Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political

Chapter Six. Singularity

CHAPTER SIX Singularity From the 1960s to the 1980s, the idea of singularity had a leading role in French philosophy. In response to the totalizing aspirations of existentialism , structuralism, and Marxism, a series of thinkers began to rethink political contestation in terms of affirming singularity against the ruling structure rather than revolutionizing the structure. For these thinkers, singularity was not individuality but much more difficult to nail down because it was irreducible to any systematic attempt to comprehend it. In fact, this irreducibility is what defines singularity. It is distinct from everything else and attests to a break in relationality. The student revolts of May 1968 in France owed a debt to the attempt to think the singular and also increased its prominence. These revolts were not so much an attempt to forge a new order in French society but more an effort to challenge order as such. The interventions were local rather than global, a force emanating from the bottom rather than one directed from the top. May 1968 aimed to give singularity an expression that the whole of French society would not and could not swallow. The resistance to the revolts by the power brokers of the Left testifies to its emphasis on the singular. May 1968 was not a political intervention in the traditional sense, and it even had the effect of aligning, for a time, conservative government forces and the Parti Communiste Franc;ais. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari put it in A Thousand Plateaus, "May 1968 in France was molecular, making what led up to it all the more imperceptible from the viewpoint of macropolitics."l The molecular, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the level of singularity, and it is on this level that the events of May 1968 played out. Traditional Leftist leaders couldn't understand it, nor could traditional analyses properly account for it. If May 1968 did not change the larger political scene, its effect on the importance of singularity and on the subject's sense of its own singularity was pronounced. It marks the moment at which singularity becomes a 163 164 Chapter Six fully articulated social value and replaces social authority as the basis for the subject's worth.2 Perhaps the chief spokesperson for singularity during this epoch and after was Michel Foucault. But Foucault was such an exponent of singularity that he would vehemently refuse the title of spokesperson. He envisions himself not as a universal philosopher who stakes out a position on every issue but as an archaeologist or genealogist of thought who makes strategic local interventions. In contrast with someone like Jean-Paul Sartre who takes a public position on every controversial issue of the day, Foucault refuses the position of the philosophical prophet, speaking from the standpoint of universality. This refusal bespeaks his commitment to the primacy of the singular in relation to the universal. Foucault's philosophical method also hews rigorously to the authority he grants to the local or the singular. In his version of the Cartesian discourse on method, he distinguishes his method-what he calls archaeology and genealogy-from any identifiable operation of knowledge that would arrive at mastery over its objects. He explains, Compared to the attempt to inscribe knowledges in the power-hierarchy typical of science, genealogy is, then, a sort of attempt to desubjugate historical knowledges, to set them free, or in other words to enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse. The project of these disorderly and tattered genealogies is to reactivate local knowledges-Deleuze would no doubt call them "minor"-against the scientific hierarchicalization of knowledge and its intrinsic power-effects. To put it in a nutshell: Archaeology is the method specific to the analysis of local discursivities, and genealogy is the tactic which, once it has described these local discursivities, brings into play the desubjugated knowledges that have been released from them. That just about sums up the overall project.3 By approaching discourses through an archaeological and then a genealogical method, Foucault works to sustain rather than reduce their diversity. If similarities emerge, these are similarities that inhere in the discourses themselves; they are not the product of the theorist's drive to unity. If it comes at all, universality comes on the heels of singularity, not as its theoretical foundation. The exploration of local knowledges is not an implicit denial that the universal exists.4 It is instead an attempt to circumvent...