Martin Rosenberg

Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of English
Texas A&M University
mer1911@tamvm1.tamu.edu

 

[O]rators and others who are in variance are mutually experiencing something that is bound to befall those who engage in senseless rivalry: believing that they are expressing opposite views, they fail to perceive that the theory of the opposite party is inherent in their own theory.

 

–Thrasymachus of Chalcedon

 

Introduction

 

In their recent work Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (1991), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari make explicit the role that the concept of chaos plays in their representations of subjectivity, with respect to philosophy, science and the arts.¹ I wish to exfoliate the chaotic in Deleuze and Guattari’s works, for their analysis of the ways in which chaos may be used referentially in philosophy, science and the arts in this later work may interfere with readers’ attempts to grapple with manifestations of chaos as a referent in their earlier collaboration, the two volumes subtitled Captialism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. One way to make visible Deleuze and Guattari’s recourse to the chaotic in these two works is to examine the role that particular physics tropes play in their representation of subjectivity, especially since the tropes that model the subject in these two works engage agonistically with those that model subjectivity in the works of Sigmund Freud.²

 

The descriptions of human consciousness in Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari are problematic precisely in their inverse, mirrored opposition, and we may discover the “ground” for that opposition by examining the role played by tropes from the discipline of physics in these theorists’ representations of subjectivity. We will need to notice particularly the historical differences in the ideological use of these tropes–at the end of the nineteenth century, and since the mid-twentieth century. As we will see, these two periods are interesting because they represent moments when the term entropy, a concept describing the amount of disorder in a physical system, has very different meanings– in physics, and in the cultural matrix as well. In the mid- to-late nineteenth century, entropy (in the context of equilibrium thermodynamics) refers largely to terminal processes of disorder for a physical system; since the nineteen-sixties, however, entropy (in the context of non- equilibrium thermodynamics) came to be understood as an initial condition enabling greater order and complexity in a physical system. Since Freud draws on the first version of entropy as referent, and Deleuze and Guattari draw on the second version of entropy as referent, two questions emerge: Can we say that Freud and Deleuze and Guattari are making the same claims for tropes of chaos (or entropy, or disorder) as grounds for their contending representations of subjectivity? If so, what can we then say about the stability of such claims for a correspondence between laws of physics and the forces and processes of human consciousness? In order to confront these questions, we should first examine trope theories that might illuminate the problematic construction of correspondences.

 

Physics and Tropes

 

The problematic of the subject becomes the problem of representation when the particular forms of representation of the subject, such as tropes, come into question. This problem of representation then requires a rhetoric of the tropes of subjectivity that will discover the relationships among particular tropes representing specific functions of consciousness, such as the dreamwork, or the Oedipal scenario.

 

By the term trope, we may refer to what Hayden White calls the irreducible nature of metaphor in imaginative and realistic discourses. A trope is a turn of phrase that links an abstract concept to the physical world, and as such, establishes a correspondence between the physical world and human ideation. According to White, tropes are “inexpungeable from discourse in the human sciences” (White 1-2). In other words, for White, every trope is a fiction, the authorship of which all writers must deny, in order to preserve their claim for the truth-content of their discourse. But even contemporary theories of tropes have had recourse to the discipline of physics in order to model how tropes work. Thus, for the sake of this inquiry, we must first question the motives for such recourse, not only in psychology, but in theories of the trope as well.

 

Jacques Derrida argues that tropes (or one particular form, metaphors) function explicitly as the onto-theological manifestation of a “White Mythology” that tolerates a “provisional loss of meaning” to arrive at “what is proper” (Derrida 45). Tropes demonstrate their truth-content by grounding discourse in the phenomenal world, with the given that there must be some essential connection posited between word and thing:

 

Like mimesis, metaphor comes back to physis, to its own truth and its presence. Nature always finds in it its own analogy, its own resemblance to itself, and finds increase there only of itself.(Derrida 45)

 
Yet Derrida argues that metaphors serve both to “menace” and to function as “accomplices.” They menace by the way that the connection between name and thing is subject to “wear and tear” (13): by the tendency of tropes to wear themselves out like coins through the “repetition” of use; and by tearing that precise link between name and thing through deviation, or tropical “divergence” (71).

 

Derrida associates this precise link with “Physis,” or the claim for natural law, a law that apparently must decay, “wear and tear” through time–as implied by the nineteenth-century conventional understanding of the thermodynamic term entropy as a kind of end-game. Both Jacques Derrida and Harold Bloom have noticed that interest in tropes and in entropy coincided in the middle of the nineteenth century (Derrida 60-74; Bloom 83-105). Yet, according to Derrida, tropes are also accomplices, allowing for “an inevitable detour,” in order to maintain “a horizon of circular reappropriation of the proper sense” (Derrida 73). That sense, of course, remains dependent upon the fiction that there lies an essential connection between word and thing: these tropes imply a correspondence between a pull or force among planets in a solar system, and with the sun; or, among electrons swarming around a nucleus and the energized link among the tropes in a system of signification, with the significance that it surrounds. As opposed to the borrowing of thermodynamic tropes to describe the irreversible decay of an individual sign, here systems of signification are described with reference to the reversible laws of dynamics–Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics. Here one finds the conceit that the irreversible “decay” of individual signs can be arrested by situating signs in a system governed by stasis, or inertia. After all, it was Friedrich Nietzsche who said: “What is Truth? Inertia; that hypothesis which gives rise to contentment; smallest expenditure of physical force, etc.” Will to Power 291).

 

Derrida’s deconstructive agenda involves demonstrating both the instability of individual signs, and the contradictory traces always present within the inertia of a system of signification. William R. Paulson has argued that Derrida draws on information theory, on the relationship between entropy as formulated in physics, and “noise” in the channel between sender and receiver as a problematic (1988, 26-28, 92-99). In this view, Derrida seeks therefore to subvert philosophical discourse by foregrounding the noise present in every possible message. More recently, Alex Argyrous explores Derridean discourse by formulating a theory of order which emerges out of the noise generated by his tactics, thus presenting a positive gloss on what Derrida’s critics have argued constitutes a nihilistic agenda (1991, 57-85). Yet Hans Kellner identifies the agenda of all tropical relations metaphorically (!) with catastrophe theory, particularly with the relations established in the shift from one master trope to another, as suggested by Vico’s notion of “ricorso” (1981, 24-28).

 

Within the field of trope theory, we can demonstrate the instability of a tropical system, based as it is on “circular reappropriation,” by observing trans-disciplinary borrowings. In recent theories of rhetoric, there has been a return to the four master tropes discussed by Aristotle– metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony–in order to ground trans-disciplinary borrowings.³

 

Both Hayden White and Frank D’Angelo have asserted the primacy of the four master tropes from Aristotle’s Rhetoric to demonstrate the stability of certain cognitive structures beneath specific disciplinary formations, history and psychology. They argue that Freud’s mechanisms of the dreamwork–which would be useful to review here: condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision–are their psychological equivalents. Condensation, the process of fusing several elements or images into one, is equivalent to metaphorical identification; displacement, by which one idea, image or element “surrenders to another, signaling a shift in meaning and emotional intensity,” is equivalent to metonymic displacement; representation, the “process of transposing ideas, feelings into symbols,” is equivalent to synecdoche; secondary revision, which with the help of an analyst converts dream elements into comprehensive form through the intrusion of self-conscious distance, is equivalent to irony.⁴

 

We may accept or reject D’Angelo’s more pointed defense of the continued study of classical rhetoric by positing (in cognitive psychology) an ontological ground for the four master tropes. Still, and this is crucial, that rhetoric may supply tropes for clinical psychology, and that developmental psychology may provide tropes for rhetoric, indicates the potential circularity inherent in any attempt to ground tropes by recourse to other disciplines. For example, White becomes quite dependent upon a cultural application of Freud’s psycho-analytic approach when he claims that within a cultural field, schemes of tropes function “unconsciously” (White 13-20), thus circulating the grounds of his discourse between psychoanalysis and linguistics, with reference to the work of Jacques Lacan. White’s key word for describing tropical function here is defense, and I am most directly interested in exploring the defensive posture implicit in the recourse to tropes from other disciplines.

 

As Hayden White points out, Harold Bloom has taken the further, Freudian step in pronouncing tropes “the linguistic equivalent of a psychological mechanism of defense” that, while directed “against literal meaning in discourse,” must always assume that literal meaning is something possible (Bloom 88). For Bloom, however, literal meaning is “death,” what would occur if electrons spun into the nucleus, or planets spiraled into the sun. Bloom refers here, of course, to Freud’s Life and Death drives. Thus, out of “survival,” tropes form a reversible system of false signification that he compares to Newtonian mechanics (93), or even to a chess game (96), both of which are premised on reversible laws. This suggests that even what Bloom calls the romantic undoing [kenosis] of an existing tropical system marks merely the commitment to a “personalized countersublime” that itself then systematizes suddenly freed tropical patterns in order to avoid the “threat” of the literal meaning that is death (Bloom 89). We have here a physics of romantic revolution, of private epistemic shifts, a physis of deterritorializations and reterritorializations of the tropical approximations that constitute the limits of representation.

 

Yet we must force Bloom’s influence theory into a further step that he would resist, by insisting that tropes “defend” an ideological as well as a psychological state, and thus that the disintegration of an accepted tropical field constitutes a public as well as a private event. Scientists resort to tropes of cultural phenomena to make their explanations of physical forces and processes accessible; social philosophers, artists and psychologists resort to tropes from physical forces and processes in order to similarly explain cultural, aesthetic and psychological phenomena. This borrowing from other disciplines reveals, first, a consensual dependence upon a given set of assumptions about the laws governing physical or human phenomena to which these tropes refer; and second, a mutual complicity in suppressing the fictive nature of the tropes that are used. Thus, physicists, philosophers, artists and psychologists betray their dependence on the fictive correspondence between the laws governing nature and the laws governing culture because it makes their thoughts intelligible. Furthermore, this dependence points ultimately to an essentialist perspective underlying even the thoughts of those whose project is to demystify, to deterritorialize old systems of tropical approximations. We address, therefore, how the institution of the avant-garde functions in complicity with the dominant systems it seeks to destabilize. But, before discussing historical examples of this complicity in two avant-garde moments in the history of theories of the subject, Freud’s, and Deleuze and Guattari’s, we should address motive more directly.

 

The problem of cross-disciplinary borrowing becomes complicated further by the relative status of each discipline in the cultural field. By this I mean that the borrowing of physical tropes by the arts, philosophy and psychology marks their marginalized position more than their cosmological reach. In contrast, the borrowing of cultural tropes (Richard Feynman’s use of the chessboard to describe the laws governing the interactions of sub-atomic particles, for example) to illustrate physical laws extends mastery, which in turn reflects the domination of the sciences across the spectrum of social discourses. As Michel Serres writes of the poverty of literature:

 

Science is on the side of power, on the side of effectiveness; it has and will have more and more credit, more intellectual and social legitimacy, and the best positions in government; it will attract strong minds--strong in reason and ambition; it will take up space.(1990, 4)

 
Here, Serres emphasizes the legitimating power as well as the fictiveness of tropes from physics, and we must recognize, when examining the internally contradictory use of these tropes, that the motive for constructing such correspondences lies with the will to power. The source of internal contradiction generated by the tropes themselves comes from an ideological difference, a struggle from within the discipline of physics itself. This struggle arises out of the difference between the precision possible with the time-reversible geometrical perspective usually associated with dynamics, and the statistically-approached contingencies of the time-irreversible perspective normally associated with equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

 

Here I am drawing on the works of Ilya Prigogine, particularly on his work to make visible an ideological war within the physical sciences, a war of what he calls “Clashing Doctrines,” between time-reversible and time-bound models of physical processes. In this “war,” time-bound theories are marginalized by time-reversible theories. Prigogine’s work in the physics of turbulent systems far- from-equilibrium brought him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1977), not Physics. A further illustration of the marginal status of Prigogine’s own work comes from chaos theory, which was introduced to the public through James Gleick’s popular work, Chaos. This work emphasizes the geometry of fractals without once mentioning Ilya Prigogine’s works on self-organizing systems (Gleick, 1990; 1984, 1-26 and 79-102). Yet Prigogine’s work may provide the most help in confronting problems created by the ideological appropriation of tropes from physics by other disciplines.⁵

 

We can situate the historical determinants of the construction of theories of subjectivity by identifying tropes from the very different conceptions of physical laws, identified here simplistically by the familiar terms dynamics and thermodynamics, as they are found in the works of Freud and in the works of Deleuze and Guattari.

 

After discussing dynamics and thermodynamics, particularly with reference to the internal combustion engine, we will then limit discussion to the allusions to machinery in Freud’s description of dreamwork and of the unconscious; and to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of human consciousness as an aleatory subject embedded in the schizo-fluxes of cultural machinery as a means of resistance to these machines of cultural signification. Finally, we will address Deleuze and Guattari’s transgressive yet fundamentally complicitous relationship with the Freudian hegemony of the subject’s representation.

 

Dynamics and Thermodynamics

 

The mechanistic world-view of dynamics involves the study of matter and its interactions; that is, the dynamic view reduces natural events to simple laws that can explain the motion of planets, cannon ball trajectories, the movement of molecules and atoms, the interactions of sub- atomic particles, even the time-lines of Einstein’s Twins. Crucial to the success of this view is the search for absolute precision in the description of these forces, in accounting for the history of, and in predicting the future of the systems upon which these forces work. This precision becomes actualized by the capacity of calculus to determine mathematically the time-line of any dynamic system by freezing time itself into an infinite series of still frames, thus tracing that system into the past or into the future at will.

 

This assumption of absolute certainty as the criterion for the success of physical investigations was challenged for the first time in the mid-ninetenth century by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, equilibrium thermodynamics, or entropy: given any isolated system, that system moves in the direction of greater entropy or disorder. Articulated further by Boltzmann’s Order Principle (given a closed system, that system will always choose the direction of greatest probability), this Second Law forces observers to recognize the roles that randomness and the irreversibility of time play in physical processes: a Mazda Miata is more likely to turn into a pile of rust then a pile of rust will turn into a Mazda Miata. Most important, however, the state of any system is perpetually contingent until it arrives at its rest state or equilibrium. The precise predictions possible in charting a planetary system, or in plotting the recursive trajectories of comets, are impossible in the investigation of processes governed by thermodynamic laws.

 

In dynamics, therefore, we have precision and certainty in the prediction of the behavior of any system; in thermodynamics, we have only statistical probabilities that remain contingent until equilibrium or, in the case of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, a steady-state is achieved.

 

In the design of the internal combustion engine, we have a relationship between dynamics and thermodynamics that illustrates through metaphor, first, the hegemonic domination of dynamics within physics, and second, Freud’s agonistic model of the subject as a dynamic equilibrium of (dynamic) drives forcefully modulating unconscious (thermodynamic) processes.

 

Prigogine argues that as engineering became the context for the question of thermodynamic processes (mechanical, thermal or chemical), two constraints on the observation of those processes emerged. First, the classical method for accounting for every element in a system became replaced by statistical approximations called “macroscopic parameters.” Second, “boundary conditions” needed definition to account for the relationship between the system and its surroundings (1984, xxx). In engines, these referred, first, to the need for statistical analysis in order to predict the behavior of the energy utilized by the engine; and second, to the need to account for the active movement of that energy from one part of an engine to another, as well as the loss of energy from the engine altogether.

 

Internal combustion engines require two systems, each with a different energy level, to accomplish work. If both systems can be the source of heat flow from hot to cold, then any engine is reversible in the dynamic sense. Yet the Second Law also describes a universal tendency to erase thermal difference through diffusion, resulting in a limit to the utility of controlling heat to produce work. If engines depend upon the Second Law to do work, and yet have to fight the Second Law to do work, then two constraints occur: engines function inefficiently, and there is a limit to the amount of energy available. This does not mention the threat to the integrity of the mechanical system that friction produces, as well as threats created by imperfections in the dynamic system itself: there are limits to precision even in the manufacturing of the parts for the engine.

 

Thus, the industrial revolution brought about a war of domination by applying the principles of dynamics to mechanical dissipative structures against the inefficiencies that plague those systems. These inefficiencies are due, in turn, to processes governed by the same law of thermodynamics that enable work to be generated by dynamic machines in the first place. In the nineteenth century, the contradictions inherent in the application of dynamic systems and thermodyanmic processes culminates in a world- view, best described by Lord Kelvin, that the universe itself tends toward the degradation of mechanical energy. As Prigogine notes:

 

This world is described as an engine in which heat is converted into motion only at the price of some irreversible waste and useless dissipation. Effect-producing differences in nature progressively diminish. The world uses up its differences as it goes from one conversion to another and tends toward a final state of thermal equilibrium, "heat death." (1984, 115-116)

 
The philosophical implications for this irreversible process were not lost on the nineteenth-century mind. Aside from the shift from a fascination with system and classification in the eighteenth century to the seeming domination of time over the imaginations of all the disciplines in the nineteenth century, the association of time with disorder, decay and death shaped the imaginations of social philosophers such as Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler well into the twentieth century. Here we may situate Freud’s recourse to the discipline of physics in modeling the unconscious and the dreamwork, while anticipating the cultural as well as clinical implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s polemical statement that “Everything is a machine” Anti-Oedipus 2, 8).

 

Physics, Hegemony and the Freudian Subject

 

If we examine the stages of the dreamwork– condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision–these stages seem similar to the stages of the function of a steam engine as it does work. Condensation, or the mixing and fusing of disparate elements into one, corresponds to the initial activity of the chamber, the function of which is to mix coal or other fuel and oxygen before ignition produces heat. Displacement, or the surrender of meaning and emotion as it is transferred from one image to another, corresponds to the generating of heat in the chamber after ignition, that is then channelled to the steam engine used to drive the machinery being worked.

 

Representation, or the translation of those elementary ideas and feelings into symbols, corresponds to the commodity that can be manufactured by harnessing the process of conversion taking place in the secondary chamber of the machine. Secondary revision, or the conversion of the elements of the dream into coherent form with the aid of a therapist, corresponds to the attachment of public value to the commodity created by this dream machine. The dreamwork, then, modulates the flow of desire through a process that transforms that desire into a system of valuation cultured, even manufactured (in process), with the aid of the therapist.

 

Psycho-analysis, in this sense, becomes one of many cultural machines that control desire. Furthermore, Freud describes thought itself as the fundamental transformation: the sublimation of effulgent desire becomes by itself a threat to the health of the system that generates the desire in the first place. The purpose of thought itself, of which the dreamwork is only one manifestation, is to channel the libido, defined thus in thermodynamic terms, into acceptable behavior. As Freud writes in The Ego and the Id:

 

If this displaceable energy is desexualized libido, it may also be described as sublimated energy . . . . If thought processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements, then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive drives.(45)

 
In other words, the entire subject-system, expressed in terms of the Id, Ego and Superego, can be made to correpond to a mechanical dissipative structure, in which desire, as heat or entropy, motivates the system, and is modulated through drives for the purposes of psychological survival.

 

LaPlanche and Pontalis have identified two different subject-systems in Freud’s works: the narcissistic ego/ideal-ego system; and the superego/ego-ideal system (1973, 144-5, 201-2). Both systems modulate flows of sublimated energy-desire to different ends. One may inquire (as LaPlanche does, for example) into how these differing structures function in terms of the life and death drives respectively (1976, 8-24), especially if we remember Bloom’s conceit that the literalization of tropes brings “death” to the system-subject. What most concerns us, though, is that the function of the subject appears to be the control of energy-as-desire, to limit the representations of motivated thought by modulating motivated thought through systems that drive thought into acceptable forms. If forms are unacceptable, as in the case of disturbing dreams, the function of psychoanalysis, with reference to dreamwork, is to remodulate desire through a symbolic system navigated, and therefore mapped, in the dynamic, geometrical sense, by the therapist. To undertand how this system might work at the level of culture-dynamics, we should digress briefly to the work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White.

 

In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White demonstrate, first, the disappearance of carnival forms in Northern European (British) society, and second, the reconfiguration of the carnivalesque into the lowest and basest of social interactions, that become a threat to emerging middle-class values (1986, 1-26). In two chapters on Freud, these authors demonstrate the function of the unconscious as the seat of the carnivalesque in the discourse of the bourgeoisie, the seat of dissolved hierarchies and vital turbulence that threatens the carefully modulated orderings of the European middle-class. They also demonstrate the institutions of control, associated with the Family Romance, that enforce the control of desire, seated in the Id, through the triangulation of the Oedipal scenario (149-91). As we have seen, the dynamic forces modulating the thermodynamics of desire for the individual, as a synecdoche, are now applied to the dynamic control of entropic forces throughout culture as a whole.

 

It will now be useful to negotiate a transition from Freud’s Oedipus to the anti-oedipal strategies of Deleuze and Guattari by situating the public mechanisms at work at the level of individual neurosis and psychosis.

 

In Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative volumes, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, lies a Nietzschean synthesis of the Marxist theory of production (dominated, as it is, by the dynamics and thermodynamics of the Industrial Revolution), and by Freud’s theory of the libido. They do so through the conflated term “desiring-production.” They state that the Oedipal scenario structures desire in capitalist countries, and that psychoanalysis helps to enforce the restrictions imposed by that structure. Also, they agree with the Marxist formulation that capitalism reduces all human interactions to “commodity-relations of universal equivalency.” As Ronald Bogue points out, capitalism therefore “deterritorializes” desire by exploding not only the limits created by the Oedipal scenario, but the limits created by other traditional structures as well (1989, 88-92). Yet capitalism also “reterritorializes” desire by forcing it to manifest itself through the network of commodity relations. While Oedipus helps to focus human desire through the family, leaving its residue to wander the leveled field of “universal equivalency,” capitalism also generates “schzophrenic fluxes,” a mixing up of material and human refuse in the diffused heat of undifferentiated desire which, if all goes well, is redirected through the Oedipal machinery. As trope, the “residue” of desire– “schizophrenic fluxes” of human and material refuse–makes sense when we recognize its thermodynamic origin, while tropes for capitalism and psychoanalysis take on the dynamic properties of machines modulating “fluxes.”

 

Deleuze and Guattari then define clinical schizophrenia as the psychological equivalent of a thermodynamic state of equilibrium, the human refuse (institutionalized or not) in which the machinery of Oedipus, and even the more primal subject-structures, have been overthrown. Their project is to build a psychoanalysis, aesthetics and politics that valorizes the schizo-flux. They provide a schizo-analysis of the multiple cultural machines of desiring-production, and a program for resistance to those machines.

 

Deleuze and Guattari’s program for resistance lies in two related tropes for thought and action: the nomad and the rhizome. Representing subjective and cultural contingency on the one hand, and spontaneous aggregation of contingent subjective and cultural formations on the other, these terms constitute a theory of self-organization: the nomad and the rhizome have explanatory power across the human sciences: the writings of Kafka, the contingencies and collectivity of jazz performance, Pynchon’s Tristero postal subculture, the multiple human formations of the dance troop Pilobolus (itself a name for a rhizome), the “cells” of the Kuwaiti resistance.

 

Physis, Nomos and the “Grounds” for Subjectivity in Deleuze and Guattari

 

First of all, it should be clear that Deleuze and Guattari merely valorize the heat-energy fluxes (limited by Freud to the chamber of the subject-machine as dissipative structure) over the machine itself: they argue for the sustained play of entropic thought and action, as that play may exist independent of the machinery that depends upon entropy to produce work and controls the chaos that seems necessarily to pose a threat to the system itself. Up until this point we have been discussing entropy as an end-game phenomenon, but it is precisely Prigogine’s work, over the last thirty years, on processes of self-organization possible in chaos or turbulence, that may provide a model for how Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to Freud is not merely destructive, but nihilistic in the affirmative sense. We will then need to confront how their response to Freud also remains complicitous in the rhetorical sense.⁶

 

Yet Deleuze and Guattari are sly, and they do not wish to seem invested in an essentialist correspondence between the laws of physics and the laws that may govern consciousness and culture. In the chapter from A Thousand Plateaus, entitled “1227: Treatise on Nomadology–The War Machine,” Deleuze and Guattari analize war by opposing chess and Go as opposing game theories: “from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved” (1987, 34-52-3). Yet this concept of war involves processes within the subject as well as the most violent manifestations of social dynamics. While Deleuze and Guattari state that “Chess is a game of State, or of the court; the emperor of China played it” (352), we must also remember that chess tropes signifying systems that determine the socially-constituted subject, with rigid rules governing identity. Go pieces, on the other hand, “have only an anonymous, collective or third-person function,” with “only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations” (353). The properties of Go involve not semiotic precision but strategic flows that obey not cause and effect, as with chess, but dissemination that is contingent upon situation. They write, “it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival” (353).

 

The oppositions in the tropes generated by their analysis of these two games are useful for our purposes: a closed system against an open system; precise identity against the anonymity of numbers; determined trajectory of the pieces against contingent dissemination; fixed function against virtual potential. Clearly, these tropes from chess and Go draw respectively on the opposing models of pysical forces and processes, the dynamic and the thermodynmic.

 

We should note that by opposing the “‘smooth’ space of Go against the ‘striated’ space of chess,” Deleuze and Guattari make the distinction between the “Nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis” (353). By opposing polis to nomos, they imply that chess is premised upon physis, or natural law, while Go is premised upon nomos, or law agreed upon by convention. In their discourse, Go is valorized over chess in order to valorize nomos over the State’s claims for physis. Deleuze and Guattari assault the assumptions of natural law, proposing their avant-garde social philosophy in order to demystify the State. They do so by denying the correspondence between the laws of nature and the laws describing forces governing culture (physis). In their discourse, the laws of nature refer specifically to classical mechanics, and especially to the chess tropes used by Richard Feynman to describe the dynamics of quantum electrodynamics and by Saussure to describe the laws governing signification.⁷

 

But in using the game of Go as a source of tropes, Deleuze and Guattari must make recourse to physis themselves by valorizing contingency and aggregation as an essential condition of nomadic and rhizomatic thought and action. These concepts refer respectively to the initial conditions necessary for thermodynamic processes (contingency as a condition of freedom), and to one possible behavior for physical systems governed by those processes (prairie grassroots as a collectivity of blades of grass; slime mold as an aggregation of unicellular nomads).

 

We can trace fairly precisely a genealogy of concepts related to equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics in Gilles Deleuze’s earlier works, indicating his debt to nineteenth and twentieth-century theories of chaos or disorder that provide the tropical grounds for his theory of subjective and collective resistance to cultural machinery. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962, 83), Deleuze describes Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as the return to difference, not sameness, an analysis of the contingent dimension of cultural systems and human consciousness affirming for any physical system, and, by implication, any human subjective or cultural system, the always-already contingency of past and future as it is reformulated in every present moment. This seems, in turn, to indicate a reformulation of Boltzmann’s Order Principle, first defined in Deleuze’s earlier Bergsonism (1966, 1988). In this work, Deleuze defines Bergson’s theory of creative evolution as a dialectic between contingent duration as “pure becoming” and the memory of a system engaged by elan vital or a physical/metaphysical principle of desire, a dialectic explored with remarkable subtlety in his recently translated Difference and Repetition (1968; 1993, forthcoming), particularly when repetition becomes a referent for pathology applicable both to the individual isolate and to the cultural field. The specific applications of these concepts–of the Eternal Return and of contingent duration as Becoming to human subjectivity and to the forces and processes of culture–lead to the nomad, and to nomad thought (“Nomad Thought” 1973, 1985). This is true as well of the passages on becoming as an initial condition for schizophrenia in The Logic of Sense (1969; 1990). This genealogy, in turn, helps to locate in Deleuze’s corpus, as well as in his collaboration, a continuous commitment to the concept of an intense, irreversible and irresistible impetus underlying the relational grids superimposed upon the subject by various visible and invisible cultural machines, machinery that produces aesthetic objects such as cinema (see Cinema I [1983, 1986] and Cinema II [1985, 1989]), or fiction Proust and Signs [1964, 72]; Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature [1975, 1986]). And it is in The Logic of Sense that Deleuze first comes to terms with the cultural as well as clinical implication of schizophrenia as a theory of subjective and cultural chaos (1-3, 82-93). With the help of Felix Guattari, Deleuze offers in A Thousand Plateaus an extended meditation on the role of Becoming as a form of resistance (232-309), a role recognized in Brian Massumi’s recent reading of the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia.⁸

 

But what interests us further in this passage on game theories of war are the attempts to disguise the nature and function of the system of tropical oppositions that I have demonstrated are crucial to Deleuze and Guattari’s representations of subjectivity. We can find other examples of oppositions disguising a recourse to physis.

 

Deleuze and Guattari’s recourse to the thermodynamics of open systems far-from-equilibrium, systems grounded in contingency and multiplicity, permeable membranes instead of rigid lines, enables them to articulate their program against the laws of dynamics as applied to human affairs, while hiding their own affiliations with the claim for physis:

 

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction "and...and...and...." (A Thousand Plateaus 25)

 
Here we may find, hidden in this parable of two opposing “organic” tropes (the arboreal against the rhizomatic), the implicit reference to the structures of dynamics against the processes of thermodynamics–the definitive static, vertical structure of the tree versus the open conjunction of the spontaneous aggregation of wandering cells into a weaving of roots constructed by simple addition. Chess and Go, tree and grass–sedentary structure and flows of openness: at the center of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing machine lies a programmatic commitment to one side of the ideological opposition between dynamics and thermodynamics, as well as a complicitous commitment to ground their discourses in natural laws of a different sort than those justifying the dominance of our machine age.

 

Notes

 

1. I’d like to thank Ronald Bogue for pointing out the crucial role of chaos theory in this work and its relevance to this essay. An extension of the lines of inquiry pursued in this essay will serve as the springboard for a panel on chaos theory and subjectivity in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari at the 1993 Modern Language Association, with the following essays: my “Chess and Go: The Physis/Nomos Debate in Deleuze and Guattari’s Game Theory of War”; William R. Paulson, “Self-Organization and Figures of Resistance”; and Ronald Bogue, “The Micropolitics of the Fractal Fold.”

 

2. This requires an extension of the concept of chaos, as it is currently employed, to include an earlier theory of disorder associated with nineteenth-century entropy theory. We can suggest such a connection through the works of the contemporary physicist Ilya Prigogine, whose particular approach to chaos theory draws on a genealogy that begins with those nineteenth-century physicists working in thermodynamics, and whose work is central to my argument.

 

3. One exception has been George Lakoff, who, by drawing on generational grammar as well as on cognitive psychology, argues not only that all conceptual systems are metaphorical, but that the systems of human knowledge that depend upon these metaphors are grounded in the biology of cognition. Expanding beyond the four tropes, he argues that even the most abstract systems from any discipline are dependent upon spatio-temporal metaphors. Lakoff claims that these spatio-temporal metaphors are not arbitrary constructions, but function systematically and have universal status, precisely because they are rooted essentially in the biological fact of a complex organic orientation determined by gravity, by the perception of up and down, of inside and outside, of near and far (Lakoff 3- 24, 56-68). But Lakoff’s tactical representation of those grounded categories of metaphors in terms of maps remains problematic because using maps implies a structuralist methodology. In other words, despite Lakoff’s claims that there may be a “natural” order to metaphors, his use of maps involves the embrace of a conflicting assumption, which of course can be traced to Saussure’s argument that signs are, for the most part, constructed arbitrarily.

 

4. D’Angelo’s brilliant demonstration of the seemingly arbitrary correspondence between dreamwork and the master tropes of classical rhetoric requires a further negotiation. Specifically, D’Angelo shifts his fascination with the function of tropes in Freud’s account of the process of dreaming toward the discipline of developmental psychology by demonstrating that these tropes also correspond to the four stages of cognitive development as described by Piaget (1987, 37, 36). In fact he argues elsewhere, as Lakoff does, that the master tropes of Aristotle are similarly grounded in human cognition; that is, rhetoric itself, as the science of inquiring into the available means of persuasion, has ontological status in the deep structures of human cognition, structures that can be understood developmentally (1982, 105-117) and in fact may be described with reference to theories of evolution such as that of Pierre de Chardin. Another source for this kind of grounding comes from Gerald Edelman, whose Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind grounds the work not only of George Lakoff, but of Mark Turner and Mark Johnson as well. Another example of the dangers inherent in cross-disciplinary borrowings comes from Mark Turner’s Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Turner suggests that contemporary theory has led to a dead end in English studies; he considers their discourses suspect because of their complexity and inaccessibility. Calling contemporary theory “ungrounded bootstrapping” and “fragmented,” Turner argues that “contemporary theory fails to connect with the full human world to the extent that it treats objects in literature that can be seen only by means of the theory: in that case, if the theory vanishes, its objects vanish” (4). Turner argues for humanistic studies grounded in schemes and tropes that are working metaphors in the physical world. He grounds his systematic exploration of the matrix of schemes and tropes by resurrecting classical stasis theory: “image schemas to structure our understanding of forces,” in other words, through ordered forms or geometric structures. What makes Turner’s polemic so astonishing is its deliberate ignoring of a new paradigm in cognitive science that bears some relationship to the chaos theory discussed in this essay: emergence. Instead of connecting cognitive science and English studies through reference to geometric schemes and tropes organized by an implied and unified subjectivity, one could pursue such an interdisciplinary connection by postulating a human cognizing subject that has no unity but the unity that it perceives in itself is a fiction constructed to encompass all the heterogeneity of cognitions occurring. “Emergence” is a theory of self-organization that shares certain characteristics with Prigogine’s formulation of self-organizing systems theory. What Turner misses so egregiously in his attack on contemporary critical theory is that Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the crucial developer of this connectionist/emergence paradigm (dormant though it was for some twenty years after he first conceived of the possibility of human perception without autonomous consciousness), is responsible for certain grounding concepts that led to Barthes’, Foucault’s and others’ assaults on naive concepts of authorships. Turner therefore attempts to ground his assault on contemporary critical theory in one paradigm of cognitive science, ignoring (or ignorant of) how another, competing paradigm within cognitive science grounds the very theories he attempts to refute.

 

5. One must say at this point that not all physicists have been drafted into this war, only those that are interested in the ideological dimension of the formations of their discipline. Prigogine’s reputation within the human sciences also lacks unanimous support. For example, take N. Katherine Hayle’s account of Prigogine’s position within the field of chaos studies, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (91-114). Yet if we apply Prigogine’s ideological categories to her own account, Hayles demonstrates a clear bias toward a time-reversible, geometrical perspective on chaos, something she shares with James Gleick. This becomes visible in her chapter on physics concepts in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon from her earlier The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Theories and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (168-198). In addressing the concept of the “field” in physics, she ignores physics tropes that have to do with time irreversiblity and with self-organization. These tropes play a crucial role in the representation of subjectivity and cultural processes in that novel. See my “Invisibility, the War Machine and Prigogine: Dissipative Structures and Aggregation Processes in the Zone of Gravity’s Rainbow,” forthcoming in Pynchon Notes 21. See also David Porush’s response to Gleick’s account of chaos, “Making Chaos: Two Views of a New Science,” in New England Review and Breadloaf Quarterly (“On Science” Volume XII, 4, Summer, 1990, 427-442), which may also serve as a useful critique of Hayles’ own methodology.

 

6. By the term “complicity,” I refer to the implied “contract” embraced by contending opponents to perpetuate the struggle indefinitely. I consider the opening quotation from Thrasymachus a useful arche for this implication. Baudrillard calls this seduction. See “On Seduction,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited with an Introduction by Mark Poster, 149-165.

 

7. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 22; 88; 110; Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. For the most sustained treatment by an avant-gardist of the cultural implications of the game of chess, see Marcel Duchamp and H. Halberstadt, Opposition et les cases congugee sont reconciliees (Brussels: l’Echiquier/Edmund Lancel, 1932). The opposition of the Kings at endgame is described in terms of the dynamics of the reversible movement of the pieces, and of the thermodymamics of equilibrium, preserving the opposition and breach of equilibrium which precipitate the end of the endgame. At this stage, the kings remain complicitous in attempting to preserve the endgame for as long as possible by seeking only to avoid making a mistake.

 

8. See Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari; citations with secondary references too numerous to count here. For a different reading of the significance of the concept becoming, as it indicates continuity between Deleuze’s work on Bergson and his work on Nietzsche, see Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, especially 19-25, 47-55.

Works Cited

 

• Allison, David, ed. The New Nietzsche. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985.
• Argyrous, Alex. A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution and Chaos. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
• Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford, 1975.
• Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze and Guattari. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
• D’Angelo, Frank. “Rhetoric and Cognition: Toward a Metatheory of Discourse.” Pre/Text 3, Summer 1982, 105-119.
• —. “Prolegomena to a Rhetoric of Tropes.” Rhetoric Review 6.l, 1978, 32-40.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1991.
• —. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
• —. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
• —. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester, Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia, 1990.
• —. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
• —. Difference et repetition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968.
• —“Nomad Thought.” In The New Nietzsche. Ed. David B. Allison. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985, 142-149.
• Derrida, Jacques. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” New Literary History VI, 1, Autumn, 1974, 5-75.
• Edelman, Gerald M. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
• Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton.
• —. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Avon Books, 1965.
• —. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1966.
• Hardt, Michael. Gilles Deleuze: Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
• —. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• —. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Theories and Literary Strategies in the 20th Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
• Kellner, Hans. “The Inflatable Trope as Narrative Theory: Structure or Allegory?” Diacritics Vol. 11, March, 1981, 14-28.
• Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
• Laplanche, Jean, and J.B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.
• Massumi, Brian. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations From Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will To Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967.
• Paulson, William R. The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
• Porush, David. “Making Chaos: Two Views of a New Science.” New England Review and Breadloaf Quarterly, “On Science,” Volume XII, 4, Summer, 1990, 427-442.
• Prigogine, Ilya. From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1980.
• Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature. New York: Bantam, 1984.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehay. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
• Serres, Michel. “Literature and the Exact Sciences.” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 59, xviii, #2, 1989, 4.
• Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. New York: Cornell University Press, 1986.
• Turner, Mark. Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
• White, Hayden. Metahistory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
• —. Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.