fear of a blank planet
gregory j. seigworth
millersville university
Eight Points in Pursuit of Absolute Fabulation1
1 October 2000


"Culture is what we make it Yes it is
Now is the time
To invent"

-- from "#1 Must-Have"
Sleater-Kinney
All Hands on the Bad One
(2000, Kill Rock Stars Records)

1. "I-I-I can't say it."
"I-I-I can't say it" was the frustrated, foot stomping, stammering response that our daughter Kendall (about two to three years old at the time) would often give to a question to which she could not supply any immediate answer. Not "I don't know" but "I-I-I can't say it" -- as if she was vexed less by the fact that the answer didn't reside within the realm of knowledge or immediate recall but, rather, that she hadn't yet acquired the capacity that made it possible to physically speak it.

2. "I lie."
In an essay written about the work of Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault begins by arguing that, in the modern era, one should really try to start over with the tradition of Western Philosophy (1987, pp.9-13). Instead of "I think," Foucault wonders what might happen if we were to begin again: this time with "I speak." As it turned out, "I think" only served to bend philosophical discourse back upon itself as the reverberating interior space of reflective thought, the perpetual looping and infinite regress of thinking about thought.

To be sure, "I speak" (on its own) conveys a rather distinctive emptiness -- what Foucault calls the void of its "contentless slimness" (p.11). But Foucault asserts that in its barren self-evidence and neutrality, "I speak" also sets itself more distinctly outward rather than inward, causing discourse to flee on all of its sides at once, undeterred by any immediate notion of addressee, truthfulness, or representation. (However, of course, pertinent questions almost always arrive soon enough, such as: "who speaks?" "what is said?" "what opportunity or occasion allows this moment of speech?" "who listens and what is the adequacy or equivalency available to response?" etc). Still, in the slimness of its moment, "I speak" creates a distance and dispersion that tends to leave the status of the "I" far back in the wake of a "speak" -- a "speak" that spreads forth, borne along as if ripples of a surface stretching to the furthest edge of a horizon where it doesn't, finally, so much disappear or drop over this horizon as curl under it.2

Foucault adds that the statement that most makes "I speak" vacillate is "I lie." As an utterance or event that no longer immediately coincides with itself in the way that "I speak" does, "I lie" creates a disjunctive space, a space that opens up, not by bending back on itself in reflection, but in a split that dissimulates. With "I lie," there is an incorporeal transformation, a kind of skip in place as the utterance cracks open into a fictive space. "The fictitious," writes Foucault, "is never in things or in people, but in the impossible verisimilitude of what lies between them: encounters, the proximity of what is most distant, the absolute dissimulation in our very midst" (pp.23-24). And that's one of the reasons why Foucault argues that critical approaches to the contemporary moment might be best reinitiated through fiction.

3. Foucault, as Blanchot Imagined Him (Maybe You Do Too)
In a section called "Who is me today?" from a response essay to Foucault, Blanchot (1987) details the reasons why it is often so hard to pin Foucault's work down to any single area of study. Blanchot says:
Do we know who he is, since he doesn't call himself either a sociologist or a historian or a structuralist or a thinker or a metaphysician? When he engages in minute analysis dealing with medical science, modern punishment, the multiple uses of micropowers, the disciplinary investment of bodies, or, finally, the immense field extending from the testimony of the guilty to the confessions of the just and the endless monologues of psychoanalyses, one wonders whether he is selecting certain facts accorded the status of paradigms, or tracing historical continuities from which might be evolved the diverse forms of human knowledge, or finally, whether he is merely strolling at random in the field of the known--or deliberately unknown--events, choosing them skillfully in order to remind us that all objective knowledge remains doubtful, that the pretensions of subjectivity are illusory. Did he not confide to Lucette Finas [in an interview]: "I am fully aware that I have never written anything other than fictions." Or, in other words, I am a fabulist composing fables whose morals one would be unwise to wait for. But Foucault would not be Foucault if he did not then immediately supply the emendation or nuance: "But I believe it is possible to make fictions function within truth." Thus the notion of truth is not at all dismissed, any more than the idea of the subject or the inquiry into the constitution of man as subject are lost from sight (pp.93-94).
4. Powers of the false (Insistentialism)
Gilles Deleuze -- particularly in interviews toward the end of his life (see, for instance, an interview with Antonio Negri in Negotiations) and in his cinema books (especially Cinema 2: The Time-Image) -- remarks that, since "utopia" has regularly tended to designate a static thought-representation of an ideal place (or no-place), Henri Bergson's concept of "fabulation" should be taken up and given a political meaning: largely by attending to that which is common to a people and to art.

Working as a fabulist means to discover that sliver or wedge (in its fullest and most dissimulating, contentless slimness) -- within and across the interstices and lingering insistences of any number of true-false dichotomizations: a sliver or wedge that might be pried open or pulled uniquely together in order to create a set of conditions that will tip from what is now impossible or false toward the threshold of a decidedly more palpable potentiality beyond true and false. Fabulations are false to the extent that one is writing in the fictive space of what doesn't actually exist as yet, a people or a world to come. Almost inevitably, then, the activity of fabulation is untimely.

Besides a fictioning that transpires between an art and a people, Deleuze describes how a fabulist usually works in two modes: as diagrammatician (fabulist cartographer / genealogist) and as symptomatologist (often taking the form of diagnostic novelist) (Lambert, 1998). Again, the point is precisely to raise what is usually deemed as false --within a moral-juridical opposition of true-false -- to a higher power than what is presently circumscribed by (representational / identificatory) modes of truth.3 The fabulist operates on a sometimes precariously groundless ground where subsists the affective-potential of a missing collective, persisting (insisting) so often on the deepest interior of the inside of the social while, at the same time, outside the true-false equation, in "the proximity of what is most distant." A fabulation is a collective imagining created within the untimeliness, not of existence but, rather, of insistence.

As Roland Barthes (1957/1972) noted - seemingly so long ago (but so close) -- in his essay "Myth Today," myth on the Left "lacks a major faculty, that of fabulizing" (p.148). But the Left still needs such a faculty, now as much as ever: an absolute fabulation that requires the transduction (the conversion of one form of energy into another) of what insists / persists / subsists on the outside and within the nooks and crannies of any seemingly all-encompassing true-false coupling, insisting / persisting / subsisting as a force for change or modulation, as on-going capacity to affect and be affected. In the untimely space of a fabulatory falsification, a people to come.

5. What Children Say
"This won't hurt you." "You heard me." Jotted down by my mother in my "baby book," there were the first two fully understandable sentences that I spoke aloud as a child. I am certain, of course, that I had virtually no idea what I was saying when I spoke either of these sentences. At one level, I might just as well have said, "I speak." I wasn't uttering particular words (and their meaning) so much as their sensation, their feel, their accompanying thresholds and boundaries. Or, to put it another way, while these words are not exactly empty of signification, they do, more pointedly, call attention to what moves in the contextual zone of parent and child and their relation to an ever-unfolding, ever-enveloping outside. These two sentences, now that I think about them, seem to chart a course along different vectors through the affective territory perpetually being constituted and reconstituted alongside nearly any and all child/parent actions & interactions: reassurance ("This won't hurt you") and reprimand ("You heard me" -- as in, "Don't do that again! You heard me"). I was not speaking words so much as their variable, divergent trajectories.

Both sentences enfold a particular relationship of a body (and bodies) to space and movement. After all, these are statements that one utters at the moment when things press too close to a body ("this won't hurt you") and when a body verges upon a dangerous territory or practice ("you heard me"): two lines on a child's map that envelop (in vocal form) the forces that attend to nearness and distance and the movements that can eclipse them. Through the virtual forces circulating around a voice (as the visceral register of a relation external to its individual terms: parent/child), there is an affective constellation forged at the intersection of language and bodies and, thus, arising with the continuous setting and resetting of thresholds. In an essay called "What Children Say," Deleuze (1993/1997) writes that "there is never a moment when children are not already plunged into an actual milieu in which they are moving about, and about which the parents as person simply play the role of openers or closers of doors, guardians of thresholds, connectors and disconnectors of zones. The parents always occupy a position in the world that is not derived from them" (p.62).

6. I would prefer not to.
The essay that follows "What Children Say" in Critique and Clinic (the book that sets out the projects of diagrammatician and symptomologist most directly), Deleuze writes about Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." As it so happens, Bartleby has had a bit of a critical resurgence recently, appearing not only in Deleuze's Critique and Clinic but also in the final chapter of Giorgio Agamben's recent Potentialities and at a turning point in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire.

Along with the affective contagion of Bartleby's "I'd prefer not to," Deleuze (1993/1997) writes that, particularly in Melville's work here, one finds that
. . . even in the midst of its failure, the American revolution continues to send out its fragments, always making something take flight on the horizon … always trying to break through the wall, to take up the experiment once again, to find a brotherhood in this enterprise, a sister in this becoming, a music in its stuttering language, a pure sound and unknown chords in language itself. . . . Even in his failure, the writer remains all the more the bearer of a collective enunciation, which no longer forms part of literary history, and preserves the rights of a people to come, or of a human becoming. A schizophrenic vocation: even in his catatonic or anorexic state, Bartleby is not the patient but the doctor of a sick America, the Medicine-Man, the new Christ or the brother to us all (pp.89-90).
For his part, Giorgio Agamben (1999) reads Melville's Bartleby in terms of his refusal ("I prefer not to") and, especially, how it also bears along with it the "potential to." As Agamben argues, "An experience of potentiality as such is possible only if potentiality is always also potential not to do" (p.245). And, then, Agamben elaborates upon the different modalities of this potential-to or potential-not-to:
There is a potentiality . . . that resembles the condition of a child who may certainly one day learn to write but doesn't yet know anything about writing. Then there is a potentiality . . . that belongs to the child who has begun to write with pen and ink and knows how to form the first letters. And there is, finally, a complete or perfect potentiality that belongs to the scribe who is in full possession of the art of writing in the moment in which he does not write. Later, in Arabic tradition, creation was thus likened to an act of writing; the agent or poetic intellect, which illuminates the passive intellect and allows it to pass into actuality, is therefore identified with an angel, whose name is "Pen" [Qalam] (pp.246-247).
Agamben concludes that, if indeed Melville's Bartleby can be understood as "a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not" (p.270).

While Hardt and Negri, in Empire, don't exactly see Bartleby as a new Messiah or Christ-figure, they do see him as occupying -- in his slim, fictitious space -- the site of a threshold. His refusal of every form of voluntary servitude, they argue, situates Bartleby at the level of ontological purity. But his "I'd prefer not to" can only serve as a beginning. The refusal, whether divinely empty or brimming over with potential, must not remain in this state of perpetual suspension but must tip toward a revolutionary becoming. Hardt and Negri (2000) write:
What we need is to create a new social body, which is a project that goes beyond refusal. Our lines of flight, our exodus, must be constituent and create a real alternative. Beyond the simple refusal, or as part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of life and, above all, a new community (p.204).
So, yes, each of these works give their attention to Bartleby in order to wrestle with how the status of refusal might link to different forms of collective potential within our contemporary conjuncture: how to view/use refusal as affirmation, how to affirm within the act of refusal, how to move beyond refusal. Each, in its particular way, endeavors to draw out the fabulatory affects available in this slim, fictive act of refusal.

In this regard, I find Empire especially stirring in its attempt. However, (and this may be just a consequence of my own reading conjuncture), despite its best intentions while I do find Hardt/Negri's Empire to be a remarkable and crucially important work, I also cannot help but feel that this book is sometimes missing something. Although it is hard to put a finger on, I believe that this "something" has to do, somewhat paradoxically, with a certain layer of specificity (for such a hefty book, it manages to float and drift off by times4) along with a slightly more sustained faith in its own fabulatory potential (this would require a much longer parenthetical focussed on, for instance, how the category of the "possible" obliquely enters into Empire's otherwise Spinozist ontology). And, admittedly, some of my ambivalence and hesitation about completely embracing Empire could also be due to the way that it seems to have neatly fulfilled the prophecy that Meaghan Morris (1998) offers in the epilogue of her Too Soon, Too Late when she writes:
As the sense of history moving with grim necessity into bloody repetition becomes insistent in global media, I can understand why some writers long for the benign, familiar closure of that stirring manifesto, that singular avant-garde gesture, that great book to initiate a "whole new era" (p.232).
And never mind that, according to Slavoj Zizek (in a backcover blurb from the book), this "whole new era" initiated by Empire signals the ringing of "the death bell . . . for pseudo-radical Cultural Studies."

But, here, the pseudo-radical image that I can't seem to escape these days is one that skitters off (as Zizek might) to the final scene -- which is also the opening scene -- of David Fincher's 1999 film, Fight Club: the revolution that the schizzy-split Ed Norton character accidentally sets in motion, as he (impossibly alive) and Helena Bonham-Carter's character hold each other up, standing on the top floor of an empty skyscraper to watch five towers at the financial center of the Western world light up, explode and, then, disappear from their horizon of vision. Or, maybe, it is not so much disappear or drop from the horizon as curl under it. Or, anyway, the effect of that moment is breathtakingly unsettling. This sinking and jittering feeling is caused in part, I'd imagine, by the accumulated subversive faux-subversions of the film's narrative & visual effects. But it is also got something to do with the uncanny way that the Pixies' "Where is My Mind?" snakes in beneath this scene, and then rises up (as a voice howling, a drumbeat stutter-kicking, a guitar line slowly whiplashing) as Black Francis sings about having "your feet in the air and head on the ground." And, watch out, because with all this "spinning out of control . . . your head will collapse if there's nothing in it."

But just as rapidly, somewhere around here, once again my soundtrack switches (even if the film's doesn't) to REM's "Daysleeper" from their album Up. And one finds a similar swerve by John Sutherland (2000), in a wonderfully brutal review of Roger Scruton's "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture" from the London Review of Books, where -- after a couple of perfunctory paragraphs toward an actual review -- he shifts to REM's Up and never really bothers to comes back to flog Scruton much more. Like me, Sutherland is transfixed most of all by the song "Daysleeper." Straightforward in its sound (by the conventions of REM's canon anyway), it's nicely fabulatory in its lyrical narrative. Here are some of the words (with the usual disclaimer about what's lost in the absence of music5):
receiving dept., 3 a.m.
staff cuts have socked up the overage
directives are posted
no callbacks, complaints.
everywhere is calm

Hong Kong is present
Taipei awakes
all talk of circadian rhythm

I see today with a newsprint fray
my night is colored headache grey
daysleeper

the bull and the bear are marking
their territories
they're leading the blind with
their international glories

I'm the screen, the blinding light
I'm the screen, I work at night

[. . .] I cried the other night
I can't even say why
fluorescent flat caffeine lights
its furious balancing
As Sutherland observes, the listener gets an image here of someone "fantasizing a lonely existence over global territory, someone who thinks his observations make the stars keep their courses in the heavens." Or, that is, sort of how I tend to sometimes imagine Fredric Jameson. But, then, I wonder: is there any other way to fabulize the flows and -scapes of the globe without coming off as a little mad? After all, as Deleuze (1993/1997) argued, one sometimes needs the invention of a little "delirium" that "forces it [language] out of its usual furrows" (p.5). Perhaps, too, this offers some further indication of how the fabulist might proceed: not by fantasizing lonely existence but by fabulizing collective insistence.

"Daysleeper" strikes me as an apt inheritor of Melville's Bartleby -- now, the subject of a "new America" as a society of control: where it is no longer, as Foucault once described it, a disciplinary society of enclosures but, in Deleuze's view, a society of continuous meshworks and infinite modulations. And while it may be just the proximity of the song's title "Daysleeper" to "day trader" (and, yeah sure, "daytripper"), I tend to hear its central character as a young-ish stockbroker perched on the edge of a breakdown, spinning, all-but-spent, prone to crying jags but otherwise empty, destined for eminent collapse (head or market, same thing). Whereas Bartleby spends his days and nights (since he never leaves the office) standing in silent refusal behind a screen, "Daysleeper's" protagonist (spending his nights battling a dull caffeine headache and gravity and the incessant cycling of 24-hour financial rhythms) is the screen, involuntarily pulsing with the beat of world markets (not unlike those recent U.S. television commercials that show a stock market ticker running across, wrapping around, passing through the bodies of people going about the course of their everyday lives).

While disciplinary societies are based on enclosures and discrete molds and, thus, any moment of refusal can be enacted on one side or another of a wall (or screen), a person in a control society "undulates, moving among a continuous range of different orbits" (Deleuze, 1990/1995, p.180) and, consequently, the act of refusal is newly complicated, immanently implicated. This resonates with what Deleuze and Guattari (1975/1986) had earlier found insightful in Kafka's work: "If I am not the typist, I am at least the paper that the key strikes. If I am no longer the machine's mechanic, I am at least the living material with which it deals. Maybe this is a much more essential place, one that is closer to the gears than is the mechanic . . ." (p.56). I am the screen, the blinding light. If it's no longer the local position of a scrivener who can utter "I prefer not to" and return behind the screen, but, instead, the more planetary depths of the screen itself, across and through which the circadian rhythms play (as a body is permeated by them, and, thus, perhaps -- by some combination of grace, skill, and/or accident -- is able to bend or alter these rhythms and lines of force as they traverse and curl in their passing and persistence), this is surely provides one of reasons why there has been all of the recent attention and emphasis upon the bio-political sphere: in Agamben (e.g., Homo Sacer), Paul Gilroy (in Against Race) and Negri/Hardt's Empire.

So far, so near (a sort of spatial equivalent to the perpetually untimely too soon, too late) to the various and variable thresholds and boundaries of our bodies. This becomes one of the avenues by which to approach the often (seemingly) delirious ways of imagining and reshaping our present scenes of freedom and struggle. There's nothing deeper than the screen and the skin.6

As Michael Hardt says, during an online elaboration of he and Negri's notion of the biopolitics of immaterial labor, "Today production takes place equally across our body, our brains, our affects, and indeed all the forces of life" (Negri/Hardt, 2000). Then to find new ways to speak, to write, to fabulate the forces of "life." According to Gregg Lambert (1998), this new "subject of enunciation … underlines juridical language that has been deranged by the entrance of new technologies and bio-physical forces" and, so, following Deleuze, "the intellectual or writer must becomes adept at speaking of life rather than of law." Whether or not the different items and events haphazardly and deliriously scattered here speak of "(a) life," I don't know for sure. Or, maybe, it's that I-I-I can't say it. But if life is, in part, found in what moves, collectively, in-between and across different & often divergent sensory-modalities, then, there indeed might be something quite symptomatic happening here ... and maybe that's why I keep hearing this new subject of enunciation in the lyrics and emotional tone of REM's "Daysleeper," why I keep seeing it in the jittering sound and image of the financial world's collapse and curl at the end of Fight Club, why I keep reading it in all of these recent biopolitical reinflections of the gently obstinate refusal of "I'd prefer not to" in Melville's Bartleby.

Or, maybe, their coincidence is more than the inclusive-disjunctive line cutting, transversally, through a body's (or several bodies') viscera. If nothing else, it is worth remembering that the subtitle of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" is "A Story of Wall Street."

7. What Plays?
Anyway, I want to begin again then ... not even with the already begun-again of Foucault's "I speak" -- which often leads to all manner of quandries in a world ready to reply "who speaks?" or to argue that "to speak is never neutral." Better to begin over, Meaghan Morris (1998) says (by carrying forward Rey Chow's convincing arguments in response to the question of "who speaks"), with the question "What plays?" And that's because, "what plays" opens a
question of pragmatics ... that is historically distinct, open to portability, and technologically part of a broader process of circulation (or, as Deleuze and Guattari might say, of a "pick-up" rather than a "cut-up") in which there is no way of limiting, with any finality, "for" or "to" whom anything plays (p.231).
This is Morris' alternative to the closure (so often pessimistic, if not downright fatal) that follows when all one can imagine, with "I speak," is a "who speaks" "who know other somebodies who 'can do'" … so that, then, we are left at this apparent moment of rupture where all cultural studies can do is meekly hand-off to someone else who'll get the job done. But Morris reminds that we work with "indefinite interlocutors in uncontrollably porous contexts" (p.231) and, so, one should never "forget (once again) the pragmatic force exerted by emotion, desire, affect, and the audible energy that Rey Chow calls 'surplus,' in 'definitely shaping' social futures" (ibid). With that fabulist reminder, let me start again in order to conclude.

8. A Moral One Would Be Unwise To Wait For
It is earlier this summer and Kendall is in the backyard playing. We (Jackie, Kendall, and I) have just come back home to Lancaster after a visit to the flower garden and butterfly house in nearby Hershey, Pennsylvania. Kendall has just constructed a "house" in our tiny backyard from two plastic beach chairs, a bamboo pole, and an old sheet blanket. She's handwritten a sign and taped it to the front of her make-shift house that reads "East Buckeye Street." When my wife and I ask Kendall what motivated this little home-making enterprise, she immediately cites, as influences, the story of Roxaboxen (a poignant tale about a neighborhood of children founding their own community) and Neil Diamond's "Shiloh" (a song that came onto the car radio on the return-drive from Hershey and which Jackie knew so well from her own childhood [I'd never heard it] that she sang along with every word).

But later in the day, Jackie and I began to wonder about something else: why "East Buckeye Street?" (The "east" part is easy enough . . . since we live on "East Frederick Street." But there are no "buckeyes" in this town.) Then, I remembered that, while at the gardens, the one and only butterfly that we'd seen both inside the butterfly house (where there were a couple of dozen varieties) and outside in the gardens was the "buckeye" butterfly. There was an immediate resonance in this interpretation.

As the parents of a child destined to be our only child, we are determined to find ways that she is not a lonely child. And the fact that the buckeye butterfly had been both inside the butterfly house in a community of other and different butterflies but also, happily, outside of it was a delightful conclusion indeed.

So, later I asked Kendall, "Why is your house named 'East Buckeye Street'? After the butterfly, right?"

"No-o-o-o, dad," said Kendall, happy to prove me entirely wrong about her once again. "Buckeye is a tree."
"Oh ... why that tree then?"

Rather than answer the question directly, Kendall told me a brief story, what she called "the story of the squirrels" and it goes like this. "Once upon a time, there were squirrels living happily in a forest. And, then, one day, the king of the squirrels ate a buckeye nut. Because the buckeye nut is poisonous [please note: I don't actually know if this is 'true'], the king of the squirrels died. For days, the other squirrels ran around frantically not sure about what they should do. And, then, one day they realized that they could live without the king. The End."

Outfabulized. I don't so much disappear over the horizon as curl under.
Notes

1. This weird and undoubtedly problematic little essay -- the majority of which was written in a three hour dash in Iowa one morning in June 2000 -- is dedicated to Zachariah's dad, whose most recent work is very much concerned with a people that is missing. In the United States (and elsewhere around the globe), this particular people are sometimes known, most simply, as our "children." As Michael Taussig writes, at the end of his Defacement, "[T]he place the child occupies on the crossroads of Enlightenment [is] as both fabulist and as the one who is supposed to tell it like it is" (271). Likewise, this is one of the reasons why I tend to believe that cultural studies -- which has nearly always strived to "tell it like it is" -- could certainly do with a little more fabulist building with childhood blocks (even ones made by Duplo). For additional insights on building with childhood blocks, see Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka (1975/1986, pp.78-80) and for more on the potentialities of Duplo blocks, see Zachariah, in the middle of the page, at http://www.lego.com/kidcorner. [back]

2. Watch as Foucault enters the space of this "contentless slimness" at the very start of his December 2, 1970 inaugural lecture at the College of France. Foucault (1972) says:
I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path -- a slender gap -- the point of its possible disappearance (p.215).
[back]

3. Some of my thinking and words in this section in particular are indebted to a wonderful essay by Gregg Lambert (1998) called "On the Uses and Abuses of Literature for Life: Gilles Deleuze and the Literary Clinic." [back]

4. For one angle on this aspect, see Stanley Aronowitz (2000) and his mostly laudatory review of Hardt/Negri's Empire in The Nation. [back]

5. If you have Real Player Audio/Video, you can hear REM's "Daysleeper" song and see its still-life-in-real-time video at: http://www.wbr.com/rem/up/med/daysleeper_vid.ram [back]

6. This is adopted from a line that Deleuze (1990/1995) has on Foucault in an interview from Negotiations: "Never interpret; experience, experiment . . . The theme of folding and enfolding, so important in Foucault, take us back to the skin" (p.87). (The notion that "the deepest is the skin" can first be found in Deleuze's Logic of Sense). This notion of skin and screen, by the way, has little in common with Baudrillard's "screen." For an interesting pick-up and elaboration on Deleuze's control society argument, see Nikolas Rose's Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (1999, New York: Cambridge University Press). [back]
References

Agamben, Giorgio (1999) Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Ed. And Trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Aronowitz, Stanley (2000) "The New World Order (They Mean It)," The Nation, July 17: pp.25-28.

Barthes, Roland (1957/1972) Mythologies (Trans. by Annette Lavers). New York: Hill and Wang.

Blanchot, Maurice (1987) "Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him" Foucault/Blanchot (Trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman). New York: Zone Books.

Chow, Rey (1993) Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1975/1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Trans. by Dana Polan), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1990/1995) Negotiations (Trans. by Martin Joughin), New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. (1993/1997) Essays Critical and Clinical (Trans. by Daniel Smith and Michael Greco). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, Michel (1972) "The Discourse on Language," The Archaeology of Knowledge (Trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith). New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, Michel (1987) "Maurice Blanchot: Thought from the Outside," Foucault/Blanchot (Trans. by Brian Massumi). New York: Zone Books.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lambert, Gregg (1998) "On the Uses and Abuses of Literature for Life: Gilles Deleuze and the Literary Clinic" in Postmodern Culture (8.3). For those who have access to John Hopkins University's Project Muse, this essay is accessible at http://www.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v008/8.3lambert.html

Morris, Meaghan (1998) Too Soon, Too Late. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt (2000) "Negri/Hardt chat about Empire." Available at: http://www.net-i.org//archive/msg00102.html

Sutherland, John (1999) "Sad Professor," London Review of Books online, Vol.21, #4, February 18. Available at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n04/suth2104.htm

Copyright © 2000 by Gregory J. Seigworth