Bouvard and Pécuchet at the End of History

One day, they find (in the old papers from the mill) the draft of a letter from Vaucorbeil to the Prefect.

The prefect has asked whether Bouvard and Pécuchet are dangerously insane. The doctor's letter is a confidential report explaining that they are just two harmless imbeciles. They recapitulate their actions and thoughts, which for the reader should be a critique of the novel.

"What shall we do with this?"--No time for reflection! Let's copy! The page must be filled, the "monument" completed. All things are equal: good and evil, beautiful and ugly, insignificant and characteristic. There is no truth in phenomena.

End with a view of our two heroes leaning over their desk, copying.
- Gustave Flaubert, notes for the last chapter of Bouvard and Pécuchet

It is a measure of Flaubert's greatness as a writer that even the rough notes for his unfinished novel contain a depth perhaps seldom encountered in nineteenth-century literature. Indeed, without this coda, it is difficult to make sense of the book's project at all. Why the endless regurgitation of nineteenth-century scholarship? Why the thematically-organized chapters, pointing towards an almost maniacal completeness? It's tempting to think of the book as merely a satirical Magical Mystery Tour of nineteenth-century folly, the barest shadow of a plot holding the whole thing together. (Hayden White finds this to be the mode of nineteenth-century "satirical" historiography, at least.) Roland Barthes lends his weighty authority to such a view: the absurdity of the "eternal copyists," he says, is "both sublime and comical."

The final notes make it difficult to see things his way. Bouvard and Pécuchet are absurd, to be sure. But they are sinister figures as well as comical ones. They are the literary Last Men of the coming age; through their untiring efforts, all knowledge, all culture, is rendered equally bland fodder for the senseless project of copying. Their "monument," in fact, seems less to "designate the truth of writing" than to serve as a cenotaph marking the malign and premature closure of the literary enterprise as such.

In this way, the end of Bouvard and Pécuchet is an apparition of the future, and it is significant that it comes after the heroes deliver solemn speeches about the coming fate of the world. Pécuchet thinks political evil, in the form of "pantheistic radicalism" or "theistic fundamentalism," will at last triumph, sweeping away the last remnants of civilization; Bouvard thinks scientific progress will finally bring permanent happiness and prosperity. But Flaubert, in this last chapter, suggests a third conclusion: Bouvard and Pécuchet are the whimper at the end of the world, beyond which there can be no more culture.

Political evil, that great bogeyman, is nowhere to be found. For all of Pécuchet's handwringing, the end of history is not a function of politics; the political world belongs to the "phenomena" in which there is no truth. The structure of the novel, and the role of politics within it, allows a distinction between this phenomenal world and its underlying noumenal reality, the turn of the monstrous monument. In Bouvard and Pécuchet, the phenomena can be satirized--as politics is--but the noumena are treated with reverence and trepidation.

Just as we are Nietzsche's Last Men, so are we copyists. Barthes' essay thus functions as a sign and symptom of the times, along with the myriad other phenomena of contemporary thought. (The Internet and its projects are equivalent in purpose and effect to the "monument.") What is to be done? That is, as always, an elusive question; but in one of Mallarmé's prose poems, "The Future Phenomenon," we already find the "poets ... forgetful that they live in an epoch which has survived beauty." That forgetting, the escape from the trap of memory and copying, might be our only glimmer of light.

Marxism and the Gay Conspiracy

The paederasts are beginning to count themselves, and discover that they
are a power in the state. Only organisation was lacking, but according to this
source it apparently already exists in secret. And since they have such
important men in all the old parties and even in the new ones, from Rosing to
Schweitzer, they cannot fail to triumph. Guerre aux cons, paix aus
trous-de-cul will now be the slogan. It is a bit of luck that we,
personally, are too old to have to fear that, when this party wins, we shall
have to pay physical tribute to the victors. But the younger generation! ...
Just wait until the new North German Penal Code recognises the droits du
cul, then he will operate quite differently. Then things will go badly
enough for poor frontside people like us, with our childish penchant for
females.
- Engels to Marx, June 22, 1869

There is much that can be made of Engels's hysterical, pseudo-ironic paranoia about homosexuality, though we naturally ought to be charitable about the prejudices of a different age. Questions of heteronormativity aside, this letter seems to reveal something quite important about the nature of Marxism; as always, it is Engels who is more over-the-top in exploring these questions, while Marx stands quietly to the side.

The anxiety in this letter is a counterrevolutionary one. It recognizes the "paederasts" as a well-organized, politically motivated, anti-establishment movement--and yet, even in its sarcasm, does not find an affinity with the proletariat. After the New Social Movements of the past decades, we've been accustomed to lump the vaguely leftish political affiliations together: Marx with Gay Liberation, black separatists with radical feminists. Here, no such camaraderie is to be found. Engels plays the role of the offended bourgeois.

His anxiety is inseparable from the theoretical foundations of Marxism. The proletariat is the only really revolutionary class, and the German Ideology suggests that it is such because it is a class that lacks a concretely defined identity: a permanent "outside" of all the "have-nots." Any other revolutionary movement is thereby grafted onto or colonized by the proletariat--as a kind of body without organs. But the appearance of a conspiratorial revolutionary movement not based on the jejune claims of homo oeconomicus throws this neat conception into disarray. Hence Engels's outburst.

But are (were?) the NSMs really the solution to this relentless totalization of radical agency? For Engels, there's no clear contradiction between him making his revolution and the "paederasts" making theirs at the same time. That seems to be the only redeeming feature of this letter: that it does not assume that the goal is in any way the same. The "multitude," the Rainbow Coalition, the putative alliance of NSMs and OSMs: all of these commit that mistake, and thus aspire to nothing more than a bourgeois utopia. For if "differ[e/a]nce" can be made a principle of praxis, so can contradiction, and one implies the other. Flows of desire can run at cross-purposes.

Neither the proletarian body without organs nor the contemporary telic unity of movements can be adequate schemata for conceptualizing revolution. Better ideas have yet to be found; it is perhaps more worthwhile to abandon the project altogether.

Oedipus at Colonus: The Medium and the Message

[Oedipus:] O shameless railer, think'st thou this abuse
Defames my grey hairs rather than thine own?
Murder and incest, deeds of horror, all
Thou blurtest forth against me, all I have borne,
No willing sinner; so it pleased the gods
Wrath haply with my sinful race of old,
Since thou could'st find no sin in me myself
For which in retribution I was doomed
To trespass thus against myself and mine.
Answer me now, if by some oracle
My sire was destined to a bloody end
By a son's hand, can this reflect on me,
Me then unborn, begotten by no sire,
Conceived in no mother's womb? And if
When born to misery, as born I was,
I met my sire, not knowing whom I met or what I did, and
slew him, how canst thou
With justice blame the all-unconscious hand?
... Yet thou, for just thou art not, but a man
Who sticks at nothing, if it serve his plea,
Reproachest me with this before these men.
- Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

If the narrative orientation of Oedipus Rex is broadly epistemological--what have I done?--and that of Antigone a question of praxis--what is it right for me to do?--then that of Oedipus at Colonus is discursive: the story's out, what does that entail? The play is often ignored, because it lacks an Aristotelian sense of unity; it feels like a mere connective tissue between Oedipus Rex and Antigone, with little independent tragic significance or power. Yet the lesson of Oedipus at Colonus is a profoundly interesting one.

The real tragic implication of Oedipus at Colonus, I think, lies not on the level of content but of interpretation. The characters are constantly engaged in rehashing, reconsidering, thinking through the story of Oedipus, and their interactions with one another are grounded in their common understanding of the importance of what happened. But, as Oedipus's monologue reveals, their interpretation is inadequate: they reach instinctively towards blame, towards an Aristotelian line of thinking in which there is some tragic flaw that causes his downfall. No blame, Oedipus says, can in fact be applied to him--and this makes the tragic incomprehensible, non-rational, Nietzschean.

Beneath this indictment of Creon is an indictment of his audience; are we not also inclined to blame the victim? Oedipus points his finger at our interpretive efforts and tells us that these efforts themselves are blameworthy, for they unjustly condemn an already destroyed man. To use the story of Oedipus in the world, to fit it into our conceptions of reality, we cannot avoid committing this crime; if the tragedy is no one's fault, if it is senseless and resistant to causal explanation, the sublime overtakes our ability to understand.

Why is Oedipus Rex taught in schools along with Aristotle's theory of tragedy? After all, as Nietzsche already knew, there are few plays which fit that framework less well. It is because we must still commit the crime of interpretation; even the modern audience cannot comprehend the senseless sublime of tragedy without subsuming it under a structure of transcendental Law. The Aristotelian Law requires a criminal, and Oedipus must fill that role--though he be innocent.

Herodotus: Despotism in the Agora

[Cyrus] gave the following answer to the Spartan herald: “I have never yet been afraid of men who have a special meeting place in the centre of their city, where they swear this and that and cheat each other. Such people, if I have anything to do with it, will not have merely the troubles of Ionia to chatter about, but their own.” This was intended by Cyrus as a criticism of the Greeks generally, because they have markets for buying and selling, unlike the Persians who never buy in open market, and indeed have not a single marketplace in the whole country.
- Herodotus, Histories, Book I

There are two noteworthy things about this passage. First, Cyrus's worldview cannot accommodate the agora at all. The notion of a special place where men cheat each other, a privileged public space of intercourse, is wholly alien and incomprehensible—and, indeed, the object of mockery. Though Cyrus's sneer is merely one part of Herodotus's account of the various customs of different people, it is interesting that the possession of an agora, for Cyrus, eclipses all the other salient distinguishing characteristics of the Greeks.

The other curiosity is in Herodotus's own explanation. It is clear that by mocking the “special meeting place,” Cyrus is not merely speaking in economic terms: the agora, like the Roman forum, is in equal measure a space of economics and of politics, and the attack is addressed to both aspects (hence the emphasis on “chatter”). But Herodotus, who ought to be most familiar with the institutional features of the agora, does not even mention its political significance. In the context of a broader Greek critique of Asiatic despotism, this means he missed a perfect opportunity to score points at the expense of even the wisest Persian despot—though we might be thankful for Herodotus's restraint in this regard.

What is the meaning of Oriental despotism, when it is so obviously set against the Greek norm of politics grounded in debate? Deleuze and Guattari paint the (rather ahistorical) figure of the Despot as a sort of primitive accumulation of territoriality. That analysis is rather disappointing, but it does point to a certain expectation: the despotic form of power is undeveloped, unsophisticated, undifferentiated brute force unfounded on any debatable ideological grounds. Invariably, when the Greeks want to dismiss the Persian way of politics, they attack the arbitrariness and capriciousness of despotism—implicitly suggesting that the Greek type of monarchy, founded on some sort of implied rational choice, is more sophisticated.

Thus, only after having passed through the gateway of the agora can a form of government become fit for intellectual debate and comparison. This can explain Herodotus's strange description of the conspiracy against the Magi (Median impostors who ruled Persia after the death of Cyrus's son Cambyses). The Persian conspirators slaughter the Magi and then hold an agora-style, Thucydidean debate between democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy. (Monarchy, in the person of Darius, ends up winning.) If Herodotus, broadly, aims to justify his partial sympathy with Persian culture, or at least his cosmopolitanism, against more chauvinistic critics like the later Plutarch, then his insertion of this clearly apocryphal scene can be read as an attempt to domesticate or legitimate despotism as a rationally arrived at form of government.

But is despotism after the agora the same as despotism before it? The theoretical legitimacy of the despotism of Cyrus is not discussed, but presumably it involves an explicit acknowledgment of divine favor and an implicit monopoly on violence. Either way, the roots of the despotism seem unimportant because—as Deleuze and Guattari have it—they rest in unconscious historical developments. But a despotism after the agora is explicitly justified, and hence cannot ground itself in the same kind of collective unconscious. It is permanently in crisis, just like oligarchy and democracy—subject to the “revolutions” of the political wheel, which is turned by the agora itself.

The lesson to be drawn from this is that the public sphere is much closer to a transcendental historical and political category than we might like to think. Once it arises—or is figured as arising—it can never disappear, but must be reckoned with as directly as space and time in Kantianism. As a result, a world which includes the public sphere is intellectually incommensurable with one that does not—for the Greeks, the world without the agora is one big soup of barbarians; for modern Westerners, Russia and the Third World are equally frustrating, equally inaccessible.

Revolution in Deleuze

A true politics of psychiatry, or antipsychiatry, would consist therefore in the following praxis: (1) undoing all the reterritorializations that transform madness into mental illness; (2) liberating the schizoid movement of deterritorialization in all the flows, in such a way that this characteristic can no longer qualify a particular residue as a flow of madness, but affects just as well the flows of labor and desire, of production, knowledge, and creation in their most profound tendency. Here, madness would no longer exist as madness, not because it would have been transformed into 'mental illness,' but on the contrary because it would receive the support of all other flows, including science and art...
- Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

It seems unavoidable that Anti-Oedipus would be read as a revolutionary text. Its arrival in the wake of May '68, its broad-ranging critical project, and--this above all--Michel Foucault's stunning preface to the English edition have shaped its image as a Capital for the post-'68 era. The rhetoric Deleuze and Guattari deploy in their vindication of the desiring machines seems undoubtedly to imply that the cause and effect of their deterritorialization is a cataclysm.

But I think that it is more productive, more interesting to read it as an ethics and not a politics. The depth of our real or feigned commitments to radical politics make it difficult to separate the two--you can just see Mark Seem, the translator, nervously making the Sign of the Cross as he hastens to claim that the book is about a collective project and not, god forbid, an individual one. It is impossible to appreciate the book's philosophical power, however, without distancing oneself from the implicitly political.

For what kind of revolution is really being advocated here? To hear the academic establishment tell it, it's just another reconnaissance raid on the Culture War battlefield, the queer-theory wing of the identity politics corps (my book jacket insipidly calls it "an important text in the rethinking of sexuality and sexual politics spurred by the feminist and gay liberation movements"). In short, it is a kind of arcane alchemy: an alloy, not of Marx and Freud, but of hippies and New Left. "Desire," here, becomes just another slogan, a plea for free love or gay marriage or what have you. If this is a true interpretation, then Deleuze must stand or fall with the revolution, just like any other revolutionary theorist.

I think this view belies the complexity of the Deleuzian critique. The key to a different approach lies in a snarky paragraph in "Nomad Thought," Deleuze's best written and most powerful essay:

If we consider the evolution of Marxism or Freudianism (rather than taking Marx or Freud literally), we see that they are paradoxically launched in an attempt at recodification: recodification by the state, in the case of Marxism ("You have been made ill by the state, and you will be cured by the state"--but not the same state), and recodification by the family, in the case of Freudianism ("You have been made ill by the family, and you will be cured by the family"--but not the same family). Marxism and psychoanalysis in a real sense constitute the fundamental bureaucracies--one public, the other private--whose aim is somehow or other to recodify everything that ceaselessly becomes decodified at the horizon of our culture.

After reading this, we can no longer think that Deleuze is simply using Marx against Freud. We come to appreciate what he really is: a Nietzschean. And a Nietzschean strives always to see beneath the surface of the inevitably shallow (despite all of Badiou's whining to the contrary) revolutionary Great Event, to the transvaluations swimming blindly beneath it like prehistoric fish.

Can we not see, beneath the critique of one reductive territorializing schema, the concurrent indictment of another--a binary one? Revolution (even one decked out with the fashionable slogans of Continental philosophy) is still an affair of classes (even if they look like Multitudes). Hardt and Negri's attempt is to alleviate the territorialization of the concept of class-consciousness by embracing a rhizomatic politics of difference. But they miss the mark; the creation of a revolutionary subject, which is what the Multitude really is, is inevitably un-Deleuzian. It fantasizes about agency, it makes believe that a multitude can act as a unity--whereas even the molecules (not atoms!) of the multitude cannot do so. An ideological smokescreen, in short.

And so I am tempted to find an ethics here, and to blame the Marxism that remains on Guattari. It is, so far, an unfulfilling reading--but that's the price of avoiding the apparatus of obviousness.

[incidentally, if you read this far, would you please comment on the new theme?]

Thucydides and Oral Publicness

[Cleon:] The most alarming feature in the case is the constant change of measures with which we appear to be threatened, and our seeming ignorance of the fact that bad laws which are never changed are better for a city than good ones that have no authority; that unlearned loyalty is more serviceable than quick-witted insubordination; and that ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows. The latter are always wanting to appear wiser than the laws, and to overrule every proposition brought forward, thinking that they cannot show their wit in more important matters, and by such behaviour too often ruin their country; while those who mistrust their own cleverness are content to be less learned than the laws, and less able to pick holes in the speech of a good speaker; and being fair judges rather than rival athletes, generally conduct affairs successfully. These we ought to imitate, instead of being led on by cleverness and intellectual rivalry to advise your people against our real opinions.
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book III

It is all too easy for me, with my fascination with the Habermasian eighteenth century, to forget that yes, public discourse--perhaps even something like a public sphere--existed before the age of Dryden. In Thucydides' History, that dimension of politics is manifest; he records not only oratorical triumphs or the words of the great, but the whole broad and multifarious process of debate. Still, of course, there are crucial differences between the Athens of the fifth century BC and the Europe of two millennia later.

In Book III, the Athenians confront a particularly important question--whether to massacre the citizens of Mitylene for revolting against their rule or to leave the bulk of them well enough alone. But the debate is not about war crimes, ethics, the responsibility of a democracy to uphold human rights. Rather, it is about something more abstract: the mechanics of legitimate participation in discourse and the specific possible forms of that discourse.

Diodotus, spokesman for the anti-slaughter party, supports a model of the public that is particularly Greek, both in its rationalism and its taste for moderation. "I think," he says, "the two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion; haste usually goes hand in hand with folly, passion with coarseness and narrowness of mind." Of course, this means that reasoned debate must be translated into virtuous action. Such men, and such arguments, would be heard often in the eighteenth century.

But his opponent Cleon, whom Thucydides despises, does not apologize for wanting the Mitylenians dead. In fact, he rejects Diodotus' moderation wholesale. Cleon suggests that passion and hotheadedness is admirable, for it promotes the making of difficult decisions. The rationalism of public discourse is directly opposed to this; when the audience coolly considers the speeches of different orators, evaluating them in the calm and levelheaded manner of Diodotus, they become "more like the audience of a rhetorician than the council of a city." Cleon's substantive arguments in favor of massacre are inseparable from this substratum, because the slaughter can only have value as the expression of a passionate righteous indignation; there is no form/content divide in this debate.

It seems that Cleon and Diodotus represent very different models of what discourse ought to be. Diodotus is the way of the future; the way of the printed word avant la lettre. For the definitive aspect of the eighteenth-century public sphere of print is precisely its claim to cultivate rational reflection at a distance from immediate emotional appeals, and thence to shape political action. Cleon, on the other hand, represents--and argues for--the values of orality and the critique of representation. His hostility to detachment, his emphasis on immediacy and authenticity, his attacks on professional orators, are all very characteristic defenses of the oral.

What does this mean for us? In Sandra Gustafson's recent book on oratory in early America, she never quite stops herself from conflating all forms of oral participation in political discourse with oratory as such. But we see with Cleon that oratory negates the characteristics of orality just as it deploys it for its own ends--and hence we might not even be able to speak of oratory as distinct from the publicness of print!

Yet Cleon, by the eighteenth century, loses. Even in Rousseau the orator comes to represent the anti-representationalist viewpoint. Yet Cleon's defeat is not the result of new social structures or technologies; it is the outcome of his own participation in the debate. For he himself introduces the argument into the public sphere, and that imposes obligations on it. These obligations, the structural features of the public sphere, make any effective critique of detachment impossible, because by virtue of being public the discourse is already a representation. A sort of inescapable petitio principii!

This helps to explain why Feyerabend's proposal for an "open debate" cannot be workable. Any such debate must involve a confrontation over form; but even substantive formalist arguments are inevitably imprisoned in the framework of public discourse. It must reign unchallenged; and it can set the terms and outcomes of the debate.