Outliers, flows, and micropolitics

Hannah Arendt once complained about the methodology of statistics in use in studies such as political science, economics, sociology in this way:

“The laws of statistics are valid only where large numbers or long periods are involved, and acts or events can statistically appear only as deviations or fluctuations. The justification of statistics is that deeds and events are rare occurrences in everyday life and in history. Yet the meaningfulness of everyday relationships is disclosed not in everyday life but in rare deeds, just as the significance of a historical period shows itself only in the few events that illuminate it. The application of the law of large numbers and long periods to politics or history signifies nothing less than the willful obliteration of their very subject matter, and it is a hopeless enterprise to search for meaning in politics or significance in history when everything that is not everyday behavior or automatic trends has been ruled out as immaterial.”

Arendt, The Human Condition, 42-43.

(As will be seen, there are points of both profound agreement and profound disagreement between Arendt and contemporary theory.)

According to this view, which has only gained currency with the theme of the exception in thinkers such as Badiou, Agamben, and Zizek, the outlier is that which eludes the counting procedure of a knowledge-situation, that element which denies its elemental status, which subtracts itself from presentation. Statistics can, thus, only grasp the molar fluctions in a terrain of study and does not register the subjacent molecular flows determining those fluctions. The outlier, in a very real sense, orients the structuration of the as-one, and yet appears (to the counting procedure, the statistician) as nothing, as a scientifically uninteresting, marginal datum. Agrammaticality, infinitesimal asignifying particle, the outlier escapes the overcoding of representation and “microdetermines” the macrodecisions of actual political work, that done by legislators and politicians.

The outlier is understood by the statistician as an individual, a mere anomalous individual deviating from the distribution of the general population studied. However true this may be from the molar-representational standpoint, the essential is lost if the analysis stops here. Hence the need for a micropolitics, a microstatistics, a subrepresentational study of details, of desires and beliefs, of quantum flows. For instance, Fernand Braudel’s three-volume history of capitalism up to the 18th century follows social phenomena such as trends in clothing, edibles, spending, and so on, to formulate a theory of the formation of market and antimarket economies, general and restricted economies. Braudel is a micropolitical theorist for this reason: he follows flows and waves operating at the level of the productive unconscious, using statistics only for their cutting edges, their outliers.

In what is arguably the most important plateau (noting the irony of such a contention – it has meaning only with reference to its closest cousins, the “Treatise on Nomadology,” “The Smooth and the Striated,” and so on), Deleuze & Guattari write:

“What…is a flow? It is belief or desire (the two aspects of every assemblage); a flow is always of belief and of desire. Beliefs and desires are the basis of every society, because they are flows and as such are ‘quantifiable’; they are veritable social Quantities, whereas sensations are qualitative and representations are simple resultants. Infinitesimal imitation, opposition, and invention are therefore like flow quanta marking a propagation, binarization, or conjugation of beliefs and desires. Hence the importance of statistics, providing it concerns itself with the cutting edges and not only with the ’stationary’ zone of representations. For in the end, the difference is not at all between the social and the individual (or interindividual), but between the molar realm of representations, individual or collective, and the molecular realm of beliefs and desires in which the distinction between the social and the individual loses all meaning since flows are neither attributable to individuals nor overcodable by collective signifiers. Representations already define large-scale aggregates, or determine segments on a line; beliefs and desires, on the other hand, are flows marked by quanta, flows that are created, exhausted, or transformed, added to one another, subtracted or combined. [...]
This is how you tell the difference between the segmented line and the quantum flow. A mutant flow always implies something tending to elude or escape the codes; quanta are precisely signs or degrees of deterritorialization in the decoded flow. The rigid line, on the other hand, implies an overcoding that substitutes itself for the faltering codes; its segments are like reterritorializations on the overcoding or overcoded line.”

Deleuze & Guattari, “Micropolitics and Segmentarity,” A Thousand Plateaus, 219.

These mutant flows, emitters of asignifying sign-particles, literally “make or break” the macropolitical decisions of policymakers, legislators, and so on. If, as Deleuze & Guattari hypothesize, beliefs and desires are the basis of a modern State society (they seem to think this is true for any society), an evaluation of flows and their quanta ought to reveal the variable, fluid ‘architecture’ subtending politics and judgment in the popular sense; that is, in this realm of inquiry, we ought to find the distributions, nomadic or sedentary, of singularities organizing the macropolitical field. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of initiating such an analysis, however, is finding the correct, “molecular” means of ingress into the mass. This is the role of the outlier for minor statistics.

I wonder what the relation might be between the figure of the outlier and of what Deleuze & Guattari call power centers or central black holes. The latter function as switches in the economy of quantum flows and segmentarities, translating one into the other in a ceaseless perpetuum mobile. Power centers are chambers of resonance, causing communication between the microflows and macrosegments to commence. Every power center is thus molar and molecular, centralizing and decentralizing, coordinating and reshuffling. This is termed the “zone of indiscernibility” between flows and segmentations, the becoming-flow of segmentation and becoming-segmentation of flows – the operative microtexture of a black hole. As elsewhere, smooth and striated, mutation and overcoding, flow and segment cannot but analytically be separated. Hence, a power center is the entre-deux in the economy. As such:

“[T]he texture [of a power center] lies between the line of overcoding with rigid segments and the ultimate quantum line. It continually swings between the two, now channeling the quantum line back into the segmented line, now causing flows and quanta to escape from the segmented line. This is [the limit of power centers]. For the only purpose these centers have is to translate as best they can flow quanta into line segments (only segments are totalizable, in one way or another). But this is both the principle of their power and the basis of their impotence. Far from being opposites, power and impotence complement and reinforce each other….”

“Micropolitics and Segmentarity,” 225.

We might suspect that the figure of the outlier is a product of the impotency of power. But this is probably not accurate. The outlier rather functions as a removal from the power center, a soft subversion of the regime of signs, precisely an asignifying particle, a line of flight. The scheme produced by the statistician crosses over into, or rather opens the space of possibility for the drawing of a map from the perspective of its silent datum. The outlier is included in the scheme but excepted from the general curve. The latter sees the former as hostile – here again, Draussen ist feindlich, outside is hostile. But we receive a new image of the curve itself when we stand in the place of the outlier: perhaps that of a mountain peak, an unscalable height. Our map becomes a diagram for action, a system of creative evasion: the outlier becomes a war machine (in truth, it has never been anything but).

The space of an outlier is, in Arendt’s language, uncivilized (see her Origins of Totalitarianism, 297) or, in Deleuze & Guattari’s language, smooth. A war machine creates smoothness, seizes upon agrammaticalities, paves over striations and rigidifications. The task is always to carve out uncivilized spaces. In this sense, a war machine is universal, a stateless assemblage of universals (i.e., flows: desires, beliefs). The virtual universalism of flows is only ever embodied in particular outliers; however, it is in this way that the outlier determines the curve, curves the curve. The interactions between flows enact redistributions of singularities and relations between singularities in the universal Open (the Whole, the ungivable antitotality, connective thread), and are the objects of study, by way of the outlier, for the positive science of micropolitics – the positive science of discerning potentialities in a given historical situation.

Absolute disjunctive syntheses: contemporary music, part one

In this post, I’d like to highlight one of a number of identifiable absolute, or inclusive, disjunctive syntheses in contemporary art. In the grand scheme of things, highlighting these phenomena of the new poem may point toward a kairotic moment opening an evental site, to use the language of Badiou & Derrida: Politics, Events, and Their Time author Antonio Calcagno.[*see addendum] In that sense, my conceptual matrix for this project is heavily dependent upon Badiou’s work. However, Badiou largely provides me with only formal guidance in the overall determination of this project’s direction. When I do use his concepts as tools in analysis, moreover, I will undoubtedly run up against obstacles that require extensions of these tools beyond their breaking points and have to look to other theorists, other artifacts, and conceptual invention to capture the affects generated by these disjuncts. I think my approach is more in line with Deleuze’s method than Badiou’s, for that matter.

Broadly speaking, I understand absolute or inclusive disjunctive syntheses as propulsions into a structural impasse, direct confrontations with terminal points built into the edifice of a field of praxis or discourse. Moreover, these encounters, which thus bear upon the impossible, must be conceived as productive, edifying (heightening of power), potentially transformative operations. Foreign elements with no necessary or prescribed relation come together to break apart a sedimented, totalized-totalizing scheme of behavior. And yet, any one instance is never the necessary precursor, however dark, to an opening of lines of communication between divergent series. An amorphous, vertiginous cloud accumulates differential elements (elements with no intrinsic properties whose relations are therefore wholly exterior) and relations which do not interact and determine themselves through negation, but rather do so through affirmative, symbiotic amplification or resonance. If no resonance forms between such series, which are nevertheless synthesized or brought under a sort of vinculum in the synthesis at hand, nothing (substantial) in the structure changes and the series might dissociate (de-synthesize, dissolve) or remain non-resonantly, non-communicatively, non-productively coupled, acquiring new elements (and concomitant relations) for synthesis in future encounters. An absolute or inclusive disjunctive synthesis is thus one potential “effect” of a de/reterritorialization or erasure and reinscription of relations of exteriority pertaining to some set of differential elements. As such, finer prediction is guesswork.

I would like to take the work of Einstürzende Neubauten, a group of German pioneers of sonic metallurgy, as a muse in this and follow-up posts on contemporary music. This work is marked by a series of profound reversals, foldings-back (and foldings-forth, foldings-diagonal, etc.), and errant, unpredictable reorientations over the course of several decades. This is evidenced not only in changes in raw materials (ranging from traditional musical instruments and electronic components to specially-crafted or found objects and, importantly, found phrases) and methods of composition, but also in forms of arrangement. The latter have taken traditional or “conservative” schemes, but less frequently than they have been cast in the shape of the “revolutionary” – and we shall see that this conservative-revolutionary thematic is important for understanding Neubauten’s impact on contemporary music’s structure of behavior in itself. Neubauten has, in some counter-cultural circles, become famous for the silence-noise circuits, the conservative-revolutionary zone of indistinction, and the amplifications or swellings of singularities constituting the body of work. These, for us, highlight the shifting of the virtual landscape and the rise toward crisis points of self-enveloping quanta, which promise to reshape the actual, constituted patterns of behavior in contemporary music.

Kollaps is a natural starting point for any discussion of Neubauten’s body of work, being the first official full-length work. This post discusses, however incompletely, only this project. Few subsequent projects will have the consistency of this first; or, perhaps, we might say that this first project suffers from a lack of complexity that properly embodies Neubauten’s profound inconsistency. In either case, the sonic assault that is Kollaps has, in Zizek’s language, its space curved according to a principle of pure noise. Percussion dominates on a material level; of this there is no question. As pure, concrete noise (concrete here in the sense of musique concrete, sound as material, sound disconnected from any means of production and metonymically substituted for both its process of production and itself), however, it must not be confused with destruction. As the introductory cut (“Tanz Debil”) demonstrates, it is a dance of the mad, a “body devoted to its zenith” (Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 59). It desires to rely on no criterion outside itself to determine its movement; it wills its movement alone as itself. However, a certain ambivalence remains inscribed at the heart of the work of this period. The mad dance knows, as if proprioceptively, that it is nothing but amor fati, creation of its own immanent fate, yet expresses itself as a logic of the No. This is the meaning of the title of the cut “Negative Nein”: Kollaps thinks itself as negative-no, “three times No,” but engages with itself, materially functions as affirmation of amplification.

Nevertheless, Kollaps also enacts an unrelenting critique of capitalism, perhaps to be located on a continuum somewhere between a classical Marxist / dialectical materialist approach and a Deleuzo-Guattarian (radical trans-Marxist?) political-libidinal economic approach. That is, capitalism and its overcodifications, its microfascist-engendering chains of displacement grounded upon its floating metric (capital), are subjected to a line of interrogation calculated to extract the affective kernel: namely, greed. Greed is indissolubly linked with death, a principle and practice, a culture, of death (as the opening line of “Tanz Debil” attests: stell dich tot!). Greed and death color the entirety of Kollaps, and the fascination with these themes probably played a part in its self-conception as “negative-no,” progression according to negation and self-externalization. Greed and death culminate, in Kollaps, in the conclusion that Draussen ist feindlich, outside is hostile: go and hide with me, retreat into interiority, close off all lines of flight. Such is the subjective structure produced in a capitalist social formation (microfascism, desire’s desire of its own repression, outside is hostile: synonyms); such is the object of Kollaps, however inadequately reached it might be.

The use of found objects in art is often aligned with such a (latent or manifest) critique of capitalism. The very artifacts capitalism secretes – especially in disused or abused condition – are taken up and mobilized against its operation. Hence, in Kollaps, unidentifiable metals, plates or shards of glass, hand tools, heavy springs, and running water, among other instruments, are put to use on the body of capital, tearing away at its hard surface. Capital, as we already hinted above with our brief comments on the motif of greed, is weighty, hard, insofar as it is inextricably bound up with the spirit of gravity, is this very spirit at its core. Subjects of capitalism – all of us – “tr[y] convulsively to fly from the earth, but at the following level [we] actually rise[] above it…powered by centrifugal forces that triumph over gravity” (Paul Klee, On Modern Art, 43; quoted in Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 312). The lightness of the dance of the mad gracefully – though frenetically – strives to reshape the body of the earth, make it rotate upon an axis other than that of capital, the spirit of gravity. Yet, perhaps despite Klee’s optimism, the subject of / to capitalism is always in a sense the tarantula (Nietzsche’s figure of gravity in Thus Spoke Zarathustra), the ideologue. Trying convulsively to flee the earth of capital and succeeding in flight requires composition with the infinite forces of the outside, those centrifugal forces to which Klee alludes; however, the subject of / to capitalism is structured according to the maxim outside is hostile, and so incipit homo, commence reactive-man. The active figure of praxis is today often thought in Nietzsche’s terms as the Übermensch, the form of life that is a zone of indistinction between life and itself, that is, between life itself and its own immanent power. “The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier. … What is the [Übermensch]? It is the formal compound of the forces within man and these new forces” (Deleuze, Foucault, 131-132). Agrammaticalities superseding the signifier! If this deadlock of the regime of signs (legitimizer of the signifier) yet sounds foreign to us – how can an asignifying particle, an agrammaticality, present itself as anything other than nothing? – we remain as tarantulas, tattooed with the triangle and black symbol of capital on our backs.

Segue to the next post on contemporary music: Kollaps does not, in itself, articulate a vehement, serious critical treatment of capitalism. It lacks the anarchitectural efficacy of, e.g., Haus der Lüge, with its free-zones and perplications, that Neubauten has deployed and shown to be necessary for any sustained treatment of capitalism. That is to say, Kollaps receives its truth in subsequent projects. How Kollaps plays into the synthetic act of absolute disjunction cannot be made clearer until other works have been explored.

*Addendum: You’ll note that I merely use his language; the kairological moment, for Calcagno, is the temporality of the intervention.

Of teleological suspensions

The athletic and evocative LarvalSubjects blog currently features a discussion on the aims of and possibilities of reflexivity for philosophy / critique: here and here. I’d like to wager a modest contribution in the form of a mutant Kierkegaardian-Foucaultian model. As such, shall we start with Zizek?

Somewhere in the vast archives of culture jamming extraordinaire Slavoj Zizek lies a claim to the effect that the Kierkegaardian triad, aesthetic-ethical-religious, is transposed in Lacan’s imaginary-symbolic-real knot. The consequences of this might be that the fundamental question – the parallactic question of Passage – is similarly a transposition of Kierkegaard’s fundamental question: Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical? That is, our (critical) question would be: Is there a teleological suspension of the symbolic?

It appears quite impossible. Any true rupture with the symbolic order would seem to merely institute a new symbolism, as it were, a new regime of signs. This is a question of some considerable dialogue – it is present in Freud as in Lacan, in Benjamin as in Adorno. But isn’t this impossibility precisely the “aim” or telos of philosophy as critique? This would be the impossibility of freedom, a freedom that must first be recognized as a new symbolic mediation. Freedom can, from the immersed perspective of critique, only be given as that which is not given in the symbolic. Freedom is the unpresented in presentation, the void of the situation. Subtractive freedom.

How can the symbolic be suspended, teleologically? We have many names for this most romantic figure of latter day anti-romanticisms: care of the self, celebration of awareness, traversing the fantasy (in a sense), pure Act, occupation without counting, subtraction, to skim the surface of popular alternatives. We might follow Foucault, in his lecture series on the Hermeneutics of the Subject as he painstakingly develops his notion of care of the self, to be assembled in the third volume of The History of Sexuality.

Foucault effectively claims that the teleological suspension of the symbolic can be accomplished through a set of self-displacing practices known to the ancients as epimeleia heautou, broader in scope and efficacy than gnothi seauton (and not, for that, the very same set of practices, which would be not only undesirable but impossible). Foucault says: “Attending to the self is not…just a brief preparation for life; it is a form of life,” exactly the form-of-life Agamben thematizes throughout his work on politics (the zoe that is its own bios, life that refuses separation from what it can do). This extends to (critical) pedagogy, the truest form of which would probably look something like Deleuze’s paideia or apprenticeship. For Foucault, care of the self involves a certain experimentalism, a ceaseless intensification of life, becoming a body without organs in the throes of individuation. Recall that Deleuze, for instance, celebrates the suspension of individuation we witness in the close-up in cinema – suspension here in the sense of prolongation, moving to the edge of the void without allowing the schizophrenizing-intensifying processes to bring about a collapse of cognizance, but rather to cause an excess of cognizance, a hyper-perception. This would be freedom. Philosophy requires a perpetuality of movement, an utterly ceaseless subjectification/desubjectification circuit. This is not a “leap out” of the dominant symbolic-ideological discourse. This is a productive reconfiguration of the symbolically determined structures of subjectivity, a discernment (hence “hyper-perception”) of the virtualities / potentialities available for actualization in any given social formation. “Leaping out” is impossible – it is a negation. Freedom must be produced, and produced through adjustments to the assemblage – hence my blog’s subtitle.