Encounters in the Blind Zone: Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, and the Question of Ideology

Alexander Ruch, 2000

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In the section of A Thousand Plateaus in which Deleuze and Guattari discuss the "postsignifying regime of signs" (119-134), they present a discussion of the process of subjectification which characterizes this regime. Attempting to elucidate the social nature of subjectification, Deleuze and Guattari bring up the figure of Althusser, particularly his concept of interpellation. While interpellation does seem to function well in the semiotic schema of Deleuze and Guattari advanced in "Postulates of Linguistics" and "On Several Regimes of Signs" (for example, linguistic interpellation as order-word, affecting an incorporeal transformation which is attributed to a body: that of the interpellated subject itself), the conceptual framework in which the concept was elaborated by Althusser, his discussion of ideology, is dismissed by Deleuze and Guattari as unnecessary at best, and misleading at worst. Such a puzzling move (interpellation without ideologywhat could that mean?) can only really be understood by taking stock of its various functions for Deleuze & Guattari; that is, where it gets them, as well as how it fits within their more general method of critique. Rather than imagine Deleuze and Guattari's dismissal of ideology as an irresponsible and self (selves?)-serving move that

allows them to appear profound while at the same time eliminates any real engagement with concrete social practices, I would like to suggest at the outset that this move is (1) directed, at least in this instance, specifically at Althusser, and for a specific purpose; and (2) in perfect accord not only with Deleuze and Guattari's preferred mode of critique (that is, non-dialectical), but also with Althusser's. This means that this moment in A Thousand Plateaus cannot be thought of as a mere digression (which is, in fact, how it appears in the text), but actually as a complex argument that brings together many of the disparate strands that constitute the pragmatist semiotic system advanced by Deleuze and Guattari. Interpellation, Subject, and Subjection Althusser famously defines ideology as "a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence." This imaginary relationship is made possible through the category of the subject, which is itself supported by what Althusser designates as the Other Subject, the position that centers any given ideological system. The Other Subject functions as the anchor of ideology, providing an absolute reference for subjectivity ("a subject through the Subject and subjected to the Subject"). The means through which the Other Subject transforms individuals into subjects of ideology is designated by Althusser as interpellation. I shall then suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or transforms the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!' (Lenin and Philosophy, 174) Deleuze and Guattari clearly feel there is something useful in Althusser's discussion of interpellation, which is transformed through its appropriation into the description of the process of subjectification, and which, at the same time, transforms or at least clarifies several points regarding Deleuze and Guattari's articulation of the working of signs. For Deleuze and Guattari subjectification is a characteristic of a particular regime of signs (the postsignifying). This regime holds no natural privileged place for them, it is only one regime among many (an infinite number of possible regimes). It is important for them, however, because together with the signifying regime it forms a constrictive system that blocks absolute deterritorializations: "The principal strata binding human beings are the organism, signifiance and interpretation, and subjectification and subjection" (A Thousand Plateaus, 134). The postsignifying regime is characterized by a double turning away which is subsumed under the heading of betrayal. Subjectification results from this betrayal, in which the authoritarian figure (the point of subjectification, which is also associated with Althusser's Other Subject) turns away from the subject, who also turns away and proceeds down a positive line of flight. The Subject betrays the subject, who betrays the Subject in turn. What is curious about this schema is that Deleuze and Guattari's insistence on the importance of betrayal to the process of subjectification does not seem to fit either with Althusser's discussion of interpellation or with Deleuze and Guattari's own discussion of subjectification as a binding stratum. On a surface level, betrayal seems at odds with subjection, since it indicates a line of flight. The crucial point, and one that Deleuze and Guattari do not elaborate as clearly as they could, is that they see betrayal as something like the most extreme form of devotion. The passional line of flight is designated as absolute, but is negative and segmented, it "pursues its own death." Far from moving away from the point of subjectification, as the term betrayal might suggest, the subject is utterly subjected to the point of subjectification as the guarantor of its being; it is only through the point of subjectification that any of these proceedings are possible, and even the turning away presupposes a more fundamental devotion and subjection to that which is betrayed. The examples that Deleuze and Guattari use to illustrate the double turning away make this clear. For the anorexic food is not something dismissed or ignored. Rather, it is the locus of passion even (especially) while it is being betrayed. Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the prophet (the fundamental figure of the postsignifying regime) is crucial here as well:

When a prophet declines the burden God entrusts to him (Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc.), it is not because the burden would have been too heavy, as with an imperial oracle or seer who refuses a dangerous mission. It is instead a case like Jonah's, who by hiding and fleeing and betraying anticipates the will of God more effectively than if he had obeyed. The prophet is always being forced by God, literally violated by him, much more than inspired by him. (A Thousand Plateaus, 124) Subjectification is not the passional escape that it may appear to be (although it is an escape from the regime of signifiance, for all that is worth, since Deleuze and Guattari provide an image of the two regimes functioning as a larger system to bind the human being to the strata, another set of God's mighty pincers). The relation of subjectification to subjection (they are essentially the same proceeding in (A Thousand Plateaus) looms over any deterritorialization that occurs within the postsignifying regime. The various forms of education or "normalization" imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving toward a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality (of which the mental reality just mentioned is a part, even when it seems to oppose it). (A Thousand Plateaus, 129) There indeed does seem to be a real affinity between this discussion of subjectification (and therefore subjection) and Althusser's discussion of the interpellation of subjects by the Subject (the prophet who requires a sign from God (A Thousand Plateaus, 123) as the subject who finds its very subjectivity within interpellating signs, which originate from the Other Subject; the double functioning of the term subject as free agent and subject of a higher authority (Lenin and Philosophy, 182), and a similar double functioning which Deleuze and Guattari see brought together in the Cogito, the subject as slave to itself, both free and at the same time utterly bound by the system of reason which provides that freedom (A Thousand Plateaus, 130), etc...). Yet the concept that is most important to Althusser, namely ideology, is completely eliminated in Deleuze and Guattari's treatment of subjectification and interpellation. Neither is it [subjectification] a question of a movement characteristic of ideology, as Althusser says: subjectification as a regime of signs or a form of expression is tied to an assemblage, in other words, an organization of power that is already fully functioning in the economy, rather than superposing itself upon contents or relations between contents determined as real in the last instance. (A Thousand Plateaus, 130) I contend that Deleuze and Guattari's rejection of ideology as a functional concept not only allows them to distance themselves from the orthodox Marxist base/superstructure model, but also serves as a register of both the philosophical debt to as well as their epistemological distance from Althusser. Two Critiques of Ideology There exist in A Thousand Plateaus not one but two critiques of the concept of ideology. I say not one but two because there is only one explicitly referenced in the text, a critique based on the base/superstructure model that Deleuze and Guattari believe is presupposed in any discussion of ideology. This argument proceeds as follows: as soon as one imagines that expression is determined by content, content is rendered Abstract (in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari write of the diagrammatic), and expression is reduced to ideology, which means that all expression derives ultimately from the State (it serves to recall that ideology comes to us from the ISAs), all of which renders the organization of power which overflow the boundaries of content and expression utterly opaque: If this parallelism [of form of content and form of expression] is replaced by a pyramidal image, then content (including its form) becomes an economic base of production displaying all the characteristics of the Abstract; the assemblages become the first story of a superstructure that, as such, is necessarily situated within a State apparatus; the regimes of signs and forms of expression become the second story of the superstructure, defined by ideology.... It misconstrues the nature of regimes of signs, which express organizations of power or assemblages and have nothing to do with

ideology as the supposed expression of a content (ideology is a most execrable concept obscuring all of the effectively operating social machines). It misconstrues the nature of organizations of power, which are in no way located within a State apparatus but rather are everywhere, effecting formalizations of content and expression, the segments of which they intertwine. Finally, it misconstrues the nature of content, which is in no way economic "in the last instance," since there are as many directly economic signs or expressions as there are noneconomic contents. (A Thousand Plateaus, 68-69) If this long quotation seems gratuitous, it appears here because I would prefer not to dwell on this critique for too long, since it is rather clear in the text, and since it serves to obscure another critique of ideology, one which I feel is ultimately more productive. I would like to make the point, however, that this first attack is directed not only toward theories of ideology in general (although it certainly is that), but toward Althusser's specifically, as is indicated by the terminology, primarily the emphasis on State Apparatuses and "determination in the last instance." This is particularly important because Althusser has perhaps gone the furthest in rendering a subtle and persuasive reading of "determination in the last instance" through the "effectivity of a structure on its elements" (Reading Capital, 182-193), a reading that actually comes quite close to Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the functioning of the Abstract Machine. The second critique of ideology to which I referred earlier is in my estimation the more interesting, in part because it interrogates the epistemological underpinnings of Althusser's project (or at least the project of his earlier years, prior to the latter half of the 1970s), and in part because it renders Althusser's inclusion in the discussion of the postsignifying regime of signs intelligible as more than a exercise in theoretical recuperation on the part of Deleuze and Guattari. This second argument basically contests Althusser's use of the binary opposition, one of the central refrains of Althusser's work, between science and ideology. However, this critique is not meaningful without an adequate examination of just how this opposition works for Althusser, and how it structures his writings during the period from around 1965 to 1975. Althusser: Ideology and Science That the distinction between ideology and science appears only briefly in the "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" essay is not particularly surprising, since the essay is concerned primarily with two questions: (1) How does a given social formation reproduce its conditions of reproduction, and (2) How does ideology (in general) work. Since neither of these questions explicitly references conditions of knowledge, Althusser restricts any discussion of such things to several "self-reflexive" asides in which he comments upon the possibility of someone writing about ideology from within ideology. Regarding this curious position, Althusser has this to say: That the author, insofar as he writes the lines of a discourse which claims to be scientific, is completely absent as a 'subject' from 'his' scientific discourse (for all scientific discourse is by definition a subject-less discourse, there is no 'Subject of science' except in an ideology of science) is a different question which I shall leave on the side for one moment. (Lenin and Philosophy, 171) After this moment, we are told that we are able to recognize that we are subjects from within ideology (since ideology functions precisely on the register of (mis)recognition, the imaginary), but we are not yet able to produce knowledge. To reach a knowledge of "why the category of the 'subject' is constitutive of ideology", we must attempt a break with ideology, "in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific (i.e. subject-less) discourse on ideology" (Lenin and Philosophy, 173). We are not told specifically what criterion would be necessary to constitute a "subject-less" discourse, but we are told (in the next paragraph) that Althusser intends to "employ a special mode of exposition: 'concrete' enough to be recognized, but abstract enough to be thinkable and thought, giving rise to a knowledge." Althusser then proceeds to give us his theory of interpellation, which is referenced above. But what is lost here is any satisfying description of how a knowledge (connaissance rather thanreconnaissance) is produced, for Althusser tells us only that it must be 'concrete', in order to provide recognition (which has already been aligned with the necessary functioning of ideology), but must also be balanced out with enough abstraction to render it

thinkable (since we clearly cannot think the concrete directly, because to attempt that would be to fall back into the misrecognition of recognition for knowledge). Beyond the fact that we are given a disturbingly unsatisfying suggestion as to what might differentiate a discourse based on the subject (ideology) from a subject-less discourse (science) (it apparently has to do with the level of abstraction, or a delicate balance, in true renaissance form, between the abstract and concrete), I am struck by the uncharacteristic lack of clarity within these pages. Althusser, who typically proceeds by such tactics as the enumeration and subsequent commentary upon certain explicit theses, has at this moment allowed his argument to rest upon the vague notion that a requisite level of abstraction will eliminate the subjectivity from a discourse. And the fact that he doesn't come right out and declare openly that this is what he is arguing (since in any case such an admission would be quite embarrassing) is precisely what interests me, because as I have mentioned it is quite uncharacteristic of Althusser's writing in general, but it is in fact characteristic of his writing (at least his writings before the mid 1970s) when he comes to a moment that seems to demand a justification for his categorical distinction between science on the one hand and ideology on the other. Before going right into these moments, it is worth situating exactly what they mean to Althusser. One of his most common refrains is that of Marx's "epistemological break", which Althusser locates in 1845, with the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology. To put it in the most general of terms, the break is construed as the single most important shift in Marx's thought, which allows Althusser to do two things. First, he is able to create a periodization of Marx's work that is structured around this break (into four distinct periods: the Early Works, the Works of the Break, the Transitional Works, and the Mature Works). Second, he is able to use this periodization to deemphasize the role of Hegel (and Feuerbach) in Marx's thought (or at least in Marx's "mature thought," which includes only the volumes of Capital). It is within this context that we must read Althusser's discussion of science and ideology, because the "break" in question is the moment at which, according to Althusser, Marx denounced his earlier problematic (based on an essence of man) in favor of a new problematic, located around class struggle as the engine of history. Or, to use Althusser's own words, "This 'epistemological break' divides Marx's thought into two long essential periods: the 'ideological' period before, and the scientific period after, the break in 1845" (For Marx, 34). To forecast what is to come, I might make note of the fact that 'ideological' appears here in quotations, while 'scientific' does not, suggesting that the term 'ideology' will require some explanation, while the meaning and conditions of 'science' are perfectly obvious (after all, we all know what science is). In order to situate more specifically this analysis of Althusser's deployment of the science/ideology distinction, it is useful to look at an earlier, yet (by his own admission) aborted, attempt to formulate rigorously the said distinction: There can be no question of attempting a profound definition of ideology here. It will suffice to know very schematically that an ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society. Without embarking on the problem of the relation between a science and its (ideological) past, we can say that ideology, as a system of representations, is distinguished from science in that in it the practico-social function is more important than the theoretical function (function as knowledge). (For Marx, 231) This quotation appears in the midst of the 1965 essay "Marxism and Humanism", which argues systematically against interpretations of Marxism as humanist. Now this argument (the basic thrust of which is unassailable, in my opinion; the theorization of the class struggle leaves no room for such tired concepts as an "essence of Man") turns, as do most of the essays compiled in For Marx, on Althusser's rehearsal of Marx's epistemological break, through which Marx moved from a rhetoric of "Man" (and with it such concepts as species-being or alienation) to a scientific theory of history (as demonstrated with new concepts such as "mode of production" or the class struggle itself). For this reason, the argument would seem to call for a discussion of what would distinguish ideology from science. Which makes it all the more surprising that this is all we get, a tentative elaboration (or rather, a tentative elaboration couched as a non-elaboration: "I can't elaborate on the difference, but if I were to, this is what I might say"). But even this tentative elaboration is quite interesting, and it cannot be discounted for the simple reason that Althusser included it in the essay. It is interesting first because it is not a categorical distinction, but also because, as I intend to argue,

it gives explicit form to one of Althusser's hidden (and indeed scandalous) desires: that true knowledge be sheltered from the contagion of the social. To remark on the first of these observations, it is worthwhile to note that the very tentativeness of the approach allows Althusser to admit that the distinction is not categorical; that ideology and science differ in degree, but not in nature. That is, if we take Althusser's wording seriously here, then both science and ideology have a practico-social function and a theoretical function, and the only way to distinguish the two is in their relative importance within a given field. And, to take up the second of these observations, it is precisely because the distinction is not categorical that Althusser expends so much effort trying to shore up the dividing line in different ways, to draw a "line of demarcation" around pure knowledge, rendering pure thought free from the contamination of the social. A brief moment of self-reflection must ensue, particularly since the suggestion I have just made is likely to have raised the hackles of any reader of Althusser. "But just a moment," one can only exclaim, "this is a decidedly rash accusation to levy against M. Althusser, particularly considering the lengths to which he has gone in insisting that knowledge is never found, but always produced." And this is clearly an important objection, which should occasion the investigation of the two moments in which Althusser most systematically lays out (and the emphasis on systematicity is not simply mine) the process of production of knowledge: in the essay entitled "On the Materialist Dialectic" and Part 1 of Reading Capital. "On the Materialist Dialectic" (dated 1963) contains Althusser's first systematic elaboration of the process of production of knowledge, an elaboration that is structured around an isomorphism between material production and theoretical production (Theoretical Practice). Scientific knowledge is the product of a theoretical labor. As such, Althusser distinguishes three Generalities that appear within the "labor of science": Generality I, the raw material on which the theoretical practice of science works, which is defined as necessarily abstract; Generality II, the "means of production" of science, the theory or system which performs the labor (and indeed, at least in this discussion, the laborer is not even the scientist or aggregate of scientists, but science itself); and Generality III, the (provisionally) finished product of scientific labor, the "concrete-in-thought" that is knowledge. But science is not the exclusive realm of theoretical practice; indeed Althusser argues that there are two kinds of theoretical practice: ideological and scientific. Once again, Althusser is decidedly elliptical in his discussion of what might formally distinguish one from the other. We are told that ideological theoretical practice is also a labor performed upon a raw material provided by other practices, but that it is "pre-scientific" in nature. Althusser draws out the consequences of this (very briefly) to indicate that it is part of the workings of a dialectic of knowledge. Succinctly: The theoretical practice of a science is always completely distinct from the ideological theoretical practice of its prehistory: this distinction takes the form of a 'qualitative' theoretical and historical continuity which I shall follow Bachelard in calling an 'epistemological break'. This is not the place to discuss the dialectic in action in the advent of this 'break': that is, the labor of specific theoretical transformation which installs it in each case, which establishes a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and by revealing this past as ideological. (For Marx, 167-168) In this formulation, a science is distinguished from ideology precisely by distinguishing itself from one, from negating its own past, and transforming itself, through that negation, into something we might call (for the sake of rhetorical overstatement) "non-ideology". Now it would clearly be to miss the point to "expose" the dialectical underpinnings of en essay entitled "On the Materialist Dialectic", but I do believe that it is illustrative of some of the problems that Althusser creates for himself by advancing the singular distinction between science and ideology as one of dialectical negation. For one thing, it presents what will come to be called scientificity as non-ideology, and enables Althusser to proceed without discussing in any more detail the actual mechanism of the "break"; it always appears as already having occurred in order to be recognized at all. Ideology and science break away from any exterior reference (even one in relation only to other signifiers) to form a dual-crystal formation in which each is defined solely by the other, precisely by the negation of the other (a two-word circle of signifiance). The general elaboration of the relation between science and ideology in Reading Capital is not so dissimilar from that of "On the Materialist Dialectic," so I will restrict my comments to the changes or additions to that argument that appear here. First, Althusser highlights that knowledge is an effect

(hence the coinage of the short-lived term "knowledge-effect"), that is, the product of a system. This in itself does not appear to be such a shift from "On the Materialist Dialectic," but here Althusser is more careful to draw out some of the consequences of such a move. In the most general of terms: the purpose of scientific discourse is to enable a determinate mechanism to produce something in such a way that its product functions as scientific knowledge. This mechanism is basically coterminous with the Generality II, the theory that transforms a given abstraction (Generality I) into knowledge (Generality III). This cannot really be understood apart from the other major change that comes about in Reading Capital, that is, that the ideological knowledge-effect is distinguished from the scientific knowledge-effect by its reliance on a mirror structure of (mis)recognition. It is difficult to deny that this definition looks forward to the ISA essay, where the consequences of the homology between ideology and Lacan's Imaginary are drawn out in more detail, and insofar as it does, I would suggest that for the moment I rename Althusser's "ideological knowledge-effect" as "subject-effect". The question, then, is how one discourse is able to produce a knowledge-effect, while another is able to produce a subject-effect. And Althusser's explicit answer here is that one type of discourse (scientific) proceeds through a mechanism that ensures the presence of scientificity, while the other proceeds through a mechanism of mirror-recognition. If we recall that science is a "subject-less" discourse, and that (following the argument in Reading Capital) it is determined as such through a mechanism that ensures scientificity (and not through any sort of relation to reality; Althusser is very clear about this point, at no moment in the process of generating knowledge do we touch upon a reality outside of science1), it follows that scientificity (the overwhelming generality of this term is not so much a defect in Althusser's terminology as a need to avoid recourse to any particular science) is generated through one's submission to a mechanical system outside of one's own control or creation. That is to say, again, that science is done by science (not by scientists), and that it is precisely the self-enclosed status of the science that renders it scientific. And this, finally, should bring us back to the question of how Althusser attempts to remove true knowledge from the contamination of the social. For the problem is not so much that Althusser has made science into an automaton, a machine in which the subject (and in Althusser "subject" must be read as ego -- the theme of a subject outside of consciousness that appears so often in Lacan is never commented on by Althusser -- to make any sense) has no place other than as an indifferent material support, but in the assumption that such automatism does not necessarily relate to the social. Althusser is led to argue that in the interplay of differential elements that constitute a symbolic system, one is successfully able to sidestep social relations (which basically consist in his work of (1) the economic infrastructure and (2) the ideological and (3) politico-legal superstructure). Hence the suggestion that science is exterior to both superstructure and infrastructure (Reading Capital, 133). Indeed, I would urge any reader who still has doubts regarding Althusser's positing of science as beyond the social to re-read chapter 5 of Reading Capital, in particular Althusser's critique of Gramsci, in which Althusser argues that the dialectical rupture between science and its (ideological) past "inaugurates a new form of historical existence and temporality which together save science (at least in certain historical conditions that ensure the real continuity of its own history - conditions that have not always existed) from the common fate of a single history: that of the 'historical bloc' unifying structure and superstructure" (Reading Capital, 133). That is: science emerges from concrete historical circumstances, but nonetheless its emergence consists of the leap out of said concrete circumstances into the self-enclosed realm of pure theory. Althusser's theory of Theoretical Practice, in light of this argument, can be seen as the final act that closes off the theoretical realm from the concrete-social realm, since theory and practice need not communicate; theory is already practice, but only in the realm of theory.2 Method Before returning to Deleuze and Guattari, to see what their system does to Althusser's opposition between science and ideology, it would be worthwhile to consider the form of the critique itself, to get some sort of handle on how and why it is effectuated in the way that it is. In this regard, Michael Hardt's Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy presents a quite useful description of Deleuze's preferred mode of critique. He argues that Deleuze, while confronting Hegel, will never deal with him directly (since doing so would be to already concede to a certain Hegelianism by

operating on the terrain Hegel has laid out), but instead introduces another philosopher or philosophical system to serve as a "middle ground." Here, with the rejection of determination, we can recognize the anti-Hegelian approach of Deleuze's early work, his reaction to the dialectic of negation. In this process, however, Deleuze's critical method takes on an interesting form. He does not attack the dialectic directly, but rather he introduces a third philosophical position that he locates between Bergson [Deleuze's own double in this circumstance] and the dialectic. Deleuze engages this proximate enemy on the specific fault that marks its insufficiency, and then he proceeds to show that Hegel, the fundamental enemy, carries this fault to the extreme. (Gilles Deleuze, 4) As Hardt argues, this enables Deleuze to effect a critique without entering into a relation of direct opposition, one that could always be recuperated back into a dialectical schema. I would like to argue that Althusser appears in A Thousand Plateaus as just such a proximate enemy. This would seem to necessitate a determination of just who Deleuze and Guattari consider their fundamental enemy. There appear to be any number of choices (Hegel once again? Descartes? Marx?), in the sense that each of these figures come into play in Althusser's designation of science and ideology as a binary opposition. Althusser himself has singled out Descartes' rationalism as a culprit: "I was led to give a rationalist explanation of the "break," contrasting truth and error in the form of the speculative distinction between science and ideology, in the singular and in general" (Essays in Self Criticism, 106). However, in the same text he goes on to maintain the science and ideology distinction with slight modifications, insisting that the distinction is still tenable because it was dialectical all along (121). As I have already pointed out, this is the case, but it does not, for all that, save the distinction (which remains absolute even when Althusser acknowledges that there are different sciences and different ideologies) from the critique to which Deleuze and Guattari submit it. It would appear that Hegel might pop up in Descartes' place, except for the fact that at this point in his career, Deleuze seems to want to have nothing more to do with Hegel at all. I would suggest that the fundamental enemy, then, is not Marx (as we shall see, Guattari claims that the science/ideology opposition is "without any real relation to Marx"), but rather a certain type of dogmatic Marxism. Althusser is posed between this dogmatic interpretation of Marx and Deleuze and Guattari themselves. This means that Althusser escapes this tradition (which tends to rely uncritically upon massive oppositions like science/ideology and base/superstructure) for the most part, but falls prey to it at certain moments, the theorization of science and ideology being the most prominent. Therefore, the critique of Althusser in A Thousand Plateaus must rely upon both the convergences and divergences of thought between Deleuze and Guattari and Althusser, and I must, in following this critique, make those convergences and divergences explicit. The Inertia of the Present The desire to render up or imagine a realm of thought that is not determined by the concrete historical dimensions from which it arises is not unique to Althusser; in fact, Deleuze, from the very beginning, has been concerned with a similar problem. This problem (a fundamentally Nietzschean one) could be summed up as follows: how is one able to resist the inertia of the present. This is in a sense the question of the productivity of thought (and of social change) that serves as the motor for both Althusser and Deleuze's writings. (I leave Guattari out here simply because the problem of the inertia of the present is not as central to his own writing as it is to Althusser's and Deleuze's.) And if this sort of question is what led Nietzsche to theorize the untimely, it is also a question that was central to Marx. After all, the question is one of thinking revolution. How can those acting in the present resist it in order to usher in the future? This problem seems all the more pressing when one considers that it is laid out within a structure of determination of a superstructure by an economic base. If the analysis of capital is to serve as one answer ("capital necessarily tends toward its own destruction"), this answer does not necessarily serve the revolution too well, since, as Althusser himself has commented, it can lead to an understanding of Marxism as a pure historicism, and ultimately to such poor formulations as Stalin's "right side of history." What I call the "inertia of the present" appears under different terms in Althusser and in Deleuze, and it is through those terms that I can begin to draw out the differences of the responses; differences

that attest as much as anything to the different formations of the problem in Althusser's work and in Deleuze's. In Althusser, the inertia of the present appears under the terms "empiricism," "obviousness," and of course "ideology." For Deleuze, the same phenomenon appears in the terms "clich," "opinion," "the dominant reality," and the "state of affairs." The problem of thought is to escape the determination of the present, to render up the new and enable one to think, however problematically, the transformation of the social. We have seen that Althusser's answer to this is the self-enclosed nature of science, such that in the elimination of the subject through recourse to a purely symbolic interplay of differential elements, the social is absolutely excluded. It remains to be seen just how Deleuze formulates his response to the question, and how that response conditions the critique of Althusser that appears in A Thousand Plateaus. However, in order to orient my discussion of this relation between thinkers, I may as well present Deleuze and Guattari's response at its most fundamental: we escape the state of affairs or clich through aproductive encounter with the outside. In light of this shared concern, it may become more clear why Althusser was singled out for critique in A Thousand Plateaus (after all, he is not the only Marxist who has written about ideology). As a preliminary, we can at least state the following: (1) Althusser was interested in a problem which was also of interest to Deleuze and Guattari, namely, how to theorize a thought that is resistant to the present. (2) In doing so, Althusser employed the binary distinction between ideology and science, repeatedly shoring up the dividing line to save science from the contamination of ideology. (3) While theorizing the mechanism of ideology, Althusser created a concept that Deleuze and Guattari found useful, namely, interpellation. The question, then, is where the use of interpellation gets Deleuze and Guattari, since the argument contained in their discussion of the postsignifying regime of signs does not seem to require it in any way. Or, to put it differently, there must be some other motivation for their reference to Althusser, since it is in no sense necessary to their argument. In a sense, maintaining the concept of interpellation marks a fundamental debt to Althusser, since what interpellation suggests is that the subject is a product of the social functioning of signs. This is clearly one of the reasons that Althusser comes up, and indeed, his discussion of interpellation is quite powerful on precisely those grounds. But, to return to the question I posed originally, what do Deleuze and Guattari get from the maintenance of interpellation coupled with a categorical rejection of the concept of ideology? Having marked the fact that for Althusser ideology and science are inseparable concepts (as with all dialectical oppositions, one cannot think one without the other), it would appear that Deleuze and Guattari do not feel that ideology is a salvageable concept, and would rather try to save interpellation than enter into the dialectic of science and ideology. Given what I have just said regarding a desire for "resistance to the present" in both Althusser and Deleuze, this rejection of science/ideology also entails a rejection of Althusser's solution to their mutual problem. But on what grounds? In order to answer this I will have to elaborate more on the semiotic system that Deleuze and Guattari propose in A Thousand Plateaus, and link that system up with the more general philosophy of strata that they propose. Signs and Strata As per the general structure of A Thousand Plateaus, the sections on semiotics proceed through a vast proliferation of interrelated concepts. However, this proliferation can often obscure more systematic strategies employed by Deleuze and Guattari, and despite the suggestion that the plateaus should be read in whatever sequence best suits the reader, the moves being made and overall arguments advanced in plateaus 4 and 5 are best understood when read in the order in which they appear in the book. Deleuze and Guattari begin by proceeding systematically through an examination of the assumptions of various linguistic or semiological theories (from Saussure and Benveniste to Chomsky and Labov) in order to root out the exclusions of the social that all these systems (presented through the "postulates of linguistics") effect. This is done through recourse to the curious discussion of strata first put forward in the section perversely entitled "The Geology of Morals," in which Hjelmslevian Glossematics are twisted almost beyond recognition. To lay out summarily the basics of this system, there exist in every stratic formation (and indeed strata exist everywhere, according to Deleuze and Guattari, even though, as we shall see, they are not primary or originary) a pair of strata (which may be in turn made up of other stratic systems), that of content and that of expression. Both expression and content have their own form and substance,

which means that neither one directly determines the other; nor do they share a particular form. Deleuze and Guattari's examples run from the biological strata (organic forms as content, genetic coding as expression) to the various human strata (hand and tool as content, face and language as expression). Since there is neither determination nor isomorphism between content and expression, Deleuze and Guattari posit the existence of an abstract machine that formalizes substances (of both content and expression) while itself remaining formless and substanceless (Deleuze and Guattari do not talk of substances before they are formed, because substances are defined as formed matter). These abstract machines exist on the plane of consistency, from which all other planes and strata arise. (This plane of consistency is the One-All that preserves both the immanence and univocality of the stratic systems, it is primary in the sense that it is the support of all the strata.) As we shall see, the abstract machines are something like condensations of forces allowing the strata to relate through a non-relation. And finally, abstract machines are effectuated (actualized) through concrete assemblages. What this complex jumble means for linguistics is that any examination of language that does not take into account those elements that have been systematically excluded from the linguistic object (social context, implied assumptions, until recently the entire realm of the performative and illocutionary) will be unable to account for language in any productive way; that is, in any form that does not simply note the existence of correspondences, which in itself tells us nothing. For Deleuze and Guattari, the theories of the performative and the illocutionary are useful precisely because they immediately relate language to an extra-linguistic reality. "It [the theory of the performative sphere] has made it impossible to define semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics as scientific zones of language independent of pragmatics" (A Thousand Plateaus, 77). To put it bluntly, one cannot conceive of language without also thinking the social. Their theory of the order-word appears as an expansion of the illocutionary to encompass all language; language does things, and this is not accidental to some enclosed structure of language, but is fundamental. But linguistics does not, despite all that, simply open up into some miasma of generality, but can and must still be considered as an object (albeit in modified form): There are variables of expression that establish a relation between language and the outside, but precisely because they are immanent to language. As long as linguistics confines itself to constants, whether syntactical, morphological, or phonological, it ties the statement to a signifier and enunciation to a subject and accordingly botches the assemblage; it consigns circumstances to the exterior, closes language in on itself, and makes pragmatics a residue. (A Thousand Plateaus, 82) I would like to note two words: "outside" and "exterior". Although quite similar, there is one serious difference in usage here, and this usage will become crucial to our problematic. The exterior is a self-enclosed realm, both heterogeneous and utterly uncommunicative with the interior. The outside, in contrast, remains in relation to language (which we may as well call the inside for now) despite its heterogeneity. From this basis, Deleuze and Guattari then proceed, in the section "On Several Regimes of Signs", to move from a discussion of language to the more complicated discussion of regimes of signs, which will bring us back to their treatment of strata. A regime of signs is defined as "any specific formalization of expression...at least when the expression is linguistic" (111). We already know that language necessarily relates to an outside, but now we are given the specifics of that relation. First, forms of expression relate to their respective contents, but only through a non-relation. Second, they relate directly to the abstract machines, which function to give form to both expressions and contents. Third, they are effectuated through concrete assemblages. If this analytical schema appears extraordinarily abstract, that is because it is. But that does not mean that it does not require clarification. In fact, this philosophy of strata does not really take on its full meaning until Deleuze clarifies it in his book on Foucault, and indeed the discussion of content and expression in A Thousand Plateausappears far less gratuitous when it is thought in relation to Foucault's writing, particularly Discipline and Punish and the first volume of the History of Sexuality. Foucault

In Foucault, Deleuze makes clear just how much of this analysis of strata he feels comes from Foucault. The book constitutes an effort on Deleuze's part to sustain Foucault's status as a philosopher (rather than a historian or archivist); and in laying out what he feels constitutes the basis of Foucault's contribution to philosophy, Deleuze returns to precisely this discussion of expression, content, and abstract machines. In doing so, he makes much clear that was only hinted at in A Thousand Plateaus. This is particularly relevant for us as well, because it opens up a discussion of strata and regimes of signs in relation to power and knowledge. In Foucault the planes of expression and content are determined as the articulable and the visible, the said and the seen, statements and visibilities. Taken together as an assemblage, the strata give rise to knowledge. "Knowledge is a practical assemblage, a 'mechanism' of statements and visibilities" (Foucault, 51). The strata are specifically linked to historical formations, in the same way that Foucault analyzed knowledge as a historical phenomenon (most dramatically in The Order of Things). Historical formations are posited upon a particular relation between content and expression, but again this relation appears as a non-relation. The statement has primacy over the visible, but does not determine it (Foucault, 49). For this reason, Deleuze argues, Foucault needed to formulate a mechanism outside of the strata that would explain the correspondence (non-relation) between content and expression. This mechanism is the diagram, or the abstract machine. From this it becomes more clear just what to make of the abstract machine, because it appears here as "a presentation of the relations between forces unique to a particular formation" (Foucault, 72). And this is precisely the definition of power that appears in Foucault: a relation between forces. It seems that a little more should be said about forces (and about power) simply to clarify their relation to the strata. Forces are determined as acting only upon other forces ("force has no object other than that of forces, and no being other than that of relation"; Foucault, 70), meaning that power is not something that is possessed, nor is it something that is privative. For Deleuze as well as Foucault power imbues the social, since it exists in each and every force relation, and indeed is defined as that relation itself. Yet power does not lie within the strata, but conditions the strata, making certain statements and visibilities possible. Power has no form, but it is what gives form to both content and expression. A diagram, then, is a description of the function of a particular power relation (more specifically, a set of power relations that have entered into a system of resonance). Power relations tend to change with historical formations, yet there is never one unified power relation that could define once and for all a given historical formation, if for no other reason than the fact that relations of force always exceed those which become crystallized (become resonant) in the diagram. It is for this reason that all periodizations (for which Foucault is famous) rely on tendencies that arise out of an interplay of multiplicities, rather than a single monolithic relation that is suddenly and mysteriously replaced by another relation. Power and knowledge must then presuppose each other, since without power there would be no form (or substance, for that matter) for either expression or content, and without knowledge (the dual strata) power relations would remain only virtual, they would not be actualized in a concrete assemblage. Regimes of Signs What emerges when we fold Foucault back into A Thousand Plateaus is an elucidation of the workings of an abstract machine as a system of resonance of power (molar organizations of power, such as the State, arising precisely from resonance between local and molecular power relations) which functions to give form to contents and expressions. This emphasis on power is precisely what makes Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the abstract machines relevant for social analysis, since it clarifies the relation between abstract machines and the strata. Regimes of signs appear as potential functions of language that condition the possibility of the enunciation of any particular speech act. As Foucault clearly shows, regimes of signs are only functions of existence of language that sometimes span a number of languages and are sometimes distributed within a single language; they coincide neither with a structure nor with units of a given order, but rather intersect them and cause them to appear in space and time. (A Thousand Plateaus, 140) Regimes of signs operate transversally within language to bring about an actualization of both a particular function (for example, subjectification) and a portion of the constants that make up a given

language. Both function (the functioning of the abstract machine to formalize expression) and language (the set of rules and variations that make up a particular language) would remain purely virtual without this intersection of the two to effect a concrete speech act. Subjectification occurs when an abstract machine enters into a corresponding assemblage in order to effectuate a linguistic proceeding that would function to transform a "concrete individual" (Deleuze and Guattari would be more likely to admit to a certain molar organization of particles and signs than posit a concrete individual that precedes subjectification) into a subject. This is interpellation, a pure function itself without any form, but which gives form to substances, in this case the form of the subject. It is precisely because interpellation can be stripped down to a pure function that it can emerge unscathed (yet not completely untransformed) from the repudiation of ideology as a productive concept. This provides an answer as to how Deleuze and Guattari feel they can extract interpellation from the theoretical framework in which it emerged, but the why remains unanswered. In order to explain why Deleuze and Guattari cannot stand the concept of ideology ("a most execrable concept") it is necessary to see just what this machinism of theirs does to the opposition between science and ideology. Deleuze and Guattari: Science and Ideology In my view it would be wrong to accept an opposition between science and ideology, especially in the obsessional mode of the Althusserians, who make that opposition massive, schematic and without any real relation to Marx. (Molecular Revolution, 105) Science, like all knowledge, appears within the strata, that is, in the relation between expression and content. While Althusser believes that the scientificity of science (precisely the self-enclosed and systematic nature of science) will allow it to exist in a realm divorced from the social, Deleuze and Guattari do not allow for any such self-enclosure. In much the same way that they opened up linguistics to an outside that would condition it (even render it possible at all), Deleuze and Guattari are unwilling to admit any absolute border between science and its outside (power). Like all other knowledges, science presupposes power relations that would function to make it speak, just as power relations themselves presuppose formations of knowledge to actualize them. This is not to say that all knowledges are scientific ("Knowledge is the unity of stratum which is distributed throughout the different thresholds, the stratum itself existing only as the stacking-up of these thresholds beneath different orientations, of which science is only one"; Foucault, 51), nor is it to say that sciences are thereby rendered indistinguishable from other knowledges. Foucault's four thresholds of scientificity (precisely what Deleuze is referring to in the quotation above) already give an indication of how scientificity can be determined without resorting to a binary opposition between science and nonscience. In fact, reading Foucault's discussion of the process of discourses crossing the various thresholds he determines (that of positivity, epistomologization, scientificity, and formalization), it is difficult not to think of it as something of a response to Althusser, particularly in Foucault's closing statements regarding Mathematics: Mathematics has certainly served as a model for most scientific discourses in their efforts to attain formal rigour and demonstrativity; but for the historian who questions the actual development of the sciences, it is a bad example, an example at least from which one cannot generalize. (The Archeology of Knowledge, 189). Of course Deleuze and Guattari are not Foucault, and it would be a bit disingenuous to fall back onto Foucault to treat Althusser, but I have included this quotation because it draws attention to one of Althusser's mistakes; that is, precisely what Foucault warns against. In positing science in a dialectical relationship to ideology, Althusser presses the thresholds into a single one, which a discourse would cross to become a science (and even if it is a structural threshold, which science would be continually crossing and falling back toward, the difficulty and tendency toward homogenization still arises). A knowledge-effect is still the result of a scientificity, but there are varied types of scientificity, none of which can eliminate power relations from entering into the formation of that knowledge. It should be no surprise that Althusser chose Mathematics as his ideal model for science, because among the sciences it is the only one to have crossed all the thresholds at once, thereby rendering the difference in thresholds indistinguishable, appearing as something that, through the building up from a small number of axioms, was able to constitute itself as a purely selfsufficient and closed sphere. (The actual self-enclosure of Mathematics is not at question here; even the most "developed" of sciences still requires practices of power to give it form.)

Science in general, just like linguistics in particular, opens onto an outside. That outside is the field of forces relating to other forces, which give rise to power. It should be no surprise by this point that Deleuze and Guattari write of science in much the same way they earlier wrote regarding linguistics, but this time in relation not only to the object of science (language in the case of linguistics) but to the various sciences themselves. Science as such is like everything else; madness is as intrinsic to it as reorderings. The same scientists may participate in both aspects, having their own madness, police, signifiances, or subjectifications, as well as their own abstract machines, all in their capacity as scientists. The phrase "the politics of science" is a good designation for these currents, which are internal to science and not simply circumstances and State factors that act upon it from the outside, leading it to make as [sic] atomic bomb here and embark upon a space program there. These political influences or determinations would not exist if science itself did not have its own poles, oscillations, strata, and destratifications, its own lines of flight and reorderings, in short, the more or less potential events of its own politics, its own particular "polemics," its own internal war machine (of which thwarted, persecuted, or hindered scientists are historically a part. (A Thousand Plateaus, 144). There are any number of problems with this passage. The usage of the term "outside," for example, has more in common with the usage of "exterior" that I cited earlier than with the previous usage of "outside" with which I had contrasted it. (I must note that here it is opposed to "interior" rather than to "inside.") As well, the use of the term "scientists" could well lend itself to a falling back on scientists as subjects of science in the most traditional of senses, although this danger is partly defused by reference to "their capacity as scientists," which gives "scientist" more of a structural rather than subjective/humanist connotation. Nonetheless, the passage is important for bringing up two points: (1) there is not one regime of signs that would correspond to scientific knowledge; as is the case with language, regimes of signs cut transversally across scientific and non-scientific discourses; and (2) regimes of signs are not simply negative formalizations binding us to the strata; even the most constrictive of regimes sets about lines of flight, which always hold potential for becomings or destratifications. The first of these points makes clear just what a discussion of regimes of signs means for science. If a science, like all discourse, is effectuated through a formalization of expression (more precisely, any number of formalizations of expression, depending upon the assemblage in which the science is articulated), and if formalizations of expression (regimes of signs) exist as functions deriving from an abstract machine (a diagram of power relations), then the functioning of the abstract machine permeates science at is very core. Subjectification, like all other functions of regimes of signs, can be the occasion for the formalization of scientific knowledge. As soon as subjectification appears as internal (at least potentially) to science, then it becomes impossible to maintain science as a subjectless discourse. Ideology (at least as defined by Althusser) is injected into the very structure defined by its absence. More generally, we could simply say that the fact that power relations are necessarily actualized in knowledges (there is no knowledge without power) explodes any attempt to shelter science from the social. Yet this move, which has been long in coming, requires some added articulation. For too long I have spoken of the social without elaborating upon the term itself, and now it would seem imperative that I clarify just what is meant by it. The Social and History I wish to begin here with one question: are "the social" and "concrete social relations" the same thing? For Althusser, as well as for Deleuze, the present and its concrete conditions (the dominant reality or state of affairs) pose a certain problem: they are inertial. If we take Althusser seriously when he defines ideology as a lived relation (ideology exists within material practices and actions), then ideology derives directly from the concrete conditions of our existence (at least insofar as we are never outside of ideology). For Deleuze, the state of affairs breeds opinions and clichs. In order for one to think productively, in a manner that creates something useful, there must be a way to

counteract the inertia of the present, as it appears in and through concrete social conditions. Does this necessarily mean that the social must also excluded from thought if thought is to be productive? I believe that I have demonstrated that this is so for Althusser, for whom the social must appear coterminous with concrete social relations. Or at least, that is how he formulates his response to a particular problem, that of resistance to the present, since his answer is to attempt to jettison the social from science altogether in an attempt to salvage its purity. The problem is slightly different for Deleuze, however, because ideology (or rather its correlates: opinion, clich, etc.) does not necessarily imbue the social as a whole. This is because the social can never be reduced to pure actuality, but always holds a virtual element, and a relation to force. Concrete social relations are actual; they create an inertial system. But even this inertial system is related to an outside: power. This is to say, then, that while concrete social relations would appear coterminous with the state of affairs, the term social would refer both to the actuality of the state of affairs as well as the virtuality of forces that are only partially actualized in concrete social relations. This line of reasoning could appear quite ungenerous to Althusser when formulated in such a manner, since it appears to simply chide him for not having developed a theory of power relations or virtuality with which to understand the social. I should perhaps rephrase my comments in the following manner: by returning to Michael Hardt's discussion of Deleuze's use of proximate enemies/proximate friends in critique, it allows me to point out that Althusser, whose social analyses come very close to Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the abstract machines, nonetheless tends to fall back into a much less interesting and productive model of the social (the social as monolithic whole or dialectical contradiction, in a strictly Hegelian sense) when he tries to formulate the conditions of thought and knowledge in terms of a dialectical opposition between science and ideology. Althusser, who would (I think it is fair to say) never be caught dead proposing a theory of the social as a homogeneous whole (it suffices to recall that overdetermined contradiction is one of his most important and productive concepts), appears to be led to do just that when he draws upon the science/ideology distinction to explain the proper conditions of the production of knowledge. In this sense, we can say about Althusser precisely what Althusser continually argued regarding Marx: that the ambiguities and confusions surrounding certain parts of his work derive from the inadequacy of the concepts employed to the thought from which they derive. Just as Marx was led (from the exigencies of the circumstances in which he wrote) to employ certain concepts inadequate to his thought (such as the opposition between essence and phenomena), thereby causing ambiguities and theoretical contradictions in his writing, so too Althusser, in employing science and ideology as dialectical concepts flattened out his otherwise quite productive theorization of the social.3 I have characterized Althusser and Deleuze's mutual problem as the question of resistance to the present. This suggests not only a relation to concrete social relations, but to history itself. It turns out that Althusser and Deleuze employ history in much the same way: in relation to a totalizing narrative. Hence the desire on the part of Althusser to "save science... from the common fate of a single history: that of the 'historical bloc' unifying structure and superstructure." (The historical bloc can be said to roughly parallel Deleuze's state of affairs.) For Deleuze, history belongs to the strata, it derives from the state of affairs, and tends to read the state of affairs as a moment in a teleological progression; one which, to reverse this formula, always reads the past and future in terms of the present, the state of affairs. So now we must return to the solution that Deleuze presents regarding resistance to the present (and to history, at least in the sense I have just roughly elaborated): a productive encounter with the outside. The Thought of the Outside [I]f the two formal elements of knowledge, external and heterogeneous, find historical accords which provide solutions for the 'problem' of truth, this is, as we have seen, because forces operate in a different space to that of forms, the space of the Outside, where the relation is precisely a 'nonrelation', the place a 'non-place', and history an emergence. (Foucault, 86-87). This thought, the thought of the outside, which comes to Deleuze from Blanchot via Foucault, is what solves, for Deleuze, the problem of the inertia of the present. If power (force) is conceived of as part of the social (but not contained within concrete social relationsthe state of affairs), then the social need not be excluded from thought, and in fact any attempt to "save" thought by hermetically

sealing it off from the social is bound to sabotage its own mission. This may appear a perverse definition of the social, but it seems less so when "force" is replaced with "power" (which is defined as the relation between forces). It is true that power cannot be seen or said (it is pure function and matter), but nonetheless thinking must "become thought" through a relation to this outside of the strata. "Thinking does not depend on a beautiful interiority that would reunite the visible and the articulable elements, but is carried under the intrusion of an outside that eats into the interval and forces or dismembers the internal" (Foucault, 87). This appears as a thought that does not reintroduce the subject (at least not in the sense that Althusser uses the term), but nonetheless is in intimate contact with the social. Nor is it susceptible to something like instrumental reason, since, much like Althusser spoke of ideology, we are always caught up with it already ("It follows that this action can never be purely instrumental; the men who would use an ideology purely as a means of action, as a tool, find that they have been caught by it, implicated by it, just when they are using it and believe themselves to be absolute masters of it"; For Marx, 234). For this reason, any attempt to make use of force to transform ourselves or the social is called experimentation by Deleuze and Guattari, to highlight the point that we have no absolute control over the outcome of new force relations. Hence also the warnings: [The Body without Organs] is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don't. This is not reassuring, because you can botch it. Or it can be terrifying and lead you to your death. It is nondesire as well as desire. It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. (A Thousand Plateaus, 149-150) One more difficulty must be surmounted here, however, because it could be objected that the thought of the diagram of power that formalizes the concrete state of affairs would only replicate that state in thought, since the diagram is what renders "words and things" the way they are as such. To this it can be objected that relations between forces always exceed those that become resonant in the diagram. [T]he final word on power is that resistance comes first, to the extent that power relations operate completely within the diagram, while resistances necessarily operate in a direct relation with the outside from which the diagrams emerge. This means that a social field offers more resistance than strategies, and the thought of the outside is a thought of resistance. (Foucault, 89-90) Again, there is a problem with this passage. While it is a concise summing up of one of Foucault's points in the first volume of The History of Sexuality ("Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power"; The History of Sexuality, 95), Deleuze's language effectively goes against both what Foucault says regarding the "position of exteriority to power" and his own rehearsal of the definition of power in Foucault as relations between forces. It would be more precise to say not that resistances relate to the outside of power as it functions in the diagram, but that they relate to those power relations that exceed the system of resonance that makes up the diagram. Nonetheless, this quotation does draw attention to the fact that relations of force are part of, rather than external to, the social ("a social field"). It also makes it clear that a given social field could never be homogenous, since any (even the most restrictive) diagram gives rise to its own resistance, and not simply in a negative way, as part of the diagram (in the sense that a major key always has its relative minor that can always be subsumed back within the major), but through those forces that simply do not enter into resonance with the diagram at all (but with which the diagram still communicates; otherwise diagrams would be static formations rather than constant transformations). Productivity and Experimentation This is what we are told by the forces of the outside: the transformation occurs not to the historical, stratified and archeological composition but to the composing forces, when the latter enter into a relation with other forces which have come from outside (strategies). Emergence, change, and mutation affect composing forces, not composed forms. (Foucault, 87). It would appear, then, that the fact that science exists necessarily in relation to power (it must if it is to exist at all), far from damning science to replicate in theoretical form the state of affairs, saves science from precisely that fate, since it is the relation to an outside that gives science its potentiality

for creation. We are now in a position to understand just what Guattari means when he claims that sciences cannot be "considered independently of their technico-experimental context." It is not a matter of a return to what Althusser calls "empiricism", the belief that we can abstract an essence from phenomenon via a proper use of abstraction, but a matter of relating a particular science to the forces with which it interacts and intersects. It also explains why, after describing all the bindings that the regime of subjectification can enact, Deleuze and Guattari finish their discussion of subjectification with a call for experimentation: Subjectification carries desire to such a point of excess and unloosening that it must either annihilate itself in a black hole or change planes. Destratify, open up to a new function, a diagrammatic function. Let consciousness cease to be its own double, and passion the double of one person for another. Make consciousness an experimentation in life, and passion a field of continuous intensities, an emission of particle-signs... Use love and consciousness to abolish subjectification. (A Thousand Plateaus, 134) This is clearly hyperbolic writing; the point of such writing is to stress that our relation to power (we are always in relation to power) always has the potential to bring about deterritorialization, and not just a relative deterritorialization like subjectification. If the diagram or molar organization of forces is built upon a non-totalizing system of resonance between local power relations, then functions can be transformed by entering into relations with other forces outside of the diagram. As I have mentioned, however, it is not possible to predict in any absolute sense what a new relation of forces will entail. That is why the call is for experimentation. Productivity is the result of new relations of force, which only occurs through our connection to an outside, the outside that is power. It is from this standpoint that we can see why the attempt to seal science off from the social in a self-enclosed sphere is counterproductive. First, it denies the fact that science always presupposes power. Second, it attempts to remove from science precisely that which renders it productive, its relation to force. On the other side of things, we can also say that the negative valuation of ideology that the binary distinction between science and ideology presupposes makes all experimentation on the practico-social level appear useless, doomed only to reproduce docile subjects under the control of the State. Productivity and Critique? Finally, the question of productivity should bring us back to the question of critique itself, in this case, why this critique which I have argued is implicit in A Thousand Plateaus was not made explicit. If what I have called Deleuze and Guattari's "critique" of Althusser were simply a matter of chiding him for his mistakes, it would appear as pure ressentiment and if it were along the lines of a slight retooling of his concepts (for example, a slight modification of the definition of ideology or of science), it would appear as a dialectical negation that preserves precisely that which it negates. Instead, the gesture of critique that appears in A Thousand Plateaus proceeds entirely through selectivity.4 Interpellation as a concept describing a pure function (that which transforms something into a subject) is retained as a useful concept, while the framework of ideology and science (as put forth by Althusser: Deleuze and Guattari are clearly interested in talking about science in other ways, most directly in What is Philosophy?) is negated absolutely. Neither Deleuze nor Guattari are particularly interested in the task of the negative (particularly at this point in their joint project), which explains why what I have called a critique is in fact comprised of one sentence ("Neither is it a question of a movement characteristic of ideology..."; A Thousand Plateaus, 130; or, even more concisely: "We are no more familiar with scientificity than we are with ideology; all we know are assemblages"; A Thousand Plateaus 22). For Deleuze and Guattari, it is better to proceed with the creation of concepts than to descend to the arena of elaborate criticism (to "tarry with the negative," as it were), which tends to put a halt to real productivity. If my project appears to have descended to just such a level, I can only hope, perhaps delusionally, that it may nonetheless give rise to something productive. Notes

1. On this point, I would refer the reader to Reading Capital, 46-60. 2. Michael Hardt has already advanced a similar argument, although for different purposes, regarding the function of "Theoretical Practice" in Althusser's writings. SeeGilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, 104-107. 3. For Althusser's discussion of the inadequacy of the concepts available to Marx to his own thought, I would direct the reader to Section Nine of Part Two of Reading Capital, in particular 189-193. 4. On Deleuze's selectivity, see Hardt, xix. Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. "Elements of Self-Criticism." Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock, London: NLB, 1976, 100-161. Althusser, Louis. For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Verso, 1996, 19-39. Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, 127-186. Althusser, Louis and Balibar, tienne. Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Verso, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Foucault, Michel, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Guattari, Flix, "Towards a Micro-Politics of Desire." Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Hardt, Michael, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.