It’s frankly difficult sometimes to listen to seminar discussions about his books, because everyone wants to be critical. It’s such a pleasure to be a critic – again, as the man himself points out. And while I don’t begrudge my colleagues their unflagging critique in the least, I tend to get in A Mood when I really like philosophers whose work I’ve just started reading, and I’m not ready to critique them for a long time. Or at least I like to be very cautious in my critique, taking into account the most charitable and careful of interpretations, avoiding crude generalizations as far as possible, and so forth… My attitude is that, constructed though ye philosophers’ canon may be, and especially contentious in these days, most of the big figures are there because they’re considerably smarter than us. Or perhaps they’ve just mobilized a great deal more allies than their less successful peers, but frankly I think one point of the ANT approach is that this redefinition does not subvert the effect of a cognitive explanation like ‘they’re smarter:’ allies or intelligence (itself an ally within the network by which oneself is constituted), these philosophers have a place in the canon for a reason, and it’s only very rarely that this can be ‘explained away’ with reference to considerations apart from the rhetorical and explanatory power of their respective philosophies. But I digress. The only point of said digression is that one must be careful with one’s critique (lest it run out of steam).

The real point of this post is that I’ve been pondering Latour, ANT, and the question of its quite tentative ‘realism’ (as opposed to its avowed ‘constructivism’) and trying to work out how it relates to de Landa’s so-called ‘assemblage theory,’ and, by extension, to Deleuze (even as Deleuze himself is rather deeply buried beneath de Landa’s so-called ‘reconstruction’). Inspired by a lovely little post on larval subjects about Latour and the ‘trials of strength’ by which he claims an object proves itself to be ‘real,’ I thought I’d throw out a few ideas on here. Incidentally, I was also inspired to check out The Pasteurization of France by this post – thank ye inexistent Deity for Google Books! – and I’m experiencing an irrational excitement about reading a book by Latour organized a la Tractatus.

It’s curious to me that there hasn’t been more comment on this relationship though, given the fact that the theory of assemblages and that of actor-networks seem very similar in many important respects, and given the popularity of both Latour and de Landa in this brewing philosophical circle of realists.

But is Latour a realist? It seems we can offer two equally obvious and wholly contradictory answers to this question.

Clearly, on the one hand, he is not a realist. After all, he writes about the construction of facts and of things and of objects, indeed even of the accursed social construction of these, at least until the pesky term was finally redacted from his book’s title for the confusion it inspired. And as everyone knows (here the Deleuzian hairs on the back of our collective neck should be standing up), constructivism and realism are opposing tendencies in philosophy and sociology!  de Landa would thus appear to be rather far from Latour, with his explicitly realist conception of society, one in which “the existence of institutional organizations, interpersonal networks and many other social entities is treated as conception-independent.” He goes on to contrast such an approach with that of the accursed ones: “This realist solution is diametrically opposed to the idealist one espoused by phenomenologically influenced sociologists, the so-called ’social constructivists’” (new philosophy of society, 2). The ‘phenomenologically influenced’ comment is of course meant to single out Berger and Luckmann (with whom I’m only marginally familiar and have no interest in defending here), and so this is by no means a direct jab at Latour. But certainly it’s part of a good prima facie case for their occupying opposite ends of the ‘political spectrum’ when it comes to ontological positions. (A piece of Graham Harman’s called de Landa the ‘upside-down Latour,’ and presumably the opposite would hold true as well.)

But things are less clear when we try to evaluate Latour in terms of the explicit criteria de Landa himself puts forth for realism. From the beginning it is described as a “commitment to the mind-independent existence of reality,” and an assertion that social entities are autonomous “from the conceptions we have of them” (NPOS, 1 – incidentally, a rather infelicitous acronym if there ever was one).  This is certainly a respectable definition of realism. And by these criteria Latour is just as certainly a realist. On the second point it is absolutely clear – social networks are in no way ‘dependent’ on cognitive factors, whether our ‘conceptions,’ our intentions, or any other such notions; on the first point it is perhaps less obvious, but I think that Latour is equally a realist in this sense.

Which brings me back to Levi’s post, where I begain. Reality is that which resists. An equally serviceable notion of the real, with an equally serviceable realism to accompany it. I savour the difference between Latour’s definition of reality and de Landa’s of realism.  These are completely different kinds of definition (at the risk of being trite, this kind of tension between definitions is what would lead a Derrida to argue that any final, solid signification attached to the term ‘real’ is interminably deferred). The one is explicitly, stolidly philosophical and ontological, the other wholly strategic, sociological, and anontological. (Sometimes, coining a word really is the quickest way to get your point across.) Yet at its core the idea of reality as resistance to trials of strength does indeed support the response of Latour’s belief in a mind-independent reality. Ultimately I think the first of my two contradictory answers can summon the fewest allies to its cause. The solution to the dilemma is that de Landa, as ontologically-oriented and materialistic philosopher, begins with the real; Latour, as sociologically-oriented philosopher, begins by bracketing any ontology or materialism which he might happen to possess. Why? And what am I talking about?

Simply put, the real is Latour’s explanandum. Where de Landa’s project is to ground sociology in a realist ontology, Latour’s (at least in the bulk of his work I’ve read so far) is to determine the conditions of our access to such domains as reality, truth, Nature, and so on. Does this not make it obvious why Latour – realist or otherwise – cannot begin by staking out an ontological position? What brings this out for me is the discussion of Nature in Science in Action. Nature is appealed to by good, realist scientists as the final cause by which scientific disputes are settled. One may summon all the allies one wishes in service of one’s hypothesis, but they are all irrelevant once Nature has spoken. Natura mit uns: when nature is with us, nothing else really matters – especially none of these accursed social factors! One may easily substitute ‘reality’ for Nature at any point in this ramble. Yet the beauty of Latour’s argument is that the scientists’ objection, good realists though they may be, becomes almost hysterical. Can they not recall, looking backward at their grand discovery, the time when Nature herself was in question? The time when one could not appeal to her as the arbiter of one’s dispute? In this sense one cannot conduct history or sociology or even philosophy of science by taking for granted a mind-independent Nature or reality as the cause of one’s knowledge. The question is precisely how a mind comes to knowledge of said reality.

How does Latour answer this question? In part by these trials of strength. And so in his rough-and-ready definition of the real, what resists? Reality – it seems precisely this mind-independent reality of which de Landa speaks, and which he decries the constructivists for ignoring.  What is a trial of strength but a mind, or better an actor, pressing up against the real? So what if it occurs by the mediation of a network of other actors – techniques, technicians, technologies… – this does not detract from the reality of the real. Reality is something which is constructed; leaving aside Latour’s fetish for laboratories, we can recognize it under construction everywhere. But for this it is no less real! The persistence of the realism / constructivism opposition boggles my mind. Certainly we are comfortable with the reality of physical constructions, yet to demonstrate the construction of ideas is almost inevitably construed as robbing them of their reality. (And here we may refer to Latour’s lament in ‘Why has the critique run out of steam?’) Yet I am running out of steam. How to wrap this up?

As a philosopher one can, and should, ground one’s ontology in reality. It seems to me that no other kind of ontology deserves the name. To deny realism is to deny any real ontology, anyway. (Ha, ha.) Yet when one’s concern is to determine the conditions of our access to such mind-independent domains, when one wishes to write a history or a sociology of science, one simply cannot begin with ontology. This, it seems, is why Latour is so tricky on the question of realism. To begin with an avowed realism would destroy his critical project, render it an inane parody of the worst internalist histories. Pasteur’s microbes became an accepted fact because they were really there; TRF(H) became Pyro-Glu-His-Pro-NH2 because that’s what it always really was, &c. To start with the real, then, as the saying goes, would be to assume what he wanted to explain.

I would just like to note that at this point in the text, my composition was interrupted by a fire alarm, and then nearly a half hour of watching firemen walk in and out of my building.

To conclude, I think this resolution shows why Latour and de Landa’s projects are far from incompatible, and why their ontologies – of course explicit in de Landa’s case and tacit in Latour’s – are probably more than superficially similar: Latour’s constructionist analyses do not preclude his being a realist, and it seems that just like de Landa (and unlike the ’social constructionist’ bugbears) he’s interested in the real construction of the social (rather, of course, than vice versa). Without a real, there would be nothing to push back, nothing to resist our trials of strength. So Latour, finally, is a realist, at least in the sense that matters. (He calls this being a realist with respect to ‘matters of concern’ rather than ‘fact,’ but that’s a distinction that eludes me for the moment and which can be unpacked later.) Thus we can go on to interpret the basic affinities between assemblage theory and actor-network theory in this light.

I’ll end with a provocation for those fellow realists who may be reading this. I count myself amongst you, to be sure, but we must subject ourselves nevertheless to some critique. (Because we know the critiques of most anti-realists aren’t to be taken very seriously!)  To play the quasi-deconstructive skeptic, is the gesture of avowed ‘realism’ not one of the typical Anglo-American, analytical ‘ism’-tricks which makes a gesture of apparent simplicity and common sense, but which simultaneously conceals a great deal which is far from certain or settled?  ’I am a realist.’ Well, this is all well and good, but still, what do we know of reality? How do we know it? Shouldn’t we dig deeper into the construction of these very difficult terms, ‘reality’ and ‘knowing?’ Those who are at pains to call themselves realists often seem to overestimate how settled and certain the so-called real actually is. Some others emphasize the formation and individuation of the phenomenal real by a subterranean play of something (virtual) – a laudable and often necessary gesture, but a similarly tricky one, and one which always courts the Platonic privileging of a ‘world behind the scenes.’ Latour’s emphasis is evidently on the actual manifestations of the real within our phenomenal ‘reach’ (inscriptions, interventions, productions, and so forth). To settle these finer points of ontology is a task beyond my powers, and in any case beyond the scope of this posting. These points are only brought forward to suggest one part of Latour’s value for me and the value of so-called STS in general: to point out how tenuous and contestable, how dependent on a whole network of production, our knowledge of reality is – beginning first of all with science, that most privileged contemporary domain of reality-access.

Certainly to be a realist is to claim an independent existence for the world beyond our mediated and fallible knowledge thereof, and ’tis a worthy exercise indeed. But not one suited to every purpose.

That’s enough for now – the question of Deleuze’s role in all this will have to wait for another time.

Prof. Steven Shaviro posted on his blog a few days ago a brief meditation on Daniel Day-Lewis’ (now Oscar-winning) performance in There Will be Blood, responding to Salon’s rather scathing review of said performance. Quite a fascinating post really, and one which linked to and generated a number of very interesting comments. Definitely worth taking a look, particularly for those of us who aren’t satisfied with just enjoying a wonderful movie like this, and insist upon analysing it theoretically (with reference, of course, to M. Deleuze).

While reading his post and the resultant comments, I was left hesitating between the implicit claims being made by Shaviro and by commenter LB: isn’t there a much more productive and Deleuzean way of thinking about Daniel Plainview’s character? One which doesn’t neatly fit into the category of ‘nonpsychological subject’ or Homo Economicus, or that of ‘disillusioned but still-sentimental misanthrope?’ And so, instead of getting started on this stack of semiology papers I’ve got to mark, I decided to write up a little dilettantish critique of Day-Lewis’ performance in response to these interesting theses.

What can we call the affective state of this fictive Homo Economicus but a state of disaffected misanthropy, in which a preexisting assemblage of desires (BwO) recognizing the inadequacy of bourgeois sentimentality seeks to channel all of its drives according to the imperatives laid out by capital? On this interpretation (perhaps more in line with the sentiments of Shaviro than LB), Plainview is neither wholly unsentimental, nor an unfortunate victim of the curse of capital. To decisively propose either reading seems foolish. There is something strange about DD-L’s calculated affect, but a ‘non-psychological’ subject or pure homo economicus is simply a convenient fiction, and I credit Paul Thomas Anderson’s characterization with a bit more verisimilitude than that.

The quote Shaviro provides from American Stranger’s blog seems particularly perceptive, especially in the light of Deleuze & Guattari’s thoughts on masks and faciality (visagéite) in Mille plateaux. Plainview adopts the mask of the tycoon in order to achieve his desires for fortune: this is a mask which (as we all should know from our own experiences with an increasingly media-friendly batch of tycoons) demands far more calculation than sincerity. And so DD-L’s extremely calculated affect, his ‘heavy cloak’ of technique is very appropriate here. Following the formula of D&G (which in its original context rather tellingly refers to the ‘despot-god’), Plainview’s mask “does not hide the face, it is the face” (MP 115). The mask of the disaffected and calculating tycoon does not simply conceal a hidden reserve of sentimentality, nor does it define Plainview’s character in its entirety. Instead, the film clearly dramatizes the mechanisms by which the mask of the tycoon gradually supplants the naive and uncalculating sentimentality of Plainview-the-father (more apparent in the early portions of the film) and replaces it with the calculating, amoral emptiness of Plainview-the-tycoon. Neither the tycoon-mask nor the familial mask is Plainview’s ‘real’ face, but rather each mask corresponds with certain possibilities and impossibilities for Plainview-the-individual. The familial mask is warmer and more impassioned, while the tycoon mask is colder and more calculating; likewise, it seems that both masks correspond with certain movements of territorialization and deterritorialization, with family carving out a territory which is constantly deterritorialized by capital. Nevertheless, neither mask, it seems, corresponds with “Plainview himself” (insofar as this term has any referent at all).

It seems that Shaviro is quite right to question the rather staid critiques put forth by Salon: Day-Lewis’ calculated, ‘obvious’ acting is not a deficiency, but precisely what his character demands. But I’m not sure why he would claim that “even Plainview’s rashest and most impulsive acts, like the murders he commits, are crimes of calculation, or at least of mechanism, rather than crimes of passion.” Plainview’s murders are clearly not ‘just’ crimes of calculation; indeed, I’m not so sure that a murder can ever be purely calculating or mechanistic. (NB: I’m about to spoil the ending for you, if you haven’t seen it.) His first murder corresponds with a resurgence of the tycoon-mask after a period in which it gets tentatively replaced with a brother-mask: Plainview seems to let his guard down somewhat when he meets his ‘brother,’ slipping into a familial mask which was apparently discarded once he sends away his now-’useless’ deaf son. But when he finds out that this brother is an impostor, the disaffected tycoon-mask (not without its own cold and sadistic passions), demands that he slay this witness to the less-guarded fraternal mask.

Likewise, it seems that if Plainview were really as calculating and cold as the visage his tycoon-mask presents, he would not be so threatened by Eli Sunday the impassioned preacher. The dialectic of these two characters turns on the question of passion, and it shows up the inadequacy of any reading in which one character is purely ‘calculating’ and the other purely ‘passionate.’ On the surface, this reading works just fine: Eli seeks salvation for his people through charismatic religion; Plainview seeks only to work out a calculated bargain with these same people, trading their rights to the land for the right to a (tiny) share of the capital sequestered beneath it. Eli is therefore the impassioned foil to the calculating Plainview. But it’s not even close to this simple: both characters must ultimately compromise their values, and their masks are decisively shattered by the end of film. Perhaps this even happens at the beginning: either Eli leads Plainview to the oil on his family’s farm (hiding behind a pseudonym, the identical mask of his ‘twin’), or it’s the work of a real twin brother. In either case, it is someone who shares Eli’s face, someone who hides behind an identical mask, that brings Plainview to the Sunday ranch in search of oil.

More significantly, however, the two most compelling scenes of the film are the scenes in which Plainview and Sunday’s masks are shown for what they are. In the scene where Plainview is baptized and humiliated by Sunday, we can see the depth of Plainview’s passion straining against the tycoon-mask he has adopted for himself as he is forced to shout again and again: “I have abandoned my boy!” In the comfort of his own calculating world of capital, Plainview can sustain the mask of the tycoon without contradiction: he sent his son away simply because the oilfield was no place for a deaf child, because a boarding school could offer him far better care than he, etc. etc. But when he is forcibly dragged out of this world and placed in the charismatic sphere of the church, the essentially non-calculating thought at the basis of his calculating mask is laid bare. Without his impassioned, irrational desire for wealth, Plainview could never sustain this calculating visage: he would have given it up for the sake of his child. Plainview-the-tycoon is in no way ‘purely’ calculating, but is sustained by an underlying passion for calculation. This is what Eli hopes to lay bare in his baptismal ceremony, but although he draws out the passions which underly Plainview’s calculating nature, the tycoon-mask is too firmly entrenched: Plainview-the-tycoon returns as soon as the ceremony is finished, and he sees the entire drama as simply a means to an end.

But this is not the only resurgence of the passions of Plainview, the drives of his body-without-organs which forever transgress the limits set out by one mask or another. Somewhere, subconsciously, this character ‘knows’ exactly what happened in the church, and will never forgive Eli for subverting his mask in this way. The last scene of the film only makes sense in this context. In the baptismal sequence, Eli, finding himself in a position of power over Plainview, attempted to lay bare the passions which sustain Plainview’s calculating mask; in the final sequence, Plainview, finding himself in a position of power over Eli, seeks to lay out the fundamentally calculating quality of Eli’s passions. While Plainview was forced to admit the essentially irrational quality of his calculating greediness, Eli is forced to admit the essentially calculating quality of his faith by admitting that his God is nothing more than a useful fiction. This is of course an essentially Hegelian contest, in the master-slave sense of a struggle for identity: the impassioned, pious thinker seeks to exert mastery over the calculating one by showing that his mode of thought is more fundamental, and vice versa. The contest, however, makes clear that neither term of this opposition is wholly separate from the other, but in fact contains the germ of the other within itself, as its vital or animating force. Plainview, alone in his mansion, desperately seeks to prove the value of his own mask by showing up Eli’s disguise. And he’s far from wrong about Eli: why else would Eli have sought to publicly humiliate Plainview in front of his congregation, except as a calculated move to undermine (in the eyes of the people) Plainview’s mode of thought and buttress his own? Eli clearly has no qualms about supporting his faith through calculation (which makes me think that Eli and his ‘twin’ are one and the same character). But Plainview’s calculating qualities are clearly only made possible by an underlying passion. After all, the last scene presents is no public humiliation for Eli, but simply Plainview’s irrational desire to prove to himself the superiority of his own way of thinking. This scene shows Plainview desperate to sustain the calculating mask of the tycoon, but his desperation is anything but calculating. Eli proves his fundamentally calculating nature by his willingness to admit that God is nothing more than a fiction; but in this epic struggle for recognition, this admission is profoundly unsatisfying to the impassioned Plainview. As in Hegel’s formulation of the master-slave dialectic, the recognition of mastery is attained by the forced submission of the slave: Plainview’s mastery, the mastery of capital and calculation, is at long last recognized by Eli. But this recognition can bring no satisfaction to the master, since it depends upon the recognition of the slave: the mastery of capital demands the submission of the passions, but it is nothing without these passions and their submissiveness. And so, in a final act of desperation, Plainview seeks to decisively abolish the passions, to affirm the joint dominance of capital and calculation once and for all by murdering the man of faith.

But bludgeoning a man of God to death with a bowling pin has to be about the furthest thing from calculated: the vicious bludgeoning with whatever heavy object is ready-to-hand is perhaps the archetypal crime of passion (cf. of course Cain and Abel). The last scene dramatizes the fact that calculation is always sustained by passion. We might, like Shaviro, be quite uncertain as to whether Plainview will ever be punished for his misdeeds. But Plainview-the-tycoon is far from victorious in this combat. In the submerged violence of his face-to-face encounters with Eli, and in the accomplishment of this violence in murder, Plainview’s existence is revealed to himself as absurd. (I would love to expand more on these connections with Levinas, but this is getting far too long already.) Plainview has long confused the disaffected and calculating mask of the tycoon with his own reflection, and even come to accept it as his true face: archetypal méconnaissance. With the death of the impassioned Eli, he finally comprehends the truth that ought always to have been in plain view. Behind the rationalizing mask of the tycoon, there is no rational subject, no unified ground of economic calculation, but only an assemblage of irrational passions. And so Plainview’s ambiguous final words are his most profound, and his most sincere. In shattering Eli’s mask and his face, he has finally slain his specular double, his passionate foil, and so he might finally considered homo economicus, a being of pure calculation without passion: so he says, “I’m finished,” implying that his project is finally accomplished. This accomplishment, however, can only be attained at the expense of his subjectivity (cf. Levinas’ reading of murder), in a combat which subverts the very mask it seeks to support. These last words might therefore also be read as an implication that Plainview has finally metamorphosed into a pure mask of capital, or the homo economicus referred to by Shaviro. Thus, at the end of the film, Plainview has become a space of dissimulation bereft of any independent subjectivity: a mask which conceals no face, but only an infinite regress of disguises. And so Plainview’s last line of dialogue is to be interpreted as the unutterable “je suis fini” in opposition to the possessive finitude of the subjective “j’ai fini.” These are not the words of a subject of enunciation – “I have finished!” – but the utterance of a mask which conceals no subject, a mask whose ‘I’ is itself ‘finished.’

The other two theses constitute about 100 pages of writing. I thought I’d post them up here for the edification of anyone who’s interested in figuring out what the hell is going on between Derrida and Deleuze, but also dogmatic philosophy in general. I’m going to – as I’ve said in a few posts previously – work up some of my ideas about dogmatism into a more ‘bloggy’ format soon. But in these two term papers (!!!) I wrote in December are the real ‘origins’ of these ideas. The first is called ‘The singular Aufhebung,’ and the second goes by the equally cumbersome ‘Difference/Repetition; Sign/Memory.’ They’re term papers which exploded to the length, if not necessarily the coherence of masters’ theses, and so they’re kind of heavy going in some ways. But damned if I didn’t have a lot of fun writing them, and didn’t feel as though I was really on to some good ideas (in spite of being, no doubt, seriously off in places). I’d be super excited to hear comments from anyone who read them, as I’m very interested in how I might chop these up into conference or publication papers. I’m working up some of these ideas for an abstract to send to the Cornell Theory Reading Group conference, ‘The substance of thought’; it’s maybe out of my league, but it’s focused on the exact ideas that I’m throwing around in these theses, so why the heck not! Please, if you read even a portion of these papers, let me know what you think in comments or email! Even if you violently hated them. Cheers!

In ‘The interpretation of utterances’ (a text whose entire authorship is a bit uncertain, but doesn’t specifically indicate anybody but Deleuze, so I am assuming this is D. himself), Deleuze says that “Freud continually misunderstands infantile sexuality. He interprets, and therefore misunderstands. He clearly sees that the child is completely indifferent to the difference between the sexes; but he interprets it as if the child were reacting to castration anxiety by maintaining its belief in the existence of a small penis on the girl. This is not true: the child has no castration anxiety before being reduced to a single sex. The child lives as having n sexes that correspond to all the possible arrangements into which the materials common to girls and boys enter but also those common to animals, things…” (Two regimes, 94-95)

SO, Deleuze critiques Freud and psychoanalysis for roughly the same reasons as — but fleshes out his critique more thoroughly than — either Lacan or Derrida. Perhaps he is only more positive than Derrida, whose borrowings from negative theology make him pretty clearly a thinker of the absent, of the negative, etc. The first of two things: It’s not that unconscious is structured like a language in a literal sense, but in the literal sense of that sentence – a simile of language (but think about how the next sentence might lead to a relationship beyond the simile, perhaps pointing to the notion of a ’simulacrum’). So the unconscious undergoes a process of structuration, through the formalization of differential relations in terms of degrees of opposition and difference. What a thoroughly linguistic critique of Freud (as in the case of Lacan and perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent Derrida) misses is that although the place of différance is not an actual place, that doesn’t imply it is not. In other words, the being of différance is negative in relation to language, but that does not imply that it ‘is’ altogether lacking in real existence. The differential relations which are structured by language are not created by language. Instead language delimits and regulates a play of différance which preexists language and takes place on a virtual level – the unconscious, the place of the archē-writing – and the free play of difference on this virtual plane is always trying to escape its linguistic binding. Différance is therefore the plane of immanence properly belonging to language. While this certainly has a real existence somewhere in the biological, electrical, and chemical processes of our body (unless we really do want our ontology to lead to some sort of ontotheology), its virtual nature implies that this plane will in no way resemble the linguistic structure. Indeed, language is a principal source of the logic of representation, and so if we were to draw our connections between the structure of language and the as-yet undetermined structure of the mind according to this logic of representation, we would be drawn into a truly vicious circularity. There was a second thing, but I either forgot it, or it wove itself into what became a very drawn-out first thing.

But when I cut and pasted that from my first virtual writing of this on google documents, (a handy tool for the nomadic and multicomputered pseudointellectual if there ever was one) I remembered the second thing. I finally grasped last night the fundamental Idea of Deleuze’s project in a way that allowed me to make it my own – allowing for a bit of enculage, one might say. It’s not all about the unrestricted play of differential elements on a plane of immanence (nor is it about solidifying this play into a process of making-sense ala deLanda), but rather it’s about the movements of actualization, the points at which the planes intersect, when we see the virtual and the intensive revealed in the midst of the actual and the extensive. In these moments, the structural logic of a thing’s genesis (which operates on a virtual plane of ideas) is revealed within the actualized, extended matter which covers over and exceeds any totalizing structural description. The question of language is an essential one that, barring LoS, seems to get sidestepped a bit. Language gets a playful treatment in the vein of Carroll, but is never subjected to the sort of serious analysis that Deleuze applies to other phenomena. But none of this was the second thing – instead the second thing was that gender and sexuality, as shown in the above passage, are essentially free plays of difference which are shackled in place by the logic of representation. What’s interesting to me — and this is somewhat immanetnt in the ‘first thing’ above as well as all many encounters between psychoanalysis and deconstruction — is to what extent this work is performed by the representational logic within language (ie ‘gender discourse’), and to what extent this is performed by language itself (ie. a strong version of Lacan’s thesis on language & unconscious). Inverted, this problem is equally important: to what extent is language an independent, conceptual medium of expression, and to what extent does it remain an actualization/structuration of unconscious sex/death drives? What can we say about the respective positions of langue and parole in this regard? That was more or less the ’second thing,’ an Idea whose problematic form really started to become apparent towards the end.

This discussion led to an almost unrelated (but of course deeply connected) third thing – I mentioned virtual writing above in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, but now I am thinking about it more seriously. If language expresses a free play of virtual differences, made manifest and shackled by its actualization in representation, then what can we say (ha!) about ‘virtual writing?’ Above I tied archē-writing to the virtual plane of language – and so is there anything to say about the connection between digital publishing and arche-writing? How have word processors have really taken almost all of the ‘actualization’ element out of the process of writing (or at least shifted it from mechanical actualization – graphe - into electronic actualization ; but how ‘actual’ is a digital representation of language in an electronic circuit?). Our writing is no longer anything like speech. When we type on a computer (as opposed to writing with a stylus of any kind, or typing on a machine which fixes text immediately) only language itself – a ‘pure’ writing of sorts, at least the most pure so far – constrains the free play of différance, while all of the difficulties implied by mechanical (in the physical sense) actualization are borne by mechanisms (in the engineering sense). This is liberating – but of course, its liberation is a Janus-faced one, like all of the liberations wrought by capital. The free play of desire is less restrained and more fervently productive, but perhaps this is a road which leads only to schizophrenia.