By Gordon Hull
I want here to tie together the preceding several posts (one, two, three, four, five) and finish the case for a Deleuzian undercurrent (perhaps better to say, Deleuzian and Althusserian undercurrents) to Foucault’s 1969 “What is an Author” seminar. Recall the specific point of interest: in a somewhat odd moment near the end of the lecture, Foucault distinguishes between authors and “instaurateurs.” The first move is to distinguish Marx and Freud from Ann Radcliff, the founder of Gothic novels. Radcliff “opened the way for a certain number of resemblances and analogies which have their model or princiuple in her work” (114). Marx and Freud, on the other hand, “have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded” (115). He then disginguishes Marx/Freud from science as established by Galileo; for Marx/Freud, “the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogenous to its subsequent transformations” (115) rather than a development of it.
The most direct Deleuzian way to express this distinction is to say that instaurateurs are repetitions (as I explored earlier) or “events.” Before doing that, though, it’s worth noting that Foucault did not have to mention Marx in this context. Indeed, given his dismissals of Marxism and his hostility to the PCF, it is perhaps striking that he does so. After all, while it is certainly the case that Foucault sees himself as offering a different critical approach from that in Marxism, he could achieve that simply by distinguishing his approach from Marxism. Why the reference to Marx? As I have suggested, the Foucault-Marx relation is one that’s under-explored in the literature; here, it’s only necessary to note that Foucault takes appreciative notice of Althusser’s circle and its efforts at rereading Marx. In a decisive passage (that I noted last time), Althusser writes:
“This work which is essential to a reading of Marx is, in the strict sense, at the same time, the work of a theoretical elaboration of Marxist philosophy …. This theory which alone makes possible an authentic reading of Marx’s writings, a reading which is both epistemological and historical, this theory is in fact nothing other than Marxist philosophy itself” (For Marx 39, trans. revised slightly / Pour Marx 31-2).
It is ultimately this kind of rereading of Marx that makes it possible to characterize Marx as an instaurateur, to read Marx’s texts as “events.” As such, they break with the eidos-copy logic that is characteristic of what Deleuze calls Platonism, and instead participate in the logic of simulacra.
In Logic of Sense, in a passage celebrating the ability of structuralism to move past humanist discourses of origin, Deleuze proposes that it is “pleasing that there resounds today the news that sense is never a principle or an origin, but that it is produced. It is not something to discover, to restore, and to re-employ; it is something to produce by new machinery” (LS 72). After the statutory cite to Nietzsche, Deleuze comments that “we do not seek in Freud an explorer of human depth and originary sense, but rather the prodigious discoverer of the machinery of the unconscious by means of which sense is produced always as a function of nonsense” (LS 72). The sentence has a footnote, which does not refer to Freud at all, bur rather indirectly to Althusser’s Marx. Deleuze writes in the note:
“In pages which harmonize with the principal theses of Louis Althusser, J.-P. Osier proposes a distinction between those for whom meaning is to be recovered in a more or less lost origin (whether it be divine or human, ontological or anthropological), and those for whom the origin is a sort of nonsense, for whom meaning is always produced as an epistemological surface effect. Applying this criteria to Marx and Freud, Osier estimates that the problem of interpretation is not at all the problem of going from the ‘derived’ to the ‘originary,’ but in comprehending the mechanisms of the production of sense in two series: sense is always an ‘effect’” (341 n4. The reference is to a preface to Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity; I’ve not read it).
As far as I know, this is the only reference to Marx in Logic of Sense. The remarks apply directly to Marx and to the Althusserian prescription for how to read Marx. Marx, as early as the 1844 Manuscripts (the ones Althusser complains are still humanist), argues that:
“We must avoid repeating the mistake of the political economist, who bases his explanations on some imaginary primordial condition [erdichtete Urzustand]. Such a primordial condition explains nothing. It simply pushes the question into the grey and nebulous distance. It assumes as facts and events what it is supposed to deduce …. Similarly, theology explains the origin of evil by the fall of man, i.e. it assumes as a fact in the form of history what it should explain” (Early Writings, Penguin ed., 323).
Marx’s “erdichtete Urzustand” – which might be more literally rendered “manufactured originary state” emphasizes the way that origin stories are artifacts of the discursive environments that invoke them. In other words, on this point, Marx can be aligned with Deleuze’s and Foucault’s Nietzsche.
As a matter of Marx interpretation, Deleuze’s footnote suggests that we can distinguish between those for whom the meaning of Marx is to be recovered in the lost origin of his authorial intention (or other such hermeneutic to be applied to the texts) and those for whom those texts produce an excess of sense, for whom rereading them is itself productive of that excess because they displace the origin point with “nonsense,” defined as an “empty square in the structural series” (LS 71). Deleuze concludes the series by noting that “today’s task is to make the empty square circulate and to make pre-individual and nonpersonal singularities speak – in short, to produce sense” (LS 73). A few pages earlier, Deleuze had connected all this to authorship, suggesting that the singularity of an event should “not be confused wither with the personality of the one expressing herself in discourse” (LS 52).
These remarks are sketchy; they certainly do not add up to an interpretation of Deleuze on “sense” or “event” (I am not sure I could do justice to either topic). But they should suffice to indicate the space in which Foucault is operating. Deleuze’s language in Logic of Sense emphasizes coordinate points and series when referring to events (eg. 53-4); Foucault says of instaurateurs that “the work of initiators of discursivity is not situated in the space that science defines; rather, it is the science or the discursivity which refers back to their work as primary coordinates” (“Author,” 116). That is, in both cases, the work is locative of a field or space, not a precise eidos.
He then notes that “we can understand the inevitable necessity, within these fields of discursivity, for a ‘return to the origin.”” (116). And what is this “return?” It is a matter of forgetting and gaps; “of that which is said across words, in their spacing, in the distance which separates them [de ce qui est dit à travers les mots, dans leur espacement, dans la distance qui les sépare]” (D&E 836). This return – this rereading – involves seeing what is not in the text:
“This return is addressed to that which is present in the text, more precisely, one returns to the text itself, to the text in its nudity, and, at the same time, however, one returns to that which is marked in the hollow, in the absence, in the gap in the text [ce retour s'adresse à ce qui est présent dans le texte, plus précisément, on revient au texte même, au texte dans sa nudité, et, en même temps, pourtant, on revient à ce qui est marqué en creux, en absence, en lacune dans le texte]” (D&E 836).
This is “an effective and necessary work of transformation of discursivity itself [est un travail effectif et nécessaire de transformation de la discursivité elle-même]” (836). The translation picks up from there:
“Reexamination of Galileo’s text may well change our knowledge of the history of mechanics, but it will never be able to change mechanics itself. On the other hand, reexamining Freud’s texts modifies psychoanalysis itself, just as a reexamination of Marx’s would modify Marxism” (116).
In terms more aligned with Difference and Repetition, rereading Marx actually changes what Marxism is – in other words there is not model/copy relation, especially insofar as that relation serves the moral function of policing good and bad copies of the model (as in the endless debates within communist circles over whose Marxism was authentic, whose was bourgeois opportunism in disguise, etc.). Rather, this is a form of self-differentiation that establishes its own order, and it is an order of simulacra in the precise sense that it’s not trying to be something else or to prove its credentials as the correct interpretation of a science.
Among Foucault’s auditors was Lacan. We unfortunately do not have many comments from him; he begins by apologizing for having received his invitation very late. He does however focus with approval on this material about “return” in order to align structuralism with what Foucault says he’s doing, suggesting that the point of structuralism is to show that the subject depends on something else, whether one calls the move “structuralism or not” (D&E 848). Or, as Deleuze puts it, “the importance of structuralism in philosophy, and for all thought, is that it displaces frontiers” (LS 71).
Foucault is of course not interested in the role of Marx’s unconscious or anything of that sort, but he is interested in how (for example) capitalism might enable certain subject positions (such as, he says earlier in the essay, "author") even if asking those questions requires reading Marx against Marxism and perhaps even himself. In short, Foucault is identifying Marx (and Freud) as writers whose works do something subtly but importantly different from those who are said to found a science or even a literary genre, and thus who exceed the reductive principles of “authors.” Rather, as instaurateur, Marx functions productively, as generative, as the producer of texts the reading of which changes their meaning. This is what Marx’s texts do, their function, and it is fruitful to organize them that way as opposed to by the juridical function of classical authorship. Deleuze has furnished a conceptual apparatus with which we can start to understand this other, different way of understanding texts and encountering them: Marx needs to be understood not under the author-eidos-science-history series of terms, but rather under the series of instaurateur-simulacra-repetition-event. These terms organize a productive way of approaching Marx’s texts, one that exceeds the strictures of humanism, in either its phenomenolgical or existentialist varieties. Needless to say, as Althusser spent his career untangling, this is not how Marx was generally read – when not reduced to “scientific” economism, he was presented as a humanist or even in religious terms. But Foucault sees the value in juxtaposing this Althusserian Marx into the space opened by a Deleuzian displacement of these particular “authors” into “instaurateurs.”
In the discussion after “Author,” the Marxist literary theorist Lucien Goldmann had complained that this was all a political non-starter, citing student graffiti from the Sorbonne that “structures don’t take to the streets [les structures ne descendent pas dans la rue];” “that is to say: it is never structures which make history, but people, even though the actions of the latter are always of a structured and significative character.” (D&E 844). I’ll give Lacan the last word, after noting that May, 1968 was a problem precisely for orthodox Marxism and the PCF (which had refused to help the students on the grounds that they weren’t workers, Marxism says that workers were the vanguard, etc.):
“I don’t think that it’s in any way legitimate to have written that the structures don’t take to the streets, because, if there is something that the events of May [1968] demonstrate, it is precisely structures taking to the streets.” (848).
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