Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 23:24:33 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Deleuze's fifth paragraph


	The second consequence of a philosophy of social apparatuses
[*dispositifs*] is a change of orientation which turns one's interests
away from the Eternal and towards the new. The new is not supposed to mean
the same as the fashionable but, on the contrary, the variable creativity
which arises out of social apparatuses [*dispositifs*]. This fits in with
the question which began to be asked in the twentieth century as to how
the production of something new in the world might be possible. It is true
that, throughout his history of enunciation, Foucault explicitly impugns
the 'originality' of an *e'nonce'* as being something which is of little
relevance and interest. All he wishes to consider is the 'regularity' of
*e'nonce's*. But what he understands by regularity is the sweep of the
curve which passes through singular points or the differential values of
the ensemble of enunciations (in the same way that he defines power
relations by means of the distribution of singular elements in a social
field). When he challenges the originality of an *e'nonce'*, he means that
a contradiction which might arise between two *e'nonce's* is not enough to
distinguish them, or to mark the newness of one with regard to the other.
What counts is the newness of the regime itself in which the enunciation
is made, given that such newness of the regime itself in which the
enunciation is made, given that such a regime is capable of containing
contradictory *e'nonce's*. One might, for example, ask what regime of
*e'nonce's* appeared with the social apparatus [*dispositif] of the French
Revolution, or the Bolshevik Revolution: it is the newness of the regime
that counts, not the newness of the *e'nonce'*. Each apparatus is thus
defined in terms of its newness content and its creativity content, this
marking at the same time its ability to transform itself, or indeed to
break down in favor of a future apparatus, unless it concentrates its
strength along its harder, more rigid or more solid lines. Inasmuch as
they escape the dimensions of power and knowledge, the lines of
subjectification seem particularly capable of tracing paths of creation,
which are continually aborting, but then restarting, in a modified way,
until the former apparatus is broken. Foucault's as yet unpublished
studies on various Christian processes probably open a number of different
avenues in this respect. Yet it would not be right to think that the
production of subjectivity is the territory only of religion:
anti-religious struggles are also creative, just as regimes of light,
enunciation and domination pass through different domains. Modern forms of
subjectivation no longer resemble those of Greece any more than they do
those of Christianity, and the same goes for their light, their
enunciations and their forms of power.




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< John S. Ransom     717-2 <
< Political Science      4 <
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