be called the properly theoretical area of cultural studies.
The muffling of radical thought has long been analysed by various luminaries of the continental field; Theodore Adorno and Jean Baudrillard have provided copious amounts of in-depth criticism on processes involving the cooptation of thought by the capitalist machine.[5] Indeed, there are many philosophers and cultural theorists who have criticized this epiphenomenon of capitalist development and there are a select few who have attempted to push this thought to its limit (much to the chagrin of traditional Marxists). For these few the task of philosophy (and here we might also include cultural studies) is to search for the “outside” of thought and cultural formations without reverting to a political economy or historical materialist perspective.[6] This has long been the focus of certain strands of continental philosophy and it can also be found in the Birmingham ideology. Stuart Hall himself echoes something of this idea in his ongoing critique of Marxist thought:
From the very beginning there was always-already the question of the great inadequacies, theoretically and politically, the resounding silences, the great evasions of Marxism – the things that Marx did not talk about or seem to understand which were our privileged object of study: culture, ideology, language, the symbolic. These were always-already, instead, the things which had imprisoned Marxism as a mode of thought, as an activity of critical practice – its orthodoxy, its doctrinal character, its determinism, its reductionism, its immutable law of history, its status as a meta-narrative. That is to say, the encounter between British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement with a problem – not a theory (CD 265).
The histories of both post-Marxism and, in the past century, psychoanalysis have taught us to rearticulate our thoughts on ideology; the transcendental dialectics that were once pitted against false consciousness have been dismantled and, thanks to Althusser, what was formerly a claim on enlightenment has converted to an acknowledgement of the necessary immanence of ideology itself for the human individual. Today’s slogan might be “back to bare life”, which should not be confused with Marx’s concept of species being. The properly heterogeneous and interminable character of ideology is understood here in the psychoanalytic sense as a necessary development for every individual without recourse to a unifying “collective consciousness”. If we are to take Althusser seriously and understand ideology as that through which the individual becomes interpolated and subjectivated within society, then we must acknowledge the properly a prioricharacter of ideology when compared to that of self-consciousness. If ideology is to be understood as a product of our immanent stationing within the world then the traditional Marxist dialectic must be flattened out; it is less a matter of collectively embracing this “vale of tears” in the clear reasoning of consciousness than it is a matter of acknowledging the limited control that we have over the dialectics of our own thought processes. The case makes itself clear when one thinks the problem of religion. Unlike the notion of class hierarchy the question of bare faith does not lend itself to rational critique. If we consider faith, as Derrida does, not as faith in some-thing but faith in faith, faith for faith’s sake, then the question of false consciousness proves moot if not irrelevant. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has posed the question in even plainer terms by using “religion” as a formal signifier to describe something of the faith based character of every dialectical thought. Has the “end of an illusion” arrived? “Or is precisely that the illusion: thinking that human beings can live without religion”?[7] It would seem, then, that the problem is one of accounting for the necessary exigency of conflicting ideologies without reverting to a dialectics of pure transcendence.
If one might be permitted to look even further into the past, past the Birmingham school, Baudrillard and even before Althusser’s reappraisal of the Marxian conception of ideology, a figure appears who might be the first interlocutor of a philosophy of heterogeneity and Marxism: Georges Bataille. Far beyond his initial investigations into sacrifice and eroticism Bataille constructed a basic economy that addressed bare forms heterogeneity and homogeneity in the context of political philosophy. His argument, which in structure resembled the very same argument that Marx had had with the bourgeois economists of his time, was that the ideas at work within Marx’s theory of capital remained hermetically sealed while aspiring to transcendence, and thus were problematic when approached from a general economy perspective. Reengaging the problem of the study of culture might appear at first blush to require a reappraisal of Marx’s theories on historical-material processes in order to develop a methodology; however it would become increasingly evident that the idiosyncratic readings of concepts such as exchange economy, accumulation and expenditure places the theoretical apparatus of the project well outside the boundaries of economics and discourse on capital. Instead, the project should turn toward certain post-Marxist thinkers like Bataille who, while admitting to traditional Marxist tendencies in their work, sought to realign the aforementioned concepts within a much broader philosophical program while avoiding the discourses of political economy and historical materialism.
Bataille was among the first of the “post-human” philosophers that came out of France in the twentieth century who were able to revolutionize Marxism by abandoning transcendental dialectics in favour of a theory of pure heterogeneity. In fact, much of this group’s work shared an affinity with the work being done in France by post-Freudian clinical psychoanalysts at the time; later clinical techniques developed in the 60s and 70s by psychoanalysts like Félix Guattari sought to bring the analyst to the level of the analysand as it were, thus contributing to the patient’s progress by avoiding traditional master-slave dialectics over the course of their therapy. Bataille had already envisioned an alternative to transcendental dialectics in a text from 1933 titled “The Psychological Structure of Fascism”. In it he introduces the basic concepts of heterogeneity and homogeneity before exploding their historical definitions; for Bataille, not only is it the nature of these seemingly disparate forms to coexist simultaneously – homogeneity itself is predicated on the necessary existence of a heterogeneous form. Bataille would later go on to develop a philosophy of excess and heterogeneity in The Accursed Share, his magnum opus and a highly influential work of post-Marxist thought. But the beginnings of his philosophy of pure heterogeneity can be found even in the following passage taken from “The Psychological Structure of Fascism”:
A shared orientation has, in itself, a constitutive value: it presupposes […] the imperative character of the object. Unification, the principle of homogeneity, is only a tendential fact [epiphenomenon], incapable of finding in itself a motive for requiring and imposing its existence; and, in most circumstances, the recourse to an external requirement has the value of a primary necessity.[8]
The key sentence is the one already emphasised by Bataille. The development of any homogenous form – a political system, a sexual orientation, an economic infrastructure – finds its predicate not in itself but in a heterogenous body that it excludes and which shapes its development. Modern-day classics of political theory, from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy to Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, find something of Bataille’s heterogeneity operating within their key concepts. Laclau and Mouffe’s antagonistic democracy and Agamben’s zone of indiscernibility would not be the same were it not for the radical conceptualization of heterogeneity outlined by Bataille. It is true that traditional Marxism reserves a place for heterogeneity (Marx used the word antagonism) underneath the various conflicts in society, but Marx also said that this antagonism may be resolved by the objective conditions of reality once it has reached the stage of a totally transparent society. Laclau and Mouffe, far from believing its reality in the material world, think it is impossible to approach such a resolution even in the realm of discourse.[9] The reason for this is that concepts like hegemony and ideology could not exist if there were not some outside force that impeded their full realization. As for cultural studies, the concept of heterogeneity might help to inject it with a little bit of relevance. The palpable sense of conflict in the concept of heterogeneity need only be applied to a cultural studies methodology and directed at significant cultural events. In this way one might recognize that, as Laclau and Mouffe do, plurality is not the phenomenon to be explained, but the starting point of the analysis.[10]
Bataille’s influence has always remained the strongest in the field of French continental philosophy. Specifically, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard have for years practiced the immanent and impersonal philosophy first introduced by Bataille; Deleuze’s work on concepts such as evental sitesand Baudrillard’s thoughts on the nature of symbols share a similar spirit with the work of their philosophical predecessor. In addressing the current problems in cultural studies, then, one might begin with an investigation into Bataille’s revolutionary Marxism before turning to a discussion on the re-conceptualization of evental sites and symbolic life in order to better understand how one might formulate a methodology for the study of culture, historically or otherwise.
2. Rethinking Exchange Economy, Accumulation and Expenditure
Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them.[11]
Bataille’s concept of a general economy differed radically from that of Marx. Basically, the concept states that there is an overall surplus of energy in our world and that certain portions of this surplus must, in every circumstance, eventually be spent without profit according to the internal logic of the surplus of general economy itself:
The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically (AS 21).
This unique factor – that a portion of wealth must necessarily be lost without gain – runs counter to the judgements that form the basis of a rational economy like the one analysed by Marx. According to Bataille economies must necessarily reach a point where they can no longer increase their equipment (the productive apparatus) due to either an absence of spaces of production or the sudden appearance of another heterogeneous development which vies for space in the general economy. The basic thesis of The Accursed Shareis that every economy must eventually lose a portion of its growth due to the fact that “if one considers life as a whole, there is not really growth but a maintenance of volume in general”. In other words, “the possible growth is reduced to a compensation for the destructions that are brought about” (33). Note that even a concept like David Harvey’s accumulation by dispositiondoes not fit this model due to the fact that it operates in the realm of particular economies. If accumulation by disposition, which implies a sort of transcendental dialectics within its very logic, were to be commensurable with a general economy that must necessarily have profitless expenditure as one of its inherent qualities, then the economy would be self-contradictory. It follows then that the concept of Bataillian general economy does not recognize industrial modes of production or the capitalist system of exchange as the primary basis of a general economy. It is the economists and traditional Marxists who make the mistake of, to use Adorno’s concept, universalizing the particularby positing a specific economy in their analysis while playing by the rules of the logic of general economy. But these systems are never general; they are totalities in their own right due to their finite nature. The general economy outlined by Bataille contains an infinite amount of micro-economies that play out its flow. Like Deleuze’s plane of immanence on which every concept is situated and joins with other concepts, Bataille’s general economy is the plane on which multitudes of economies form and transfigure, expand and dissipate.[12] But more on this later.
The logic of the necessarily limited character of particular economies is self-evident in that at a certain point “the advantage of extension is neutralized by the contrary advantage, that of luxury” (AS 36-37). Economic growth must relieve itself of surplus and this can happen in one of two ways. It can use it for growth, but the basic thesis of The Accursed Shareprecludes this option once the growth has reached a particular stage (indeterminate though it may be). The only other option is unprofitable loss. Thus, the question of utility is no longer relevant given that the loss must necessarily occur; “it is only a matter of acceptable loss” (AS 31). If the remaining option is that of an acceptable loss this would then re-qualify the question of “how to expend surplus” as an ethical one. Bataille argued that the only way we can negotiate the amorphous and sometimes dangerous character of economies is by becoming aware of this fact; it is our ignorance of this universal necessity that “causes us to undergo what we could bring aboutin our own way, if we understood” (AS 23). Here he is quite literally referring to the difference between a catastrophic outcome such as war, brought about by our own ignorance (our inadvertent annihilation of ourselves), and a more peaceful outcome like artistic creation. But he takes the thought even further. What if the only possibility for general growth, in the sense of a shifting of planetary resources based on expenditure, involved the notion of gift giving? Right away, then, we must consider the ethical dimensions that this Copernican transformation of restrictive economies into general economies introduces. Bataille sums up the argument as follows:
If a part of wealth (subject to a rough estimate) is doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return […] the possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: The industrial development of the entire world demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations (AS 25-26).
While the final argument of The Accursed Sharemight seem to suggest that we aspire to something that resembles the political ideology of communist formation the text actually inverts the traditional idea. It is not up to the proletariat to initiate change; the burden instead lies on the overruling organizers of the processes of accumulation itself to recognize that they (in 1948 and 2008, Americans) must necessarily dissipate surplus if they wish to maintain economic equilibrium (for a finite length of time). Thus, Bataille exposes the mirage created by Marx that calls for a final redistribution of the productive forces of accumulation in order to obliterate surplus. At the risk of sounding banal, the process of accumulation and expenditure outlined by Bataille is a process that is inherent and internal to the nature of nature itself. The most pressing task involves how to approach the problem of this necessary development and how to initiate the necessary purging of surplus in order to maintain equilibrium. It follows that the maintenance of this equilibrium in the general economy requires antagonistic and heterogeneous forms in order for expenditure to occur, however these forms are not arranged in a hierarchical fashion. Only then might heterogeneous economies hope to happily outlive the movement that exceeds them.
There is another dimension to expenditure. Bataille, for all intents and purposes, chose to focus his discussion on the material reality of general economy, and the concept of expenditure provides a useful tool in the development of a methodology for the study of cultural artefacts. But there is enough space in the concept to pose a qualitatively different question: can the theory of general economy help us investigate the role of the symbolic in cultural life? There is an argument to be made against the disappearance of a general theory of symbolic economy from the discourse of cultural studies, especially in the current climate of highly customizable Facebook profiles and the public execution of westerners by Islamic radicals on YouTube. It is true that the study of culture should center itself on “the material cultural effects or formations” that immediately follow “the dissipation of a surplus”, and that this event can be approached from either side of the transference, that is to say, from the original surplus or the other that demands its negation. But in our increasingly technologized world which has existed according to some theorists on the level of the symbolic for many decades, the concept of symbolic expenditure, or symbolic excess, proves especially relevant and pressing. The instantaneous profusion of the image across networks lends it a special power that in many cases is far greater than that of material reality in regard to its potential for effectively shaping the world around us. One might even be tempted to say that the requalification of symbols into simulacra has permanently tipped the scales away from reality into the realm of the hyper-real.[13]If, following Bataille, we are to consider that every economy must ultimately expend a part of itself without possibility of exchange then we must lend our thinking to this problem in both the material and symbolic orders. Is it not true that today, despite the copious amount of literature published over the past half century proclaiming “the death of reality”, the simulacrum is on the way out? Has the absolute event that was 9/11 not ruptured the paradigm of western thought, punching a large hole through the screen of simulacra that was our narcissistic slumber? In order to understand the present and the unique situation of the symbolic today one might begin by leaving these “modern times” to look “back” for a unifying moment, global in structure and locatable in both every major and minor detail, from televised revolutions to the introduction of handheld telecommunication products. But this project, which might be called a cultural study, should not follow the strict logic of historical materialism if it is to meaningfully engage the symbolic in tandem with material reality. Instead, it should attempt to trace the internal movement of a concept from inception to explosion in order to produce a period of meaningful, historical significance. Following Bataille’s argument, one should search not for a point of material or symbolic exchange (this would be the logic of historicism, the Enlightenment’s idea of progress, the rationale behind The Sopranos and Philosophy) but for a rupture, for events that signal the transformation of energy from one heterogeneous form to the next and which ultimately create the constellations that we conceptualize as eras in retrospect. But one must also be careful to understand the procedure. In order to understand better the production of history as a meaningful collection of momentary fragments gathered together by a concept, one should pose the question of the problem of history itself and investigate how to arrive at the process of identifying the irruptive historicization of events.
3. Deleuze’s Evental Site
The only nihilistic analysis of events is the pious one.[14]
According to Werner Heisenberg (arguably the father of modern day physics) it is only recently that science finally aligned itself with philosophy. Heisenberg, practicing something like the scientific equivalent of Deleuzean differential ontology, is responsible for proving that the experiential proofs which formerly legitimated scientific experiments based on cause and effect must be treated as arbitrary and stripped of their finality. It was with his work that the problematic effects of the limited applicability of methodology and rationalization on the verifiability of facts came to be recognized within field of science. [15]The consequences of this thought in the realm of cultural studies are complex when rigorously considered; how does this modern re-conceptualization of experiential reality affect our understanding of time, cultural processes and culture itself? Deleuze first attempted to think something of this difference within the realm of epistemology before turning to the investigation of how this change re-qualifies traditional notions of history.
According to Deleuze to think is one thing, to think like a revolutionary another. The difference between the two is that the former is susceptible to participating in what is, at its base, a type of non-thought, that is to say, a thinking that is not its own; a thinking for the State. Deleuze has warned us: “the less people take thought seriously, the more they think in conformity with what the State wants”.[16] Thought, as we have been told throughout the history of Marxism, produces concrete effects. Certain strands of continental philosophy have also taught us that concrete substances affect thought; it is no longer a question of mind over matter for the thinkers of these strands. Philosophy long ago stripped the Cartesian cogito of its transcendence and today we can say that the force that is active behind the words “to think” exists on the same plane as a cinder block.[17]The “division” between Thought and Nature is less one of hierarchal opposition than a commingling of forces; both Thought and Nature are co-dependent elements on the same folded line where they have an equal stake in the actual construction of our reality. But this is pure Spinozism.[18]Deleuze introduced the most radical extension of this philosophy by opening a caesura within thought itself and by “thinking beyond concepts” as it were. In an effort to expose the prejudice of thought (the thought that our thinking has a “good nature”) he attempted to formulate a philosophy that would allow us to rethink the way in which we previously found thought to be operating, and it involves a type of thinking that is suspicious of thought itself as it tries to remain true to that which thought cannot lay claim to. It is a thinking beyond the concept, a thinking that stretches thought to the extreme limit of necessity. In “The Image of Thought” Deleuze writes:
Concepts only ever designate possibilities. They lack the claws of absolute necessity – in other words, of an original violence inflicted upon thought; the claws of a strangeness or an enmity which alone would awaken thought from its natural stupor or eternal possibility: there is only involuntary thought, aroused but constrained within thought, and all the more absolutely necessary for being born, illegitimately, of fortuitousness in the world. Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy: everything begins with misosophy.[19]
Deleuze’s remarks on the nature of conceptualization differ radically from the positivist notion of thought introduced throughout the Enlightenment. He basically creates the following axiom: if the task of thought is supposed to be the construction of new ways of understanding then it must necessarily seek to avoid presuppositions which, strictly speaking, are not a form of thought. According to Deleuze the New (in mental or physical reality) does not come from any previously existing incarnation that can be thought.[20]Integral to this schematic conceptualization then is knowledge of the not-known, or, the notion of antagonistic concepts. Thus, Deleuze’s second axiom: the New announces itself conceptually via a type of ruptural event. The New is ushered in by the event; it is a type of pure heterogeneity, an infinite source of virtual vibrations begging to be actualized. If we have truly finished with metanarratives then there are only heterogeneous beginnings, and the task of cultural studies should be to think the place from which these beginnings are born by interrogating both the way we conceptualize these beginnings and our complicity in the creation of fraudulent thought (or what can be called a kind of false start). The latter thought is expressed as a slowimage of thought (compared to the proliferation of heterogeneous events) which Deleuze describes as being in a “natural stupor”. The creation of a space for the appearance of the New, for new individualities and new identities comes first not from the old image of thought but as a consequence of a multitude of infinitely quick symbiotic struggles. The subsequent mutations are then “comprehended” or conceptualized by a posteriori thoughts; thought plays catch up with the event, however there is a danger in using the “old tools” to understand the New.
Revolutionary thinking is not found in thinking as repetition but in thinking as differential repetition initiated by an event. It is intimately linked to a “significant” event, the symbiotic properties of which should not be forgotten.[21]It is a type of absolute deterritorialization, one that creates both a space for new zones of becoming and the potentiality for actualization without reference to manifest content.[22]Basically, and this applies to everything from socio-political events to philosophical breakthroughs, it is a matter of thinking the event, the previously unthought-of, in a way that leads to the production of new agencies of enunciation (“new tools”). This is significantly different from saying: “the event gives us something new”. In the rupture initiated by the evental site the new never is; it is only made possible by the agency of the event and this is, in fact, why the event itself must be called evental. One cannot overstress this point:
The possible does not pre-exist; it is created by the event. It is a question of life. The event creates a new existence, it produces a new subjectivity (new relations with the body, with time, sexuality, the immediate surroundings, with culture, work…). When a social mutation appears, it is not enough to draw the consequences or effects according to lines of economic or political causality. Society must be capable of forming collective agencies of enunciation that match the new subjectivity, in such a way that it desires the mutation. That’s what it is, a veritable redeployment (RM 234).[23]
Deleuze teaches us that not only is it counterproductive to consider the apparently a prioriconstituent elements of the event but that it is really a form of fraudulent thought that allows us to do so; such thinking builds itself on a foundation which is misunderstood as natural, rational, etc. It is a thinking that reinstalls the metanarrative. The singularly unique function of evental sites is that they necessarily come before the conceptualization or the discursive demarcation of their components. Axiom number three, then: the concept does not cohere.[24] It is in this sense that the event can never be extinguished; it is, rather, an infinite source for openings and the zone of a never ending birth. It would not be going too far, then, to say that simultaneously and opposite this, in the moment of their foundation, concepts and their components (whether they be historical, geographical, ideological) are in a way already in danger of being en route to their destruction, their closure or at the very least, their self-contradiction; “every detour is a becoming-mortal”.[25]This, one learns from Deleuze, is the opposite logic of the Enlightenment, and as our developing methodology turns to one of his contemporaries in order to investigate the significance of symbolic economy it will be important to recognize these two irreconcilable regimes of thought that surround the understanding of evental sites.
4. Dialectical materialism was getting out of hand…1987-1989
Let me but gaze on what I may not touch.[26]
Expenditure and evental sites might prove significant for cultural studies if we look “back” in time to what, for the sake of discussion, will be called a type of historical bloc: the late nineteen eighties. Following tradition one might be tempted to perform an analysis of both the ideologically and the materially constructed cultural formations during this period with the model given to us by Antonio Gramsci; however this model does not address the problems that are inherent to Marxian historical-materialism in that it posits ideology as the form and material as the content. It should be explained that the inadequacy of Gramsci’s Marxism does not stem from a counterclaim against the commingling of thought and nature; its failure cannot be attributable to its praxis. Rather, the failure is a purely conceptual one; as with Marx, Gramsci’s historical bloc remains predicated on the transcendental dialectics of pure reason, or, as Deleuze would put it, the image of a “good nature” of thought. More specifically, such a methodology would continue to posit political economy as the subject of cultural analysis, thus relegating important cultural formations like language and the symbolic to a type of second order analysis. In addressing the crisis that cultural studies continue to face it is disheartening to note that the nature of this crisis had been recognized almost half a century ago; one would think that cultural studies should now be passed “the problem of Marx”. In Symbolic Exchange and DeathJean Baudrillard outlined the problem thus:
Society has to reproduce itself as class society, as class struggle, it must ‘function’ at the Marxian-critical level in order the better to mask the system’s real law and the possibility of its symbolic destruction. Marcuse pointed out a long time ago that dialectical materialism was getting out of hand: far from being deconstructed by the forces of production, the relations of production from now on submit to the forces of production (science, technology, etc.) and finds a new legitimacy in them. There again, we must pass on to the second level: the social relations of symbolic domination utterly submit to the mode of production (both the forces of production and the relations of production), where we find, in the apparent movement of political economy and the revolution, a new legitimacy and the most perfect alibi. Hence the necessity of resurrecting and dramatising political economy in the form of a movie script, to screen out the threat of symbolic destruction. Hence the kind of crisis, the perpetual simulacrum of a crisis, we are dealing with today.[27]
Far from criticising the proliferation of technology over the course of its historical-material development as the reason behind man’s complete and utter alienation in the Marcusian fashion, cultural studies might reinvigorate itself by turning once again to the problem of symbolic economy introduced by Baudrillard. In the above passage, written well before the events in 1987-1989 which we will address, Baudrillard asks us to rethink the nature of our theoretical practice. He is, in a sense, asking us to engage cultural formations not at the “productive” level of a critique of political economy, which gets caught up in the discourse of its enemy, but rather at the level of an immanent analysis of the symbolic. The term “immanent analysis” operates here in the same sense as Deleuze’s “plane of immanence” in that both are used to describe a type of thinking that remains forever mobile in its engagement with its components; it does not predicate itself on any one of them. Where “concepts” are the components of Deleuze’s plane, certain “evental sites” will serve as the components of our symbolic analysis.
In order to understand the logic of a general symbolic economy and how it might form the basis of a methodology for cultural studies one must locate the symbol’s “historical” signifiers in an evental site, and as we have already discovered such evental sites appear during a release of expenditure into one or more heterogeneous forms. We have also shown, via Deleuze, that in these evental sites the referent does not yet exist as such; thought, or the conceptualization of the event-as-sign, occurs after the permutation initiated by expenditure has taken place. This is not to say, however, that there are not already a group of symbols that the event itself is already comprised of. So the event can be misleading in two ways; first, one is exposed to the danger of taking a particular symbol from the event and substituting it for the event itself; second, one might ignore the fact that the event is already filled with the symbols which serve as its components. The model of this second danger is not unlike the double layered semiotic analysis that Roland Barthes 
outlines in his Mythologies. Where the signifier is already laden with semiotic meaning in the mythological sign, each component in the symbolic event already operates as a symbol, and the dangerous conclusion of this thought process is in reading the new symbolic event metonymically in regard to the previous symbolic assemblage. In any case, according to the logic of Bataillian accumulation, this accumulative process eventually leads to an excess of meaning and eventually requires expenditure from the symbolic economy.
The theoretical difference between symbols and spectacles is especially important when considering the expenditure of meaning in the general symbolic economy. The existence of the symbol is predicated on the existence of two heterogeneous fields; following the logic of Laclau and Mouffe, if there were not an outside to the symbol the symbol would cease to exist as such. The symbol is there, speaking to us, in place of something else and this something else is, of course, the Real.[28] The symbolic realm is constituted in terms of oppositions such as that between “presence” and “absence”; it is a type of dialogue that allows us to negotiate the Real without coming into contact with it. The Real, on the other hand, does not contain any gaps or fissures through which one may gain access to it. It is an object of anxiety; it lacks any possible mediation, and is thus “the essential object which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence”.[29] The spectacle, on the other hand, is a relationship within the already recognizable; the spectacle belongs to the realm of homogeneity in that it is an already established “social relationship between people that is mediated by images”.[30] Where the symbol is introduced to account for heterogeneous and unknowable forms the spectacle operates as a mirror; “it is the opposite of dialogue” (SS 17). In the creation of meaning, then, the spectacle contributes nothing whereas the symbol contributes everything; the symbol is difference, the spectacle is selfsame. If one were to submit this logic as part of a methodological apparatus for the study of culture then the task becomes much clearer, though it by no means involves only the sorting of spectacles from symbols. If one had to put it in a simple formulation the project might be this: a cultural study should be that which, following the expenditure of a material or symbolic surplus, investigates an evental site and seeks to posit an agency of enunciation that matches the new symbolic or material subjectivity.
*
The crisis that Baudrillard discovered so long ago continued to develop until it reached critical mass. Far from the Warhol-infused pop culture of the 60s, the Reaganomics and Thatcherism of the 80s or the smashing of the final nail in Soviet communism’s coffin in the early 90s, the effects of the neglect of the symbolic realm achieved their greatest impact in the period from 1987 to 1989. In this short period the world saw an excess of meaning produced by homogeneous specular accumulation (predominantly in the West) and there are innumerable events that attest to this, from the last death throes of Eastern Bloc communism in Romania to the inauguration of laws pertaining to the spread of computer viruses in the United State’s Ivy League. But one could ignore the beginnings of the fall of communism; it would be too easy to place the final era of one symbolic paradigm, represented in the form of communism, at the center of a claim that seeks to locate the beginning of another. The spectacles are in no short supply if one had a wish to posit the late 80s as the epitome of a new type of Global Narcissism; a haphazard survey would suffice. It should be mentioned here, however, that the following does not fully conform to the previous argument concerning the construction of a legitimate methodology for cultural studies. Rather, many of the events will be utilized in order to serve as an example of the privileging of narcissistic, specular imaging over symbolic difference in the late 1980s.
One could start with that first technological curiosity for the Birmingham group: television. Perhaps the most significant factor in Romania’s 1989 coup, television and radio played a significant part in ensuring the success of that final revolution. 
The image of Ceauşescu’s corpse flashed across the screens of twenty million Romanians and along with it the dawn of a new era, but television had a much larger role to play even before the broadcasting of this once powerful dictator’s corpse across the networks. In the early stages of the coup the Romanian revolutionaries quickly realised that they had to seize control of the broadcasting stations before they could continue; incoming contacts from around the country informed them that the people in the provinces could not believe what they were hearing from friends and relatives in the capitol.[31] The revolutionary bloodshed that was happening in Bucharest would not resonate throughout the rest of the country unless the provincials could see what was happening. Is this not exactly like Derrida’s comment on the televisual simulacrum, except the inversion of it, and does this not prove the simulacrum even more powerful? When Derrida says even if he “knows what’s going on” he can’t disassociate himself from the effect that the simulacrum has, we could say then that even though the Romanian people knew what was going on, via word of mouth and phone calls from relatives (also a form of evidence which curbs the notion of faith but we will let it pass), even though they were aware of the revolution, they were unable to believein it until they saw its image on the screen. The postmodern revolution happened before Chiapas, but the televised revolution is only the loudest example of this visibility. We do not even have to leave Romania. On the opposite side of political visibility, one only needs to take a look at one of Ceauşescu’s most astonishing architectural projects – the Palace of the Parliament – and one of the world’s largest civilian administrative buildings (not to mention one of the most expensive). It is as if, to emphasize the fact that all power would emanate from this structure, the structure itself had to be the biggest of all structures and that its image must speak in tandem with the meaning that would come from within it.
By the end of the revolution the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania estimated the number of direct victims of the communist repression to be two million people, but the most famous victims were those who were captured on film. The “unknown” terrorists’ capture and execution was transmitted across the stations as if it were evidence of the success of the revolution – theirs was the most public death (aside from the Ceauşescus’). Twenty million dead, but only a couple dozen televised corpses to verify the fact that yes, something did indeed happen here. The most significant factor throughout the Romanian revolution is this notion of visibly; it is as if, before the real revolution could take place and be solidified, the Romanian people had to see themselves doing it first. Similar to the necessity of televisual presence in Romania was the United Kingdom’s 1988 ban on the broadcast of interviews with IRA members during a spike in terrorist activities. The BBC was able to get around this stricture through the use of professional actors. This was almost like the Romanian situation except the opposite in that the state was concerned for the innocent, non-“terrorist” viewers who would be affected by the images – “here is your enemy, he exists, and he is human”. There are many other examples of a similar type of publicity whose visual properties significantly increased the verifiability, really, the legitimacy, of events.
As evidenced by the UK’s ban on IRA interviews there is also reverse visibility; the hiding of symbolic images to reinforce the current spectacle. These are symbols that send a shock through the maintenance of the overruling narrative so the narrative merely forgets them, usually with a little bit of help from the national fund to pay off those who urge for the heterogeneous symbol’s recognition. 
Take the July 3, 1988 attack on Iran Air Flight 655 as a perfect example. Shot down by missiles launched from the USS Vincennes, the US has to this day admitted no wrongdoing nor have they issued an apology. US media initially attempted to downplay the event and most of the reports identified it as a mere casualty of war. It was only eight years later that the US, now under the presidency of Clinton, agreed to pay Iran and the victims of Flight 655 $61.8 million in compensation, on an ex gratia basis of course. The symbolic cover-up was so complete that the US gave the crew of the Vincennes combat-action ribbons, and the air-warfare coordinator even won the navy’s Commendation Medal for “heroic achievement”. None of these citations mentioned the downing of the Iran Air flight at all (Ghasemi). But the Flight 655 fiasco might be an all too obvious form of narrative maintenance and symbolic repression.
What about those events that popped up out of nowhere, in our own backyard, due to the constant suppression of heterogeneous “unhealthy” matter by our excessively perfect public image; events which had to make themselves visible to us optically. 1988 saw the first reports of medical waste washing ashore on beaches in the Greater New York area, including hypodermic needles and syringes infected with the AIDS virus. It was not until similar reports came from outside districts that the decision was made to finally clean up New York’s water; it is as if the symbolic content itself (in this case, disastrously unclean water caused by unregulated toxic emissions) had to make itself visible in order to be addressed. The extent of this invisibility even extends to people and one does not have to look to the obvious example of the third world. 
One of the most interesting cases of the exclusion of the symbolic Other is that of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, “the terminal man”. In 1988 Nasseri was stuck in the Charles de Gaulle Airport where he continued to reside until 2006. It is confounding to the point of absurdity that a man could be denied entry into a country for years simply due to improper papers and yet at the same time be forever immortalized by someone like Tom Hanks in a Hollywood blockbuster (The Terminal, released in 2004, earned over $77 million at the box office). The adaptation of Nasseri’s life to film is yet another example of how the west seeks to co-opt and exploit even the most marginalized of unknowables who enter into its symbolic order. Nasseri was pushed to the margins, forced to live in what Marc Augé would call a non-place; he was not a person, officially, and thus could not have a home of his own, literally. But thanks to Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg we have the comfortable image of a Hollywood movie to serve as our point of reference should another such anomaly make itself visible.
The visible-invisible divide enters murkier waters in the technological realm. The case of the first mass distributed and replicable computer virus, Christmas Tree EXEC, is interesting because it is the first example where the perfectly manageable system of computer networks and virtual space was beaten at its own game. 
The hermetically sealed network of computational technology had yet to experience anything that was not self identical; all hardware, software and input could be made to function for the system at large. However, like any system it developed a type of autoimmunity. The same is true for the structure of language in general; Deleuze gives us the example of Jews who had to hollow out the language of the State, who were essentially writing in it in order to write against it. They utilized the very apparatus which they fought against in order to destroy it from the inside out.[32] After the Christmas Tree EXEC the US filed legal protection against this unknown field and in 1988 a federal grand jury indicted Cornell University student Robert Tappan Morris for releasing the first computer worm (the Morris Worm), making him the first person to be prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Morris is currently an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; it is a well known fact that, in order to assimilate the threat, the most destructive computer “terrorists” go on to receive lucrative offers of employment from both universities and firms in the technological sector.
Assimilation is the method of narcissistic specularity and in the late 80s this was nowhere more apparent than in the realm of economics; what greater act of assimilation has occurred in the west than the Single European Act? The passing of this act in 1987 combined heterogeneous national markets into a single European market and saw the formation of the European Political Cooperation which would eventually, together with the Police & Judicial co-operation in Criminal Matters and the European Community, form the European Union as we know it today. The SEA was a major step forward in the process of globalization and opponents of that process should take heed of the political murmurings which signal the imminence of a similar unification in our hemisphere. 
One of the largest non-State affiliated mergers in North America came to produce one of the world’s largest media and entertainment conglomerates; Time, Inc. and Warner Communications formed Time Warner in 1989. But by the late 80s globalization was already finalizing itself not just in our hemispheres but beyond our stratosphere as well. On February 14, 1989 the first of twenty-four Global Positioning System satellites were placed into orbit and on August 25, Voyager II became the first spacecraft to pass the planet Neptune and its moon Triton. But one does not have to leave the planet for further evidence; narcissistic economies can be found in the television programs and musical crazes that swept through the back half of our selected decade.
The most famous, and perhaps the first reality television show, is the absurd amount of media coverage that Jessica McClure in received after she had fallen down a well. The unfolding of her plight across the live media networks was like the narrative of a single television episode (think 24). Then of course there are the premieres of both Seinfeld and The Simpsons. 
The former a show about nothing which, in reality, was a show about everything, the latter, the same only more able to accommodate difference due to its nature as a cartoon; it is no wonder that they were both two of the longest running television programs of all time. Nothing was too taboo: masturbation, racism or even death, all were flattened out and discussed as if they were equally worthy subjects of attention. Both were the postmodern sitcoms par excellence and at the same time the most narcissistic sitcoms in that everything became self-referential; there was nothing that one could not already encounter as meaningful based on their historical experience. Aliens included. As for music, 1988 saw acid house sweep through the UK and the proceeding three years would be called the Second Summer of Love. The impetus behind the explosion of this music (one could call it a lifestyle) was not dissimilar to that of the psychedelic scene of the 70s; drugs and music combined to create a euphoria of kinky sex, repetitive beats and hard chemical-based drugs. However, where the hippie generation smoked organic substances and were politically active, what was happening in the late 80s with acid house was a good deal less self reflexive. It was still about the drugs and music but this time it was a qualitatively different sort; the drugs were harder, the parties hidden or illegal (Genesis staged their first illegal acid house Party in 1988) and the music was based on repetitive beats (what Deleuze would call the repetition of the same). The repetition of the music and the intense self-awareness of a drug like ecstasy can only be called the products of a type of narcissistic cultural milieu. But there were even stranger things afoot in the music scene, though not necessarily related to music. In 1988 Michael Jackson purchased a ranch in Santa Ynez, California and named it “Neverland”, while former rock and roll singer Sonny Bono was inaugurated as the Mayor of Palm Springs. Is this not the inversion of the imaginary and the real; the imaginary become real? Here we have the same logic that brought the Governator into existence; the desire to see the imaginary image come to life. Jackson essentially tried to do the same, geographically speaking, in order to convert the real into fantasy (the selfsame). Is this not a type of narcissism, to extend the personal imaginary across the reality of the outside world and to extend the mirror? Interestingly enough, Disney-MGM Studios at Walt Disney World opened to the public for the first time as did The Wonders of Life pavilion at Epcot. But the palpable sense of stupefaction engendered by all of these late 80s spectacles, by the narcissistic desire for a spectacular reality, might arguably be attributable to this: that on December 29, 1987 Prozac made its debut in the United States. The drug caused a craze that saw millions of (mostly) Americans diagnosed as having everything from general anxiety to full blown bipolar disorders; as if there were no room in human experience for melancholy reflections or the occasional panic of stress. Aldous Huxley would have been proud.
*
The perfection of late 80s global narcissism found its symbolic antagonist in the event of 9/11. But has it not always been a case of East against West? Jean Baudrillard has said of 9/11 that we have dreamt of this event.[33]One must understand the amorphous and shifting nature of symbology and the way in which it operates in our world. With the technologization of society, which in and of itself should not be seen as a bad thing, the symbol is now more than ever on the same plane as that of the immediate and the real. Perhaps this is why theorists like Baudrillard claim that the real does not exist anymore. We must acknowledge symbolic symbiosis at every level, the personal, the religious and the political, rather than the cold and impersonal transcendental dialectics of historical materialism. We must learn to take the hierarchy out of hegemony, like Laclau and Mouffe have, and recognize, as Gadamer did, that if we cannot live without a ground to guide our thought then we must be conscious of faith and preserve its status as the sovereign for every human being. This might involve moderation, perhaps not unlike the kind practiced in that mystical utopia of Lost Horizon. Utopic without being a utopia, governable without being a government. To the notion of faith, then: cultural studies should be a gift to that which it addresses itself.
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 2002.
—. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939.Ed. Allan Stoekl. Trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Baudrillard, Jean. Paroxysm. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1998.
—. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage Publications, 2002.
—. The Spirit of Terrorism. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2003.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
—. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
—. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995.Ed. David Lapoujade. Trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2006.
—. What Is Philosophy?Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Derrida, Jacques. “Above All, No Journalists!” Religion and Media.Ed. Hent de Vriess and Samuel Weber. Trans. Samuel Weber. Stanford University Press, 2001.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents.Ed. James Strachey. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics.Trans. Joel Weinsheimer. Yale University Press, 1999.
Ghasemi, Shapour. “Shooting Down Iran Air Flight 655.” 2004. Iran Chamber Society.27 November 2008 <http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/shootingdown_iranair_flight655.php>.
Hall, Stuart. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies.Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996.
Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution In Modern Science. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55.Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.
—. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press, 1977.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Second Edition. New York: Verso, 2001.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Videograms of a Revolution.Dirs. Harun Faroki and Andrei Ujica. 1992.
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. London: Vintage, 2004.
[1] Virginia Woolf. The Waves. 52.
[2] See Alan O’Connor’s “The Problem of American Cultural Studies” for just one discussion on the differences between these two schools of thought.
[3] Stuart Hall has emphasized the fact that, for the Birmingham School, cultural studies announced itself as a type of intrusion; they did not anticipate it. In this sense cultural studies can be taken to mean the study of cultural formations that are yet unknowable. According to Hall “it is a project that is always open to that which it doesn’t yet know, to that which it can’t yet name”. Woolf’s “nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it” reverberates in Hall’s comment, taken from Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. 263. Hereafter cited as CD.
[4] There are so many of these titles in popular bookstores that if the average reader were interested in the study of philosophy they would almost be required to engage it through a mediator; Seinfeld and Philosophy, The Simpsons and Philosophybut never philosophy itself. This is the commodification of philosophy par excellence.
[5]Space does not allow for a discussion of all of these unique theorists here. For an introduction see Horkheimer and Adorno’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” and Baudrillard’s “Political Economy as a Model of Simulation”.
[6]There are, of course, many theorists who misread this task as if it sought to compel theory to some “real” ground that exists outside of thought itself. This is not only a poor reading; it misses the point of post-structuralist theory completely by creating a type of straw man argument. See Ronald Dworkin’s grossly misdirected argument where he claims that “post-structuralists” aspire to an unattainable Archimedean point in “Objectivity and Truth: You Better Believe It”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 25, no. 2 (Spring 1996).
[7]Hans-Georg Gadamer. Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics. 119.
[8]Georges Bataille. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. 147. Hereafter cited as VE.
[9]“A non-exclusive public sphere of rational argument is a conceptual impossibility”. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. xvii. Hereafter cited as HSS.
[10]HSS. 140.
[11]Georges Bataille. The Accursed Share. 26. Hereafter cited as AS.
[12]“The plane envelops infinite movements that pass back and forth through it, but concepts are the infinite speeds of finite movements that, in each case, pass only through their own components”. Deleuze. What Is Philosophy?. 36. Hereafter cited as WP. One could substitute the word “economies” for “concepts”.
[13] “Even if I know what’s going on, even if I am extremely vigilant, the simulacrum is part of the thing itself, if one can put it that way. No critique can penetrate or dissipate this structural “illusion”.” Jacques Derrida. “Above All, No Journalists!”. 85.
[14]Jean Baudrillard. Paroxysm. 24.
[15] “Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning; that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world. We often know that they can be applied to a wide range of inner or outer experience, but we practically never know precisely the limits of their applicability. This is true even of the simplest and most general concepts like “existence” and “space and time.” Therefore, it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth”. Werner Heisenberg. Physics and Philosophy. 66.
[16] A Thousand Plateaus. 376.
[17]“Concepts are inseparable from affects, i.e. from the powerful effects they exert on our life, and percepts, i.e. the new ways of seeing or perceiving they provoke in us.” Deleuze. Two Regimes of Madness. 238. Hereafter cited as RM.
[18] Deleuze’s debt to Spinoza is well known, specifically the concept of an always differentiating monism.
[19] Difference and Repetition. 139. My emphasis. Hereafter cited as DR.
[20] “The new, with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new, just as the established was always established from the outset […] What becomes established with the new is precisely not the new. For the new–in other words, difference–calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognized and unrecognizable terra incognita”. DR. 136.
[21] “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter”. Deleuze. DR. 139.
[22]“As concept and as event, revolution is self-referential or enjoys a self-positing that enables it to be apprehended in an immanent enthusiasm without anything in states of affairs or lived experience being able to tone it down, not even the disappointments of reason. Revolution is absolute deterritorialization even to the point where this calls for a new earth, a new people”. Deleuze. WP, 101.
[23] Taken from the short text “May ‘68 Did Not Take Place”. My emphasis.
[24] “The concept speaks the event, not the essence or the thing […] Concepts are centers of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the others. This is why they all resonate rather than cohere or correspond to each other”. WP. 21-23.
[25]Deleuze. Essays Critical and Clinical. 2.
[26] Ovid. Metamorphoses. 65.
[27]Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange and Death. 31-32.
[28]Jacques Lacan refers to the Real as that which resists symbolization absolutely; it is “the impossible”. The Seminar. Book XI. 167. The Real serves the same theoretical function as the Other or the New, though Lacanians would probably object to this generalization.
[29]Jacques Lacan. The Seminar. Book II. 164.
[30]Guy Debord. The Society of the Spectacle. 12. Hereafter cited as SS.
[31]See Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s Videograms of a Revolution for a superb historiography which contains a compilation of both independent and state video and film sources.
[32] See Deleuze’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
[33]Baudrillard. The Spirit of Terrorism. 5.
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