The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, Religion

Chapter 5: Deterritorializing the Text: Flow-Theory and Deconstruction

f i v e Deterritorializing the Text: Flow-Theory and Deconstruction Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in a chapter of A Thousand Plateaus entitled ‘‘10,000 b.c.: The Geology of Morals,’’ indicate an architecture of strati fication and doubling germane to the enterprise of establishing a flow theory embracing both textual and extratextual phenomena: God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata come at least in pairs, but in a different way each stratum is double (it itself has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena constitutive of double articulation. Articulate twice, B—A, BA. . . . Double articulation is so extremely variable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units (substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms). The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures (forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures are simultaneously actualized (substances).1 The inexact symmetry of lobsters, ticks, prawns, and other creatures from the natural world becomes the infrastructure for a kind of doubling, or what 129 130 The Task of the Critic Borges, in ‘‘Death and the Compass,’’ calls ‘‘maniacal repetition,’’ which is a feature in the architecture of culture.2 A Thousand Plateaus is, in one of its facets, a deranged, antilinear history book. Each chapter is named by a temporal marker, a year or period in apposition to a major breakthrough in what Foucault would characterize as archaeology, the genealogy of culture in an invariably discontinuous sequence of epistemo-linguistic formations. The year zero, pivotal to Christian iconography, is linked to a phenomenon that Deleuze and Guattari name ‘‘faciality,’’3 the maniacal reinscription of facial traits across the gamut of major civilizations and a staggering range of artifacts. The structural unit of faciality is ‘‘probe-heads,’’ another biologically derived feature interchangeable with and introducible into artifacts of what we might call a higher symbolic order. Within the same discontinuous historical sequence, 1227, the year in which Genghis Khan died, is accorded special status in the formation of nomadology, or the war machine. Nomadic despotism, as Deleuze and Guattari have culled it from source materials by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Durkheim , and others, is an irrational, violent, and pathogenic substructure upon which all organized societies, including modern ‘‘liberal’’ ones, are grounded. The despotic machine, more like the Freudian preconscious and the Lacanian pre-Oedipal than the Freudian unconscious, is a massive, collective will to anomie, incest, and death capable of crystallizing and deranging bourgeois society at any moment. Deleuze and Guattari, only partially successful in their attempt to avoid dialectical and/or genealogical schemata, make a point of distinguishing this chaotic, destructive happening from a massive sociological regression, which it would otherwise closely resemble, naming it an ‘‘involvement.’’4 The most precipitous deployments of the mobilization of the despotic machine in the waning years of the last century were Hitler, the Kmer Rouge, and the genocide in Rwanda, while an American blitzkrieg that can be directed anywhere is an irradicable feature on the current geopolitical map. The rise and meaning of Hitler are memorialized in a chapter of A Thousand Plateaus entitled ‘‘1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity.’’ Hitler’s takeover of the German chancellery and Reichstag becomes an exemplary occasion for showcasing the fluctuations between what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘‘molar’’ and ‘‘molecular’’ movements. In the distinction between classes and masses, postmodern flow theory opts for the latter. Masses release themselves from the ‘‘molar segmentar- Deterritorializing the Text 131 ity’’ defining the conventional division of labor in advanced societies.5 Like the despotic machine that generates them, the masses are a trump card, a loose cannon, whose unpredictable wills and movements are able, at any moment, to upset the hierarchically defined socioeconomic order defining distinct classes and assigning them different roles and functions. Deleuze and Guattari favor the ‘‘molecular notion’’ of masses ‘‘that do not have the same kind of movement, distribution, or objectives’’ as classes and ‘‘do not wage the same kind of struggle. . . . The notion of mass is a molecular notion operating according to a type of segmentation irreducible to the molar segmentarity of class. Yet classes are indeed fashioned from masses; they crystallize them. And masses are constantly flowing or leaking from classes.’’6 The unpredictable turns of the masses...