The Jargon of Alterity*

*Appeared in Antithesis journal (Melbourne, Australia) 2004.

“Measure is alien to us, let us admit it to ourselves; what we itch for is the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider on a charging steed we let

fall the reins before the infinite, we modern men, like semi-barbarians.”1

“The resigned leftist challengers of yesterday now take theoretical tranquilisers and spiritual analgesics (instead of working through their

sorrow and returning to praxis).”2

In the Anglo-American humanities, a jargon of alterity is spoken – even more so, written.

Its language is a trademark of social marginalisation – sometimes jubilant, sometimes

remissive – sublanguage as superior language. The jargon extends from cultural studies

and comparative literature – not only of English departments – to philosophy, graduate

conferences, even to the hippest diction of the representatives of advertising and

business. While the jargon overflows with the pretence of the most controversial

radicality, it is just as standardised as the world that it officially negates; the reason for

this lies partly in its widespread success, partly in the fact that it posits its message

automatically, through its mere nature. Thus the jargon bars its own truth from the

experience that comes to animate it. The jargon has at its disposal a modest number of

words which are received as promptly as signals. ‘Alterity’ itself is not the most

prominent of these. Condensing and invoking ‘alterité’ in the French, meaning

‘otherness’, and the verb ‘to alter’ in English, it is more an illumination of the ether in

which the jargon flourishes, and the way of thinking which latently feeds it. For a

beginning, terms and phrases like ‘difference’ (with or without an ‘a’), ‘the Otherness of

the Other,’ ‘relation without relation,’ ‘the in(-)finite,’ ‘bodies without organs,’ ‘rhizomes,’

and ‘lines of flight’ will do for examples.

Thus we might imagine Theodore Adorno beginning, if he were alive today. And there

are perhaps some people who might agree with him. The preceding is, in fact, a direct

citation, with only a few nouns and adjectives changed, of a famous paragraph near the

beginning of Adorno’s 1964 The Jargon of Authenticity.3 In this work, Adorno ruthlessly

lampoons the theoretical language developed by Martin Heidegger in particular, and

German existentialists such as Buber and Jaspers. But the book makes a very serious

case. ‘Jargon,’ for Adorno, is any set of terms that have been lifted by a group of users –

usually in a position of some institutional authority – out of the contexts which usually

informed them. Thus isolated, he contends, the terms of a jargon can appear, like the

proverbial fetish, to have sublime significance in themselves:

What is or is not jargon is determined by whether a word is written in an

intonation which places it transcendentally in opposition to its own meaning; by

whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its

propositional force, and the thought content.4

The words become terms of jargon only through the constellation that they

negate, through each one's gesture of uniqueness. … Thus they become more

important than the jargon’s so-called system …5

With jargon, we are back, Adorno thus stipulates, with an unwitting, pre-Kantian view on

language, where words can signify without reference to any mediation. The formation of

any jargon by any ‘in group’ hearkens back most deeply, he intimates, to the ancient

belief in the magic power of ceremonial words to by themselves directly affect changes in

the physical world. The jargonist’s move of lifting words out of the contexts from

whence they derive their meanings accordingly bespeaks most deeply a nostalgia for lost

immediacy. Adorno invokes Benjamin’s famous analysis of ‘aura’ to describe what is in

play here, and comments that:

… as words that are sacred without sacred content, as frozen emanations, the

terms of the jargon … are products of the disintegration of the aura [that

surrounded pre-modern artworks and religious artefacts]. The latter pairs itself

with an attitude of not being bound and thus becomes available in the midst of a

demythified world …6

Of course, Adorno’s examples and his analysis directly concern German writings from

the 1920s through 1950s. The nostalgia for immediacy that he charges against the

existentialists is hence politically loaded and historically particular. The jargon of

authenticity, and of existential resolve, commitment and decision, hails from the same

sense of historical and cultural dislocation, Adorno implies, that fed the Nazis’ calls to

return to blood and soil. To cite only the most hilarious example: Heidegger's account of

his 1935 decision not to teach in Berlin, which would hardly pass muster before a

Habermasian tribunal as ‘the better argument’:

Recently I got a second invitation to go to the University of Berlin. On such an

occasion I leave the city and go back to my cabin. I hear what the mountains and

woods and farmyards say. On the way, I drop in on my old friend, a seventy-five

year old farmer. He has read the newspaper about the Berlin invitation. What will

he say? He slowly presses the sure glance of his clear eyes against mine, holds his

mouth tightly closed, lays his forceful hand on my shoulder- and almost

imperceptibly shakes his head. That means absolutely ‘No!’7

Of course, we are no longer Heideggerians today, with all that we know that that implies.

Has not Jacques Derrida himself boldly shown us, after all, that Heidegger's homey

rhetoric of pathmarks, forest clearings, and toiling farmers, is secretly still too betrothen

to the West’s epochal metaphysics of presence, from which – ca va sans dire – all else

follows? And has he not also, above all others (except maybe Deleuze), pointed the way

forward out of the folksy Heideggerian morass; not by withdrawing from the thought of

difference the master initiated, but by one more, more radical thought of the same?

Theory today no longer “needs the sixth hand symbol of the farmer as a proof of its

primalness, as a way of acquiring some otherwise unavailable distinctness,” to be sure, as

Adorno griped about Heidegger.8 Yet one perhaps still wonders, for all that, whether we

should so quickly file Adorno’s critique of an academic jargon in the humanities away in

the historical archives.

The type of question to ask, in order to approach this issue, is surely something like the

following: what would someone, even someone very well educated, but from outside of

‘theory,’ have to say when they read passages like the following, all taken from reputable

journals or publications? Consider first Derrida’s eulogy (literally ‘good word’) about

French writer Louis Marin:

Who could ever speak of the work of Louis Marin?

Who would already know how to speak of the works of Louis Marin and of all

the work that bore them, a work without measure?

Work: that which makes for a work, for an oeuvre, indeed that which works –and

works to open: opus and opening, oeuvre and overture: the work or labor of the oeuvre

insofar as it engenders, produces, and brings to light, but also labor or travail as

suffering, as the enduring of force, as the pain of the one who gives. Of the one

who gives birth, who brings to the light of day and gives something to be seen,

who enables or empowers, who gives the force to know and to be able to see…

Who could ever speak of the work or works of Louis Marin?9

In fact, we know the answer. One can only hope that there was no one present who

actually had produced a detailed study of Marin's work. But consider secondly the shock

that the unwitting adolescent must undergo when he opens his newly acquired Anti-

Oedipus,10 and reads the following, truly different (italics mine) mode of address:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and

starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake ever to have

said the id. Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative one, driving other

machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary

couplings and connections. An organ machine is plugged into an energy-source-

machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a

machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it … For every

organ machine, an energy machine; all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge

Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works …11

It would be easy, but really too easy, to go on. And would we not, by doing so, be

indulging in something very like the lifting of words out of their contexts that Adorno

rightly condemns in all jargons, and thereby be throwing ourself upon our own sword?

The spectre of Alan Sokal’s Impostures Intellectuelles looms large here. We need not mention

the much wider modern scientistic tendency to denigrate everything that is not

scientifically quantifiable to so much ‘subjective’ ‘rhetoric’, in fact another key target of

the Frankfurt School’s ‘critical theory.’

The argument is not about mere point scoring. Nor is it a question of denying the

importance, and the need, of specialised academic communities to develop specialised

theoretical languages which deal with more and more precise and isolable object fields.12

That language affects thought, and what can be thought within a given discipline or sub-

discipline, is indeed of the essence. We would hardly expect a particle physicist to be able

to describe all of his work to an educated layperson, or even a dedicated reader of

Deleuze and Guattari. The question is instead, firstly, whether or not the same type of

jargonistic elevation of certain terms, phrases, and modes of speaking that Adorno

charges against Heidegger and company is not also in play in much of the French theory

predominant in sections of the Anglophone humanities academy for two decades.

Secondly, we need to ask ourselves whether we – because we are now often simply too close

to this jargon – cannot see our way beyond it, out to the way that it functions, as Deleuze

and Guattari would italicise, in the wider socio-historical conjuncture in which we

academics are working.

Let us then consider again Adorno’s case against Heidegger and company in more detail.

The Jargon of Authenticity forms part of a wider Frankfurt School critique of then-

contemporary philosophy, in both its predominant Anglo-American and ‘continental’

variants. If Anglo-American philosophy carried the bags of the then-hegemonic

scientism, and so could say nothing about ethical, political, and aesthetic matters, the

argument runs, the existentialists – together with post-romantic lebenshilosophie – filled out

this metaphysical gap. However, the Frankfurt Schooler’s anxiety was that this

philosophy nevertheless conceded too much to the scientific positivism and instrumental

rationality which it was conceived in rightful opposition to. Their argument, moreover,

had a specifically historical spin. As Adorno wrote, if “philosophy which once seemed

outmoded is now alive, [it is] because the moment of its realisation has been missed.”13

He is referring to the Frankfurt School’s powerful sociological reading of Kant’s famous

metaphysical divisions – of the object against the subject, theoretical versus practical

reason, and the phenomenal versus the noumenal self – as reproducing in philosophical

form the structural divisions within modern capitalism, between the market and the state,

the bourgeois private realm and the public realm of the citoyen, and the freedom to trade

against all the other liberal freedoms. Kant’s much-touted freedom in this society was

necessarily an abstract, formal and idealistic one (in both the philosophical and pejorative

sense), they argued. It could hardly be anything more in a world wherein only a minority

of people, structurally, commanded the vast majority of society's resources for actually

acting freely, and impressing their good wills upon the world:

The rising bourgeois groups had based their demand for a new social freedom on

the universality of human reason. Against the belief in the divinely instituted

eternity of a restrictive order they maintained their belief in progress, in a better

future. But reason and freedom did not extend beyond these groups’ interests,

which came into increasing opposition to the interest of the majority. To

accusing questions, the bourgeoisie gave a decisive answer: … to the need of the

isolated individual it responds with general humanity, to bodily misery with the

beauty of the soul, to external bondage with internal freedom, to brutal egoism

with the duty of the realm of virtue …14

In Hegel and then in Marx, the attempt to concretely realise the freedom of thought Kant

celebrated and practiced came and went, the argument continues. In the existentialist

movement, then – despite the famous public break of Heidegger from the neo-Kantians

– we get a continuation of Kantianism by other means. The authentic resolve of a

Heideggerian subject, for instance, is every bit as empty as the perfectly good will in

Kant: it can mean literally anything, because it concretely means nothing at all. Again: the

subject’s achievement of such ‘resolution’ changes nothing in the object world, because it

involves nothing less than a complete, and completely formal, change of perspective on

everything that the subject has experienced hitherto.15

The concern about a jargon of alterity therefore must resolve itself into this question: in

post-structuralist theory, beyond but finally also in the revamped theoretical languages, is what we are

getting – functionally – a still quasi-Kantian normative formalism, dressed up alternatively in the clothes

of a wolf or a lamb? What will be at issue is whether, as Adorno charges about Heidegger et

al, the jargonistic propensity to elevate words and phrases above the normal run of

language, and in this gesture to obfuscate the wider socio-political irrelevance of one’s

discourse, has not found a new vehicle. In using the terms of this theory, at least without

due caution, the question is: are we not discernibly in danger of reproducing a blindness

to our own position of academic enunciation no less alternatively tragic, comic, or

ethico-politically myopic, as that of a Heidegger?

If the charge of a jargon of alterity were to be true, what might we hypothesise? In the

face of an inability to actualise one’s ideals, and the freedom which s/he exercises in

thought, how might we expect a theoretical subject to act? Freud tells us that in the face

of the loss of a cherished object or ideal, a subject’s inability to mourn leaves him/her

with two, equally flawed options: either an impotent, melancholic resignation, or a manic

hyper-activity. On the surface, the two options look dissimilar, and even opposed. They

are united – often in the history of one ‘bi-polar’ individual –only by the subject’s

continuing failure to accept the loss, and to reorient her/his subject position around this

acceptance. In the light of this Freudian observation, you can then see, what we would

expect of contemporary academic theory, if what we are dealing with were indeed – at

least in part – theoreticians’ shared inability to actualise the freedom their very thinking

presupposes, would be a propensity to lurch between two theoretical poles, one

melancholic, and the other manic. Adopting for a moment this as an hypothesis, then, let

us ask: if we looked, where could we see a melancholic pole?

Mourning and Melancholia: Deconstruction’s ‘Affirmation Without Affirmation’

Well: let us listen to Derrida, responding to Simon Critchley’s ‘Remarks’ on Derrida’s

relationship to Habermas’ valorisation of popular sovereignty, at least as a regulative

political ideal:

… to this inherited theological fantasy of sovereignty, I would oppose an

unconditionality without power. And it is there, in this ‘without power,’ that I

expose myself to the event, to the arrival of an event for which no performative

is ready. For which no legitimating convention is provided. And it is to this

arrival that the ethical question presents itself, that the call of the other, the

arrival of the other, of an event is a burden, an infinite responsibility. This is not

to say that I assume it myself. I cannot assume responsibility. I know simply that

I cannot assume the responsibility that overwhelms me. I am infinitely

overwhelmed as a finite being by a responsibility that cannot but be infinite – and

impossible to assume. But at least I think this impossibility, and it is there that I

think that responsibility should be, which is to say, infinite. All the same, I cannot

assume it …16

We are doubtless all emboldened by this robust thought.

Nevertheless, we should not move too quickly. One whole line of Derrida’s texts – and

of his proponents’ – after all, repeats that deconstruction is far from being simply

pessimistic, and hails from a fundamentally “positive response to an alterity which

necessarily calls, summons, motivates it.”17 Derrida variously calls this alterity a

“promise” or an invitation “viens” / “come”.18 Drawing the ground sharply from under

the feet of critics of deconstruction’s supposed normative indecision, he has even boldly

claimed that “deconstruction is justice” tout court, by invoking this fundamentally

‘affirmative’ response that deconstruction imputably enacts.19

However, as Thomas McCarthy has argued, the fact that such protestations have been

made on deconstruction’s behalf does not mean that they can be borne out, certainly in

anything like the – doubtlessly ‘metaphysical’ but also ethico-political – senses in which we

usually use the terms at issue (‘affirmative,’ ‘justice’).20 Here, I would in fact propose, it is

precisely the Kantian and transcendental heritage of Derrida’s argumentation that is

decisive.21 The fundamental ‘promise’ which would supposedly found the ethics of

deconstruction, and to which it would ‘positively’ respond, Derrida nevertheless avows to be

the fundamental pre-condition for the possibility of any sociable discourse. As Derrida explains:

The promise of which I shall speak will have always escaped the demand of

presence. It is older than I am or than we are. In fact, it renders possible every present

discourse on presence…22

Now: despite Derrideans’ ‘best intentions,’ and as Derrida knew well, it remains that the

efficacy of such a transcendental condition, which “opens the scene” of presence, is in

no way alignable with any ‘empirical’ (hence also ethicopolitical) moves that may be made

within this scene, however ‘positive,’ ‘neutral,’ or radically evil we might wish to deem

them. “Come [viens], opening the scene, could not become an object, a theme, a

representation,” as Derrida says.23 On these terms, that is – and however upsetting this

might sound – Adolf Hitler had always already responded to the ‘invitation’ or ‘promise’

from the wholly Other, no less than Mahatma Gandhi or George W Bush. As Derrida

clarifies in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” in terms which directly invoke Heidegger’s

Being and Time, “even if I decide to be silent … this silence remains a modality of speech,”

and in this way a response to the ‘promise’ of the Other that made it possible.24

If any normativity can be arrived at in such a (post-)transcendental problematic, then, it

can only arise at the level of a formal, reflexive attitude subjects take towards this

transcendental instance that deconstruction uncovers. Subject positions may

‘inauthentically’ forget their own conditions of possibility – this charge is the invariable

form of Heidegger’s deconstruktion of metaphysics.25 Other positions, by contrast, ‘own’

up to (eigen) or avow these conditions, and hence attain to authenticity (eigentlichkeit).

However, it is at precisely this point that Derrida moves one step beyond (at least the

early) Heidegger. If, as Heidegger argued, the conditions for the possibility of the field of

presence must always – as such – remain ‘other’ to this field, Derrida repeats that these

conditions can then in no way be ‘owned’ by any form of closed identity, self, or coherent discourse.

Hence, at the same time as Derrida talks of an ‘affirmation’ at the heart of

deconstruction, he can and has in other places not hesitated to affirm that deconstruction

– like every other discourse – is caught up in a fundamental impossibility that rends any

attempt to construct a coherent discursive position. Indeed, deconstruction – in its

affirmative response – is an infinite work of trying to ‘come to terms’ with, or – exactly – to

mourn, the impotence of discourse before this impossibility: “It remains that the

otherness of the other installs within any process of appropriation (even before the

opposition between introjecting or incorporation) a ‘contradiction’ …”26

The properly melancholic structure of this position27 is then evident. Having named the

impossibility of ever doing justice to the Other (and/or Others) that founds discourse,

Derrida nevertheless repeatedly ‘double codes’ this impossibility in an interdiction: one

must not attempt to represent the Other adequately, because one cannot.28 It should not surprise us

then, in turn, that when Critchley asks about Derrida’s invoked ‘other’s decision in me’

above, that Derrida replies obligingly that it is an “inconceivable” “absurdity”. We could

only in fact question this impeccable inference by referring to Derrida’s own notion of the

“spectral” “new International” in Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning

(sic.), and the New International. For, in a way that might have left Hegel or Kant recanting

on the title of ‘idealists,’ this ‘new international’ turns out to be a strange kind of ghost

that cannot even raise a political whimper, let alone rattle its chains, residing as we are

told it does in the attic of a future which can by definition never trouble the realm of the

possible.29

What Mourning? Deleuze and Guattari

Our hypothesis is of a ‘jargon of alterity’ that (cor)responds to a fundamental inability of

progressive theory to envisage any connection with political praxis. If it seems borne out

so far, where might we locate signs of mania in contemporary theory?

Keeping our heads, it seems we do not have to look far here either. Gilles Deleuze, as is

well known, never had much time for Jacques Derrida’s post-Heideggerian

deconstruction.30 For him, the ‘de-’ in ‘deconstruction’ still reeks too much of what he

throughout his career denigrated as ‘negativity,’ flirting at every moment with reading this

Hegelian notion as an empirical ‘downer’ that we might simply opt against, like an

outmoded brand of clothing.31 It is of course in one way a shame that, once the

revolutionaries hit the streets, they will have to know exactly what they are rebelling

against, why, and will also probably need to communicate with each other. Deleuze,

however, especially in his work with Félix Guattari, consistently refuses to be fazed by

such “dull and sad” considerations.32 What we could call the ‘syllogism’ of melancholia,

in response to loss, runs something like: ‘I have lost someone,’ via the devaluation of the

subject ‘I am worth nothing,’ to ‘thus nothing is worth anything’ and/=‘there is anyway

nothing worthwhile to do.’ Adapting the terms of Freud’s Schreber analysis to Deleuze

and Guattari’s concerns, however, we can say that the thought of these authors – and

certainly of many of their followers – sails much closer to the following, properly

maniacal, fallacy: ‘I have lost something,’ via the devaluation of the object ‘I have lost

nothing worthwhile,’ to ‘there is nothing to lose!’ and/= ‘I can do anything!’33

If Derrida works for the most part within language inherited from the philosophical

tradition, Deleuze and Guattari boldly set out to invent wholly new theoretical languages.

“Schizoanalysis rejects any notion of pre-traced destiny.”34 We have already cited one

instance of the type of “assemblage” that results,35 the opening passage of Anti-Oedipus.

Yet the rest of this text, and of its successor A Thousand Plateaus, ‘flows’ on in what is –

beneath the surface differences (see anon) – a profoundly repetitious manner. As a reading

of the two Volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia bears out in full:

All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, lines of flight

and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various types, bodies without

organs and their construction and selection, the plane of consistency, and in each

case the units of measure. Stratometers, deleometers, BwO units of density, BwO units of

convergence …36

Whether we hesitate to believe it or not, then, (and Manfred Frank questions it)

“something remarkable is making itself known” in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative

works.37 Philosophy, the authors clarify in What is Philosophy? is not meant to be

communicative. In a remarkable bidding up of philosophical romanticism, they

pronounce that philosophy is a species of creative activity. In line with this understanding

– and perhaps even more surprisingly – the authors also instruct us that neither should

the “concepts” of philosophy’s palate be bound by reference to anything external to

themselves.38 The ‘concept’, they stipulate, “has no reference, it is self-referential, it posits

itself and its object at the same time as it is created.”39

Whether Capitalism and Schizophrenia can be said to ‘prove’ such a singular viewpoint, what

is clear is that their “inspired” texts certainly produce(s) such (a) universe(s).40 As Brian

Massumi elucidates in the “Translator’s Foreword” to A Thousand Plateaus:

The concept has no subject or object other than itself ... Nomad thought replaces

the closed representation, x = x = not y (I = I = not you) with an open equation

… + y + x + a +… (… arm + brick + window +…).41

And so what we get in the texts is precisely such metonymic series’ – or “multiplicities” –

of “interlinked nominations that proliferate as the text shifts from one register of Being

to another.”42 To take only “Plateau VI”: its diverse ‘flows’ nevertheless very discernibly

‘coagulate’ around the following sequence of privileged terms: BwO (body without

organs), the spatium, “intensities,” field of immanence, plane of consistency, the plateau,

the nagual, the egg, and desire.43 To “lodge onto a stratum” from only pages 164-165:

The BwO is the egg … The egg is the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not

extension … The egg is the BwO … The BwO is a childhood block … the BwO

is precisely this intense germen where there are and cannot be either parents or

children … Thus the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a body … the

indefinite article is the conductor of desire … The BwO is desire: it is that which

one desires and by which one desires … it is the plane of consistency or the field

of immanence of desire …44

And so on.

We cannot address here the question that poses itself at every point as to the desire to

represent the world in this de-anthropomorphised way, or “if it were worth proving, how

even the images of this language open themselves up to worlds of repression and to the

spitefully overcompensated denial of pleasure.”45 If we nevertheless do stop and consider

for a moment how these ‘rhizomatic assemblages’ are constructed, it cannot escape us

that all the authors’ metonymic prolificness discernibly stands to conceal – as it turns

around – what are in fact a very basic set of “dualities” or binarisms.46 As Clemens notes:

… though they are not strictly ‘the same’ – such concepts as the ‘rhizome’, the

‘Body without Organs’ (BwO), the ‘molecular’, the ‘intensity’, ‘becomings’ and so

on, all find themselves thoroughly imbricated, and arrayed against their others,

the ‘arborescent’, the ‘organism’, the ‘molar’, the ‘quantitative’, ‘history’, and so

on.47

Moreover, this series of oppositions is all over-coded by an unexamined normative

principle: “a classically anarchistic a priori … [that] motivates and authorises the entire

series of meditations on everything under the sun.”48 If with Derrida the emphasis of

‘alterity’ falls on the adjective alterite, in other words, with Deleuze and Guattari the

jargon of alterity moves in the direction of the verb form ‘to alter,’ which in turn gets

elevated to an end in itself. An everywhere-evident, indeed “Manichean”49 valuation of

becoming over being, movement over stability, in fact prevails over the entire Deleuzo-

Guattarian construction. Its force – which as Zizek comments, operates “in different

guises (the Nomad versus the State, the molecular versus the molar, the schizo versus the

paranoiac, etc.)”50 – is indeed that which produces whatever ‘radical’ appearance the texts

are able to sustain. The terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s very attempt to deny this type of

charge in A Thousand Plateaus are instructive. If we were tempted, when reading Anti-

Oedipus, to identify the positive value ‘good’ with the series of indeterminate, antinomic,

and formless terms (‘nomad’, ‘becomings’, ‘multiplicity’, ‘the map’ …) over the ‘bad’ pole

(‘the state’ ‘history’, ‘unity’, ‘tracings’ …), our authors reassure us that “one can never

posit a dualism or dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of good and bad.”51 And the

reason? Even the most rudimentary opposition such as ‘good’-‘bad’ is still much too stable

and reified, as they instruct us. By contrast, we are urged to make one more effort to

destabilise things: “good and bad are only the products of an active and temporary selection,

which must be renewed.”52

It is not then just that Capitalism and Schizophrenia sets about re-clothing the entire

vitalistic problematic dating back beyond Nietzsche to Schopenhaur (“Deleuze’s

remobilisation of the old humanist-idealist topic of regression from the ‘reified’ result to

its process of production …”53), although enthusiasts are well reminded that this

‘progressive’ paradigm has itself a very ‘multiple’ political history.54 Deleuze and Guattari

at every turn evince in the most striking fashion what Terry Eagleton has dubbed

‘pessimistic libertarianism.’55 Beneath the Nietzschean, “unlimited saying of Yes and

Amen” that officially governs Capitalism and Schizophrenia, that is to say, it is easy to

discern what is a “strict” – but epistemologically facile as well as politically paralysing –

“identification of authority with organisation, and organisation with oppression.”56

Mutatis mutandis, the emptiness of any ethico-political prescription the text is then able to

muster – forced as it is to eschew any form of organisation, dominant or oppressed,

fascist, capitalist or socialist, etc. – must accordingly become apparent:

Lodge yourself onto a stratum, experiment with the opportunity it offers, find an

advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialisation,

possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and

there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of

land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one

succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing congregated flow to pass and escape

and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO.57

It should surely go without saying that, unless we take this literally – and whether anyone

could take them in anything like a determinate sense is the issue – this ‘prescription’ can

mean everything to every (wo)man, insofar as it manifestly means nothing at all. It is certainly

here in point that the question of why? – as in ‘why then becoming over being?’, ‘why make myself

a body without organs?’ etc. – does not cease not to be asked by Deleuze and Guattari. The

reasons, again, are revealing, as well as deceptively complex. Firstly, their radicalisation of

Nietzsche’s critique of ‘transcendence’ not only negatively codes all ‘oppressive’

conceptual, political, cultural … (viz. any unified) orders. It also deprives desire of its

counterfactual potential, whereby some – or any – future (hence ‘lacking’) state or value

could be posited as an ‘ought’ to be achieved. At this point, in what is a classically

modern predicament (witness economic rationalism), the only language available to

Deleuze and Guattari is one of functionality, that addresses not why but how whatever

happens to be present works:

We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier, we will not look

for anything or understand anything in it. We will ask what it functions with, in

connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in

which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and what

bodies without organs it makes its own converge.58

Secondly, in “Plateau VI,” our guide to “How (sic.) to Make Yourself a Body Without

Organs,” the very formality (as in ‘without substance’) of this prescription does in fact

cause the authors a crucial hesitation. In spite of what we might have hoped, the authors

explain: “you don’t reach the BwO and its plane of consistency by wildly destratifying.”59

In strict parallel with Kant’s notion in the second Critique that the perfectly good act is

not achievable by a finite subject – and so notably close also to Derrida and his infinite

indebtedness to the Other – Deleuze and Guattari now qualify that the achievement of

this organ-less plane of pure intensities is in any event impossible: “you never reach the

Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit.”60 But

does this mean then that perhaps this limit might not be a worthwhile goal? Not at all.

Again precisely following the logic of Kant’s practical philosophy, what is impossible is

not for that reason for Deleuze and Guattari undesirable. It just becomes – like Kant’s

perfectly good will – a regulative ideal. In what stands as an almost Aristotelian moment in

A Thousand Plateaus – as well as, incidently, sage advice to friends out for a big night – we

are advised to proceed moderately: “and how necessary caution is, the art of dosages,

since overdose is a danger. You don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a fine file …

you have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn …”61

Conclusion / Provocations:

What then should we say concerning the charge of a ‘jargon of alterity’? We have singled

out two instances of how much of today’s ‘radical’ theory tends towards the extremes of

melancholic resignation (eg: Derrida) or manic triumphalism (eg: Deleuze and Guattari).

The point of this provocation (and doubtless today we should say ‘intervention’ or

‘project’) is not that we should not read this theory, as if it can have nothing to say to us. It

is surely such ‘all or nothing’ ways of thinking that critical theory should set itself against.

We have in fact been deploying in this paper many of the best motifs associated with

what has come to be called ‘post-structuralism’ in the Anglophone world. We could even

claim an inspiration here from A Thousand Plateaus, commenting on Chomsky’s

linguistics:

Our criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract but …

that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine

that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements,

to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social

field.62

It is just that, as Manfred Frank comments, “for the sake of several thought-provoking

ideas in Anti-Oedipus, it is too bad that their ‘discursive’ medium makes them inaccessible

to the reader …”63 And our case is stronger than this. We are claiming that the particular

form (or ‘medium’) in which much contemporary theory is presented is not contingent to

its message. To put things in psychoanalytic terms, these evident formal particularities

give symptomatic expression to impasses that bedevil it at the level of its content. To be

clear: there can be no question that an emancipatory concern for elements marginalised

by predominant socio-political and intellectual realities animates the leading statements

of this theory. Its crucial forbears, Heidegger’s ‘overcoming of metaphysics’ and

Nietzsche’s ‘transvaluation of values’, transfigure motifs dating back beyond the critique

of theology carried out from Kant, through Hegel and Feuerbach to Marx, to at least the

French enlightenment, when “the word ‘philosophy’ did not call to mind logic and

epistemology so much as attacks on the Church hierarchy and on an inhuman justice

system…”64

Yet one has only to attend a conference in cultural studies, comparative literature, or

continental philosophy to observe how this emancipatory socio-political impulse has

increasingly found a substitute outlet at the level of the text, and more or less insulated

hermeneutic disputes. Everywhere metonymies of the sublime and inassimilable

(‘alterity’) abound: not only DeleuzoGuattarian ‘lines of flight,’ Derridean ‘x’s without x’

(‘democracies without democracy,’ etc.), but Levinasian ‘Others’ and ‘infinities,’

boundless Nietzschean affirmations, incommensurable Lyotardian differends, and –

more recently – amorphous HardtoNegrian ‘multitudes.’ Underlying this language,

moreover, it is impossible not to discern the invariable a priori value orientation we

observed in Deleuze and Guattari, in favour of the atypical or different as such, and/or

any movements (‘alter-ations’) that would produce it, presumably – or exactly – without

limit.

The case for a ‘jargon of alterity’ turns on the claim that this orientation, however well

intentioned, is unsustainable at the level of political praxis.65 Its ceaseless ‘political’

invocation within academic theory can hence only itself be a question-worthy

phenomenon. To put it in a maxim: there where key theoretical formulations are

increasingly empty of possible referential content, what we need indeed to ask is how this

type of discourse works in its wider socio-political context(s), and the socio-political effects that

it sustains. Let me close then by proposing two further provocations, in this vein.

Firstly: perhaps Adorno’s harshest charge in The Jargon of Authenticity is that the language

of the existentialists functions as a jargon precisely insofar as it conceals from its

proponents the complicity of their own statements (or ‘enunciations’) with the

‘bourgeois’ system they officially opposed. For Adorno, that is to say, what is most

worthy of critical attention is not the existential singularity of individual ‘daseins’ that,

like the proverbial ghost, nomadically elude the systemic machine. It is how the machine

serves to produce, and literally to capitalise upon, individuals’ sense of being such

irreducible singularities. Precisely insofar as it abstracts ‘concern’ (sorge) from these

systemic conditions, Adorno comments:

the jargon [of authenticity] becomes practicable along the whole scale, reaching

from sermon to advertisement. In the medium of the concept the jargon

becomes surprisingly similar to the habitual practices of advertising.66

In a similar way, then, what surely is most deeply questionable about the contemporary

emphasis on alterity, is that we simply do not need to read the most advanced statements in

avant garde theory to be confronted at every turn in later capitalism by injunctions to (for

example) ‘dare for more’ (Pepsi), ‘enjoy!’ (Coca Cola), ‘think outside the square’ (Freedom

Furniture), etc. In a way that Adorno could scarcely have imagined, in fact, today’s

advertising has self-consciously taken to invoking images of dissent no less ‘affirmative’

than contemporary theory, in order to sell products.67 To quote Thomas Frank’s

landmark study, The Conquest of Cool:

For all the sophistication of recent cultural theory, many of its practitioners still

tend to identify the sins of consumer order as ‘homogeneity’ or an obsessive

logocentrism. In the advertising industry, that order's primary ideologist,

however, these values were everywhere under attack by the mid-1960s. … the

advertising industry began to recognise creativity, even more than science or

organisation or standardisation or repetition or regulation, as a dynamic element

of advertising and, ultimately, of the permanent revolution of capitalism itself.68

Secondly: in “Plateau IV,” “November 20, 1923: Postulates on Linguistics,” Deleuze and

Guattari radicalize the emphasis on the performative dimension of language emphasised by

the English ‘ordinary language’ philosophers, chiefly Austin and Searle. “The elementary

unit of language – the statement – is the order-word”, they now instruct us.69 As well as

being a vehicle to transmit information, to speak is also to position oneself, and to be

positioned, in relation to others, socio-political authorities and institutions. The

illustrative limit case of this performative dimension of language is passwords: words

whose reference is a matter of complete indifference, but knowledge of which serves to

separate those subjects included in a group from all of those who are outside. What

Adorno directs us towards in his theory of jargon, in these terms, is something that Don

Watson might arguably have given more emphasis to in his recent book on similar

concerns.70 This is the insight that, there where words are elevated above the contexts

which gave them their meanings, this is because they are coming to function more and more like

passwords (or ‘order-words’) for those who use them. Although emptied out at the level of their

content, that is, the truth of the jargon rather concerns the level of form: the very fact that

some people can use them, while others – the outsiders – can not.

If we are to apply Deleuze and Guattari’s almost-Foucaultian position on language here

to contemporary theory itself, what though are we to say? In such troubling surrounds as

would-be progressive humanities academics continue to face, the function that generating

more or less closed theoretical languages can have is surely evident. On the one hand, in

a socio-political context where the wider Left seems to be in almost terminal decline,

there is the unquestionable ‘kick’ that practitioners are afforded through adopting jargon

of alterity. Undertaking Derridean or Deleuzian analyses allows practitioners – without

having to change anything in the external world – the gratifying sense of daringly defying

or subverting the entire history of Western metaphysics, or philosophy, or dialectics, or

modernity, or the disciplinary / technoscientific / Oedipal / capitalist order (‘x + y + z

…’). On the other hand, within the more specific context of the tertiary academy,

increasing ‘economic rationalisation’ means that more and more importance accrues to

any markers that distinguish a discipline, and can accordingly function to justify its

continuing institutional independence. In this context, an evident ‘strategic’ value can

attach itself to the generation of more or less closed and ‘singular’ theoretical languages,

into which – in rough parallel with the natural sciences – students have to be painstaking

initiated.

The point, however, is that we should always remain aware at what cost the tentative and

increasingly formalistic ‘freedom of thought’ afforded us by adopting any jargon is

bought. As Deleuze and Guattari specify, to the extent that language ceases to open

itself out to contestation and debate,71 it tends to give birth to:

rather than common sense, a faculty for the centralisation of information, … an

abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-

words… we see this in police or government announcements, which … say very

clearly what should be observed or retained. The indifference to any kind of

credibility by these pronouncements often verges on provocation ...72

More than this, much ‘new Left’ theory flirts with actively eschewing the concerns of the

public sphere, and the – doubtless mundane or in today’s world even sad – task of trying

to envisage concrete ways of unifying theory and praxis. Strategically, the cost here is that

we come to justify in spades the charge of the new right that the academic ‘elite’ is out of

touch, self-serving, and finally nihilistic. Or, to quote Gilles Deleuze one more time, and

his properly idiotic (from the Greek ta idiotos, meaning ‘private’) ‘defence’ of his work

against a ‘harsh critic’:

We’re well aware that Anti-Oedipus is still full of compromises, too full of things

that are still scholarly ... So we’ll change, we already have, it’s all going

wonderfully. Some people think we’re going to continue along the same lines,

some even thought we were going to set up a fifth psychoanalytic group. Yuck.

Our minds are on other things that are less public and much more fun. We’re

going to stop compromising, because we don’t need to anymore. And we’ll

always find the allies we want, or who want us.73

1 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated by Helen

Zimmern and Walter Kaufmann (at http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/bgept7.htm

accessed 1/12/04), Fragment 224. 2 Manfred Frank, What is Neostructuralism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 342.

3 Theodore Adorno, The Jargon of Alterity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Routledge:

London, 2003). 4 Adorno, The Jargon of Alterity, 5.

5 Adorno, The Jargon of Alterity, 4.

6 Adorno, The Jargon of Alterity, 6.

7 Heidegger quoted in Adorno, The Jargon of Alterity, 44.

8 Adorno, The Jargon of Alterity, 45-6.

9 Jacques Derrida, “By Force of Mourning,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (Winter 1996) Excerpt on

http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v22/v22n2.derrida.html <accessed 15 May 2004>. 10

Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press,

1995), 7. 11

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R Lane

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 3. 12

Deleuze, Negotiations translated by Martin Joughin (Coumbia University Press, 1995), 32 13

Adorno, The Jargon of Alterity, viii. 14

Marcuse, Herbert. Negations (Penguin: London, 1968), 98. 15

Heidegger, Being and Time translated by J. Macquarie et al (Blackwell: UK, 1983): p. 317 / H272-

273. 16

Jacques Derrida, “Performative Powerlessness,” Constellations 7, no. 4 (December 2000), 468. 17

Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” dialogue with Richard Kearney, in Richard

Kearney, Dialogues With Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester University Press, 1984),

118. 18

Jacques Derrida, Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Howard Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany:

SUNY Press, 1992) 84; Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” trans. C Porter, in Reading

De Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1989) 56. See also John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington &

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997) 26-31; 95-101. 19

Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” 11 Cardozo Law. Review.

919 (1990), 945 (italics mine). 20

Thomas McCarthy, “The Politics of the Ineffable: Derrida’s Deconstructionism,” in Hermeneutics

and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 21

Cf. chapter one of Peter Dews, The Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987). 22

Derrida, Derrida and Negative Theology, 84, italics mine. 23

Jacques Derrida, “Le Toucher: Touch/to touch him,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Paragraph 16, no. 2

(1993),165. 24

Derrida, Derrida and Negative Theology, 85. 25

Heidegger, 1983: #6-7; #18b-21 26

Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Abraham and Torok,” trans. Barbara Johnson,

Georgia Review 31 (Spring 1977), 71. 27

Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity (London: Verso, 1999). 28

As – for example – the dialogic partner in his “Pas” asks, invoking the “other shore” [autre rive] or

“event” of the Other to whom deconstruction would respond: “But is one able, is one obliged, is it

necessary to approach the other shore (cette autre rive)? Would it not cease at once to be other? Would

the event have arrived yet? Would it not be struck by interdiction (ne pas) by its very arrival?…”

Jacques Derrida, Parages (Galilee, Paris: 1986) 66. 29

Cf. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New

International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge 1994) 52-54; Caputo, The Prayers and Tears

of Jacques Derrida, 131-132. 30

Deleuze, Negotiations translated by Martin Joughin (Coumbia University Press, 1995), 136. 31

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 8-9. 32

Deleuze, 1995, 22. 33

Cf. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey,

Penguin Freud Library Volume 11, ed. Angela Richards (Penguin: London, 1991). 34

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 13.

35

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4. 36

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4. 37

Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, 321. 38

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 8; Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (Routledge,

London: 2000), 24. 39

Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 22; Patton, Deleuze and the Political, 23-26. 40

Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 3. 41

Brian Massumi, “Translator’s Foreward” to Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, xiii. 42

Justin Clemens, Romanticism and Contemporary Theory (Ashgate: London, 2003), 136. 43

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 150-165. BwO (body without organs), from 150; the

spatium, from 153; “intensities,” 153; field of immanence, from 154; plane of consistency, from 154;

the plateau, 158; the nagual, 162; the egg, 153 and 164; and desire, 165. 44

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 164-165. 45

Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, 327. 46

Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, 334; Zizek, Slavoj. Organs Without Bodies (Routledge: London,

2004), 28. 47

Clemens, Romanticism and Contemporary Theory, 136. 48

Clemens, Romanticism and Contemporary Theory, 148. 49

Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, 328. 50

Zizek, 2004, 28. 51

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9. 52

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9, italics mine. 53

Zizek, 2004, 28. 54

“I will go so far as to assert that the phantasm of the savage flow of craving and of it discursive

subdual is the foundation of the minimal consensus of the counter-enlightenment, which, as we know,

was by no means procapitalist and friendly to the bourgeoisie. Thomas Mann, in his Doctor Faustus,

called Nazism ‘the completely unbourgeois adventure.’” Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, 323. It is

significant that no post-war theorists of ‘the Left’ in Germany have had recourse to this vitalist

paradigm. In that nation, it is tied most closely not only to Nietzsche, but in the twentieth century, to

figures like Oswald Spengler and Ernst Junger. Cf. Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The

Intellectual Romance with Fascism: from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University

Press), 160. 55

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Blackwell: London, 1997), 119-121. 56

Clemens, Romanticism and Contemporary Theory, 148; Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, 341. 57

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 161. 58

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4. 59

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 150. 60

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 150. 61

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 160. 62

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7. 63

Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, 329. 64

Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory, trans. Matthew J Connell et al (New York: Continuum, 1982),

271. 65

To quote Albert Camus, “chaos is also a form of servitude,” insofar as it defaults to the rule of the

stronger. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1956), 71. The

maximal appreciation of difference then presupposes the defense of some form of law. This law will in

turn have to defend some form of prohibition of the form, familiar since Mills-ean liberalism: “each

difference shall be defended and encouraged that does not infringe upon the right of other differences

to similarly be expressed.” Compare, for example, Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 119-120. 66

Adorno, The Jargon of Alterity, 35. 67

Matthew Sharpe, “The New Marketing and the Discourse of the University”, in R. Grigg and J.

Clemens (eds.) Lacan’s Seminar XVII (Duke University Press, USA: 2005 [upcoming]). 68

Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1997), 89. 69

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 76-77. 70

Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (Random House: Australia, 2003). 71

Cf. Deleuze, 1995, 130. 72

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 76. 73

Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, 9.