GILLES DELEUZE AND FELIX GUATTARI
Known as "D & G" to
cultural theory junkies everywhere.
Postmodernism's most famous double act (though to be fair, they
don't do everything together), Deleuze and Guattari emerged
from the same late 1960s intellectual hothouse as Jacques
Lacan and Michel
Foucault. For a kick-off, they took Freudian
theory to new extremes (like Lacan) by proposing that the self is fragmented and decentered,
consisting of a "multiplicity of "desiring machines" (Turkle,
1995).
"Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism is a schizophrenic
system, i.e. it makes everyone in it schizophrenic. Because it
is interested only in the individual and his profit it must subvert or
![]()
deterritorialize all territorial groupings such as the church, the
family, the group, indeed any social arrangement. But at the same
time, since capitalism requires social groupings in order to function,
it must allow for reterritorializations, new social groupings, new
forms of the state, the family, or the group - in other words new identities.
[See also Turkle
for more about this.] These events happen at the same time. The life
of any culture is always both collapsing and being restructured. The
point of the distinction is to allow for a post-Marxist analysis which
can be social and materialist without accepting the historical
inevitability of the [Hegelian]
dialectic."
NB: One of their most famous
works is called Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In
this work the two authors tried to develop a "political analysis of
desire" (see below). The idea is that, by "reconciling the Marxist
opposition between consciousness and ideology with the Freudian
opposition between consciousness and desire," they
"sought to introduce unconscious desire as a
productive feature of political economy" (The
Continental Philosophy Reader, p. 403).
NB: D & G are not Marxists.
They argue there is no such thing as a class struggle because there is
only one class, the class of slaves, some of whom dominate others.
(This is not too dissimilar to Foucault's
idea that we all have a little power and we all use it in varying
levels to control each other.) Most so-called "desiring individuals"
can never fulfil their desires. Why? Because each individual moves
between two poles, between a.) schizoid desire, which is
revolutionary but anti-social, and b.) paranoid desire, which
is social but codified and demands its own repression. The two cancel
each other out.
They aren't Freudian,
either (although both were influenced by Freud, and Guattari in
particular got a lot of his ideas from Lacanian
psychoanalysis) because they talk about an "Oedipal prohibition." This
produces the neurotic person who has internalized guilt in order to
repress desire; however, this is not a fact of nature (as Freud would
argue) but the result of social codification.
(See also Deleuze and Guattari: An introduction. Available from
http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Deleuze.html)
10/97
See also:
~~~~~~~~~~
JACQUES DERRIDA
~~k.i.s.s.~~
Prominent French poststructuralist.
He studied the nature of language, knowledge and meaning, and
was a pioneer in deconstructing,
(i.e., decentering,
or breaking down to an individual level) many of modernism's
so-called "deep structures," such as with language. He also
criticized the hierarchical nature of traditional,
Western-oriented binary
oppositions. |
I.
"Il n'y a
pas de hors-texte"
(There is Nothing Outside the
Text)
Derrida deconstructed language
and Western philosophy, emphasizing the notion of decentering.
Looking at texts in a poststructuralist
way (things that communicate information to us are texts to
postmodernists, but works to modernists, by the way), he made
the (notorious) claim that "there is nothing outside the text", i.e.,
there are no signifiers in text that can relate to any sort of
"reality." When language (whether spoken or in texts) tries to deal
with society or some other externality, signifiers slide
into other signifiers without reaching a signified; they only
reach meaning when working on some immediate, limited level. But there
is no ultimate truth which can be arrived at through language. Making
any sense?
Okay: so why is language so
important? Well, Derrida, like Lacan
and Barthes,
thinks that our whole identities are constructed out of language,
nothing else. If that sounds daft, at least ponder on this for a
moment. In structuralism
language still has some relationship to reality. For example, if I
point to an airplane and say "airplane," I am using the structure of
language to relate my concept of that physical object of an airplane
(albeit in terms of other words in the system, but let's not get into
that just now). But how would I describe an airplane to someone from,
say, Mars who has no idea what an airplane is? Unless he was right
there so I could point the airplane out to him, I would have to
describe it to him. And to do that, I would have to use other
words to give the description "meaning" (presuming he could speak
English, of course). If I looked up airplane in the dictionary, I
would find other words to describe airplane (aircraft, jetliner, etc.)
but that gets me no closer to what an airplane actually is.
After all, a dictionary is just a bunch of synonyms, or signifiers
in semiotic
terms.
Now Derrida would argue that, in fact,
we cannot get past this problem of words just leading to other
words when we are trying to relate the "outside world" to each other,
and that this is a big problem for us. Why? Because we become stuck in
an endless chain of signifiers (i.e., all those words), and are unable
to get to what is really out there. We like to think we're
dealing with the real world, but in fact we're just dealing with a
construction of the world we've built up using language. And because
we're stuck in that construction, our selves are therefore constructed
by langauge. This is Derrida's "chain of signifiers" (like
Lacan's idea of "glissement"): when we try to mean something or
discover who we are, our descriptions only slide off from one
signifier to another. This means that the self is
effectively fragmented, and we lose our Cartesian
sense of identity; we are all subjects to the social formations
of language. This fragmentation leads to a sort of
schizophrenia, because of our lack of identity. Pretty
depressing, I think.
II.
A quick review of
Derrida: His deconstruction approach emphasizes the
following:
1) The concept of "sous rature" meaning "under erasure"
(influenced by German Heidegger
-- more on this to come). Derrida developed this into an attack on
language.
2) Saussure's
theory of a signifier/signified/sign
relationship is inadequate, he argued,.
3) Language is "semiotic
play" where you never reach a true meaning, only a new set of
signifiers, or a chain of signifiers (i.e., like a dictionary).
4)
The sign only reminds you of the absence of a thing, not its presence
- all you have is the sign.
5) He broke with structuralist
theory; language is not stable, only a chain of
intertextuality.
6) Deconstruction (Derrida's term) is the
ideological opposite of structuralism - language is seen as 'chains of
signifiers' with only unsatisfactory glimpses of meaning.
![]() 7)
Derrida distinguished between phonocentrism,
the traditional western, Platonic obsession with the voice; and
logocentrism,
the obsession with the word, i.e., the 'big
explanation' of everything. Western philosophy is phonocentric,
because it favors the spoken voice (think of the importance of
rhetoric and debate in Western culture): the voice proves what it is
saying by virtue of the fact that it is spoken, immediate (the "inner
voice"). This: "It is for this reason that the Western philosophical
tradition, from Plato to Levi-Strauss, has consistently vilified
writing as a mere lifeless, alienated form of expression, and
consistently celebrated the living voice" (Eagleton, 1996, p. 113).
Anyway, Derrida had problems with both: logocentrism, because of its
search for a big system which explains everything; and phonocentrism,
because of its suspicion of texts in favour of the spoken word.
Nevertheless, he eventually rejected phonocentrism and concentrated on
the power of writing. (See Derrida's main works, e.g., Of
Grammatology).
Criticism of deconstruction: 1) If
there is no such thing as truth or meaning or self how did culture get
this far and how can critics like Derrida write about it? 2) Chains of
sliding signifiers - signifiers rub against each other until you get
some spark of meaning? Maybe, maybe not. If not, how do we really
understand each other, since we have no common elements of meaning
outside of our own schizophrenia?
III.
Derrida on language.
The
Structuralist approach to language ultimately presents and accepts the
impossibility of using language to study language, of examining
culture while one is a part of that culture. Its adherents include,
among others, post-structuralists
such as Derrida.
IV.
Spinal
Tap -- once described as a "Derrida-esque" film; there is
nothing outside the text.
V.
Derrida's work Dissemination, along with Barthes'
S/Z, has proved particularly useful in categorizing and
defining the potentials of the hypertext medium. The chains of
signifiers idea does have some resonance with the we we use hyperlinks
and the World Wide Web (see the Barthes
entry for more on this).
2/98
~~~~~~~~~~
RENE
DESCARTES
Descartes, with his famous
maxim cogito ergo sum, or "I think, therefore I am,"
essentially posited a dualist, non-skeptical concept of reality,
saying that reality is quite simply that which we experience with our
minds -- period. This is the famous 'mind-body split' -- the idea that
humans could be independent observers of the non-deterministic world
around them (something that would be attacked consistently by
philosophers of various stripes in the 20th century). Ultimately,
however, Descartes' theory rested on the existence of a beneficient
God. Basically, to buy into Descartes you had to accept that (a.)
there was a God and (b.) that S/He would be a "nice guy," who would
let us hold on to our "real" reality, and who wouldn't deceive us so
systematically that everything we sensed was a mirage. Not
surprisingly, some people thought that this was a bit of a
stretch.
See also:
CT. Author Index
Dd
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