This is an expanded version of an essay that originally appeared in Politics and Poetics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom, Amitava Kumar, editor (St. Martins Press, 1999)

(Not) Going with the Flow: The Politics of Deleuzean Aesthetics

One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette.

Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm [1]

Introduction

Over the last several years the concept of the "aesthetic" has emerged with considerable force in American and European intellectual circles. As David Beech and John Roberts note in the New Left Review, this "return" to the aesthetic has been staged largely by writers identified with a left political position. This is, as they argue, somewhat surprising because of the tendency of writers on the left in the past to regard the aesthetic as little more than an extension of bourgeois ideology.[2] It has typically been conservative commentators who have celebrated the aesthetic for its capacity to reveal the fortuitous correspondence between the subjective tastes of the wealthy and powerful and ostensibly universal standards of cultural excellence.[3] Beech and Roberts suggest that this new concern with beauty, bodily pleasure, and subjectivity derives in part from the anxious soul searching of progressive academics faced with the demise of the USSR (and the resultant "crisis of Marxism") and the ascendancy of political and cultural conservatism in the U.S. and the U.K. They note in particular the recent works of neo-Marxist art historians such as Charles Harrison and T.J. Clark who have to some extent repudiated or at least re-evaluated their former commitments. Harrison and Clark now consider their interest in the political and cultural context of art production to have been unduly instrumentalizing, and have embraced instead the belief that art enjoys a fundamental autonomy from the social.[4]

Beech and Roberts' essay--which also examines the philosophical works of Andrew Bowie and J.M. Bernstein--reflects only one dimension of a broader interest in somatic experience that has been registered across a range of other disciplines including art practice and theory, architecture, film studies, and critical and literary theory. In the American art world interest in the aesthetic has been linked with the seemingly inexhaustible fascination with beauty and "the body" in recent years; a movement that is associated with writers such as David Hickey, Wendy Steiner, Barbara Stafford and, as I will discuss below, Gilles Deleuze.[5] Hickey's book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, published in 1993, precipitated a ground swell of interest in beauty and the aesthetic, especially within art schools. In The Scandal of Pleasure (1995) Steiner defends aesthetic experience on the basis of its subversive capacity to generate diverse and even conflicting interpretive responses. And Stafford's books, including Body Criticism (1994) and, more recently, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (1996) have been influential in turning the attention of artists and art historians to the changing status of visual and sensual experience during the modern period. In Stafford's narrative this bodily "intelligence" has been driven underground during the post-Enlightenment period. As a result, we have come to mistrust sensory experience and surrendered ourselves instead to an "authoritarian reason".[6] A variant of this analysis can be found in recent architectural criticism. In Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (1983) Alberto Perez Gomez contends that architecture was violently severed from its organic rootedness in the phenomenologically rich experience of physical construction by the evil abstraction of the Renaissance building plan, thus effecting a mind/body split that has reduced the contemporary architect to little more than a clerical worker.[7]

What has emerged from these works, taken in conjunction with the theoretical writings of Bernstein and others, is a generalized view of the aesthetic as an autonomous, powerfully transgressive mode of experience which places us in touch with a repository of "an-exact," "sub-representational," sensual knowledge. In the following remarks I will investigate this "new" aesthetics, focusing on its significance for dialogical art practice. I will also explore the way in which the counter-discursive orientation that I have already outlined within the traditions of modernist art and art theory is articulated through a contemporary theoretical framework. My interest in the aesthetic is based on its status as an epistemological mode, a way of knowing the world, rather than on its relevance for the evaluation of beauty per se. There are two inter-related aspects of aesthetic epistemology that are of particular importance for my investigation. The first is the relationship of the aesthetic to the constitution of the subject; how one comes to experience a sense of self through forms of aesthetic knowledge. The second is the question of how aesthetic forms construct or pattern our experience of the "given" world around us. The relationship "of knowledge to its Other, to that which is to be known," as Wlad Godzich has noted, is one of the primary concerns of aesthetic discourse.[8] In my view these two dimensions of research into the aesthetic—the formation of subjectivity and knowledge of the given—provide it with a particular salience for current debates over identity, community, and political transformation.

The questions of subject constitution and intersubjectivity have been elaborated with particular intensity in the works of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (and in Deleuze's collaborations with Felix Guattari). Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari's approach to these questions has been staged through an ongoing negotiation with the traditions of Enlightenment philosophy. The aesthetic, and modes of subjectivity associated with aesthetic experience, play a central role in Deleuze and Guattari's work. On the thematic level, Deleuze and Guattari have a long-standing interest in the operations of literary, cinematic, and visual works of art. Deleuze has written on the English painter Francis Bacon (Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, 1981), Marcel Proust (Marcel Proust et let signes, 1964), and auteur cinema (Cinema 1: l'Image-Movement, 1983 and Cinema 2: l'Image-Temps, 1985). And Deleuze and Guattari co-authored a study of Franz Kafka (Kafka: pour une litt(c)rature mineure, 1975). However, it is not simply the subject matter of art that is of concern in their work, but the analytic system that they have developed, which assigns to the aesthetic a significant capacity for political agency. This centrality is explicit in Guattari's last book Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm (1995), in which he describes the "aesthetic paradigm-the creation and combination of mutant percepts and affects" as "the paradigm for every possible form of liberation. . ."[9] The movement towards what I am calling a new aesthetics is of course quite diverse and it is important to avoid over-generalizing about what is in fact a disparate set of approaches located across a range of different disciplines. I do, however, concur with Beech and Roberts assessment that these approaches are united by a concern to re-establish the (relative) autonomy of aesthetic experience in response to what is seen as its unduly instrumentalized role in earlier critical theory. Deleuze and Guattari's work presents what is undoubtedly the most complex attempt to re-claim the efficacy of the aesthetic, and to understand the political implications of aesthetic subjectivity.

If Deleuze and Guattari consider the artist to be, in some ways, an exemplary subject, artists have returned the compliment by avidly embracing their work. With the exception of Deleuze and Guattari's co-authored books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus and Guattari's Chaosmosis, it has been Deleuze's work (the Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 studies, Leibniz, the Fold and the Baroque, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, Bergsonism, and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, among others), that have had the greatest influence in the arts. In fact, over the past few years Deleuze has threatened to overtake Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida as the art world's French philosopher of choice. Both Feature and the Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts have published a number of essays on the relevance of Deleuze's thought for contemporary art practice.[10] And Deleuze's book Leibniz, the Fold, and the Baroque, (published in 1988 and translated into English in 1993) precipitated a spate of special issues including New Observations ("Art in the Folds," #110, Jan./Feb. 1996) and Architectural Design ("Folding in Architecture," vol. 63, no. 3/4, 1993).[11] Part of the attraction that Deleuze holds for artists, in addition to his rather flattering portrayal of their liberatory creative powers, is his reliance on figural terms, in part as an attempt to challenge the logocentrism of conventional philosophical discourse. I will discuss the implications of this "figuralism" in more detail below. Deleuze, who committed suicide in November of 1995 after a lingering illness, received obituaries in fashionable art magazines such as Parkett and Art Forum and continues to be regularly cited and invoked by artists, architects, curators, and critics. In addition, his currently unpublished lectures and essays promise that the flow of Deleuzean discourse will continue unabated for some time.[12] I want to outline some of the ways in which Deleuze's philosophy has been taken up in the art world, but it is first necessary to describe more specifically how the aesthetic functions in his thought.

I. The Spectre of Hegel

Deleuze's attempts to re-think the constitution of the subject were heavily influenced by the negative example of the Hegelian tradition. Hegel's thought came to dominate the French academic system in the post-war period, due in large part to the lectures given in Paris during the 1930s by the Russian emigre Alexandre Kojeve and the teaching of Jean Hippolyte at the Sorbonne. By the time that Deleuze was studying at the Sorbonne in the mid-40s Hegel was an unavoidable fact of life. For Deleuze and his contemporaries it was necessary to move beyond Hegel, and specifically to move beyond Hegel's ontology as outlined in The Science of Logic and The Phenomenology of Spirit. There were two aspects of Hegel's ontology that Deleuze found particularly objectionable. The first was the belief that being was externally determined, that is, that it required the "recognition" of some other subject. "Self-consciousness exists" as Hegel writes, "in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged."[13] The second was that this determination unfolded through a process in which the external subject's identity was negated or destroyed. These two views are presented by Hegel in his explanation of the master/bondsman relationship in the Phenomenology of Spirit: "one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord, the other is bondsman."[14]

The Hegelian subject requires the existence of an external agent to establish its identity. As a result of this vulnerability it emerges as an aggressive and conative entity, driven to sacrifice other subjects through the process of negation on which its own survival depends. For many French thinkers of the post-war period Hegel's thought is set in a syllogistic chain that stretches from the psychology of the master/slave relationship to Nazi Germany to modern day state capitalism. In each case a monolithic entity attempts to mask its own external dependence by imposing its will (both conceptually and physically) through the mastery or destruction of difference (e.g., slaves, Jews, labor or natural resources). There is a certain easy transference here between questions of ontology and questions of a political and institutional nature that is, as we shall see, a hallmark of Deleuze's writing. This set of associations was strengthened by the events of May 1968. After the inaction of the French Communist Party following the worker and student strikes, whatever residual faith intellectuals such as Deleuze might have had in organized or collective forms of political struggle was extinguished. Any overarching program, identity, theory, or mode of resistance that might potentially subordinate and "negate" the specific differences of member individuals was to be deplored: any collective form (of thought, of social or political organization) was irretrievably compromised by its association with a coercive, Hegelian reason.[15]

In order to defeat this paradigm Deleuze can't simply invert the terms of Hegel's formulation and "free" the slave of dominative reason. Hegel himself has already anticipated any direct transcendence of oppositional terms through the concept of the dialectic. Thus Deleuze was driven to search through Western philosophy for alternative models of subject constitution that would be both positive and internally grounded. It is this search that led him to Leibniz, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson. From these disparate sources he assembled a model of subjectivity that does not rely on external determination and negation. It is impossible here to convey the full complexity of Deleuze's formulation. I will, however, identify two aspects of this new subject that have a direct bearing on the implications of Deleuze for a new aesthetics. First, Deleuze's subject is determined by internal rather than external differentiation. Deleuze turns to Henri Bergson's concept of an "elan vital" or life force to describe a process of internal differentiation: "Being differs with itself immediately, internally. It does not look outside itself for an other or a force of mediation because its difference rises from its very core".[16] The experience of difference, of predication, that is necessary for the formation of even the most nominal form of subjectivity, is thus drawn into the interior of the subject. Deleuze is consistently attracted to models of the subject which describe it as enclosed or sealed from discursive interaction with the external world. Thus his interest in Leibniz's "windowless monad" in The Fold or the "Body without Organs" of Anti-Oedipus, which eliminates all possible points at which the subject's desires might be organized or regulated through an inter-subjective domination. On the one hand any "organ" represents a site of possible external coercion (or "territorialization") of the body's "intrinsic drives". At the same time the organs represent the demand of the body to master or consume the outside world.[17]

The second step that Deleuze takes is to expunge any residual traces of Cartesian self-identity from his monadic subject (which in some respects bears a striking resemblance to the protean and self-sufficient bourgeois individual). He turns to the concept of a "will to power," developed in Nietzsche's version of the master/slave relationship. For Neitzsche the master's will is un-restrained by reason or conscious reflection--his subjectivity is always in motion, always in the process of being produced in the act of doing. Deleuze is concerned to identify the will to power not with the personality of the master (he seeks to "de-personalize" Nietzsche, as Michael Hardt has written), but rather as a positive, creative force that works through the body of the master, thus resolving the problem of how to found identity without negation.[18] Only an action that bypasses our rational, conscious self can invent entirely new possibilities (new forms of art, new models of social organization). The master is able to engage in a radical self-forgetting that allows him to change from one mode of being to the next. The master doesn't depend on recognition from the Other, rather, he utterly destroys the Other, clearing the ground for an absolute break with existing values instead of the false and half-hearted Hegelian negation. The slave on the other hand is negative and reactive; burdened by resentment against the master, unable to forget, and brooding over past injustices. The slave, because he is powerless against the master in reality, must make a virtue out of his powerlessness and turn an abstract and ineffectual reason against the master, holding him accountable to an ideal standard of justice and equality that doesn't pertain in the real world. The slave's reason is simply a reaction to (and the negation of) the Master's power. The slave inverts the master's values (aggression and the power to destroy and create at will) and makes them his own (passivity, the deferral of radical change for some ideal utopia).

The Nietzschean master is for Deleuze a proto-typical artist. As he writes: "in Nietzsche, 'we the artists' = 'we the seekers after knowledge or truth' = 'we the inventors of new possibilities of life'".[19] The artist is able to transcend his own subjectivity and create entirely new values. Moreover, when the artist creates it is not as an expression of his individual personality; rather, he is merely the vehicle for a greater spiritual force that moves through his body. He [and it has to be said here that Deleuze has written on few if any women artists] is literally not himself and is transported through the act of creativity to a productive mode of existence (the "being of becoming") that transcends reason and conventional self-consciousness. This experience of positive being is captured in Deleuze's discussion of Bergson's "creative emotion," which is produced "between the pressure of society and the resistance of intelligence":

And what is this creative emotion, if not precisely a cosmic Memory, that actualizes all the levels at the same time, that liberates man from the plane (plan) or the level that is proper to him, in order to make him a creator, adequate to the whole movement of creation? This liberation, this embodiment of cosmic memory in creative emotions, undoubtedly only takes place in privileged souls. It leaps from one soul to another, 'every now and then,' crossing closed deserts. . . And from soul to soul, it traces the design of an open society, a society of creators, where we pass from one genius to another, through the intermediary of disciples or spectators or hearers.[20]

Although Deleuze is anxious to downplay the "personalist" references in Nietzsche, to say nothing of Bergson's confederacy of "privileged souls," I have some question as to how fully the Deleuzean subject is differentiated from the traditional, romantic belief in creative genius. There is of course a long tradition of describing the artist as a conduit for higher forces in the Picasso: Creator and Destroyer genre. The correspondance between this view of a spiritualized aesthetic force and the Romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is striking. Thus Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry of 1821, differentiates poetry from "reason" as a "power. . . not to be exerted according to the determination of the will". For Shelley "the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness" in a process that the "conscious poritions of our nature" can play no role.[21]

The concept of genius in its conventional usage refers to a form of subjectivity in which individual identity is consummated with an intelligence that transcends existing norms and values and "gives the rule" to art, in Kant's words. Just how innovative a form of being is this, given its association with the idea of a privileged elite of highly sensitive individuals who streak like comets through the dull sky of an otherwise mundane culture? In fact, Deleuze's books consistently celebrate the achievements of mostly white, male, Europeans, from Artaud to Beckett to Joyce to Kafka to Proust to Ravel to the "Great Directors" of the Cinema books. Whether a given action or work is attributed to an impersonal "will to power," an elan vital, a body without organs, or a good old fashioned "genius," the practical effect is much the same--both the effect of the work of art on a potential viewer and on the political and cultural construction of the artist and art-making. Throughout his writing Deleuze seems oblivious to the normative social and cultural function of the artistic personality, its conflicted relationship with the market, with bourgeois myths of individuality and merit, and with the complex function of symbolic capital. Moreover, he seems to assume that artists, or at least the effects produced by works of art, are necessarily progressive. This is, in part, because he is treating the artist as an ideal form of being. But what does it mean strategically and politically to celebrate a mode of being that, in its outward appearance and operation (rather than in its internal ontological condition), is so strikingly isolated and individualistic?

This may seem like a rather petty complaint to make given the grand philosophical questions that Deleuze is attempting to address, but it is related to a broader criticism I have of his work, which has to do with the status of the aesthetic itself as an organizing political principle. If the Deleuzean subject is an ideal form of being, one that is currently experienced only by a "privileged few" then it takes on a decidedly Hegelian connotation; it emerges as a teleological goal or model, a condition towards which we should aspire, assisted by the special personality of the artist. Deleuze's work is not by and large, based on an explicit political or historical analysis, but on the assumption of a transhistorical form of bad subjectivity. Capitalism is "bad" because it produces "bad" (dominative, binary, hierarchical) forms of subjectivity. The solution then is to establish in philosophical terms what a "good" subjectivity might be (non-hierarchical, de-centered, etc.). This description is arrived at through the use of a figurative language (the body without organs, the monad/nomad couplet, the rhizome, smooth vs. striated space, the fold). But what, precisely, is being figured? It seems clear, as I've noted above, that this mode of being is offered as something yet to be achieved. It does not currently exist, except in fragmented and dispersed forms (in art-making or schizophrenia, for example) and it requires the work of philosophy to survey these fragments and develop a framework within which their broader political significance can be established.

How might this ideal be achieved? In other words, what forms of political agency are Deleuzean monads capable of? If the Deleuzean subject is no longer required to look outside itself for a determinative moment, if it has withdrawn from all "linked and connected flows," how precisely will it make contact with other subjects?[22] Any conventional form of inter-subjective dialogue, communication or political organization is out of the question. First, because it would inevitably succumb to the dynamic of negative determination, and second, because the very concept of discourse requires a model of subjectivity that is anathema to Deleuze. The effective separation of the corporeal "body" as a potentially liberatory site, and as a surrogate mode of being (if not of subjectivity per se), has the effect of separating the Deleuzean subject from any form of social experience based on discourse. As a result Deleuze must locate the basis of intersubjectivity or community in devices such as "cosmic memory" that perform a typically "aesthetic" function in reconciling the individual with the social, or the one and the multiple (albeit in a very atypical ontological framework). There are, in fact, distinct echoes of Schiller (or perhaps Norman O. Brown) in Deleuze's appeal to an nature-like state of unregulated bodily desire, defined by positivity, creativity, and expression, which is threatened by the hierarchical, rational, systematizing abstraction of modern life.

This aesthetic function is typified in Deleuze's treatment of Spinoza. Deleuze turns to Spinoza for an account of the possible foundation for the social organization of bodies. He develops the theory of a "univocity" of being; the idea that individual subjects are all related attributes of a larger whole or substance: "not only is being equal in itself, but it appears equally present in all beings. . ."[23] As expressive bodies we are able to sense or intuit our essential commonalty with other bodies. As Deleuze writes, paraphrasing Spinoza, "God produces things in all attributes at once. Because the attributes are all equal, there is an identity of connection between modes differing in attribute."[24] The natural harmony that exists between and among individual bodies obviates the need for any discursive rationality; as individual beings we are all united as attributes of a greater force (God for Spinoza; the aesthetic or cosmic memory for Deleuze); drawn together by the commonalty of a "joyful passion".[25] Deleuze's study of Spinoza also exhibits his characteristic ontological foundationalism: his tendency to draw conclusions about social and political relationships from ontological questions with little or no mediation ("modes" become subjects, "substance" becomes roughly synonymous with the social or an underlying foundation for sociability, an ontological conatus becomes political or social power).

Moreover, despite his allergy to Hegelian negation Deleuze himself seems susceptible to certain binary tendencies. There is a distinctly Manichean quality to his definition of power: representation is opposed by "sub-representation," conscious reason to the unconscious or "aconceptual ideas," hierarchical forms to rhizomatic structures, order to chaos, identity to alterity, and so on. Moreover, this same oppositional form is echoed in Deleuze's figural language, for example, the "smooth" versus "striated" spaces discussed in A Thousand Plateaus or in the following description of the Nomad: "On one side, we have the rigid segmentarity of the Roman Empire, with its center of resonance and periphery, its State, its pax romana, its geometry, its camps, its limes (boundary lines). Then, on the horizon, there is an entirely different kind of line, the line of the nomads who come in off the steppes, venture a fluid and active escape, sow deterritorialization everywhere, launch flows whose quanta heat up and are swept along by a Stateless war machine."[26] Despite his concern with preserving difference against the reductive abstractions of Hegel, Deleuze also tends to speak in totalizing terms. He ascribes inherent moral or political value to given forms of power or modes of being (the rhizome, the fold, the boundary line), with little or no concern for the specific historical and political contexts in which they might operate or the effects they might produce. Along with this comes a tendency to collapse differences among and within forms of resistance under the guise of a kind of universalized bohemianism. Here is Guattari from Chaosmosis:

It is in an underground art that we find some of the most important cells of resistance against the steam-roller of capitalist subjectivity-the subjectivity of one-dimensionality, generalized equivalence, segregation, and deafness to true alterity. This is not about making artists the new heroes of the revolution, the new levers of History! Art is not just the activity of established artists but of a whole subjective creativity which traverses the generations and oppressed peoples, ghettos, minorities.[27]

The aesthetic emerges here as a trans-historical political form that unites "established artists," "ghetto dwellers," "minorities," and generally "oppressed peoples" everywhere and over the generations. There are no doubt any number of "established artists" who have little or no interest in being included in the company of Guattari's "ghetto dwellers" and "minorities". The basis of this aesthetic resistance, defined through an almost total collapse of specificity and attention to context, is to be "true alterity". Not surprisingly Deleuze provides relatively few examples of what a contemporary political practice based on his ontology might look like. The locus classicus is, of course, May '68, an event which has done so much to form the political imaginations of Deleuze and his contemporaries who seem to think that the very foundations of human identity were changed by the student/worker riots in France. Here is Deleuze's description from A Thousand Plateaus:

Those who evaluated things in macropolitical terms understood nothing of the event because something unaccountable was escaping. The politicians, the parties, the unions, many leftists, were utterly vexed; they kept repeating over and over again that "conditions" were not right. It was as though they had been temporarily deprived of the entire dualism machine that made them valid spokespeople. Bizarrely, de Gaulle and even Pompidou, understood much more than others. A molecular flow was escaping, minuscule at first, then swelling, without however, ceasing to be unassignable.[28]

These are the characteristic elements of a Deleuzean political movement: it is not the product of a conscious agency or plan, but the spontaneous movement of an anonymous political substance that "swells" and "flows" and "escapes," like steam from a radiator. It operates not on the oppressive and generalizing level of macropolitics, but on the level of individual bodies and sub-conscious desires, on the street and in action. As an event it entirely eludes the centralizing, teleological, and rational mindset of both the left and the right. And most importantly its meaning, like that of a work of art, can't be "assigned" or accounted for in advance. In these rare moments political struggle becomes an aesthetic event--unplanned, unadministered, unanticipated new collectivities or configurations of bodies are formed that elude the instrumentalizing grasp of political "theory," and that may break up as easily as they have congealed. Deleuze's commentators repeat this basic formulation with variations. Thus Michael Hardt, who has written one of the best general introductions to Deleuze's thought, describes "political assemblage" as "an art in that it has to be continually made anew and reinvented."[29]

Hardt attempts to read Deleuze as endorsing the general ideals of "liberalism," defined as the refusal of a specific political telos ("the most important single tenet of liberal democratic theory is that the ends of society be indeterminate, and thus that the movement of society remain open to the will of its constituent members.").[30] While this is certainly a laudable sentiment, one could no doubt find fairly similar language in the Congressional Record or most high school civics classes. The difficulty comes, of course, when we attempt to define concepts like "will" and "openness" in actual political contexts. Brian Massumi, in his Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, is a bit more specific, providing a list of approved Deleuzean political movements that includes, in addition to the obligatory May '68, the French Situationists, the Yippies, the Provos in the Netherlands, "extraparliamentary Greens" in Northern Europe, the Italian autonomia movement of the '70s, and Catalonian anarchists during the Spanish Civil War.[31] Despite his caricature of the "Standard of the European White Male Heterosexual," Massumi's list is remarkably European, white, male, and, with a few exceptions, middle-class. There is no mention of the National Welfare Rights movement, the Black Panthers, La Causa, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in Detroit, the black urban rebellions that took place in American cities between 1964 and 1968, or the Lordstown, Ohio GM work-stoppages of the early 1970's, to name but a few U.S. examples, perhaps because these are seen as compromised by their association with concrete, "Hegelian" objectives or insufficiently Deleuzean forms of political agency.

II. A Deleuzean Aesthetic

In the second section of this essay I want to explore the implications of the new aesthetics, and of a Deleuzean aesthetic in particular, for art practice and cultural politics. There are three interrelated aspects of the Deleuzean aesthetic discussed above which have a particular relevance for art practice. The first is what I will term a "figural formalism," the second is the non-discursive, internally-determined construction of the Deleuzean subject, and the third is the consequent reliance by Deleuze on the aesthetic, understood as an a-historical force, as the basis for social or political organization. I have already discussed Deleuze's use of the figure as a philosophical device. These terms (the monad/nomad, the rhizome, the body without organs, the fold, etc.) don't function through the traditional techniques of philosophical analysis, but by a compelling visual/intuitive "logic". The figure is integral to Deleuze's effort to develop a subject-less model of political power. The form of the fold or the rhizome is not simply a metaphor. Rather, it takes on a life of its own (the influence of Henri Focillon on Deleuze is evident here) and is endowed with an inherently liberatory capacity to transmit or express modes of being and of social organization. When taken up in art and architectural practice the discursive mobility that is a feature of Deleuze's figural language (the movement from the ontological to the social, or from a figural form to a political form), manifests itself in a tendency towards literalism, in which the mere presence of a folded shape in a sculpture, or a convoluted roof-line in a building, is taken as a political expression.

Fig. 1 Kenny Scharf, When WorldsCollide (1984) from Kenny Scharf: When World's Collide (University Galleries of Illinois State University, 1997).

The catalog for a recent exhibition of paintings by Kenny Scharf provides a typical example (figure 1). Scharf is a painter who first gained recognition in the early 1980s as part of the East Village art scene in New York. His paintings feature jumbles of cartoon characters, pop and advertising icons, and fantastic, rubbery objects, arrayed against lurid backdrops that combine graffiti-style spray paint, washes of color, and sci-fi landscapes. In an essay contained in a brochure for the show the exhibition's curator draws on Deleuze's concept of "smooth" and "striated" space to situate Scharf's canvases: "Striated space, the domain of the State (the university, the military, the corporation) is hierarchical and is ruled by order, purpose, routine, and control-all attributes that cannot exist in smooth space which flourishes on anarchy and choice. . . Plumbing the surface of a Scharf painting is analogous to jumping into this "matrix of contingent connections". The cacophony and chaos of his facades activate the viewer's gaze, allowing her to embark on a smooth voyage through Scharf's fun tunnel."[32] This statement presents a less sophisticated (or perhaps simply more laconic) expression of the characteristic Deleuzean tendency to collapse differences among modes of power. The university, the military and the corporation are presented as interchangeable manifestations of a greater oppressive form, under the generalizing categories of "order" and "control". This ordered form is then juxtaposed to the "anarchy and choice," "chaos" and "fun" of Scharf's paintings. The "smooth" surfaces of Scharf's paintings-they are typically painted with little or no impasto and relatively fine surface detail, and with various iconic elements arranged over a field of color-becomes a gesture of cultural resistance against the oppressive order of the modern state.[33]

Some of the most striking examples of this literalism occur in architecture, and specifically in the rarefied precincts of conceptually-oriented architectural journals such as Architectural Design, Oppositions, and the Journal of Architectural Education. In the following discussion I will refer primarily to discussions contained in the 1993 Architectural Design issue on "Folding in Architecture". Deleuze's work has been particularly welcomed in academic architectural circles because it provides a much needed infusion of intellectual legitimacy for a long-standing analysis of the "crisis" of modern architecture. This analysis, which previously drew on the phenomenological tradition, locates the effect of an instrumental reason in conventional forms of measurement, geometry, and representation culminating in the architectural "plan". The plan epitomizes an abstract, a priori rationality that imposes itself on the infinitely nuanced and ultimately un-mappable "site" (a kind of surrogate nature). Deleuze's writing has been used to credential an updated version of this view which, again, relies on a reflexive figural literalism. The response to the tyranny of the plan and traditional forms of measurement involves, predictably enough, some recourse to non-traditional forms of measurement and representation: "anexact" geometries, "proto-geometric" or "weak" forms, "viscous systems," and so forth.[34] The rigid lines and planes of the modernist bunker give way to a whole repertoire of "smooth spaces," "hybrid movements," and generally "folded, pliant, and supple" architectural forms (figure 2). Thus Peter Eisenman's plan for a convention center in Columbus, Ohio, according to Greg Lynn, opens up "unforeseen connections. . . between differentiated sites and alien programs" (figure 3).

Fig. 2 Peter Eisenman, Center for the Arts Emory University, Atlanta

Fig. 3 Peter Eisenman, Columbus Convention Center, Columbus, Ohio

Eisenman's approach requires "conciliatory, complicit, pliant, flexible and often cunning tactics. . . A multitude of pli [folds]." [35] "The force of. . . [the] Deleuzean schizo-analytic model" as Lynn continues, lies in "its ability to maintain multiple organizations simultaneously. In Eisenman's project for the Wexner Center the tower and grid need not be seen as mutually exclusive or in contradiction."[36] It is the relationship between formal modes within design (e.g., the grid or the tower) and their "cunning" re-organization that defines architectural practice under the auspices of a Deleuzean aesthetic.

Deleuze's reflexive analysis of being (a negative and externally determined ontology will be remedied by one which is positive and internally determined) leads, as I've argued above, to the formal reflexivity of "smooth" vs. "striated" space or the fold vs. the Cartesian grid. This same reflexivity is reiterated in the formal dynamic of conceptual architecture which defines bad architecture in terms of exact geometries and good architecture as "supple" and aleatory. In each case the operations of reason are hypostatized (for Deleuze reason and discourse can only be experienced as dominative and for architects buildings based on "exact geometries" have a necessarily instrumentalized relationship to site). Architecture's complicity with, or resistance to, oppressive forms of power is only acknowledged on the formal and technical level; in terms of the organization of space and material in response to exact or an-exact aesthetic typologies. The social, cultural or political context of habitation, the position of a given structure within a larger urban space or political economy, the position of the architect him or herself within this economy, are all effectively negated as areas of critique, analysis or creative intervention.

Although there are occasional references in the Architectural Design issue to the creation of a "broadly empowering political space," individual projects are discussed almost solely in terms of the architect's ability to generate formal and technical expressions of anexact geometries.[37] The architect is treated throughout as a paradigmatically autonomous creative subject involved in a protean struggle with the materiality of building. Nowhere is the subject position of the architect him or herself questioned, or the underlying creative system in which an elite of well-known architects, typically supervising an office of underpaid designers, travel the globe imposing their innovative and aleatory buildings on the urban landscape. The possibility that the autonomy and hierarchy of the architectural profession itself might be subject to a Deleuzean critique is of course not considered. Nor is the possibility that the creative process might be opened out into a collaborative relationship between the architect and the residents or inhabitants who will actually work in, live near, or inhabit, his "auratic, signature buildings" (as opposed to the clients who pay for them).[38] The closest that the architect comes to this kind of dialogue is to acknowledge the presence of nearby design typologies or forms in his own building. Of course even these "connections" must be carefully modulated to avoid the oppressive means/end rationality of signification. Thus Eisenman is celebrated for making vague references in his projects to the surrounding cityscape ("provisional, ad hoc affiliations" rather than scandalously full-blown "alignments").[39]

There is actually one occasion, described in the Architectural Design issue, in which an architect risks some interaction with the hoi polloi. It occurs while Frank Gehry is designing a chair assembly factory and a furniture museum for the Vitra corporation in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany. The Vitra company has made a name for itself over the past several years by commissioning a range of blue chip architects with well established avant-gardiste credentials (Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Nicholas Grimshaw, etc.) to create bulidings for their "office parks" in Germany and Italy. Gehry was invited to develop a design museum, entrance pavilion and industrial building, which we can see here in an aerial photograph and a plan of the site (figs. 4 & 5).

Fig. 4 Frank Gehry, et. al., View of Vitra & Complex, Weil am Rhein (1989)

Fig. 5 Plan of Vitra entrance pavilion and museum (1989)

In Gehry's initial proposal he devoted most of his creative energy to the design of the museum, which is not surprising as museums are typically viewed as prestige commissions. We can see this relationship quite graphically in the plan, which shows the smaller design museum in the foreground, enveloped in a fungal profusion of jumbled rooflines and unexpected nodules. His small building struggles with all its might to cast off the shackles of "exact" geometry, while still enclosing a sufficently rational interior space to allow for the proper display of artworks in Vitra's museum. Just behind the design museum sit the industrial buildings, where the chairs are actually assembled, looking very much like the bland, hopelessly rational industrial buildings that they are.

Gehry's initial design decisions enact a classic division between manual and intellectual labor. The chairs that Vitra sells are based on plans by prestigious designers from the US and Europe (e.g., Ray Eames), and are destined for the corporate boardrooms and private homes of the rich and powerful. Their status as conventional art works (rather than mere "furniture") is a necessary to maintain their extremely high cost. The chairs are thus displayed in the museum as the issue of protean genius; a status which is sanctioned and reinforced by the museum itself. The messy process of actually producing the chairs, however, is clearly viewed as of secondary importance, a merely physical and thus non-creative act of fabrication that can be relegated to the banal warehouse-style building in the background. It is probably unecessary to mention here that this is precisely the kind of binary opposition that a Deleuzean metaphysics is intended to challenge. Consider the relative formal complexity, the extent to which the rational floor plan is subject to an expressive and aestheticized disruption, in the design museum and the almost wholly functionalized industrial building (figures 6 and 7).

Fig. 6 Plan of Vitra design museum, Frank Gehry

Fig. 7 Plan of Vitra industrial building, Frank Gehry

Here formal complexity, whether it is symbolic of a rational or an irrational design semantics, has an explicit economic value and function. Although I don't have time to pursue it now, there is an interesting analysis to be made of the status of "signature" architectural styles in relationship to the corporate marketing strategies employed by fashion-oriented companies like Vitra and The Limited, in Columbus, Ohio, which has played an influential role in two Eisenman commissions.

This curious distribution of formal and symbolic resources did not, apparently, go unnoticed. During the design process Vitra expressed its "fear" that the assembly plant employees would complain that "all of the design attention was being invested in the museum, and none in the workplace." "As an afterthought" Vitra asked Gehry to "enliven" the factory building. In response Gehry "appended" some additional design elements. The architectural effect was "dramatic," according to Jeffrey Kipnis, "the additions knit affiliative links between the factory buildings and the museum, smoothing the site into a heterogeneous but cohesive whole."[40] These elements are visible in both the plan and aerial views. They are also quite evident in the photographic record of these buildings that has been disseminated in architectural journals. Consider this image from the pages of Lotus. The industrial building has clearly been photographed at an oblique angle in close proximity to Gehry's "additional design elements" so that they appear to constitute a major feature of the building's overall appearance (figure 8).

Fig. 8 Vitra industrial building, exterior Frank Gehry

This is what a Deleuzean practice comes down to, then, in architectural terms: placating workers who are concerned that their factory is not receiving an adequate proportion of Gehry's cultural capital. Far from opening up the creative process to a dialogical interaction with the people who work in the factory, Gehry simply imposes a formal reconciliation between the two buildings. The architectural elaboration of a Deleuzean aesthetic demonstrates just how easily a conventional model of artistic individuality can be detached from his ontological claims. Throughout the essays contained in Architectural Design the architect is cast as that most conventional of subjects: the heroic creator; assimilating complex philosophies and meeting practical demands to produce something absolutely "new". In lieu of any discursive interaction with the public Gehry, Eisenman, and others rely on the figural itself as a kind of surrogate political mode that ostensibly enacts both dialogue and resistance, even as they enjoy the privileges of a life-style supported by corporate capital. Discursive interaction, far from being viewed by Deleuze as a basis for ontology, is seen as a source of potential contamination which must be avoided at all costs (via an internal determination).[41] He is left, however, with the problem of how his monadic subjects might communicate or form political or social alliances. Deleuze's solution, as I've noted above, is to postulate the operation of an abstract aesthetic force that enables some form of social or political organization. But this force can only operate in rare moments of spontaneous political action, effectively excluding or marginalizing many forms of resistance that have made political change possible in the past. Further, it discourages the strategic development of those forms of inter-subjectivity, dialogue and discourse that we often have to rely on in actually existing political and cultural struggles (most of which bear little or no resemblance to Deleuze's volunteerist fantasy of May '68).

Due in part to his great antipathy to Hegel, Deleuze seems to assume that external determination and negation are irrevocably linked. I would argue, however, that it is possible to develop an externally-determined ontology that does not depend on negation. We can locate one resource for this model in Valentin Volosinov's work on dialogical interaction. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language Volosinov provides the outline for a mode of discursive intersubjectivity that is both positive and creative [42] "The organizing center of any utterance, of any experience," as Volosinov writes "is not within but outside-in the social milieu surrounding the individual being."[43] Although Volosinov doesn't make an explicit appeal to ontology his analysis of "experience" clearly has ontological implications. Thus he distinguishes the pre-linguistic and individualistic "I-experience" from the "we-experience". The "we-experience. . . is not by any means a nebulous herd experience; it is differentiated. Moreover, ideological differentiation, the growth of consciousness, is in direct proportion to the firmness and reliability of the social organization. The stronger, the more organized, the more differentiated the collective in which an individual orients himself, the more vivid and complex his inner world will be."[44]

Deleuze argues that Hegel's model of being depends on the spatial relationship between a fixed and static subject and some external thing. Drawing on Bergson, he postulates instead a mode of being that is always/already differentiated, and which doesn't have to search for difference in an external object. Bergson describes being as a process that unfolds over time (through "duration") in which identity is never fixed. Thus we carry "difference" within ourselves, in all the potential forms of being that each of us contain. It is in this movement from "virtual" to "actual" forms of being that Deleuze locates the "positive," "expressive" antidote to Hegelian negation. It is notable, however, that this positive moment occurs within the subject's own ontological experience. It is this internalization that lends itself so easily to the solipsistic individualism of a conventional artistic identity. A dialogical ontology would locate this positive moment in the subject's (external) social and discursive interactions. The concept of a dialogical ontology doesn't depend on a fixed subject, rather, it argues that being changes over time through the experience of discursive interaction. It thus operates in both a spatial register (the realm of the social and of inter-subjective experience) as well as a temporal, Bergsonian register. In the context of a cultural politics, the "positivity" of this mode of being would derive from the interaction between the artist and a given community or constituency. The creative autonomy of the artist (Deleuze's "Great Directors" and "privileged souls") would be replaced by a concept of the artist as a co-participant in cultural or political struggles rooted in a specific community context. The "work of art" would emerge less as a discrete object (a novel, painting, or convention center) constructed along the lines of a figural formalism than as a process of dialogical exchange. This process would take the place of Deleuze's aesthetic force or "cosmic memory" as the basis of a positive, inter-subjective creativity.

In the Gehry case above there is no indication that the work of the architect, or the act of cultural resistance, might be defined through a collaborative dialogue with the inhabitants of a given site or structure. If this were the case the outcome would be far more "spontaneous" and "unassignable" precisely because the architect can't know in advance what new forms of knowledge might be produced out of his or her interaction with a community. Instead of a reflexive formal response, the structure of the building would come into being through a process of exchange in which the autonomy of the architect/designer would be at least partially challenged. Moreover, in this way "site" would be defined in a far more complex manner. Rather than a matrix of universalized phenomenological experience, overlaid with a schematic historical sensibility, the site would be understood in terms of the complex actions and interactions of its current inhabitants and the social, economic, and political forces that pattern its present and future use. Defined in these terms the site is given the power of speech; it can talk back to the architect and respond to, modify, or critique his or her plans. It seems obvious that the tyranny of the "plan" does not simply lie in the fact that one employs conventional forms of measurement, but in the entire apparatus (of which the plan is merely symptomatic) in which the autonomous and self-sufficient intelligence of the architect/creator plays such a central role.

Grant H. Kester University of California, San Diego, 2002

NOTES

[1] Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p.7.

[2] Dave Beech and John Roberts, "Spectres of the Aesthetic," New Left Review 218, ( July-August 1996), p.105. Beech's and Robert's original essay elicited a number of critical responses focusing specifically on the concept of the "philistine" viewer. See Malcolm Bull, "The Ecstasy of Philistinism," New Left Review 219, pp.22-41; Malcolm Quinn, "Re-thinking the Unthinkable: Ventriloquy, the Quotidian and Intellectual Work," Third Text, no.40 (Autumn 1997), pp.13-20; Julian Stallabrass, "Phoney War," Art Monthly, no.206 (May 1997), pp.15-16; Stewart Home, "The Art of Chauvinism in Britain and France," everything, no.19 (March 1996), pp.19-22; J.M. Bernstein, "Against Voluptuous Bodies," New Left Review 225, pp.89-104; Andrew Bowie, "Confessions of a 'New Aesthete,'" New Left Review 225, pp.105-106; and, Dave Beech and John Roberts, "Tolerating Impurities: An Ontology, Geneology and Defence of Philistinism," New Left Review 227, pp.45-71.

[3] See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp.60-61.

[4] "Spectres of the Aesthetic," pp.112-114. Also see Peter Brooks, "Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened to Poetics?" in Aesthetics and Ideology, George Levine, editor (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

[5] Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993); Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); and Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

[6] As Stafford writes "Among my several aims is to expose how the visual arts, and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence in general, were damned to the bottom of the Cave of the humanities. . . . sensory and affective phenomena continue to be treated as second-rate simulations of second-class reflections. [. . . ] Coercive and authoritarian analogies such asthe book of the world, clear and distinct truth, dissecting reason, and pure spirit became objective standards against which confused, or non-geometric, shapes and colored, or mutable, semblances were judged." Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, p.2.

[7] "Contemporary architecture, disillusioned with rational utopias, now strives to go beyond positivistic prejudices to find a new metaphysical justification in the human world; its point of departure is once again the sphere of perception, the ultimate origin of existential meaning." Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p.325.

[8] Wlad Godzich, "Correcting Kant: Bakhtin and Intercultural Interactions," boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 18:1 (Spring 1991), p.13.

[9] Chaosmosis, p.91.

[10] "Multiplicity, Proliferation, Reconvention" edited by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and John Johnston, Feature (1997). Also see the "Abstraction" issue of the Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, (no. 5), edited by Andrew Benjamin (London: Academy Editions, 1995).

[11] "Art in the Folds," New Observations #110 (January-February, 1996) and "Folding in Architecture," Architectural Design 63: 3/4 (1993).

[12] See Richard Pinhas's "Deleuze Web", which includes transcripts of seminars that Deleuze gave while teaching at Vincennes (http://www.imaginet.fr/deleuze/sommaire.html).

[13] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.111.

[14] Ibid., p.115.

[15] For an useful intellectual history of the impact of May '68 see: Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May '68 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

[16] Cited by Michael Hardt in Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 14.

[17] "In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, it sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluids." Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p.9.

[18] Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, p.31.

[19] Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p.103. As Deleuze writes, for Nietzsche "Art is a 'stimulant of the will to power', 'something that excites willing.' The critical sense of this principle is obvious: it exposes every reactive concept of art." (p.102).

[20] Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p.111.

[21] Percey Bysche Shelley, "The Defence of Poetry," 1821, in Nature andIndustrialization, p.214.

[22] Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p.9.

[23] Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, translated by Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p.173.

[24] Ibid., p.110.

[25] Ibid., p.240.

[26] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p.222.

[27] Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, p.91.

[28] A Thousand Plateaus, p.216.

[29] Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, p.121.

[30] Ibid., p.120.

[31] Brian Massumi, A user's guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), p121.

[32] Greg Bowen, "Rhizomatic/Schar(morphous): Scharf's (Outer)Space Fun" essay in exhibition flyer for Kenny Scharf: When World's Collide (University Galleries of Illinois State University, January 14-February 23, 1997). Bowen continues: "Kenny Scharf is smooth, and I don't mean smooth as in cool or hip, although that would certainly apply. No, Kenny Scharf is smooth in a hip theoretical way. Behind the bubble gum colors and through the gaping grins of his morphed cartoon characters are the foundations for intriguing critical thought concerning our fractured contemporary existence. . ."

[33] Another instance occurs in a catalog for an exhibition of paintings by Maria Nazor at Laurie Rubin Gallery in 1989. After explaining the distinction Deleuze draws between the "molar" and the "molecular" the writer goes on to assure us that "A careful glance at Maria Nazor's paintings" will reveal that "they have absolutely nothing to do with molar structures, nothing to do with points, positions, ordered progressions, with closed systems, templates, and grids. The absence of molar segmentarity constitutes the absolute newness of these paintings." (author's italics). Catalog for Maria Nazor exhibition, (October 21-November 18, 1989), Laurie Rubin Gallery (155 Spring Street, New York, New York 10012), text by Phillip Evans Clark.

[34] The term "anexact" derives from Husserl and appears, among other places, in Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, translated by W.R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1931), section 74, p.190. For the use of this term in an architectural context see: Greg Lynn, "Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple," in Architectural Design 63:3/4 (March-April 1993), p.11. The other terms cited appear in the A.D. issue above, and in Greg Lynn, "Multiplicitous and In-Organic Bodies," Architectural Design 63: 11/12 (November-December 1993).

[35] Greg Lynn, "Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple," p.11.

[36] Ibid, p.10.

[37] Jeffrey Kipnis, "Towards a New Architecture," Architectural Design 63:3/4 (March-April 1993), p.42.

[38] Ibid., p.41.

[39] Ibid., p.45.

[40] Ibid., p.46.

[41] It is on the basis of his demand for a "pure" form of ontology that Hegel criticizes Spinoza in Science of Logic: "Self-subsistence pushed to the point of the one as a being-for-self is abstract, formal, and destroys itself. . . It is that freedom which so misapprehends itself as to place its essence in this abstraction, and flatters itself that in thus being with itself it possess itself in its purity." G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, translated by A.V. Miller, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1969), p.172.

[42] There is an ongoing debate as to the actual authorship of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Some historians claim that Bakhtin wrote the book, even though it was published under Valentin Volosinov's name. Others argue that Volosinov and Bakhtin co-authored it. For stylistic economy I will simply use Volosinov's name. For a discussion of this debate see the forum in Slavic and East European Journal 30/1 (Spring 1986), pp.96-102.

[43] V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p.93.

[44] Ibid., p.88.