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Ideas from this paper are further developed in:
Sections and ideas are also drawn from the Addendum of Jill's thesis "[Ad]dressing Methodologies. Tracing the Self In Significant Slips: Shadow Dancing,"
John Schostak
Jill Schostak
Presented at ECER Conference, Geneva 2006
What is the truth of a situation? Consider:
C2: I’ve got a bilateral breast cancer in a nurse who’s fifty and it’s recurrent ‘cos she’s back and she’s had chemo and we admitted her in June and she was pretty well on the way out, and I got Consultant P (consultant oncologist) to see her, and I talked to the family, had a long chat with her and her husband: she’s a nurse, she understands, she was having more chemo and that was it. She went off and the past few months I’ve been waiting for the letter from Hospice saying “Died in peace with her family surrounding her”. And last week I got a letter from Consultant P saying “She’s off on holiday in Teneriffe and I’ll see her in six months”. I thought what’s he done to her?
C1: And that’s what makes life fabulous, isn’t it?
C2: Just comes out like that [laughs]
C1: A friend of mine who I had lunch with today, his Mum’s got breast cancer, but she’s eighty-three, no, she’s got lung cancer, I think. Eighty-three, eighty-four, and you sometimes have a valid group, you can have people who live with their illness in symbiosis, with their cancer, and something else takes them five years later, and it can grow very slowly. It’s very, very humbling.
C2: Unpredictable. […] totally amazing. I’ve had a twenty-six year old die within six months and the other thing is I’ve got a grade 1 node negative, you know all the best histology; died six months from multiple skin met[stase]s which you rarely get from breast cancer.
Taped CasE core team meeting transcript: 29/10/01
This is from a discussion between medical consultants working in different specialties sharing and comparing their experiences. One recounts a story of a person who had been expected to die from her illness but who surprisingly recovered. This led to other stories of unpredictable outcomes.
Are the surprises identified by the medical consultants due to incompetence, lack of scientific knowledge or because science itself cannot hope to cover all? As consultants they are assumed to be experts. As experts they are assumed to have a command over available knowledge concerning medical conditions in their particular specialty. In particular, they are expected to make decisions based on best available evidence. And this evidence is constructed through certain legitimated procedures – currently randomised controlled trials (RCTs). As such, the procedures conform to what Kuhn (1970) calls the ‘normal science’, that is, the prevailing view of what constitutes science at a given time period. This science is founded in a particular conception of ‘reason’.
These consultants are not talking about a gap in knowledge that can be filled, nor about incompetence that can be corrected. They are talking about something that is ‘fabulous’, in particular, something about the nature of life itself. Adorno gestures towards this something that is outside of expert representation as follows:
In truth, all concepts, even the philosophical ones, refer to nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are moments of the reality that requires their formation, primarily for the control of nature.
(Adorno 1973: 11)
And more particularly:
No object is wholly known; knowledge is not supposed to prepare the phantasm of the whole. Thus the goal of a philosophical interpretation of works of art cannot be their identification with the concept; it is through such interpretation that the truth of the work unfolds.
(Adorno 1973: 14)
But of course, this is art and not the highly skilled ‘scientifically underpinned’ act of the surgeon. Yet, as the surgeon and the other ‘experts’ speak, more of the art and less of the science appears at those critical moments of judgement and of surprise, those moments where lives are saved or lost. It is here that circumstances have to be grasped in judgement rather than deduced through a chain of logical reasoning operating on empirically collected ‘facts’. It is here too that facts seem less solid, where the relation between concepts and the ‘non-conceptualities’ they are supposed to correspond with, slips, where the non-conceptualities offer a resistance to over-easy conceptualisations and theorisations. It is thus not a simple matter of making observations, gathering the facts, and processing them in terms of ‘evidence’ that then informs judgement. The observations of what appears to consciousness themselves are in question. In commenting on Schelling’s philosophy, Bowie (1994:6) writes that for Schelling:
The issue is Kant’s question as to how synthetic a priori judgements are possible. They were possible for Kant because of the synthetic activity of the subject in judgements of the understanding. Schelling maintains, however, that there is a more fundamental problem, that of why there is a realm of judgement, a world of appearances at all. If judgement consists in syntheses of appearances, it must depend upon a prior separation of what is joined again in judgement, otherwise there would be nothing that required synthesising.
If all is just a mechanism where all things are conditioned by all other things in a chain, then, at least through rational procedure, it is possible to uncover the chains. But a being contained within this conditioned universe would not be able to step outside this complex mechanism and ask how it all became possible (Bowie 1994: 9); nor presumably, would it be free to speculate on and form judgements about how things are arranged, or indeed be surprised by anything. A system of mechanical chains cannot produce consciousness, cannot produce the judgement that transcends how things are, nor make free decisions concerning how one should think about reality, what choices should be accepted and how to behave with others in the world. Thus any system of thinking that suspends or excludes conscious freedoms in its search for causal chains is already inadequate. Yet, there is a concept of reason that does just this. Weber (2001) described its emergence in terms of the puritan work ethic:
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into evervday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
(Weber 2001: 123)
This iron cage becomes tighter with every technical innovation that locates individuals in the data bases of financial, health, education, social, legal and political systems. Our lives are reduced to transactions, socio-economic indices, performance indicators, and patterns of consumption. It is possible to track us wherever we move by closed circuit TV or mobile phones. Google Earth, or something like it, will in the near future have us covered in real time. What these technologies seem to promise is the easy truth-machine or legitimased evidence-machine answers desired by paymasters and the iron cage bureaucrats of those agencies through which research is commissioned and constrained. Imprisoned in the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic reason, it is all about the big numbers, through which populations are to be described and manipulated to produce desired outcomes. However, for critical judgement it is all about thinking. Much of philosophy is about the depth of thought and critical assessment of the details of thinking and a single instance can be the motive. For statistical surveys it is all about large numbers of instances and the application of procedures without much further thought; indeed, the less thought the better for that just introduces human error and ‘subjectivity’. Reason, in this view is set over and against the world as a focus for mastery. This is a world where :
with regard to matters of space and time, the modernist reduction to a radical subjectivism means that all objects, including our environment, are set up in opposition to a thinking subject, that is to say our perceiving and experiencing mind. Precisely this oppositional and dichotomous way of constructing our world would lead to a general consideration of all objects outside of ourselves as “other” with the resulting problem of communication with those exterior objects. Obviously this modernist approach thought of man in contradistinction to his environment, setting up an opposition – perhaps unintentional, yet persisting to this day – viewing disparate objects in space existing only to be measured, tied down, and ultimately controlled.
(Kavanaugh 2003: 116)
In what counts as contemporary or indeed bureaucratised ‘normal’ science (Kuhn 1970) involving quantification, randomised control trials and surveys, concepts are to be matched rigorously with the non-conceptualities they are to represent. Perhaps rather like points that ‘stand out’ due to observation, they can be represented as follows:
When looking at this, what possible arrangements can be seen? As in the cases
discussed by the medical consultants it is through a mixture of observation,
experience, exploration and judgement that the dots are sufficiently joined
to engage in decision making:
C2: we’ve just operated, this is fascinating, we operated a week ago, on a fifty year old man, and I can show you the photographs, it will put you off your food, he had a cauliflower hanging out of here [points to his lower abdomen], a cauliflower hanging out of his belly. And we biopsied this thinking it was squamous. It was adenocarcinoma from his caecum; came right through the body wall. And literally, outside, I’ve got pictures there. And you sit back think if it’s got that big he’s in symbiosis with it, he’s living like ivy on a tree. So we operated on him, opened his belly, pulled all this out, did a right [procedure named] joined his bowels together, no bag, cored out a great big hole in his body wall, took out a chunk of meat that size [gesticulates], got the plastic boys in and moved his belly across and skin grafted the defect, he went to ITU, that’s fifty-five, went to ITU that night and they took his tube out and he sits up the next morning and says, “That’s pretty good, doc. I feel better now”.
[Everybody (three consultants, two researchers) laughs]C2: and the guy has left ITU and he’s up on the ward. He made his will, he called in a lawyer and made his will on the day of his op. But liver was clear, lungs are clear, this thing’s a huge cancer, and no spread. Now the opposite is you get a tiny little thing in the bowel and it’s boom, lungs, liver, the lot.
Taped CasE core team meeting transcript: 29/10/01
No matter how experienced, there is still the possibility of a surprise, something that seems to go beyond or defy the ‘norm’. But life is not just about treating bodies, it is about living and thus about relations to others. It is about making wills, dealing with lawyers, setting affairs in order. It is about values, what makes life worth living for a group of people who fear the circumstances in which their ‘identity’, their ‘possessions’, their ‘way of life’ are lost. In this domain of values defined by judgements made from a multiplicity of viewpoints reason is the backdrop to desires, hopes, ambitions. The world is always more than what reason makes of it.
The worlds of the political
The multitudes that compose the world can be counted, their patterns of behaviour
described for purposes of control but only through the exercise of power. There
is no reason why one person should submit to the demands of another:
NATURE hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.
(Hobbes 13)
This results in what Hobbes calls a war of all against all unless a fearsome power arises to bring order to a given territory. Even then, of course, there are other territories who may seek to invade. This fear of the other is a power means to consolidate power around the central protecting agency, whether Monarch, Tyrant or some oligarchical elite. For political theorists like Carl Schmidt and Leo Strauss (1952a, 1952b, 1988) this results in a view of the political being necessarily defined by the friend-enemy relation, or the existence of what Bush has called the ‘axis of evil’:
In this configuration, whoever is not a friend is an enemy. If the diagram
is read as if looking from above , that is, each dot representing a person at
the same level, then the connecting lines can be read as identifying who associates
with whom. The one group sees the other group as a threat, an enemy. However,
one side of the friend-enemy line is more strongly connected than the other.
This could mean that the one will use that power advantage at some time. However,
the isolated individual is seen by the camp of friend’s as an enemy, this
it is in that individual’s interests ultimately to side with the camp
of the enemies. Perhaps, this is rather like a position of mutually assured
destruction, MAD, as it was known when the survival of the world was dependent
on the capacities of the West and the East to launch nuclear missiles that would
ensure mutual destruction. If the diagram were read as hierarchies producing
pinnacles representing elites having power over multitudes then another dynamic
is added. For Spinoza there are two kinds of power. There is Potestas that refers
to the top down power of Leaders of various kind – Monarchs, Aristocracies,
Tyrants, Oligarchies – and then there is the power –potestas - that
is natural to each and every individual that enables them to persist in their
being. Potestas refers us back to the Hobbesian argument where no on individual
is able to feel safe from another without seeking some advantage in associating
with others. It is some of this power that an individual gives up in exchange
for security and other goods like friendship and being able to trade without
fear. The leader or ruling groups aggregates this power. But ultimately, the
reality of power rests with the multitude who vest some of their power in the
ruling groups in exchange for such goods as security, law and order. But that
power that seems too real and immense for generations can in just one short
period, even just one day, evaporate. It did so during the French Revolution
when in the name of the multitude all were proclaimed equal, brothers and sisters,
and free. It did so, as MacGregor (1998: 21) describes, in the Soviet Union
when on 25th December 1991 Gorbachev gave his resignation speech following the
failed coup in August 1991 and ‘The former superpower slid silently away
as though it had never existed’. Zizek (1991) provides a similar account
of the fall of Ceaus¸escu after a week of riots in Romania in 1989. In
Zizek’s terms Ceaus¸escu represented the Big Other in whom was invested
the aggregated powers of the multitude. Ultimately, as Spinoza argued the power
of the Leader, the system, or however the Big Other is constructed, is illusory.
Unless the leader or ruling elites satisfy sufficiently the desires of the multitude
there will be riots and the Power of the Big other will be shaken and even collapse
unless steps are taken to satisfy the desires of the multitude. The only system
that does this Spinoza argued is democracy where each individual in the name
of equality and freedom chooses to give up some of their powers to act freely
in return for a safe and rewarding form of governance. This form of governance
is by the people for the people. MacGregor (1998) describes Hegel’s admiration
of Napoleon’s attempts to bring a liberal constitutional monarchy to the
German States thinking that the spirit of the French Revolution (1789-99) will
be carried further by the German peoples. Hegel, in his philosophical and political
works, sought to show how the final form of governance had indeed appeared,
a form that synthesized both individual freedom and the role of the community
to support the needs for freedom (Hardimon 1994). Instead of a divided state
the oppositions were to be reconciled to form a totality. The task was, as it
were, to join the dots and bring all under a more liberal form of rule:
Those that remain outside, of course, would feel vulnerable, and so could see
that it was in their best interests to become reconciled to the whole:
The final form of the state then is one in which the principles of individual freedom are married with that of community as a basis for being free from fear and free to explore individual talents, needs and interests in so far as this is consistent with the persistence of community. It is thus a resolution of conflicts and differences. In short, it is the end of the history that narrates the grand paradigmatic battles between world views. Thus Kojève (1969) saw in Hegelian philosophy an end of History as it was emerging in the European Union and Fukyama (1992) proclaimed its accomplishment with the fall of the Soviet Block. it was, the triumph of Western Liberal Democracies.
Policing the Data
Rancière (1995, 2004) describes the order that is imposed on every part
of the social whole by the rule of power, the police. Police, here, does not
refer to police officers but rather the force exerted to ensure that every part
carries out its function in the whole. Each institution of society has its role
in moulding every part to fit the whole. However, this does not mean to say
that there are not disagreements:
in fact I was in the midst of a group where I was in it, and the girl come to me and said "I'm sorry," she says, "that I'm in your group." And I says, "Well, why would you say that?" She says, "because you're not gonna get a good mark". And I says, "Oh forget it", like you know because being in the 80s, like you know, I said, you know there's no chance, like, here we all put our heads together sure. Sure enough the mark come back and it was C minus. Well I went to the teacher. And I said, "Excuse me," I said, "could you kindly explain to me why we only got a C minus." Well she started looking for a bunch of excuses eh, and I said "I don't see that in the paper," and I got kinda rude and I said, "can you not read?" I said, "Everything you're telling me and the points you're saying that we don't have are right in there." And I said, "Well, I'm taking that paper back and I'm going through it on my lunch hour and I'll be back to see ya. And I'll underline everything that you're telling me is not there." Before I even got a chance to get the paper back, she come to me and took it and changed that mark. So you tell me. You know.
(Data from Canadian school 1991; see also the study of the school)
This, of course, does not sound like a child speaking to an adult who is authority. There is perhaps a double take in reading this extract from an interview transcript until it is all nicely resolved when the student in question is seen to be a 40 year old who has returned to school to take a course that will help her towards her goal of being a nurse. If she had not been a 40 year old, her views may well have remained silent and the sense of injustice unresolved. In short, there are no necessary mechanisms of democracy even within an apparently liberal institution serving the needs of a democracy. The 40 year old did not feel powerless. She felt like an equal demanding justice. Perhaps the teacher felt it more difficult to look an adult in the eye than a 14 year old. The collapse was swift. However, there are other circumstances where the sense of wrong is so pervasive, so irreconciable, that it feels hopeless as expressed by a group of 10 year old children living in an area known for its violence and deprivation:
G2: yeah there’s like, like .. if you go out in a car like a 15 minute drive there’s like (place name) which is really clean. And if you go like down, this way out the school, that’s clean, but when you come onto my street, that’s real mucky. Our mum hates it there.
Interviewer: why’s that then?
G2: Because there’s teens that are always like cause fights and the police are always round. And I’ve got like you know them porches outside me ‘ouse, everyone’s wrote their names on it. And me mum’s like phoned the council and the police and everythin’
(CAPE project data 2005)
None of the children in the group liked living in the area. As well as noise and aggression they mentioned litter and graffiti and
Boy: cos sometimes you just can’t get to sleep at night, cos like shouts ‘n you can hear bottles smashing
There is a pervasive sense of fear and anxiety. This is the point at which ‘the police’, in Rancière’s sense, begins to fall down. Areas become interstitial as Thrasher (1927) in his early twentieth century study of Chicago gangs called them. These are the liminal domains where people are not quite in nor quite out of the reach of the dominant institutions of social controls. It is the point at which a political leader like Thatcher in the early 1980s during the miner’s strike can talk about ‘the enemy within’. It is at this point where the truth of the matter becomes contested. What kind of truth is it? Each leader proclaims that their policies are supports for more universal principles like Freedom, Justice, Peace and the protection of the ‘people’ in the face of ‘enemies’. At this point, decisions have to be made, sides chosen, concerning what contents, what actual practices, what kinds of individual qualities what particular details are going to fill the space covered by these essentially empty signifiers of universal principles (c.f., Butler et al 2000; Laclau 1996, 2005).
What happens to a notion of truth when there are liminal spaces to deal with, those ‘betweens’ that are neither an inside nor an outside? They are thresholds, their definition depends on purpose. Which way do I want to go? Edges are constructed through threads, intentionalities if you will, that are directed from subject to other generating both object and spaces, insides and outsides. Pull a thread and every edge is ready to collapse like the collapse of Ceaus¸escu regime or the Soviet Union. As the definition of who is in and who is out retreats, some are excluded
There is always one more left outside until the inside cannot hold and the people as multitude again generates the possibility for a new social order that increasingly meets the needs of the people, that is, addresses the issue of inclusion, always adding the excluded others.
It is often said of post-structuralism, de-construction, postmodernism and the like, that ‘anything goes’, that there is no truth as such. This of course is nonsense. Post structuralism and so on are involved in debates about the nature of truth and offering approaches to understanding the ‘truthing’ processes, the processes through which people as thinkers and as actors in relation to others handle their truths. It is thus deeply involved in matters of truth as embedded in the political. Being sceptical as to meta-narratives is the necessary step to that freedom of thought that is productive of alternative ways of seeing and thus the contest necessary to the debates concerning freedom and the forms of governance appropriate to underpinning freedom. The question then returns, are there any more revolutions to come, or is it like Fukyama’s prouncement, that we are at the End of History… and it is now just a matter of ironing out the little local difficulties?
Radically Including the Truth of the Particulars
of the dots, what then is the ‘truth’ of humanity when there is
always another viewpoint, another way of ‘joining the dots’ another
way of producing what is to count as a dot…. The dot, of course, itself
may be read in multiple ways and there is the issue of how it is produced as
a representation of a free standing entity. A particular is itself a universal
signifier the contents of which may be filled in strange and wonderful configurations
but always denoting a single definable, bounded incorporated as it were, ‘something’.
It would be useful if the fiction could be maintained that each particular could
be addressed uniquely and behaved always in its single, particular way, mechanically.
Reducing individuals to instances of behaviour as in the behaviourism of Skinner
is one such way. However, people act towards each other in ways that are more
than this. They form alliances, dissolve alliances. They have multiple agendas
and can be defined as being members of more than one grouping. The ‘truth’
of one’s particular needs may best fit the ‘truth’ of one
group rather than another for one time period and one particular scene of action
but not at other times and in other places. An individual may be seen as having
the interests of a male as against those of a female in one set of circumstances
but the interests of a wage-slave, whether male or female in conflict with big
business in another set of circumstances. In each case the definition of one’s
‘enemies’, that is, those whose interests are opposed, changes.
This is what Laclau and Mouffe (1985) discussed in terms of the development
of hegemonies, or alliances that are directed towards particular goals. In order
to achieve their purpose they have to change in order to include those who are
not traditionally associated with them. The discourse of feminism may exclude
male discourses but under certain circumstances when working class men are fighting
through their trade union activities the same ‘enemies’ as feminists
an alliance may be formed. In these circumstances
There is no closure of discourse, discourse only ever being a compromise – or bricolage – between what it is legitimate to say, what one would like to contend or argue, and what one is forced to recognize.
(Le Doeuff. 1989: 19)
There is thus the ever continuing possibility of the radical production of hegemonic alliances. But it is only possible to have this without bloody revolution if all parties essentially ‘feel at home’ under the rules of engagement. If the rules of engagement significantly privilege one party rather than another then the sense of wrong and of injustice will be aggravated, perhaps to the point of revolution. This is a return to Hegel’s project of reconciliation (Hardimon 1994). However, what is at stake here is not reconciliation to an unfair state but reconcilation to the continuous production of the democratic project which in Mouffe’s (1993) phrase, is the unfinished revolution. It is unfinished and indeed unfinishable because as Arendt (1998) argued with each new born child, there is the birth of a new viewpoint that demands to be included. This is not the myth of the Child as Saviour or a symbol of eternal renewal but is the recognition of the particularity, the singularity and the finitude of the individual in relation to any concept or organisation of the community that might arise from the activities and the desires of individuals.
Opening the Space for Radical Methodologies
Doing research under normal condition can only mean under the current organisations
of power globally. This means that a double writing is involved, that is to
say, a text appears to say and be doing one thing but covers the intent of another
writing and doing. The writing, in this sense is not ‘at home’ within
itself. It becomes a writing with besides and against that never quite coincides
with the dominant views of what counts as truth. Under conditions of power,
hostile to the ‘truth’ that a writer or researcher is expressing,
this double writing is the only way of avoiding censorship and persecution (Strauss
1952a). It is, in itself, a political act that leaves open the possibility of
a ‘true’ reading by those who can come to understand it and feel
‘at home’ in its truths. Hannah Arendt’s views on the relation
between understanding and the feeling of “at-homeness” if another
comes to understand something in the way that she (Arendt) has come to understand
it, is explored by Kristeva in the following terms:
The com-prehender waits, accepts and welcomes an open space, she allows herself to be used, she sets forth, she is with (cum-, com-), a matrix of studied casualness (what Heidegger called Gelassenheit) that allows itself to be fertilized. At the same time, the comprehender apprehends: she selects, tears down, molds and transforms the elements; she appropriates and re-creates them. Alongside others but accompanied by her own selection, the comprehender is one who gives birth to a meaning that harbours in altered form, the meaning of other people. It then falls upon us to unravel the process that turns thought to action, that constructs and deconstructs.
(Kristeva. 2001: 26)
To accept entering a mutual sense of being at home in Arendt’s sense requires a change in both identities. This prefigures Laclau’s (1996, 2005) insistence than in engaging in alliance to form even a temporary hegemony necessitates a change in the identity of each participant in order to be inclusive. As increasing numbers of individuals engage in associations for mutual benefit their particular values, their particular truths concerning what is right and wrong, desirable undesirable, necessary, unnecessary are made to count under a under a regime of truth and a system of laws that define a territory of operation and countenances no exception. If all are equal, then there can be no exception without causing a sense of injustice. However, there can be no closure if all particular viewpoints are to be treated equally since, as Arendt argues there is always the birth of a new viewpoint. Rather than writing and researching to avoid censorship, double writing becomes Derrida’s écriture, a metaphor, a figure for ‘an entire structure of investigation, not merely “writing in the narrow sense,” graphic notation on a tangible material’ (Spivak. 1976: ix-lxxxix). As Cusset (2003) points out, those that have been referred by Anglo audiences under the terms French Theory deconstructionist, post-structuralist or postmodern could better be named non-, or anti-totalitarian. Such approaches by rejecting strategies that seek to cover all and bring to end the histories of debate between alternative views concerning truth, knowledge and ways of living are not thereby relativistic, nor arguing that ‘anything goes’. Rather there is a search for a way of thinking about the pre-conditions for any ground of thinking that does not a ground that freezes history. In her discussion in the Addendum to her thesis, Jill Schostak draws upon Gasché’s (1986) critical exploration of Derrida’s use of terms like ‘différance’, ‘trace’, ‘parergon’ arche-writing supplement and so on which are seen by him as constituting a chain of substitutions, an ‘infrastructure’. The problem is that the term ‘infrastructure’ implies ‘hierarchy [which] detract[s] from its pertinence’ (Hobson. 1998: 239n: 31). Gasché (1986, 1995) is well aware of the difficulties, but other words like ‘quasi-transcendentals (Derrida, 1988, 1996; Gasché, 1986) and ‘lexemes’ (Hobson, 1998) also seem inadequate. In Addendum, however, Schostak employs the word ‘infrastructure’ keeping to its sense of ‘structurality of structure’ rather than its sense of ‘basic’ structure. Infrastructures are ‘instances of an intermediary discourse concerned with a middle in which the differends are suspended and preserved’ (Gasché. 1986: 151). This signifying structure, structure signifiante (Derrida. 1976: 158), has as its outcome a knotting together of otherwise distinct particulars. Thus there is ‘an interlacing, a weaving, or a web, which would allow the different threads and different lines of sense or force to separate again, as being ready to bind others together’ (Derrida. 1973: 132).
The concept of the parergon can be employed to invoke the effect of any such Derridean infrastructural strategy. It radically displaces the concept by both undermining while also facilitating its frame, its threshold, that is, that place which is neither being ‘on the outside’ nor being ‘on the inside’ until a decision is made. And that decsion, as Derrida says echoing Kierkegaard is an act of madness (Derrida. 1992: 26). But this act of madness in the place of undecidability is also an ethical stance. It is the point where an individual in his or her finitude and particularity stakes his or her being. This is the place where meaning slips as boundaries fray. What holds it all together are the decisions of people to engage in association with each other, to knot their lives together in a place that they might feel free to call home. Rather than a simple de-construction, there is the emergence of multiple possibilities, each to be explored. This might become a criterion for assessing the richness of data as well as its appropriateness to exploring the complexity of particularity.
Deleuze and Guattari provide another way of thinking through anti-totalitarian strategies that radically eat into the iron cage of bureaucratic reason. ‘Organisms, cells, machines and sound waves are all responses to the complication or ‘problematising’ force of life’ (Colebrook. 2002: 1). The power of life, human or otherwise, is the power to develop problems. ‘[W]e impose all sorts of dogmas and rules upon thinking’ (Deleuze. 1994: 135) and thus the concepts of ‘difference’ and ‘becoming’ are all-important for Deleuze and Guattari. Influenced by Nietzsche Deleuze challenges the idea that thinking is a picture of the world. Ways of thinking and conceptualizing engage with the flux of reality and cut it up into manageable pieces. But as Nietzsche argued all thinking is a type of metaphor whereby a fixed image is substituted for a fluid reality. Thus we can never be literal saying exactly what we see. All language, not just literary language is metaphorical. Thus language
… takes the concrete and sensible world and refers to it through something else, such as the sign or the concept. All language then, by virtue of the fact that it is language, is creative.
(Colebrook. 2002: 18)
For anti-totalitarians, the commonly held belief that there is some single, unchanging ‘truth’ behind language is just an illusion. People’s identities embodied as they are in and of language cannot step outside into the ‘true’ world, that is the world of non-conceptualities, the nouminal world of Kant, or Spinoza’s world of natural powers that is the starting point for much of Deleuze’s philosophies and the radical politics of Laclau. Deleuze, thus, celebrates Nietzsche’s notion of ‘pre-personal singularities’ (Deleuze. 1990: 102), those chaotic and free-roaming fluxes of language, so different to the general forms that language was said to organise. For Deleuze reality has no order or fixed being, rather concepts create this order; active, they bring about myriad connections and create intensities. Deleuze therefore focuses upon the singular event and its specific power of being different.
For Lyotard the reading of another (text, subject, act…) as event for raises up, or addresses ‘the figure against discourse, the libidinal skin against the organic body’ invoking a materiality of an in-betweeen~ness of tensions between reading and seeing (Readings. 1991: xx). This reading which incorporates the figural force thus goes beyond the flat ‘textual space’ - that ‘space of pure opposition’ of structural linguistics, to one of ‘depth and opacity’ as required by the introduction of ‘motivation and continuity between the linguistic elements’. It is at that point where a loose association becomes a relatively coherent community or a multitude is embodied as a people. For Badiou (2005) the problem of the multitude is that of the One-Many and the problem of politics is that it is in ruins, that:
In the real field of politics today, which is a sort of destroyed field, or a battlefield without armies, we often oppose a reactionary politics – liberalism and so on – the crucial concept of which in the political field is law and order, which are the protection of potency and richness, and on the other side a revolutionary politic the crucial concept of which is collective desire, the desire for a new world of peace, justice, and so on.
(Badiou 2005: 2)
The problem is that through a loss of belief in the great metanarratives or through a return to fundamentalisms there is no great narrative that enables inclusion. Hence
The most important political problem is the problem of a new fiction. We have to distinguish between fiction and ideology. Because generally speaking ideology is something which isn’t coupled with science, or with truth or with real, reality. But as we know from Lacan and from before, the truth itself is in a structure of fiction. The process of truth is also the process of a new fiction. And so to find the new great fiction is the possibility to have a final belief, political belief.
(Badiou 2005: 12)
Truth in particular arises in complex political circumstances where particularities are always in conflict with generalisations or universalities. Is a resort to a new myth, a new noble lie, the real solution? If reason cannot contain the uniqueness, the particular truth of the individual, a myth no matter how rich still erodes that uniqueness, haunting it with visions of universalities that the experts, the new priests of the myth, the noble lie that they will interpret to their benefit. The only safeguard for truth in particular is its insistence on the radicality of viewpoint, a viewpoint that engages with otherness as its equal in the formation of communities.
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