Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 12:34:31 -0800 (PST)
From: Paul Bryant <levi_bryant-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: The Empty Square


Charles--

Thank you very much for this post...  Very illuminating.

Paul



---"Charles J. Stivale" <C_Stivale-AT-wayne.edu> wrote:
>
> At 04:42 PM 1/27/99, you wrote:
> >Sorry to burden the list with a question of detail, but am in need
of some
> >assistance, for the sake of my own sanity more than anything.
> >
> >Can anyone shed some light on the 'paradoxical instance', the 'Unique
> >Event', the 'aleatory point', the 'empty square', the
'differentiator', the
> >'question'- how many more names are there?
> >
> >
> >"the empty square, which makes evrything function"
> >
> >Anyone?
> >
> >
> >Steve
> Please excuse the lengthy post that follows in response to Steve's
query.
> It's also a self-indulgent post since I scavenge from my book on
D&G, _The
> Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze & Guattari_, specifically from the intro
to the
> appendix which contains a translation (by Melissa McMahon and
myself) of
> Deleuze's "How Does One Recognize Structuralism?" I try to indicate
how
> this essay of 1967 functions, and the "empty square" has a
particular role
> in it, similar too, but not quite identical to how it appears in
_Logique
> du sens_ two years later. (Obviously, for anyone who has already
consulted
> this translation/intro, this is a convenient post for deletion).
> 
> Charles J. Stivale
> 
> The text under consideration here, "A quoi reconnaît-on le
> structuralisme?" [How Do We Recognize Structuralism?], was written in
> 1967, shortly before the start of Deleuze and Guattari's
> collaboration.\1 Bearing many marks of Deleuze's ongoing reflections
> that would result in the publication of -Différence et répétition-
> (1968a) and -Logique du sens- (1969), this essay might seem to be what
> one online interlocutor has called a "throwback" text that raises
> puzzling questions particularly in the context of our
> post-post-structuralist, cultural studies-nourished critical
awareness in
> the 1990s. Yet, I wish to offer some commentary that relates this
essay
> (abbreviated AQR in the text) both to Deleuze's writings and to his
> eventual collaboration with Guattari. 
> 
> Structuralism(s): Aggressive, Interpretative
>     Following his books on Nietzsche (1962, 1965) and an initial
> version of his study on Proust (1964a),\2 Deleuze undertakes a
> reflection on the pair "difference"/"repetition", their links to the
> concepts of expression and subjectivity (1968b) and of sense,
> identity, art and desire (extended in -Logic of Sense-). In the
> structuralism essay, he explores the relation of these concepts to
> (then) contemporary critical perspectives and thereby elucidates an
> idiosyncratic conceptualization of "structuralism." By developing
> seven (or eight) criteria for "recognizing structuralism" as well as
> its diverse practices, Deleuze offers a superb example of his
> "loving", yet "monstrous" re-view of different works by the main
> "structuralist" proponents, already implicated in what would become
> known in North America as "post-structuralism": Lévi-Strauss,
Althusser,
> Lacan, Foucault.\3
>     Under the guise of avoiding customary practices of providing
> "samples" like so many bits of fabric or wares, Deleuze "names
> names" transversally by linking individual writers qua structuralists
> through the means by which they "recognize structuralism,"
particularly how
> they discern "the language proper to a domain" (AQR 299-300). If we
recall
> Foucault's above-cited statement (made three years before -Logique du
> sens-), that Lévi-Strauss and Lacan indicated to contemporaries the
> "surface effect" of meaning and how "system" "sustains us in time and
> space," we can best orient the procedure that Deleuze follows and
the links
> that he makes in this essay. To discover traits for recognizing the
> "system", or what he calls "series," Deleuze discerns criteria by
> which he can carefully disengage and "assemble" the particular
practices of
> key writers. He thus pursues his practice of -enculage-, of "taking an
> author from behind," but equally making the author "actually say all
I had
> him saying," through a particular mode of "depersonalization through
love"
> (N 6-7, P 15-16). Thus, despite or because of the diversity of the
projects
> pursued by the different authors cited, Deleuze both extends and
adapts
> what he proposes as the following distinct criteria: 1) the
symbolic, 2)
> the local or positional, 3) the differential and the singular, 4) the
> differenciator and differenciation, 5) the serial, 6) the empty
square, and
> finally 7 and 8) "from the subject to practice".
>     The opening section is indicative of his "assemblage" process.
> Deleuze first makes what for us is now a familiar distinction
> between the "real," the "imaginary," and the "symbolic" (i.e. the
> three orders identified by Jacques Lacan). He then insists that this
> "symbolic" does not derive merely from forms, figures, or essences,
> but that it is fundamentally "the production of the original and
> specific theoretical object" (AQR 304). Let us note the dynamic
> aspect, the production of this "object," which will contribute to
> the development of the "two-fold" in important ways. Deleuze defines
> structuralism's productive enterprise as both "aggressive" -- in
> denouncing "the general misunderstanding" about the "symbolic"
> category -- and "interpretative" -- in employing this category to
> renew interpretations of works and their links to language, ideas
> and action (AQR 304). For readers of the collaborative works by
> Deleuze and Guattari, particularly -Anti-Oedipus-, the following
> statement indicates the fruitful line of inquiry and critique they
> later pursue: "Romanticism and Symbolism, but also Freudianism and
> Marxism, thus become the object of profound reinterpretations. . . .
> But this reinterpretation only has value to the extent that it
> animates new works which are those of today, as if the symbolic were
> the source, inseparably, of living interpretation and creation" (AQR
> 304).\4
>     Having emphasized the "symbolic" in part one, and thereby
> seeming to foreground the importance of the Lacanian perspective,
> Deleuze proceeds in the subsequent sections to nuance his
understanding not
> only of this crucial term, but also of the very concept of
"structure." The
> second criterion, the local or positional, helps Deleuze explain
what the
> symbolic is not, specifically not real or imaginary. Rather, it is
> relational, having a sense as both meaning and direction within "a
> topological space . . . pure -spatium- constituted bit by bit as an
order
> of proximity" (AQR 305). Here Deleuze can address the question of
> subjectivity with reference to particular proponents of
"structuralism" –
> the constitution of subjectivity through distributions in relation to
> production (Althusser), determinations (Foucault), and signifying
> displacement (Lacan). The results of this for structuralism are,
first,
> that it regards sense (especially an overproduction of sense) as a
> "positional effect" (AQR 306), that is, dependent on relational
assemblages
> within particular domains for the (over)production of sense.  Second,
> structuralism tends to emphasize combinatory and positional play and
> theater. Third, Deleuze asserts that
> structuralism is "inseparable from a new materialism, a new atheism,
> a new antihumanism" (AQR 306-307).
>     To situate this perspective in terms of a structuralist proponent
> mentioned, but unexamined in Deleuze's essay, Roland Barthes, I read
> Deleuze's perspective certainly as having little similarity to the
> "heroic structuralism," for example, of Barthes's "Introduction to the
> Structural Analysis of Narratives" (1966).  However, the relational
> elements that Barthes develops in two different texts before and after
> this "Introduction..." are worth considering in this context.  In "The
> Structuralist Activity" (1963; Barthes 1964 [1972]), Barthes stakes
> out the positional relations between analysis (dissection) and
> creation (assemblage), a multi-disciplinary practice that participates
> in what Deleuze calls "reinterpretation . . . that animates new works
> which are those of today" (AQR 304). Seventeen years later in -S/Z-
> (1970 [1974]), Barthes returns forcefully to the positional relations,
> but then in order to prepare the terrain for a concerted
> destabilization of signification. The movement of structuralism into
> the "heroic" confidence in defining relational significations typified
> the increasing formalism of the mid-1960s that many structuralist
> acolytes extolled, Barthes included. It is to his credit, then, that
> Barthes pushed his reflection toward a thorough interrogation of the
> stability of the author, the subject, and the possibilities of formal
> multiplicity, a stance that only became more pronounced and complex in
> his writings of the 1970s.\5
>     Deleuze's development of the third and fourth criteria suggests,
> however, that any such comparisons for "recognizing structuralism"
> are risky and approximate, at best. Regarding the third criterion,
> of the differential and the singular, Deleuze affirms the
> consistency of a "positional symbolic" along two axes: on the one
> hand, an axis of reciprocal determination of symbolic elements kept
> in differential relationship among themselves; on the other hand, an
> axis of singularities, i.e. of symbolic elements distributed as
> -singular- points that thereby determine a corresponding space of the
> structure. According to these two axes, Deleuze defines structure as
> based on multiple relationships, elements and points that one must
> seek in different domains: kinship systems (Lévi-Strauss),
> "libidinal movements" of the body (Serge Leclaire), modes of
> production (Althusser) (AQR 310-312).\6
>     Then, in the essay's fourth part, Deleuze considers where and
> how such multiplicity of structures emerge in their diverse
> elements, points and relationships. He begins by exploring the
> distinction between the actual and the virtual and draws from Proust
> (and behind him, from Bergson) to define the virtual as "real
> without being actual, ideal without being abstract" (AQR 313).\7
> Structuralism would play a crucial role in understanding how the
> virtual and the actual communicate since, as Deleuze argues, "to
> discern the structure of a domain is to determine an entire
> virtuality of coexistence which pre-exists the beings, objects and
> works of this domain" (AQR 313). Yet, he also emphasizes the
> necessity for distinguishing "the total structure of a domain as an
> ensemble of virtual coexistence" from "sub-structures that
> correspond to diverse actualizations in the domain" (AQR 314). He
> thereby posits a double process: on the one hand, there is a
> structure's "undifferenciation" as virtuality while being "totally
> and completely differentiated"; on the other hand, there is a
> structure's "differenciation" through the virtual's actualization.
> i.e. through the structure's embodiment in particular forms.
> Insisting on this "complex" of differen-t-/-c-iation of "structure,"
> Deleuze describes structuralism's ability at once to constitute "in
> itself a system of elements and of differential relations," and to
> actualize the virtual by "differenciating" species and parts (AQR
> 315).\8 Structure functions, then, to enable the actualization of
> the virtual that "presents a dynamic multiplicity in which the
> process of differentiation creates the original arrangement or
> coherence of actual being: This is the multiplicity of organization"
> (Hardt 1993, 41).
>     Deleuze provides several examples: first, he points to Georges
> Dumezil's work on comparative religions as showing how species and
> parts are differenciated by the structure which, itself, achieves
> actualization through them. Referring to the way that "gods of
> religion" are realized at once within differential relations and as
> functions in proximity to singularities, Deleuze says, "it is
> precisely here that the border passes between the imaginary and the
> symbolic: the imaginary tends to reflect and to resituate around
> each term the total effect of a wholistic mechanism, whereas the
> symbolic structure assures the differentiation of terms and the
> differenciation of effects" (AQR 316). That is, while the terms may
> be associated with distinct species of differential relations, the
> effects assure the actualization of the structure through
> singularities. Developing a second example, Deleuze considers the
> extent to which "structures are unconscious, necessarily overlaid
> with their products and effects," with links at once to the
> psychoanalytic and economic domains. Forming problems and questions
> 
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