The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 4
‘event’ in poststructuralist thought, it is clear that each of the thinkers we focus on treated events as both the appearance of the radically new (never
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occurrences that must always be treated as containing an excess in relation to their conditions and manifestations in the present. In this sense, events may have happened but they are also always about ‘to come’, albeit differently.
Poststructuralism then can be treated as an event that contains within itself the potential for a ‘poststructuralism to come’; its constitution, we may say, as a live event once more.
In today’s ‘conjuncture’ (if we speak with Althusser), we have inherited
the set of political and philosophical problems left by the poststructural-
ists, and part of the rationale of the book is to introduce these problems
so that they can be taken up and furthered in the clearest possible way to
work in other political and philosophical situations. It was by bearing this in mind that the question about the direct translation of poststructuralism into a real form of politics was asked to Bernard Stiegler at the end of the volume, in an attempt to diagnose the real effects of this group of authors on contemporary society. He agreed on the richness of the conceptual legacy
left by these thinkers though he could not help but witness the apparent
‘conceptual disarmament of the new social movements’ of the recent times,
the ‘occupy’ movements, from Wall Street to the City in London, and in
other highly localised symbolic places of the world’s financial hubs. The
call to theorise and the democratisation of theory have at least provided
a resurgence of the belief in words and ideas in a cynical world that is too often based on consumption and mindless work. The development of control societies, with surveillance, health and safety paranoia (especially in the United Kingdom), micromanagement of lives and constant monitoring,
has asked citizen-consumers to remain increasingly silent and complicit
in a becoming-homogeneous environment (what Hardt and Negri called
‘smooth space’, borrowing it from Deleuze and Guattari while displacing
its meaning). Smooth space has to be resisted and overturned but not by
micro-protest and commodified slogans or signs, but by collective actions.
These are the limits of poststructuralism, but Deleuze was perfectly aware
of these limits soon after 1968,10 and it almost seems as if nothing has
changed since then – at least not for the better. The crushing of unions and the increasing limitation and marginalisation of strikes and protests attest that, on the contrary, the situation has worsened. As Stiegler explains, we are increasingly proletarianised; if we do not know how to protest and strike anymore (even when the university is being privatised under our nose), it is because of our increasing loss of knowledge ( savoir-faire, or the know-how of general strikes and demonstrations) and the insufficient care we give to the processes of learning that condition such knowledge. Deleuze in 1990 also
discussed the evolution of political resistance:
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It’s true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of
delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing.
Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what
the nineteenth century called ‘sabotage’ (‘clogging’ the machinery). You
ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of
resistance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the
‘transversal organization of free individuals.’ Maybe, I don’t know. But it would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and
communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by
money – and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack
speech. Creating has always been something different from communi-
cating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication,
circuit breakers, so we can elude control. (Deleuze 1995: 175)
What exactly is involved in creating circuit breakers that elude control cannot be said in advance, but that is the point; Deleuze refused to reify what we call the poststructuralist event, aiming instead to revivify it by inviting us to construct our own problems. This is, we propose, the motif of the poststructuralist event, its signature: problems, real problems, can never be wholly accommodated within the institutions of contemporary life, appropriated
by Western rationalism, nor consumed by liberal parliamentary capitalism.
In this sense, and in companionship with the contributors to this volume, we announce that the event of poststructuralism is still to come.
Notes
1. Other recent publications chose different perspectives and therefore constructed their objects in different ways. In Schrift (2010a), we find a multiplicity of thinkers that are not included in this volume and could be read alongside this companion. It also includes two chapters by Schrift (2010b) and Nealon (2010), on French Nietzscheanism and the Yale deconstructionist school that are particularly relevant to this present companion. Differently, Elliott and Attridge (2011) present the vitality of theory today against those arguing that the state of the academy has moved beyond theory, but also against those who continue to celebrate the 1970s as the only ‘time of theory’. Finally, in France, Maniglier (2011) insists on the philosophical dimension of the 1960s by including Lévi-Strauss and Althusser (though surprisingly he does not include Lacan, Foucault or the French feminists in his cartography of significant moments:
‘Lévi-Strauss 1962’, ‘Althusser 1965’, ‘Derrida 1967’, ‘Lyotard 1971’).
2. ‘Existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy … the refusal to belong to any school of thought, Untitled-2 29
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the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life – that is the heart of existentialism’ (Kaufmann 1975: 11, 12).
3. Consider, for example, the book series entitled ‘ Théorie’ that Althusser edited from 1965 in which he published For Marx, Reading Capital and the work of his students (Badiou, Macherey, Lecourt, Balibar, Rancière). The term ‘theory’
also refers to (or draws from) the work of the Frankfurt School, especially from the 1940s and 1950s, and in this sense, poststructuralism could equally be analysed as a response to the wave of enthusiasm spread by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (mostly Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer). Bernard Stiegler
also shares this argument, as evident in his interview included at the end of this volume. In more recent literature we note that Eagleton’s distinction between theory and philosophy seems inherited from Althusser and Althusserianism as well as poststructuralism.
4. ‘The critique of universal necessity implied in dialectical materialism opens the path, in Althusser and Deleuze, to a valorisation of the specific and fragmented regions of political activity where the becoming of conflicts as well as the identity of the actors obey variable laws that are never predetermined. In raising totalisation as their common enemy, Althusser and Deleuze wish to leave to the multitudes the chance to self-determine and to express their constitutive powers independently from all external representations existing in hegemonic regimes’ (Beaulieu 2003: 174, our translation).
5. This text, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, echoes Adorno and Horkheimer’s attempt in 1956 to conceptualise in new ways the relation between theory and practice:
‘It can be seen that there is something deluded about the separation of theory and practice. Separating these two elements is actually ideology’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2011: 70, see also 75–81).
6. See for example Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s recent illuminating commentary on Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Lévi-Strauss in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (Viveiros de Castro 2010).
7. ‘Clearly, at this point the philosophy of difference must be wary of turning into the discourse of beautiful souls: differences, nothing but differences, in a peaceful coexistence in the Idea of social places and functions … but the name of Marx is sufficient to save it from this danger’ (Deleuze 1994: 208). Derrida shares this warning: ‘I did not read [Marx] enough. No one reads enough Marx’
(1992: 195).
8. Derrida for instance once affirmed, ‘I think good politics never comes from a limitation on questioning or on the demand of thought’ (Derrida 1992: 197).
9. For instance, Žižek wrote ‘more than a solution to the problems we are facing today, communism is itself the name of a problem’ (2009: 129).
10. ‘As we know, the revolutionary problem today is to find some unity in our various struggles without falling back on the despotic and bureaucratic organization of Untitled-2 30
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the party or State apparatus: we want a war-machine that would not recreate a State apparatus, a nomadic unity in relation with the Outside, that would not recreate the despotic internal unity’ (Deleuze 2004b: 260).
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Part I
Emergence
emergence
In Chapter 1, ‘Poststructuralism and Modern European Philosophy’,
Lumsden emphasises the connection between poststructuralism and post-
