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.

Hearsay: A Note on a Lacanian Question

According to Federal Rule of Evidence 802, hearsay is not admissible as evidence in a court proceeding except as provided in the FRE (or other legislation). “Hearsay” is defined as “a statement, other than one made by the declarant while testifying at the trial or hearing, offered in evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted.” Fed. R. Evid. 801(c). The hearsay exceptions are legion (for instance, excited utterances, assertions made during the course of a present sense impression, various types of records, and so on are all admissible to prove the truth of the matter therein asserted – and these examples come from only one of many categories of such exceptions). A case often turns on whether or not some key piece of potential evidence can be admitted for its truth-value or probativeness with respect to the fact or set of facts to be proven in the claim. The court must decide whether to hear, to take into consideration in formulating its decision, the item in question; this requires an analysis of the merits of a hearsay objection (by opposing counsel) and, concomitantly, whether a hearsay exception applies (assuming we are dealing with an out-of-court statement offered against a party, etc.). That is to say, what is at issue is always whether or not the court will register the out-of-court utterance; we would not be remiss in suggesting that the court masquerades in the garb of the Other in a hearsay question, par excellence. The supplicative desire (an impoverished desire) of the party offering the evidence is, in a Lacanian reading, a demand (demande, appeal, request) addressed to the Other from which the party-Subject can expect a symbolic response, a coded articulation. This particular reintroduction to the juridico-Symbolic realm raises a question about the reproduction of the imaginary order of things, namely, when or in what circumstances will the discursive structure admit a foreign element? A second question, though of decisively greater importance, quickly follows the first: If we can assume (as I think we can) that the structure grants admittance only to those elements capable of re-encoding, capable of being neutralized, is it ever possible to subvert this reproductive process, to elude the symbols of (imaginary, “consistent” in Badiou’s terminology) justice?

I would like to follow this thread for a bit, using the hearsay rules as a launching pad only (they are quite elastic, after all).

According to Lacan, Freud (in Totem and Taboo)

“link[s] the appearance of the signifier of the Father, as author of Law, with death, even to the murder of the Father – thus showing that if this murder is the fruitful moment of debt through which the subject binds himself for life to the Law, the symbolic Father is, in so far as he signifies this Law, the dead Father.”

“On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Écrits: A Selection, 199.

The monopoly over sexual gratification held by the primal Father, in Freud’s myth, is an originary social formation in itself. The violent overthrow of that regime – the parricide executed by the band of brothers – is the dialectical response produced by that originary formation; that is, the father’s “monarchy” created the conditions for its own dissolution precisely insofar as it operated smoothly, though in truth the tonality of this dissolution was predetermined in that it comes to pass through a process of negation. (One sees, therefore, an important precedent to Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” in Freud.) This new regime, prospectively one of liberation and freedom, turns out to be quite different than expected (though not, of course, from a dialectician’s point of view): it is the founding site for the event of repression (we might thus say, “Repression”). The guilt that emerges in the killing – more accurately, in the aftermath of the killing – is the kernel of the Other abstracted from its “property” and internalized, such that, henceforth, we can say that the Other resides in each subject (though not, of course, completely – whatever that might mean). This “fruitful moment of debt” is the true (Lacanian) constitution of the subject, properly its subjection. The Law, the Name-of-the-Father, operates as the ultimate anchorage point for the entirety of social / symbolic life, which is to say, as the superegoic thrust in ideal form.

Law & Psychoanalysis takes this extremely panoramic view of law – law as culture, law as society – as its point of departure. Moreover, Law & Psychoanalysis is not exactly a marginal-marginalized approach any longer – it has developed into a rather sophisticated mode of legal critique, with adherents from all intrajuridical disciplines or practice backgrounds and from all styles of legal academy. I would like to discuss the psychoanalytical approach to law and, in relatively short order, raise some fundamental questions.

For Lacan, according to noted Lacanian legal theorist David Caudill,

“no one is ever outside the Law – people stand in relationships of vassalage and crime, honor and dishonor, with the Law. Already, of course, ‘the Law’ is the symbolic order consisting of ‘chains’ that bind and orient and transform without regard to consciousness. We enter the symbolic order with language, in place, and it assigns us our places.”

Caudill, Lacan and the Subject of Law: Toward a Psychoanalytic Critical Legal Theory, 63.

All this is vintage Lacan, so the potential holdup is not with Caudill per se. The stumbling block is that the law, as evidenced in the quotation from Lacan’s discussion of Schreber posted above, the object of study or at least the means of ingress into larger social theory problems, is in such an approach the symbolic order as such (the Name-of-the-Father as pure “grounding” signifier, ultimate point of reference), while legal theory, at least in the Liberal tradition (in which American jurisprudence is anchored), wants to focus on questions of judicial decisionmaking, doctrinal analysis, and so forth, and this holds even for radical legal theorists in this tradition (I am thinking of the “radical realists” of the 1930s and 40s in particular, but also the more recent CLS movement, a revival and even an excrescence of that earlier mode of attack known as realism). It seems a Lacanian approach might broaden the field a bit too much, bite off a bit more than an American scholarly audience (which is not to suggest the opposite for, e.g., a European scholarly audience, a Canadian scholarly audience, etc.) cares to chew through. These are concerns near to the hearts of critical theorists in general, of course, because they want/need an audience that is greater in number than they themselves (otherwise they are writing to themselves alone) yet, and perhaps this is despite protestations, there is a certain “critical pride” in minority, a certain seduction in moving against the mainstream, and in assaulting said mainstream with allegations such as that these strands of work “naturalize the status quo” (this is Peller), “contribute to the reproduction of hierarchy” (this is Kennedy), and so on. I point this out not because I want to neutralize these claims (indeed, I wholeheartedly endorse the Peller and Kennedy critiques of mainstream sociolegal thinking), but because I wish to highlight the “critical anxiety” or ambivalence in a reflexive manner, as a way to engage it productively.

Is this stumbling block fatal to such an approach? Hardly! But it is real, and must be grappled with (like any real). The minority of an approach is sometimes its strength, as we know. Delivered unto us thereby is often a new set of percepts, a new structure of affect, a whole new potentiality or singularity awaiting actualization. These percepts and affects appear, from the molar standpoint, as, e.g., trivialities, non-sensical, or bits of paradox. The real, as Lacan claims, is essentially misrecognized. Yet the redistributions and condensations they bring in being carried out lead us to look back on them as events, defining, earth-shattering (some will say: “volcanic”) events.

What is really at stake here is the content of the set of potentials available for actualization in a Lacanian critical jurisprudence. The courts and the legal institution in sum play a distinctive part in the perpetuation of a particular symbolic order or regime of signs. Given this, we are required to follow up: Is there a potential for liberation in the virtual sphere of a Lacanian approach? Psychoanalysis may run up against its limit here, or, for more sympathetic folks, may force the realization upon us that there is no such thing as liberation. Schopenhauerian as it sounds, we may be condemned to the particular brands of oppression brought out by our representational-democratic (i.e., pseudo-democratic) regime of signs. All we can hope for is to “traverse the fantasy,” to become docile with respect to the order of things through acceptance. But if this is the case, why did we bother with a psychoanalytical critique of law in the first place? (Zizek has some interesting things to say on this question, but I can’t discuss them now – certainly, I will return to Zizek’s role in developing a psychoanalytic critique of law, revisiting this question with a new immediacy; Zizek is able to discern in the law, in an institutional as well as cultural sense, a sort of de-limitation, a restriction that nevertheless enables, and so the possibility of a truly constructive psychoanalysis of law becomes real.) For my part, here is where I think the possibility of a Deleuzian, not to say “schizoanalytical,” approach to law becomes necessary. I’ll merely light the path here but will return in a series of future posts to begin actually following it, as I work out some details.

A central theme of the Anti-Oedipus is that social formations generate their own lines of escape, that laissez-faire capitalism, for instance, breeds marginal subjects that sense the means of egress, the “leaky spots,” made available by the functioning of the system itself. And this is its “proper” functioning: Deleuze & Guattari continually note, in that text, that capitalism “works,” there is no reason for it not to work; in “working,” however, variegated flows of labor (minor sciences, war machines of various types, and so on) come into being as a sort of remainder, in the form of a hold-over – and then it becomes a matter of seizing this liberatory potential in some constructive way, or, as Deleuze will say, “to be carried off elsewhere, the beyond, on a crazy vector, a tangent of deterritorialization” (“Two Regimes of Madness” in Two Regimes of Madness, 15). Does it become possible to follow such a tangent in a Deleuzian mode?