COLLECTING INTENSITIES: THE ARRIVAL OF FRENCH THEORY IN AMERICA, 1970s

JASON DEMERS

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

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I+I Canada iv Abstract

My dissertation is an exploration of the ways in which French thinkers and

American cultural and political radicalisms mixed during the late 1960s and through the 1970s. I establish that terms such as "French theory" and Post-structuralism" are an effect of translation, and that the latter in particular is an effect of the predominance of a narrative in the history of literary theory that posits the arrival of

French theory in the United States at the Johns Hopkins conference on "The

Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man." I mark the turn of the seventies as a period when the university was in crisis, and theorists were forced to answer difficult questions regarding the relationship between the university and the larger society that resided outside university walls. Whereas French concepts were imported as academic capital, particularly in the field of literary studies as it searched for a replacement paradigm for the New Criticism, I argue that these concepts were often born of extra-academic investments in the women's and gay liberation, prison, and worker's movements.

If narratives are constructed according to the privileging and arrangement of particular sets of events, my dissertation displaces the narrative trajectory which features the Johns Hopkins conference by focusing instead upon the French and

American events of 1968 and the Schizo-Culture conference organized by

Semiotext(e) in 1975. In the process of reconstructing this history I take note of figures (Jean-Jacques Lebel, Sylvere Lotringer) and projects (the Underground Press

Syndicate, Semiotext(e)) that maintained and fostered relationships with French thinkers and American cultural and political radicals during this time. Drawing upon

Bruno Latour's work on assemblage theory, I argue that what American and French icons represent are ideas and acts that are in circulation, and that they are assembled, embodied, and dispersed by intermediary figures and publications. In this way, I complicate oversimplified notions of influence, entry, and contact.

Drawing upon archives and alternative presses, my dissertation locates points at which French intellectuals like Michel Foucault, Felix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze entered America extra-academically, providing alternative contexts for the study and use of "French theory" in America. vi Acknowledgements

This project came together thanks to the assistance and support of a great number of people. I feel extremely privileged to have been able to work under the supervision of Barbara Godard. Anyone who knows Barbara is acutely aware of the fact that the emeritus that has been tacked onto her title will not slow her, but it does mean that I was one of the last of several generations of students to have benefitted from her unwavering devotion to the art of supervision. Due to decades of dedication to her students, Barbara anticipated the administrative and professional tasks at every turn, allowing me to prepare for every hurdle along the path to completion. In her capacity as supervisor, Barbara transmitted her encyclopedic and nuanced knowledge of theory as institutional object and toolkit for practice; each meeting with Barbara was an event. A tremendous amount of thanks must go out to Darren Gobert for being an uncompromisingly demanding close reader during the final months of writing. Without this push - combined with Darren's sincerity, warmth, and sense of humour (the latter particularly prominent in marginalia) - the document would not have ended up where it did. Art Redding provided encouragement, enthusiasm and unforgettable and inspired late night conversation over pitchers at the Gem. These conversations kept me going. Were his investment in intellectual community not so utterly genuine it would be a model to be followed. As an early reader of this project, Marcus Boon provided stimulating intellectual debate and valuable contributions as the project was unfolding. Thanks to Gary Genosko, Martin Breaugh, and Tom Loebel for bringing to my examining committee a close attention to historical and conceptual details, and for leading a dynamic conversation which will help to nuance my future work.

Kathy Armstrong, Emma Posca, and Jan Pearson, frontline for the Graduate Programme in English, helped me to navigate all things bureaucratic and provided laughs and smiles through it all. Along with Rose Crawford, Laureen Verasammy, and Souad Redouane down the hall, they had a knack for making a gloomy concrete building bright. Thanks, as well, to Ross Arthur, Ian Balfour, Shannon Bell, Julia Creet, Marie-Christine Leps, Steve McCaffery, Kim Michasiw, Susan Warwick, and to colleagues and friends at York for the part that they played in various capacities and at various stages during my years there.

The research for this dissertation was made possible by funds from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Ontario Graduate Scholarships (OGS), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship at York University, and research and fieldwork cost funds from CUPE 3903 and the Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University. Together, these funds allowed me to consult the William S. Burroughs collection at Ohio State University, the Allen Ginsberg collections at Columbia and Stanford Universities, the Downtown collection at New York University, the City Lights and Lawrence Ferlinghetti collections at University of California Berkeley, the Michel Foucault and Felix Guattari collections at 1'Institut Memoires de L'Edition Contemporaine (IMEC) and, with additional funds from the Mary Lily Research Grant at Duke University, the Kathy Acker collection. That the unpredictable twists and turns encountered in the archives felt at every juncture seamless is testament to the patience and resourcefulness of the archivists and staff that facilitated my research. Special thanks to Jose Ruiz-Funes at IMEC for helping me to make connections beyond the archives, and to Jeff Smith at OSU for a shared fascination with Burroughs that always made the day's research come to life.

Thanks to Denis Hollier, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Sylvere Lotringer, and John Rajchman for discussing their participation in, and perceptions of, the transatlantic travels of theory.

My parents, Jean-Jacques and Patricia Demers, kept me both motivated and grounded. I've learnt a lot from them, and continue to learn from them every day. This dissertation is for them. Thanks should also go out to my siblings Marc and Jennifer. Jennifer in particular accompanied me on my journey through two decades of counter and radical culture and helped me to maintain a sense of wonder through it all. And thanks, of course, to Joyce and Paul Mathews for becoming a second family along the way.

Vanessa Mathews was always my first reader, often my harshest critic, and she lived out and livened this project in at least a dozen daily conversations from cigarette breaks to marathon runthroughs. I can only hope that I was half as generous and helpful to Vanessa as we negotiated doctoral projects in parallel. I cannot fathom what writing would have been like without her constant companionship, support, patience, and intellect. viii Table of Contents

Abstract iv

Acknowledgements vi

List of Figures x

Introduction - Field - Event - Assemblage 1 From Baltimore to New York: Two Case Studies - Opening Remarks on "Travelling Theory" - Theory in the Field, or, The Cultural Economy of Academic Crisis - Eventalizating Theory - Re-assembling Theory

Chapter One - 1972: Les Annees '68 or the Second Coming of French Theory in America? 37 Cultural Cold War Criticism?: French theory and the Ford Foundation Structuralism: Split subject or signifying returns? - Do structures take to the streets? - The Structuralist Four — French Nietzsche - From Field to Assemblage

Chapter Two - Movement and Event: Paris X New York -> 101 Displacement and Recontextualization: "The Ends of Man " (1968) - Of Cobblestones and Campuses: Columbia XNanterre/Sorbonne - From classroom to classed room: the university, its curriculum, and its environs - Collecting for the Event: Up Against the Wall, April 22nd, 1968 - Theory and Events

Chapter Three - Of Spontaneous Collectives: Paris - French Theory - New York 132 From Event to Assemblage: Going Underground - In the Beginning, there were six: A Brief History of the Underground Press Syndicate - Paris XNew York (with Jean- Jacques Lebel) - Burroughs-Artaud-Deleuze-May '68-Guattari - Paris- Subterranean-New York - Deleuze/Guattari-French worker-Hoffman-Sinclair- Woodstock-Up Against the Wall Motherfucker - For the movement of Columbia (from the movement in Columbia) - Collecting the Event - Projecting the Event: From (Paris X) New York Chicago - The Containment Industry - The event, external relations, and internal syntheses: Becoming Women's LibeRATion - Up Against the Wall, RAT! - "Goodbye male-dominated left, " or, presencing futurity - Reachings out from within - Re-assembling Post-structuralism

Chapter Four - Foucault, the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons, and the Black Panther Party 214 Foucault-Nietzsche-Newton - Intolerable-Information: Foucault-Genet-Jackson Attica - For the Relay of Prison Speech ix

Chapter Five - In Search of Common Ground: On Semiotext(e) and Schizo-Culture 245 The Schizo-Culture Event: On Madness and Prisons - Interlude: On the Road with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - Conversational Theory: Producing the Common - Signalling downtown - Projection) for a Revolution in New York - What happens between the two: A New York Reel - Bounces, signals, jumps, and clicks - Of Foreign Agents and Time Bombs

Conclusion - Diagrams Over Top of a Tracing 298

Works Cited 307 X List of Figures

Figure One - The Structuralist Four 59

Figure Two - Cover of Columbia issue of RAT Subterranean News 165

Figure Three - Up Against the Wall, Grayson Kirk! 165

Figure Four - Cover offirst post-Columbia issue of RAT Subterranean News 172

Figure Five - The becoming-woman of RAT 193

Figure Six - Semiotext(e) Anti-Oedipus issue. Front cover 277

Figure Seven - Semiotext(e) Anti-Oedipus issue. Inside cover page 278

Figure Eight - Semiotext(e) Nietzsche's Return. Front cover 286

Figure Nine - The French Theory tracing 299

Figure Ten - Columbia XNanterre 302

Figure Eleven - The Lebel groupuscule 302

Figure Twelve - Foucault and the (prison) information network 303

Figure Thirteen - Displacing Arrivals, Semiotext(e) and Schizo-Culture 304

Figure Fourteen - Diagrams over top of a tracing 306 1 Introduction. Field - Event - Assemblage

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history - blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework.

-Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" 262-63

From Baltimore to New York: Two Case Studies

The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, 1966

With the help of the Ford Foundation, and under the auspices of the newly formed Johns Hopkins Humanities Center, a group of French intellectuals including

Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan, and Tzvetan

Todorov1 convened in Baltimore, subject to the gaze of "over one hundred humanists and social scientists from the United States and eight other countries" (Macksey and

Donato, "Preface" xv). The symposium on "The Languages of Criticism and the

Sciences of Man" marked an inaugural moment, the beginning of "a two-year program of seminars and colloquia" whose purpose was to "explore the impact of

1 Gilles Deleuze was invited, declined the offer, and sent a paper instead. Claude Levi-Strauss, who had spent the forties in New York becoming acquainted with Roman Jakobson and anthropologist Franz Boas - concocting structural anthropology in their company - helped to organize the event. 2 contemporary 'structuralist' thought on critical methods in humanistic and social studies" (xv).

Structuralism was au courant. In France, the movement was the subject of an infamous cartoon printed in a 1966 issue of Magazine litteraire. Grass-skirted and circle-seated in the secluded woods was a pensive group of four: Roland Barthes,

Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Levi-Strauss. The garb and location represented Levi-Strauss's groundbreaking Structural Anthropological work on

"primitives," and the cartoon, on the whole, proclaimed Structuralism a successor to

Sartrean existentialism. Though the cartoon was just that - cartoonish, a gross categorical oversimplification which all who were rendered disputed - on the other side of the Atlantic, Structuralism was a foreign knowledge and, in effect, presented itself to the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center (the Ford Foundation, attendees at the conference, the readers and writers of Structuralism's effects in Anglo-America), as an opportunity to invest in academic capital; the new French thought was a commodity whose stock appeared to be on the rise with evidence of this increase of market value coming in the form of the proliferation of discourse on Structuralism.

Although attendance at the conference was limited, it garnered a great deal of attention: academic discourse on Structuralism came to dominate a number of high profile journals such as Diacritics and Yale French Studies, and Structuralism was the topic of a number of edited collections. As a result, French texts were translated at a rapid rate, de/re-coding the new conceptual language that it offered. The terms and proper names imported circulated abundantly; theory became a storehouse of 3 references necessary for admission in certain journals and presses, a cultural capital that was establishing a position in the academic marketplace. Amongst the participants, it was a then unknown (in France as well as in the United States) Jacques

Derrida who had the most profound impact on the disposition of Structuralism and its successor in the United States. As a result of his intervention - his delivery of

"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" - the conference that was meant to introduce Structuralism (the new "language of criticism") to an

American audience became an emblem for its immediate undoing, the beginning of

Post-Structuralism in America. Post-Stucturalism, however, did not really arrive in

America until around 1980, and it was an American invention.3

2 As Robert Young characteristically describes "Post-Structuralism" in the preface to his 1981 edited collection Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, "[t]here is not a great deal of consensus about what, if anything, post-structuralism is, apart perhaps from the recognition that it involves the work of Derrida" (viii). Young's edited collection was one of three that appeared at the turn of the eighties, consecrating the term "Post-structuralism," and stapling it to a set of French names. See also Josue V. Harari's Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (1979), and John Sturrock's Structuralism and Since: From Levi-Strauss to Derrida (1979). Although Edith Kurzweil in The Age of Structuralism: Levi-Strauss to Foucault (1980) takes a somewhat more historical approach to her French subject matter, she concludes her work with a section on the troubled label and therefore also participates in the Anglo-American consecration of the term (240-245).

3 Francois Cusset makes this clear in his book on French Theory with its purposively anglicized title. As such, Cusset's book provides important insight into how differently French thinkers were positioned in France and the United States, but it is also a book whose purpose is to put "French theory" on display in France in order to demonstrate the potential of thinkers whose stock dwindled rapidly in their native country with the rise of the nouveaux philosophes at the turn of the eighties. While I am similarly interested in charting the translation, arrival, and positioning of theory in the Anglo-American academy, my own history remains in the 1970s because my aim is to recuperate significant crossings that have had less impact on the position and disposition of French theory in the Anglo-American academy during this decade and to consider how these extra-academic affairs had an impact on the shaping of French thought. 4 Schizo-Culture: On Madness and Prisons, 1975

In 1975, another French theory event was held both on and off Columbia's

New York campus: the Schizo-Culture conference on madness and prisons, co- organized by Sylvere Lotringer and John Rajchman. Lotringer, who had been organizing seminars at Reid Hall - Columbia's campus in Paris - since he was hired by Columbia's French department in 1972, returned to New York in 1975 and invited

Deleuze, Foucault, Felix Guattari, and Jean-Franfois Lyotard to speak alongside

American artists, activists, and intellectuals including radical feminist Ti-Grace

Atkinson, novelist and control prophet William S. Burroughs, chance-operating musician and writer John Cage, ex-prisoner and member of the Black Liberation

Army Judy Clark, Nietzsche scholar Arthur Danto, experimental playwright Richard

Foreman, poet John Giorno, and American and Scottish critics of psychiatry, Joel

Kovel and R.D. Laing. The event drew a diverse audience of 2,000 spectators.

Deleuze drew rhizomes on chalkboards, Guattari talked about microfacism, Foucault introduced his "repressive hypothesis," and Lyotard, without prior warning, implicitly denounced the three of them in his talk, reducing their work to "magisterial discourses;" Lyotard would never speak with them again.4

The "French Nietzscheans," as Lotringer refers to them, were as yet relatively unknown in Anglo-American circles (and they were certainly not known as such in

France). When Lotringer arrived at Reid Hall in 1972, Deleuze and Guattari had just

4 Lyotard's paper is printed in the Schizo-Culture edition of the Semiotext(e) journal as "On the Strength of the Weak." 5 published Anti-Oedipe, which received widespread attention for its critique of capitalism and the family, capturing and celebrating the spirit of May '68, a line which Lyotard followed in Economie libidinale (1974). By this time, Foucault's books were bestsellers in France, and 1975 marked the publication of his Surveiller et punir, a history of the French penitentiary. Rather than introducing their work to a virtually non-existent American academic audience - Foucault had received some attention in academic journals and had held a chair in the French department at

SUNY - Lotringer endeavoured to place them alongside artists and activists "who were reflecting on society in less rational but often far more creative and perceptive ways than those within the academic sphere," and who were, according to Lotringer,

"the closest equivalent to French thinkers" ("My '80s: Better than Life").

Perhaps it is because the proceedings for the conference have never been published that the event - along with its controversies, and the concepts it introduced

- has not been narrativised to the same extent that the Johns Hopkins conference has.5

While the Johns Hopkins conference has attained something of a mythological status in the history of French theory - it marked the entry of Structuralism and the conception of Post-Structuralism, it was the moment of Derridean deconstruction

(which would move to Yale and thrive in high profile journals on literary criticism) - accounts of the Schizo-Culture conference are sparse and inconclusive, and mark

5 The proceedings are, instead, scattered in collections devoted to one author or another (Foucault's collected interviews, collections of interviews and essays by Guattari). Amongst other controversies, which will be explained at greater length in chapter five, the conference saw Foucault accused of being an agent for the CIA and Guattari forced to cut a talk short due to accusations of sexism. 6 instead the beginning of a project which would continue to juxtapose French theorists with their American "equivalents" without the intrusion of a metacommentary to situate the aims and narrativise the ends of the project.

The Schizo-Culture conference was part of the Semiotext(e) project which

Lotringer had launched with a handful of graduate students and faculty interested in the study of semiotics when he arrived at Columbia. The Semiotext(e) group had already published two low-budget journal issues before organizing the conference in

1975, using the Semiotext(e) banner as a site for the publication and interrogation of linguistic theories being conceived in France. The conference, Lotringer reflects, changed the course that Semiotext(e) would take as a small press and independent publisher over the course of the next two decades. Lotringer describes the post

Schizo-Culture Semiotext(e) project as follows:

The idea always was to find a way out, but it doesn't exist before you create it, so we kept burning our own traces, abruptly jumping in different directions, losing at every step the readership we had just created among young academics, radicals and artists. Semiotext(e) first started publicizing theory, but it didn't take long to realize that the way out was also the way out of theory. And this is where the paradox began, which never quite cleared in the minds of those who thought that we were digging in, that we were "French Theory" and eventually celebrated us for it. ("After the Avant-Garde")

Whereas the Johns Hopkins conference was organized for the purpose of diffusing a new paradigm, sparking interested fields into frenzied discourse in their attempts to master a foreign knowledge, Semiotext(e) was not at all interested in settling the question of theory (avoiding, at all costs, the implementation of explanatory footnotes and introductions); instead it invested itself in the task of taking theory elsewhere, 7 configuring it anew at every step, and refusing to explain away each new configuration.

§

The question that originally sparked my project was: what if, rather than focusing upon the arrival of theory at Johns Hopkins in 1966, we were to take as a focal point the constellation that Sylvere Lotringer and John Rajchman fabricated in

New York in 1975, the "Schizo-Culture" conference which placed French theorists alongside American activists and avant-garde artists in front of a mixed audience of

2,000 in New York? This roster and audience are certainly far different than the hundred or so academics that congregated in order to bear witness to the unveiling of

Structuralism in Baltimore just short of a decade prior.

The aim of my dissertation, however, is not to shift from one context to another - from Baltimore to New York - but to lay bare a set of actors, issues, and opportunities that are related to theory but that have been passed by, or passed up.

Consequently, between my accounts of the Baltimore and New York events, I offer up a collection of subterranean connections among French theory and a New York anarchist group, the Living Theatre, and the Black Panther Party, demonstrating that the breadth and reach of histories are always much wider and less definite than their conventionalization allows.

As will become apparent over the course of my project, when the event of

French theory's arrival is approached from the perspective of the field of literaiy studies it is possible to explain why French theory is consecrated as Post- 8 structuralism at the turn of the eighties: its disposition, I will explain, is a result of the way in which it was relationally positioned in the field over the course of the seventies. In order to explore French theory's other travels, however, the restrictive grounds of the field must be abandoned because it is according to the relations and complexities that this adoptive field lops off that French theory is delimited as "Post- structuralism" in the first place. By returning to the event of French theory's arrival from the perspective of the assemblage, theory is revealed to be both constitutive of, and constituted by, other constellations, and other events. After considering the fundamental question of theory's translation in the next section of my introduction, the three sections that follow characterize the movement of my dissertation: from a mapping of the economy of an adoptive field in crisis (chapter one), to the unmooring of theory by way of the event (chapter two), to a tracing of the predominantly extra- academic associations which "assembled" theory over the course of the 1970s

(chapters three to five).

Opening Remarks on "Travelling Theory"

[A]s a result of specific historical circumstances, a theory or idea pertaining to those circumstances arises. What happens to it when, in different circumstances and for new reasons, it is used again and, in still more different circumstances, again? What can this tell us about theory itself - its limits, its possibilities, its inherent problems - and what can this suggest to us about the relationship between theory and criticism, on the one hand, and society and culture on the other?

-Edward W. Said, "Travelling Theory" 230 9 Although the appearance of French Structuralism in the United States is dated (October 1966) and therefore has the air of immediacy, its translation into the

Anglo-American context proved immediately problematic. Translation is never a smooth process whereby a signifier in one language finds its equivalent in another.

Even in the most ideal cases, where the equivalency of a term is indisputable, the position of the signifiers of origin and destination occupy different positions within their respective languages. As the "cultural turn" in translation studies - heralded by

Andre Lefevere and Susan Bassnett in the introduction to their edited volume

Translation, History, Culture - has demonstrated, translation is not simply a linguistic phenomenon, but should be considered in its cultural, political, and ideological dimensions as well, complicating the idea of source-text and translated-text equivalence. As Lawrence Venuti argues, the fluency model for translation erases cultural differences as a text is prepared for readability in its target-language culture meaning that it is "inevitably coded with target language values, beliefs, and social representations .... domesticating] the foreign text, making it intelligible and even familiar to the foreign language reader" (5). What I would like to assert from the outset is that without equivalent cultural, political, or intellectual contexts in France and the United States, French thought necessarily signifies differently when expressed on either side of the Atlantic.6

6 As Barbara Godard argues in an essay about the arrival of Structuralism and, ultimately, Post- Structuralism in Canada (her analysis also begins at a conference, that of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures in 1974), when contemporary French thought arrived in Canada, structuralism and phenomenology arrived nearly simultaneous to the arrival of semiotics, deconstruction, and feminism. As a result, "[f)orty years of European critical theory [was] absorbed in ten brief years, 10 Authors and concepts have different dispositions dependent on their position in field of origin and destination; factors including the hierarchal organization of presses, universities, and critics have an impact on how a translated text is received. As Pierre Bourdieu notes in his Preface to the English Edition of

Homo Academicus, he had to explain to the astonishment of an American visitor that

"all his intellectual heroes like Althusser, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault... held marginal positions in the University system" (xviii), a shock that undoubtedly has much to do with the fact that, as Cusset points out in the Preface to the English

Edition of his French Theory (a title which loses its irony in translation), texts that were "published by Gallimard or Editions de Minuit wind up translated by specialized

University presses" in the United States (xiv).7 When I approach questions of translation it is in terms of these broader cultural lexicons that I am speaking.

While these factors inform my consideration of translation throughout my dissertation, another methodology of translation is operative in this work, particularly in chapters three through five where I analyze the ways in which theory is assembled resulting in hybrids which the respective grandparents, French and German philosophy and Saussurean linguistics, would have difficulty recognizing" ("Structuralism / Post-Structuralism: Language, Reality, and Canadian Literature" 54-55).

7 As Godard points out in "Signs and Events: Deleuze and Translation" (an extended version of an earlier essay printed in parallax), where Deleuze's work is concerned it is not as simple as a transposition from creative to academic publishers. Before being picked up by Minnesota and Columbia University Presses, Deleuze's work was translated by countercultural and mass-market presses like Semiotext(e), City Lights, and Viking, and his major philosophical texts were only published in the 1990s. The difficulty of translating Deleuze's neologisms aside - which Godard considers in line with Deleuze and Guattrari's own theorization of semiotic translation - the trajectory of Deleuze's thought in translation, Godard argues, is effected by the position of the presses in which it was published, the order in which his work was published, the relationship (or, in comparison with Derrida, lack thereof) of Deleuze with his translations, and the relationship of his translators to "the hegemonic American academy" (Deleuze's translators are principally British, Australian and Canadian) (6). 11 extra-academically and extra-textually. In these chapters I pursue translation as an aspect of Bruno Latour's assemblage theory where "there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations" (108, emphasis original). Such a pursuit allows me to trace the way in which theory is "assembled" in the first place, recuperating aspects of French theory that are outside the parameters of (or, prior to their positioning in) academic fields, and that are in some cases made in America and not simply imported to America from abroad.

Discrepancies that arise in the process of translation are often evident in the most trivial of spaces, but further examination of these discrepancies reveals their fundamental significance. Richard Macksey gestures towards one such glaring discrepancy in his opening address at the Baltimore conference: "some of our initial difficulties are clearly indicated by the fact that the symmetrical English and French titles are not, on close examination, identical" ("Lions and Squares: Opening

Remarks" 1). Indeed, the French title for the conference, Les langages critiques et les sciences de I 'homme, made little sense in the context of the American university system where there was no such thing as the "Human Sciences," a division that dated back to the end of the nineteenth century in France. If Structuralism was a method, born of a national context - French Structuralism - how would this new methodology work when imported into entirely different fields and intellectual traditions? As

Macksey and Donato further point out in the preface to the published proceedings, although they "received help from many quarters in trying to make out passages in 12 the transcription or in carrying over the sense of an argument," infelicity and inaccuracy in translation "accountfs] for about eighty percent of the text" (xix). More important than quantifying the effect of such discrepancies is to note that the act of

"mak[ing] out passages" does not only involve a discerning eye, but also the use of foreign tools for the extraction and display of the thought being carried over (i.e, the

English words assigned with the task of conveying French thought). As soon as the conference was transcribed and collected, it was already foreign to itself.8

To put it simply, the grounds on either side of an ocean necessarily provide a different context for the interpretation and dissemination of a discourse, a culture. I do not intend to devalue the ripples produced by the arrival of foreign knowledges, proclaiming arrivals, point final, to be the destination of knowledges that are, via geographical remove, always further from the(ir) "truth." What I mean to say instead is simply that the removal of a knowledge from its context of production - as Edward

Said argues in his essay on "Travelling Theory" - means that it will necessarily signify differently.

In "Travelling Theory," Said points to four stages for the movement of ideas.

There is: 1) a point of origin, or, a set of conditions of emergence for a text; 2) a

"distance traversed" which involves pressures from various contexts along the way;

3) a "set of conditions" which shapes both the acceptance of, and resistances to, a transplanted idea; and, finally, 4) accommodation: the idea is "transformed by its new

8 Though incommensurability should be taken into account, I do not at all mean to suggest that such instances are negative. As John Rajchman points out, an "anomaly of sense" can produce novelty and "incommensurability may be said to be 'creative' when it gives rise to something new" {Philosophical Events 6). 13 uses, its new position in a new time and place" (226-227). When ideas move from one point to another, from origin to destination, they are transformed. Conditions of emergence become conditions for accommodation, and new uses do not necessarily speak to the versatility of ideas, but to the forcible adaptation of ideas to make them applicable to new problems.

Said's argument is helpful to the extent that it lays out a straightforward trajectory for mapping theory's travels, but it is only useful as long as it is not applied in such a straightforward manner. It is tempting, following Said, to move from origin to end, or emergence to accommodation, in a single swoop (French Theory originated in France and it is different upon arrival in America). It is crucial to recognize the difference between here and there, to understand that concepts are spatially and temporally contingent, and that a disjuncture in one or the other - or, in this case, both - will necessarily set concepts askew. The main focus for this project, however, will be on the second step in the process that Said outlines: the pressures encountered along the journey across time and place. By treating the movement of ideas as though they have beginning and end - a certain strand of turn of the seventies French thought becomes Post-structuralism in turn of the eighties America - conversations about what happens in the middle become limited as they are constrained by the necessity of a certain beginning and a predetermined end. All of a sudden, tangents become problematic. If ideas stray, so too does the narrative that must bring them from point

A to B. For narrative purposes, it is usually only the encounters that bring A closer to

B that are considered to be relevant (unless one is permitted to allow their account to 14 sprawl). By focusing upon the second step in this process - taking a closer look at the encounters dispersed between point A and B -1 will bring tangential encounters to bear on the pre-determined story of the origins of Post-structuralism.

As such, my dissertation is a work of historiography, a calling into question of the way in which a particular moment in the history of theory is generally transmitted.

As Hay den White reminds us:

histories ought never to be read as unambiguous signs of the events they report, but rather as symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that "liken" the events reported in them to some form with which we have already become familiar in our literary culture .... By the very constitution of events in such a way as to make a comprehensible story out of them, the historian charges those events with the symbolic significance of a comprehensible plot structure. (91-92)

Perhaps the most illustrative example of this tendency comes in the third edition of

Peter Barry's Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.

For his new edition, Barry adds a section entitled "Literary theory - a history in ten events" (262-286). Barry begins with the Indiana "Conference on Style" in 1958 which signaled the rising profile of linguistics in the humanities and ends with the

Sokal affair of 1996 which he reads as a signal of the beginning of the end of theory

(and, in particular, of the central position occupied by the French, Sokal's main targets). I do not contend with the entirety of this trajectory in my dissertation; instead, my focus is on the prominent position of two "consecutive" events: the Johns

Hopkins conference in 1966 and the publication of Deconstruction and Criticism in

1979. The problem with Barry's narrative arc is not that it is contentious; the problem is rather that his arc - particularly as regards these two events - is conventional and 15 not unique. This has everything to do with the hegemonic position that the Johns

Hopkins conference in general, and Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play" in particular, has assumed in the history of theory.

The writing of the history of French theory in America is vexed by this trajectory.9 While Francis Cusset is careful to point to threads that are scattered about this line in his recent book on French Theory, such threads remain on the margins of a text that is driven by the more or less conventionalized narrative that posits Derrida at the helm of the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, exploding

Structuralism at the instant of its arrival, and producing deconstruction/Post- structuralism from its ashes through the collaborative thinking that occurred at Yale, spreading through leading journals, and eventually, through the eighties and nineties, culminating in the canon and culture wars. What I argue is that the trajectory of theory's arrival has itself become something of a given that misses out on the potential of many of the other relationships and possibilities that characterized theory's Anglo-American arrival. As I will argue herein, the position that

Besides the glosses on Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, and Jacques Derrida that routinely appear in major anthologies, another notable predecessor for this narrative trajectory is Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism (1980), which relates the major movements in literary criticism from 1957-1977, from Frye's Anatomy of Criticism through Existentialism, Phenomenology, Structuralism, and Post-Structuralism. Lentricchia's history is linear and iconic, drawing attention to the Johns Hopkins conference and MLA Lowell prize-winning Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics (1975), before moving to Post-structuralism proper through Derrida's delivery of "Structure, Sign, and Play" and the formation of the Yale school (and journals like Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, and the Georgia Review who published them), with requisite nods to the work of Foucault and Barthes who played part in the shift from structuralism to this problematic post. Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) contributes not only to the canonization of certain "Structuralist" and "Post- Structuralist" thinkers, but also to the types of readings that render their analyses particularly appropriable by the field of literary studies, readings borrowed heavily from the Yale School in spite of his open criticism of their depoliticization of the work of Derrida. 16 Structuralism/Post-structuralism assumed in literary studies had a lot to do with a crisis in criticism at the moment of theory's arrival.

Theory in the Field, or. the Cultural Economy of Academic Crisis

[T]he essence of New Criticism: the ostrich sticks his head in the sand and admires the structural relationships among the grains.

-Bruce Franklin, "The Teaching of Literature in the Highest Academies of the Empire" 122

[A]s the 1970s unrolled, it was structuralism and its progeny which were to prove hegemonic. This was hardly surprising, not only because radical humanism had been rolled back and dissipated with the passing of the liberationist late 60's into the crisis-ridden mid-70's, but because structuralism, as a theoretical rather than political discourse, was considerably more appropriable by the academy than talk of student power.

-Terry Eagleton, The Function of Theory 97

By the late fifties it was widely acknowledged that the time for a replacement of the New Criticism had come, a sentiment most succinctly laid out, Frank

Lentricchia argues in After the New Criticism, by Murray Krieger in The New

Apologists for Poetry (1957). Lentricchia characterizes Krieger's book as a landmark, comprehensive account of the New Criticism that "predicted - correctly, it turns out - that the New Criticism had done all it could do for American literary critics (and the teaching of literature in the United States) and that newer movements were waiting in the wings to take its place on center stage" (3). If, according to Thomas Kuhn, paradigm shift occurs when questions arise that cannot be answered by the current paradigm, what were the questions at the centre of this shift away from New

Criticism as the critical dominant in literary studies?

In the face of rapid industrialization in the American South, American New

Criticism emerged as part of the Southern Agrarian movement skeptical of the scientific rationalism that was perceived to be the root cause of the erosion of

American values and Southern culture. The New Criticism was culturally conservative: promoted as a criticism that operated at complete remove from history and politics - focus was on the text itself - the New Criticism propped up a curriculum of classics, continuing to exclude issues of race, class, and gender while feigning pluralism (Poetry subscribed to no one value system, history, or course of action, but was comprehensive of all reality in the face of its fragmentation in the modern age).10 The New Criticism was indeed a modern paradigm, central to the

Humboldtian university of culture whose task was to produce national subjects, a task which, as Bill Readings puts it, the New Criticism accomplished in true republican fashion in the United States: via the canon as opposed to tradition (84-85). Although the layout of Readings' s book suggests that the Humboldtian university of culture succeeded the Kantian model of scientific rationality, the modern university was marked by the tension between the two, particularly in the post-war period that saw a rise in enrollment numbers, a change in demographics, and a perceived need to legitimize disciplines in order to procure funding.

10 As Bruce Franklin argues, the New Criticism was born of Brooks, Warren, Ransom and Tate in the 1930s as a conscious attack against the rising proletarian culture and fully thrived in the 1950s as anticommunist ideology ("The Teaching of Literature in the Highest Academies of the Empire" 112- 15). 18 The problems with the New Criticism in the sixties were manifold, but I would like to focus on the tension between two issues of position: the status of literary studies in the university, and the status of the university in society. On the one hand, in terms of outward appearances, the New Criticism was not scientific enough in a university that expressed its modernity in scientific terms (it did not answer to the demands of the modern university that saw a shift towards the hard sciences whose products were tangible). On the other hand, if the humanities necessarily play a cultural role in the university, the New Criticism was proving irrelevant to a diversifying and growing student population, particularly due to its inbuilt tendency to promote the reading of certain types of texts, conserving the sanctity of an exclusive canon unappealing to a student body that was producing its own cultures and demanding change. What is important to remember, however, is that this change was not only, and certainly not primarily, being demanded of the humanities - which benefitted from the sixties in the form of black and women's studies programs currently on the chopping block - but also of a university whose headlong dive into the logic of progress manifested itself in the form of the military-industrial complex, criticized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who coined the term to characterize its growth during his presidency) and students alike. The crisis in the New Criticism, then, demands to be read against the backdrop of the larger crisis in the university itself. When Structuralism arrived in America in the late-sixties and early seventies it was positioned in answer to the crisis in criticism in spite of this crisis in the 19 university and it should therefore be understood as an attempt to secure the future of the humanities in an unstable American university.

Richard Ohmann explains the crisis in the criticism in a telling fashion his

1976 book on the profession, English in America (1976). Beginning his book with a paper he delivered at the 1966 National Council of Teachers of English convention

(the same year that saw Structuralism arrive at Johns Hopkins), Ohmann characterizes the contemporary study of English as hyper-specialized, a characteristic which is typically associated with scientific study. Though initially skeptical of science, the

New Critical method was not exactly adverse to this requirement (the work of I. A.

Richards in particular had prepared the New Criticism for scientific application): the language and methodology crafted for the close reading of poems was meant to equip the reader for objective interpretation and was therefore readily adaptable to the demands of a university driven by the doctrine of science. While science is characterized by increased specialization, however, Ohmann points out that its particularity is always reined in by a simultaneous push towards generalization that is facilitated by a body of theory common to subfields, a discourse of legitimization that unifies fields and places otherwise non-conversant disciplines under a common banner, pursuant to a common cause. Ohmann refers to this phenomenon in literary studies as a need for theory (13) (a reference, it would seem, to the inadequate program proposed by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren in their Theory of Literature, the classic text from 1956 which made an adamant case for, and provided a thorough outline of, a program for the intrinsic analysis of texts). 20 If the New Criticism emerged in defense of literature from the perils of unhindered progress, Structuralism, early on, was cast as the ascendancy of a

"Science of Literature,"and was therefore a position that appeared as a challenge to the fundamental beliefs of the New Criticism. Leo Bersani ponders the legitimacy and intrigue of structuralism as a scientific paradigm for literary studies in his 1972

Partisan Review article, "Is there a Science of Literature?". In the article, Bersani takes note of the places where French "structuralists" are turning towards literature, stomping through the grounds laid out by Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Todorov, Lacan,

Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze in the process. Even if Bersani is skeptical about the utility and long-term viability of a science of literature, his piece has the effect of circumscribing all of the thinkers that it references. Not only does this have the effect of creating an affinity group of sorts (these are the French theorists who have affinities with literature), but Structuralism - and all of the names that the article associates with the label - is presented as a science. The question that the article poses is not whether structuralism is in fact scientific, but whether this science is appropriate to the study of literature. Bersani's skepticism aside, the offer of a new scientific apparatus for literary studies would have been intriguing because it had a cachet that might update, or, legitimize the humanities in an academy that was driven by the doctrine of progress. Structuralism, as a paradigm, had scientific semblance and was advertised as such. Although the New Criticism operated on the basis of fundamental assumptions (a disavowal of everything outside of the text: history, biography, reader response) and had crafted a number of concepts in order to 21 systematically analyze the text at hand, its scientific aspirations were undercut not only by its anti-progress origins but, more substantially, its reluctance to further distance itself from texts, to venture into the still more objective regions of textuality or the literary system).

The problem that Ohmann outlined in his 1966 paper, however, could not be answered by Structuralism; in literary studies, it was an apparatus made for close reading, an intrinsic - synchronic as opposed to diachronic - reading of texts.

Therefore, there was a move towards particularization that was, once again, unaccompanied by a move towards generalization (in spite of structuralism's basis in larger systems like linguistics, literature, and semiology). The allure of Structuralism was perhaps the interdisciplinarity which gave the paradigm an air of generality necessarily lost when appropriated in service of a discipline. In literary criticism,

Structuralism was not incommensurable with the paradigm against which it was contending for position;11 the result of overlap upon the Anglo-American disposition of French theory is that certain of its features are accentuated according to the structure of the adoptive field and the habitus of its Anglo-American users, their understanding of the rules of the game of literary criticism (which involved a close reading of texts).

11 That the infamous "deconstructionists" congregated at Yale, which had been a bastion of New Criticism from the late forties through to the early sixties (counting Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Rene Wellek, and W.K. Wimsatt as faculty), is emblematic of the ease with which New Critical and Structuralist strands could cross. Kuhn's study of scientific revolutions draws attention to the special circumstances that arise as a result of the incommensurability between old and new paradigms, pointing to crises as moments during which scientists become translators

(201-202). According to Kuhn, this period of translation is fleeting because it is threatening to the operation of normal science, but that such periods provoke "the participants in a communication breakdown to experience vicariously something of the merits and defects of each other's points of view," using tools that are not a part of their normal arsenal in order to overcome crises (201-202). If the position that

Structuralism would assume in literary studies was aimed in answer to the crisis in criticism - a vying for position in a field in search of a modern paradigm - in the process of being attendant to this crisis in the field, the position that Structuralism took at the turn of the seventies neglected the larger crisis in the university. If the modern university saw the privileging of science over culture, what were the consequences of modernizing literary studies as students were becoming as cynical about the myth of progress? It is for this reason that the moment of self-reflexivity that crisis presents, according to Kuhn, is such a compelling opportunity.

Structuralism, as adopted at the turn of the seventies, challenged the New Criticism by answering the call of science, but it was not at all incommensurable with the New

Criticism in its neglect of politics and history. Rather than caving into demands being made by students regarding the culture of the curriculum, literary critics saw in

Structuralism the opportunity to fulfill the perceived demands of the university to become even more scientific. 23

Eventalizing Theory

With the Semiotext(e) project, French theory was not introduced to contend with a lack - distributed so as to maintain the integrity of a field - but was instead constellated with other elements in spite of the lack of any coherent field, institution, language, or medium for conversations amongst elements to take place. Although

"actual" conversations were a rarity at the Schizo-Culture conference - Foucault,

Deleuze, and Guattari did not talk to Burroughs, Cage, or Foreman at the event12 - the conference and the journals that ensued rendered them conversant by the simple stroke of juxtaposition in both person and in print. When these French and American elements are placed side by side, we begin to recognize that they have something in common, that French concepts are evident even where they are not, and have never been. Concepts are "common names"; though singular, they are part and product of a larger "general intellect."13

If we understand concepts to be part of a general intellect, it is important to consider the way that a larger context, inclusive of the chatter that occurs outside university walls, factors into their creation and distribution. A concept is not created ex nihilo, it is given life by the crossing of several points at once; it is an intersection,

12 Lotringer, conversation with the author, 2 October 2006.

13 For a brief explanation of the general intellect, see Negri's "The Biopolitics of the General Intellect." The concept is related to his theorization, with other authors of the Italian Autonomia movement, of the immaterial labour that drives the contemporary service-based economy. The term is based upon a passing comment made by Marx in the Grundrisse. See also Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude 35-40, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire 28-29, 364-367. 24 a point produced of a multiplicity. As the second through fourth chapters of this project will make clear, an account of theory's arrival should not be restricted to theory's own orchestrated events (at Johns Hopkins, at Columbia) because theory is in an immanent relation with a (larger than academic) social context.

For Deleuze, an event is the momentary uniqueness expressed in a nexus of forces that has neither model nor goal. As such, the event is part of a continuity

(perpetual movement, becoming), but it is at the same time built of discontinuity; it is the appearance of something new that is irreducible to its appearance.14 Events are effected by a synthesis of forces. Events, therefore, collect. What the event simultaneously projects is the internal dynamic of the interaction of its constituent forces - a moment of productive intensity, a plateau - whose becoming moves through the event. It is in this sense that it is more appropriate to call May '68 the '68 years, and it is in this vein that, in the pages that follow, I analyze events according to their collection and projection. If Deleuze and Guattari point out that the concept is the domain of philosophy, that it is the role of the philosopher to create concepts, we should consider the creation of a concept as a philosophical event, a confluence of intensities. If they note in What is Philosophy that "[t]he greatness of a philosophy is measured by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in its concepts" (34), a great deal of what my project is about is

14 For Deleuze on the event see, in particular, The Logic of Sense 148-153 and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque 76-82. Consider, as well, the constitution of A Thousand Plateaus, as set of dates under which assemblages are collected, speaking to the perpetual movement of the event whose intensities actualize in several directions at once, each chapter a body of diverse and pertinent quotes brought together as a result of the event demarcated at the plateau's head. recuperating this movement of events on either side of the Atlantic, elided by the narratives into which concepts have been pulled. The (trans-Atlantic) movement of events through a concept like Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome will provide the thrust for Chapter three.

What is required for this project is, above all, a method through which the singularity of events can be taken into account without rendering them singular. In an interview entitled "Questions of Method," Foucault provides a brief outline for a methodology - "eventalization" - that he uses in his own work. As this method is a driving force for my project, it is worth pausing over his explanation here. Foucault describes eventalization as follows:

What do I mean by this term?

First of all, a breach of self-evidence. It means making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness that imposes itself uniformly on all. To show that things "weren't as necessary as all that"....

Second, eventalization means rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies, and so on, that at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal, necessary. In this sense, one is indeed effecting a sort of multiplication or pluralization of causes This procedure of causal multiplication means analyzing an event according to the multiple processes that constitute it....

As a way of lightening the weight of causality, "eventalization" thus works by constructing around the singular event analyzed as process a "polygon" or, rather, "polyhedron" of intelligibility, the number of 26 whose faces is not given in advance and can never properly be taken as finite.15 ("Questions of Method" 226-227)

Foucault's concept of eventalization is useful because it presents the event in such a form that it is automatically rendered transitive: the event is rendered procedurally rather than as an occurrence. As Foucault's first point makes clear, what eventalization guarantees, in historical research, is that whatsoever is singular - a moment, a thought - will not be a priori obscured by the reductive renderings of history. Instead, the self-evidence of what was thought universal, timeless, true - punishment, delinquency, sexuality, deviance - is revealed to be particular, historically constructed, and is only true by virtue of the entire discursive apparatus that makes it so. At the same time as the event is severed from the self-evidence that historical constancy brings, the event, following Foucault's second distinction, is multiplied as its "connections, encounters, supports," and so on, are rediscovered.

Although the event is singularized, it is not reduced to pure singularity which would, in the end, be extremely uneventful, inconsequential (as the event would then be without bearing on anything but itself).

My project will thus go through two related moves: first, the abolition of self- evidence (of the field and the "Post-structuralism" that it created) and second, the multiplication of processes, causes, and effects (embodied by Semiotext(e), but also by a number of things that happened between 1966 and 1975). What this study provides is not simply an account of two events (the Johns Hopkins and Semiotext(e)

15 The paragraph breaks are mine, which I have inserted for clarity. conference) - there are, after all, three chapters that come between them - but two different perspectives on the event of theory: theory as a construct of the

Bourdieuxian field on the one hand, and theory as an assemblage (everywhere conjoined with real world struggles, a force that cuts across several orders of discourse, passing over and through multiple dimensions; theory not as a product of, but with its time) on the other. Relating the event from the perspective of the field is useful, but it is also restrictive because it limits the points to which the event is allowed to digress.16 Such a history of the event is conservative in that it maintains the limits of the field that it relates, reaffirming the field's integrity by working within its bounds. The event, as such, is circumscribed. Perceived from the perspective of the assemblage, however, the event is freed from the retroactively imposed parameters that determine it: "Theory" is not a field but a common name, a multiplicity of divergent and otherwise invested points held together by, though by no means limited to the scope of, the concept, a signifying designation.

Re-assembling Theory

S[tudent]: So why is it called a "theory" if it says nothing about the things we study? P[rofessor]: It's a theory, and a strong one I think, but about how to

16 As Godard remarks in "Notes From the Cultural Field: Canadian Literature from Identity to Commodity," "there is no such thing as a 'complete' diagram in the representation of a given field ... The visibility of relations, the inclusion or exclusion of positions and details, depends on the scale of the map in question" (269). Although Godard demonstrates the dynamism of field theory by way of shifts in scale and perspective, I have opted, in this project, to concede to Bruno Latour's prompt and "re-assemble" French theory. To conclude my project with diagrams over top of a tracing is, Godard's qualifications considered, to assert that the assemblages I uncover are already part of the (differently scaled) field. 28 study things, or rather how not to study them—or rather, how to let the actors have some room to express themselves.

-Bruno Latour, Re-Assembling the Social 142

When we look back at the origins of French theory in America, it is evident and noteworthy that the eruptions of '68 which contributed to the form, content, references, and concern of theory - the eruptions that were "in the air" - were not the topic of much discussion as theory's concepts and personalities arrived in the United

States throughout the seventies. That connections are not documented does not mean that they are not there; concepts are a part of other constellations (besides the "Post-

Structuralist" or "Theory" constellations into which they are pulled), and these other constellations branch off at every point to other constellations, and so on.

It is for this reason that it is important, following Bruno Latour, to reassemble the social, to sketch in some of the elements that have gone missing in the process of translating the past - or an elsewhere - into something that is more suitable to, or readable in, another context. In Re-Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-

Network-Theory, Latour leaves behind the grounds forged by Actor-Network-Theory

(ANT) in the field of science studies and explains how the method might contribute to the social sciences by "redefining sociology not as the 'science of the social,' but as the tracing of associations" (5, emphasis original). The problem with the former approach, according to Latour, is that it takes "the social," "society," "social factors," and so on, as prefigured dimensions, domains, or frames which can then be applied to a problem or research object that will then be explained away. Such an approach does 29 not account for the proliferation of innovations or the uncertainty of boundaries. As

Latour lays it out, "there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations" (108, emphasis original). To begin from the perspective of the social is to begin with a predetermined group, a perspective from which the actors involved always tend to end up saying the same types of things. A sociology of associations frees actors from these group roles by looking instead to the process of group formation, deploying strings of mediators which complexify thought, give it new dimensions, and do not guarantee that it will ever arrive at the destination into which it has retroactively been installed.

To work through the history of French theory's arrival according to its multiple associations rather than taking the representational route that an analysis of its entry into a field would necessitate is an approach that is sensitive to one of the key features of the theory that is travelling: multiplicity. As Deleuze points out in a conversation with Foucault on the topic of "Intellectuals and Power:" "Who speaks and who acts? It's always a multiplicity, even in the person that speaks or acts. We are all groupuscules. There is no more representation" (207). This disdain for representation is not simply a feature of "Post-Structuralist" thought although it very much does have something to do with the time and space of its writing; it is a general condition rendered explicit in the politics of these thinkers. Rather than making

Deleuze and Foucault representatives of Post-structuralism, it is much more 30 interesting to recuperate and follow the group-forming lines that led them to develop these anti-representational politics in the first place.

If my study proceeds under the banner of "collecting intensities," my task is to recuperate unacknowledged moments of contact and to reconstruct around them a process of translation - a type of movement - that is more complex than translation documented as the migration of thought from take-off strip to landing pad, touching down securely within the confines of a field. To restrict documentation and analysis to movement from one defined field to another involves a restricted approach to the question of translation. Translation involves more than a movement from one temporo-spatial grounds to another, or from one field of forces and struggles to another; its movement is dispersed. The assemblage approach operates by recognizing that the process of translation is dispersed amongst intermediaries and mediators and by accounting for them. Rather than jumping from one context to another, concepts, politics, and cultures travel through innumerable mediators, brushing past and through one another. Assembly is an act, a process that cannot be delimited or measured because: 1) the assemblage being produced is more complexly connected than truncated characterizations of its constitution could ever gather or express, and 2) assembly is a continuous process of becoming that cannot be frozen for measure. When we travel through theory, its history, its making, we will there find, lingering and unacknowledged, actuals and possibles whose discovery will spark new becomings, other assemblages. 31 When Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari in particular crossed the Atlantic, the stage had been set for their subsumption under the rubric of Structuralism. The Post- structuralist obsessions of the eighties (an ushering into the eighties for which John

Sturrock's 1979 collection Structuralism and Since: From Levi-Strauss to Derrida is perhaps the best emblem amongst a group of consecrating texts) was an Anglo-

American invention that wed the work of these newer French intellectuals to a specific set of academic predecessors. The complex set of concerns that this new

French intellectual work represented was foregone in favour of the shorthand of a negative relation. At the turn of the seventies, as the importers of structuralism fought to take a position in a field in crisis, the "movement" was in the process of delegitimizing the very academy that such critics continued to court; a vast network of potential was growing out of the academy during the time that Structuralism was being brought in. I employ Latour's Actor Network Theory (ANT) because it urges us to broaden our scope, to collect the connections being made on the very grounds that disciplinarians delimit in advance. It is with the aim of reassembling this history - the arrival of French theory in America - that I will proceed.

How will this network of actors be assembled? On the one hand, it is as simple as acknowledging that Michel Foucault did not have to meet face to face with members of the Black Panther Party in order for a relation to exist between them.

Foucault was reading BPP documents as early as 1968 with a great interest in the way that the Black Panthers were developing Marx. Few would consider it a stretch to acknowledge that encounters in print are as significant as encounters in the flesh. As 32 for encounters in the flesh, if Foucault did not have a direct relationship with the

Panthers, Jean Genet, beyond being a transporter of Panther writings to France, was involved in the prison liberation movement with Foucault in France and the Panthers in the United States. By following the lines traced by mediators such as translated texts and mutual mobilizers, the crossing of concerns and strategies becomes tangible.

But the tangibility of overlapping concerns and strategies does not always have to be born of such tangible (human and textual) circumstances. Because objects, as Latour reminds us, are actors as much as humans, things become a bit more complicated. In this sense, a seemingly inanimate object can end up being as animate as people and publications like Genet and the translated writings of the BPP. As I will argue in Chapter two, when cobblestones are thrown by Columbia protestors - a conscious reference to the Parisian uprisings - Columbia is linked to Nanterre and the

Sorbonne, New York to Paris. What is marked by such events is the opening up of local practices to an outside: an associative channel is forged (in this case, between two continents). This is to say that it does not take a human being (Jean Genet) to act the part of mediator; an object (a cobblestone), in some cases, will do.

On a fundamental level, if Foucault was more interested in visiting Attica prison in 1972 than he was in giving a seminar on the "history of truth" at SUNY

Buffalo, then why can't we understand Foucault from this perspective point? If we find allusions to George Jackson, Huey Newton, and William S. Burroughs in

Foucault's and Deleuze's texts, why can't we read the America that they did?

Foucault notes that "if [the genealogist] listens to history, he finds that there is 33 'something altogether different' behind things" ("Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"

371). What might we make of the recognizable but unmentioned Foucault amongst a crowd of marching SDS protestors in a documentary on sixties radicals in America?

§

In the project that follows, I string these elements together, beginning with the event of theory's arrival and its field-specific adoption, and then complexifying its arrival by accumulating other events and mediators through which theory passes, becoming something entirely different along the way. What begins as the problematic movement of thought from one field to another becomes an amalgam of local struggles, moving and assembling.

In the first chapter, I examine the constellation of edited collections and special journal issues that emerged around the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, focusing upon 1972 - when the conference proceedings were republished under the title The Structuralist Controversy - as a banner year for publications on structuralism, particularly in the field of literary studies. Although Structuralist terminology was new, I argue that the paradigm shift represented the continuation of a formalist project that remained out of joint with the world outside university walls, a disposition that I consider in the context of the Cold War. I then contrast the inward-oriented Anglo-American collection of Structuralism with Structuralism's outward-oriented developments in France. Whereas the 1966 Johns Hopkins proceedings were republished in 1972 without regard for developments in the interim

- except for a new introduction that draws attention to an emergent Nietzschean strain - the elided '68 years (a French term that accounts for a more drawn out period of crisis than "May '68" suggests) form an instrumental backdrop for the philosophies that were being elaborated at the turn of the seventies in France. Drawing upon minor essays like Deleuze's "How do We Recognize Structuralism?" - which advocates actualization rather than an enumeration of features - and Deleuze and Foucault's

"Intellectuals and Power," the chapter recuperates the socio-political context that informed the production of French concepts, demonstrating that the Nietzschean turn in French theory - a becoming-active - was grounded in a subtle and intricate negotiation of the relationship between theory and practice.

In the second chapter, I begin by considering a paper that Derrida presented at a 1968 conference in New York in order to unmoor the narrative trajectory that elides the '68 years. If this elision is due in large part to the hegemonic status of Derrida's

"Structure, Sign and Play," Derrida's 1968 paper resituates theory at the crossing of

New York and Paris, a shift in date and location which prepares the grounds for the re-assembly of theory that characterizes the remainder of my dissertation. Having resituated theory at this crossing, I outline the correspondent geographies and socio- political struggles at Paris's Nanterre campus and Columbia's campus in New York. I argue that the Vietnam War - for which universities were developing weapons - and the expansion of university grounds over top of existent communities (Nanterre over top of the industrial suburbs, Columbia over black and Puerto-Rican communities in

Harlem) exposed the horrific underside of universality, truth, and progress. The launching of cobblestones - an act of protest which Columbia students employed, 35 directly quoting students in Paris - was a symbolic act against the unchecked march of modernity. By performing a close reading of a campus newspaper dated the day before the Columbia revolt I mark an unfolding conversation between Paris and

New York and analyze the textual strategies that were employed in order to bring the correspondent uprisings to a head.

In the third chapter, I follow the trajectory drawn by RAT Subterranean News, an underground newspaper that reported from the midst of the Columbia uprisings and that continued to report upon the youth movement through the late sixties and early seventies. I document how RAT collected the youth movement energy expressed in and for the black, gay, and women's liberation movements alongside countercultural texts by William S. Burroughs, underground comix, and the films of

Jean-Luc Godard, assembling them into a singular yet multifaceted struggle against

American imperialism. I take particular note of the reporting of Jean-Jacques Lebel, who participated in revolts on both sides of the Atlantic, and who maintained significant relationships with Deleuze and Guattari, Beat writers, and Abbie Hoffman.

Drawing upon Latour and Manuel DeLanda's recent work on assemblage theory, I argue that these American and French icons represent ideas and acts that are in circulation, and that they are assembled, embodied, and dispersed by intermediary figures like Lebel and publications like RAT. In this way, I complicate oversimplified notions of influence, entry, and contact.

In the fourth chapter, I demonstrate how the French theory assemblage, via

Foucault, is inclusive of the Black Panther Party (BPP). I document the work that 36 Foucault did on behalf of George Jackson and the Attica Defence Committee in

1971-72 under the aegis of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons (GIP), a prison information group that was conceived and led by Foucault. I draw upon the resonant

Marx/Nietzsche hybrid that Huey P. Newton mobilizes in his analyses of power in the

United States in order to flesh out the potential inherent in the genealogical model and the strategic uses to which it is put. Considered in the context of the BPP and the prison liberation movement in the United States, Foucault's corpus - a compound of concepts like power, knowledge, discourse, subject, and truth - is given to an immediate and urgent application in an informational project whose operation provides pertinent lessons about both the utility of Foucault's thought and the role of the intellectual today.

In the fifth chapter, I analyze the Anglo-French crossing orchestrated by

Lotringer for his 1975 "Schizo-Culture" conference and in the Semiotext(e) publishing project which followed. I posit the Schizo-Culture conference as a viable counterpoint to the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins. I analyze the specific textual strategies that the Semiotext(e) journal employed as it self-consciously forged a space for French theory in America, juxtaposing French theorists and American artists. I follow the project through the beginning of the 1980s as it introduced French theory via a series of pocket books under the "Foreign Agents" imprint which framed French theory as a subversive and insurgent project standing in stark contrast to the "theory boom" of the eighties, foregrounding a politics of translation. 37 Chapter One. 1972: Les Annees '68 or the Second Coming of French Theory in America?

A genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge will never confuse itself as a search for their "origins," will never neglect as inaccessible all the episodes of history .... Wherever it is made to go, it will not be reticent - in "excavating the depths," in allowing time for these elements to escape from a labyrinth where no truth had ever detained them. The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin. -Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" 373

As American academic circles appropriated French Stucturalism with increasing fervour at the beginning of the seventies, the significance of May '68 to

French thought was not given consideration. What was imported as a steady flow of concepts was on the other side of the Atlantic being lived as a series of seismic rumbles: rises to celebrity and falls from grace, expulsions and self-imposed exile from universities, the creation of new departments and even new universities to accommodate the turmoil or to invest in a currency that was appreciating rapidly. In this chapter I argue that North American journals and university departments in need of a new paradigm to re-legitimize their fields imported the work of the French for the academic capital that it carried.

One of the major differences between the positions that Structuralism assumed on either side of the Atlantic is that due to Structuralism's marginal position in relation to the university in France it operated in a more general cultural economy whereas it was appropriated into a restricted academic economy in the United States.

Parisian intellectuals were part of a broader public in France. Theory was not 38 engaging the same public in France as in the United States: it may have had a big impact on the types of discussions ongoing in academic journals and graduate

seminars, but translations of Levi-Strauss's Tristes tropiques and Foucault's Les Mots et les choses did not make bestseller lists when made available in translation in the

United States, and it was certainly unthinkable that the authors of these serious and complicated texts would give lectures that were open to the general public as they did

at the College de France in Paris. This is not to say that there was no such thing as a public intellectual in the United States, it is just to say that "French theory" was not pertinent within this sphere.

A further distinction to be made is that the theory being produced and

discussed in France was relationally positioned amongst a much larger set of French

intellectual fields in France. Not only does this mean that we must attend to the

broader and different set of conversations in which theory was engaged in France, but

that attention should be given to how group formation occurs in the United States:

who is being talked about and amongst whom? In this chapter I argue that it was a

"triumphant" line of Structuralism (as Francis Dosse calls it in his two-volume

History of Structuralism) that was being translated and privileged in Anglo-American

discourses about Structuralism at the turn of the seventies. The line that Dosse

identifies is shaped by the work of a select group whose development of structuralism

tends inwards. One of the major consequences of this manner of appropriation - not

the only consequence, but one that is pronounced and particularly germane to the

present inquiry - is that the privileging of the triumphant line in the United States obscures other lines that draw attention to, and energy from, the student movement that was developing on French campuses and across the world.

In this chapter, I use 1972 as a constellation year. In the United States, 1972 marks a rekindling of the sparks first pronounced at the 1966 meeting of French

Structuralists at Johns Hopkins via the republication of its proceedings (hence, the

"second coming" of French theory in America). The constellation that the republication represents is the accumulation, alongside other representative publications that had emerged in the time between, of a paradigm. Rather than considering The Structuralist Controversy on its own, I will consider the republished

Johns Hopkins proceedings as an exemplary text, part of a larger structuralist moment comprised of an accumulation of journals and edited collections. In France, on the other hand, 1972 is part of les annees '68 or the '68 years), an expression which some

French circles have adopted to refer to May '68 within its broader context.1 The logic behind this nuance is that what happened in France in May 1968 cannot be contained within, or explained if restricted to, its month of climax. If more than ten million student and worker-led revolters stormed into the streets in May, bringing the entire country to a halt, the seeds were already there in mass and militant protest against

France's imperialism during the Algerian war. There is a vast and meaningful span of history that stretches both before and after May. On the after-side of May, the return of de Gaulle to government did not mean that all things radical had ceased to exist

1 See, in particular, Genevieve Dreyfus-Armand, Robert Frank, Marie-Fran?oise L6vy, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel's Les Annees 68: le temps de la contestation. once and for all. If, as Pierre Bourdieu argues, in the process of translation the theorization of a theory is less obvious than the fact of its routinization ("The Market of Symbolic Goods" 123), what might we learn about the theorization of theory by looking at this particular moment of translation? What emerges over the course of this chapter are two responses to the crisis in the university, one which marks the continuation of a long formalist century in the university (albeit with a new vocabulary) and the other which creates new concepts in order to turn away from the university, plugging into the university's outside.

In this chapter I will proceed as follows. I contextualize the arrival of theory in the Cold War university, drawing attention to the funding and figures that brought

French theory to the Johns Hopkins conference. While this context is neither singular nor determinate, it is worth considering its effects on the shape that theory took over the course of the sixties and seventies. Building upon this context, I describe the way in which Structuralism was being consecrated in Anglo-American journals and books at the turn of the seventies, paying particular attention to the republication of the

Johns Hopkins proceedings in 1972.1 do so in order to lay out the phenomenon of group formation that determined the way that French theory would be taken up in the

Anglo-American academy in general, and in literary studies in particular. In a final move, I present key theorists on either side of a triumphant/French Nietzschean divide in order to begin to explain, on the one hand, how the privileging of certain figures led to the elision of France's '68 years in the Anglo-American university and, on the other, in order to recuperate the contextual bottom that fell out when theory 41 arrived, a particularly significant circumstance because the questions being asked of intellectuals and the university in France resonated with questions being asked on

American campuses.

Cultural Cold War Criticism?: French theory and the Ford Foundation

There is evidence to suggest that it might be worth considering French theory's linkages to the "Cultural Cold War," a term used by Frances Stonor Saunders to describe a decades-long project conceived by the CIA to promote the exchange of cultural traditions and innovations across the Atlantic; in particular, revelations about

Stalinist Russia were exploited in order to foster the development of a Trans-Atlantic

Anti-Communist left. Although much more work would need to be done in order to establish the existence of a direct link between the CIA and the importation of a strain of French theory that has proved particularly important to the field of literary studies, that Ford Foundation funding appears at significant points of French theory's entry into the Anglo-American academy at the turn of the seventies immediately calls to mind the Foundation's work for the cultural Cold War during this time.

It is important to recognize that successful CIA influence - as was the case with most Cold War tactics - did not depend on explicit tampering but, for the most part, unwitting complicity with an unspoken agenda aimed at blocking the entiy of communism and preserving a neutralized population in all sectors of society.

Saunders's example of the CIA's interest in, and funding of, the abstract expressionist movement is pertinent because it demonstrates how the cultural Cold War project was not simply about the promotion of art condemned in the Soviet Union; fundamentally, Saunders notes, it was opportune to promote an art form that was experimental and abstract rather than realist and representational. As Saunders puts it, Abstract Expressionism was "a movement which so deliberately declared itself to be apolitical" and yet, in the hands of its promoters, it became "intensely politicized"

(275): entangled within a discrete ideological web being spun to promote a certain idea of what freedom of expression meant in America, Abstract Expressionism became the political act of expressing oneself apolitically. (And it was good for business: as Saunders notes, Nelson Rockefeller called Abstract Expressionism "free enterprise painting" [258]). That the "art for art's sake" aesthetic and criticism that the CIA promoted as the driving force of the cultural Cold War is apparent in the way that Structuralism was appropriated in the Anglo-American academy is indicative of, at the very least, the Humanities' turn of the seventies adoption of a paradigm well- suited (even if not expressly tailored) to the Cold War era University.

The New Criticism, with its focus on close reading and textual analysis, did, in fact, play a large part in the CIA's recruitment and training of analysts, the most emblematic and famous case being James Jesus Angleton, first head of counter- intelligence for the CIA, who edited the literary magazine Furioso while at Yale and applied the close reading skills learnt at Yale - particularly from William Empson's

Seven Types of Ambiguity - to intelligence gathering over the course of almost three 43 decades with the CIA.2 Short of invoking agency infiltration, Bruce Franklin and

Richard Ohmann assess the effects of a thoroughly distributed New Criticism on a professorial and student population trained in its distancing tenets;3 it is only when the sheer breadth of the New Criticism's influence is taken into consideration that the enormous worth of the paradigm as a "brand" of Cold War Criticism can be properly grasped.4 As Franklin relates in "The Teaching of Literature in the Highest

Academies of the Empire," the New Criticism shot through universities, colleges, and high schools like wild-fire, having a profound effect upon the way that students were trained to look at culture (115). Concluding a section on English's worth in the university as military-industrial complex in English in America, Ohmann provides the following summary:

Problem formulation and problem solving, distancing of people, abstraction away from historical circumstance, disappearance of the writer as a being with social attributes, and denial of politics: these are threads that run through both the textbooks of English 101 and the examples of successful writing I have considered. Perhaps the similarity goes some way toward explaining the usefulness of our subject, English, to America. (206)

2 It is easy to understand how Empson's theorization of ambiguities rather than ambivalences made it a logical field guide, over and above the work of the other New Critics, for the gathering of intelligence. For an account of the New Criticism's positioning in the CIA web see, in particular, Saunders's chapter on "The Ransom Boys" 234-251. See also Jeet Heer "School for Spies: What the CIA Learned (and mislearned) in the Groves of Academe," Terence Hawkes's "William Empson's Influence on the CIA," and Jerome Christensen's section entitled "The CIA, Yale, and the Resistance to Theory" in his article "From Rhetoric to Corporate Populism: A Romantic Critique of the Academy in the Age of High Gossip" 445-448.

3 See Franklin "The Teaching of Literature in the Highest Academies of the Empire" and Ohmann "English and the Cold War" 77-79 and English in America 66-92.

4 As Arthur Redding points out, following the publication of "Criticism, Inc." - an essay whose title prophesizes the merging of corporate and national interests in the post-war period - "Ransom oversaw the institutional spread of the New Criticism among English departments" (7). The series of seminars following the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference sees Structuralism spread in an analogous manner. 44

While Ohmann's assessment is focused upon the spread of the New Criticism and the analytical skills acquired in compulsory first-year English courses in composition, his description of the discipline under New Criticism applies as readily to Structuralism as its successor.

If American New Criticism was a product of the South, Structuralism was developed abroad, across the Atlantic, and that is where the intrigue begins. Even in

France Structuralism was being supported by funds from the Ford and Rockefeller

Foundations, with the founder of Structuralism himself, Claude Levi-Strauss, having developed the paradigm at the Rockefeller-funded New School for Social Research in

New York. The Ford Foundation situated between continents, facilitated the flow of theory on both sides of, and across, the Atlantic.

What we can deduce about theory's trans-Atlantic travels according to what has been written about the Ford Foundation is that "theory" was part of a larger, loosely knit but generally honed Atlanticist project aimed at fostering American-

European relations in the interest of security and prosperity. The Atlanticist backstory of this moment in the Ford Foundation's history is related most comprehensively by

Volkar Berghahn in America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe. Berghahn's account revolves around Shepard Stone, a steadfast proponent of an "elitist

Atlanticism" who took charge of the International Affairs (IA) division of the Ford

Foundation in 1954 (184). Upon assuming his position, Stone immediately began to build a "two-way sea lane" between America and Europe so that traditions and 45 innovations in culture and politics could be exchanged. Crucial to the suitability of this trans-Atlantic relationship was Stone's conviction that Western Europe was out of reach of the Soviets (Berghahn 183-185). As such, it would prove to be a safe channel for the free flow of what Stone perceived to be rich cultural traditions that continued to flourish in the form of new cultural innovations on either side of the ocean.

France was a major beneficiary of the International Affairs project. Two of the recipients pertinent to early Anglo-American ventures in French theory are worth mentioning here. In 1959, the Ford Foundation provided $1 million for the establishment of the Fondation maison de science de I 'homme by Gaston Berger

(director of higher education in the French Ministry of Education) and Fernand

Braudel (who had established the sixth section of the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, devoted to economic and social sciences, with money from the Rockefeller

Foundation in the late forties) (Berghahn 207). The purpose of the grant was to build a research centre for the training of graduate students and to collect and continue to promote dialogue amongst a growing but dispersed body of researchers in the human sciences. Around the same time, the Ford Foundation also provided funds for

Raymond Aron to launch his Centre de sociologie Europeene (with Pierre Bourdieu, who parted ways with Aron shortly thereafter) which acted as a network for a loosely 46 knit group of scholars conducting research on French society and culture in the early sixties (207).5

Both Fernand Braudel and Raymond Aron are linked to theory's early ventures to the United States. Whereas Braudel helped to organize the Ford

Foundation funded Johns Hopkins conference (as Macksey and Donato note, not only

Braudel, but the sixth section of the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in general, was heavily involved in all stages of planning [Preface xvii]), Aron was on the Editorial

Board of Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, when it received Ford Foundation money for a project on the state of the humanities in 1969-

70, declaring - with the soon-to-be "Yale School" critics Paul De Man, J. Hillis

Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman in tow - that theory was the future of the humanities.6

5 Aron not only received money from the Ford Foundation to found his Institute of European Sociology in Paris but was involved with the CIA-affiliated Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) from its beginnings in 1950; he assumed presidency of the Congress in 1966 as part of a scheme to free the CCF from its reliance on CIA funding, procuring its operating funds (a six-year grant of $7million in 1966) from the Ford Foundation - that had long sponsored its seminar series - instead. Stone had been trying to orchestrate this shift (in order to conceal CIA involvement by getting it off the books) since the early 1960s. See Berghahn's chapter on "The CIA, the Ford Foundation, and the Demise of the CCF Empire" 214-249 and Peter Coleman's The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Post-War Europe 219-234. As Saunders notes, Aron knew about the CIA's funding of the CCF but was upset about revelations of this connection in 1967 because of what it could mean for his reputation in Paris (391-394). Aron's presidency was therefore short- lived; he stepped down in 1967 and the CCF was converted into the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF).

6 With the grant from the Ford Foundation Daedalus sponsored three closed-door colloquia resulting in the publication of two special issues, one devoted to "The Future of the Humanities" (1969) and the next to "Theory in Humanistic Studies" (1970). Taken together, the issues identify a crisis in the university and offer a solution in the form of "theory" earmarked, in particular, for the future of literary studies. Whereas the first issue, Graubard notes in his preface to the second, grasped at questions of "relevance" and was a "'document' ... of the intellectual and political turmoil" abound in the university and beyond" (v), a "close reading" of the Theory issue would: make it apparent that the volume is not so much a celebration of what the humanities presently do as a reminder of what the humanities aspire to be. The volume, in short, seeks to re-establish a sense of the boundaries and the possibilities of study in the 47 Short of attaching the Yale critics or the Johns Hopkins conference to highly stigmatized signifiers like CIA or the Congress for Cultural Freedom, I would like to argue that French theory is implicated in them by proxy via the Ford

Foundation and figures like Aron and Braudel who were commissioned in several instances to organize groups of various scales: schools, research centres, colloquia, journal issues, and so on. As Saunders makes quite clear in her book, involvement in the "Cultural Cold War" project did not require affiliation or consent, but a nudging of the Western European and American intelligentsia on the left away from a

Marxism sullied by Stalin - an unbearable signifier - and "towards a view more accommodating of 'the American way'" (1) or of a way for the American way, the development of a trans-Atlantic infrastructure for the flow of "free" ideas, the development of, and exchange between, "free" markets on either side of the Atlantic.

The Cultural Cold War was not so much a position as a disposition planted and spread like a virus via unwitting agents; most of its agents were unaware of the source or intended purpose of the ideas they were helping to spread, or of the Atlantic channel - for security and prosperity, against the spread of Communism - that they were helping to forge.

humanities. The issue is filled with expression of the unique contributions that the humanities make to the understanding of man and his intellectual universe, (v-vi) To use Graubard's language, the Yale critics in particular would indeed have a profound influence on the "boundaries and possibilities" of literary studies over the course of the next two decades. Not only did the cluster prompt the development of a theory canon from Yale, but they also wrote critical texts that more often than not demanded and performed close readings and, most significantly, the history that they promoted was literary, not social. Rounding out the list of contributors to the issue were Eric Weil, Morton W. Bloomfield, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Roy Harvey Pearce, and Northrop Frye (who, representing Canada, Macksey and Donato point out, also participated in the Ford-sponsored seminars organized at Johns Hopkins following the 1966 conference [Preface xviii]). 48 The most explicit connection made between the Johns Hopkins conference and the Cold War appears in Richard Macksey's introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of the conference proceedings. Reflecting upon the significance of the legendary event, Macksey identifies two interpretations of the conference, one made by Jean-Michel Rabate in The Future of Theory and the other a statement made by the editors of the journal Telos which, according to a short paragraph in Macksey's introduction, conspiratorially links the conference to the Vietnam War due to its having been funded by the Ford Foundation. Not only does Macksey misidentify the

Telos intervention - labeling it as an editorial comment about the 1966 conference two years later when it in fact came in the form of a book review of the first edition of the collected proceedings in 1970 - but his assessment of the commentary makes the

Telos allegations seem more inflammatory and ludicrous than they do in the essay in question. Macksey suggests that Telos characterizes the Ford Foundation that funded the symposium and seminars as "an armature of multinational capitalism using its wealth in the interests of thought control and the promotion of American imperialism in Vietnam and elsewhere. End of tale" ("Anniversary Reflections" xi). The actual comments made by Richard Moss in his Telos review, however, although rhetorical and suggestive, are far from being concretely accusatory, particularly when it came to the nature of the Ford Foundation. Instead, Moss characterizes the conference as "a clique of French intellectuals . .. going to play spectacular language games for an

American audience" and, playing upon a comment that Macksey makes in his original preface - that "in the Anglo-American world games can be a serious 49 business" - Moss takes the opportunity to list the deadly games played at the Johns

Hopkins University in the form of the Center for International Studies and

Department of Defense-sponsored research projects (355).7 The Ford Foundation is only mentioned at the end of this lone, ire-inspiring paragraph in the form of a rhetorical question: "we might ask what is the interest of the Ford Foundation in sponsoring this symposium?" (355).8 The most that could be said about Moss's comments, which came in the form of an aside in an article that otherwise critically engages with the arguments made at the conference, is that they insinuate.

Coming as they did in 1970, Moss's insinuations were not all that out of place; this is a time when students were protesting against the university's role in

7 The militarization of the Johns Hopkins research agenda under Isaiah Bowman, president of the university from 1935-1948, is related by Neil Smith in his chapter "The Kantian University: Science and Nation Building at Johns Hopkins" in his American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization 235-239. It is worth noting that the President of Johns Hopkins at the time of the 1966 conference, heavily involved in the founding of the Humanities Center, was Milton Eisenhower, brother and advisor to former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. During his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned against the irresponsibility of continued unguarded growth of the military-industrial complex (coining the term), which saw universities securing funds for their operation and growth by banding together with military and industrial leaders in order to lobby the government for increased defense spending necessary for the research and development of new weaponry. While the statement is, on the surface, a statement of warning and regret, it is marked by Cold War paranoia and the suggestion of a future project: [I]n holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become captive of a scientific and technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system - ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society. (Eisenhower 110) If Eisenhower's address named rather than put a halt to the development of the military-industrial complex, Milton Eisenhower's investment in the humanities while at the helm of Johns Hopkins is notable in this ideological aspect; recognizing the role of culture alongside that of science in the university, President Eisenhower's remarks denote a diversification rather than a curtailment of the post-war project.

8 Moss's rhetorical answer is that the "sciences of man .. . for[m] the basis for an anti-human ideology" (355). Moss took issue with the anti-humanist and ahistorical approach, but Telos more generally had its affinities with the Marxist Humanism of Sartre in France, emblematically embodied in a reprinted interview with Sartre entitled "Replies to Structuralism." weapons development for the Vietnam War, and revelations that the CIA had infiltrated the academy via the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) were relatively fresh. While the focus of expose journal and newspaper articles was the financing, distribution, and editorial influence of the CCF/CIA on journals like Encounter, information about the CCF/CIA connection was relatively scant in 1970. In light of the immediacy of this context, however, it is likely that Moss was alluding to ties between the CCF and the Ford Foundation, which, as mentioned above, provided enough finances for the CCF to cut official ties from the CIA in 1967, just after - and therefore just a little too late - CIA support was revealed in a Ramparts article, quickly followed by an expose series in the New York Times in 1966.9 The Ford

Foundation's funding of CCF seminars, symposia, and publications had been steadily on the rise since 1956. Although the review would have raised eyebrows and hackles in 1970 - Volkar Berghahn notes that the Times expose "was widely noticed and led to concern in academic circles about the future of Ford Foundation funding" (243)10 -

Macksey's reference to an obscure review thirty-six years later sticks out as a bizarre pre-emptive strike against future research regarding this buried aside. If Moss's review was insinuating, it certainly did not, in the end, generate much intrigue.

9 For an account of the fallout, squabbles, and attempted cover-ups following the New York Times expose on the CCF and Encounter, see Christopher Lasch's The Agony of the American Left 98-110. Published in 1968, Lasch's book has little to rely upon but articles from the mainstream press. Some of the revelations found therein have been fleshed out since, but no other source is more thorough in its account or sourcing of the immediate and widespread coverage that the CIA/CCF/Encounter connections received in the press in 1966-67.

10 As an example of the anxiety that followed the New York Times explose, Berghahn cites a letter from Stephen Graubard, editor of CCF-funded journal Daedalus, to John Hunt, a CCF administrator whose salary was paid by the CIA in Paris (343 n.124). 51 By contrast, what is disappointing about the Rabate account upon which

Macksey bestows his approval - that the conference essentially embodied an encounter between Hegel and Nietzsche - is that it is not at all intriguing. Instead, this dated - 1966 - encounter between Hegel and the new Nietzsche is the conventional account that we read about in anthologies, and it is the same basic acount - albeit in more detailed form - that Macksey himself provides in the preface to the second edition of the proceedings. If the conventional narrative that Macksey endorses is rather banal, what is notable about Macksey's response to Rabate is his clarification regarding the decision to reverse the title of the proceedings when they were republished in 1972: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The

Structuralist Controversy becoming, just two years later, The Structuralist

Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. While Rabate suggests that the reversal singularizes the plural positions on either side of a foregrounded Hegel-Nietzsche divide, Macksey notes that the directive to change the title came from the publisher and was not philosophical in nature; instead, it was aimed at making the title '"shorter, zippier,' and less suggestive of 'gender insensitivity'" ("Anniversary Reflections" xii).11 Rather than dismissing the motivation behind this editorial change as redundant and banal, it is worthwhile to take it as a prompt to pause over the 1972 republication in order to consider the way

" This last point is an important reminder not only that the conference presentations and attendees were all men, but that Johns Hopkins had only begun admitting women into the undergraduate population in 1971. Such was the nature of the "language games" - to draw on the term from Moss's review of the first edition of the proceedings - being played by Johns Hopkins in order to conceal its abhorrent gender politics. 52 in which Structuralism was sold to the humanities in general and literary studies specifically. Although the new preface endeavours to complicate Structuralism as a category, it nevertheless points to Structuralism as a site of academic intrigue. If the object of the conference was to import a new paradigm in structuralism, what it imported instead was "the structuralist controversy."

Structuralism: Split subject or signifying returns?

"Controversy," rather than simply being the stuff of tabloids, is a site of intrigue in academic study because it designates a problem in need of solving, a situation in need of straightening out, and it is therefore a site for the proliferation of discourse. As Macksey and Donato's preface announces, "evidence was already available in the Johns Hopkins symposium of the ensuing moment of theoretical deconstruction" (ix), as was indication of the waning importance of linguistics proper and a displacement of the role of Hegel (x-xi). The republished proceedings, as such, can be mined for the origins of this controversy. Lest the apparently outdated

Structuralist impetus of the 1966 conference minimize the relevance of the Baltimore proceedings, Macksey and Donato argue that the papers collected "bear witness to the fact that a few years ago, briefly, there existed the necessity of referring the various lines of thought which dominate the current French intellectual scene to a unified core," and this unified core was "pre-text" for current directions in French thought

(Preface x). Framed as such, the value of republication is twofold: 1) it provides a content for, and is therefore something of a signified of, "the structuralist 53 controversy" (as is indicated, above all, by the reversal of the title), and 2) it comes as close as one can expect to an iteration of the briefly united core that is, as pretext, a fundamental progenitor for the newest lines of French thought. That republication is legitimized as such in the same breath as a quote from Deleuze on the disdain for origins in contemporary French thought suggests that a fundamental contradiction is at play. Although it would be absurd to deny that the conference was an originary moment, that it was marketed and is perpetually recast as such has the effect of obscuring not only other moments that coincide with the conference but, more importantly, other issues or "controversies" which the new French method was in the process of working out at this point in time. On the one hand, acknowledging that structuralism is fundamentally fraught problematizes the paradigm, allowing room for play, but on the other, controversy is reduced to something quite specific in this case and therefore limits the nature of the play: the text sets the parameters for a regime of controversy.

The most deceptive move in the new preface comes at the end, in a sleight of hand that establishes the volume as being current with French thought at the same time as it legitimizes republication. Macksey and Donato end their preface with the following notice: "given that the times are not propitious to another symposium which would attempt to circumscribe (nostalgic image!) this new topology, the editors of this symposium have accepted its republication" ("The Space Between" xiii). This gesture is particularly deceptive because the statement implies currency and complicity in the practice of disavowing circumscription. While Macksey and 54 Donato are correct to gesture towards the disdain for circumscription as a recent

French trend, their own nostalgia for a specific set of foundational papers, the very act of republication, is complicit in a project of circumscription, of erecting a fence around (an) intellectual movement.

The Structuralist Controversy was not the first republished edition regarding the new French thought, indicating the perception of, and the attempt to create, a market for structuralism in the Anglo-American academy. In 1966, Yale French

Studies published a special issue on "Structuralism" to coincide with the Johns

Hopkins conference and, in 1970, the issue was re-published in book form. If the

Johns Hopkins edition took a minimalist approach to reframing its contents in a new preface, the introduction to the Yale French Studies volume - titled Structuralism in book form - remains unaltered save for a very brief paragraph appended to the end. In the added paragraph, Jacques Ehrmann notes that structuralism, since the 1966 issue, has continued and spread, and that "the material and perspectives presented" in the reissue have neither "lost any of their actuality" nor "been invalidated by subsequent research" (xi). Like the Johns Hopkins volume - though even more sure of itself, insisting that its contents have not been invalidated - the Yale French Studies special issue on Structuralism frames itself as being as relevant republished as it was when it first appeared. Jacques Ehrmann's introduction for the republication was written two years before it appeared in print: it is signed "May 1968" (xi). The issue of elision which this date calls to the fore is one that I will take up at greater length below. 55 Although Ehrmann's introduction doesn't have much to add by way of words, it announces the book's inclusion of a bibliography that will "indicate the major and most recent developments in the structuralist trend" (xi), pointing to further reading that might be done to flesh out and develop the kernel that the volume represents. The suggestion that structuralism is a "trend" (in which, by extension, the republication is partaking) is interesting in itself12 but most interesting about the bibliography is the way that it disciplines Structuralism in the process of laying it out.

At the end of the volume, we find twenty-four pages of bibliographies broken down into five sections: 1) linguistics, 2) anthropology, 3) Jacques Lacan, 4) structuralism and literary criticism, and 5) a general bibliography. The list acts definitively, giving each essay its place, its system of thought, in the history of knowledge. As the republished Yale French Studies issue bibliographically suggests, the structuralist craze, in essence, was about linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and a few other (somewhat more difficult to categorize) things. The adoption of structuralism was disciplinary: everything it argued was given to a discipline.

The prominent position that Structuralism would take in the field of literary studies is predicted by Geoffrey Hartman in his article "Structuralism: The Anglo-

12 In face of the trendiness of Structuralism in France, the Anglo-American approach that Ehrmann promotes in his original preface is scientific. Although it is crucial to "keep a critical distance from structuralism as fashion," Ehrmann argues, "we should appraise it dispassionately, with attention to its value as method of investigation and analysis, we should test it through reflection and practice, appreciate its valuable qualities, pass judgments on its weaknesses, possibly improve its efficiency as a tool, and only after careful examination reject it if we feel it is no longer suitable to our needs" (viii). 56 American Adventure." Although structuralism had already made headway into

American Anthropology departments due to the early work of Levi-Strauss, increasingly, it was literary criticism that seemed to be signalling its intent to adopt the fashionable theories of the French. Arguing that the structuralist intellectual movement "is not suited for monogamy," Hartman argues that structuralism "is about to form a dangerous alliance with literary criticism" (138). Using Levi-Strauss's

"Structural Anthropology" as his premise - structuralism's invasion of anthropological grounds - Hartman argues that a more general overtaking is in its cards: "having made the term 'social sciences' respectable, structuralism becomes more ambitious and holds out the hope that even literary criticism might be counted among the sciences humaines" (138). Whereas in France structuralism was associated

fVi ' with the 6 section of the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, a bastion for the social sciences established just one year after sociology became a degree-granting discipline, its Anglo-American arrival, according to Hartman, marked the coming scientification of the humanities. Hartman's piece operates in a peculiar way when it is republished: because the volume does not provide an assessment of the position that structuralism has (or has not) established in literary criticism, Hartman's original hypothesis repeats itself, and the question of literary criticism's delicate fate is left dangling. The repetition, in this instance, suggestively reasserts the inevitability of a merger between literary criticism and structuralism. As if in answer, in 1975, Derrida would join Hartman, Bloom, De Man, and J. Hillis Miller in New Haven, forming the 57 Yale Critics group that attained an extremely prominent position in the field of literary studies through the late seventies and early eighties.

Alongside the development of high-profile departments, the phenomenon of group formation was achieved and spread via the proliferation of journal articles and special collections. 1972 saw the re-publication of the Johns Hopkins proceedings, a number of articles in journals that were becoming increasingly preoccupied with

French thought, and a handful of books that either commented on, or collected representative essays by, prominent Structuralists.13 In the introduction to their collection The Structuralists from Marx to Levi-Strauss, Richard and Fernande De

George address the question of group formation head-on. Surveying the Structuralist scene, noted for its trendiness, they observe that Sartre's intellectual high ground was now the stomping grounds for Levi-Strauss ("high priest," because he popularized the term), as well as "Roland Barthes in literary criticism, Jacques Lacan in

13 Alongside pioneering Yale French Studies and The Partisan Review, which consistently printed scattered articles on structuralism, were SubStance and Diacritics. While the former, founded in 1971, was predominantly written in French, and therefore boasted a much more nuanced reading across a much larger breadth of yet-to-be translated resources, the latter, also founded in 1971, sold itself as "a forum for the discussion of critical approaches to literatures and experiments in literary creation" inviting "the critical focus of the social scientist as well as the humanist, the anthropologist as well as the literary scholar" (Grossvogel 2). During its first two years, the journal was liberally peppered with articles devoted to, and written by, Levi-Strauss, Sartre, Todorov, Foucault, Piaget, Lacan, Barthes, and Derrida. In terms of books, 1970 saw not only the republication of the special issue of Yale French Studies, but also Mike Lane edited Introduction to Structuralism, a collection of contextualizing and foundational essays. Beside Macksey and Donato's Structuralist Controversy, 1972's booklength works included Howard Gardner's The Quest for Mind: Piaget, Levi-Strauss and the Structuralist Movement, Richard and Fernande De George's collection The Structuralists: From Marx to Levi- Strauss, and David Robey's Structuralism: An Introduction, which collected Oxford's 1972 Wolfson College Lectures on the subject of Structuralism (contributors included Jonathan Culler, Umberto Eco, and Tzvetan Todorov). Following the lead of the republished issue of Yale French Studies, Macksey and Donato's republished Johns Hopkins proceedings includes a partial bibliography of the work that had been done in the name of "Structuralism" in France and the United States between the 1966 conference and its second appearance in print in 1972. psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault in philosophy, and Louis Althusser in Marxist theory" (xi). Even if, against their own desires and better judgment, these five men were being grouped together as leaders by "non-structuralists," the result was the same. In their name, "scores of lesser figures [fought] to be included in the group, to learn the terminology, and to apply and misapply the techniques at random and at will in order to be associated with the fashionable successor of existentialism" (De George vii). Such am assessment is refreshing and tempered, but it also seems misplaced at the beginning of a collection that participates in the process of consecrating a group.

Although there is no explicit citation, the De Georges' account seems to be following the lead of the French press. Perhaps the most famous example of the grouping of structuralism's "founders" is the emblematic and now famous cartoon that appeared in the July 1967 issue of La Quinzaine litteraire: Levi-Strauss, Lacan,

Barthes, and Foucault sitting together in a circle, wearing grass skirts (see Figure

One). Levi-Strauss's work on Anthropologic structurale and La pensee sauvage provided the foundational glue (the intellectual setting and garb), and the cartoon advertised that these men, rather than Jean-Paul Sartre, had become the ones to watch.

The cartoon was reprinted in Yale French Studies's first volume of 1968, couched in the middle of an article by Peter Caws that is entitled "What is Structuralism?".

Alongside the four that are pictured, the article lists Louis Althusser as one of the

"people who occupy essentially independent leading positions" in the movement (75- 59 76). Hence, the original group of four are joined by a fifth in the American version.14 The question posed - "What is Structuralism?" - and accompanied by a circumscribed and featured five has determining effects upon the way in which

French thought is taken up by its new Anglo-American public. Although Caws complicates the question of Structuralism by surmising that the thinkers are united by

Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude IJvi-Strausi et Roland Barthes

Copyright © WW b; Quam Utunirt, Figure One: The Structuralist Four. First Printed in La Quinzaine litteraire, 1967 Reprinted in Yale French Studies, 1968.

14 David Paul Funt makes the same gesture in his summary article on "The Structuralist Debate" in a 1969-1970 issue of The Hudson Review. Funt cites these five central members, reserving the space of "the father of the school" for Levi-Strauss, and provides a footnote that lists each of these men's essential works (625). 60 the question of the place of the subject above and beyond the structuralist apparati that they employ, by adamantly stating that men as different as those named above form a single school not at all deserving of the Quinzaine's epithet "pseudo" (77),

Caws takes part in the process of determining what Structuralism will be in America, and who it will include as a group. As Kuhn argues, the existence of a group with shared rules and assumptions is the basis for the operation of a paradigm in a period of normal science. Caws's essay argues that although Structuralism is tainted by disagreements and controversies, and although it has been heralded as a trend, there is much to be said about what these five men have in common; if this common ground can be traced out, we will be that much closer to understanding what Structuralism, as paradigm, is.

During a period of perceived crisis, there will inevitably be conservative hold- outs, but there will also be those who will reach out, introduce new elements, and push them. Cultural capital, Bourdieu points out, moves in a way similar to finance capital: the riskiest moves, particularly by early bidders, yield the best rewards ("The

Field of Cultural Production" 68). In this light, Derrida's rapidly rising star - considering his maverick presentation at the Johns Hopkins conference - is not all that surprising. Bourdieu characterizes the general history of struggles that determine the history of the field as follows:

On the one side are the dominant figures, who want continuity, identity, reproduction; on the other, the newcomers, who seek discontinuity, rupture, difference, revolution. To " make one's name" \faire date] means making one's mark, achieving recognition (in both senses) of one's difference from other producers, especially the most 61 consecrated of them; at the same time, it involves creating a new position beyond the positions presently occupied, ahead of them, in the avant-garde. ("The Production of Belief' 106)

Bourdieu's assessment of the struggles that ensue in the field are interesting because they correspond not only - and certainly not primarily - to Derrida's own work, but to the way that his work - and, more broadly, the work of the (so-named)

"Structuralists" and "Post-structuralists" - is taken up in the field.15 Bourdieu's signposting of "difference" is Saussure's: the field is a system of difference according to which each signifier is given its unique position. Difference is, therefore, logically necessary for entrance into the field. When Structuralism arrived in the midst of a crisis in literary studies, it signaled the possibility of a new critical position. When

Structuralism (and, quick on its heels, Post-structuralism) replaced the New Criticism at the critical apex in literary studies over the course of the seventies, it did so by way of the introduction of new names, by making available relatively new positions in the field. This is the way in which constellations (or, to use the Kuhnian terminology, similarity sets) are formed, which is a foundational step in the process of consecration.

What would happen if the question of Structuralism was posed in another way? If reframed, might it drastically change the potential of the paradigm? In 1972,

Deleuze penned an article entitled "How do we recognize structuralism?" for

15 Michdle Lamont's "How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida" is indispensible. Particularly notable are a series of charts and graphs that mark a spike in articles about Derrida in the field of American Literary Criticism in the United States from 1975-1984 (604-606). The article provides an excellent account of how Derrida was differently positioned in both France and United States, explaining how his intellectual trajectory was positioned on either side of the Atlantic. Francois Chatelet's edited volume Histoire de la philosophic. At first blush, the title of Deleuze's piece would seem to suggest that his ultimate goal is to provide a brief sketch of structuralism's features, and in many ways it does: it reads like an encyclopedia entry, breaking structuralism down into seven formal criteria which

Deleuze describes in turn. Although Deleuze's piece comes in the form of an encyclopedia entry, a political suggestion is implicit in the question the title is asking.

The verb "to recognize" can - and should - be read in another way. The point of

Deleuze's essay is not simply to enumerate features: the question that Deleuze is posing, or sees it pertinent to pose when considering structuralism, is how do we actualize the dormant potentialities that are inherent in structuralism? Deleuze is gesturing towards the line that bridges theory and practice. If we follow his argument in the structuralism piece through to the end, Deleuze makes this point quite clear:

"[bjooks against structuralism ... are strictly without importance. No book against anything ever has any importance; all that counts are books for something, and that know how to produce it" (192, emphasis original). Not only is this statement very

Nietzschean (active vs. reactive, overcoming vs. ressentiment), an important point that I go over in more detail below, it also takes a political position that speaks to the impact that May '68 was having on French academic culture.

"Do structures take to the streets?"

The question "do structures take to the streets" was asked and answered numerous times and in diverse ways over the course of the '68 years. As such, the 63 political legitimacy of structuralism was of central concern as new concepts were being invented and deployed by French intellectuals. As Dosse points out, "for some,

May '68 was the death if not of structuralism, at least of 'triumphant structuralism'

{History of Structuralism, Volume 2 116). The type of story that Macksey and Donato were telling with their conference proceedings - the birth and rise to academic celebrity of a new discipline, a triumphant structuralism, a new and, disclaimers aside, fashionable theoretical apparatus - was, as they themselves point out in the preface to the re-publication, already outdated. This did not stop them from reprinting the proceedings unchanged, or from venturing deeper into what made the paradigm controversial in the first place. Although Macksey and Donato gesture towards a conceptual line separating the Structuralists of old from the new ones - a turn to

Nietzsche - there is an important political context for this conceptual turn. The turn has a lot to do with Nietzsche but also with the necessity of asking political questions when speaking from contested university grounds.

In the sections that follow I will outline the way in which the triumphant and

Nietzschean strains differed in their approach to the political question of the university. It is on these grounds that I will separate out the constellation that was adopted as the basis for future research (and the consecration of Post-structuralism) and the Nietzschean potential that was left behind (but which was being collected concurrently at Columbia University in Paris in 1972 by Lotringer who would bring 64 these "French Nietzscheans" to America in 1975 for the Schizo-Culture conference).16

I. The Structuralist Four

Barthes says: 'Structures don't take to the streets.' We say: "Barthes doesn't either" -Written on the chalkboard of a Parisian classroom in 1968

"Althusser is useless" -graffiti on a Parisian wall, May 1968

I would like to proceed, at this point, with an account of how the cartooned four - Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault - responded to the events of 1968. Were they still, in 1972, grass-skirted, pensive, and setting up camp miles away from the bustle of the urban? When the academy flooded the streets in 1968, did they remain in the woods? What happens when 1966 is reprinted in 1972? Is 1968 not erased, denying its intervention? If the historical context for the American absorption of French concepts was a hunger for a new discourse of legitimization, the social relations that characterized the production of these concepts in the first place, in France, speak of another context altogether.

16 The introduction of this binary assessment does not at all times do justice to the important political work often being done by those slotted into the "triumphant" group. At the same time as such assessments demand nuance, I adopt this problematic distinction because it allows me to foreground the demands being made of the French thinkers who were being translated, their positions and position-takings in relation to these demands, and the impact such demands had on the thought being produced during this time. Highly problematic as such assessments were, the distinction is helpful precisely because it is a useful bracket that helps to identify the lines that I will be following in my dissertation. Just as concepts should be understood according to their relationship with others in the philosophical field, concepts must also be understood in their historical context that is constituted, like the philosophical field, of relations which affect the production and reception of concepts. 65 Because the university - Nanterre in March 1968 followed by the Sorbonne in May

- was the site of initial revolt, it is worth taking some time to consider the politics that

were at work in academic institutions, and the way that the academy was, during

these years, leaking out on all sides.

While I approach the question of the academic politics of structuralism via

this group of theorists, I want to be clear at the outset that this is but one possible -

though I would argue prominent - constellation representative of the entry of

structuralism into the Anglo-American academy. In the end, different criteria could

be used to include other figures in this larger constellation. At this point, however, I

would like to establish a tracing of what was imported and understood in America to

constitute Structuralism because on the grounds of Structuralism - or, more precisely,

on the basis of a relation to what was translated as Structuralism in the Anglo-

American academy - Post-Structuralism was invented at the turn of the eighties. At

stake, in other words, is the group that would be consecrated as a point of departure

for future research.

What I would like to explore are the political positions that are imported

unannounced when French Structuralism is written into Anglo-American criticism.

The process of moving between paradigms involves the overcoming of

incommensurability. This involves translation on both sides of an encounter as it

becomes necessary to question the similarity relations ("similar with respect to

what?") that comprise each group. If paradigm shift is marked by a change in

similarity relations, what relations change on the basis of this encounter, and which 66 relations remain? On the basis of what relations might certain French thinkers be more readily commensurable than others in 1972, and what does this disclose about the arrival of French theory in America?

i). Claude Levi-Strauss

Claude Levi-Strauss is the foremost and, because he is the only Structuralist who did not openly and adamantly dispute the title, least controversial symbol of the rise of structuralism in both France and the United States. Levi-Strauss's arrival in the

United States came before the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins. It was during their overlapping tenure at the New School for Social Research in New York during the

Second World War that Levi-Strauss met Roman Jakobson (former member of the

Moscow and Prague linguistic circles), provoking the former - the "Father of

Structuralism" - to assume a "structuralist method" in the first place.17 There is, then, already something of the dominant American method - via Paris, Moscow, and

Prague - in Structuralism's "French" origins. In conventional accounts, it was the publication of Tristes tropiques in 1955 that started the movement, establishing Levi-

Strauss as the movement's father.

Prominently positioned, Levi-Strauss stands as an illustrative symbol for the way that the events of 1968 were negotiated by several professors (particularly those associated with "triumphant structuralism") in Paris. If Levi-Strauss's anthropological

17 For more on this encounter, see Eagleton, Literary Theory 85; Levi-Strauss and Didier Eribon 41-42; Foucault, Remarks on Marx 84-95; and Merquior 20, 35-36. work on pre-capitalist savages was not at all written in disdain for the primitives, his view of student protest in the midst of the turmoil was not so kind: seeing the student-worker protests as nothing short of degeneracy "symptomatic of yet another step downward in the deterioration of the university" Levi-Strauss withdrew from the

College de France, opting out until a semblance of order returned (Levi-Strauss and

Eribon 78-80). To be fair, the College de France where Levi-Strauss worked at the time was more like an academy than a university, and it was, as a result, less shaken than the other universities in Paris. The fact that he walked around the occupied buildings at the Sorbonne "with an anthropologist's eye" (Levi-Strauss and Eribon

80), however, says something about the disengagement of his theoretical approach, its tendency to distance itself and, in effect, place itself above, its object of study. When pressed by Didier Eribon about a small group of feminist militants who worked in his laboratory in '68, Levi-Strauss admits that "one or two women got stirred up and were asked to leave the laboratory. By general consensus, moreover" (79). The comment is matter of fact, revealing a Levi-Strauss who does not care to go into any detail about the particulars of (feminist) political struggle. Levi-Strauss provides the context:

If I were to seek the signs of this break [with political engagement], I would find them much earlier [than May '68], in the final pages of Tristes tropiques. I remember that I was still trying my best to maintain a link with my ideological and political past. When I reread these pages, they have a false ring to them. The break was made a long time ago. (80) 68 A disposition such as this, situated at the origins of the Structuralist movement (the publication of its founding text) is worth pause. These are passages that see Levi-

Strauss pledging his allegiance to Marxism, but, context now considered, it is always a Marxism that - from that point on for Levi-Strauss - is disengaged from its own history.

This disposition is also apparent in Anglo-American appropriations of Levi-

Strauss. When Fredric Jameson plunders structuralism for Marx in The Prison House of Language, also published in 1972, it is this disengaged Marx that he finds, fitting to the Hegelian Marx he advocates. The project that Jameson outlines in Marxism and

Form, of which Prison House was initially intended to be a part, is aimed at a specific set of circumstances that characterized the university classroom in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century: an absence of Marx (which, by extension, was an absence of history). As Jameson puts it: even the better known writers such as

Sartre or Lukacs have never come into focus clearly in English on account of the anti-

Communist bias of their commentators, or often simply on account of the absence of any genuine Marxist culture in academic circles" (Marxism and Form x). Not only were these fervently anti-communist grounds like acid to the seeds of Marxism (it was only three years before, in 1969, that Angela Davis had been fired from the

University of California system - in which Jameson was teaching at the time - for her membership in the Communist Party), American readers, long out of the loop, also held an outdated, stereotyped view of Marxist literary criticism. Jameson begins his preface by pointing out that, for the American reader, imagining the Marxist literary 69 critic would almost inevitably involve visions of the 1930s, and recollections of a criticism that "was of a relatively untheoretical, essentially didactic nature, destined more for use in the night school than in the graduate seminar" {Marxism and Form ix). In the face of this truism, Jameson proposes to provide an overview of recent developments: the emergence, in recent years, of "a relatively Hegelian kind of

Marxism" {Marxism and Form ix). What students were demanding, not only in

France but in the United States as well, however, was relevance: what was spoken in the lecture hall was assessed according to its pertinence to an immediate context. As will become increasingly clear by way of the examples of Barthes and Lacan below, the Marxism that was being called for by students in France was one that was, to use

Jameson's expression in order to contrast it with the Marxist disposition being demanded in France, "more for use in the night school than in the graduate seminar."

Levi-Strauss did not answer to this demand in France; instead, his work introduced a new position which, as Bourdieu notes, was "opposed in a thoroughly dialectical fashion to the figure of the politically committed 'total' intellectual represented by Jean-Paul Sartre" (The Logic of Practice 1-2). It would be remiss to characterize Levi-Strauss's work as being without political import; his development of Structural Anthropology, after all, came in the context of France's occupation of

Algeria and it introduced a methodology that problematized the reductive oppositions between primitive and civilized at heart of the basest racist claims and imperial ambitions. While Structuralism, as Bourdieu points out, was something of a synthesis of the scientific and political vocations {The Logic of Practice 2), the shift toward a 70 theory that was scientifically moored necessitated a distance that precluded the type of engagement demanded at the barricades.

ii). Roland Barthes

While American and French circles were writing Barthes into "Structuralism," he was always writing in order to try to find a way out of structure. Although essays like Elements of Semiology and "The Structuralist Analysis of Narrative" see Barthes holding an identifiably structuralist pose, as Reda Bensmai'a argues these were always

"essays" for a reason. Barthes himself insists that he has never written a book; nothing definitive, and nothing comprehensive. Only essays: attempts.18

Fundamentally, beyond his refusal to make definitive statements, it is impossible to classify Barthes's writing into any neat series of sequences. If we were to examine his work as a line of progression, we could say that it became increasingly erotic in its lyricism, and that there was a break from structuralism to its complication with S/Z in

1970. It would not be unfitting, however, to characterize Barthes as someone who was at all points negotiating his obsession with structure.

This is not the picture that his address to the Johns Hopkins conference painted. Barthes's paper, "To Write: An intransitive verb,"19 advocated the move, in recent years, towards a science of literature, and proposed that it be called "semio-

18 An illustrative biographical parallel might be his widespread notoriety and the high regard in which he was held in spite of his difficulties with passing the aggregation. Every time the date approached, his health pulled him away.

19 This selection also appears in the De Georges' collection. 71 criticism" (135), a language-based hermeneutic that was even equipped to deal with the seemingly problematic work of Joyce and Proust.20 Because Mythologies was also translated in 1972, alongside the republication of the Johns Hopkins proceedings, the Barthes of 1957 and 1966 converge for English audiences in 1972.

In the translator's note that opens Mythologies, Annette Lavers notes that what

"strikes one at first as being highly poetic and idiosyncratic [l]ater reveals a quasi- technical use of certain terms" (7). The technical terms that Lavers is referring to, she explains, are derived from linguistics. As such, the translator's remarks further frame the text as a compendium for the study of linguistics, coupling his most explicitly

Marxist text as an exercise in Structuralism (which, in many ways, like Levi-Strauss's nominally Marxist Tristes tropiques, it was).

Barthes did not only appear in the United States in translated form, he was being read by critics in French, so his more recent work was being cited in secondary sources. Beyond Fredric Jameson's consideration of many of Barthes's untranslated texts in The Prison House of Language, Michael Riffaterre reviewed Barthes's Sade,

Fourier, Loyola, including passages of S/Z, in the Autumn 1972 issue of Diacritics.

The review is far from reductive, taking a complicated approach to Barthes's complicating work, but the review ends with the following reductive statement: that

"textual constants" make it "possible to translate [texts] into structural terms" (9).

What is most troubling is that, in the process of making this point, Riffaterre invokes

20 Barthes draws on the work of Jakobson, here, his distinguishing of the poetic function, a mode of address that is "linked to the message and not to its referent" ("To Write: An intransitive verb" 13 5). 72 "literariness," giving Barthes to a simplified lineage (that also formed the first half of Jameson's Prison House, framing Structuralism in the process): Russian

Formalism. Riffaterre concludes by stating that structures "provide what Barthes believes is excluded by le pluriel triumphant of the text: a single model for the interpretation of a whole corpus" (9), granting the method a special, critical distance from its object of study, no matter how complicated the object might be.

Towards the end of Mythologies, Barthes admits that the mythologist "can live revolutionary action only vicariously" and that "the mythologist is condemned to live in a theoretical sociality" (156-157). It is not a stretch to argue that Barthes is talking about himself, about his own internal struggles. Just a bit more than a decade after the publication of Mythologies, in the months following May, Barthes experienced these

"internal" struggles on a public stage. Greimas was the explicit object of severe criticism in a three-page motion read by Catherine Clement at a meeting of the action committee on the sciences of language, a meeting at which faculty had been barred from speaking. On the following day, however, the motion's concluding sentence was written on a blackboard and attributed to Barthes: "Barthes says: 'Structures don't take to the streets.'" The blackboard writer added: "We say: Barthes doesn't either"

(Dosse, History of Structuralism Volume 2 116, emphasis added). It was precisely because Barthes was not at the meeting the night before that the statement was attributed to him. In the aftermath of May, a significant mass of students had formed that for various reasons (a turn to Maoism, in particular) was not concerned with the political efficacy of Structuralism in any abstract, theoretical sense. The concern, in 73 many ways, was to assess the political commitment of structuralism's champions.

Sometimes such interventions were productive, but at other times the provocations were empty, and did nothing more than shut down communication and alienate potential allies.21

Framboise Gaillard invokes a fragment from Barthes's critical autobiography,

Roland Barthes, in her plea "For a Political Roland Barthes." The fragment she selects sees Barthes admitting that, "all my life, I've worried myself sick about politics. I infer from this that the only father I knew (that I gave myself) was Father politics" (qtd. in Gaillard 50).22 It is the Levi-Strauss of Tristes tropiques that emerges as the more appropriate father: referring to himself in the third person further on, Barthes notes that "because of a perverse disposition to see forms, languages, and repetitions, he gradually became a political misfit" {Roland Barthes 169-170, emphasis original). Barthes did not fit in the immediate post-May context; tortured by student denunciation, Barthes departed for the calmer waters, leaving Paris for an appointment at Rabat. When he returned, he had no interest in joining the Groupe d 'Information sur les prisons or the Front homosexuel d'action revolutionnaire in which his friends were taking part. As his biographer Louis-Jean Calvet relates, he considered such groups to be "expressions of'hysteria' .... he refused to join a minority group of any kind" (183), watched the engagement of Deleuze and Foucault

21 That the FBI was using a similar strategy to break apart the burgeoning New Left on American campuses indicates the part that such interventions could play in the obstruction and dismantling of potential.

22 Although Gaillard indicates the passage to be from the fragment entitled "Brecht's response to RB," the passage is actually from the fragment entitled "Politics / ethics." in the prison movement from a distance, and dismissed gay liberation as leading to conformity of another type (183-184). Calvet even calls Barthes's affiliation with Tel quel into question, noting that, when asked by a television interviewer about his affiliation with the group Barthes reads a script asserting that the project is being undertaken without the slightest bit of vulgarity or complacency before looking up from his notes and making a passing "personal" comment: regardless of its seriousness, Tel quel is "a great game, a fiction" (qtd. in Calvet 188-189). Barthes then turns back to his script and continues to speak about the seriousness of the journal's revolutionary Marxist political stance.

iii). Jacques Lacan

As Jan Miel relates in her introduction to Jacques Lacan's "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious," the first of Lacan's essays to be translated into

English for the Yale French Studies special issue on Structuralism, Lacan was also involved in controversies and departures. The departure she relates is the resignation of five leading members of the Societe psychanalytique de Paris from its membership. While they intended to remain under the auspices of the International

Psychoanalytical Association, forming a new group under this umbrella, their resignation from the Paris society was taken as a separation from the larger group and, as a result, they were not even allowed to attend the congress at which decisions were being made regarding their status (94). 75 While this "controversy" appears trite, at issue was the question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Structuralism as a science. As Miel relates,

"Lacan's revolution in psychoanalysis has many affinities with the thought of Levi-

Strauss" (99). Indeed, "The Insistence of the Letter" is the very piece in which Lacan makes his famous proclamation that "what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language" (Lacan, "The Insistence of the

Letter" 103). This statement also formed the heart of the discussion following

Lacan's paper at the Johns Hopkins conference23 and, as a result of this doubled origin, it would prove to be the Anglo-American obsession regarding Lacan for years to come. The relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and scientific methods thus established, what was Lacan's relationship with the university?

If Barthes was forced into exile for his absence on the streets, Lacan was one of the first through the gates of revolt in '68, co-signing on May 10th - on the eve of the night of the barricades - the following letter to Le Monde:

The solidarity we affirm here with the movement of students throughout the world - this movement that has abruptly, in the course of a few shattering hours, shaken up that society of well-being that is perfectly incarnated in the French world - is first of all an answer to the lies by which all the institutions and political parties (with very few exceptions), and all the newspapers and tools of communication (practically without exception), have been seeking for months to alter this movement and pervert its meaning and even to portray it as laughable, (qtd in Dosse, History of Structuralism Volume 2 113)24

23 See Jacques Lacan, "Of Structure as an Inmixing Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever" 95-200.

24 Lacan's co-signatories were Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot, Andre Gorz, Pierre Klossowski, Henri Lefebvre, and Maurice Nadeau. Amongst these names, Lefebvre and Sartre are particularly interesting contrasts to Lacan. Lefebvre had a direct influence on the revolting students (student leader 76

While Lacan entered the gates of May as a co-signatory in the ranks of rebellion, it would be entirely remiss to say that he supported the students in their revolt. As Joan

Copjec points out, while "dinosaurs" and "progressives" became the discernible camps as far as university faculty were concerned - there were the naysayers on the one hand and partners at the barricades on the other - Lacan's position was precarious: "aligning himself neither against nor on the side of the student radicals, he simply accused them of not being radical enough" (90). As Clement notes - articulating the fundamental issue in the confrontations and controversies surrounding

Lacan during this period - Lacan was being "challenged and jeered" because he was

"systematizing his attacks on the University without changing the form of his seminar one iota" (17). Lacan's seminar was notoriously difficult; his lecturing style, bourgeois and baroque.

It was not Lacan's seminar in general but, more specifically, the seminar that

Lacan was conducting in the immediate aftermath of May that provoked the volatility that came to characterize his seminar room. His seminar that year was about distinguishing analytic discourse from university discourse. He claimed that there were four discourses: academic, hysteric, master, and, above these three, the discourse of the analyst. It was a loaded message to convey, delivered, as it was, from

Daniel Cohn-Bendit was one of his students). In his disdain for structuralism, Lefebvre contrasts decidedly with Lacan. While Lacan struggled with rebellious student audiences, Sartre "was the only major intellectual allowed to speak in the main lecture hall of the Sorbonne at the heart of the uprising" (Dosse History of Structuralism Volume 2 112-113), a fact that speaks to the horizontal tendencies in Sartre's engagement with students. 77 a lecture hall podium, in the convoluted language that the students had come to expect from Lacan over the course of the previous fifteen years.

If the form and content of Lacan's seminar revealed a posture of grandeur, the way that Lacan practiced social relations saw this posture become all the more pronounced. The ambition of his 1969 seminar on the four discourses was proclaimed in the midst of a hostile crowd during an invited lecture at Vincennes in December

1969. Only shortly before he was to begin his lectures on L 'Envers de la psychanalyse [The Other Side of Psychoanalysis], he chided the rebellious students for wanting a master, a desire that would inevitably be consummated:

What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one .... I am, like everybody is, liberal only to the extent that I am antiprogressive. With the caveat that I am caught up in a movement that deserves to be called progressive, since it is progressive to see the psychoanalytic discourse founded, insofar as the latter completes the circle that could perhaps enable you to locate what it is exactly that you're rebelling against. (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis 207-208)

In calling himself anti-progressive, Lacan is alluding to the educational reforms that sought to model the French university after the career-oriented American one, a project of modernization that critics like Daniel Cohn-Bendit claimed did not leave room for the questioning of knowledge production. That Lacan distinguishes the discourse of the analyst from that of the university would be promising were it not so easy to juxtapose these remarks with his reaction to Alain Geismar after the latter

25 While the exchange between Lacan and students in December of'69 in Vincennes is published in the appendix of The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, the accuracy of the transcript is questionable. Audio of this exchange can be found on lacan.com; it is virtually impossible to make sense of the exchange because it is so chaotic. For accounts of the lecture, see Clement's The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan 155, and Elisabeth Roudinesco's Jacques Lacan 342-43 and Jacques Lacan & Co. 567-68. 78 approached Lacan for financial support for the Gauche Proletarienne, a prominent leftist group that emerged from May. Lacan's answer to Geismar: "The revolution, c 'est moi [Iam the revolution]. I don't see why I should subsidize you. You are making my revolution impossible and taking away my disciples" (qtd. in Roudinesco

Jacques Lacan 338).26 Lacan was, in fact, losing his disciples: a not insignificant number of his students had, in the midst of May, become ardent Maoist activists who had much less time and patience for Lacan's lectures than they used to.27 Lacan was furious because he believed himself to be offering a discourse that would enable students to identify what it was that they were rebelling against, and yet his podium was perpetually being threatened. That difficulties persisted even as new venues were secured for his seminar was unacceptable to him. Similar to his good friend

Levi-Strauss,29 whose literal dismissal of feminist militancy is mentioned above,

Lacan had no time for dissidence: those who dissented were subject to both

26 See also, Herve Hamon and Patrick Rotman 182.

27 The competition with Maoism is also linked with a cross between Lacan's and Louis Althusser's students, where Althusser was also counting significant losses to Maoism in the aftermath of '68. See Dosse, History of Structuralism, Volume 2 120 and Clement, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan 153-154.

28 Due to controversies surrounding the practice of psychoanalysis in general, and Lacan's theories and practices in psychoanalysis in particular (not only his sometimes peculiar manner of reading Freud but also his short sessions which would encourage transference from analyst to analysand and his claim of sole authority to authorize his students to practice psychoanalysis), his seminar was perpetually being shut down and starting up at new institutions. For histories of the movement of the seminar, see Clement's The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan and Roudinesco's Jacques Lacan and Jacques Lacan & Co.

29 Not only did Levi-Strauss and his wife enjoy outings with Lacan and the Merleau-Pontys, but he also secured a seminar room for Lacan at Ecole des Hautes etudes when Lacan was shut out of Ecole Normale Superieure in 1964. See Levi-Strauss and Eribon 73. 79 intermittent and sustained ridicule, and, in some cases, they were banished from his seminar altogether (Clement 17).

A brief crossing with Daniel Cohn-Bendit - the (reluctant) leader of the

March 22nd movement at Universite de Paris Nanterre that preceded the events of

May - appeared to produce a spark of fraternity from the relentlessly paternal Lacan.

The day after a meeting with Cohn-Bendit, and prior to giving the stage to the union of university teachers for a scheduled announcement in the middle of his seminar,

Lacan praised Cohn-Bendit, making the following remarks:

I half kill myself telling psychoanalysts they ought to expect something from the insurrection. And some of them reply: 'And pray, what does the insurrection expect from us?' Then the insurrection answers: 'What we expect from you is help in throwing cobblestones when the occasion arises.' (qtd in Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 336)

There is, however, a larger context to this encounter. When Lacan had initially asked a student to schedule a meeting between himself and organizers of the student revolt, he threw the invited protestors out of his office in a matter of minutes and reproached the student who had arranged the meeting for "sending in such lightweights"

(Roudinesco 336). Lacan believed that he merited the time of a leader. In the resultant meeting, there was not much to talk about, no real point of intersection. As

Roudinesco lays it out, "Cohn-Bendit and his friends tried to explain the aims of their own movement, while the analysts really just wanted to listen to some protestors"

(336), protestors, in any case, that were worthy of the profile and, more importantly, of the time of this particular group of psychoanalysts. 80 Fundamentally, Lacan was an analyst in search of recognition. In another inaugural seminar, this one at the ENS in 1964 (the year that saw him, alone, founding the Ecole Freudienne de Paris) on the Four Fundamental Concepts of

Psychoanalysis, Lacan begins his lecture on "the subject who is supposed to know," by clarifying his aims: "the aim of my teaching has been and still is the training of analysts" (FFC 230). This gesture is also stylistic. If Freud is the one who knows

(FFC 232), in the process of teaching, Lacan's narcissistic desire to be the subject who is supposed to know (the Freudian analyst) is recognized: his students are certified on the basis of his training. Such is the nature of the transference: it is the process whereby psychoanalysis is consecrated as system.

iv). Michel Foucault?

Whereas Levi-Strauss, Barthes, and Lacan are distinguishable points in a triumphant structuralism, Michel Foucault is something of a question mark. Although

Foucault's Madness and Civilization (a truncated version of his doctoral dissertation published in France as Folie et deraison) and The Order of Things (a liberal translation of Les mots et les choses or Words and Things) were translated into

English rather rapidly, and although Foucault held a chair in the French department at

SUNY Buffalo in 1972, his work was not yet garnering consistent attention in the

United States. If the Structuralism I delineated above is characterized by a positive relationship with the university as an institution of knowledge production readily assimilable in the Anglo-American academy, Foucault signals a departure, a way out. 81 A case in point of the confusion surrounding Foucault's work is an exchange with George Steiner in Diacritics. The exchange began with an article by

Foucault which responds to two reviews of The Order of Things. One of them is

George Steiner's review for the New York Times Book Review. In the following issue, a perplexed Steiner calls the tone of Foucault's article "that of an enraged prima donna," stating that "a number of scholars in the natural sciences, in philosophy and in linguistics regard him in that light" (59). It is possible that Steiner is alluding to more than just the "tone" of Foucault's retort; his comment could also be taken as a derogatory swipe at Foucault's sexual preferences. In the offending essay, Foucault objects to the other reviewer's labeling of his work as "structuralist," insisting that "I have never at any moment pretended to be a structuralist, on the contrary. This I explained several years ago" ("Polemic: Monstrosities in Criticism" 58).30

Edward Said's article "Michel Foucault As an Intellectual Imagination" in the inaugural issue of boundary 2, on the other hand, marks a more sympathetic point of

•5 1 entry. Foucault, of course, would prove to be central to Said's work, and this 1974 article sees him taking a sophisticated approach to Foucault's writing, explaining the parallels to Nietzsche, the complexities of discourse, and an archeological approach which is "not intended to be used as a pass-key for unlocking texts" (2). In the face of

30 Perhaps the most illustrative misunderstanding of all occurred in Holland in 1971, when Foucault debated the subject of Human Nature with Noam Chomsky. As James Miller relates it, "Chomsky was stunned by [Foucault's] line of questioning. He had read The Order of Things, and knew Foucault's work on eighteenth-century linguistics. But here Foucault was, invoking Mao Tse-tung and denying the need for even the most rudimentary principles of justice!" (202).

31 There was, however, a significant difference of opinion regarding the question of Palestine, the same issue that allegedly saw Deleuze and Foucault part ways at the end of the seventies. 82 the Structuralist fervour in the American academy, Said's conclusion on the archeological method, although it conflates this earlier method with the genealogical method that Foucault developed shortly after the publication of L 'Archeologie du savoir, is notable. "Archeology," Said argues, "is a return to Nietzschean critique and genealogy, a re-actualization of a proper way of doing the history of science, consciousness, concepts, and ideas, and then also a polemical invention to harass the establishment historians or philosophers" (26). It is towards these French Nietzschean grounds that I will now turn.

II. French Nietzsche

[Tjheory demanded that those involved finally have a say from a practical standpoint.

-Gilles Deleuze, "Intellectuals and Power" 208

Anglo-American critics evaluated Structuralism and its successors on the basis of whether or not these paradigms had succeeded in the ambition of becoming a system; when being system proved problematic ("impossible" even, as Macksey and

Donato note in their introduction to the republication of the Johns Hopkins proceedings), "Post-structuralism" was created and then plundered for the languages it created for the systematic study of follies of system. While controversy as translated in Anglo-American criticism read academically and required the acquisition of new language, in large part the crisis in Structuralism had to do with the problem of the university: its tendency to distance itself from, and to speak in place of, the populations it represented, maintaining an unacceptable status quo rather than working for change. It is worthwhile, then, to read what has come to be known as "Post-structuralism" not as a response to Structuralism proper, but as a response to this encompassing controversy, as a position-taking with respect to the university.

"Structuralism" was a reductive categorization that had specific effects on what would enter later. Although this should preclude the temptation to label it something else instead, my investment in a "French Nietzsche" is in large part because this is how Sylvere Lotringer characterized the group that he began to collect in 1972 at Reid Hall, Columbia's campus in Paris, and which he would bring to New

York in 1975 for the "Schizo-Culture" conference. As Michel Foucault argues in a retrospective interview with an American interlocutor, "[i]t is not at all true that

Nietzsche appeared in 1972;" rather, "he appeared in 1972 for people who were

Marxists during the sixties and who emerged from Marxism by way of Nietzsche"

("Structuralism and Post-structuralism" 439). Not only does Nietzsche stretch back through Bataille and Blanchot, but what he represents is a manner to escape;

"Nietzsche" was not a determining grounds. I am turning towards the French use of

Nietzsche precisely because of the manner in which it signals the appearance, and encourages the practice, of departure.

i) Michel Foucault

As noted above, when Foucault wrote Les Mots et les choses in 1966, he was swept up in the fervour of structuralism; it was on the basis of Words and Things that

Foucault was given to the Quinzaine's structuralist cartoon. A shift away from these 84 grounds is immediately apparent in the introduction to 1969's Archeology of

Knowledge. In the face of sweeping generalizations of historians and gross systematizers in general (read, "structuralists"), Foucault asserts that "beneath the rapidly changing history of governments, wars, and famines, there emerge other, apparently unmoving histories" (3), and he proceeds, in the pages that follow, to unravel a schema for studying history without taking recourse to cultural totality.

While Nietzsche is only twice invoked in Foucault's Archeology,32 in an essay that would appear two years later, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault describes the genealogical method in such a way that the importance of Nietzsche's genealogy to his research methods and writing is without question. When Foucault notes that genealogy "requires patience and a knowledge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material" (370), consider not only his section on "The

Statement and the Archive" in Archeology of Knowledge but also the rigorous archival work that Foucault performed throughout his career when studying mental institutions, medical clinics, prisons, and sexuality. Foucault is arguing for liberation and the affirmation of difference in the place of sweeping histories.

Foucault's shift from archeology to genealogy allowed him to overcome the problem of the coupure, problematic breaks and shifts from one episteme - system of

32 Foucault describes the way that both Nietzsche's genealogy and Marx's decentering of history have been dismissed due to the sovereign subject that is privileged by the dominant themes of "historical consciousness and continuity" (Archeology of Knowledge 12-14). Nietzsche is mentioned once again to note that "the same relation does not exist between the name Nietzsche" and the various writings that he produced, from youthful autobiography to Zarathustra and "the innumerable notebooks with their jumble of laundry bills and sketches for aphorisms" (24). A variation on this latter comment can also be found in "What is an Author?" (118), a lecture that he gave before the Society at the College de France in February of 1969, shortly before L 'Archeologie du savoir was to appear. 85 relations - to the next. According to Foucault in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,"

the task of the genealogist is to "expose a body totally imprinted by history and the

process of history's destruction of the body" (376) but the body is more complex than

these inscriptions; it "gives rise to desires, failings, and errors" (375). The body is not

only an inscribed surface, an agent in history, it is also an agent o/history, a creative force in history's becoming. 1968 was important to Foucault because it marked the

beginning of a time during which - as James Miller notes in his biography of

Foucault - he was putting his body on the line, becoming engaged in passionate, and

sometimes violent, demonstrations. Foucault would continue his lifelong project of

articulating desiring bodies but, for a time, via megaphones and the popular press.

These are the types of articulations that are left out of, or lost in, translation.

Foucault was not in Paris in 1968; he was in Tunisia. His presence at the

barricades in Paris is mythologized and even taken as a given as he is listed alongside

other French intellectuals as being a prominent participant in the May events (in the

end, he may have returned for a day and blended into the background at the

Sorbonne).33 In the face of the popular mythologies of today, Foucault notes that "it

33 Although Foucault himself marks his return in November-December '68 (Remarks on Marx 138), Miller insists that he returned at the end of May, unknowingly exchanging words with Maurice Blanchot at the still-occupied and under-siege Sorbonne (173-174). Miller cites the exchange with Blanchot on the basis of a 1991 letter from Foucault's life partner Daniel Defert, from whom Miller had procured assistance with his research on Foucault. To make matters more confused, another corroborating piece of evidence comes from Blanchot's essay "Foucault as I Imagine Him," where Blanchot notes that he never met Foucault, but immediately mentions the Sorbonne exchange that Miller relates in his book on Foucault. Blanchot, however, in a playful way, makes it clear that his rendering of the meeting is fictional: "I never met him, except one time, in the courtyard of the Sorbonne, during the events of May '68, perhaps in June or July (but I was later told he wasn't there), when I addressed a few words to him, he himself unaware of who was speaking to him" (63). 86 wasn't May of '68 in France that changed me; it was March of '68, in a third world country" {Remarks on Marx 136). The militant brand of Marxism that was circulating in the university was the polar opposite of Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba's visions of enlightenment, nationalism, and modernization. The government's pro-

American, anti-Communist policy led to increasing tensions between the government and the university from 1966 until the police stormed onto campus in March of 1968, beating and arresting student protestors. While in Tunisia, Foucault assisted the embattled students, hiding a copying machine that was used by students to print anti- government pamphlets in his garden, transporting students-in-hiding, and using his own apartment as their hideout.34 As Foucault relates, "the risk of doing fifteen years in prison" for Tunisian students was considerably higher than for the French in May

{Remarks on Marx 138).

Upon returning to Paris, Foucault was struck by the extreme factionalism of

Marxism in the university. Tunisian students cared very little about the specificities of the Marxist theoretical apparatus. Instead, they debated about "the choices of strategy

Didier Eribon, whose biography of Foucault is more reliable (as Miller himself states in the sentence that opens his book, "this is not a biography" (5), both of necessity due to the difficulty of procuring authoritative materials on Foucault, and because Miller's book is, to a large extent, "a blend of anecdote and exegesis" [5]), also places Foucault in Paris at the end of May. Eribon narrates a walking scene: Foucault strolling down the streets of Paris with the editor of Le Nouvel observateur, remarking upon the marching students that "[t]hey are not making a revolution; they are the revolution" (Eribon 192). No source is given, though Jean Daniel, the editor that Eribon places Foucault with, is given a nod in Eribon's long list of acknowledgements (361). In his foreward to Feenberg and Freeman's When Poetry Ruled the Streets, Douglas Kellner lists Foucault alongside Baudrillard, Lyotard, Virilio, Derrida, Castoriadis, Deleuze and Guattari as "participants in May 1968" (xviii), a typical - and sweeping - assumption considering the way that Foucault and these other intellectuals have been mythologized into the month of May.

34 For accounts of Foucault's experiences in Tunisia, see Remarks on Marx 131-146; Eribon 192-195; Macey 203-207; and Miller 168-171. 87 and tactics .... on what to do" (Remarks on Marx 137). In the face of fragmentation and splinter group dogma, Foucault states that he "tried to accomplish a series of actions that would really imply a personal, physical commitment that was real and that posed problems in concrete, precise, definite terms, within a determinate situation" (139). As the first head of the department of philosophy at Vincennes,

Foucault was responsible for all of the appointments. In the face of extreme factionalism, Foucault drew together as many representatives from the splinter groups as was possible. As Miller notes, Foucault tried to hire Andre Glucksmann, then a well-known militant Maoist organizer during the events of May, who declined. But

Foucault did manage to secure a Trotskyist, a Communist, and a mass of Maoists affiliated with the Gauche proletarienne as junior faculty members (Miller 176).35

Vincennes was conceived as an experimental university in response to the uprisings in Paris and opened its doors in the fall of 1968. As Dosse notes, it "was to be the anti-Sorbonne" (History of Structuralism, Volume 2 141); it was the students who had risen up against the traditions of the Sorbonne and the hypocrisies of

Nanterre that populated the campus. Situated on land that was leased from the ministry of defense in a secluded area east of Paris, Vincennes was a place where, as

Dosse sums it up, "agitation could flourish freely at a healthy remove from society ..

35 The Gauche proletarienne (GP) was composed of the union of anarchists from the March 22nd movement with Marxist Leninists from the banned Union des jeunesses communistes. Since De Gaulle's return to government, a whole slew of leftist student groups had been banned. The GP began to publish its own journal in March of 1969, La Cause du peuple. The journal would eventually see Sartre step in as its editor at a time when simply selling the journal was enough to get one arrested. For more on the GP, La Cause du peuple. and the banning of student groups, see Hamon and Rotman, and Jean-Paul Aron 308-314. 88 .. [T]he government was all too happy to have circumscribed the sickness in a forest" {History of Structuralism, Volume 2 142).

In January of Foucault's first year there, he joined in with students when the university was under threat of lockdown by the police. In response to a police crackdown on student occupation of the rector's office of the Sorbonne earlier in the day, students at Vincennes demonstrated their solidarity and would soon find themselves in the same situation as the students on the Sorbonne campus. As student presence began to wane, some surrendering themselves to the police, Foucault remained amongst the determined, ending up on the roof of the administration building, throwing bricks at the police.36 As James Miller notes, in the days leading th up to January 26 at Vincennes, the campus was already abuzz with demonstrations, demonstrations that often mocked and taunted professorial power (175,178). As director of the Philosophy Department, Foucault was a natural target. Against student expectations, Foucault, who had just returned from his own 68 - a year where professorial duties, beyond anything else, meant active solidarity with embattled and emboldened Tunisian students - found himself, once again, situating himself alongside, rather than above, the student masses. Rather than identifying with the professorial or administrative class, Foucault demonstrated a commitment to lateralization in the process of group formation.

In January of 1970, one year after Foucault had taken to the roof of

Vincennes, rocks in hand, the Philosophy Department that Foucault had created at 36 See Eribon 205-206, Macey 225-226, and Miller 178-179. 89 Vincennes was under threat of discreditation: the National Minister of Education,

Olivier Guichard, declared his intention to stop granting a license to its graduates, effectively blocking them from teaching philosophy in lycees. Guichard legitimized his assessment - that the department was too "specialized" - by listing off the titles of a number of courses on Marxism and politics.38 Foucault took up the battle, arguing that specificity had nothing to do with it. In an interview that was published in Le

Nouvel observateur the next month, Foucault asks a question of Guichard: "What does philosophy (the philosophy class) have that is so precious and so fragile that he must, with such care, protect it? And what is there among those at Vincennes that is so dangerous?" ("Le Piege de Vincennes" 67).39 The question is significant.

Ironically, if Vincennes was conceived with the aim of containing dissent at a remove from the heart of the city, Foucault's appointment of representative leftist militants was all the more helpful to the cause. By revoking their right to teach, the government could keep these voices at bay. Just as workers had banded with students in May, so too did lyceens. The government was effectively pushing militant students away from the heart of the city and locking high school doors in order to prevent the re-entry of disruptive leftist discourses. Although he had banded with the students, perhaps

Foucault was so agitated by the situation because, in spite of his intentions, he had inadvertently been working for the Gaullists all along.

37 Lycees are the French equivalent of North American high schools.

38 See editors' note to "Le Pi6ge de Vincennes" 67.

39 "Qu'est-ce que la philosophic (la classe de philosophic) a de si precieux, et de si fragile pour qu'il faille, avec tant de soins, la prot^ger? Et qu'y a-t-il, chez les Vincennois, de si dangereux?" 90 Foucault's mobilization on behalf of students was as short-lived as his stint at Vincennes; his next book was to be on the penitentiary, and his departure from the university marked a turn towards the plight of prisoners. When Foucault left

Vincennes for an appointment at the prestigious College de France (which would host all but Jacques Lacan of the Structuralist four), Foucault used his status as a prominent professor to transmit the speech of prisoners (publishing it in pamphlets and reading it at protests and press conferences). As such, Foucault opened his position to an outside with the ultimate purpose of breaking down the barrier that separates inside and outside in the first place. Foucault advocated on prisoners' behalf as part of the Groupe d'informations sur les prisons (GIP) and, as I will explain in

Chapter Four, his work with this group was part of what brought him to North

America in 1972 (in spite of his resolutely academic consecration in the Anglo-

American academy).

The way in which the GIP was constituted is notable because the group collected was akin to the Philosophy Department at Vincennes; it was constituted of factions which otherwise rarely spoke. Foucault's groups were strategically conceived to combat the tendency to circumscribe intensities: political lines can go much further, accomplish much more, if connected with an outside. Factionalisms are strata that obscure and segregate points held in common. Such was the case with

Structuralism, which restricted conversation to a certain set of terms and position- takings read in relation to them. Although thought does not develop independent of its context, certain contexts are restricted from discourses whose interests lie elsewhere. 91 As Foucault writes in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," "[t]he origin lies at a place of inevitable loss, the point where the truth of things is knotted to a truthful discourse, the site of a fleeting articulation that discourse has obscured and finally lost" (372).

Turning away from origins, the proliferation of groups emerges. It is worthwhile to consider every unaccounted-for departure as also a regrouping.

ii) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Felix Guattari had been attending Jacques Lacan's seminar since its beginnings, and his archives are filled with binders and notebooks that house his reflections on, and engagements with, Lacan's development of a science of psychoanalysis. Guattari remained a card-carrying member of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris from 1969 through to - and beyond - its abolition by Lacan in March of

1980. A student and analysand of "the master," Guattari left Lacan's tutelage in 1955 in order to work at an experimental clinic called "La Borde," one hour south of Paris, run under the direction of Jean Oury. It was a communally run establishment which aimed to avoid imposing order upon the patients that populated the clinic. As Guattari recalls, "in a matter of months' time I had contributed to the establishment of multiple collective proceedings: general assemblies, joint commissions between patients and personnel, and 'workshops' of all kinds: newspaper, drawing, sewing, raising chickens, gardening, etc." ("La Borde" 189). "Schizoanalytic theory," as it appears in

Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, is not in any way restricted to concerns with, and battles fought against, psychoanalytic philosophy. Guattari, in fact, was taking 92 part in a whole series of battles, so the larger question of Guattari's "schizopolitics" has to do with a lot more than what he was involved in at La Borde. Just as Guattari's work at La Borde informed his development of schizoanalytic theory, so did his other activist commitments, each of these constituent parts of Guattari's theoretico-political activity having an impact on the others. During the fifties and sixties, Guattari was a member of the French Communist Party, he edited the Marxist-Leninist newspaper

La Voie communiste, and he co-founded le Federation des groupes d'etudes et de recherches institutionelles (FGERI) and edited its review Recherche, a research group and journal that provided a base for social militants across a broad spectrum of fields.

As part of Mouvement de la paix, the Campagne de milliard, and as president of Le

Comite departmental d'aide aupeuple du Vietnam, Guattari took part in protests, organized documentary screenings, and organized letter-writing campaigns soliciting donations for medical supplies for the civilians that were being injured by the

American invasion of Vietnam. This issue also propelled him to the prominent protest at the barricades in the spring of 1968.

The relationship between Deleuze and Guattari was mutually beneficial: each was an influence on the other in a discernible way. While Stephane Nadeau, in his introduction to the Anti-Oedipus Papers, says that the perception that Deleuze used

Guattari for the raw stuff is an oversimplification (13), there is some truth to the claim. The influence that Guattari had on Deleuze, where political engagement is concerned, cannot be overstated. I am not only referring, here, to Deleuze's presence at manifestations or his signature on petitions. During the years that Deleuze 93 corresponded and published with Guattari most frequently, the themes that he explored in his own writing became resolutely political; they were swimming with political signifiers. Conversely, Deleuze was able to remedy Guattari's struggles with writing. Guattari relates that when he approached Deleuze with his ideas at Vincennes in 1969, Deleuze's suggestion that he write all of his ideas down wasn't something that he was comfortable with; whereas conversation was easy for Guattari, writing had always been a struggle. Between the first encounter in 1969 and the publication of Anti-Oedipus in 1972, Guattari produced "a frenzy of work that [he] hadn't imagined possible until then" (Guattari, "Everywhere at Once" 30).

It is notable that Guattari, in his correspondence with Deleuze while co- writing the first volume of Capitalisme et schizophrenic, repeatedly insisted that Anti-

Oedipus "be envisioned in the context of the French student rebellion" (Nadeau 12).40

That May '68 was at the centre of their concerns is nowhere clearer than in the following remark made by Guattari shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus:

The work of theory should no longer be the business of specialists. The desire of a theory and its propositions should stick as closely as possible to the event and the expression of the masses. To achieve this, we must knit a new breed of intellectual, a new breed of analyst, a new breed of militant: blending the different types and running them together. (Deleuze, "Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back" 217)

In an infamous conversation with Foucault in 1972, Deleuze notes, quoting the title of one of Guattari's essays, that "we are all groupuscles. There is no more

40 For references by Guattari to May '68 in his notes on Anti-Oedipus to Deleuze see the sections in the Anti Oedipus Papers entitled "On What is to Come" (53-57), "Instructions for a New Psychoanalysis" (94-99) "Who Wrote...?" (123-27), "The Workers' Movement" (173-75), and "Class Interests and Group Desire" (196-97). 94 representation. There is only action, the action of theory, the action of praxis, in the relations of relays and networks" (Deleuze and Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power"

207).41 If Guattari had long been insisting that the intellectual, analyst, and militant needed to be blended together into a new breed (the premise of transversality),42

Deleuze echoed this sentiment, adding that theory is: "exactly like a toolbox. It has nothing to do with the signifier... A theory has to be used, it has to work. And not just for itself. If there is no one to use it, starting with the theorist himself who, as soon as he uses it ceases to be a theorist, then a theory is worthless, or its time has not yet arrived" (Deleuze and Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power" 208). Because May '68 burst out of the academy with such force it was challenging intellectuals to rethink the relationship between theory and practice.

Nietzsche, for Deleuze, was an important thinker because he provided a philosophical path that drove beyond the stasis of structure and, further, pushed past the duality and negativity inherent in the dialectic. As Francis Fourquet notes,

Deleuze was important to Guattari and the group of militants at the FGERI because he brought to them Nietzsche's "genealogy of morals" and "will to power" ("Histoire du CERFI"). It was in 1962 that Deleuze wrote his book on Nietzsche. In it, he

41 See Felix Guattari, "Nous sommes tous des groupuscules (1970)." The concept is not Guattari's, but was popularized and practiced during the 68 years. Guattari's is perhaps in reference to a 30-40,000 strong march of students who marched the streets of Paris chanting "nous sommes un groupuscule" [we are a small group] (Azenstarck).

42 Gary Genosko rightly features the concept of transversality as being fundamental to Guattari's (and Deleuze's) theoretical development, at root of the concepts that Guattari would develop over the course of his life. See, in particular, Genosko's section on "Transversality" in Felix Guattari: An Abberant Introduction 66-121 and the biographical essay included in The Three Ecologies, "The Life and Work of Felix Guattari: From Transversality to Ecosophy." The essays provide particularly productive accounts of the concept because of their mix of conceptual and historical rigour. 95 criticizes the dialectic for being wed to the negative. It is "reactive" because, built as it is on the basis of opposition and contradiction, the only positivity that derives from the dialectical relation emerges from the negation of negation.43 Summing up the potential that resides in Nietzsche's philosophy, Deleuze notes that: "the death of

God needs time finally to find its essence and become a joyful event. Time to expel the negative, to exorcise the reactive - the time of a becoming-active. This time is the cycle of the eternal return" (Nietzsche and Philosophy 190). It is Nietzsche's emphasis on affirmation that Deleuze finds so enabling. For Deleuze, Nietzsche is all about "becoming-active" where the dialectic is "re-active." Even if Marx inverted

Hegel's idealism by rendering the dialectic material, the problem of the Hegelian dialectic remains: "for the affirmation of difference as such it substitutes the negation of that which differs" (Nietzsche and Philosophy 196).

The premise of Anti-Oedipus is that the unconscious produces and it should, therefore, stop being treated as a theatre, a site over top of which the Oedipus script is incessantly imposed. Deleuze and Guattari deploy Nietzsche to overcome not Marx and Freud but the stasis which they have become. Deleuze renders the political potential of Nietzsche within the problematics of post-'68 France quite clear at a conference taking up the question of "Nietzsche Today":

The modern trinity - Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud - is taken to be the dawn of our culture. Little does it matter that we are all defused beforehand. Marx and Freud may be the dawn of our culture, but with Nietzsche, something altogether different occurs: the dawn of a counterculture ... If we consider not the letter of Marx and Freud, but

43 See, in particular, his section on "Nietzsche and the dialectic" 162-64. 96 the development of Marxism and Freudianism, we see that they have paradoxically launched into some sort of an attempt at recoding: recoding by the state, in the case of Marxism (you are sick on account of the State, and you will be cured by the state, but it won't be the same State), recoding by the family (sick because of the family and cured through the family, but not the same family), such are, in the perspective of our culture, the elements which truly constitute Marxism and psychoanalysis as the two fundamental bureaucracies. One public and the other private, they tend to bring about somehow or other a recoding of what has never stopped being decoded on the horizon. But the questions Nietzsche raises have nothing to do with this. His problem is elsewhere. It is to use all codes, past, present, and future, to introduce something which does not and will not let itself be coded. ("Nomad Thought" 13)

It was upon recoding that the revolutionary potential of '68 was blocked: a miniscule state-wide raise for French workers and a referendum that would see Charles de

Gaulle return to parliament, restoring order. For Deleuze, Nietzsche captured the spirit of May with his transvaluation of values: the affirmation of difference without recoding. Whereas Structuralism was an apparatus of coding which itself became a code for the categorization of thought, concepts like transversality and groupuscules were invented and developed to prevent and overcome recoding, to explain the way that thought is a collection of dispersed points, and that active pursuit of departures is more productive than the consolidation of a code that threatens to capture or neglect any given departure accordingly.

Conclusion: From Field to Assemblage

Structuralism was a suitable paradigm for the reinvigoration of an Anglo-

American discipline in crisis. Not only was it a paradigm presented in the garb of 97 science, making it appear appropriate for the task of modernizing literary studies, but it was readily appropriable by the discipline because literary studies was already trained in the practice of close reading. It is not surprising, in this respect, that the arrival of French theory in the Anglo-American academy was followed by its rapid ascendancy in the ranks of literature departments. Nor is it surprising that the arrival of theory at Johns Hopkins was followed by the consolidation of a high profile group at Yale; the poaching of talent and trends by a well-endowed university is certainly not unheard of. That this trajectory for French theory's arrival in the Anglo-American academy makes sense and has been narrated several times over, however, obscures from view some of the finer details of the process of consecration.

To interrogate the arrival of theory at Johns Hopkins because it was funded by the Ford Foundation at a time when the foundation was operating in concert with the

CIA is not to suggest that Barthes, Derrida, or the conference's organizers were on the agency's payroll. It is instructive in this respect to examine a sensationally titled paper, "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," written by Supreme Court

Justice Lewis Powell in 1971 (then a lawyer in Richmond, Virginia) for the educational committee of the National Chamber of Commerce.44 Blaming the flurry of turn-of-the-seventies bank bombings on the popularity of UC San Diego professor

Herbert Marcuse, Powell suggests that big business should direct a program to diminish the views of radicals by providing sustained funding for those whose views

44 "The logic behind, and implications of the paper are explained by Hollinger in "Money and Academic Freedom a Half-Century after McCarthyism: Universities amid the Force Fields of Capital." 98 were more sound. As David A. Hollinger relates, the ultimate goal of Powell's project as outlined "was to shift the intellectual center of gravity in the social sciences and the humanities, where the curriculum and the content of knowledge had potential relevance to politics" (166); such an approach made for a subtler, more patient, and ultimately much more effective (because less controversial) method than

McCarthy ism for influencing the work conducted in the university. This work was, of course, already being done before 1971, and in this respect it is worth interrogating the disposition of the strand of French theory that gained ascendancy at this particular moment in time.

The problem that I am concerned with is the way that Post-structuralism is consecrated in a particular position, and with a particular disposition, for literary studies: on the ground of Structuralism (as a Post) and as part of a larger formalist project. I am not suggesting that either Structuralism or Post-structuralism ever stand in as literary studies; they are, rather, points or paradigms whose stock - cultural capital - enjoyed rapid appreciation over the course of the seventies, dominating the pages of high profile journals (whose profiles were, in turn, strengthened by their inclusion of French thought) and becoming the subject of an explosion of anthologies.

Structuralism is a point in relation to others in the field of literary studies (a field of forces and a field of struggles). In a 1972 review of Derrida's Positions for Diacritics,

Richard Klein applauds Derrida's admitted distance from Marxism-Leninism and the student struggles of 1968 as a feature that makes his thought appealing for serious study. As such, Derrida is considered "serious" because of the distance he keeps, 99 while "public interventions and Marxist themes" are reduced by Klein to markers of "the polemical style Parisian intellectual life ... an immense trap" (31). The situation regarding Marx and Lenin, or Marxism-Leninism/Maoism is much more sophisticated than Klein allows; it is a complicated negotiation of Marx and Lenin alongside countless other contemporary texts and experiences that characterized the bitter ideological and political struggles sweeping through France and the United

States in 1968. Rather than deeming "public polemics" to be an immense trap within which Derrida's thought might be swallowed, why not consider these questions about, and interventions in, the university and society as being part of a larger network within which Derrida's work could be a part? Why does Derrida have to maintain a critical distance - refuse to engage - in order to retain a legitimate position in the Anglo-American academy?

Marxism-Leninism was, in fact, a position in the field of literary studies in the

United States. In 1972, the same year that Macksey and Donato republished The

Structuralist Controversy, Bruce Franklin, the most outspoken champion of Marxism-

Leninism in American literary studies, edited an anthology of movement writings,

George Abbot White and Charles Newman edited Literature and Revolution, and

Louis Kampff and Paul Lauter (co-founder of the MLA left-caucus with Richard

Ohmann) edited The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays in the Teaching of

English. The latter two of these collections both interrogate the ways that literature and criticism might be rendered relevant to their own contemporary political climate, forging another series of points, another set of groups, in the relational field of literary 100 studies. Whereas Kampf and Lauter's volume is dedicated to recently felled political prisoner George Jackson (whose relationship to Foucault will be explored in

Chapter Four), Macksey and Donato's volume was dedicated to presenting

Structuralism as a grounds for future research. Structuralism can be such a point for literary studies, but it can also be a venture into the political questions being posed elsewhere in literary studies, and it can even be a strategic departure from the grounds of the university in the midst of a crisis much larger than the need for a new paradigm.

If the work of the triumphant structuralists was readily appropriable in a field trained in the intrinsic reading of texts, the work of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in particular was not about maintaining a position of perspective by acquiring new and sophisticated critical apparati, it was about giving up vertical relations for lateral ones that stretched outside of the university. Even when dealing with thinkers that veered from the triumphant line and its characteristic refusal to intervene, the triumphant line becomes grounds for all things Structuralism, obscuring from view and consideration the groups that formed as a result of departures from the academy as a centre of gravity. The remainder of my project will pursue this turning away, taking the overlapping revolts in New York and Paris in 1968 as a prompt for this turn. 101 Chapter Two. Movement and Event: Paris X New York

In 1968, campuses across the United States and in France were shaken by revolt. The uprisings taking place at Columbia and Nanterre are the focus of this chapter, but they were not the first to take place in the United States and France, nor were student revolts unique to these countries. In Germany, under the leadership of theology student Rudi Dutschke and the German SDS, students protested their living conditions, the myths perpetuated in the classroom, and held an International

Congress on Vietnam. In Japan, students by the hundreds of thousands protested against the Vietnam War, blocking American attempts to use harbours, trains, and air- strips to dock and move weapons and ammunition; the wounds of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki were fresh, and resolve was strong. In Warsaw, students protested the

Communist Party's banning of Adam Mickiewicz's play Dziady, a protest that intensified across Poland as the Communist Party took a hard-line stance against the students (justifying their impatience with anti-Semitic invectives that stoked the fire further). In Prague, reformist Alexander Dubcek's rise to power marked the beginning of the Prague Spring, a period of mass civil unrest as Czechoslovakia vied for independence from the Soviet Union. In the lead-up to the 1968 Olympic summer games in Mexico City, students protested for university autonomy and against 102 massive investment in the games in spite of widespread poverty. These examples, to name but a few, have resulted in the legacy of 1968 as a year of global protest.1

Although globalization is a term usually reserved for the fall of the Eastern bloc two decades later, McLuhan's theorization of a "global village" - at this precise moment, in 1967-68 - created by the instantaneous pulse of images and information in the electronic age certainly sheds light on how the transmission of information led to a snowballing of unrest. Widespread opposition to the Vietnam War played a large part in creating a sense of unity in protest, and the Tet offensive at the beginning of

January and February, which proved that the Vietnamese National Liberation Front was capable of coordinating effective large-scale campaigns against the American occupying army, was a source of inspiration. Just as the Tet offensive was followed by the My Lai massacres, however, the Mexican protests culminated in the Tlatelolco

Massacre of October 2nd and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia provoked occupation by the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries in August.2 1968, in other words, was a year that saw the global eruption of liberation struggles, but these struggles were not unmet by oppression and resulted in the death and displacement of thousands of people across the globe.

I select the events that I do - the revolts at Nanterre and Columbia - because they were concurrent and correspondent. When I say this, I do not just mean that the

1 For a month-to-month account of the global events of 1968, see Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins's 1968: Marching in the Streets.

2 The French PCF not only condemned the student-worker uprisings in 1968 but also supported the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, leading to further divisions between the French left and the Party. 103 events correspond to one another; rather, they corresponded with one another in the underground press and through sentiments and actions readable in mainstream newspapers and television images. The concurrent events mark a pronounced line of communication between continents, a trans-Atlantic channel for the movement of impulses and dispositions different than those being exchanged and consecrated as

Structuralism and Post-structuralism. If the Johns Hopkins conference proceedings elide the events of 1968 when they are republished in 1972,1 use this chapter to recuperate the events that transpired between the two.

Displacement and Recontextualization: "The Ends of Man " (1968)

To begin, I will consider another publication of 1972, but one which has an expressly marked connection to 1968: Jacques Derrida's Marges de la philosophic.

The volume is mostly comprised of seminar papers delivered by Derrida at various international colloquia. I would like to foreground one paper, "The Ends of Man," which Derrida presented in October 1968. The interruption that this paper enacts has already been highlighted - and re-enacted - by Martin McQuillan in a paper he presented at a 2006 symposium entitled "40 years of Structure, Sign and Play."3

McQuillan's "Extraordinary Rendition: Derrida and Vietnam" is a unique contribution to the anniversary symposium because it veers from the subject at hand, focusing on a text from 1968 - at a New York colloquium on the theme of

3 The proceedings of the symposium are published in Theory & Event 12.1 (2009). 104 "Philosophy and Anthropology" - rather than "Structure, Sign and Play."4 For the most part, the summary thrust of Derrida's paper would have been completely appropriate for the 1966 event which was organized to introduce an Anglo-American audience to the current trends in French thought. Derrida's paper provides a thorough account of the state of the French intellectual scene from the rise of humanism in the post-war period under Jean-Paul Sartre to the so-called end of man (an event heralded in the closing pages of Foucault's Les Mots et les choses), an extension of the human sciences into the philosophical field, a phenomenon that introduced "a certain distance" from the human as per the convention of objectivity fundamental to the practice of science (Derrida 117). The feature that renders Derrida's paper an impossible fit for the 1966 conference on the "sciences of man," however, is that

Derrida dates his paper, noting that it was written in April 1968 and completed on

May 12,1968. While the date of completion is signed at the end of his essay, Derrida explains the context of its writing at the end of his introduction: that it was written in

April 1968, Derrida explains, means that it was composed against the backdrop of the opening of the Paris peace talks, the assassination of Martin Luther King and, "[a] bit later, while I was typing this text, the universities of Paris were invaded by the forces of order - and for the first time at the demand of a rector - and then reoccupied by the students in the upheaval you are familiar with" (114). This moment marks another

4 Part of what makes Derrida's signature on "The Ends of Man" intriguing is that although the paper as published in Marges is said to have taken place in New York (presumably New York city), as McQuillan notes, the conference took place at a SUNY conference hall on Long Island. The detail is worth considering in a volume where Derrida is particularly self-conscious about signatures. New York, like Paris, is iconic, particularly as regards 1968. 105 eve of the ends of man: a calling into question of imperial power, of racism, and of a regime of knowledge.

"Extraordinary rendition" - the transfer of a person from one state to another associated in the present day with the practice of "torture by proxy" - is perhaps not the most appropriate term for considering the question of "Derrida and Vietnam," but the term nonetheless signals a productive act of displacement. By veering from the course set by the colloquium on "Structure, Sign and Play" McQuillan resituates

Derrida in 1968 and has him ask questions about the state of man in the context of the

Vietnam War. Situated in the context of McQuillan's own paper, the Vietnam war resonates with the current war in Iraq, which McQuillan characterizes as a war driven not by the threat of communism, but "by the threat to capital by its own exhaustion of the natural resources of the earth and the extreme climate change it has produced"

("Extraordinary Rendition"). McQuillan's own paper is thus contextualized at yet another eve of the end of man.

My chapter shares with McQuillan's paper a gesture of displacement and recontextualization which characterizes and drives the remainder of my dissertation.

My chapter also shares a fascination in the potential of the eve, taking pause in order to perform a close reading of Columbia Students for a Democratic Society's newspaper dated on the eve of the Columbia revolt in New York. Where I fundamentally differ from McQuillan - and Derrida - is that my interest is not so much in the date May 12th, the eve of the march of millions in Paris (or, a few weeks prior, the eve of the Columbia revolt), but in March 22nd. The latter date, as I will 106 explain below, signifies movement and not the moment of suspension that characterizes a threshold. As will become increasingly clear in the next chapter, the

March 22nd movement also has a lot more in common with the work of Deleuze and

Guattari than it does with Derrida, and so a shift from Derrida's "eve of the ends of man" to Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on movement will be yet another displacement.

I focus on the crossing between Paris and New York in 1968 for three crucial reasons, and all have to do with the reorientation of my project as regards "French theory." First, New York is where much of the remainder of the dissertation focuses: in chapter three, Deleuze and Guattari appear in New York's underground newspaper

RAT Subterranean News via Jean-Jacques Lebel; in chapter four, Foucault visits

Attica prison while lecturing at SUNY-Buffalo; and in chapter five, with the conference on Schizo-Culture at Columbia, I return full circle. What is usually narrated as a trajectory from the Baltimore controversy to Post-structuralism at Yale I re-narrativize in my dissertation as a trajectory through New York. This moment of concurrent events therefore marks a shift. Second, as I will relate below, the 1968 events in Paris and New York were outwards-oriented in relation to the university, and so this crossing acts as a jolt that forces one to look away, to see what is happening around the university rather than trying to capture the nuanced way in which theory was being molded in seminar rooms, academic journals, and books.

Third, the crossing introduces the cobblestone, whose launching I read as a rejection of the narrative of progress and modernity. When I return to Columbia in the final 107 chapter, the cobblestone reappears. The cobblestone, as I relate herein, both collects and projects, and it therefore stands in as a figure for the assembly and movement of events. It is with the cobblestone that I begin.

Of Cobblestones and Campuses: Columbia X Nanterre

Events never simply cross but are collected and projected, particularly in the pages of local undergrounds, where this process is documented. In the pages that follow I consider the uprisings at Nanterre and Columbia alongside one another in order to explain how each event included the other in its revolt. The events of

Nanterre and Columbia do not simply overlap - each retaining its integrity in the process - but are mutually mclusive, an important reminder that events, though singular (the uprising is bound to a specific time and place), are in no way insular

(currents pass through them). One of the most enduring characters in Paris's '68 - even more so than Daniel Cohn-Bendit - is the cobblestone. What better place to start the crossing of Paris and New York, then, than with this animate object? In 1968,

Paris's campuses crossed New York's in the form of cobblestones thrown in tandem.

By following the cobblestone, the gathering of a collective life and knowledge produced by French and American contingencies becomes possible. What these cobblestone-bridged contingencies have in common is that they were both engaged in the process of casting modernization into doubt, uncovering the contradictions at the heart of the liberal humanist university. 108 In the first chapter, I discussed the strategies that the field of literary studies employed in order to preserve its status in the domain of knowledge production, to redefine itself out of crisis; in this section I follow the strategies deployed by a movement determined to turn away from a university which the movement recognized as perpetuating fundamental class divides. While literary studies imported French philosophy in order to bind itself to the academy as a reinvigorated and legitimate field of academic inquiry, students in Paris and New

York were turning 180 degrees, not simply out from the buildings and into the streets, but away from the buildings and towards others in their immediate environs: workers in Paris and a black and Puerto-Rican community in New York. It takes but a single connection - Columbia and Nanterre - to set an immense network in motion, a network that is surging with potential, proliferating rather than binding itself in place, opening up to others rather than acting to conserve itself.

Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit reference Columbia amongst the American influences for the French student revolts of 1968. Wearing Columbia's (and

Berkeley's) influence on their sleeve in the pages of Obsolete Communism: The Left

Wing Alternative - their rapidly translated late-1968 book - they provide the following comment:

Berkeley-Columbia-New York: Students sickened by the imperialist policies of their country, especially in Vietnam, showed their solidarity with the Vietnamese peasants and workers and with the oppressed racial and ethnic minorities of their own country. They made known their refusal to become privileged members of the American bourgeoisie. (33) 109 Students in the Sociology department at Nanterre were particularly upset about the Americanization of their curriculum, with tests and competitive entry exams which guaranteed fluency in the specialized language of the discipline; from industrial sociology, to political and advertising sociology, they declared that the discipline "has increasingly been used by the bourgeoisie to help rationalize society without jeopardizing either profits or stability" (Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism

36). The importation of the American model of modernization was read by sociology students as an earmarking of the discipline for the rationalization of organized capital, clearing the discipline of the potential to reflect critically upon the manner in which society is run, and for whom.

As the Cohn-Bendit reference to Columbia makes clear, French students were immediately aware of the situation in New York. This example of a New York / Paris crossing is important because it demonstrates that lines of influence were never uni- directional. If French students were enthralled with the goings-on at Columbia while rising up on their own in Paris, the reverse was also true. While Paris was rising,

Columbia was watching; the consumption and performance of revolt became increasingly common as a result of the well-networked underground press, a phenomenon I will explore in greater detail in the next chapter.5 Beyond opening her book with parallel quotes by Mark Rudd at Columbia and Cohn-Bendit in Paris (xiii-

5 Barbara and John Ehrenreich's Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad, for example, was born of the decision by two Columbia students, who participated in the Columbia protests, to take a late-spring trip to Europe in order to learn more about their European revolutionary counterparts in Germany, Italy, and France, in particular. While in Europe, "[w]e spent more time discussing strategy and common problems," they point out, "than we did making notes" (8). 110 xiv), Joanne Grant, writing about Columbia in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, describes a May 21st demonstration where mimeographed copies of "La

Marseillaise" were handed out and its lines "Allons enfants de la patrie / le jour de gloire est arrive" were sung during the march.6 The irony, as Grant points out, is that

"La Marseillaise" was the song of law and order in France; students there had adopted the "Internationale" (121). Far from beginning and ending in misappropriated song,

New York's solidarity with Paris ran to significant depths; Columbia's students watched Paris's revolutionary ambitions and actions with a keen eye, consciously adopting Parisian tactics for use on New York streets. During the May 21st protest during which "La Marseillaise" was being sung, Grant notes that "people were pulling up bricks from the walks and hurling them at police" and windows, prompting someone to comment that "the mobile tactics of European students - diverting the police to all parts of the campus - were being used" (122).

The act of throwing cobblestones marks a mutual turning away that is seething with potential. This is not at all to say that the launching of projectiles is an act that should, without qualification, be celebrated, but that the contextualized act represents a correspondence deserving of greater attention; it is an act that can, I hope, throw the arrival of French theory in America into a new light. The significance of this crossing via cobblestones will be suspended for the moment as I explore the overlap between

Columbia and Nanterre in greater detail.

6 "Come children of the native land / the day of glory has come." Ill In order for the event to be projected - even if the event itself is to stand in the place of projection - it has to be collected first. In order to understand the potentials of the event, it is imperative to draw out the correspondences that it represents. The event, in other words, is not something that exists in itself; it is an assemblage of points that has the potential to, in Deleuze's words, "find a shattering unity in a revolutionary utilization" (Deleuze and Guattari, "Capitalism and

Schizophrenia" 237).

From classroom to classed room: the university, its curriculum, and its environs

Universite de Nanterre, sitting 10 miles west of Paris in the suburbs, was built with the purpose of giving students a grounds for expression, encouraging them to become involved in university governance for the purpose of reform. When bureaucracy reigned toward the end of 1967, and the Fouchet reforms - championing efficiency rather than a broader culture of learning in order to deal with the mass influx of students in the post-war period7 - were imposed from above, a handful of students boycotted classes and a group of a few dozen students, naming themselves

o the enrages, emerged. When the police invaded campus to break up a confrontation between the enrages and another student group, the enrages (whose practice of disrupting lectures in the name of Mao and Guevara was more often than not the 7 The reforms instituted yearly examinations to replace the certificate system. It also took control of the constitution of the Baccalaureat away from professors, and by extension removed their influence over the curriculum in the lycees. For a discussion of the reforms, see Schnapp and Vidal-Naquet 11-16 and Michelle Patterson 39-41.

8 "The Angry Ones," a reference to a radical group during the French revolution of 1789. 112 object of ridicule), experienced a rapid swelling in its ranks as a result of widespread opposition to police presence.

On March 22nd, a group of more than 500 students occupied a faculty

conference room to protest the Dean's refusal to fight on behalf of four students who had been arrested for their participation in a protest against the Vietnam War and for his refusal to provide a bigger lecture hall for meetings of the burgeoning student radical left. The result was access to the university's largest lecture hall, where perpetual meetings saw the ranks of revolt double, a mass boycott of midterms, and

finally the shutting down of the university on May 2nd. The next day, students from

Nanterre went to the Sorbonne to join protesters who were beginning to organize

around the closing down of the suburban university. This protest in turn led to the

closing of the Sorbonne only a day after the doors at Nanterre were shut. Hundreds of protestors were arrested. On May 6th, more than 20,000 teachers and students

iL marched in protest of the arrests, and on May 13 , with the support of major workers'

unions, the number of people on the streets increased to over a million and continued to grow over the course of the month.9

9 The sources on the May uprising are numerous. The main sources that I have consulted are notable for their precise examination of the student revolts that led up to, and proceeded through, May '68 in Paris. See Herve Bourges, The Student Revolt: The Activists Speak, Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freeman, When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of1968; R. Gregoire and F. Perlman, Worker-Student Action Committees: France May '68; Alain Schnapp and Pierre Vidal- Naquet, The French Student Uprising, November 1967-June 1968: An Analytical Record; and Patrick Seale and Maurren McConville Red Flag/ Black Flag: French Revolution 1968. The Bourges volume is useful for its inclusion of prominent student perspectives in the direct aftermath of May, and the Feenberg and Freeman, Schnapp and Vidal-Naquet, and Gregoire and Perlman volumes are significant in that they reprint a vast array of documents and communiques from the revolt. Nanterre's enrages were inspired by the Situationist International, and their 1966 pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life 113 It is important to take the geography of the university into consideration when looking at how student-worker alliances were established. At Nanterre, the industrial working class was permitted to emerge from the fictions within which they had otherwise been enrobed simply because the experimental university had been dropped into their midst, into the working class suburbs of Paris. Access to the French academy was classed, and Nanterre's geography played a significant part in confronting French students with an image of the university as a beacon of privilege.

As a result of this new geographical proximity, some of Nanterre's students started to form alliances with the workers, helping workers to organize and supporting their causes.

Numbers swelled from twenty-five students at Nanterre to ten million student and worker-led revolters in a matter of months. To overlook the way that protests reconfigured the space of university campuses and the streets of France in the vicinity of May, or the way that intellectual production was to a large extent determined by this material context, is to overlook the way that concepts - like complex compounds composed of bonded molecules boasting atoms of various charges - are infused with the volatile stuff of history. The relationship that various political camps had with the academy, and the way that intellectuals at specific teaching and research institutions reacted to (became a part of, acknowledged, incorporated, denied) these political currents, are significant factors to consider. Not only is a turn towards political

considered in its economic, political, psychological, and particularly intellectual aspects with a modest proposal for its remedy - which also references Berkeley - is a key document in this respect. 114 engagement an important context for French thought, a context that, more often than not, falls into an imperceptible background in North American appropriations of theoretical terminology, but it also tells us something about the utility of French thought in that it was being used, thrown around by students that were at times inspired, and at others exasperated, by its form and content.

Although the Columbia protesters did not explicitly invoke curricular issues amongst their official demands, as was the case with Nanterre and the Fouchet reforms, dissatisfaction with the distance that separated the curriculum and the world outside its walls was widespread. Speaking to this dissatisfaction among students,

Robert Friedman hones his attention on an illustrative example. When faculty met in order to reevaluate their approach to a course in "Contemporary Civilization" the weekend before the uprising - a course which had been a requirement for all of

Columbia's students since 1919 - the result of the discussions was that they would lop off Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas and begin with the Reformation. The irony is too much for Friedman to handle:

Educational reform was once again a step behind reality. Studying old revolutions in the classroom while new ones were taking place on the Harlem streets just ten blocks away is typical of the University's relation to society. In recent years students had come to discover that ... the University was a social as well as an academic institution and would have to play an active role in the society it once attempted to avoid.(3)

Friedman goes halfway here, recognizing that the University could play a relevant role in society. What Foucault - and, of course, Althusser - so effectively and resolutely point out is that it already has its role to manufacture docile bodies, not 115 agitated ones. As was the case with Nanterre, curricular design only helped to accent the disparity between the University classroom and its immediate environs.10

The crossing between the New York and Paris campus uprisings (and their

subsequent snowballing into much larger and generalized revolts) is not at all

surprising. As Grant points out in the preface to her book on the Columbia uprisings, parallel uprisings were not the result of students mimicking one another but a

response to "conditions which are general in this society" (ix). Daniel and Gabriel

Cohn-Bendit, representing the way that French students understood the Columbia and

Berkeley uprisings, point out that, at base, American students were "ma[king] known

their refusal to become privileged members of the American bourgeoisie" (33).

Beyond sharing a focal point in opposition to the Vietnam War, this more general

"refusal" - to become a part of the middle-class (and all of the complicities that the

conversion entailed) - was a common ground. If this is what French students

recognized in American uprisings, what did the "poetry" of the Parisian uprisings -

their marches, building occupations, barricades, graffitied and hollered slogans, and

10 Although dissatisfaction with the curriculum did not make it into the explicit demands of Columbia students, in the first part of the Cox Commission report on the Columbia uprisings, devoted to "Conditions giving rise to the disturbances," a section on the "Uncertainty Concerning the Role of the University" is included (19-24). The section is further broken down into two sections, "The Role of the University in Relation to Society" and "The Curriculum." In his introduction to Roger Kahn's quasi- novelistic report on the Columbia uprisings, The Battle for Morningside Heights, Senator Eugene McCarthy, a Democratic candidate at the infamous 1968 convention in Chicago, lays the blame directly on the University's inability to recognize - or admit - that it "is involved in contemporary problems and in contemporary history" (11). At centre of his argument is the government and private funding sources that determined not only the University's research projects but also the way that results are reported (11-12), a criticism amplified in the context of the neo-liberal university. 116 so on11 - signify if not the refusal of a whole way of life? With Mao as a common signifier for a cultural revolution, French and American students were acting in concert against the spread of global capitalism. France and the United States were linked by protests against Vietnam, a war which the Americans took over from the

French. Protests against "American imperialism" took place on campuses on either side of the Atlantic. Discourses of third world liberation began to run through the student left in the sixties. Frantz Fanon's work, for example, was being read by

French students critical of France's occupation of Algeria, but also by the black liberation movement in the United States, whose base was rapidly broadening in the late sixties. Alternative nationalisms (internationalisms, and intercommunalisms) were conceived in opposition to the imperialist tendencies of a global elite, whether national or corporate.

To say that the parallel uprisings were conducted in concert against global capitalism, however, is not to forget that the uprisings were acted out upon local stages, against global capitalism's local effects. It is important and illustrative to note that when we attune ourselves to the local details underlying the parallel uprisings, rather than pushing the revolts further apart in the process of outlining their specificity, we find another crossing. If the events at Nanterre were, to a large extent, sparked by its geography - the suburban space in which the new, experimental

Universite de Nanterre was built - Columbia's uprising had a lot to do with its

" My use of the term "poetry" is in reference to Feenberg and Freeman's collection of posters, manifestoes, and graffiti from the May '68 events in France, When Poetry Ruled the Streets. 117 location in New York. Around the same time that Nanterre was being built in the industrial suburbs of Paris, Columbia was expanding into Harlem, driving out the local black and Puerto Rican population by buying real estate out from under them, raising rents, and establishing policies that enforced segregation.

The figure of the Columbia uprising is not reducible to the confines of the campus but a pivotal moment and space of revolt (against the assassination of Martin

Luther King at the beginning of April, for example, which only fueled the fire against the politics that Columbia's expansion practices represented); it was part of a radiating movement that included larger segments of the city of New York and the

United States at large. Similar to the case in Paris, where the first in a string of student uprisings was in Strasbourg, uprisings in the United States had Berkeley as an emblematic first. Just as high school students rose up in solidarity in Paris, in New

York high school students formed a High School Coalition in order to support

Columbia students, becoming a "citywide protest group" (Grant xvi). Just as worker- student alliances formed in France, in the United States there were several attempted alliances not between students and workers but white students and black movements

(an important though troubled trajectory negotiated on and through various stages over the course of the sixties). For the remainder of the chapter I provide a reading of the Columbia SDS newspaper that announced the protest that led to the campus uprising, collecting the event and orchestrating its eruption. 118 Collecting for the Event: Up Asainst the Wall April 22nd, 1968

The day before Columbia's Morningside Heights campus was taken over by students, Columbia SDS, in its campus paper which was for this particular edition renamed Up Against the Wall, announced a protest that was to be held on the following day. Scrawled in handwriting in an inset box at the top left corner of the second page:

PROTEST THE I.D.A. + UNIVERSITY REPRESSION Tuesday, April 23rd Sundial - Noon12

From the sundial, the students would go on to occupy Low Library and shut down

Columbia's campus within a matter of hours.

The announcement of the IDA / University Repression protest was not, however, the beginning of the battle between Columbia's administration and students.

Just as Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the "Intolerables" were a fringe group in Paris who elicited telling administrative reactions that the student body at large refused to tolerate, Columbia saw seven students threatened with suspension for their involvement in a 150-student strong protest in Low Library against Columbia's affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) (Columbia SDS 7), an agency that coordinated weapons research on American campuses and therefore marked official complicity with the Vietnam war and the death of Vietnamese people.

12 Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society, Up Against the Wall, 22 April 1968 2. 119 Columbia had already been a part of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, which developed the nuclear bombs that would be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Part of the task of the newspaper, then, was to provide, for itself, its context, the reasons behind the coming-into-being of revolt.

The issues at centre of the call to revolt are presented alongside it, on the second and third page of the paper, tucked in under the cover so as to collectively emerge upon its being opened. Two articles join the protest-announcing inset on the second page, the continuation of Mark Rudd's cover article "Reply to Uncle

Grayson" - a response to Columbia President Grayson Kirk's dismissive and sweeping accusation that "young people ... have taken refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destruction" (1) - and Nick

Freudenberg's "I.D.A. must go!".13 If issues regarding IDA and student repression are detailed on the second page (via Freudenberg and Rudd), the issue of race is raised on the adjoining third page so that, as soon as the paper is opened, all of the issues are presented at once.

The third-page article that ushers in the issue of race, Bob Feldman's "The

King Memorial - Why We Disrupted," explains the reasons behind Rudd's orchestration of a walkout from the memorial service that was held at Columbia for

Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 9th, 1968 (five days after his assassination):

13 It is significant to note that the announcement for the protest is immersed in a spread of appeals being made by two of Columbia's high profile "martyrs:" both Rudd and Freudenberg were among seven students who had been threatened with suspension for their involvement in the March 27th action. 120 Dr. King fought for the dignity of black and poor people. Yet Columbia University has consistently related to its neighboring community in a fashion which implies that somehow Black and Puerto Rican residents are people who don't mind being forced to relocate to facilitate university expansion, forced to keep off the campus to facilitate security demands or forced to give up their parkland for the sake of Columbia's athletic needs. (3)

By emphasizing the link between the King memorial walkout and Columbia's proposed gym - forcing Black and Puerto Rican residents to "give up their parkland for the sake of Columbia's athletic needs" - the Columbia students painted the university as an institution representative of the forces that King was fighting against.

To oppose Columbia's practices in this way became a manner of recognizing the importance of King's battles in the wake of his assassination. When one considered what King stood for, not only was Columbia's expansion into Harlem condemnable, but the memorial service itself was a mass of contradictions. Feldman's article teases out these contradictions. How did King's pacifism jive with Columbia's support of the IDA? How can King's advocacy for a group of working poor people earning an unlivable wage of $1.75/hr, on the one hand, be negotiated with Columbia's paying cafeteria workers $1.65/hr on the other (Feldman 3)?

April's Columbia revolt was a local protest against Columbia's displacement of the black and Puerto-Rican community in Harlem, but it was also part of a larger student movement against racism that had been developing over the course of the sixties. If Columbia had a predecessor in the University of California Berkeley campus's Free Speech Movement (FSM) in 1964, the FSM grew out of the Civil

Rights era of the Black Liberation Movement. As Angela Davis points out in her 121 introduction to Bettina Aptheker's The Academic Rebellion in the United States,

Berkeley students had been participating in Civil Rights movement-organized sit-ins against the hotel industry in San Francisco in the months leading into the sit-ins on campus, student sit-ins that themselves had precedents in the sit-in conducted by black students at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960

(11). Two months later, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was established. One of the SNCC's first actions was to co-organize Freedom rides with the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), bus rides from north to south aimed at desegregating transportation in the south. The lineage is important because it saw white students participating in the Black Liberation Movement in 1961 before establishing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) a year later; the impact that the civil rights and black liberation movements had on the American student movement cannot be overstated.

The Columbia situation in 1968 brought the politics of segregation to the fore once again. The proposed gym was a fitting focalization point because it stood for

Columbia's continued practice of buying land and driving the local black and Puerto-

Rican population out of their communities. Columbia's stipulation that members of the local community would be allowed to use the gym's facilities provided that they entered by the back and used only the space reserved for them in the basement resurrected memories of Jim Crow. The gym represented not only a recognizable trend (Columbia's ruthless expansion) but also an explicit and glaring regression to 122 the America of old (the America of segregation that still very much existed in the

North, not only in the South).

Capping off the newspaper's strategic opening spread: at the foot of the article on the King memorial walkout, on the third page of the paper, is an inset similar to the one that announced the protest on the second page. The inset, rather than being handwritten, is engraved in sober type. The matter is serious:

As we are going into print, we have been informed that Mark Rudd, chair- man of S.D.S, leader of the walkout in St. Paul's Chapel, faces possible disciplinary action for the incident.

Beyond laying out the three issues that would be at the centre of tensions between

Columbia's administration and its students, the paper was, it would seem, very aware of the power of both layout and juxtaposition. If the rhetoric in some of the articles -

Mark Rudd's "Reply to Uncle Grayson," in particular - was overblown, the issues that the students were raising were both up to the minute (as the inset about the new charges that Rudd was facing made clear) and urgent (students would have been entirely aware that suspension would leave those who had effectively lost their privileged student status vulnerable to the draft). It was fitting, then, that the outlet for collective action (an announced protest) was inherent in the issues themselves; in other words, if revolt was to come from within, it was only fitting that action be embedded in exposition, in the unraveling of the issues. As Freudenberg makes clear

th in his article on the IDA, the March 27 protest in Low was a follow-up to Columbia

SDS's presentation of 1500 signatures demanding the end of Columbia's affiliation 123 with the IDA to President Kirk. Rudd, Freudenberg, and the other five students who had been threatened with suspension were, therefore, always already representative of a larger contingent of students: this was the mass that the inset was inviting to the sundial. Such is the way that the event is collected.

There is another important racial element central to the Columbia revolt that should not be left out, but which is missing from the SDS newspaper because it was not planned in advance. When members of Columbia SDS met with several students at the sundial on April 23rd, they were joined at the last minute by members of

Columbia's Students' Afro-American Society (SAS), who decided to support the

SDS action after a pamphlet was circulated which threatened violence against the

SDS protestors by a group of right-wing athletes. Members of SDS and SAS worked together for the duration of the day in an initially unsuccessful attempt to occupy Low

Library, followed by a march to the gym site and scuffles with police at 113th Street and Morningside Avenue, and ending with the occupation of Hamilton Hall. Once there members of SAS and SDS formed an impromptu joint steering committee and co-produced a list of demands. At 3 a.m., when police were reported to be on way, a black student caucus decided that white students should leave because they wanted to run their own protest against the gym and they felt that the white students were not disciplined enough. The suggestion by black students that white students were just playing at being revolutionaries echoes comments made by Stokely Carmichael and

Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America: 124 It is our position that black organizations should be black-led and essentially black-staffed, with policy being made by black people. White people can and do play supportive roles in those organizations. Where they come with specific skills and techniques, they will be evaluated in those terms. All too frequently, however, many young, middle-class, white Americans, like some sort of Pepsi generation, have wanted to "come alive" through the black community and black groups. They have wanted to be where the action is - and the action has been in those places. They have sought refuge among blacks from a sterile, meaningless, irrelevant life in middle-class America .... Many have come seeing "no difference in color," they have come "color blind." But at this time and in this land, color is a factor and we should not overlook or deny this. (83)

Carmichael and Hamilton's assessment illustrates a tension writ large not only as regards the revolt at Columbia, but in general over the course of this period of protest.

Beyond immediate tensions regarding the constitution of protest, the often well-

intentioned actions of a generation seeking refuge from white middle-class America has had the effect of obscuring many of the important battles waged by black and

brown groups during this same period. The "white-washed" history of the Columbia

revolts - as Paul Cronin terms most of the narratives that relate the history of the

events of April 1968 (qtd. in Hond) - is one such instance.14 Considering the legacy

of Columbia '68, that the SAS protest at Hamilton Hall fulfilled its task of blocking the gym without erupting in or provoking violent clashes makes its omission

particularly curious and troubling.

14 For discussion of the Hamilton Hall protests by Columbia's SAS see Stefan Bradley's '"Gym Crow Must Go!' Black Student Activism at Columbia University, 1967-1968" and Joanne Grant's chapter in Confrontation on Campus entitled "Malcolm X University" 43-48. Paul Cronin's as-yet-unreleased documentary on the Columbia events, A Time to Stir, promises to act as a corrective to the historical omission of this important aspect of the uprising. 125 Conclusion: Theory and events

Just as Nanterre and the Sorbonne marked an intensive knot of revolt that

would reverberate across the country, the Columbia uprising was an event that

marked a changing in the tides of protest in the United States. If I opted to knot Paris

and New York via cobblestones above, what is significant about the correspondent

launching of inert matter? Why emphasize the crossing of campuses via

cobblestones? Cobblestones made for a convenient and readily available projectile, to

be sure, but the significance of cobblestones runs deeper. If we understand the term

"modernity" to describe a relatively lengthy journey to the present - centring around

the rise of capitalism, urbanization, and the increasing role of science and technology

- the emergence of the cobblestone in the fifteenth century marked the transformation

of the street into a route for commerce, suited for heavy traffic the whole year round.

Following in the barricade-building footsteps of the June rebellion in 1832

(memorialized by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables with the heroic death of Gavroche),

the February revolution in 1848, and the Communards of the Paris commune in 1871,

students disassembling the streets of Paris and New York were also undoing the roads

that had paved the way for capitalism's flows. As a May 68 slogan went, "Sous les paves, laplagel"15 In the process of battling with police, students were uncovering

collective spaces that had been covered over by modernity's steadfast march.

15 "Under the cobblestones, the beach," a reference to the fact that, if enough cobblestones were pulled up, the sand underneath transformed the street into an urban beach. 126 If we further understand modernity to be a marker of the rise of individualism, by this time dressed in liberal humanist robes, in the hands of French students in particular the term individualism had become inseparable from the prefix bourgeois. The unearthing of cobblestones not only made for the emergence of collective spaces; the act of throwing a cobblestone became a collective-building act.

As Daniel Cohn-Bendit put it, "People were building up the cobblestones because they wanted - many of them for the first time - to throw themselves into a collective, spontaneous activity" (qtd. in Fraser 9, emphasis added).

Understanding the cobblestone in this way, we can begin to understand the significance of the link between Paris and New York or, at the very least, the impetus for drawing it out. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, the crossing was in no way unique: in 1968, the globe was rife with mass uprisings, uprisings whose awareness of each other was in many cases tangible, and the generalized nature of revolt in itself provided a significant impetus for particular uprisings. A closer examination of the correspondences between Paris and New York provides an opportunity to understand a small set of authors in a different way, as a part of a different community, and as representative of a different set of concerns with which they are seldom connected. To use the words of Cohn-Bendit in a somewhat altered form, to consider French theory in this way is "to throw [a set of French thinkers] into a collective, spontaneous activity," or, in any case, into a set of collective activities and organizations. To connect Paris and New York via these parallel uprisings is to 127 open a channel between continents, a back door through which French theory might retroactively re-enter.

I marked French structuralism's entry into America not only by means of journal articles and collected anthologies, but also via an event: The 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University on the "Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of

Man." While the 1966 event is republished in order to capture "Structuralism" and the origin of "Post-Structuralism," what the 1968 events on French and American campuses exhibit is a different type of impulse altogether. What will quickly become apparent is that Columbia and Nanterre, by virtue of their being events, cannot remain singular. They move and, in the process, become several events which reverberate on either side of a special kind of temporality, at once livened by their contexts (their singularity) and projected towards possible futures.

There is an intriguing correspondence between the American underground's impetus to move, to be projected towards possible futures, and the de rigueur leftist tendencies of what has come to be known as "French theory." Foucault, for example, often said of his work that its purpose lay elsewhere, in its future use: "My discourse is obviously that of an intellectual, and as such it functions in the networks of power currently in place. But a book is made to serve ends not defined by the one who wrote it. The more there are new, possible, unforeseen uses for it, the happier I'll be"

("From Torture to Cellblock" 149). Foucault was talking about Discipline and

Punish, in another interview he provides an example of this very book breaching the intellectual network, and being put to new use: 128 [T]wo years ago there was turmoil in several prisons in France, prisoners revolting. In two prisons, the prisoners in their cells read my book. They shouted the text to other prisoners. I know it's pretentious to say, but that's a proof of a truth - a political and actual truth - which started after the book was written. I hope that the truth of my books is in the future. ("Truth is in the Future" 301)

This is theory as event theory whose requisition is to be projected, theory as projectile.

While Foucault's work reveals the grammar of power, the lines that escape the logics of power tend, at times, to go undocumented, are left unexplored. This was the problem that Deleuze had with the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, for example: whereas, for Deleuze, "the body-without-organs is the place or agent of deterritorialization (and thereby the plane of immanence of desire ).... all organizations, all the systems Michel calls biopower, in effect reterritorialize the body" ("Desire and Pleasure" 131). To be sure, the marginalization of lines of escape can already be seen in Discipline and Punish, where the realities of contemporary and past revolt are raised as transgressions that are, without notable exception, absorbed by the penitentiary. From the penalized offender to the disciplined delinquent, the progression is from bad to worse, wholesale integration into the penitentiary.16

What concerns Deleuze is not only strategies of power but the elaboration of escape lines. For this reason Deleuze and Guattari are particularly useful when thinking about the event. In an interview following the publication of Anti-Oedipus,

16 Where Deleuze located an interesting potential in Discipline and Punish was in the "diagram," "which could not be reduced to the global authority of the State" and which "was perhaps operating a micro-unification of small arrangements" ("Desire and Pleasure" 132). 129 Deleuze argues that the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project is not about

"determining which science will be the human science par excellence," but rather about:

determining how a certain number of "machines" endowed with revolutionary potential are going to fit together. For example, the literary machine, the psychoanalytic machine, and political machines: either they will find a unifying point, as they have done so up until now, in a particular system of adaptation to capitalist regimes, or else they will find a shattering unity in a revolutionary utilization. We mustn't pose the problem in terms of priority, we have to pose it in terms of use and utilization. So, the question is, to what use are they put. (Deleuze and Guattari, "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" 237, emphasis added)

Whereas Foucault's work reveals the way that institutions come together in a point adapted to capitalist regimes (the grammaticized event), Deleuze and Guattari's focus is on the event put to revolutionary uses that run counter to the way that lines of flight, constitutive of the event, are captured and made to converge according to the grammar of institutional powers. To use an example which will be important below, we can understand the political reasons for the infiltration, imprisonment, and murder of vocal members of the Black Panther Party in the context of Discipline and Punish.

Foucault's theory of discipline, in this way, is indispensable. What we find in Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, is the perpetual refrain of George Jackson's "active" and "revolutionary" escape: "I've never stopped fleeing, but as I flee, I'm looking for a weapon" ("On Capitalism and Desire" 270). If George Jackson was killed during an alleged escape attempt just a few years prior to Deleuze and Guattari's celebration of his logic of flight, Deleuze speaks to the dangers inherent in escape - in relation, in 130 this instance, to the trope of schizophrenia - in this way: "[n]o one has the right to deride, to treat with flippancy, the fact that the tearing open, the breach slips into or coincides with a kind of collapse .... It would be irresponsible to turn a blind eye to the danger of collapse in such endeavors. But they're worth it" ("Capitalism and

Schizophrenia" 240). Such was the assessment of the BPP as well, where the BPP newspaper continued to carry Jackson's writings with regularity, and printed covers with the declaration that "George Jackson Lives."17

Opposed to the grammar of discipline is the event, which reminds us that points are infused with potential that is at once cast and remains available for

recasting. This versatility is already evident at the moment of the event's eruption,

when it has already been cast in several roles (Columbia in the New York Times vs.

Columbia in RAT, or Columbia on the tips of student/parent/faculty/administrative

tongues). Part of what the event discloses about itself, then, at the moment of its

emergence, is that it can be recast several times over (as it is always already playing a

role in several casts at once). It is not history itself that freezes the event, having

absorbed its potential, fossilizing it, reducing it to a solid singularity; it is historicity

that fits the event to a mold: the disciplining of the event. On the one hand, to free the

event from historicity is to give it back to history: from the synchronic back to

diachrony, to becoming. On the other hand - and to push the potential of the event

further - to understand the singularity of the event in tandem with others is to

17 See, for example, the cover of the August 18, 1973 edition of The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. consider some of the possible futures towards which (recast) singularities might be projected. This will be the driving force of the next chapter. 132 Chapter Three. Of Spontaneous Collectives: Paris - French Theory - New York

[T]he student struggle at Berkeley in 1964 - four years before the events in Paris. How much just reading the newspapers might have helped the French authorities.

-Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative 23

Some leftist theorists might talk about building a bridge between Marx and Freud, but no one could possibly devise a structure to encompass this Movement. It would have to be a grand geodesic dome fitted together from pieces of Marx, Freud, Zen, Artaud, Kesey, Lenin, Leary, Ginsberg, Che, Gandhi, Marcuse, Laing, Fidel, and Lao Tzu, strung with the black banners of anarchy to which the sayings of Chairman Mao have been embroidered, and with a 40-watt rock amplifier strapped to the top - a gaudy, mind-blowing spectacle and an impossible intellectual synthesis.

-Laurence Learner, The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of the Underground Press 13

Introduction: From Event to Assemblage: Going Underground

Spontaneous collectives did not only manifest as cobblestones; they appeared as newspapers, too. Paris and New York were reading about each other in underground newspapers that appeared as vast rhizomes. In this chapter I will forage through the American underground not in order to provide a prehistory of the rhizome, but to lay bare its pre-enactment: the rhizome was already in America before it arrived with the writing of Deleuze and Guattari. This is why the rhizome is not a metaphor: just as it exists as crabgrass, it existed as the movement, and it ran through the underground press. As should already be evident from the Learner quote above, but as I will explain in greater detail below, the underground press displaced icons; it 133 made available a set of coordinate points that circulated marginally or not at all in university classrooms and the mainstream press. That Deleuze and Guattari, as I will point out below, appear in a New York underground newspaper in 1968 displaces the origin of their work in America. What opens up in the process is a vast and intricately networked set of struggles. The way that I will proceed in this chapter is first, by displacement, and second, by moving through the network that this displacement opens up, learning from the points and connections obscured when French theory is pursued as it appeared at the turn of the eighties: the appearance of Deleuze and

Guattari as "Post-structuralism."

If Columbia SDS's Up Against the Wall announced the Columbia protest,

RAT Subterranean News - a popular underground newspaper based in New York's

Lower East Side - followed suit, reporting from the uprising's midst. Whereas Up

Against the Wall collects the event into a knot for the purpose of orchestrating the revolt, in RAT, the event is made to radiate outwards, or onwards. Because iMTplays a significant part in the revolt's aftermath - situated in its midst and pointing its forces and strategies elsewhere - it provides excellent examples of the ways that the event is projected (not according to logos but nomos, the event is nomadic, its movements are those of deterritorialization and reterritorialization; the movement's events are not bound to outside law or logic, the space of the movement is produced and distributed according to movement itself).

More often than not, chronicles of the sixties render the decade as the accumulation of energies which, in the seventies, collapsed: SDS, whose ranks 134 swelled exponentially throughout 1968 and at the beginning of 1969, would be no more by the beginning of 1970,1 and perhaps most emblematic, the Kent and Jackson

State shootings in the spring of 1970 effectively put an end to an era of university protest (after a final spike in response to the shootings themselves). What the lines that I am drawing have in common are various intensities which, before being struck down, carried vast amounts of potential. Rather than chasing the origins and ends of lines, I focus on their various crossings; these are sites where the possibility of new assemblages arises.

What makes the event's breaking off so interesting is that it is constitutive of whole new assemblages that are in process, fields of possibility. As Deleuze and

Guattari remark, the moment of an event's breach from a chain of causality marks the creation of "an unstable condition which opens up a new field of the possible" ("May

I The most thorough and authoritative histories of SDS, Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS and Alan Adelson's SDS: A Profile, were written shortly after the group's collapse. The 1969 run of SDS's New Left Notes, however, tells a more thorough story of the lead-up and aftermath of the split, charting the rise of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) as they squared off against the Progressive Labour Party (PLP) who had infiltrated the student group and were threatening to hijack the group. Under the influence of SDS Interorganizational Secretary Bernadine Dohrn, the principles of the Revolutionary Youth Movement were put into practice, central amongst these being the necessity of transcending the limit of the "student" as revolutionary subject. If the organization was to play any sort of meaningful part in the revolution, the accumulation of various contingencies (GI's, the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF), women, and the Black Panther Party [BPP]) was necessary. New Left Notes, SDS's national underground newspaper, was the perfect site for Dohrn, in her capacity as Interorganizational Secretary, to reach out to these contingencies in the form of articles and interviews which are featured prominently in the newspaper leading up to June's National Convention (NC) in Chicago. At the NC, under perceived threat of PLP hijacking, Dohrn staged a walkout and declared PLP members and sympathizers banished from SDS. In a move that involved the smuggling of the New Left Notes subscription list, SDS was declared under RYM control, and the group had its own press to print the official story (not to mention allies working for the Liberation News Service, who supplied underground newspapers with the news on the left). A further split saw RYM becoming RYM II and a contingency that would come to be known as Weatherman, named after a resolution that RYMers central to the group had penned for the NC issue of New Left Notes (reference to Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues"): "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." 135 '68 Did Not Take Place" 233). The event represents a movement outwards because what its "breaking off' indicates is that a set of points has found a way to break apart from a centre, a semiotic - or disciplinary - regime responsible for laying out the grammar according to which the social is configured (in the case of Columbia, at centre is an institution of knowledge, the university).

At the same time as the event represents the accumulation of forces and the rending of a breach, the event itself is incoherent: it has not as yet settled into itself.

As such, the body that emerges on the other side of this breach is not the movement, but movement itself. This is what makes the turn of the seventies movement not only a rich prehistory but an early iteration of the rhizome. Rather than lamenting the death of this left to COINTELPRO, corporations, fatigue, and bad decisions - or the Anglo-

American consecration of French thought as Post-structuralism - it is certainly more appealing, and I would argue more useful, to explore the moments when the potential for things to turn out otherwise ran deep, and in many directions. If re-assembling the social is about the accumulation of prematurely severed - assemblage-forming - points, RAT Subterranean News is worth following because of the contingencies that it permits us to collect along this way. Therefore, it will be useful for a time to abandon French theory to the lines drawn through RAT, learning about nomadism and how to build a body without organs from the actors themselves. The underground press is a site for experimentation where a number of disparate subjects and interests were born and pursued. 136 Although field theory is useful for analyzing the interrelational points that

are vying for position within a discipline, and how the same points are necessarily

positioned differently in one field than they are in another, it is ill-equipped to

analyze movement in several directions at once (not only away from the university, in

this case, but across several social domains, accumulating and fighting for the

inclusion of difference in process). For such a dispersed phenomenon, Bruno Latour's

Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) is much more useful.

In Re-Assembling the Social, a thorough introduction to ANT, Latour nuances

ANT by focusing on the process of assemblage-building, demonstrating how

beginning from the grounds of a pre-determined social is folly which obscures from

view the work that is being done - the connections being forged - by the objects

themselves that are being studied (but which are restricted to prescribed roles when

considered within the confines of a field). As I argue in my first chapter, looking at

turn of the seventies French intellectual work as "Post-structuralism" obscures the

extra-academic work being done by French thinkers, restricting study largely to their

complication of the discourses on Structuralism. Using field theory, we can see how

and why Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and Derrida are considered Post-structuralists in

Anglo-American criticism, and we can inquire into the effects of this consecration.

However, sticking to field analysis makes it difficult to follow the other connections

being forged by the objects being studied (points which are more or less without position within the field being analyzed). Assemblage theory forces us to look at

concepts as already multiply constituted and to pay close attention to background 137 chatter. To do so is effective not only because it helps us to more fully understand why a point has come to be consecrated in a certain manner in a given field; it also allows for concepts and configurations - what has come to be known as Post- structuralism - to be taken elsewhere.

Although Latour warns that ANT should not be understood as a method that encourages unmitigated dispersal, what happens when ANT is employed in a situation driven by movement itself? If I am arguing that it is important to remember

May '68 when talking about the work of French thinkers - labeled pensee '68 by Luc

Ferry and Alain Renault - one of the most important motors at the centre of the

Parisian uprisings was the mouvement de 22 mars, which started at Nanterre but was characterized by a will to decentre and grow. In the United States, as I explain in greater detail below, the various cultural and political upheavals that ran through the sixties were collectively labeled, and understood themselves as, "the movement," constituted of intensive lines that were collected alongside one another in movement anthologies and underground newspapers. As such, movement away from the field is not only desirable because things could be otherwise, but because they already are.

The turn of the seventies movements in both France and the United States were predisposed towards movement itself; they were resistant to circumscription.

This chapter will weave the underground press into a picture from which it has disappeared (falling victim, perhaps, to its very raison d'etre: its immediacy). In these volumes we find the position papers, manifestoes, and communiques of the

Black Panther Party (BPP), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Weather 138 Underground Organization (WUO), and the Youth International Party (YIPPIE!); it is here that we find primary documents of the movement, the papers that trace revolutions in both culture and politics amongst an extremely engaged youth, papers that were, in large part, responsible for producing the movement itself: bolstering the movement's numbers, disseminating its cultural and political codes, and coordinating various attacks on what were considered to be "enemy" institutions (not only national, state, and municipal governments, but also the larger institutions of racism, sexism, imperialism, and corporatism, enemies that the newspapers collectively worked to define, locate, and combat).

The linkages that the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) forged were both concrete and complex; to document which stories were syndicated, received the most attention, and had the biggest impact on various member papers would be a mammoth undertaking. To make matters even more difficult, many of the syndicated stories, when printed in member papers, are left unattributed. To pursue this line is not the purpose of this chapter, nor is it to provide an assessment of the movement as a whole across the United States or across continents. A scope this broad would inevitably return only superficial sweepings of an extremely large and complex sample set (of

450 internationally scattered - and profoundly local - newspapers).2

I pursue the movement through a single but significant underground newspaper, RAT Subterranean News, focusing on the particularities of layouts,

2 The statistic is from Thomas King For9ade's introduction to the Underground Reader (2). I will provide an account of the rapid growth and networking of the UPS in a "Brief History" below. 139 phrases, and local struggles which, in a nuanced way, animated the global movement (and vice versa). Restricting myself to these more modest grounds, I centre in upon the localized circumstances according to which the movement was being assembled. Just as editorial and translator notes, back-cover blurbs, and bibliographies were important framing devices for the importation of French theory into the American academy, the way that movement newspapers framed the movement is worth serious consideration. What makes the presentation of the underground particularly interesting and significant is that underground writers were extremely self-conscious regarding questions of, and strategies for, layout.

Innovations in popular print technology rendered the results all the more complex and persuasive, and they are worthy, as a result, of a great deal of attention.

My purpose, in selecting the particular paper that I do, is to trace an intensive trajectory line through mass-distributed and far-reaching print that reintroduces the

American context that was neglected while French theoretical concepts were being imported. Building upon the association lines established between Paris and New

York in the last chapter, this chapter will chart the interaction between local events and a globally connected and perpetually developing movement politics. Via the underground press, young "revolutionaries" and their events conversed with each other across the globe.

In this chapter I introduce the UPS, explaining how it operates as an assemblage, and how its operation is both Deleuzo-Guattarian and Burroughsian.

After explaining why the UPS is analogous with the writing of Burroughs, Guattari, 140 and Deleuze, I divide this chapter into three sections. In the first section, I demonstrate how, via Jean-Jacques Lebel as mediator, these writers do in fact cross in the pages of the underground in New York in 1968 - meaning that Deleuze and

Guattari are part of the American movement assemblage in 1968 - and that this intersection could be considered a point of entry for French theory in America. As I will make clear, such points of intersection are only readily discernible and recuperable if the event of French theory's translation in America is pursued from the perspective of assemblage-building - French theory in process - rather than according to how it is positioned within a particular academic field (which determines in advance the role that it will act). Returning to the Columbia uprising and its rendering in RAT (for which Lebel reported), in the second section I argue that assemblage-making is about collecting events and projecting them; it is about the movement of intensities. As such, assemblage-building is at every point a force that combats containment. By following the trajectory traced out of the Columbia event by RAT Subterranean News, I demonstrate how the movement in the United States pondered the very question that Deleuze and Guattari posed using Burroughs: How do you make yourself a Body without organs without becoming catatonic, without closing the intensities collected off from making further connections with an outside?

After demonstrating how Columbia is projected towards the Chicago Democratic

Convention in the pages of RAT, in the third and final section I will demonstrate how the movement itself was catatonic, and how RA T overcame fundamental strata by becoming Women's LibeRATion in 1970. The example of the women's takeover of 141 RAT provides a snapshot of the process by which a common is built via external relations and internal syntheses, by reaching out and bringing intensities together.

As Latour argues, there is a choice between beginning from a certain kind of group or of "following] the actors' own ways and begin[ning] our travels by the traces left behind by their activity of forming and dismantling groups" (29). After an inroads is made for Deleuze and Guattari into New York's RAT via Jean-Jacques

Lebel, an instance which shows us how assemblages are formed, we find ourselves in a place where the RAT becomes an invaluable object for refining our understanding of how groups are formed and dismantled, and, in this instance, how a common is being built in the process. What I am interested in are the traces left by the formation of groups. As Deleuze and Guattari state at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus, the rhizome is not a metaphor, it exists as crabgrass, and it also existed as the movement

(without which Deleuze and Guattari would never have written about the rhizome in the first place). My point, however, is not to play chicken and egg, but to demonstrate how groups are formed and dismantled. In this instance, it has to do with the coming together of continents in a place where events are collected and projected, and which itself must be dismantled in order to form new groups and begin collecting anew, more inclusively. 142 In the Beginning, there were six: A Brief History of the Underground Press Syndicate3

America is a special case . .. everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside.

-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 19, emphasis added

Where should we start? As always, it is best to begin in the middle of things, in media res. Will the reading of a newspaper do? Sure, it offers a starting point as good as any. As soon as you open it, it's like a rain, a flood, an epidemic, an infestation.

-Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor- Network Theory 27

If American academic journals, in the process of importing Post-structuralism, neglected the contextual bottom in order to cast nets at a conceptual top, young radicals did not only have their feet planted firmly on the ground, they were under it, forging connections between movements that were both cultural and political, both local and global. Just as there was a relay between various high schools and universities in Paris - when police and the administration sought to lock one down, an uprising, in solidarity, would pop up on another - campus movements not only across the United States but also across continents were linked to each other. The most efficient and effective way that continental shifts were linked was by the

3 The Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, the East Village Other (New York), the San Francisco Oracle, the Fifth Estate (Detroit), and the Paper (East Lansing) are the six papers that started their runs in quick succession (starting with the LA "Freep" in 1964), becoming the first members of the Underground Press Syndicate, launched in 1966 in order to increase the six papers' chances of survival. 143 Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), a network that circumvented the mainstream media which (as was made clear by Lacan, Lefebvre, and Sartre's co-signed letter to

La Monde on the eve of the barricades in Paris) downplayed and misrepresented the international student movement. By means of the UPS, students across continents shared both cultural coordinates and political strategies.

In July 1966, Allan Katzman, managing editor of the East Village Other, wrote an editorial entitled "The Underground Press Syndicate" that laid out the purpose that a syndicate would serve and the principles by which it should operate.

The six principles that Katzman proposed were:

1. Communication of the news that the middle class press won't print or can't find.

2. Some sort of teletype service between New York, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, England, etc.

3. Dividing of all income between members.

4. A clearing house, where members can choose to syndicate other members' by-lines, columns and comic strips.

5. An advertising agency which will represent and procure advertising for all members from sources around the country.

6. An agent for all member newspapers to the whole communications industry to represent them and sell news for them to A.P., U.P.I., radio and television networks. (2)

At core, the reason for establishing a syndicate was to build an income and information-sharing network. Beyond pragmatically keeping the papers afloat, a network of papers could both sustain and move the culture and politics of young people. If the newspapers remained small, Katzman argued, no one would be 144 bothered. If, on the other hand, "the avant-garde, maverick, and student papers independent of the university" banded together, they would not only have better chances of survival but might, as a result, become better informed, start to inform others, and actually begin to bother "those who would want us to remain ununited"

(2). "Let us then bother everyone," Katzman muses, "irk them, poke them, tickle them, sway them till they understand that what bothers us bothers everyone" (2). In other words, the ambition behind the syndicate was to render a (multiplicitous) young cultural and political subject visible and to intervene, to make a space for this subject in the social field.

In his study of the UPS, Laurence Learner notes that "the proportion of public considering newspapers the most believable mass medium dropped from 32 to 21 percent" in the 1960's (15). If Slavoj Zizek is fascinated with commodities that have been deprived of their innermost kernel ("coffee without caffeine, sweetener without sugar, beer without alcohol" [The Puppet and the Dwarf 148]) - commodities which, in their very structure, lay bare the empty core that resides at the centre of all ideology - Katzman's foundational editorial, speaking in the voice of thousands of frustrated young people, calls the news on its innermost bluff: "newspapers without news are newspapers 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'" (2). As we will see in the context of RATs reporting on the Columbia uprisings below, alongside Noam

Chomsky at MIT (himself, in many significant ways, a product of the Vietnam protest years) - young people were beginning to recognize the corporate interests and affiliations that determined reporting, interests which ultimately meant that when the 145 positions of the young and mobilized masses clashed with corporate interests they would be ignored, or that specific issues would be misrepresented in the mainstream media because they would paint this or that financial backer in a negative light. The news, in other words, reflected the interests of capital, not people. Where the UPS was concerned, it was not a matter of creating something from nothing as youth politics and culture were thriving in the mid-sixties; the matter of concern was to create a medium that would unite these cultures and politics. This was not done for the purpose of representing the under/mis-represented, but, crucially, in order to allow the constituent culturo-political subjects of the movement to intermingle and develop.

When the UPS was officially founded, nine months after Katzman's editorial, the three qualifications for membership were 1) the free exchange of material between members; 2) the occasional printing, by each affiliated paper, of a list of

UPS members; and 3) the free exchange of subscriptions between member papers

(Glessing 70). As Robert Glessing points out, the first of these rules was perhaps the most significant because it "served to break down the concept of copyright among underground papers from the start" (70). The purpose was not to make money, but to make available a people's culture and, eventually, to string together a people's movement.

It did not take long for the syndicate to move beyond the three qualifications that marked its establishment. Membership was multiplying on a monthly basis and the syndicate became increasingly sophisticated as an organization in order to both accommodate and foster that growth. An early step in the direction of expanding 146 readership and securing a financial base was the setting up of a library subscription system at a cost of $50-100 a year, but the organizational weight of a rapidly growing syndicate would quickly become untenable without a central office.

It was decided that new members would pay a one-time fee of $25 to maintain a central office in New York where the project could be coordinated more effectively

(Learner 45). As Glessing points out, when Tom Forgade took over the leadership role in 1968, the syndicate exploded into organizational action: Forgade incorporated the syndicate, found a national advertising representative, established a library for periodicals and films, and compiled a directory. Summing up a year of fervent action,

Glessing notes that "[b]y 1969 UPS was serving as a general clearing house for inquiries from its members, interested scholars, and the public in general" (71).4

Forgade's strategies worked; the UPS expanded at an astonishing rate. In his

1972 introduction to The Underground Reader, Forgade takes note of the progress that the syndicate made in just a few years time:

there are over 450 papers scattered from Hong Kong to Copenhagen and from Winnipeg to Buenos Aires, reaching a conservatively estimated 20 million people.5 As a result, there is now a sizable part of

4 The UPS did not emerge without definite influences. Laurence Learner, for example, traces the precursory lines to the early twentieth-century Old Left papers like The Masses, Appeal to Reason, and the Daily Worker through to 1950s cultural/satirical newsmagazines the Village Voice and The Realist before the original six members of the UPS emerged in the 1960s (16-41). Abe Peck's Uncovering the Sixties draws a similar line. See 21-40.

5 Official stats regarding the production and circulation of UPS papers are impossible to gather. In 1972, Learner writes that: Some two hundred papers, publishing at any given time, are a part of the loose confederation known as the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS). The narrowest possible definition of the underground press would be membership in the UPS, and that alone adds up to a circulation number of over 1,500,000. The formula employed by mass magazines (estimating six readers for each magazine) suggests a readership 147 the world that is functioning within an entirely different reality that has bare tangents at a few points of critical survival with the old, obsolete, decadent world. ("Introduction" The Underground Reader 2)

The UPS was instrumental to the networking of millions of youth from around the world, carrying and bolstering, in the process, a thriving anti-capitalist - if not altogether anti-establishment - counterculture, and an energetic and active left. If the problem with establishment media was the lie of the news - its empty core - the underground press, rather than simply offering the substance that would fill in empty forms, shifted the coordinate points altogether. In his introduction to the

Underground Press Anthology, also published in 1972, Forbade notes that, with the underground press:

a whole system of reality was created that was more accurate than the one before. Instead of cops, pigs; instead of drugs, mind expansion; instead of consumption, ecology; instead of the Democrats versus the Republicans, the imperialists versus the revolutionaries; instead of noise, hard rock. The list could go on indefinitely. The underground press not only set up an alternate culture, it set up an alternate reality, a new world qualitatively different, where the papers quoted the price of drugs, not stocks (think about that for a minute), printed news of what ideas had been born, instead of who died, where instead of reality being fed downward from the top, reality was everybody's. (7)

If the UPS, according to Glessing, served as a clearing house for inquiries from members, scholars and the general public, it was also, more generally, a clearing

of over 9,000,000. And by including high school undergrounds, re-upholstered old left papers, rock-culture papers, and other publications that identify with youth culture, it's possible to come up with a circulation figure of at least 3,000,000 papers, or 18,000,000 readers, an even better indication of the enormous audience for a medium that is blatantly anti-Establishment. (14-15) See, as well, Glessing's chapter on "Audience Analysis" (120-125) in which he provides a rough list of circulation numbers for a select number of papers and speculates about the demographics of the papers' readership. 148 house for the language and forms of the emergent revolutions in youth culture and politics. The underground press was a crucial site of mass displacement, a shift in coordinate points out of which an entire network was produced.

UPS papers were extremely self-conscious and sophisticated in their presentation of revolutionary form. William S. Burroughs, a frequent contributor to many underground newspapers from the UPS's founding in 1966 until its unravelling in the mid-seventies, wrote about the revolutionary potential of the underground press in a short article entitled "Storm the Reality Studios."6 In his essay, Burroughs argues that if the mainstream press alters reality by forming lines of association (juxtaposing news items, advertisements, and graphics), the underground press should follow suit, experimenting along the lines of the cut-up, "stir[ring] in news stories, TV plays, stock market quotations, adverts, and put[ting] the altered mutter line out on the street" (34). According to Burroughs - who plays out this endeavour in his turn of the sixties Nova Trilogy - the way to alter reality was to "storm the reality studios" that were responsible for manufacturing society as it was. To storm the reality studios was to shift coordinate points, to commit the insurgent act of forging a new assemblage as a temporary escape plan from the current social - cultural and political - order.

What Burroughs suggests is akin to a delicately drawn but aggressively pursued line of flight, one that does not mark a complete escape from society, but an escape plan that is forged with tools inherent in society, turning society against itself by means of the coordinates that society itself provides; it is about rearranging what is

6 Originally printed in London UPS paper Friends and reprinted in The Underground Reader. 149 given, undermining social integrity, and making space for the articulation of new ways of living. This is an important point of resonance between Burroughs and

Deleuze and Guattari (who, as I will point out in the next section of this chapter, did, in a discrete but significant way, cross paths in the pages of RAT Subterranean

News).7

It is also along these strategic lines that Burroughs, Deleuze and Guattari intersect with the underground, a vast entity of syndicated cultures and politics internationally networked and dispersed. The underground, united by its press, was not only a Burroughsian project as articulated in his "Storm the Reality Studios," it was a Deleuzo-Guattarian one as well. The potential for UPS experimentation was inherent in the technology that was used to produce the papers, and underground newspapers certainly took advantage of the possibilities that were inherent in the

7 It is also the space of resonance between Burroughs and Foucault. Although Foucault did not mention Burroughs in his writing, he was a great admirer of Burroughs's work. Foucault met Burroughs on two occasions (the first of which will be explored in greater depth in chapter five): in 1975 at the Schizo Culture conference organized by Semiotex(e) in New York, and in the spring of 1984, at Foucault's home in Paris months before Foucault's death. See James Grauerholz's letter to the editor of Mobile, Alabama's Harbinger, available online at . The latter should be taken as a significant invitation as it was at this time that Foucault was also trying to get in touch with Deleuze after almost a decade of silence between them. See Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault 259-261. Eribon credits Deleuze and Foucault's different views on terrorism as the reason for their parting ways. In print, the most concrete space of correspondence between Foucault and Burroughs comes in Deleuze's late work on Foucault. Burroughs is literally inserted into Foucault, becoming a part of Foucault's body when he gets mention in an appendix of Deleuze's Foucault, and in the essay "Postscript on Control Societies," one of the last pieces that Deleuze ever wrote, where Deleuze muses that the "disciplinary societies" which Foucault associated with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had become, in the twentieth century, the "control societies," which Burroughs described (177-178). The task at hand was to come up with "new forms of resistance" against control (182). Foucault's concern was always to uncover the apparati articulated and used by social formations to exercise power over others, and his inclination was to elaborate forms of resistance, elaborations which he demonstrated, bodily, in Tunisia, Vincennes, and under the auspices of the GIP in the global prison movement. 150 medium. If establishment news was set in sober columns, underground newspapers used offset printing not only to drastically reduce the cost of producing the papers but also to open up creative possibilities in terms of its layout.8 The papers were a collage of colours, comics, and columns, with bold-faced photographs of urban guerillas, poverty, and war shuffled in. Photo-offset printing was an inexpensive method whereby assembled columns and graphics would be transferred from film negatives onto printing plates and then rubber blankets for ink rolling. That pages were assembled and photographed rather than typeset left room for creativity; the columns could not only bleed into, but explode with each other, going off in every direction. In this way, the graphic representation of the movement was also a snapshot of its chaotically dispersed core.9

The underground press represented a shift in coordinate points analogous to what was taking place in French thought. A number of French theorists at the turn of the seventies recognized the limits inherent in intellectual and political labels like

Freudianism, Marxism, and Structuralism, and strove to invent spaces that were

8 For a more detailed analysis of the cost and effect relationship that led to such an explosion of experiments in form amongst UPS papers, see Glessing's chapter on "The Graphic Revolution" 39-49. In this chapter, Glessing focuses his sights on a small number of papers in order to provide specific details regarding cost, technology, and resultant layouts.

9 Jean-Francis Bizot's Free Press: Underground and Alternative Publications, 1965-1975 is a coffee table style book which contains over two hundred full-page colour scans from an international selection of underground newspapers. Most of the images the volume collects are covers. At the turn of the seventies several now out of print underground collections were published. Two UPS collections were released in 1968, Jesse Kornbluth edited Notes from the New Underground: An Anthology and Jerry Hopkins's The Hippie Papers: Notes from the Underground Press', another two were published in 1970, Paul Samberg's Fire!: Reports from the Underground Press and Mitchell Goodman's The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution', another in 1971, Bruce Franklin's From the Movement Towards Revolution', and two were published in 1972, Thomas King For?ade's Underground Reader and Underground Anthology. 151 beyond restriction and dogma (that would provide temporary relief from party lines and continued relief provided that intellectual work was taken as a cue and not a grounds for settlement). When Deleuze wrote "How do we recognize structuralism," as I pointed out in the first chapter, the question was not geared towards a description of its parameters but the actualization of its potential. As Foucault argues in an interview:

the function of any diagnosis concerning what today is ... . does not consist in a simple characterization of what we are but, instead - by following lines of fragility in the present - in managing to grasp why and how that which is might no longer be that which is. In this sense, any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, that is, of possible transformation. ("Structuralism and Post-structuralism" 449-450)

The impetus of the movement was not to settle into this or that label, but to seek out spaces of "concrete freedom," of "possible transformation" where "the establishment" was not simply an entity to which the movement ran counter, but the inevitable state of being if the movement ceased to move.

I) Paris X New York (with Jean-Jacques Lebel)

Jean-Jacques Lebel, who will, in chapter five, take Deleuze and Guattari on a road trip from New York to San Francisco in 1975 - during which they met Bob

Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (French philosophers "on the road" with a stop-off at Big Sur: Deleuze was enamoured of Kerouac) - crosses Paris and

New York in 1968, with a foot in either revolt, and in RAT articles which are at once 152 Burroughsian, Deleuzo-Guattarian, and relevant to the movement to whom they are being addressed. As such, the assemblage which will manifest itself in 1975 - in the form of the Schizo-Culture conference and the roadtrip that followed - was already in the making in 1968, and, as I will explain below, had been for many years prior.

Burroughs-Artaud-Deleuze-May '68-Guattari

Lebel first came to know William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso during the infamous "Beat Hotel" years at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur in

Paris (when the so-called Beat scene saw Burroughs at the centre of a collaborative experimental turn). Similar to Genet's facilitation of the movement of Black Panthers writings to France, Lebel translated the books and poems of several Beat writers during the sixties and seventies, making their writings available to an audience that resided across the Atlantic. Beat writers became something of a sensation in France; they were given extensive coverage in French UPS papers like Actuel and were read by French philosophers like Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, and Foucault. If we are willing to acknowledge Lebel's introduction of Deleuze and Guattari, in 1975, to the set of contingencies mentioned in the paragraph above as concrete crossings we should also be willing and ready to recognize that this mid-seventies crossing in the flesh was preceded by other significant, if sometimes subtler, crossings.

As we witness by turning towards Lebel, the Body without Organs crossed continents - it travelled from France to America and back - before it appeared in 153 Deleuze and Guattari's books. Lebel played a part in liberating Antonin Artaud from French vaults and finding passage for Artaud into America. When Lebel's partner smuggled a copy of Artaud's French-banned radio play To be done with the

Judgement of God from ORTF (French public radio), Lebel gathered Burroughs,

Corso, Gysin, and Ginsberg into his apartment to listen to the performance. The group dropped acid and listened to the recording backwards - without realizing it until somewhere near the end, because the piece was supposed to include sections in which

Artaud spoke in tongues - reveling in its brilliance. After twenty minutes of backwards listening, they adjusted the tape and remained transfixed. Ginsberg borrowed the recording the next day and sent five copies back to the United States to recipients that included LeRoi Jones, Michael McLure, Julian Beck, and Lawrence

Ferlinghetti.10

If Deleuze and Guattari, champions of Artaud's Body without Organs, are admirers of Burroughs, it is, in part, because they see something of Artaud in him.

Deleuze and Guattari invoke Burroughs in their chapter "How do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?" in A Thousand Plateaus. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, the chapter, dated November 28,1947, marks Artaud's penning of To be done with the judgement of God which was Artaud's declaration of war on the organs (150).

10 Lebel letter to the author, 25 July 2007. Lebel also helped to assemble On the Barricades: Revolution and Repression, a set of photos and graffitied captions from the Parisian streets, for publication under Ferlinghetti's City Lights's "Journal for the protection of all beings" banner. Lebel was further commissioned to write an introduction for a City Lights-planned Little Surrealism Anthology. Although Lebel provided a highly polemical piece on the necessity of putting writing to action, the Anthology was never published. The impassioned, handwritten tract - written in the midst of the '68 years - is available in the City Lights archives. 154 Towards the beginning of the chapter, directly following their explanation of the

significance of the date, Deleuze and Guattari quote a passage from Naked Lunch:

The human body is scandalously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order, why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up the nose and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an airhole direct into the lungs where it should have been in the first place. (Burroughs qtd. in Deleuze and Guattari 150)

For the authors, Burroughs's Body without Organs is rife with intensity, but it is

closed off; it is an "experimental schizo" that is laudable because it has waged "active

war against the organs," but this comes "at the price of catatonia" (150). Burroughs's

"drugged body" is a failed experiment, to be sure, but it is nevertheless a part of their

call to experimentation: "Find yourself a body without organs," they go on to state.

"Find out how to make it. It's a question of life and death, youth and age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out" (151). When Beat writers were introduced to

Artaud's body without organs, the BwO became part of their project. Their writings

traversed Artaud's text - and were traversed by it - extending his experiments with

new ones.

Lebel - not unlike Lotringer - is a significant mediator. In the Artaud

example, we see Lebel sending Artaud to the United States and bringing him back

again in the form of French translations of Beat writing. Beyond revealing the points

at which different contingencies come together (Burroughs listens to Artaud and is

read by Deleuze in translation) it is crucial to understand that mediators are

themselves marked by this crossing of contingencies, their having encountered both

sides of the equation that they bring together (Lebel as translator and friend of the 155 Beats and a participant in Deleuze's seminars at Vincennes and St. Denis and a friend of, and co-conspirator during May '68 with, Felix Guattari: an assemblage).

The point is not to locate originary moments or to definitively state the end results of such crossings, but to recognize the way that contingencies are multiply, persistently, and subtly intertwined in a process that cannot be reduced to the singularity of contact. As such, a logical place to look for this complex intertwining of French and

American contingencies is in Lebel's own writing, where crossing concepts leave a trace. This is where it is useful to turn to RAT, to which Lebel contributed at the end of the sixties. Lebel's "subterranean" offerings of 1968 and 1969 are, in this sense,

Burroughso-Deleuzian acts, but they are in no way definitively determined by - nor do they determine or contain - the crossings they embody.

Paris-Subterranean-New York

Lebel brings Paris to New York in a feature called "A French Diary," printed in the June 1-14, 1968 issue of RAT. Lebel was a participant in, and a continued proponent of, the March 22nd movement that was, as I pointed out in Chapter two, the catalyst for the Paris uprisings, which began at Nanterre. With a foot in either revolt

(and always in mixed company), Lebel was in both Paris and New York in 1968, a crossing documented in the pages of RAT. The UPS was responsible for collecting the revolution bit by bit via the intensive lines that were being drawn across the globe, 156 intensities that were "exclusive to the Free Press." 11 Citing the dispersion of

Artaud as "a clear, precise, and practical example of how a mental spark can set fire to an entire culture" - an "Artaud rhizome" which saw the spread of Artaud through the Beat generation, Off-Broadway theatre and beyond - Lebel notes that May '68

"was also prepared of rhizomes of that kind, decades before it grew into a mass movement and exploded onto the social field."12 This is the rhizome that will concern me the most in the following paragraphs, a rhizome that is apparent in Lebel's RAT writings.

The value of the underground press, as I have been arguing, lies in its propulsion of the movement; what makes Lebel's iMT-published "French Diary" so

interesting is that movement is the very thing that he is participating in and

celebrating in the article. Whereas the return of De Gaulle and the decades long process of de-Marxification that followed in France are apparent from the standpoint

of the present, Lebel's piece, which is in the moment, begins in an overwhelmed

ecstasy: "This is turning into a revolution. The revolution we've been working toward

and pushing for, in desperation, for more than 10 years. At last the spark has hit the wick. When I say 'we all have been working' I mean ALL the non Stalinist nuances

on the extreme left" (3). What is particularly useful about Lebel's characterization of the situation in France - even though his last line is obviously a specific swipe at the

11 Lebel's "Diary," as a note at the top of his piece indicates, is "Exclusive to the Free Press from a Paris strike participant" (3). Lebel's piece is an example of how the underground press reproduced, in practice, the first of its founding principles: "communication of the news that the middle class press won't print or can't find" (Katzman 2). 12 Letter to the author, 25 July, 2007. 157 PCF (considered Stalinists for their position regarding Algeria and, later, the

Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, in particular) - is that the trajectory that Lebel champions is analogous to what American students and radicals were beginning to articulate at this time: movement. This is what makes the "beginnings" of '68 at

Nanterre so important: even its name, the "March 22nd movement" reminds us that looking for origins and ends is beside the point. In Lebel's presentation, the (March

22nd) movement is one which is antithetical to stasis, a driving force accumulating a diverse set of orientations, struggles, and strategies along its path. In the face of petty and static divides amongst Marxist factions in late-sixties France, the March 22nd movement emerged as a collection of contingencies - "Gueverists, Anarchists and

Trotskyites" - which, rather than competing, were reigned in under a movement that had "many leaders and dynamos" (Lebel, "A French Diary" 3).

The potential of the March 22nd movement lay in its being driven by a creative force. As Lebel described the situation, militants at Nanterre and the Sorbonne were

"push[ing] for a creative insurrection" yelling, on a mass march, "etudiants, ouvrieres, un seul combat, pas dans la salle, dans la rue" (3, emphasis added).

Although this translates into a call for students and workers to unite in a single struggle in the streets and not the halls, Lebel translates the slogan to mean "get up off your ass, you 'spectators' and participate, the only revolutionary theatre is in the streets" (3). Lebel's emphasis on theatre and creativity reveals a movement whose impetus is outwards, rife with constitutive energy, calling for collection in the streets where ten million would soon march with such force that De Gaulle was forced to 158 flee.13 It is also notable that Lebel participated in the May events alongside New

York Living Theatre-founding Judith Malina and Julian Beck, who were sent the

smuggled Artaud tape earlier in the decade, and who were in the process of breaking

down the fourth wall outside of the Theatre de L'Odeon with their first productions of

Paradise Now.

Lest the only line of flight raised by the article be a pre-conceived negative -

forcing De Gaulle's flight so that a positive assemblage could be built of his absence

- Lebel's "French Diary" is at all times in the process of characterizing the movement

according to its many lines of flight. From lines of fight in battles with police (led by

a Vietnamese man hoisting a red flag [11]) to lines of flight from a generalized

"Government" (not - as iterated by an 18-year-old woman, representing the black

flag of anarchy - just De Gaulle or Pompidou [11]) to lines of flight that reassert that

the movement was already there in the first place before running someplace else,

spreading its assertions across the space of the city ("This rue Gay Lussac was ours

all night till about 4:30 or 5 A.M. OURS. I ask a student for a piece of his dirty red

shirt. We tie it to a stick, put it back on our barricade and run." [11]), the lines of

flight that Lebel describes are negative and positive at once, a relay of flight and

13 Lebel wrote articles on street theatre and Happenings (which Lebel and A1 Hansen, as Dick Higgins points out, introduced to European streets in the form of "wild, irrational free-for-alls" that "caught the journalistic eye," popularizing the term in the mid-sixties [269]) for The Drama Review. See Lebel's "On the Necessity of Violation" and "Notes on Political Street Theatre, Paris: 1968, 1969"). Lebel was also cited for his involvement in French street theatre in articles in Yale French Studies (see, in particular, Alfred Simon and William F. Panici's "The Theatre in May" and Theodore Shank and Wyley L. Powell's "The Theatre of the Cultural Revolution"). Such was the centrality of the creative act: theatre, no longer contained within the hall, was constitutive of a revolutionary culture that was becoming in the streets. If one performed their subjection to the Subject in the church, according to Althusser in his article on ISAs, did it not make sense that, in order for the revolutionary collective to come into being that it should be performed in the streets? 159 assertion, lines that turn away to assert themselves elsewhere (refusing to become trapped in the confines of any given assertion). Lebel is always in the process of relating a movement that is both constituted by, and constitutive of, movement.

Lebel not only wrote scenarios which resembled "lines of flight" in RAT; he was with one of the theorists who would go on to coin the term during the Parisian uprisings. While he first met and became friends with Guattari in 1966 (by way of

Jean-Pierre Muyard, who would introduce Guattari to Deleuze in 1969),14 the two men would reunite in the context of the Parisian uprisings in 1968, brought together, this time, not by Muyard, but by the intensities that the March 22nd movement was creating. Told that what he was writing about and practicing under the rubric of schizoanalysis at La Borde was happening at Nanterre, Guattari left the clinic for the suburban university (and later went to the Sorbonne, where the uprisings continued), enlisting Jean Oury and some of his patients for the occupation and standoff in the process. When the occupation of the Sorbonne dwindled, Guattari left the university for the Theatre de l'Odeon, which Lebel, in the company of Beck and Malina, Jean-

Luc Godard, and others, had liberated (Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari 210-

212). In this sense, when Lebel, in his RA T article, speaks of the revolt in terms of its flight lines, Guattari is literally there, but the "line of flight" is out of Guattari's hands, not a product of his books with Deleuze, but a set of intensities that these books to come - as well as Lebel's RAT dispatch - capture.

14 Muyard invited Lebel to an installation that Guattari was orchestrating at the Musee d'art moderne at the Palais de Tokyo in 1966. The exhibit involved patients from the La Borde clinic and was organized by Lacan. So began a lasting friendship, which saw Lebel visiting, and being inspired by, La Borde. See Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari 210-211. 160 "Capture," however, is a misleading term, particularly when related to

Lebel's "Diary," the movement of which is testament to the term's inadequacy.

Towards the article's end, Lebel describes the increasingly brutal tactics being used by the police against resolute students before ending the diary abruptly. The clashing of resolutes suspended, the article ends with a bracketed editorial note: "(The letter ended here)" (11). Ending openly, the goings on in Paris are rendered in process and uncontainable at the same time as they flow out from the opening that is left at the article's bottom, and into the surrounding layout. The article as an open flask (turned upside down): a Parisian word virus emptied into a New York underground, spreading through the city via a RAT.15 It is in this way that Lebel, in 1968, provided

Paris with subterranean passage into New York.

Deleuze/Guattari-French worker-Hoffman-Sinclair-Woodstock-Up Against the Wall Motherfucker

We can see, by way of Lebel, the transmission of Burroughs, Deleuze,

Guattari, and Artaud on both sides of the Atlantic. We can also - if we agree to recognize the movement of Deleuze and Guattari without remaining transfixed upon their flesh - place the French philosophers at Woodstock, which Lebel attended with the group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAW/MF) and Abbie Hoffman, opening the industry-orchestrated event up to its outside by cutting open the fences

15 Let loose in the context of the paper itself, a cartoon on the sixth page seems to be infected, a skeleton pointing the way onwards, carrying a torch burning the flame of anarchy, a sash proclaiming "Communism," carrying a sign that reads "PARIS BURNS / Henry Returns / Tonight St. Mark's Place." The cartoon was drawn by the Lower East Side group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker with whom Lebel participated while in the United States. 161 with UAW/MF and, with Abbie Hoffman, interrupting the music and drug-fest in order to draw attention to the need to mobilize around John Sinclair, the White

Panther leader and singer/guitarist for MC5 who had just been arrested and jailed for the possession of two joints (Sloman 175-179). On the other side of the Atlantic,

Lebel introduced Hoffman to French revolutionaries in Paris in 1968, providing

Hoffman with a venue to deliver a speech to the French movement.

These are by no means examples which mark significant victories or successes. At Woodstock, Hoffman, too far gone on an acid trip, fumbled his Sinclair statement (and Lebel would therefore never make it on the stage to translate the statement into French and Italian, giving it the "international flavour" that was proper to the movement). On the other side of the Atlantic, when Lebel brought Hoffman to

France to give speeches to a number of the participants in the French uprisings,

Hoffman, not recognizing that the majority of people at centre of the French uprisings and in attendance were middle-aged workers, delivered a similarly incoherent and inconsequential speech, preaching to them, in celebratory tones, on the wonders and importance of sex and drugs (Sloman 241-242). Along these lines, we might be tempted to conclude that the opening of Woodstock's gates - liberating the "festival" to its outside - is certainly closer to what would conventionally be recognized as a

"successful" act; the private space of the industry-oriented event is cracked open, given to the people. Using success as a dominant criterion for inclusion of this or that event, however, imposes stringent limits upon the drawing of an assemblage whose effects are often neither immediately effective nor discernible. 162 What I want to point out here are the subtle ways that currents are crossed in exchanges, which remind us that there is such a thing as a Deleuze/Guattari-French worker-Hoffman-Sinclair-Woodstock-Up Against the Wall Motherfucker assemblage, brought together by way of Lebel. What I am arguing, in pulling such an assemblage together - by making note of a general mixing of elements rather than a particular selection of key texts that were concretely exchanged - is that it is not really all that important (or even possible or desirable) to trace what came first, and to place all elements exchanged along a linear trajectory. We often ask questions like who had the most impact upon whom, and in what way exactly, but the fact of the matter is that what Burroughs, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, & Co. represent are ideas and acts that are in circulation, not unlike the editions of RAT by which Lebel is circulated in New York. It is in this sense that the sanitized narratives of historicity - lines of best fit - are insufficient. Such is also the case with the "Post-structuralist" designation of French theory which looks to particular collections and presses in its consecration and development of a particular configuration of knowledge. From the example of Jean-Jacques Lebel's writings and interventions, we learn that the process of assemblage-building is a far subtler affair than we often allow: subterranean routes between French Theory and America were everywhere scattered years before the rhizome was theorized, and the rhizome was simply a way of trying to capture the exchanges that produced the powerful global events of the '68 years.

Although Lebel is an exemplary case in that he embodies the crossing of contingencies that are of central concern to this project, RAT itself, an energetic and 163 engaged underground publication, was always in the process of collecting and projecting the movement; the UPS, in this sense, is the medium that bridges one event to the next (without neglecting the events in between), and acts as a sounding board for the laying out of issues and the development of strategies. This is not to say, as we see with the case of the counterculture in particular, that the movement was a smooth space completely devoid of striation.

Rather than sticking with the fetishized subjects of French Theory and the

American counterculture, it is ultimately more productive to follow the circulation of intensities which their writings celebrate and (in certain respects, and at certain times) represent. Over the course of 1968, RA T represented the collection and dissemination of this sort of potential and manifested itself in the form of a line from Columbia to

Chicago. I began this section by relating Lebel's June '68 diary of the Paris barricades; I now step back a month in order to relate the way that RAT collected the intensities of Columbia, and how these intensities were projected into Chicago, encountering Lebel's group UAW/MF again on the eve of the Democratic National

Convention, linking Deleuze and Guattari again to the ways in which the American movement moved. If the question "how do you make yourself a body without organs" is both French and American, the manner in which RAT pursues the BwO teaches us a great deal about the way in which assemblages are built. Having displaced Deleuze,

Guattari and the BwO into an underground assemblage, I will now pursue this underground network. 164 II)For the movement of Columbia (from the movement in Columbia) i) Collecting the Event

In order for the event to be projected, it has to be collected first, and it needs to be collected continuously. Regarding Columbia as event, this section will demonstrate that RAT plays a significant part not only in collecting the event from its midst (publishing smuggled documents), but also in reigning the event into a context

(what does Columbia mean in the context of global struggle?) and reigning other contexts into the event (what do other struggles mean in the context of Columbia?).

RAT orchestrates the convergence of several fields of struggle at once, laying bare the process of assemblage-building.

The process of plugging an event into movement is illustrated in the layout of the RA Tissue that was published from the midst of the Columbia events in spring

1968. For its May 3-16th issue, RATs cover carried a massive swastika-branded helmet roosting on the top of Columbia's Low library while blood flowed down the library steps (Figure Two). The machine-gun wielding rat that always occupied the top inside corner of the second page - but always with a different dialogue balloon - proclaimed "Up against the wall, GRAYSON KIRK!" (Figure Three), designating the

Columbia president as the main target of the newspaper. The issue included articles on the tactics used to occupy several buildings on campus, from Fayerweather Hall to IVP4MT SUBTERRANEAN NEWS -may.3-ie.!968 , .; HEIL COI.UMBn.y.c. 154: Outside B254 A

Figure Two: Cover of Columbia issue of RAT Subterranean News.

Figure Three: Up Against the Wall, Grayson Kirk! 166 Low Library and the Math building (Shero, "Blockade and Siege"), and it detailed the eventual police bust, where police broke into and cleared the many buildings that had been "liberated" across the campus (Moore, "The Bust Comes"). The newspaper provided insider chronicling of the Columbia events, the accounts of the barricades and bust coming from within the buildings, from participant-reporters speaking to the ebb and flow of emotions, the way that decisions were made, the messages that were written on blackboards, and even an impromptu wedding that dissipated the nervous tension that had built in anticipation of the impending police raid (Shero, "Blockade

and Siege"). The centrefold of the paper pushed the insider status even further,

devoting the entire spread to "Statements of Injured Students," and the four most prominently displayed pages in the newspaper - advertised as "Liberated Documents"

on the cover - were devoted to printing several documents that RAT editor Jeff Shero

helped to smuggle from Kirk's office,16 documents that probed into Columbia's

involvement with the IDA and revealed the corporate interests behind the

t n Morningside Heights expansion that I detailed in the last chapter.

16 Shero (who has since changed his name to Jeff Nightbyrd) describes his role in "liberating" the incriminating documents from Kirk's office in Helen Garvey's 2003 documentary Rebels with a Cause.

17 The three pages devoted to photocopied documents are titled "Columbia U: Company Store" (Embree), "Morningside Confidential," and "The Five Month Run-around." The first page includes an article by Alice Embree alongside a document disclosing Columbia's ties to Socony Mobil and a letter from an undisclosed sender that presses President Kirk for the name of his successor, boldly stating that "every tough minded corporate donor wants to know who's going to be running the store in five years. That's the question which is asked of each company head about his own corporation" (7). The page entitled "Morningside Confidential" provides excerpts from a 15-page report regarding Columbia's planned expansion, intended for the eyes of "trustees and persons specifically designated by the president" only 8). Finally, "The Five Month Run-around" reproduces a set of Xeroxed communications between the Morningside Tenants Committee expressing concern over Columbia's 167 If the documents seized from Kirk's office disclose the corporate ties and interests that motivated Kirk's (and Columbia's) decisions, the mainstream media's coverage of the uprisings, the newspaper points out, were tied to those same corporate interests, spreading the core of bias to a mass audience. Alongside RAT s first set of liberated documents, the editors print the following disclaimer:

Grayson Kirk is not, as the New York Times portrays him, the beleaguered administrator solely concerned with the unrest on his campus. And the New York Times is not the disinterested observer of revolt at Columbia University that it parades as. The reporting and editorial stance of the Times is influenced by the fact that its Chairman of the Board, Arthur H. Sulzberger, also sits on the Board of Trustees at the University of Columbia. (7)

At the same time as RAT provides an "insider" account of the Columbia events the newspaper reveals how the establishment press is driven by its associations, why and how it is biased. If, in RATs estimation, the Times paints Columbia's president into the role of the well-intentioned victim, RAT plays the same card in return, painting the stairs of Columbia blood red, including the testimonials of the meek

(injured students) that would - with persistence, and for a limited time - inherit the university. Though rhetorically overblown in its tone, RAT plays an important role in collecting and articulating the student masses.

extreme neglect concerning the apartments that it owned in Harlem and for Columbia's failure to hold a meeting between itself and community members who were uniformly upset by its plans for expansion (9). Further on in the paper is a page entitled "IDA: Cold War Think-tank" (Klare) which includes an article by Michael Klare alongside which a letter addressed to presidents of IDA-member universities is reprinted. The letter states that the presidents should do what they can to "allow the work of the IDA to continue without interruption" (15). This particular statement is underlined in RATs reproduction and, stamped across the document is an oppositional imperative: "Students and faculty of Columbia have interrupted. Now we must stop the IDA for good" (15). 168 The strength of UPS papers lay not only in their ability to report the local news with insider authority, creating local subjects; it was built of their coordination of struggles, of their ability to universalize the local, giving local struggles to common causes. Although the "Heil Columbia" issue of RAT was centred around the

Columbia uprisings, exposes and articles regarding the revolts did not occupy the entirety of the paper. The paper also included an interview with Rudi Dutschke on

German SDS's parallel uprising in Berlin ("Berlin: A Struggle and a Leader") and, as was the case in every issue of RAT, it printed a column entitled "Blows Against the

Empire," a full-page spread which included briefs on global struggles against capitalism. In this particular issue, the week's briefs included paragraphs on: a solidarity strike - with Columbia - at Stony Brook; the presentation of a 10,000 signature petition to the Governor of Massachusetts that urged reform of the state's birth control laws; a mass report card burning by high school and university students in Berlin; a white radical march in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Chicago; and a Liberation News Service item which announced the shooting by the Oakland

18 • Police of seventeen-year old Black Panther Bobby Hutton. The reason that I think it important to list these diverse struggles is to demonstrate the process of assemblage- building that is at play in the pages of RAT. In every issue of RAT, local struggles

18 The account is provided by Kathleen Cleaver, Communications Secretary for the Black Panthers, whose husband, Eldridge Cleaver, was with Sutton when he was shot. Eldridge Cleaver provides his own account of the incident in "Affidavit #2: Shootout in Oakland." See also Bobby Seale, Seize the Time 228-236, David Hilliard, Keith and Kent Zimmerman, Huey: Spirit of the Panther 133-142; and Huey P. Newton Revolutionary Suicide 196-197. Newton's Revolutionary Suicide opens with a "Tribute to Li'l Bobby," naming him "the very first member of the Black Panther Party." 169 were given to an international context that represented a broad base of diverse and pressing concerns. If the mainstream press was caught up in a corporate web - as

RATs disclosure of the Kirk-Times connection makes clear - the underground was enmeshed in a web of internationally networked struggles.

RAT, in other words, is a particularly interesting resource because of the way that it plugs Columbia into other issues; in RAT s hands, Columbia is a featured blow against the empire, it is always part of a larger movement and should not be considered in isolation. The strength of RAT s snapshots of both the Columbia event and surrounding struggles was that they caused the movement to converge. RAT was not only responsible for situating Columbia alongside a simultaneous set of "blows against the empire," but, in its pages, Columbia is given to film, music, and comics: the issue ends with a review of Luis Bunuel's Belle de jour, columns on student films and theatre, a page devoted to the rock music scene, and a feature on Stevie Wonder.

In this manner, the Columbia uprising is given to the larger context of the movement: in the layout of the UPS, the event is immersed into the movement (to which it already belongs), lines (that were already there) are drawn between it and other micro-events, and preparations are made for impending eruptions (which are already everywhere happening).

If we look at the specific targets of the Columbia protests, the more general set of issues that underlie them are readily discernible. Opposition to the IDA affiliation had to do with the Vietnam war and, even more generally, America's ruthless brand of imperialism; opposition to the proposed gym was part of the larger 170 question of race relations in the United States, and was another piece in the puzzle regarding the movement's complicated history of supporting black struggles; and, at base, opposition to the corporate structure of Columbia - its financial ties and the interests of its board of governors - had to do with the generally felt sentiment that it was appalling to see decisions being made with regard to capital rather than equality and justice.

ii) Projecting the Event: From (Paris X) New York Chicago

Every assemblage is territorial, but it is also built of lines of flight which deterritorialize the assemblage. As such, the Columbia assemblage is territorialized as the multiplicitous event which brings together a number of intensities, but it also traverses its connections, it is not in-itself a static entity. What is evident in the RAT run that follows the Columbia event is the way in which these connections continue to be brought together, for the purpose not of resolving the struggles at Columbia but of taking the energies articulated at and around the Columbia event elsewhere. I will proceed, in this subsection, by demonstrating how the event is plugged into other struggles, moving away from New York, and becoming movement in the process.

Containing a requisite article on the aftermath of the Columbia uprisings

(Millman, "Aftermath(ematics)") as well as two more liberated documents and articles - one regarding a doctored story for the New York Times ("Shucking with the

Times"), and the other concerning the corporate ties that lay behind Columbia's expansion (Embree, "The Urban Removal Masquerade") - Columbia is pushed 171 forward by the post-Columbia issue of RAT. It is not just that RAT provides more information regarding the uprisings (its causes, its persistence, its effects), but

Columbia, as centralized event, is already and all of a sudden unfettered in RATs current edition, made part of a larger mix.

Covering the issue that followed the Columbia expose, RAT sported a cartoon of a hooded, axe-wielding and bikini-brief clad executioner. The entire cover, including the muscular executioner, is painted over with dozens of corporate logos

(see Figure Four). Amongst the blizzard of corporate logos appear three that will also appear on the letterhead of liberated documents inside (New York Times, Mobil Oil, and Western Union). If the tattoos and otherwise airborne logos represented the swarm of corporate interests and the inscription of these interests upon the body, the resolute and branded executioner stands in for what would become the movement's generalized enemy over the course of the next number of years: not Kirk and

Columbia's board of governors operating in the interests of New York's elite, but

American Empire operating in the interests of capital.

Over the course of the summer, RAT brought uprisings together by linking events to each other and to the struggles that would inevitably follow: RAT was all about gathering under and rising up. Between the mid-May '68 "Heil Columbia" issue, marking the shutdown of the university, through to the "Back to School" issue at the end of September 1968, marking Columbia's reopening, RAT ran through the summer as a storehouse of struggles. The aftermath of the Columbia uprising stretched through the summer, detailing apartment building occupations in Harlem 172

Figure Four: Cover offirst post-Columbia issue of RAT Subterranean News.

("Community Takeover") and plans for the creation of a Liberation School in which, as an inset in a June issue of RAT explained, all activities and classes - including high school organizing, underground newspapers, U.S. and Latin American Imperialism - would be related to the movement ("Columbia Liberation School"). Surrounding this coverage on the continuing saga of Columbia were articles on high school revolts; an interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Cohn-Bendit, "Danny the Red: Prohibiting is

Forbidden"); an article from an anonymous American G.I. outlining the racist motivations for crowd control training, including racist comments made by high 173 ranking officers throughout the training process ("Your National Guard: Riot

Control or Nigger Control"); articles describing confrontations between the BPP and the police (Gerth, "Pigs vs. Panthers"); and a regular feature called "How to Make it in the Jungle" (which in itself documents the radicalization of the movement, from the first installment on scamming one's way through subway turnstiles without paying to, in the latter months of 1968, diagrams of police formations in riot situations). Pictures of political figures and symbols like Mao Tse Tung, Che

Guevara, and the BPP logo were peppered throughout the issues, giving the movement its various icons. Furthermore, movement politics were not separated from movement culture. In the summer months that followed the Columbia uprisings, there were articles on, and reviews of, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the Temptations, Cream,

Ravi Shankar, Jean-Luc Godard,19 Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Frangois Truffault, and

Andy Warhol, there was a constant supply of political and psychedelic comics

(including an interview with political cartoonist Ron Cobb), and there were a handful of articles on growing pot and acid trips.20 Because there is never a single one issue,

19 It is worth noting that Jean-Luc Godard's film La Chinoise -which depicted a small group of Maoist students from the Universite de Nanterre discussing Marxism-Leninism in a bourgeois parent's apartment over the summer, contemplating how their discussions and guerrilla theatre would be brought to the university once its doors reopened - played in French theatres during the summer of 1967, framing Nanterre students' entry into the 67-68 academic year. Coincidentally, the film was reviewed in the RATissue that directly preceded the Columbia events, and would therefore have been the issue in circulation at the outset of the New York uprisings. See Marjorie Heins and Leon Gassow's "La Chinoise (2 views) or: Who the hell does Godard think he is & What does he think he's doing?."

20 Drug culture, where the New York UPS scene was concerned, was mostly the terrain of the East Village Other. 174 icon, or strategy, what the UPS achieves is something greater: mass-mobilization on various fronts.

If we see, in these examples, the way that RAT was involved in a perpetual process of collecting the movement's culture, politics, and events, RAT was also, in collecting them as movement, projecting this collection of events onwards; RAT never endeavored to draw a definitive assemblage because that would cut the events off from their out ward/on ward potential. That indefinite politics are often accused of displaying an impotent relativism is challenged by RAT: while the assemblages it drew were certainly indefinite, this did not preclude the determined drawing of lines, from one event to the next (with hundreds of points in between, and the promise of events to come).The summer run of RA T culminated in an issue that was devoted to the events that transpired at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. From the closing of Columbia to the Chicago streets at the end of summer, the Chicago issue of RAT slipped in just before the "Back to School" issue. Such was the subterranean line that was drawn between the forced end of a school year and the beginning of another, burrowing under before popping up again, collecting intensities along the way.

If the focal points towards which the event reached were diverse, the Chicago event was adamantly without centre (a condition that is worth exploring because this intangibility, in part, renders the event ripe for projection in the first place). The

Chicago action had long been considered a protest against Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was slated to seek re-election; when Johnson announced that he would not be 175 running, many young people started to question whether the demonstrations should proceed as planned. The action, Abbie Hoffman points out, had been planned a year in advance, in 1967, and was to be the first Yippie gathering, an event which would send the press squabbling, a media myth-making event inspired by Marshall

McLuhan ("Why we're going to Chicago" 12). Speaking to the importance of going ahead with the Chicago action, Hoffman lays out the argument as follows:

The point is, you can use Chicago as a means of pulling your local community together. It can serve to open a dialogue between political radicals and those who might be considered hippies. The radical will say to the hippie: "Get together and fight, you are going to get the shit kicked out of you." The hippie will say to the radical: "Your protest is so narrow, your rhetoric so boring, your ideological power plays so old-fashioned." Each can help the other, and Chicago - like the Pentagon demonstration before it - might well offer the medium to put forth that message. (17)

Not only was Hoffman's statement aimed at uniting the countercultural and political fronts in the movement, it was also about uniting local communities together. What is most interesting about Hoffman's description in this regard is that the aim of Chicago sounds a lot like the layout of the UPS's most strategically sophisticated and best laid out newspapers at the time: culture and politics, local and global, side by side and in

•y | dialogue.

21 Hoffman's essay originally appeared in the underground newspaper The Realist, and toward the essay's end he flags Chicago's underground paper The Seed as an organizational hub for the demonstrations, asking people to write to organizers with their own plans and telling them to "watch the underground papers for the latest developments" ("Why We're Going to Chicago" 17). The UPS was an integral part of the movement, providing multiple sites for the movement's capture and redeployment. While the movement's message was much more complicated than, as Hoffman puts it, "each can help the other," the UPS, akin to the Chicago demonstrations' aspirations, "offer[ed] the medium to put forth [the movement's] message" ("Why we're going to Chicago" 17). The organization of unorganized action comes at a specific moment: in the aftermath of failed mass-demonstrations and the beginnings of more militant revolts like the uprisings at Columbia. Beyond the withdrawal of then-President Lyndon B

Johnson's bid for another term as leader of the Democratic party, a difficulty regarding the planned Chicago action was that mass protests - like the 70,000 large demonstration where protestors gathered to levitate the Pentagon in 1967 - did not seem to make much sense following the series of local protests that had taken place over the course of 1968. Because of the increasingly pointed nature of protest, the lack of a focal point in LBJ made collecting in Chicago particularly precarious.

In this context, the RA T issue that preceded the Chicago Convention issue features an article whose title asks the very question that was, at that moment - going into Chicago - on many young people's lips: "Has the Time for Demonstrations

Passed?".23 Recognizing that mass-demonstrations of immense proportions had had no effect on America's foreign or domestic policy, many movement activists were beginning to recognize that it was crucial to take a next step, to adopt a new set of strategies. Beyond being up in the air due to the convention's lack of an LBJ (or, following his June '68 assassination, a Robert Kennedy for that matter), the planned action was without centre because, at this point, there was no consensus amongst

22 As Hoffman puts it, "[ejverybody began the tough task of developing a new tactic of new battlegrounds. Columbia, the Lower East Side, Free City in San Francisco. Local action became the focus and by the end of May we decided to disband Yippie and cancel Chicago" ("Why We're Going to Chicago" 14).

23 See Jennifer Wolfs "Has the Time for Demonstration Passed?" Wolfs article is about a protest against Hubert Humphrey's campaign which, frustrated by its indecision and ineffectiveness, turned into a battle with police. 177 young people as to what protest was supposed to look like. Rather than being a pointed protest against something, the convention was treated as an opportunity to collect energies, ideas, contingencies, and tactics, bridging the gap between groups by engaging one another in dialogue regarding - and building, in the process - the movement's future.

Strategies for collection, including debates on the question of scale, hovered around the convention, and it is at this juncture that New York's Lower East Side anarchist group - with which Lebel was involved - reappears. Where Hoffman promoted Chicago as an opportunity to bring "local communities" together, in the pre-convention issue of RAT- directly following Jennifer Wolfs ponderings upon demonstration's passing - UAW/MF propose the concept of the "Affinity Group," giving the concept of the local community to a much smaller scale and giving this reduced scale to a sophisticated set of questions regarding strategy. Noting that mass demonstrations "fail to advance the nature and the forms of our struggle," UAW/MF propose the advancement of struggle via "small group[s] executing 'small' actions in concert with other small groups" (11). In order to successfully engage this form of strategy - which was, the article points out, already engaged in "Columbia's

Communes, Berkeley's Revolutionary Gangs, [and] France's Committees of Action"

- it was necessary that small groups look two ways at once, towards the "internal development and security" of groups and the development of "external relationship with similar groups" (11). These overlapping procedures are precisely the categories that are being considered in the context of this chapter: on the one hand, collection, 178 on the other, projection, always overlapping. As the New York group announces, it is a "network" that emerges on the other side of their proposed strategy, and not a net result.

The overlap with Deleuze and Guattari's theories on capitalism and schizophrenia are tangible. We cannot help but think of the rhizome when the Lower

East Side group states that the affinity group is an "active minority" which "plays the role of a permanent fermenting agent, encouraging action without claiming to lead"

(11). Furthermore, Guattari takes on the topic of anarchist movements in the United

States (with Weatherman - for whom affinity-group theory was crucial - taking the emblematic lead of undertaking formations that undermine the hierarchical structures of family and state) in a crucial 1970 essay on groupuscules ("Nous sommes tous des groupuscules" 285). Against the verticalizing tendencies of the state and family, the

UAW/MF article stresses that "[i]t is spontaneity which permits the thrust forward, and not the slogans or directives of leaders. The affinity group is the source of both spontaneity and new forms of struggle" (11). If we could mistake the above-quoted passage as having been produced in A Thousand Plateaus, it is because Deleuze and

Guattari's rhizome book is part of a complexly knotted UAW/MF assemblage noted above. That Lebel lingered amongst UAW/MF's loosely collected ranks reminds us, yet again, that correspondences between contingencies are never clean-cut, uni-, or bi-directional. A Thousand Plateaus, in this sense, is not at all unique in its constitution - it never claims to be - but continues a type of movement that surfaced, in the social field, at the turn of the seventies. 179 Not only is UAW/MF's suggestion rhizomatic, so too is the layout of the

Chicago issue rife with rhizomes. On the cover of RATs Chicago issue, over top of a

collage drawn of police, members of the national guard, and the large looming face of

Chicago mayor Richard Daley, is the issue title "A Closed Convention in a Closed

City." The title referred to the fact that no one was allowed near the Convention

without the proper credentials, and that in preparation for the demonstrations that had

promised to greet the convention, Mayor Daley had shut Chicago down, beefed up

police presence, instituted a curfew, and when confrontation escalated, President

Johnson called in the national guard. In other words, the state was doing everything it

could to contain the movement that collected at the site of the convention.

RATs Chicago edition creates something of a focal point out of a feature written by Elisa Katz and Gordon Bishop. Entitled "Chicago: Death of a Party," the

article begins on the inside face page of the paper and continues on as the centrefold

spread. As the italicized introduction to the article announces, Katz and Bishop, reporting for RAT, traversed Chicago's tumultuous grounds - from Lincoln Park to the convention - recording snippets of the event on a portable tape recorder. In this way, the Chicago convention centrefold is similar to the one that was printed in the

"Heil Columbia" issue: in the same way that the May edition made use of statements from injured students to create a text-box plastered centrefold, the September centrefold is covered in punchy paragraphs. In the case of the Chicago edition, however, reports regarding atrocities are interspersed amongst general observations made during the protests; snippets of dialogue between RAT reporters, medics, a 180 priest, and fellow protestors during convention; briefs on appearances by writers like William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, and Terry Southern (brought together by the event, in order to write a feature for Esquire, this configuration in itself marks a trans-Atlantic crossing in Chicago); an aside on the reported beating by police of Hugh Hefner at the corner of the Playboy mansion ten blocks away from the street action; and accounts of speeches made by recognized movement leaders like former SDS president Carl Ogelsby and BPP Chairman Bobby Seale.24 If the

Columbia centrefold, with its collection of statements from injured students, laid

Columbia out as an instance of ordered disorder, the Chicago convention, laid out over the centre of RAT m. fragments, is a cacophony of disordered intensities. The paragraphs are extended in the form of full-length articles that pick up topics raised in the remainder of the newspaper (the issue of police brutality25 and the unreliability of mainstream presses,26 both reminiscent of the Columbia uprisings).

24 Seale was in Chicago to speak to the striking transit workers.

25 The police are presented in particularly putrid strokes throughout the Convention special. Inset in the middle of David Higgins's "Chi Town Low Down," an article which describes confrontations between demonstrators and police (and describes Chicago policemen as being "ugly and paunchy" and, due to their slow reaction times, prone to using brutal force [4]) is an LNS news item, titled "Chicago Police tend to be Crazy," which cites a study by psychiatrists which found that Chicago police suffer from paranoia and are attracted to the job because it rewards them for acting out their sadistic pathologies (4). Following the centrefold in which the appearance of Burroughs, Genet, Southern, and Ginsberg is mentioned is a "Writer's Report," consisting of a quote from each in which they condemn the conduct of Chicago police force at the convention, describing them as "vicious dogs" (Burroughs et al. 12). Beneath the "Writer's Report" is a similarly scathing report on the conduct of the GIs that had been recalled from Vietnam in order to handle the protestors (Thorne Dreyer, "Know Your Enemy"). As was the case at Columbia a number of months before, the sheer force with which they were confronted in their protests was both a shock and a catalyst for their cause.

26 Where the "Heil Columbia" issue discredited the mainstream press by disclosing the corporate ties that linked Columbia to the New York Times, Katz and Bishop's report includes brief exchanges with ABC, CBS, and Newsweek which paint establishment media into a similarly disdainful corner. A 181 Burroughs was not simply written into the sort of cut-ups that he had suggested in earlier articles in the underground press; while at the Chicago convention, Burroughs was practicing the very tape recorder experiments that he was theorizing - as an extension of the cut-up - at the time. Commissioned to cover the convention for Esquire along with Genet, Ginsberg, and Southern, Burroughs arrived at the convention - after a long absence from the United States - with tape recorder in hand. He recorded the speeches on the convention floor alongside the noises on the streets and played them back in order to incite chaos and confusion. Neither the mention of Burroughs in RAT nor the quotes provided by Burroughs for RAT makes for the most interesting crossing; rather both Burroughs and RA T take the opportunity

conversation with a CBS producer, followed by one with a CBS guard, is worth reprinting, here: CBS Producer: How did you get in here? RAT: How come there's an armed guard outside your office? CBS: We always have that - for security. It's just routine. RAT: We read somebody cut your cables or something, does that have anything to do with it? CBS: Well, that too, I suppose. RAT: Can you give us an idea of what CBS will be reporting this week? CBS: We'll report anything, anywhere, that relates to the presidential candidates. RAT: How about the candidacy of Eldridge Cleaver? CBS: Is he a Yippie?

CBS Guard - (Negro): What did the lady tell you? RAT: She says she never heard of Cleaver. Have you heard of Cleaver? Guard: Of Course. RAT: It doesn't seem as though he'll be getting much publicity from the networks this year. Guard: Well, (jokingly) That's why I cut their cables. (3) Where Katz and Bishop's article is concerned, moments and speeches that were never seen on major network news, or printed in the major newspapers, surround this CBS/RAT exchange. Coming as it did just before the "Back to School" issue, RAT, with its Chicago issue "put forth the movement's message," or, marking the change in seasons, acted as a state of the union - the movement post- Chicago - address, projecting the movement into the fall quarter. 182 provided by the event - the convention - to put altered mutter lines out on the street: Burroughs's theory being put to practice.27

As Burroughs would disclose in an October edition of RAT, as a result, in part, of what he learned from his experience at the Chicago convention, he "decided to move his apartment from London to New York so he [could] directly involve himself in the movement" ("William Burroughs Interview" 11). In the two-part interview in

9R which Burroughs admits this intention, Burroughs and Jeff Shero converse about the changing nature of the movement, the education system, what transpired in Chicago, and the necessity for writers to commit themselves to movement causes. In response to Shero's suggestion that the literary scene is detached in America, Burroughs, just returned from London, notes: "I feel it's time for every writer who's worth a salt to put his ass where his mouth is. If he is standing for freedom, get out there and stand for it. I'm willing to do this" (11). Even though the event did not exactly, in the end, project Burroughs from writing to activism, the terms that he uses in the process of promoting a re-attachment of the literary scene to "America" are intriguing: the conjunction between ass and mouth, that same intensive BwO that Deleuze celebrated in Burroughs above, but this time in the context of a literary scene attached to

America, not suffering from a drug-induced catatonic collapse.

27 Although Burroughs never speculates upon the results of his experiments, details regarding his experiences at the conference are given a somewhat Hunter S. Thompsonesque treatment in John Berendt's "Hog Wild in the Streets," collected in the Walter Schneir-edited mass market paperback Telling it Like it Was: The Chicago Riots.

28 See "William Burroughs Interview," RAT Subterranean News 4-17 October, 1968: 1, 10-11 and RAT Subterranean News 18-31 October, 1968: 12-13. 183 iii) The Containment Industry

Towards the end of 1969, when the impetus of the American movement was in threat of being captured, RAT printed an article by Lebel entitled "Containing Hip."

That large constituencies in the movement were casting politics aside and "going cultural" was concerning to Lebel, particularly because capital was using the youth culture industry as a means to absorb the energies of young people, diverting the movement away from political engagement. Beyond the fact that big business was the ultimate profiteer of youth culture, the more sinister fact, for Lebel, was that "behind the money game is the political game of the rulers who want to dominate & capture the energy" of those whose "natural inclination" is to "disrupt... the social structure"

(15). Making reference to a conference on "Selling the American Youth Market" that was to take place in the fall, Lebel provides the following Burroughso-Foucauldian assessment:

The main function of the Containment Industry is the roboticization of youth. Prisons and insane asylums, for instance, admittedly control minds & deaden bodies, but the youth market moguls exploiting the music & fun scene have yet to admit what they are doing .... What we are up against, what we are immersed in, is one of the most dangerous mind-body control operations in the history of industrial society. The intention of the capitalist corporations is not merely to exploit youth's buying power, it is to make safe remote-controlled objects out of us. (15)

This is precisely what Foucault would write about in his 1975 analysis of the penitentiary as a generalized apparatus of power, and what Burroughs was theorizing and attempting to dismantle in his cut-up novels and analyses of control at the end of 184 the sixties. Lebel's concern: if the movement was characterizable by its intensive lines of flight (out from the halls and into the streets, as was the slogan in Paris), the youth culture industry was being used as a way to contain intensities. Thus, in order to evade tendencies towards circumscription, perpetual movement is necessary.

In the face of a containment industry that was persistent and complex, Lebel's argument is that it is necessary to remain focused on the project of creating revolutionary cultures that exceed establishment bounds. In authoritative support of his position, Lebel cites Huey P. Newton (by way of a speech given by Eldridge

Cleaver at a Black Arts Festival in Algiers): "the only culture that is relevant to people in our position is revolutionary culture. Obviously, if the oppressor has control over your culture, he is not going to allow it to develop into a weapon against him"

(qtd. in Lebel 15). Culture, in other words, is crucial, but if it is to remain meaningful to the revolutionary cause, its producers and consumers must remain cognizant, at all times, of the efforts of various forces and institutions to co-opt its energies, and skew its aims. While Newton, when speaking of "people in our position," is speaking of the position of black people in the United States - a position which was certainly different from the one that white radicals found themselves in (Cleaver, for example, was quoting Newton while in exile) - the necessity of developing and articulating a revolutionary culture beyond cooptation was deemed applicable to all revolutionary positions. As Newton put it in an interview published in pamphlet form by the underground newspaper The Movement, white radicals:

can aid the black revolutionaries first by simply turning away from the 185 establishment and secondly by choosing their friends. For instance, they have a choice between whether they will be a friend of Lyndon Baines Johnson or a friend of Fidel Castro. A friend of Robert Kennedy or a friend of Ho Chi Minh. ("Huey Newton talks to The Movement..." 54)

In order to become part of the revolution it was necessary to turn away from the establishment and towards the creation of a revolutionary assemblage. In other words, in one and the same breath the task was to develop an understanding of control and to strategize its subversion. The danger of the "Containment Industry" was that it would render "revolutionary cultures" static, denying them their becoming and robbing them of their potential.

The tension between politics and culture was not the only problem that the movement was facing as political protest was being ramped up in 1968. A tension that is writ large in RAT, by way of omission, is that the Columbia occupations were, to a large extent, driven by black students and community members, and garnered appearances by high profile black leaders Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.

When Carmichael assumed the presidency of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating

Committee in 1966, white students were purged from the ranks of SNCC as

Carmichael emphasized the necessity for black people to define their own goals, and lead their own organizations. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Cafmichael's sentiments were reiterated at Columbia, this time in the form of white students being expelled from occupying Hamilton Hall because black students and community members wanted to run their own protest against the construction of the gym, a cause which was adamantly theirs (Grant 47). Frustrated by the ineffectiveness of mass- 186 demonstrations on the Vietnamese front and ejected from the ranks of black struggle with which they had been associated since the creation of SDS and SNCC at the beginning of the sixties (in the form of freedom rides, driving from the American north to the south in order to combat segregation), the protest of white radicals was stripped to its bare bones, revealed, perhaps, to be nothing more than a fight for freedom of cultural expression by one of the most affluent contingencies in America.

While a continued front for cultural freedom - or a dropping out and reveling in the less and less counter-culture, (as Lebel warned in his article on the "Containment

Industry") - was a comfortable grounds for many, others tried to determine the best way to combine efforts and to support the struggles of others that were most oppressed. RAT continued to celebrate the counterculture with such frivolity and political recklessness that this binding would be at the centre of the newspaper's takeover by women in 1970.

Reflecting upon May '68, Deleuze and Guattari, in Thousand Plateaus, note that "those who evaluate things in macropolitical terms understood nothing of the event because something unaccountable was escaping .... a molecular flow was escaping, miniscule at first, then swelling" (216). No matter how hard we try, we will never be able to capture all of the micropolitical escapes, exchanges, and flows that marked the event of the turn of the seventies, but it is essential to take account of the way that contingencies come into contact, breaking down the barriers that separate them, and opening up pragmatic and dialogic lines that have hitherto remained closed. At the turn of the seventies, the movement itself was catatonic, closing off its 187 intensities, understanding itself as the movement without reflecting upon the micropolitical energies it was stifling in the process.

IIP. The event, external relations, and internal syntheses: Becoming Women's LibeRATion

Like the Columbia uprisings and the Democratic Convention in 1968, the takeover of RAT by an all-women's collective in 1970 was an event. What this event involved was 1) a pulling forward of the potential of a number of lines that were being drawn in, and neglected by, the movement; and 2) a projection of these lines towards a future, offering up other possibilities, infused with potential (the event as projectile, as in Paris and New York in 1968: pulling up the pavement and letting loose the beach beneath). What makes the event so powerful is that it liberates actors from their assumed positions within a "social" organization, unmooring elements so that collecting the assemblage becomes possible again. What the takeover of RAT, and women's liberation more generally, provided for the movement was a necessary reminder that the points being fabricated as alternatives to "establishment culture" remained exclusive and were becoming increasingly so.

The 1970 run of RAT provides a grounds through which the intricacy of the movement as assemblage can be elaborated, an example of how "movement" can remain as such in the face of profound striation. If I am writing about the movement of the event, in order for an event to exist as such (as movement), it has to avoid closing in upon itself, which would turn movement into stasis. In order for movement 188 to continue, it must proceed by forging external relations.29 This is the assemblage-forming logic of the event. The women's liberated run of RA T allows us to explore how such propensities are put into practice, reminding us that the simple act of switching fields - from the integrity-oriented academic field to the action- oriented underground - is not enough to keep things moving.

As Latour suggests, two sets of procedures need to be employed in the process of reassembling the social: "a first set that makes the deployment of actors visible, and a second that makes the unification of the collective into a common world acceptable to those who will be unified" (Reassembing the Social 256). I used the

Columbia uprising and its rendering in RAT to make a networked set of actors visible; this section, on a women collective's takeover of a newspaper, puts forth the ways in which the assemblage is in constant negotiation, a reminder that difficult work must persistently be done if the assemblage is to be made acceptable to those being unified under the movement's banners.

Up Against the Wall, RAT!

The takeover of RAT was catalyzed by a last-minute editorial decision to turn the preceding issue of RAT into a sex and porn special. The issue was so uncritically

29 If Deleuze and Guattari, stating that they were looking for allies in Anti-Oedipus, go on to celebrate the American "underground" in A Thousand Plateaus, it is, they explain, because they consider certain aspects of America to be rhizomatic. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, referring to the American underground alongside a handful of other American phenomena, rhizomes are assembled of "successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside" (ATP 19, emphasis added). As Michael Hardt points out, Deleuze's Nietzsche "is not the construction of an inferiority, but the creation of exteriority through the power of affirmation" (53). 189 objectifying that Jane Alpert, the only woman who was official staff, decided that

she would resign upon an initial leaf-through. A friend that she was with when she

encountered the issue convinced her otherwise: it would be more effective to have the

all-male editorial board relinquish power for a week, leaving the content, layout, and

printing to an all-women's collective the next week. The takeover would prove

permanent. The problem, as Alpert relates in Growing Up Underground, was not

simply the sex and porn issue, but that women were treated with the same systematic

condescension at RAT as they were encountering elsewhere (their ideas ignored, their

positions on staff subordinate). Adding impetus to the drive for a takeover, Alpert

notes, by the close of 1969 the newspaper "was deteriorating from a lively radical journal to a sophomoric joke sheet" (242).

The takeover of &4Twas by no means an originary moment (the issue that

brought the Women's Liberation movement into being). In Sisterhood is Powerful,

Robin Morgan's anthology of writings from the movement (like RAT, entirely

produced by women, published in 1970), Morgan situates the beginnings of the turn

of the seventies women's liberation movement in 1966, when, surrounding the

formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW), women's caucuses

started to convene, not only demanding representation - and the representation of

women's struggles - in and around various groups like SDS, but also forming

independent radical groups devoted to the elaboration of theories and practices of

radical feminisms ("The Women's Revolution" xx-xxiv). Guilty of dismissing and

ridiculing the concerns of women were not only the movement's Abbie Hoffmans, 190 countercultural celebrities who read the obj edification and mistreatment of women into free love, but also the politically engaged, who argued that women's struggles were secondary, and distracted the movement from the important causes at hand.30 As RAT closed in upon itself, becoming sophomoric and jokey, the paper was in the process of alienating itself from a sizable contingent of its readers and producers. Whereas RAT was becoming insignificant under the direction of men, its takeover by women marked its reinvigoration, a venue within which women could articulate their concerns as an integral part of an always complex and multifaceted movement: women saved RAT from the very limitations (against exteriority) which men argued women would impose upon the movement.

The reductive and unfounded concerns of the movement's most obstinate men were challenged by the front cover of the liberated issue. RAT, a 17"x 11" paper, was often printed with a half-page front and back cover on its flipside. By folding the paper over backwards, it became an 8 14" x 11" booklet for distribution whose centrefold, once opened, would be the full-size cover page of the newspaper.

Although the issue proclaims that the paper has been taken over by women on its folded cover page - which announces the newspaper's inclusion of three features:

"panther 21 interview p.l," "women take over rat p.2,"and "weatherwomen p.5." - it is an interview with imprisoned BPP member Affeni Shakur that is printed on the full front page cover which emerges when the paper is opened to be read. That the

30 As Morgan recounts, when women proposed a women's liberation plank for SDS in 1966, the women who presented the resolution "were pelted with tomatoes and thrown out of the convention" ("The Women's Revolution" xxi). 191 Panther 21 interview is given to this first page means that it is, in effect, the cover story (the breaking story of the newspaper's liberation could itself wait until the second page).

Shakur, interviewed by Alpert, was the most prominent spokesperson amongst

21 Panthers who had been arrested in an early morning raid on April 2nd, 1969 in

New York, allegedly plotting to bomb department stores and the New York Botanical

Gardens (all twenty-one Panthers were acquitted after only 45-minutes of jury deliberation two years later). The day after the first issue of liberated RAT hit the streets, the trial was set to begin. That the paper features an interview with Shakur on the eve of the trial's commencement suggests that the paper continued to be committed to reporting on, and rallying around, the gravest of the establishment's contrivances.31 Beyond discussing the immediate situation of the Panthers going to trial - how trials against the BPP members and black people in general were invariably infused with a racism that overrode fundamental rights and freedoms that were constitutionally "guaranteed" - Alpert and Shakur discuss the respect and excitement that Shakur inspired amongst inmates in the women's house of detention, a phenomenon that Alpert was able to witness firsthand during her overlapping

31 An extremely enlightening historical document, in this respect, is a 5-page letter by the Panther 21 entitled "To: Judge Murtagh, From: The Panther 21" which RAT printed in their March 7-21 issue. The powerful letter details the ways in which racism is built into the legal system, drawing upon a history that extends from the seventeenth century to their present case. The letter is reprinted in Philip S. Foner's The Black Panthers Speak. 192 incarceration there (Shakur and Alpert 1, 24). Although a large grey fist superimposed upon the last page of the interview has the unfortunate effect of obscuring some of the text at centre of the interview, the gesture is one of solidarity with Shakur, the prisoners in the women's house of detention, and the Panther 21.

Solidarity amongst an array of oppressed contingencies was inherent in the women's liberation movement. Issues of race, class, and gender, were intertwined.

That news of the takeover is relegated to the second page does not mean that the account of the takeover is any less significant. Persistence in mobilization would hardly be sustainable without the celebration - and articulation - of victories. On the second page of the newspaper, news of the RAT takeover is rendered in full. In the top right corner of the page, always reserved for the same machine gun-wielding rat - but always carrying an updated caption that relegates the most current and despicable enemy to the wall - the rat appears as usual, but feminized (see Figure Five). The caption "Up against the wall, RAT!" is given to the Rat-woman who, rather than stone-facedly standing, is jumping victoriously over top of the headline "women take over rat." As the italicized column that runs beneath, signed by "the rat women" explains, "RAT is supposed to be a paper about revolution. Our revolution." In the Rat

32 Alpert, charged for conspiracy to bomb eight government and commercial buildings, was on bail which she would jump when her trial was about to start at the end of spring, going underground until 1974. 193

Figure Five: The becoming-woman of RAT. women's estimation, the paper no longer seemed to be up to this task:

More than ever in the last couple of months, RAT has given the impression that we regard politics as that thing the Black Panthers and the Young Lords are into. White youth, and non-Panthers/Lords (one would think after reading recent back RA 7s) just lie back and groove on pornography, dope, rock, movies. RAT has been moving no one into action, has failed to even suggest directions for action. It labors along with humorous pretensions, which most of us can't even find funny anymore (particularly those of us who bear the brunt of its jokes) about the cultural revolution. Can we still be under the illusion that the cultural revolution, in this time of heavy repression, of mounting police power and courtroom insanity, is going to pull down the state with its dope and music and its so-called liberated sex? .... This is not to say that our culture isn't an integral part of the way we fight the system. But the culture has got to be revolutionary as surely as the revolution has got to be cultural, (the rat women 2)

If the rat women were arguing for a revolutionary culture, exploitative culture was certainly not it; if women were objectified by RATs old ideas about the cultural 194 revolution (including the printing of pornographic pictures and cartoons that were run in order to sell papers), the drawings and photographs depicting women in the liberated run of RAT were the exact opposite: women in these images were strong, racially diverse, active, and resolute.

Acting as a corrective to RATs irresponsible turn away from politics and its headlong dive into revolutionary culture, the issue is brimming with political articles

(a turn towards politics peopled by every where already active women). Where the

BPP is concerned, the issue carries not only the cover interview with Shakur of New

York's Panther 21, but also a further statement from her and an LNS item featuring

Kathleen Cleaver, an active Panther who was persistently relegated to the shadow of her husband. The item, titled "Kathleen," sees Cleaver giving a reporter a powerful and matter-of-fact answer to his question regarding the place of women in the revolution: "No one ever asks what a man's place in the revolution is." The problem at the heart of all such questions, Cleaver points out, is that regardless of women's demonstrated capability to perform the same labour as men during wartime (evicted from the factories upon their return), everything that they do continues to be considered secondary - including the labour of giving birth - by capitalist society

("Kathleen" 8). If the voices of BPP women were stifled not only by white radical newspapers but by the BPP's own organizational deficiencies (a problem that was recognized but was not substantially remedied until Elaine Brown took over the party 195 in 1974, appointing several women to the BPP central committee in the process33), in the pages of liberated RAT, the struggles and positions of Shakur and

Cleaver are featured. The perpetually ignored and often derided matter of fact that this particular issue of RAT lays bare (from an examination of the Panthers through

Shakur and Cleaver; to the recognition, amongst Palestinian women and men, that women were not only caregivers but equal participants in the Palestinian revolution

(Ryan, "Refugee Revolution"); to a focus by Anna Louise Stronger on the Chinese revolution that looks beyond Chairman Mao and Lin Piao, introducing the waves being made by Ciang Ch'ing under the title "Are women seizing power in China?"34) is that women are entrenched within the movement, and their struggles are both inspiring and important. Women did not depoliticize the movement by introducing questions regarding the oppression of women into the movement's already vast, varied, and networked catalogue of struggles (as the male-dominated left was fond of arguing), but were themselves depoliticized when they were ignored or relegated to secondary positions within the movement. How could it be argued that women were imposing themselves upon the revolution when their own complex and multifaceted political positions were already everywhere inherent in the movement?

33 Brown's autobiography, A Taste of Power, is an important - and sobering - document in this respect. Regarding her assuming the leadership of the party and her appointment of women to the central committee, see 356-376.

34 The article on Chiang Ch'ing occupies the folded back cover of the issue, a particularly biting choice considering the centrality of Maoism to the movement. In the midst of Maoist China, women were rising. 196 If the struggle was meant to be a collective endeavour, was it not counterintuitive to kick out RATs men? The rat women, arguing for unity in the revolution, were understandably skeptical about whether their own paper's men and women, at that point, could "function together as a revolutionary unit" (the rat women

2). If women writers were being relegated to secretarial duties and entire issues were being published in complete disregard for the politics of its staff (the pornography issue),35 it was clear that the paper was not only operating but also structured in such a way that women were being excluded from positions of influence. The rat women planned to render the paper truly collective by breaking down editorial hierarchies

("Editor, Assistant Editor, etc. etc.. .. divisions of labor that are dragging on both the men and women here" [2])36 and by bringing together the movement's various and pressing facets (as the statement's critique of the paper's cultural revolutionary stance made clear, it was not only women that RAT was guilty of ignoring: politics as "that thing the Black Panthers and the Young Lords are into" [2]).

Once divorced from the uncritical stagnancy of the newspaper's editorial board, RA T opened itself up to several outside contingencies. Amongst those

35 As Alpert relates in her memoirs, her very first dealings with RA T were marked by the sexist demand that - as she entered and met editor Jeff Shero to offer an article on hijacking based on her recent experiences - she commit to the paper by becoming a secretary. Judging by the state of the office, Alpert points out, "it was obvious that the paper needed a housekeeper" [177-178]).

36 At the bottom of the page, in a box reserved for the standard rundown of "Rat Staff' is the same box, but this time headed by the title "Rat collective." The box lists all of the women that worked on the first liberated issue of the newspaper without hierarchical designations appended: "Jill Bosky - valiant typesetter for RAT for unheralded decades, Jane Alpert, Lorelei B., Ruth Beller, Pam Booth, Valerie Bouvier, Naomi Glauberman, Carol Goldberg, Sharon Krebs, Robin Morgan, Joyce Plecha, Daria Price, Judy Robinson, Miriam Rosen, Barbara Rothcrug, Judy Russell, Liz Schneider, Martha Shelley, Sue Siminsky, Brenda Smiley, Christina Sweet, Laura Tillem, Judy Walenta, Cathy Werner, AND Mark, Jan, Anton, Neil, IN SPIRIT: ALICE EMBREE and PAT SWINTON." 197 responsible for the first liberated issue of RAT were "more than a dozen

unaffiliated women and sisters from WITCH, Redstockings, the Gay Liberation

Front, LNS and Weatherman," the "women take over rat" notice on the second page

announced. The paper was planned, written, illustrated, and laid out in an eight day

stretch between takeover and printing. Political objectives were most effectively

realized by collectivization, and coming together did not mean that autonomous

struggles ceased to develop or be recognized as such. A synthesized left could not be

articulated by an organization in isolation, it involved the collection of a variety of

contingencies: internal synthesis via relations of exteriority.

An example of how this seemingly complicated internal/external relationship

works - a marker of RAT's collective approach - is that authorship virtually

disappears once RAT is liberated. Authorship was renounced by the liberated

newspaper because it was considered to be a signifier of bourgeois individualism.

Although this decision has the unfortunate effect of blurring agential lines, the

positive effect that results from the lack of individual indicators (and this, I would

argue, is precisely the effect that the paper intended) is that regardless of apparent

differences, all of the issues produced - and all of the positions covered in those

issues - are the manifestation of a collective voice, representing a women's liberation

movement that was capable of accommodating singularities but was itself in no way

singular. "XI

37 Consider Deleuze and Guattari's renunciation of authorship, here: "The Two of us wrote Anti- Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd" (ATP 3). 198

"Goodbye male-dominated left, " or, presencing futurity

Divided between doing away with the past and ushering in the future, the Manifesto seeks to produce the arrival of the 'modern revolution' through an act of self-foundation and self-creation: we, standing here and now, must act!

-Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution 2

Signaled by the "women take over rat" notice as an essay that lays out "the blatant sexism of RAT' so well that it needed no further reiteration up front, Robin

Morgan's "Goodbye to all that" is something of a centerpiece to a newspaper without centre, a manifesto situated in the moment of takeover. More important than its specific criticisms of RAT staffers, Morgan's essay let loose on the entire "male- dominated left" (the name stenciled onto the side of a sinking cruise ship that is drawn into the second page of the article while, onshore, four women watch, dance, wave, and sing "bye bye baby bye bye"). According to Morgan, the takeover of certain "pornzines" might have been more obvious, but taking over was "reserved for something at least worth taking over," and the most obviously vile publications

"should just be helped not to exist - by any means necessary" (6). Morgan's essay is direct in its condemnation of 7" staff and other "movement leaders" because RAT was part of an entire movement worth saving, oozing with potential but fundamentally stratified. To label Morgan's piece as a "manifesto" is to recognize that it is marked by forward orientation in a moment of suspension. 199 If the left was merited in its championing of race, why was it so quick to turn a blind eye on gender? As Morgan puts it, "two evils pre-date capitalism and have been clearly able to survive and post-date socialism: sexism and racism." Using

Mao's well-known terminology regarding the primacy of anti-imperialist struggle,

Morgan remarks that "Women were the first property when the Primary

Contradiction occurred: when one half of the human species decided to subjugate the other half because it was 'different,' alien, the Other" (7, emphasis added). How could the movement's men wave their red books and champion racial struggles while not only ignoring women, but perpetuating women's subjugation? Morgan makes use of Mao, and appropriates other new left and countercultural discourse in the process of staking a claim from within the movement (lashing out at John Sinclair's atrociously misogynistic comments while at the same time using the title of an MC5 album to point out that, "this time, we're going to kick out all the jams, and the boys will have to hustle just to keep up" (7). If manifestoes are about both establishing a present / presence and a future, what Morgan's "Goodbye" makes clear is that women are already there, leftist discourses are already theirs, and they are moving on.

It would be misleading to consider the women's movement that the paper represented as being something of a catch-all for a left that was without internal antagonisms; "Goodbye to all that" both takes on and embodies these divisions.

Although women from Weatherman (as it was still called at the beginning of 1970) were part of the RAT collective that put the issue together, Morgan did not spare the 200 group in her critique of the emergent new left. Evaluating the group in which many movement women found themselves, Morgan disparages the women who joined the group for renouncing "their own radical feminism for that last grab at male

approval," offering an important public criticism of the female-saturated but, as personal and public accounts had revealed, male-dominated group. Morgan was particularly skeptical of the group's adoption of the policy of smashing monogamy as

a cornerstone for practical solidarity. As women had learned from experience,

Morgan argues, the "theory of free sexuality" tended to translate into the "practice of

sex on demand for males" (6). At the conclusion of Morgan's paragraph on

Weatherman, the group is forcefully swept aside, given the same treatment as the other perpetrators and perpetuators of the counterfeit male-dominated left: "Goodbye to the illusion of strength when you run hand in hand with your oppressors; goodbye to the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea" (6). Though Morgan's warning is an important reminder that Weather women should do everything they can to ensure that their newfound positions in the left are more than tokenistic, it also, in effect, expresses something of a lack of faith,

38 One of the most remarkable things about RAT over the course a five month post-takeover stretch is the dialogue that persists between Weatherman (written, for the most part, by an anonymous "Weatherwoman" meaning that it was via the organization's women that the WUO's positions were reported) and its detractors, either side representing diametric opposites within the dispersed collective. Without erasing their differences, the paper conveys a synthesis of sorts. The manner in which Bernadine Dohrn's "Declaration of a State of War" appears in 7" makes for a good representative example. Announcing the impending attack on "a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice," the first official communique of the "Weatherman Underground," published in RAT under the "Weather Report" headline that had become a virtual staple in RAT, is immediately followed by an unsigned "Weather Retort," an italically-rendered response to the statement that critiques both the sexism of its references and its stated decision that violence was the way to advance the movement's interests. See Dohrn "WAR: Weather Report," a reprint of "Declaration of a State of War," and the anonymous "Weather Retort." 201 or, in any case, a belief that statements made by Weather women were either disingenuous or naive.

The placement of Morgan's article within the issue is in itself an interesting and instructive matter. That her article is placed just after a testimonial from "Inside the weather machine" - written by "A Weather woman" - which celebrates and affirms the Weather practice of "smashing monogamy" did not mean that the rat collective had decided to lay the paper out in such a fashion that Morgan was to get the last word (and do away with Weatherman once and for all). What it did mean was that women in the movement, regardless of their respective commitments and constituencies, would be recognized in the pages of RAT, given the space that they had been denied pre-liberation. On the other side of Morgan's article are the items regarding Kathleen Cleaver and Affeni Shakur, a reminder to the dullest of feminism's critics that writing a feminist manifesto did not mean an end to all other political subjects. Where the article before Morgan's is signed by a

"Weatherwoman," and the items on the proceeding page are devoted to Panthers,

Morgan signs her manifesto WITCH (in this instance of the acronym which was given various configurations at the turn of the seventies, Women Inspired To Commit

Herstory39), which is just one of the feminist "organizations" that took part in

39 As Morgan notes, "Goodbye" marked "the debut of the word 'herstory'" (Word of a Woman 51). WITCH was subject to a number of configurations starting in 1968. While the original WITCH title was Women's International Conspiracy from Hell, Morgan notes that: on Mother's Day one coven became Women Infuriated at Taking Care of Hoodlums; another group, working at a major Eastern insurance corporation, became Women Indentured to Traveler's Corporate Hell; still another set of infiltrators, working at Bell Telephone, manifested themselves disruptively as Women Incensed at 202 assembling the issue, a reminder that, from the beginning, it was always a question of feminisms.

That ideological and personal gaps were never entirely bridged - arguments between politicos and feminists, a major divide used to characterize a rift at the core of women's liberation, were a constant in liberated RAT- does not mean that the biweekly product did not go some ways towards achieving this feat in print. In some ways, this is simply to say that the pages of RAT made it glaringly obvious that

"politicos" had as much a stake in feminism as the "feminists" did in politics, or, in other words, that it was as reductive to consider the former of anti-feminism as it was to argue that the latter was apolitical. The line of articles that continued to pour into

RAT over the next number of months - articles which, at times, decidedly articulated one or the other side of this divide - represented not only the coexistence of these positions within the women's liberation movement, but stood as juxtaposed testaments to the fact that the positions were in no way mutually exclusive; it was never quite so simple as judging an article to sit on one or the other side of the politico/feminist fence. Important articles on abortion, midwifery, and lesbianism mobilized readers around protests, shared information regarding access to services, and fostered the creation of communities.40 Alongside these articles was a constant

Telephone Company Harassment. When hexing inflationary prices at supermarkets, a Midwest coven appeared as Women's Independent Taxpayers, Consumers, and Homemakers; Women Interested in Toppling Consumption Holidays was another transfigutory appellation - and the latest heard at this writing is Women Inspired to Commit Herstory." ("WITCH Documents" 538-539) 40 Regarding abortion, see, in particular, "Abortion," an article which announces a march concerning impending legalization legislation in New York and which carries eye-opening statistics regarding the 203 stream of coverage regarding the BPP, NLF, FLQ, and WUO. Beyond simple juxtaposition, the items are interwoven on a more profound level: an imprisoned

member of the WUO is given coverage because she is 3 lA months pregnant and does

not have enough money to make bail to get an abortion;41 interviews are run with

women in the New York women's house of detention in order to expose the lack of

important women's health services available to them;42 and women's work in Cuban

fields is attributed to the creation of a national daycare program which was "crucial to

women's ability to become active in production" (while the persistence of machismo

in Latin American media and in the fields was subject to sharp criticism43). Rather

prevalence of illegal abortions in New York and the economics involved in access; and "Women unite," a map that indicates the abortion laws in each state with a legend that indicates the only circumstances under which access is granted (the categories included are life, health, physical health, mental health, physical deformity, forcible rape, statutory rape, incest, time limit, m.d. approval, residency), and which provides dates when each of the states' present abortion laws were passed. Regarding midwifery, see "Modern Midwifery," which explains the procedures and options associated with the practice. RAT also printed a questionnaire entitled "Are Doctors Pigs," headed with information regarding the importance of gynecology to sustained health of women and preponderance of bad gynecologists. The questionnaire was meant to weed out bad offices and doctors, and the results were to be collated and published in RAT and in pamphlet form and distributed to women's liberation groups. Regarding lesbianism, there were articles by women in the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in almost every liberated issue. See, in particular, articles regarding systemic persecution of lesbians by police, at workplaces, and in high schools and universities ("Out of the closets and into the streets"); four pages of coming out stories, meant to humanize the process and to encourage others to follow suit ("Women are the Revolution"); and a report from a woman who was part of the Lavender Menace group explaining how they intervened during the "Congress to Unite Women" in order to put lesbianism on a Women's Liberation map that had, until that point, been ignoring its existence in the movement ("Women's liberation is a lesbian plot").

41 See "Free Dionne and Joan." Beyond raising awareness of the issues, the article announces the establishment a bail fund for Dionne Donghi.

42 See, in particular, "Bail Fund" and "Tear down the walls!" 43 See New York Area Venceremos Brigade, "Women in Cuba" and "Women in Cuba..." See also "Revolutionaries are unfit mothers," a letter regarding tactics being used against movement women like denial of prenatal care in prison. In particular, the letter attempts to mobilize around the case of Robin Gish, who was deemed an unfit mother and had her daughters taken away when she went to 204 than articulating a specific RAT ideology, or printing the perspectives that would suggest that there was one, articles appeared from each of the many constituencies that had a stake in the movement. What the paper made clear was that each of these fronts had everything to do with women, but that contextualizing the women's liberation movement as being a movement in and for itself would be counterintuitive and counterproductive: if feminism were bracketed, women would continue to be excluded from the movement, but, in this case, by women, not men, and this involved an immediate and difficult negotiation of identity politics.

In many ways, the question at the heart of liberated RAT was "what does the revolutionary subject look like?". As Martha Shelley argued in an article entitled

"Making the revolution," articulating just what the revolution is involves "a process of finding out who you are, and what you can do. Sometimes it means running dances, or selling papers, or saying NO to the Mafia. Sometimes it means bombing pig stations. To me it always means being what I want to be and not a thing - worker, baby-factory, consumer - to be used by somebody else" (24). That RAT did not define itself meant that it refused to liberate women into a mould that would set the parameters of what it was to be a woman in the movement, but this also meant that those who were more decided about the particulars of this position were very critical of the newspaper; it left itself open to criticism from all sides, making it a tricky space to defend. In the face of such attacks, a letter signed by "a rat worker" described the

Cuba with the New York Area Venceremos Brigade. The letter argues that the case is part of a norm dissuading women from engaging in the movement. 205 collective's editorial structure and the procedures that comprised the compilation

of all issues:

Our structure is like this - we do all of the work and no men work on the paper. That is, all of us take a day in the office, write articles, make editorial decisions, hawk the papers, do layout, do distribution, go to the printer, do mailing, etc., etc. No one is in charge of any major function. Our meetings are unchaired and chaotic. Every Friday night we have open collective meetings at 6 where we decide on policy and select articles to be printed. These meetings are held in the office and any woman wishing to work with us is welcome. Welcome also are any articles women want to submit. The decisions about whether or not to print any article are made in the open Friday collective meetings and any woman wishing to discuss an article should come .... We honestly don't think ourselves to be the paper that meets the needs of all women. To the extent that we are failing to meet the needs of many women, we are trying to improve the content of the paper and welcome suggestions. We really have worked hard on the process of evolving a work collective that is genuinely open, non-elitist, and non leader-oriented. The paper is a place for each of us to start to live out as much of our potential as this whole endeavor can extract from us. (A Rat Worker 2)

The revolutionary subject was the collective, free from strata in both constitution and

speech: RAT articulated itself according to collective will, not the will of a centralized and closed editorial group. Frustrated by the request that she tone down the identifiable style of her writing, Morgan left RAT within months of the takeover, pursuing other projects. While I am not willing to argue that collective writing is the answer to the problem of bourgeois individualism, Morgan's retrospective assessment of her RAT experiences is disappointing. When Morgan reflects that RAT s feminism was foiled because the collective "had to keep covering issues that were interesting to

[men], to win their approval" (Word of a Woman 52), she is, in effect, becoming complicit in the act of denying women access to the political issues that the liberated 206 newspaper covered, arguing that they are somehow "men's" issues when the real problem was that they were considered as such in the first place.44 Women had been present in the movement since its very beginnings and, as such, they were inherent in, and co-producers of, all of the movement's more particular facets and constituencies.

Reachings out from within

If men doubted women's leadership capabilities and excluded women from positions of leadership within the movement in general, the all-female RAT collective, during this time, did not simply prove themselves capable of occupying roles that had traditionally been reserved for men - never the point - but took hold of the reins of a widely distributed newspaper in order to articulate the significant issues that were not being covered by male-dominated leftist media. They did not do this on

44 As Gary Thiher points out in an editorial that appears in the third issue after the paper had been taken over: The whole situation became even more confused when the two camps turned out to be divided not only along lines of sex, but also on matters of political outlook and journalistic style. The first women's issue had projected an exaggerated militance, a somewhat apolitical moralism and total lack of humor. (The second mellowed a bit.) While many male staffers were willing to see female editorship, they did not want RAT to espouse a line that they could not support. The women - understandably, and in some cases correctly - considered this argument as no more than a means of dodging the issue of sexism. And, of course, it would have defeated the whole purpose of female editorship if the women had agreed to hew to those views which the men approved. (2) Thiher's editorial is, in many ways, as condescending about the women's liberated issues as it is candid about the necessity of the takeover (the editorial staffs decision to twice "accede" to the women's collective - first for a week and then, the next week, indefinitely - is brandished as what he hopes will be a "first step" in grinding away "one of the pillars in this oppressive culture"). Particularly notable is the counterpoint that Thiher's account provides when read against Morgan's account of the run. Rather than being radical for the sake of male approval, Thiher's account makes clear that the politics that were avowed in RAT pages were written in spite of men, without concern for male approval and, in fact, in terms that ran completely counter to the political positions of many of the men who had been involved in the running of the paper. 207 their own as a closed collective. Rather, the collective remained open to all willing participants and to whatever issues they brought to bear on the liberated newspaper. Beyond being open, they inspired other women to follow suit: letters poured in, there were takeovers of other underground newspapers, and the paper became, in part, a medium that linked women's collectives together across the entire country without missing a beat in keeping up with other movement news and politics.

The movement was characterized as such - had momentum - because, at its best, it recognized that assemblages are characterized by relations of exteriority. At the turn of the seventies, RAT s becoming-sophomoric (as Alpert put it) marked a process by which it was beginning to favour the interiority of its relations, the closing off of its concerns. The sex and porn issue of RAT- conceived according to the uncritical executive decision of a couple of male editors at the helm of the celebrity underground paper - was simply a catalytic example of what was becoming typical of

RAT I movement behaviour towards women: women, in spite of their numbers in, and contributions to, the movement, were always treated secondarily, as operating in relation to the movement, which was "male." This was especially true of the concerns that women had begun to voice regarding the oppression of their sex, which were treated as secondary struggles, not a part of the immediately tangible class war being waged against American Empire. Men were assumed to be the centre of the movement, and women (as secretary, as object of the male gaze, as activist) were relegated to their periphery. To argue that the movement was characterized by relations of interiority at this juncture is to argue that the movement was phallocentric 208 (which is not to say that the movement was instrinsically male, but that it was being organized as such). Assemblage theory is useful because it allows us not simply to criticize the dominant but to direct the potential of configurations elsewhere by recognizing and recuperating points that have hitherto only been articulated in relation to the dominant (a centripetal movement: all forces reined in and articulated by the speaking male subjects at centre).

If phallocentrism is the product of an assemblage reduced to its relations of interiority, as Manuel Delanda points out in his book on assemblage theory, what

"relations of exteriority guarantee [is] that assemblages may be taken apart while at the same time allowing that the interactions between parts may result in a true synthesis" (11). Just as the orchid would not be without the wasp (an example of

Deleuze's propensity towards ecosystems as opposed to organisms) the newspaper, and the larger movement which it represented, would not be without its women, whose subjection demanded attention and rectification. Men's fear that the women's liberation movement would somehow highjack the movement as no other contingency had (the inclusion of a contingency's struggle being so saturating that it would distract the movement from all other struggles) was rendered unfounded by the paper that the open collective of Rat-women produced. Rather than subjectifying struggle, women's liberation included women's struggle within the movement, arguing the existent and important link between women and revolution while continuing to reach out to the movement's other constituencies. As such, post- liberation, week-to-week, the paper's layout laid bare a complex set of internal 209 syntheses forged of relations of exteriority. As Deleuze and Guattari say of becomings-woman, animal, and minor: "a becoming minoritarian exists only by virtue of a deterritorialized medium and subject.... You don't deviate from the majority unless there is a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off' {ATP

292). What made the takeover of RAT so powerful was that it was as much about the

liberation of women as it was about women's liberation of the movement from its

majoritarian tendencies: the becoming-woman of RAT. Women's-liberated RAT was a

deterritorialized medium featuring a deterritorialized subject. By 1971 it was right there in the title - Women's LibeRATion - a "little detail" that had swelled, carrying

RAT away. In the context of the liberated paper, woman was complex, multifaceted,

and impossible to pin down.

Conclusion: Reassembling Post-structuralism

Like university professors in search of a new paradigm, students were looking

for revolutions, but not scientific ones. Internationally, for large contingencies of

students, paradigm shifts that came in the form of updated scientific apparati (or new

forms of standardized testing) ran counter to a logic of revolution which was not only

aimed outside of university walls but also, to a large extent, resistant to science. As

Foucault argues, the student movements of 1968 "endowed themselves with a strong

reference to Marxism and, at the same time, have insisted on a violent critique vis-a-

vis the dogmatic Marxism of parties and institutions" ("Structuralism and Post-

structuralism" 434-435). They were extremely suspicious, in other words, with the 210 limitations imposed by doctrine. This suspicion was as true of the turn away from the PCF as it was of the students' spurning of Althusser, Barthes, and Lacan. The

movements of the turn of the seventies were being driven in multiple directions, in

pursuit of diverse interests at once, but rather than pulling apart, these interests were

assembled together into an ever-expanding movement: it was always about

movement, never teleology. The sixties were successful in spearheading a vast array

of revolutionary movements - pertaining to class, gender, race, sexuality, and so on -

because the events of the sixties were accumulated as points in an ongoing process of

movement-building.

As I explained in my first chapter, the Structuralism that arrived in Baltimore

in 1966 was re-articulated at the turn of the seventies (and again for consecration as

Post-Structuralism at the turn of the eighties) eliding the "'68 years" in the process. In

my second chapter, I explained via cobblestones how students in Paris and New York

were communicating with each other about their turning away from the university at the same time as university disciplines sought out replacement paradigms in an

attempt to "modernize" academic fields. In literary studies, the result of the event of

Post-structuralism was little more than a continuation of the long twentieth-century

formalist project couched in a new language for looking at texts. The crisis in the university, however, had to do with a shift in coordinate points due to a suspension of

belief in the modernist discourse on progress, at base in students' turn away from the university. 211 This chapter argues that the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari in particular belongs here, upon this other displaced (extra-academic) terrain. It is in the underground press that we find a pre-enactment of their (never metaphorical) rhizome. By following Jean-Jacques Lebel, we see Deleuze and Guattari appear in

RAT, collected together and dispersed as the streets of Paris in New York, as affinity

groups in Chicago, or as fences coming down at Woodstock. The question "How do you make yourself a Body without Organs?" crosses the Atlantic and comes back

again before Deleuze and Guattari pose it in Anti-Oedipe and Mille-Plateaux.

Although shifting points of entry for Deleuze and Guattari into America

means moving away from the grounds consecrated as Post-structuralism in the

Anglo-American academy, my point is not simply to critique this position. Rather

than delimiting grounds to critique - and therefore remaining trapped in the limits of

a field - it is more productive to recognize that in between and within these points are

other assemblages which can do the work of whisking away these delimited scripts.

What we find when Deleuze and Guattari are reterritorialized in the movement is just

that: movement without teleology, without determinate end, from organization to

articulation, the type of work that Bruno Latour, pushed by the work of Deleuze and

Guattari, calls assemblage-building.

Towards the end of Re-assembling the Social, Latour notes that the procedures

involved in ANT can be summarized by way of a short list. If, as Latour points out,

ANT is accused of being apolitical, filling in Latour's summary with some of the 212 movements that I have chronicled in the preceding pages goes some way towards demonstrating the utility of Latour's type of thinking:

the question of the social emerges when the ties in which one is entangled begin to unravel [what had been the general entanglement of youth in "the establishment" became the entanglements of pre- liberation RAT which, in spite of its rhetorical pretensions, failed to reach out to other contingencies];

the social is further detected through the surprising movements from one association to the next [from the movement as alternate points to the collective-assembling, liberated RA 7];

those movements can either be suspended or resumed [what was suspended by RAT is resumed in its liberation, lines are offered up for resumption];

when they are prematurely suspended, the social as normally construed is bound together with already accepted "social actors" who are members of a "society" [from all but youth establishment to a sophomoric society: the "male-dominated left"];

when the movement toward collection is resumed, it traces the social as associations through many non-social entities which might become participants later [women in: Weatherman, the BPP, China, Cuba, prison, already actors but simply not recognized as such];

if pursued systematically, this tracking may end up in a shared definition of a common world ... a collective [the ultimate lesson to be learnt from liberated RAT] (247)

My purpose, here, is not to offer some sort of note of validation for the politics of

ANT, but to demonstrate the way in which thinking about assemblages is key to the construction of (an) enduring movement. It is also to say that, if part of my project is to locate allies for "French Theory" in America, as Deleuze and Guattari had predicted, these allies were already there, and already active at the time of their 213 writing Anti-Oedipus. Women's LibeRATion emphasizes that locating such allies is not as simple as arguing for a regime change (out from the academy and into the streets). The systematic pursuit of a common world involves perpetual negotiation, the forging of external relations, and a delicate negotiation of (externally oriented) internal syntheses. To put it more simply, perhaps, what a search for allies involves is the bringing together of constituencies that are themselves characterized by their reaching out. 214 Chapter Four.

Foucault, the Groupe d'Information sur les prisons, and the Black Panther Party

The Groupe d'Information sur les prisons (GIP) was a prison information group conceived in 1971 in response to a rash of high-profile hunger strikes in French prisons in 1970-71. Whereas the hunger strikes were conducted by members of the

Gauche proletarienne who wanted to be treated as political prisoners - demanding special conditions like access to books, newspapers, and better visitation rights - the strikers modified their demands at the beginning of 1971, demanding better conditions for all prisoners. The announcement of these revised aims coincided with

Foucault's own announcement regarding the creation of the GIP, a group of magistrates, lawyers, journalists, doctors, and psychologists who had assembled to collect and publish information regarding prisons, one of the most hidden and secretive regions in the French social system. Over the course of its two years in existence, the prison information group published dozens of articles in mainstream and alternative newspapers, mobilized targeted protests outside of prisons, and published five pamphlets. The pamphlets that the GIP produced, and most of the articles that they penned, have not been translated, meaning that the insights that they provide into the Foucauldian corpus remain virtually untapped in Anglo-American work on Foucault. Drawing on this brief moment (1970-1972), my chapter will bring this activist work to bear on the Foucauldian corpus.

My aim is to expand the French theory assemblage in America. In this chapter

I will demonstrate how the French Theory assemblage, via Foucault, is inclusive of 215 the Black Panther Party (BPP). Foucault, under the auspices of the GIP, was a conduit for the speech of others; part of the task of Foucault studies should then be to allow for the entrance of other, enriching, diversifying and, ultimately, related voices.

Why is it that Foucault's political interests and interventions are eclipsed by the development of his thought while occupying various chairs (most notably, his chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the prestigious College de France, but also as the Melodia E. Jones Chair at SUNY-Buffalo in 1972)? While following the trajectory of concepts that Foucault invents and develops over the course of his academic career is certainly not without merit, if these developments are delimited and stripped from their context, Foucault's thought is rendered as though it was produced in an academic vacuum. In order to recover this context, the object of study must be broadened: from the intellectual as subject, responsible for an oeuvre, to the ever-growing assemblage out of which intellectual work is produced.

My chapter is divided into two sections. In this first section I describe how

Foucault and Huey P. Newton overlap via Nietzsche in their understanding of, and interest in, discourse and the will to knowledge. When we look at Foucault alongside the BPP, a Foucault-Nietzsche-Newton assemblage emerges which demonstrates for us the strategic use to which discourses can be put. In the second section, I analyze what Foucault's performance as a "third party relay" - transmitting the speech of others - means in the context of the Foucauldian oeuvre. If a large part of what

Foucault did with the GIP was to act as a relay for the speech of prisoners, I am employing Foucault for this role again here, for the admission of other subjects in the 216 place of Post-structuralism. Via displacement, arrivals - not Foucault in New

York for a lectureship at SUNY, but Foucault in New York for a visit to Attica - are plugged into other networks.

Foucault-Nietzsche-Newton

In his recent article "Foucault and the Black Panthers," Brady Thomas Heiner boldly states that if Foucault had not been exposed to BPP writings and the black

liberation movement in the United States, "it is quite reasonable to assume that there would be no 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,' no Discipline and Punish and no theory of biopolitics; he would not have set out to theorize the institution of the prison, discourse as power-knowledge or sought after the historical sources that he

did in 'writing a history of the present'" (337). In large part due to the state of

Foucault's archives - only Foucault's public lectures and published texts have been made available - Heiner is forced to make statements, throughout his article, such as:

"Genet assuredly put Davis's and Jackson's writings in Foucault's hands at this time"

(318). Because no evidence exists which can "assure" us one way or the other, we must replace "assuredly" with "perhaps."1 Although the article does a good job of

1 It is difficult to argue that the BPP had as profound an intellectual impact on Foucault as Heiner alleges. Besides Daniel Defert's passing indication that Foucault expressed interest in BPP writing in 1968 (33), the most concrete instance of Foucault's reading of BPP texts is in the form of the interviews that were translated into French and included in the GIP pamphlet devoted to the assassination of George Jackson. From here we could move outwards to include works that were translated into French quite early on, such as Philip Foner's collection The Black Panthers Speak (Les panther es noires par lent, 1971), the writings of Eldridge Cleaver (whose works did not only garner rapid translation [Un noir a I'hombre, 1969; Panthere noire, 1970] but who was living in exile in France between 1972 until his surrender to American authorities in 1975) and George Jackson (Les freres de soledad, 1971), as well as a slew of obscure pamphlets and underground articles that locating sites where the BPP and Foucault intersect, Heiner's fetishization of the

BPP as origin is tenuous; it diverts attention from the more productive task - which he otherwise begins to accomplish - of uncovering and learning from those sites where overlap does occur.

There is no sense in painting deterministic relationships between individuals and/or groups; when an unexplored relationship is recognized, an opportunity to further flesh out historical and conceptual understanding reveals itself and a new field of possibilities emerges. Rather than determinatively stating that Foucault's

"Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" was a product of real and speculative encounters with the Panthers, as Heiner does, the more productive question we should be asking is what might we learn from Foucault's overlap with the BPP regarding Nietzsche and the genealogical method?

As I stated in my first chapter, the importance of Nietzsche to Foucault, particularly at the turn of the seventies, was profound. James Miller's unconventional

Foucault biography argues this point exhaustively. From what we know about

Foucault and the context he was writing in, there was already a lot of interest in

Nietzsche when he wrote the "Genealogy" essay in 1971. The creative Nietzschean philosophy of Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and the work of Pierre

Klossowski were of major influence on Foucault, and his contemporaries Deleuze, appeared in France with regularity. A photograph of a GIP meeting that was being held in the office of the Agence de Presse Liberation captures an office where photographs of Angela Davis, Jackson, and the Women's Liberation struggle in the United States cover the walls (Artieres et al 196). Among these posters is a communique by the Weather Underground, detailing their symbolic action following Jackson's assassination in San Quentin. While Foucault's exposure to BPP and movement writings is indisputable, it is impossible to determine exactly which essays and books he read. 218 Barthes, Lyotard, and Derrida turned to Nietzsche as a serious philosopher with important insights regarding questions of metaphysics and truth. Foucault's infamous genealogy essay itself was collected in a book paying homage to Jean Hyppolite

(Hommage a Jean Hyppolite). In order to stake determinate and foundational claim for the BPP upon this ground, all of these diverse relationships through which

Nietzsche is simultaneously being mediated would have to be accounted for and treated secondarily, as if they were of inferior influence on Foucault. Such a claim is particularly frivolous since research which aims to fill a void left by Foucault's silence on the Panthers would end up filling that void - once again - with the figures and signifiers conventionally used to explore and explain the relationship between

Nietzsche and Foucault (as I have myself just done). If the BPP is missing in Foucault and Foucault studies alike, the more useful approach is to provide the BPP with the space that they have heretofore been denied.

Although the place of Nietzsche in Foucault's thought is well documented, the same is not the case for Nietzsche's place in the theories and practices of the BPP.

When the intellectual origins of the BPP are considered, Mao's red book (sold on streetcorners and at fundraisers to finance the Party in its beginnings), the late speeches of Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth are generally acknowledged; these are texts that were often assigned as required membership reading in a Party for whom education was a fundamental principle. The thinkers and groups that influenced the Party's continuously developing philosophy, however, were diverse and scattered. Huey P. Newton, who taught himself to read during his late-teenage years using Plato and a dictionary as his first guides, was an avid reader the moment he acquired the skill. As co-founder, Minister of Defense, and primary ideologue for the Party, Newton's essays, speeches, and his 1973 book

Revolutionary Suicide are essential guides to the history, historical analyses, conceptual bases, and strategies of the BPP.

Newton's Revolutionary Suicide most lucidly renders the key role that

Nietzsche played in the development of BPP strategy. Alongside long passages on

Mao, Lenin, Malcolm X, Marx, and Fanon in Revolutionary Suicide, Newton writes about how Nietzsche's ideas, from Will to Power in particular, "had a great impact on the development of the Black Panther Party" (163). In a chapter on "Raising

Consciousness," Newton points out that Nietzsche's thought was important "because

Nietzsche was writing about concepts fundamental to all men, and particularly about the meaning of power," a concept that was "pertinent to the way Black people live in the United States" (163, emphasis added). If Foucault devoted years to analyses of the relationship between power and knowledge - which collided in the concept of discourse - Newton's focus on Nietzsche is likewise rooted in a careful analysis of the manner in which, and the institutions through which, discourse circulates.

Newton's analysis of Nietzsche is not only correspondent with Foucault's own; the application that arises from his reading demonstrates how effective strategic implementation of Nietzsche can be. Because, as Newton points out, good and evil are just value judgments behind which resides the will to power, the BPP recognized that "words could be used not only to make Blacks more proud but to make whites 220 question and even reject concepts they had always unthinkingly accepted"

(Revolutionary Suicide 165). One of the examples that Newton provides of his employment of Nietzsche is the adoption of the word "pig" to refer to police officers.

Racism was systemic in police departments, and it was enforced on the streets in the form of false charges, routine beatings, and murder. Police officers were uniformed in order to garner respect in their role as representatives and enforcers of the law; the word pig was used to reverse the power relationship between community and oppressor. Use of the term was a precisely calculated discursive strategy that considered: the well-established theological and literary roots of the negative connotations that the pig generated; the rural backgrounds of many black people and police officers (many of whom were recruited from the South); the term's race- neutrality (it would likely be adopted by white youth assaulted by police at protests against the war and the draft); and the probable ineffectiveness of counter-campaigns unless coupled with a concrete change in behaviour (Revolutionary Suicide 166).

Nietzsche's theories were useful to the BPP because they highlighted the importance of language, and the way that language has always been, and remained available to be, put to strategic use for the purpose of manipulating and maintaining a position of power. Nietzsche's theories promoted a special historical sensitivity: excavation into the historical use of terms and an understanding of the present context for the purpose of overcoming it.

2 For further reflections on the adoption of the word "pig" see Cleaver, Soul on Fire 91-92; and Seale, Seize the Time 404-407 and A Lonely Rage 199-205. 221 Nietzsche's philosophy was also crucial to the crafting of the BPP slogan

"all power to the people." The infamous expression, Newton explains, had political

and economic dimensions; it encompassed the BPP's goals of creating community programs around which the people could be organized, the creation of a community

for the people, which the people would be willing to defend. The statement was not

only economic because it described an alternative to monopoly capitalism (in which

stores in black communities were only allowed to operate if they contributed to the

BPP "Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren" program, for example), it was a statement

which, at an absolutely fundamental level, considered power in economic terms:

"Because all power comes from the people," Newton explains, "all power must

ultimately be vested in them. Anything else is theft" {Revolutionary Suicide 167-168);

the people are the progenitors of power. The expression, Newton explains, is based on

"the idea of man as God. I have no other God but man" (Revolutionary Suicide 168).

Upon exploring the Judeo-Christian understanding of God, and recognizing the way

that religion extolled the idea of reward in the afterlife, Newton took it upon himself

to "convinc[e] Black people that their rewards [are] due in the present.... [W]hen

man clings to the idea of a God, whom he has created and placed in the heavens,"

Newton explains, "he actually reduces himself and his own potential" {Revolutionary

Suicide 169). The slogan "all power to the people" describes an economy in which

power is not vertically distributed but both the product and property of the people. In

order for black people to overcome their situation in the United States, their position 222 had to be understood in its historical and ideological dimensions; the power of the people was the power to immediately create better conditions together.

Just as slogans alone were not enough for police officers to shake the label

"pig," it was necessary for the BPP to couple such slogans with concrete action. They did so in the form of Community Patrols, demonstrating that black people had the right to defend their community from racist police, reversing the accepted coupling of law arid outlaw in the process.3 Whereas Foucault used his status as an intellectual to provide a venue for the voices of others who would not, otherwise, have had access to speech, the BPP - who did not have access to the same information network that was reserved for intellectuals (in France, in particular) - used language, actions, and art to articulate the becoming of a people who would secure for themselves venues for speech, action, and basic human dignities. As a recruiting strategy, the BPP maintained a high public profile, conducting media-garnering protests and campaigns.

As Jane Rhodes argues in Framing the Black Panthers, the Panthers' media savvy was at the heart of both their success and demise. The effect of this demise lingers: the image of black men with berets and guns remains, but, for the most part, the image has been severed from its context and emptied of its content (accordingly, the

BPP is routinely dismissed as a group of stubborn militants, gangsters, or, at worst, terrorists). In context, however, the media-captured images signaled a much deeper network being forged amongst black communities in the United States and abroad.

3 See, in particular, Erik Erikson's analysis of BPP iconography in Huey P. Newton and Erik K. Erikson In Search of Common Ground 45-46. 223 After establishing Community Patrols, a necessary protection against police brutality and murder, the BPP established people's programs at an exponential rate: free breakfast for schoolchildren, free food for entire communities, free shoes, free clothing, escorts for elderly people, free plumbing, free health clinics, liberation schools, and so on.4

Although Newton and Foucault were not directly correspondent, that they were simultaneously inspired by Nietzsche's ideas is significant. What we should ask, considering that Newton and Foucault were temporally and conceptually correspondent, is: what is it that made Nietzsche such a useful thinker at the time? In

"Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" Foucault states that "it is necessary to master history," to free the "historical sense ... from the demands of a suprahistorical history" (385). As such, the genealogical method was an important supplement to archeology, which grasped discursive formations in isolation or series but was ill- equipped to deal with the movement from one episteme to the next. In place of the

"historical sense," Nietzsche proposes "effective history," one of whose characteristics, Foucault explains, is that "[i]ts perception is slanted, [it is] a deliberate appraisal, affirmation, or negation" (382). What Newton and Foucault both understood from their reading of Nietzsche was that established narratives are interested and it is important to both expose that interest and to grant exposure for the affirmation of alternative narratives and possibilities. This Nietzschean lesson

4 A list of programs and descriptions can be found in David Hilliard's edited volume The Black Panther Party Service to the People Programs. 224 was a timely one during the '68 years that saw established governments, political parties and organizations, media outlets, and institutions such as the mental asylum and prison being called into question on a global scale.

There is certainly a difference between the way in which Foucault and

Newton encountered Nietzsche. Compared to someone like Foucault, who arrived at

Nietzsche after passing through the philosophical canon as a part of the aggregation, and as part of a developing interest in Nietzsche, Newton's reading of Nietzsche is necessarily different. While Newton writes of the strategic lessons he learnt from his encounter with The Will to Power (a text compiled by Nietzsche's sister from disjointed parts of his archive and therefore itself a problematic part of Nietzsche's oeuvre) in his autobiography, Foucault's "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" cites and manoeuvres through about ten of Nietzsche's books, each understood in the context of an oeuvre and as part of the development of a(n anti-)tradition. For Foucault, the genealogical method acted as a supplement to a method (archeology) that was inadequate on its own. Nietzsche was enjoying a revival in France as a way out of the philosophical tradition that allowed philosophers to invent themselves anew

(Nietzsche at the juncture of philosophy and literature in writers like Bataille,

Blanchot, and Deleuze). For Newton, outside of the context of this tradition,

Nietzsche's genealogy was a question of pragmatics, not nuance. That Foucault's analyses were discernibly compelled by Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals while

Newton cites only The Will to Power is notable in this respect. While Foucault's encounter with genealogy led to a crucial accentuation of the role of power in his 225 history of the present, Nietzsche provided for Newton grounds to understand how oppressors maintained their position of power, and how present conditions might strategically be overcome. Foucault's and Newton's Nietzschean overlap should be considered conjunctively: each helps to articulate what the other is thinking and doing.

While it is reductive to ascribe Foucault's genealogical turn to his reading of the BPP, Cornel West, based upon conversation with Foucault's life-partner Daniel

Defert, notes that the turn towards the "strategic and tactical" in Foucault's genealogical work comes from his reading of the BPP (270 n.27). Exactly which BPP texts Foucault read remains unclear, and explicit references to Nietzsche and the genealogical method in BPP writings are restricted to Revolutionary Suicide, published in 1973 (which post-dates Foucault's "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History").

The resonance between Foucault's and Newton's uses of Nietzsche, however, remains intriguing, all the more so considering Newton's choice of the Department of the History of Consciousness at UC Santa-Cruz for his pursuit of a doctoral degree in the mid-seventies (a program with obvious parallels to Foucault's own as the chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the College de France). The paths travelled by

Foucault and Newton, in other words, were not identical, nor did one have a determining effect on the other, but the resonance between the two is instructive and, as Heiner points out, virtually untapped. As I will point out in the next section, if genealogy provided direction about what might be done once discursive formations were more or less mapped out, Foucault's participation in the GIP was driven by the strategy to produce prison speech in order to give life to the delinquent.

Intolerable-Information: Foucault-Genet-Jackson Attica

Intolerable are: courts cops hospitals asylums school military service the press the television the State and therefore prisons.

The G.I.P. (Prison Information Group) does not propose to speak for prisoners from different prisons: it proposes on the contrary to give them the possibility to speak themselves, and to say what is happening in prisons. The goal of the G.I.P. is not reformist, we do not dream of an ideal prison: we hope that prisoners can relate what is intolerable in the repressive penal system. We will spread as quick as possible and as widely as possible the revelations made by the prisoners themselves. The only way to unify in a common struggle inside and outside the prison. 227 -GIP, "Enquete dans 20 prisons," back cover (my translation)5

The lyrically composed back cover blurb that adorns the first GIP pamphlet explains that the newly formed prison information group did not have reform in mind, nor did they envision some sort of ideal prison. The objective of the GIP was to act as a conduit, making prison-speech possible. Fundamentally, information needed to find passage through prison walls so that the public could learn about prison conditions. In

France, the prisons were among the most secretive institutions in the nation.

The pamphlets produced by the GIP followed this mandate carefully. Rather than providing a commentary on the French prison system, the GIP's first pamphlet makes available prisoners' responses to surveys that the GIP distributed at the beginning of 1971. The second GIP pamphlet, "Enquete dans une prison-modele:

Fleury-Merogis" (Investigation in a model prison: Fleury-Merogis) follows suit, providing firsthand accounts of life inside a particularly "modern" prison where inmates are solitarily confined for 23 hours of each day, a prison that had also been the site of uprisings throughout the month of May 1971 (the GIP pamphlet appeared in June). The pamphlets were printed not only to provide information on the intolerable conditions to which prisoners were subject, but also to report the voices

5 Sont intolerables: / les tribunaux / les flics / les hopitaux les asiles / l'ecole / le service militaire / la presse la / l'Etat / et d'abord les prisons. // Le G.I.P. (Groupe d'Information Prisons) / ne se propose pas de parler / pour les detenus des differentes prisons: / il se propose / au contraire / de leur donner la possibility de parler / eux-meme, / et de dire ce qui se passe dans les prisons. / Le but du GIP n'est pas reformiste, / nous ne rSvons pas d'une prison ideale: / nous souhaitons / que les prisonniers puissent dire / ce qui est intolerable / dans le systeme de la repression penale. / Nous devons repandre / le plus vite possible / et le plus largement possible / ces revelations / faites par les prisonniers memes. / Seul moyen pour unifier / dans une meme lutte / l'interieur et 1'exterieur de la prison. 228 behind a rash of uprisings which would otherwise be reducible to transgressive behaviour on the part of a population already on the other side of the law. In April

1972 the GIP published - under the initiative of Helene Cixous - a pamphlet entitled

"Cahiers de revendication sortis des prisons lors des recentes revokes" ("Book of demands released from prison during recent revolts") which made public tracts that were produced from the midst of a surge in prison revolts at the beginning of 1972.

The prisons whose tracts are included are printed on the cover - Toul, Loos-les-Lille,

Melun, Nancy, Fresnes, Nimes - and the introductory essay, signed by the GIP, announces that "Prisoners have taken speech!" The remainder of the 1972 booklet, per the GIP mandate, consists of documents produced from inside prison walls - declarations and demands - and the testimony of Dr. Edith Rose, a psychiatrist at

Toul.6 If the task of the GIP had been to "give [prisoners] the possibility to speak themselves," these GIP pamphlets accomplished that task, providing a venue for the speech of prisoners outside of prison walls (even if their bodies remained confined).

Beyond the simple movement of information across prison walls, the more complex operation that the movement of information performed was the act of desubj edification: information was the means whereby the "delinquent" could obliterate the reductive mould to which he or she was subject. If Foucault argues in

Discipline and Punish that the "delinquent" (characterized by his or her life) the

6 Rose's testimony regarding the conditions in Toul was widely circulated, not only in the GIP pamphlet, but also in La Cause du peuple and Le Monde. The result of Rose's testimony was an official inquiry into the conditions at Toul, where the string of prison uprisings began in 1972. See Macey 275-281, and Eribon 231-232. 229 successor of the "offender" (characterized by his or her act) appeared at the same time as the penitentiary technique - "the one extending from the other, as a technological ensemble that forms and fragments the object to which it applies its instruments" (255) - "to give [prisoners] the possibility to speak themselves," as the

GIP set out to do from the beginning, also involved the obliteration of discursive categories such as these, categories which obscure the complexity and humanity that resides in every cell.

Though this aspect of the project was evident from the beginning, the final two of the GIP's five pamphlets - composed of underground interviews with George

Jackson and the letters of a French prisoner who had recently committed suicide respectively - were decidedly devoted to the project of allowing the categorically dismissed - and recent casualties of the penal system - to speak themselves. Thus, the intolerable-infomation coupling - it was intolerable that there were thirty-seven suicides in French prison in 1972 (GIP, "Suicides de prisons" 8), and it was intolerable that a black man who allegedly stole $70 from a gas station was assassinated after serving eleven years of a one year to life sentence (GIP,

"L'assassinat de George Jackson" 3-4) - is deployed in such a fashion that reductive

(tactically measured) discursive categories are shattered by the uncontainable complexity that characterizes the speech of these recently deceased "delinquents."

It was Jean Genet who introduced not only Michel Foucault but the French and American public to the writing of George Jackson. Not only did Genet write the introduction to Soledad Brother, in May 1970, after having lived amongst the Black 230 Panthers in the United States, giving a number of talks on behalf of the BPP on university campuses, Genet returned to France with the express intension of establishing "Committees of Solidarity with the Black Panthers" in France and elsewhere ("Interview with Michele Manceaux" 302). Genet wrote articles and conducted interviews (on the condition that he speak of the Panthers and not his creative work) in Le Nouvel observateur, he gave public speeches and television addresses on the imprisonment of George Jackson and Angela Davis, and he circulated petitions in France that helped to build an international profile for their cases, demanding their immediate release. When George Jackson was assassinated, and when the Attica massacre followed quick on its heels, Genet responded in both

France and the United States, contributing articles to underground newspapers on either side of the Atlantic.

As Genet points out, the mainstream press only put forth certain facts, providing minute details in order to give an appearance of truth; what was always lacking was "the why and not the how - behind these facts" ("Angela and her

Brothers" 56). Listing Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, and George Jackson in an address to Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, white liberals, and "the white American nation,"

Genet argues that "[e]ver since you realized the intelligence of black Americans ... you have decided -1 repeat: decided - to annihilate them" ("Angela Davis is in your

Clutches" 65). By manipulating details and images, black struggles were reduced to violent and isolated instances of black rebellion and militancy. In response, using his status as internationally recognized writer (and former thief and prisoner, deepening 231 his affinities with George Jackson), Genet introduced Jackson's letters as an epistolary narrative that was both combat weapon and love poem (Introduction to

Soledad Brother 7), a book that was resolutely modern, situated, by Genet, alongside the writing of the Marquis de Sade, Antonin Artaud, and Richard Wright. In Genet's estimation, Jackson's book was both an important literary work and an instruction manual on the American prison system and fascism not only in America, but across the globe.

Fittingly, Genet also wrote the introduction for the GIP pamphlet on George

Jackson. As Edmund White notes in his biography of Genet, however, Genet demanded that his name not be included under the banner of the GIP, and was upset when he was told that the text he wrote would be included in one of their pamphlets

(568).7 Genet did not want to be included in the ranks of the GIP not because he did not support their project but because he did not want to be labeled a French intellectual. He was a poet (White 568). The "intellectual" label was riddled with a set of expectations, assumptions, and postures. This was not the case for the poet, an existence which allowed Genet to live amongst Black Panthers and Palestinians alike; he was not constrained within a country of origin, nor was he bound to a certain manner of intervening, or thinking.

7 The distinction between Genet and the GIP is noticeable at the outset of the pamphlet, on a Preface- facing notice which indicates that "The Preface was written by Jean Genet. The other texts were prepared by the Prison Information Group" ("La Preface a ete ecrite par Jean Genet. Les autres texts ont ete prepares par le Groupe d'lnformation sur les Prisons") (2, my translation). The note is uncharacteristic for the GIP, which published its texts under the banner of the collective and not an individual author, but it serves at the same time to distinguish Genet from the group. 232 Besides Genet's introduction to the volume and a chronology of events, the GIP pamphlet contained two interviews with Jackson. One of these - "La Lutte dans les prisons" - was taken from an issue of the Black Panther Party

Intercommunal News Service (BPPINS) that was dedicated to Jackson one week after his assassination.8 In an unprecedented move, the BPPINS issue consisted of writings by, and interviews with, the recently deceased Field Marshal of the BPP. On the one hand, it is significant that members of the GIP, including Foucault, had this particular issue of the BPPINS in their hands. In this sense, the issue marks an identifiable entry point for the BPP in general, and Jackson in particular, into GIP affairs. On the other hand, we need only advance to the next two issues of BPPINS to find Jean Genet in the form of a letter and an article written on Jackson's behalf. In Genet's letter, printed in a lengthy section devoted to "Letters for George Jackson from the People,"

Genet breaks down national bounds, arguing that no man "'belongs' to a country in which ... he just happens to be born" (Untitled L), asserting that Jackson's

"countiymen [sic]... [are] those of us who read, loved and admired his book ... entire peoples, whole countries of men for whom he wrote, deep in the bowels of

Soledad prison" (Untitled L). Rather than isolating the murder of Jackson, Genet situates Jackson within the larger community that is affected by the loss, collecting

8 The other interview included in the GIP pamphlet was "La Politique du Black Panther Party," pulled from the Berkeley Tribe, a popular movement-oriented UPS paper, originally published less than a month before Jackson was assassinated. The interview is directed towards the movement, demonstrating the manner in which Jackson's writing had become a reaching out, a manner of escaping the inescapable cell within which he had been imprisoned for the last decade (with seven and a half of those years spent in solitary confinement). During the ten months that separated the publication of Soledad Brother and his death at San Quentin, Jackson's writings were appearing in underground publications with increasing regularity. 233 for him the larger body that remains even after his own has perished. Lest

Jackson's ideas be interred with his body, Genet suggests that "[o]ne must do what he can to continue his actions and derive inspiration from his book. One can expect anything" (Untitled L). In the face of loss, Genet's article speaks to the community that surrounds Jackson's work and gestures towards an indeterminate future, pregnant with possibility. The letter is an inspiring homage paid by the French author, who via his introduction to Soledad Brother, helped to frame Jackson's entry into the public imagination. It is in this sense that Genet's status as a poet had a determining effect on his interventions; against the prison, both literal and figurative, Genet envisioned a global community built on desire, will, and the power of the imagination in the project of overcoming divisive strata. As Genet points out in an interview with Hubert

Fichte, his participation in BPP struggles was not unconditional. Approached by BPP

Chairman Bobby Seale to write an article on homosexuality, Genet, noting that the letter of request was badly translated or poorly written to the extent that it caused offense, answered the request by making it clear that if the BPP attacked homosexuals he would, in turn, attack black people. The next week, Genet received a copy of the newspaper in which Huey P. Newton emphasized the necessity of support for homosexuals ("Interview with Hubert Fichte" 149). Genet's adamancy about the conditions for his support resulted in a more universally rendered set of BPP principles.

While Genet's interventions on behalf of the BPP were adamant and numerous, Foucault's interventions on behalf of the BPP are relatively minimal and 234 of a different nature. In the company of the GIP's five pamphlets alone, not to mention the press conferences, demonstrations, and underground and mainstream newspaper articles, the GIP's research on, and mobilization on behalf of, Jackson was a single piece in a larger, and mostly France-centric, prison project. Akin to Jean

Genet - former thief and established writer - Foucault, occupant of a coveted chair at the College de France, was inescapably bound to a particular designation, in his case,

French intellectual. Like Genet's, Foucault's ideas about what it meant to occupy a subject position were nuanced. In the context of his early-seventies activism, consider a comment which Foucault makes during an interview with a Renault worker in the

French newspaper Liberation:9

The workers don't need intellectuals to tell them what they are doing; they know perfectly well what they are doing. In my view, the intellectual is the guy [sic] who is plugged into the information network, not the production network. He can make his voice heard. He can write in the newspapers, give his point of view. He is also plugged into an older information network. He has the knowledge acquired by reading a certain number of books, knowledge which other people do not have at their direct disposal. His role is therefore not to shape working-class consciousness, as that consciousness already exists, but to allow that consciousness, working-class consciousness, to enter the information system, (qtd. in Macey 318-319)

In the process of making an argument against intellectual vanguardism, Foucault makes a pointed and fundamental distinction: industrial workers and intellectuals are

9 Liberation is itself an interesting case. What has become a standard paper in France started as a new arm of a united left, including Foucault amongst its ranks from the first meeting onwards. The paper was originally printed under the name Agence de Press Liberation (APL), and acted as a regular news bulletin for the left. Foucault's original idea for his contribution to the project, which he never contributed although he did make other contributions, was to provide proletarian chronicles from the nineteenth century which would relate to current struggles in the factories in France. See Macey 313- 318. 235 plugged into different networks. Although the understanding of workers extends far beyond the machinery of the plant, that they are plugged into the production network means that they have the power, in protest, to manipulate the rate at which the machinery of production produces goods, for example. Industrial workers do not, however, have access to the information network which provides intellectuals with the power to produce public knowledge. The task of the intellectual, then, is to use her subject position as a point through which neglected consciousnesses can gain entry to the information network. To use the current example regarding the GIP, prisoners can stage protests like hunger strikes within prison but are almost entirely severed from the information network. Taking the historical component of Foucault's statement into consideration - that the intellectual has at her disposal an array of documents that have been obscured - the role of the intellectual, for Foucault, is to collect neglected voices and their histories, and to project the past into the present, the neglected into the public eye.

Intellectual work did not only involve making available illuminating histories, but also making available the contemporary voices which would otherwise not have access to speech. Characterizing Foucault's behaviour at protests in the early seventies, Alain Jaubert states that Foucault took on the position of third party relay:

Foucault is no longer a teacher; instead of lecturing, he reads a text written by others. He does the job not of production, but of transmission. Foucault speaks and yet it is someone else who is speaking, the person who was previously not entitled to speak. The philosopher is not being philanthropic; he simply wishes to take the prisoners' statement seriously, using his symbolic power as a professor at the College de France to make it heard outside prison walls. (50) 236

It is with this important function of relay that the "Suicides" and "George Jackson" issues of the GIP pamphlet should be understood; it is by way of such pamphlets that exceptional voices are made available outside prison walls. By taking note of these actions we better understand the way that Foucault not only conceived but also enacted the relation between intellectuals and power, and we can also see what this relationship has to do with discourse. We might consider, in this vein, the beginning of Foucault's inaugural lecture at the College de France, "The Discourse on

Language," delivered only two months prior to the press conference that publicly inaugurated the GIP: "I would really have liked to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings" (215). That intellectual discourse has currency does not mean that it should overwrite the concerns of others, but that its charge should be used to plug otherwise neglected voices into the information system. Rather than uphold the sanctity of the signifiers that traditionally circulate within the intellectual field, it is the task of the intellectual to transmit these struggles, to plug them into the information network to which she has access.

We could understand the GIP pamphlet in which Jackson states that the BPP has been "concentration camped" ("La lutte dans les prisons" 14) as another example of what Foucault is talking about in his College de France lectures on the shift from sovereignty to biopolitics (biopower, Foucault argues, is the operationalization of 237 racism at the level of the state, where racism is the precondition for exercising the right to kill, not only literally, but politically).10 But more than this, and more than being a site where the Foucauldian discursive strategy - the Intolerable-Information coupling - appears in his praxis, the Jackson pamphlet is a site where an entire,

complex literature should be admitted into the fold. Jackson's analysis of fascism, the prison-industrial complex, and its basis in the slave trade in both Soledad Brother and

Blood in my Eye is incisive, yet the way in which Jackson's writings might nuance

Foucauldian tools - and in particular his framing of biopower as state racism - remains untapped. Jackson was killed within months of publicly declaring his membership in the BPP, his subscription to the philosophy of intercommunalism, and his official role of recruiting members amongst the prison population (Jackson, "La

lutte dans les prisons" 19-20). If Jackson adhered to Huey P. Newton's philosophy of

intercommunalism,11 we also stand to benefit from turning there. Although the

10 See Foucault's lecture dated 17 March, 1976 in Society Must Be Defended, 239-264.

11 At the end of 1970, in a speech delivered at Boston College, Newton officially declared what was to be - and always already had been, he explained - the governing ideology for the Party: revolutionary intercommunalism. The announcement was given wide distribution when it was printed as the cover feature of the January 23rd, 1971 issue of the BPP newspaper. Within months, the weekly newspaper, entitled Black Panther Party Community News Service, became Black Panther Party Intercommunal News Service, a title which would stick until the paper ceased publication in 1980. That the party had always been intercommunal is nowhere more evident than within the pages of the paper itself. While the official progression of party politics had been black nationalism, internationalism, and finally intercommunalism, the BPP had always been a decentered organization, progressively expanding to include an increasing number of communities. The BPP newspaper included an "Intercommunal" section long before Newton adopted the term as the BPP's philosophy. Although the weekly segment included, on a fairly regular basis, Eldridge Cleaver's analyses of international socialist movements (written for the party while in exile), more significant and constant was the stream of primary documents produced by socialist leaders in Asian, African, and Latin American countries, often in the form of direct correspondence with the BPP central committee. The international influence that circulated at the time should not be understated. Communications between the BPP and China, Palestine, and Vietnam are readily available in Newton's To Die for the People. A more thorough and 238 philosophy of Revolutionary intercommunalism is available in Newton's collected writings,12 it is the philosophy's iteration in the form of its service to the people programs that is most illustrative of intercommunalism's potential, its

1 ^ successes and its failures, and, in particular, its susceptibility to attack. As Nick

Heynan points out in a recent article in the Annals of the Association of American

Geographers, the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren program mobilized by the BPP

"was the model for, and impetus behind, all federally funded school breakfast programs now in existence within the United States" (406). Heynan's framing of this complex set of relations, however, can be found in the intercommunal section of the party's newspaper.

12 See, in particular, Newton's "Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970," "Intercommunalism: February, 1971," "Uniting Against the Common Enemy: October 23, 1971," the culmination of Revolutionary Suicide 328-333, and a set of two conversations between Newton and sociologist Erik Erikson at Yale and in Oakland which begins with a statement by Newton on the philosophy and is built upon discussion thereafter, Huey P. Newton and Erik H. Erikson In Search of Common Ground. In his "Speech Delivered at Boston College," after providing an explanation of dialectical materialism as theorized by Marx and an analysis of the Soviet revolution of 1917 in order to emphasize the importance of historical context and the location of the correct revolutionary subject, Newton argues that the United States, at the hands of a ruling circle, has transformed from a nation into an empire where an elite minority exercises control over other nations. Newton explains that while the party used to call themselves Black Nationalists, recognizing similar struggles elsewhere they became internationalists and finally intercommunalists "because nations have been transformed into communities of the world'' (170, emphasis original). As such, Newton recognizes the liberation of territories - such as the NLF's move northward - as a first step, stating that: In order for a revolution to occur in the United States you would have to have a redistribution of wealth not at a national or international level, but on an intercommunal level. Because how can we say that we have accomplished revolution if we redistribute the wealth just to the people here in North America when the ruling circle itself is guilty of trespass de bonis asportatis. That is, they have taken away the goods of the people of the world, transported them to America and used them as their own. (171) Because "the superstructure of Wall Street" produces "a distorted form of collectivity" (174), Netwon argues, it is necessary to develop value systems "that help us function together in harmony" (175). It is for this reason that the service to the people programs and, in particular, the political education programs of the BPP were fundamental to its (dialectical-materialist) development.

13 See, in particular, Newton's PhD dissertation, War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America. 239 program as an important instance of social reproduction certainly resonates with

Foucault's theory of biopolitics, taking control of the right to life and death - physically and politically - away from the racist state. Once we shift coordinate points via Jackson - including BPP struggles as a matter of concern and instruction for Foucauldian scholarship - the vast network of intercommunalism opens up with a lot of very practical things to say about Empire, currently being theorized by Michael

Hardt and Antonio Negri. Although working with tools provided by GIP-affiliated

Deleuze and Foucault, the BPP's intercommunal theory and its vast, intercommunally networked history, remain untapped in their work.

When we look laterally, in the immediate vicinity of the assassination of

Jackson, we inevitably encounter the massacre at Attica prison in New York where 29 inmates and 10 guards were killed at the hands of the national guard, called in by

Governor Nelson Rockefeller in order to put an end to a hostage situation that had developed out of the prisoners' demand for better conditions. Within months of the event, on New York State soil, in Attica prison, we find Foucault. In 1972, Foucault was giving a seminar as Melodia E. Jones Chair in the Department of French at

SUNY-Buffalo; he used his stay as an opportunity to visit the embattled prison.14 If

14 Beyond Foucault's visit to Attica, the GIP organized a free meeting at La Mutualite in Paris on November 11th, 1971, less than two months after Attica, for the screening of films produced inside San Quentin and Soledad; a talk by lawyer/advocate William Kunstler, who negotiated among inmates, guards, and police in the midst of the Attica uprising; and testimony from the families of detainees in the French prison system. The poster for the meeting, as well as a brochure that accompanied the event, is reproduced in Arti6res, Quero, Zancarini-Fournel 125. To learn about Attica (San Quentin and Soledad) was to learn something about the French penitentiary system, which, as mentioned above, operated in secrecy. Moreover, Attica was an event which contained a great deal of symbolic power, and it was, in this sense, a tremendous mobilizer. Not only was it around the issue of Attica that the families of detainees could rally and speak, but a number of uprisings also took place in French prisons 240 the Foucault of 1972 was occupied with playing the part of third party relay would it not be most fitting, at this juncture, to let Attica speak? It was Attica's speech that led to the massacre in the first place: their demand for better conditions in the immediate aftermath of Jackson's death. These demands were printed, via the

GIP, in La Cause du peuple shortly after the Attica events. Rather than accusing

Foucault of epistemic injustice, these reprinted demands are the types of documents, I would argue, that should effectively be included in the Dits et ecrits. They are a part of Foucault's oeuvre: although they are not written (or even influenced by him), the demands are transmitted through him during the time that he was acting the role of relay at the turn of the seventies. In the GIP archives, we find the announcements for

Attica-related public meetings at the Mutualite and the issue of La Cause du peuple that translates the Attica demands for a French audience concerned with the functioning of prisons. We also find a copy of Attica News, addressed to the French group. That the newspaper was produced by the Attica Defense Committee with whom Foucault met within months of his visit to Attica is intriguing, but more important than the specifics of Foucault's possible involvement with this project is the information relayed therein. The paper contains a list of indictments against

Attica prisoners as a result of the uprising, an expanded list of twenty-eight demands along with notes regarding their status, and a description of the brutalilty committed by guards after the prison had been overtaken by the state. As the BPP Free Breakfast

in the months following Attica, beginning with the uprisings at Toul, as noted with the publication of the book of demands published by Cixous and the GIP in April 1972. 241 for Schoolchildren programs have left a lasting legacy in the United States, so too did the demands of Attica prisoners in 1971 directly result in prisoner access to Pell grants, which provided funds for prisoners to pursue higher education. Prisoners were excluded from eligibility in 1994. These demands made from a prison - all prisons - under siege should be considered a part of the Foucauldian oeuvre.15

Conclusion: For the Relay of Prison Speech

Although, technically speaking, Brady Thomas Heiner is correct to note that

Foucault makes no mention of the BPP in his lectures, academic articles, or books,

Foucault did co-publish a pamphlet on George Jackson's behalf shortly after he was assassinated, and he visited the Attica Defense Committee in Attica prison shortly after the Attica massacre. Although one could argue that such interventions were minimal, and that his mobilization on behalf of French prisoners was much more substantial, the reality is that Foucault spent most of his time in France and was familiar with the situation in his home country. That Heiner further criticizes Foucault for relying too heavily on European examples in his work on the genealogy of race struggle is an equally precarious claim considering the audience at Foucault's lectures at the College de France.

At the turn of the seventies, Foucault was just beginning to develop coordinate points for himself in the United States. Biographer David Macey points out that

15 Attica News is available in microfiche, as a part of the Underground Press Syndicate collection, in many American libraries. Interviews with inmates during and after the Attica events are available on Compact Disc from AK Press/Alternative Tentacles under the title Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica, and Black Liberation. 242 Foucault's visit to Buffalo in 1972 was dually significant - he reluctantly lectured at SUNY and he visited Attica prison - and he describes a Foucault who had not yet warmed to the United States, citing a passage from an interview on Attica where he compares America to the New York state prison: it is "gigantic" and "a little terrifying" for "a European like me" (Foucault qtd. in Macey 283).16 Though Foucault would in later years ensure that he could spend at least of couple of months of every year in California, in 1972, when he held the Melodia E. Jones chair at SUNY, he was by no means able to orient himself in what was, for him, an entirely foreign country.

Because he could only, as yet, speak in French - what was to Americans a foreign tongue - "Foucault's reputation in the United States," Macey points out, "had not yet become fully entrenched" (283). In France, although Foucault had had great success with Les Mots et les choses, in particular - a bestseller - he had since become known not only as an intellectual but as a political interventionist. Foucault's public interventions on behalf of prisoners garnered attention as he worked tirelessly on the cause, leaving his apartment door open at all times to prisoners' families. In the

Anglo-American academy, in 1972, Foucault was neither political interventionist, nor intellectual superstar; his place in the United States was yet to be decided.

The accusations that Heiner levels at Foucault are intriguing, and deserve consideration. However, it is ultimately the importers of his thought that should be held accountable for the omission of inroads that make more sense in the Anglo-

16 The interview, originally published in Telos in 1974, is collected in Foucault Live under the title "On Attica." 243 American context. Why is it that, up until now, Foucault's thought has not been considered alongside the philosophies and struggles of the BPP? The translation of

Foucault's thought - from four chronologically rendered volumes to three thematically organized collections which omit many of Foucault's political interventions - is indicative of a manner of reception which looks to Foucault for his contributions to developing fields of thought rather than taking stock of the context out of which it emerged, and learning from the interventions which characterize its development. Although Macey's, Eribon's, and Miller's biographies take the political/academic weave of Foucault's intellectual development very seriously, these autobiographies are rarely consulted because they fall into a genre which, generally speaking, is not considered academic. Although biography should by no means provide a definitive mould through which we read any given body of work, it is nevertheless extremely useful to understand the development of ideas in the context of the full life amongst others. To recognize the overlap between the ideas of

Foucault and the BPP, from the perspective point of Foucauldian studies, is to reopen a field that has been closed to others that it had always already included.

Foucault was certainly aware of much of the movement writing that was being produced in the United States, and he was particularly excited by the BPP. It is impossible to pin down just who had an influence on Foucault, when, how, inflected by whom, and so on. If we take seriously Deleuze's argument that we are all groupuscules, however, then the project of reassembling French theory in America is an important one. The point is not to determine why Foucault thought the way that he 244 did (how he absorbed and articulated other thinkers and histories) but to locate and include these other influences - Foucault as third party relay for a new, genealogically-rendered Dits et ecrits - in order to broaden disciplinary concerns, to recognize that we are also groupuscules, and to make way, in our speech and writing, for the others that do not have ready access to the power-saturated information network within which we are plugged. Most important of all, if we take this particular example seriously in the era of not only Guantanamo Bay but also the supermax prison (as racialized and resistant to the movement of information as the

"exceptional" Guantanamo), Foucault's name should today be used for the production of prison speech. 245 Chapter Five. In Search of Common Ground: On Semiotext(e) and Schizo-Culture1

While contemporary French theorists were infiltrating America via conventional channels like academic conferences, university presses, and chaired professorships, Semiotext(e), under the direction of co-founder and general editor

Sylvere Lotringer, stepped away from the university, settling into the rhythms of New

York rather than the halls of the academy. The Semiotext(e) project, as Henry

Schwartz and Anne Balsamo point out, "was conceived as an intervention into cultural politics, not merely as an exercise in theoretical reproduction, and far less an attempt to establish academic legitimacy for some sort of below-the-horizon publishing venture" (208-209). Semiotext(e) was about "doing theory," as Lotringer puts it in the title of an essay on the history of Semiotext(e). Lotringer's approach to the introduction of French theory to an American audience was decidedly different from its introduction via other university channels.

As Anglo-American critics sought out "Structuralism," "Deconstruction," and eventually "Post-Structuralism" over the course of the seventies, Lotringer terms the theorists he imported "French Nietzscheans," fleshing out a Nietzschean turn mentioned in the introduction to the second edition of the Baltimore proceedings, but neglected as critics continued to seek out the French on Structuralist grounds. As

Sande Cohen notes, American academic journals such as October and Critical

1 Throughout this chapter, when Semiotext(e) rendered in italics refers to the journal whereas Semiotext(e) in standard font refers to the project in general. 246 Inquiry coloured French theory with their own agendas, the former with its

privileging of "historicist psychologization," and the latter with the "enlightenment"

ideologies of progress (204-205). Fascinated by the way that the New York art scene

resonated with the theories Lotringer encountered at a lecture series he organized at

Reid Hall, Columbia University's campus in Paris, Lotringer documented the

resonance, noting that "schizo-culture" was "the reality of contemporary society" as

experienced in the "strange cultural laboratory that New York was at the time"

("After the Avant-Garde"). Rather than being about the specificity of the discourse of

any one of the writers who participated in Semiotext(e)'s conferences, or were

included in its journal, the project "had more to do with a multiplicity of flows

escaping in all directions and making no sense whatsoever, a cosmic madhouse rather

than a stern panopticon" ("After the Avant-Garde"). If the "cosmic madhouse" is

New York, the "stern panopticon" is the academy which disciplines lines of thought

upon entry, determining what they can mean, and what they can do, according to the

relations already established in a field of destination. In this sense of understanding

how thought can more fluidly move across borders, the Schizo-Culture event and the

Semiotext(e) journal are instructive; they change the way that we think about the

history of French theory in America.

Because the journal was always in flux, it is impossible to pin down what the

project was definitively about. Semiotext(e) did not have a politics of the type that a

mission statement could concisely and precisely explain. The format and layout of the journal was also perpetually changing; each issue was presented in a style suitable to 247 the subject being taken up (form was related to content), and although Lotringer was - and remains - a constant at the helm of the Semiotext(e) project, the journal was directed by a fluid group of academic and non-academic volunteers who would join and leave its design, production, and editorial committees from issue to issue.

The essays, poems, song lyrics, photographs, comics, interviews, and so on that made up the journal explored a vast array of subjects, and were written by a cast of authors and artists representing various contingencies (if they could be said to represent

"contingencies" at all). In the end, there was no such thing as "French

Nietzscheanism," nor was there such a thing as a "downtown scene" in New York; both are retroactive markers for movements more complicated and fluid than such simplifying designators suggest. The Semiotext(e) journal appeared with one foot on either side of the Atlantic without separating or labeling the movements as such. From the late-seventies onwards, the objective was to place French thought and American art alongside one another without criticism or commentary, submitting them to a plane of consistency, side by side rather than any one piece above another.

Semiotext(e) did not begin as anything close to a radical countercultural journal. When the journal noted that it was looking for "alternatives in semiotics" and that its official languages were "English and French" in its original mission statement, the work that the group was doing read very much in line with what had been happening with French theory, branded as "Structuralism," since the time of the Johns

Hopkins conference. The terminological difference at play - Semiotext(e)'s use of the term "Semiotics" as opposed to "Structuralism" (which had to do with the group's 248 interest in the alternatives on offer in Julia Kristeva's work, and therefore a way out of structure from the outset) - loses much of its distinguishing drive due to the commonality readily discernible in entrance (Columbia's Department of French) and interest (in gleaning from a foreign paradigm). Although Semiotext(e), during these initial years, favored "semiotics" to "structuralism" as a banner for the thought that it was importing, the lecture series that Lotringer organized at Reid Hall - "Summer

Program in Post-Structuralism" 2 - carried a title that suggests that Semiotext(e), in the beginning, was not all that different from the wave of criticism that consolidated under the "Post-structuralist" banner in the eighties. Lotringer, who wrote his dissertation under the direction of Roland Barthes, had been hired by Columbia not only to introduce the French Department to the new French thought but to assemble communities and organize events.3

Though employing the language of Post-stucturalism, Lotringer was orchestrating something decidedly different at Reid Hall; it was not at all the same

"Post-structuralism" that would take hold five years later. In the early seventies, while the Anglo-American academy continued to be caught up in Structuralism (trying to understand what it was and how it might serve in various fields) Lotringer was bringing together thinkers who were pushing past its limitations without any of the reverence characteristic of its disciples in America: Deleuze, Guattari, and Irigaray

2 An advertisement for the summer program is included in the first issue of Semiotext(e). See Summer Program in Post-structuralism.

3 Lotringer organized conferences while studying at the Sorbonne during which he also founded the journal L 'Etrave and edited Paris-Lettres (Lotringer, "Agents de l'etranger" 80). 249 shared staffing duties with Lotringer, offering courses on "The Ego Trap," "The

Grammar of the Unconscious," and "Erotic Literature," with other lecturers listed including Julia Kristeva, Sarah Kofman, Jacques Lacan, and Christian Metz. Thus, psychoanalysis and its subversion were certainly in promise, but so were Nietzsche and film theory. The roster would not be familiar in America for some time, but the program was subsumed under the same banner that would mark its collected entrance at the turn of the eighties, and which continues to follow it to this day. Although

Semiotext(e)'s vague starting point is similar in this way, beginning from the signifier

"Post-structuralism," the directions in which the project takes its collected thought immediately after the Reid Hall lectures are entirely different, its directions dispersed in notable and instructive ways. The trajectory that Semiotext(e) traces demonstrates how to build an assemblage with thought.

Although Semiotext(e) lacks an immediately coherent politics, the project is not apolitical: the collisions and encounters that the project orchestrated, and the conversations that it made possible, brought out politics that might have escaped unnoticed in another layout or sequence. Furthermore, the orchestration and enabling of cross-boundary exchanges was in itself a political act. Along these lines of exchange, the most important lesson embedded in the history of Semiotext(e) is its practice of conversational theory, developed over the course of the late seventies.

Taking this period as my focus, 1975-78,1 will outline - by moving through the succession of journals released, and events organized, under the Semiotext(e) banner during this time - the way that the project developed micropolitically, liberating lines of thought from disciplinary bounds or discursive orders that segregate impulses from one another. When impulses are de-segregated what is revealed is that hitherto non-conversant lines often have a lot in common; such lines can, if considered together, push ways of thinking - and doing - in unanticipated and productive directions. What can we learn about the meeting of French theory and American writing through the lens of Semiotext(e), and what does this have to do with the staging of an event?

In this chapter, I analyze the Semiotext(e) project along two lines. First, I speak to the significance of the "Schizo-Culture" conference by analyzing the conference as an event, explaining through it the ways in which translation between

France and America can never be immediate. What the Schizo-Culture event demonstrates - with its stubborn and instructive incommensurabilities - is that it takes time to translate between one language/nation/culture and another, and even when bits and pieces make it across, they are always mediated. This is not a scandal but a fact that takes nothing away from the productive potential of events of translation. After relating these lessons of the Schizo-Culture conference, in a second section I analyze the run of Semiotext(e) journals that directly followed the conference. While certain collected texts will be important to the argument I develop, rather than performing close readings of such texts I pay particular attention to the textual strategies employed by the journal itself - its presentation and layout - in order to foreground the way in which Semiotext(e) did theory. Lotringer recognized rather early on in the project that if mediation was inevitable, the pursuit of theory 251 could never be objective. As such, the mandated objective of Semiotext(e) was not to understand theory. Rather, as I explain via a run of four journals in particular, the journal sought to stage conversations. Conversation, is what occurs "between the two:" between Paris and New York, it is a becoming, it is how the event is projected, a projectile, a "Project for a Revolution in New York."4

The Schizo-Culture Event: On Madness and Prisons

Picture this philosophical loaf: knead together a little radical psychoanalysis and structuralism, add dollops of Marxism and avant-garde art theory, leaven with violent political activism, then bake to a hard crust in an oven of Freudian dialectics. Now imagine all this gastro-intellectualism taking place in France. Well, believe it or not, the dish you have just visualized is an incredibly popular movement in France that you may have read about called Semiotics. But you don't have to cross the Atlantic to sample this particular brand of French Toast. Some of its most prestigious chefs will be here for "A Colloquium on Schizo-Culture," a three-day slugfest beginning November 13 at Columbia University. Semiologians Jean-Francis Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari (the R.D. Laing of Gaul) and Michel Foucault will meet head-on with novelist William Burroughs, feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, musical Dadaist John Cage, and representatives from gay liberation, Ontological Hysterical Theatre, radical therapy organizations, Mental Patients' Liberation, and various prison authorities in assorted workshops and panels. The affair will culminate with a Schizo party on November 16 starring Patti Smith.

-Smith and Van Der Horst, "Schizo-Culture" (in the Scenes section of The Village Voice, 10 November 1975)

4 Project for a Revolution in New York is the title of a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet and a heading in Lotringer's introduction to the Anti-Oedipus issue of Semiotext(e) which I analyze below. 252 It is difficult to imagine how Lotringer could characterize the Schizo-

Culture conference "a miss." The roster that the Village Voice notice announced was formidable; even if the Anglo-American world knew nothing at all about the French intellectuals named in the announcement, the "local" talent that would be on display would have been a draw. William S. Burroughs, whose writings had filled the newspapers of the American underground, had been abroad (in Tangiers, Paris, and

London) during the time that his writings served as an integral locus of expression for the movement and had not yet performed in the United States. Although Patti Smith would only release her legendary debut album Horses (whose marathon title-track was based on Burroughs's Wild Boys) later in the year, her fame was, by this point, well established, her spoken word performances turning into the formative snarl of punk rock, setting CBGBs and a new New York countercultural movement ablaze.

Based largely in New York's Lower East Side, the just-then burgeoning downtown movement was fascinated with madness. As graduates of the fine arts, the inhabitants of the area were studied in avant-garde music and theatre and immersed in the gay and women's liberation movements which developed on New York streets, and in the same New York undergrounds that maintained Burroughs's presence in the city while he was overseas. Even if few New Yorkers were familiar with the French visitors, there were sufficient buzzwords in "Structuralism" and "Psychoanalysis" to draw in a number of American academics and graduate students who frequented both campus seminar and downtown scene. As for the transcontinental combination, hindsight certainly renders resonance more readily discernible today, but the markers of overlap 253 are already announced in the Village Voice: if semiotics and structuralism were a stretch, that the basis of these French-specific markers had something to do with avant-garde art, madness, and political activism certainly went a long way towards bridging the distance that separated New York from Paris. On the basis of the Village

Voice's announcement, along with further promotion for, and conversation about, the event on Bob Fass's radio show on WBAI,5 the Schizo-Culture conference drew in

2,000 spectators, a staggeringly successful turnout, especially when compared alongside the Johns Hopkins conference, which was considered a sensation with an audience of 150 academics.

Although the contingencies being crossed were by no means incommensurable (they did resonate), the translation of thought - the movement of culture across substantial barriers (linguistic, geopolitical) - is not immediate. In temporal terms, it took a while for the Structuralism I spoke about in the first chapter to gain a foothold in the Anglo-American academy (and it is only in hindsight that

Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play" single-handedly rendered the conference a "Controversy," marking the birth of Post-Structuralism at the very moment that

Structuralism sought entry). The translation of primary texts takes time, as does the assembly of a body of criticism around primary texts and figures, discourses of legitimation which serve to admit foreign thought into the university presses and

5 Although Lotringer states that Jean-Jacques Lebel encouraged attendance and the staging of happenings at the conference ("Doing Theory" 140-141), Lebel denies this appearance, stating that the last happenings he staged were in 1968, and that his participation on the Bob Fass radio show had to do with the "preparation" of '68 by political and artistic activists, philosophers, militants, and intellectuals, not the Schizo-Culture conference (Lebel, letter to the author, 22 February, 2007). 254 journals that give thought the visibility necessary for its "continental" existence.

Although the encounters Lotringer orchestrated at the conference made sense, the collision of such a diverse set of contingencies is not conducive to the production of immediate conversation, nor is immediate conversation necessarily desirable as it could be tantamount to a collapse of differences rather than their productive (and sometimes violent) play.

More fundamental than the necessity of delay is the fact that translation is not immediate because it is mediated. As I explained with regards to both Structuralism and the internationally circulating politics that constituted a global "movement" at the turn of the seventies, local inflections are not only lost but replaced upon mediation.

French Structuralism in the sixties was produced out of a decades-old tradition of phenomenological thinking, the demise of institutional Marxism, and a crisis in the

French university system, whereas on the other side of the Atlantic Structuralism was very quickly adopted as a possible solution to the crisis in Anglo-American literary criticism within a troubled university. When thought travels, as both Bourdieu (in his work on fields of cultural production) and Said (in his work on travelling theory) make clear, the terms for the recontextualization of thought are in large part set by the adoptive field: as actors vie for position, they choose their words (and journals and presses) according to the relations that constitute the field and their ambitions to make or take a position that figures prominently within the field. As I made clear in my first chapter, such a frame is well suited to an analysis of the turn-of-the-seventies arrival of Structuralism in the United States because it lays bare the ways in which an 255 adoptive field (Literary Studies in general by way of French and Comparative

Literature) coloured French thought, eliding its conditions of emergence in the process.

It is difficult to read the Schizo-Culture conference along field-specific lines because Semiotext(e) had context neither in the university nor on its outside in 1975, rendering the process of locating an adoptive field (even in the vaguest terms) rather futile. Although Lotringer, generally speaking, had been hired to bring Semiotics to

Columbia, the Schizo-Culture conference did not mark the foundation of a new research centre (like the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center), and it was not backed by a major granting institution (like the Ford Foundation).6 Although Lotringer was condoned by Columbia, the brand of French thought that he ended up importing was a far cry from the textual criticism practiced by Lotringer's dissertation supervisor

6 If the conference was not made possible by grant or university funding, it was a set of chance circumstances that contributed to the shape the conference took. The original impulse for the conference was Guattari's desire to visit the United States where Lotringer was returning in the fall of 1975 after having spent his first three years in America in Paris. From there, Guattari convinced Deleuze to accompany him (even though Deleuze was averse to travel due to his deteriorating health: it would be his only trip to the United States). Lyotard was already in the United States, having been invited by Telos to give a talk on Economie libidinale. Lotringer attended the 7!EZ,OS-sponsored talk and invited Lyotard at the reception that followed. Foucault had just finished a lectureship in Brazil and agreed to a stopover in New York, which would provide him with the opportunity to consult a Jesuit manual on the instruction of children at the New York Public Library (part of his ongoing work on the History of Sexuality). Laing was slated to speak in Boston, and when Lotringer contacted him about the opportunity to meet Foucault, Laing eagerly accepted the offer. More comfortable than Lotringer in the United States, Rajchman invited Joel Kovel and Ti-Grace Atkinson, introducing American anti-psychiatry and Feminism to the mix. In 1975, Lotringer was already working with John Cage to publish his conversations with Daniel Charles, Pour les oiseaux, as the first Semiotext(e) book; Lotringer recalls that the first time he read Cage he thought he was reading Deleuze and Guattari, and therefore thought it appropriate to bring them together at the event. He also saw resonance in the work of Burroughs and Foucault, and got in touch with Burroughs who had just returned to the United States after a decade and a half spent in Tangiers, Paris, and London; Burroughs was anxious to have an audience for his readings in the United States, non-existent as yet because of his long absence (Lotringer, conversation with the author, 2 October 2006). 256 Barthes; it did not fit with the profile that Columbia had in mind when they hired him. By 1975, after having included Communists and Maoists (like Phillipe Sollers and Julia Kristeva) in his project, Lotringer was allowed to continue using his office for the Semiotext(e) project, but stated affiliation of Semiotext(e) with Columbia was out of the question, and none of Semiotext(e)'s events and publications would ever receive any type of support, funding or otherwise, from the university. According to

Lotringer, it was made quite clear that the administration would not encourage or endorse scholarship that in any way sympathized with, resembled, or rekindled the impulses that rendered Columbia a volatile and unstable university during the '68 years.7 Although the lack of support rendered the project financially unstable

(necessitating, for example, the charge of a $ 15/person weekend admission fee to cover the cost of room and equipment rental at Columbia's Teacher's College)

Lotringer preferred to run the project independent of the university because, in his view, affiliation with the academy carried with it injunctions, instituting strict limits on the movement of discourse, and the shapes that discourse might take on in the process of moving ("Agent de l'etranger (foreign agent)" 217). Academic affiliation, in other words, had a tendency to circumscribe the potential of travelling theory.

Beyond differing on the fact of affiliation, the Baltimore and New York conferences were marked by very different approaches to their stated subject matter

(Johns Hopkins's "Structuralism" and Schizo-Culture's "Madness and Prisons"). The

Johns Hopkins conference was organized in order to import a paradigm, as Macksey

7 Conversation with the author, 2 October 2006. 257 and Donato put it, "to explore the impact of contemporary 'structuralist' thought on critical methods and humanistic sciences" and "to stimulate innovations both in the received scholarship and in the training of scholars" ("Preface" xv-xvi). As I explained in detail in the first chapter, in 1966, Structuralism appeared to carry a fair bit of academic capital in France, a valuation that made it particularly intriguing to the Anglo-American field of Literary Studies. The Schizo-Culture conference, on the other hand, was organized with the objective of building a bridge between institutions of knowledge (the university and psychiatry in particular) and other communities dealing in deliria (writers, musicians, dramatists, mental patients); it was about collapsing vertical relations between science and object, thinker and artist, theorist and practitioner, and so on, in order to encourage dialogue amongst conventionally segregated contingencies. As event co-organizer John Rajchman puts it at the end of the Village Voice announcement, the event was organized to "allow people who have been in touch with various kinds of madness to get in touch with each other. Papers will be presented. And I expect there will be a lot of yelling" (Smith and Van Der

Horst 26). Whereas the Johns Hopkins conference related to its subject

(.Structuralism) as a knowledge to be learned, discussed, and in many cases, paradigmatically applied, for the Schizo-Culture conference, various kinds of madness represented instances of, or strategies to, escape from confinement in various kinds of prisons - of which the academy was one - that organized the public and tempered its impulses. 258 The chaos that characterized the Schizo-Culture proceedings was in large

part due to the difficulty of translating between the contingencies presenting and

present at the conference. Half a dozen translators attended in order to translate

presentations from French to English in real time, but the three that were present for

o

Lyotard's talk, for example, couldn't agree on his meaning. Instead of employing

translators for his talk, Deleuze decided to talk slowly and draw diagrams of rhizomes

(roots and crab-grass) on the chalkboard, with apparent success. The question of

translation, however, runs deeper than the transmission of thought from one language

to another: success in conversation (as I will explain in greater detail below) requires

the location of common grounds. Lotringer provided an approximate ground in

madness and prisons, terms that meant very different things for those that were

present, but as he points out, one of his ambitions in organizing the conference was to join French thinkers with what remained of the American left ("Agents de l'etranger"

81), both sides contending with the end of the sixties in their own way (which had

officially ended in America a few months before - on April 30th - with the end of the

Vietnam war).

If Americans - particularly the radical culturo-political contingencies in New

York - "anticipated [the French] without, all the while, knowing who they were"9

(Lotinger, "Agent de l'etranger (foreign agent)" 215, my translation), the French

8 See Arthur Danto's comments in Charles Bernstein, Arthur Danto, Richard Foreman, Sylvere Lotringer, and Annette Michelson, "Beyond Sense and Nonsense: Perspectives on the Ontological at 30."

9 "qui les anticipaient sans toujours en avoir conscience." 259 participants at the New York conference were only provisionally fluent in the languages and histories of the American underground. While some books by Beat authors and high profile movement writers like Eldridge Cleaver were available in translation, most movement writing would have been encountered in the form of pamphlets and Underground Press Syndicate-affiliated magazines like Actuel (which carried occasional features about, and interviews with, Sartre, Foucault, Lefebvre,

Deleuze, and Guattari alongside Weatherman, Valerie Solanis, William Burroughs, and the comics of Robert Crumb and Spain Rodriguez).10 While pamphlets and underground news made the American movement available in France - sometimes even doing the very intriguing work of placing American radicalisms alongside

French thinkers11 - in them, the various facets of the American movement were broken down into digestible bits that obliterated their nuances, and divorced them from their contexts.

Guattari in particular had followed the American movement with some interest, citing the Weathermen's use of affinity group organization in an early paper on groupuscules,12 and mentioning the American gay and women's liberation

10 Like Guattari, Actuel did not understand the American Women's Liberation movement, illustrating its coverage of the movement in general, and its translation of Solanis's "SCUM Manifesto" in particular, with cartoons of naked women storming through the streets and beating up cops courtesy of Robert Crumb. See Valerie Solanis, "Scum Manifesto," Actuel no.4 (janvier 1971): 12-17.

11 This being a history of French theory in America, I have opted not to analyze the contents of Actuel in this project; this is certainly an interesting, important, and rich space for future research that would contribute to further understanding of the French theory-American counter/radical culture assemblage.

12 Discussing the association between groupuscules and anarchy, Guattari suggests the example of "the Weatherman movement in the U.S.A.: they are organized in tribes, in gangs, etc., but this does not prevent them from coordinating extremely well" ("le mouvement Weathermen aux U.S.A.: ils sont 260 movements when defending a special issue of Recherches, "Three Billion

Perverts," an "encyclopedia of homosexualities" which was facing obscenity charges in France.13 Mere citation of the American situation, however, did not denote depth in understanding the mechanics of the various movements. While Guattari's analysis of

Weatherman's splitting into alternative families when they went underground is accurate and developed along analogous lines to the group's own theorizations,14 his gloss on the American gay and women's liberation movements is, in the end, somewhat facile and skewed (which is understandable because the references made in passing were just that, reference for the sake of situating, identifying, and, in this case, defending a correspondent and burgeoning movement in France: the Front homosexuel d'action revolutionnaire [FHAR]).When it came right down to it, however, Guattari was not very well versed in the Women's Liberation movement in particular, so his passing lipservice to the movement at the Schizo-Culture conference, accompanied by his decision to let a band set up in the background during his talk - which would effectively drown out and potentially cancel the Ti-

Grace Atkinson talk that was to follow - led to his being booed off the stage by

organises en tribus, en gangs, etc., mais 9a ne les empeche pas de se coordonner et rudement bien.") ("Nous sommes tous des groupuscules (1970)." 285, my translation).

13 See Felix Guattari, "Three Billion Perverts on the Stand."

14 See, in particular, the essay "Affinity Groups" which appears in Harold Jacobs's collection of documents entitled Weatherman. 261 Atkinson's supporters; Guattari was revealed in this instance to be a thinker who was out of touch with the very women whom he claimed to support and understand.15

It was not always a lack of correspondence and understanding that led to the eruption of conflicts at the New York conference. The chaos that ensued during

Foucault's presentations, for example, can be attributed to his tangible involvement with the American movement. During the question period following his presentation,

Foucault was accused of being an agent for the CIA at the hands of a provocateur who went on in great detail about the affiliations that propped up the GIP at the beginning of the seventies. Lotringer surmises that the provocateur was involved with

Lyndon LaRouche's labour committee (Lotringer, Foucault Live 475; Guattari,

"Molecular Revolutions" 309 n.l). Whether the LaRouche committee was responsible for the provocation or not, Foucault had already been to New York (and had mobilized in Paris) on behalf of the American prison movement, a movement against which the state was organized (consider Nelson Rockefeller's reaction to the

Attica uprisings), and the use of provocateurs during this period was particularly popular.16 If the purpose of the conference was to conjoin French thought with

15 Lotringer, conversation with the author, 3 October, 2006. In print form, the break in Guattari's talk is marked by ellipses. See "Molecular Revolutions" 276.

16 For accounts of the FBI's COINTELPRO program, the highest profile, widespread operation that used these tactics, see Nelson Blackstock's COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom and Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall's The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. The provocation of Foucault is worth investigating further. A Freedom of Information Act request for the FBI's files on the French thinker garnered the release of only five of sixteen pages, all marking Foucault's requests and the granting of Visa Action Requests for travel to the United States over the course of the 1970s. The exclusions are made under Section 552, subsections (b)(6) and (b)(7)(C), denoting in the first case that they are personal, medical, or similar files whose disclosure "would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion 262 remnants from the American sixties, groups abounded that had an interest in foiling such an initiative. After being accused of being an agent for the other side on the first day of the conference, Foucault was mobbed by reporters asking whether the allegations were true, and he spent much of the evening between his presentation and the roundtable in concerned solitude, beyond pacification, debating whether he would participate in the roundtable the next day. As far as he was concerned, it did not matter what he said, people would not believe his denials. When confronted during the roundtable the next day, what could not be dispelled in earnest was quickly dispelled with humour: Foucault agreed that everyone involved in the conference, including its organizers, were being paid by the CIA (except for the accuser, that is, who was being paid by the KGB). While Foucault's planned rebuttal calmed the room, he was furious, characterizing the conference as "the last countercultural event of the sixties" (Lotringer, Foucault Live 475, Guattari, "Molecular Revolutions" 309 n.l).

If French and American contingencies were foreign to each other, Lotringer, in many ways, was foreign to both. It is important to remember that, much like the

French philosophers that Lotringer invited to New York in 1975, the Columbia professor was not immediately comfortable in the United States. His first three years

of privacy," and, in the second, that withheld pages related to "records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes," whose disclosure would also, in this case, constitute an invasion of privacy. Four of the redacted pages were released by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and were the Visa Action Requests themselves. Foucault's first trip to the United States required a waiver for entry due to his brief membership in the PCF, which provoked a thorough background check. Documents relating to Foucault's 1972 visit - when he remained involved with the GIP - were not released by the FBI or U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services. 263 at Columbia were spent on its Paris campus, Reid Hall, and, as such, the fall of

1975, when the Schizo-Culture conference was organized and took place, marked his return to a country that he had, as yet, only momentarily inhabited. It would take a while for Lotringer to find his footing in what was necessarily, for him, a foreign land. If Lotringer's ambition more specifically was to collect the remnants of the sixties - and, in particular, 1968, very much a feature of the Semiotext(e) project -

Lotringer had missed 1968 in both countries doing work with Cooperation (the

French equivalent of the Peace Corps in which he had enlisted in order to avoid military service in France) in Turkey and Australia. The arrival of French Theory, in

Lotringer's self-conscious hands, was a process of delicate negotiation; Lotringer was invested on either side of the Atlantic, and the encounters he orchestrated between artists, intellectuals, musicians, and writers was an act of creation which filled the void that he missed in both.

Controversies and miscalculations aside, it is certainly also worthwhile to consider the chaos that characterized the proceedings to be, at least in part, the product of the conference taking its subject to heart. It is worth arguing, in other words, that "madness" not only determined the shape of the event (the selection of its participants) but also animated the conference's proceedings, rendering them mad. As

Foucault demonstrated in his history of madness, although madness has a historical tendency to be co-opted and defined by institutional interests, it has a history of its own, it speaks for itself, the problem of "madness" is that its audience would rather stifle and contain it than listen). Lotringer characterizes his approach to theory - and 264 the way in which the Schizo-Culture enacted the prison-breaking madness it collected - as follows: "[t]he point of a theory . .. isn't to be something (someone's intellectual property) or belong somewhere (France, Germany, America), but to become everything it is capable of' ("Doing Theory" 127, emphasis original). It is because the contingencies brought together not only refused to converse but, at times, violently clashed, that Lotringer calls the event a miss (it did not "become everything it was capable of'). Assessing the event as such, however, ignores the manner in which the event is always outside of itself: the event is constituted of a multiplicity of external elements coming together, and it is constituent of the directions that its collected elements might go in light of new encounters.

The Schizo-Culture Conference on madness and prisons provided no determinate outcome, only new possibilities. It was not an event because it brought together, once and for all, the definitive constellation in which French theory belonged (and therefore holds the key that is lacking in the edited collections that brought theory in under the banner of Post-Structuralism); it was an event because it refused the very thing that the Johns Hopkins conference encouraged: to be the tangible, to be the advent of something, the arrival or origin of "French theory" or

"Semiotics" (as distinct from "Structuralism," "Deconstruction," and "Post-

Structuralism") in America. The event, rather, was a flash of productive potential sparked by the meeting of diverse elements. An important point of contrast between the Johns Hopkins and Semiotext(e) events is the lack of collected proceedings for the latter. Although Semiotext(e) put out a Schizo-Culture issue in 1978, the contents 265 did not consist of the proceedings but re-enacted the conference by way of the possibilities afforded by print. The proceedings for the conference are available here and there, but even where essays and roundtables are printed, the contents are suspect.17 Semiotext(e) did not seek to consecrate the conference's proceedings by repeating them in print because the point was always to forge connections with an outside. It is not what happened at the event that is important, but what the event made - and continues to make - possible.18 Taking Lotringer's assessment of the conference as a miss at face value, Francis Cusset concludes that "We can always imagine the encounters that might have been produced between Foucault, Lyotard, or

17 While Lyotard's "On the Strength of the Weak," Burroughs's "The Limits of Control," and Giorno's "Empty Words" are representative of proceedings collected in the Schizo-Culture issue; Guattari's "Molecular Revolutions" and "Desire is Power, Power is Desire" are collected in Chaosophy and Foucault's "Infantile Sexuality" and the roundtable "On Prisons and Sexuality" are collected in Foucault Live. The circumstances around the publication of the roundtable, however, are particularly telling: when Lotringer asked Laing whether he could publish the transcript in the Schizo-Culture issue of the journal, Laing refused, Lotringer disclosing in the process that the roundtable proceedings were not only being edited, but rewritten at liberty for the occasion, and that Laing, who was disappointed with all of his contributions to the roundtable (Laing, Letter to Sylv6re Lotringer), should feel free to follow suit (Lotringer, Letters to R.D. Laing, 18 May 1977 and 1 June 1978).

18 A similar argument could be made about some of the first issues produced by the group. The Schizo- Culture conference would mark Semiotext(e)'s most discernible turn in 1975, but it was not the first conference that the group sponsored. Inspired by Lotringer's work on Saussure's anagrams in Genevan archives, Lotringer organized a conference on "The Two Saussures" in Spring 1974. The papers would be collected in the following two issues of Semiotext(e). Presented by some of the earliest interrogators of Structuralism in America - Peter Caws, Michael Riffaterre, Wlad Godzich - the volume begins with papers that introduce Saussure's course and moves onto his anagrams, reprinting archival materials that expose Saussure's madness at centre of the issue, marking the end of the first section on "Saussure's Course," and the beginning of the next on "Saussure's Curse." In a letter addressed to Lotringer which is marked as an introduction to the colloquium, Jean Starobinski calls the conference a "confrontation," stating that if there are two Saussures, there is a difference to note, "and Saussure is the first to teach us that differences are productive" ("[e]t Saussure est le premier a nous enseigner que les differences sont productives") (5, my translation). It is a bit generous to suggest that the confrontation staged in the first journal produced the second - a sophisticated play in text of what the conference was meant to achieve - but it is worthy to note that the second conference issue on the anagrams collects essays that are far more creative in tone, that excavate madness rather than writing about Saussure's slip (exploratory pieces that in many ways complement the thirty-two pages reproduced from two of Saussure's notebooks on Virgil). 266 Deleuze and the Americans present"19 (78, my translation), an assessment that fails to inspire him to do some of that imagining in the remainder of the book. This failure is particularly disappointing because imagining (and staging) encounters is exactly what the Semiotext(e) project itself continued to do in the aftermath of the

"failed" conference: it brought French and American elements together and forced them to converse.

§

Interlude: On the Road with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

One of the directions taken by Deleuze and Guattari directly following the conference was a road trip west, from coast to coast with Jean-Jacques Lebel, beginning in Lowell, Massachusetts, and ending in southern California. In Lowell, the group caught up with Bob Dylan's "Rolling Thunder Review," and Lebel introduced the French philosophers to the American singer and Allen Ginsberg

(Ginsberg was opening Dylan's shows at the time with his singing of mantras); in

Berkeley, the French philosophers took in another Patti Smith concert; and in San

Francisco they met Michael McLure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights

Bookstore before staying at Ferlinghetti's Bixby Canyon Cabin in Big Sur. The trip,

19 "On peut toujours imaginer les rencontres qui auraient pu s'y produire entre Foucault, Lyotard ou Deleuze et les Americains presents"

20 Although Deleuze was scheduled to speak at UC San Diego on the invitation of Fredric Jameson, the group stopped short, more interested in taking in gay film in the San Francisco Castro district than fulfilling their remaining academic engagements for which France Culture had funded their trip (Denis Hollier, conversation with the author, and Fredric Jameson, conversation with the author). 267 then, began at Kerouac's burial site, and ended at the site where he wrote two of his books.21

Although mention of the American writers in Deleuze and Guattari's texts is limited, as Lebel notes, references to Cage, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and other

American writers, artists, and activists were commonplace in Guattari's conversations with him, and the work of contemporary American writers - Kerouac in particular - was often featured in Deleuze's weekly seminars at Vincennes and St. Denis.

American writing is given a prominent place in the work of Deleuze and Guattari in the immediate aftermath of the 1975 excursion to the United States. In the "Rhizome" chapter that opens A Thousand Plateaus (published on its own in 1976, four years before the publication of the completed project), Deleuze and Guattari argue that

"America is a special case," noting the way that its literatures, "beatnicks, the underground, bands and gangs," are not about a search for roots, but follow "the route of the American rhizome" (19). Citing Kerouac and Patti Smith (who "sings the bible of the American dentist: don't go for the root, follow the canal" [19]) alongside

Miller, Fitzgerald, and Whitman, the American propensity is to seek an outside, pushing through the frontier, that makes America a special, rhizomatic case. A year later, in his collaboration with Claire Parnet, Deleuze praises Anglo-American literature for its featuring of "ruptures," "lines of flight," and its treatment of frontiers as "something to cross" (Deleuze and Parnet 36-37), and he quotes a Bob Dylan lyric

21 A photograph that Lebel took of Deleuze sitting cross-legged on the beach at Big Sur adorns the cover of the Semiotext(e) collection Desert Islands and Other Texts. 268 from his 1974 Writings and Drawings at length, stating that "[a]s a teacher I should like to be able to give a course as Dylan organizes a song, as astonishing producer rather than author" (Deleuze and Parnet 8). Deleuze contrasts the work of

American writers and artists with the structuralist moment in France which, in contradistinction, "is a system of points and positions, which are supposedly significant instead of proceeding by thrusts and crackings. It warps the lines of flight instead of following them and tracing them, and extending them into a social field"

(Deleuze and Parnet 37). Coming in the interim between Anti-Oedipe and Mille plateaux, the American excursion helped Deleuze and Guattari to develop their thinking about the rhizome, from the drawing of diagrams on the Teacher's College blackboard to a roadtrip from East to West, pushing through the American frontier with significant encounters along the way. Deleuze's characterization of French

Structuralism was not all that distinct from the movement of Anglo-American criticism and its appropriation of French thought at the time; the conference and road trip were something different altogether.22

22 While City Lights was originally commissioned in 1976 to translate and publish Deleuze and Guattari's "Rhizome" and "Balance Program for Desiring Machines" - which, Robert Hurley (who offered to translate the texts when it became apparent that Mark Seem, the preferred translator, would be unavailable) pointed out, would not be included as an appendix in his forthcoming translation of Anti-Oedipus for Viking (Hurley, Letter to City Lights, July 1976) - Lebel, commissioned to write the introduction, never finished the piece. Lebel's road-trip with Deleuze and Guattari in 1975 was cited as the reason that Lebel had been chosen to write the introduction (City Lights Books, letter to Robert Hurley, 23 August 1976). Although City Lights staffers found Deleuze and Guattari's work "fascinating" and were shocked that it had not yet been translated (Peters, letter to Jean-Jacques Lebel, August 1976), they felt that the translation of their work would be a worthless project without an introduction. In a letter to Lebel, Nancy Peters from City Lights explains that Ferlinghetti felt that their technical academic style was more suited to engaged philsophers and psychologists than City Lights's American counter-cultural readership (and Ferlinghetti was violently opposed to much of the academic rhetorical style of French writing). It was thus necessary, in their estimation, that Lebel provide an 269 The encounters that Lebel staged were intentional, and some would prove enduring, like the friendship between Guattari and Ginsberg, who became more profoundly acquainted when trapped in a storm with Lebel en route to a reception for

Burroughs in New York. The city at a standstill, the three of them got stoned and listened to jazz on the radio for hours. Ginsberg and Guattari would remain in contact,

Ginsberg seeking Guattari's assistance when splitting up with a violent Orlofsky, and

Ginsberg twice participating in Lebel's three-month long "Monument a Felix

Guattari" at the Beaubourg museum. In the corner of one of Lebel's letters to

Ginsberg is a note from Guattari: "Cher Allan, Tu es une de mes raisons de vivre.

Tendresse, Felix." (Lebel, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, 20 December 1989).

In the end, I do not mean to suggest that the New York trip of 1975 was responsible for bringing Deleuze and Guattari in contact with American literature, but, considering the timing and constitution of their essay on the rhizome and

Deleuze's conversations with Claire Parnet, the conference and road-trip had a discernible impact on their theorization about the rhizome. As Deleuze makes clear at the outset of his book of conversations with Parnet, although he was writing with

Guattari at the time, his interactions with the thought and work of many of his closest friends and companions - Foucault, Jean-Pierre Bamberger, and his wife Fanny - had a profound impact on the flow of his own thinking. Where Anglo-American literature

introduction which would situate the work of Deleuze and Guattari, explaining its significance, and which would mediate between the French authors and the American counterculture (Peters, letter to Jean-Jacques Lebel, 25 March 1977). Ferlinghetti's prediction that Lebel was too busy with his activist commitments to write the introduction would prove right. 270 is concerned, a constant influence - cited in Dialogues for her work on D.H.

Lawrence's turtles and therefore Deleuze's thinking about animal-becomings

(Deleuze and Parnet 10-11) - was his wife Fanny, who was a translator of

Lawrence's texts and a scholar of American literature. References to literary works are scattered throughout Deleuze's books, not only in Logic of Sense, his study on

Sacher-Masoch, and Essays Critical and Clinical. As Deleuze points out, literary works were particularly useful to the study of schizophrenia because the authors of literary work seemed to know more about schizophrenia than psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (Deleuze and Guattari, "On Anti-Oedipus'''' 23). In the context of their theorization of schizophrenia, this makes complete sense, because schizophrenia is inherently productive, it creates. Deleuze and Guattari's 1975 road trip was not a determinate encounter with literature as such but a rhizomatic experience, lines of flight away from scheduled academic engagements, between East coast and West coast, carrying with them the intensive points encountered in between.

§

Conversational Theory: Producing the Common

[T]he common is what is always at stake in any conversation: there where a conversation takes place, there the common expresses itself; there where we are in common, there and only there is a conversation possible. Conversation is the language of the common.

-Cesare Casarino, "Surplus Common" 1 271 In the introduction to Hatred of Capitalism, a volume written to mark the end of the Semiotext(e) project (when really it was just a new beginning; the project continues under the umbrella of MIT, its new distributor after a falling out with

Autonomedia), Lotringer notes that he conducted a lot of interviews throughout the

Semiotext(e) project because he wanted theory to "have a direct impact.... [to] be grasped as naturally as you breathe" (Kraus and Lotringer 16). When wife and collaborator Chris Kraus goes on to call his approach "conversational theory,"

Lotringer agrees with the term, adding that, beyond the interviews, pieces were put into conversation by surrounding them with other things until they "became part of something more fluid and couldn't be isolated. Documents, images, quotes, ideas being part of some kind of movement that takes you from one thing to the next, and changes everything about the world" (16). The Semiotext(e) journal underwent a profound transformation in the aftermath of the Schizo-Culture conference. If the theory that the project was importing was to have a "direct impact" on anything, it was necessary that it not be contained, isolated from the elements with which contact might be desirable, intriguing, possible, and so on. Semiotext(e) would not be doing much towards the ends of making connections if its contents continued to consist of essays by and about the new French thought, making foreign ideas - sometimes translated, sometimes not - available to an American audience. If the Schizo-Culture conference was organized in order to encourage conversation across various bounds, the journal proceeded in its aftermath to break down the barriers that kept otherwise intriguingly resonant elements apart at the three-day event. The transformation of the 272 journal did not occur all at once; the journal changed gradually over the course of four issues.

I will break this section down into four movements, following the trajectory that the post-Schizo-Culture issues of the journal trace through the late seventies. In so doing, I wish to delineate how the potential of the Schizo-Culture conference was projected through the journal, culminating in the Schizo-Culture issue in 1978.

Whereas the first issue was produced independently of the conference and continued to import French thinkers - in this case, Georges Bataille - in a manner suited to academic subscribers, it signaled New York and marked the subtle beginnings of a developing conversation. The second issue, devoted to the introduction of Anti-

Oedipus to an Anglo-American audience, projected theory elsewhere, drawing upon the cobblestone that I used to connect Paris and New York, and the campus and its outside, in Chapter 3. The cobblestone also signals the projection of the event into a future, and the next issue, devoted to Nietzsche's Return, weaves New York through

French thinkers, continuing the project of establishing a common ground between continents, including texts by New York artists for the first time. In the Schizo-

Culture issue, French theory and American art are immanent, drawn on common ground, marking the journal as one that is instructively conversational, a Paris-New

York assemblage, an intriguing constellation. Rather than simply featuring this end result I follow the process of becoming in this section because it foregrounds a politics of translation, a way of doing theory, of producing a common. 273 Signalling downtown

Whereas the initial issues of the journal were primarily devoted to subversions of Saussurean linguistics, the Georges Bataille issue that directly followed the conference marked a departure into another kind of semiotics, one that exceeded the restricted economy of the Saussurean sign: an erotics of signification, the accursed share. Because Bataille's semiotics is already fundamentally about exceeding limits, his work does not require the same type of subversive treatment that the journal had enacted against Saussure (splitting him in two - the Saussure of the general course in linguistics and the Saussure of the anagrams - and taking him apart from there by subjecting him to his own madness). As a result of its devotion to a single thinker, the issue does not do much more than provide a case for taking Bataille seriously, each essay situating him amongst his kin in a growing philosophical canon (Derrida,

Kristeva, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schelling), a rather restricted economy. That the conference did not appear to have all that much of an impact on the subsequent

Bataille issue is not at all surprising due to the fact that the issue was planned well in advance of the conference, and it was edited by a board member, Hollier, who did not attend the 1975 convention, but who was associated with Semiotext(e) through Reid

Hall, where he had given lectures on Bataille.

Although the issue does not carry the characteristics of the more radical departures to come, its cover was an important marker of forthcoming changes.

Courtesy of Gil Eisner, a satirical cartoonist who did work for Newsweek, the New

York Times, and the Washington Post, the cover boasts a giant guillotine hovering 274 menacingly over Place de la Concorde. The promise of an essay by Derrida ("A

Hegelian without Reserves") on the cover - Derrida officially arrived at Yale in 1975

- was a marker of academic capital. For the swelling group of American scholars working on the new French thought, Derrida was not only at the forefront but a step beyond the pack (and by now the most American of the group). However, that the cover boasted the work of Eisner also contributed to its being the first issue to come to the attention of the New York art community, a downtown scene graduated from

New York's fine arts programs, many of whom had flocked uptown for the Schizo-

Culture conference in 1975. In spite of the relatively academic presentation of the journal - translations of Bataille alongside interpretations provided by certified experts, the key essay by Derrida - found inside the issue's covers, the Eisner graphic acted as a signifier that the journal belonged downtown.

Project(ion) for a Revolution in New York

When Lotringer re-took the helm for the next issue on Anti-Oedipus,

Semiotext(e) did not exactly leap headlong into a politics of madness, but it did begin, in earnest, its venture in print into the regions explored at the 1975 conference, particularly by continuing to build bridges of the type that the conference had

23 Lotringer, conversation with the author, 3 October, 2006. The issue is also notable in that it subtly marks the beginning of a more self-conscious approach to the process of translation. Hollier's introduction to the volume speaks of "franglas" (sic), recognizing the impossibility of perfect fit when moving Bataille from one language and tradition to another, and opting to maintain and play within the space that imperfect transposition affords. Bataille's "Hemingway in Light of Hegel" (an American- German affair translated from Bataille's French to American English) continues this play. In this sense, the journal is beginning to demonstrate a self-consciousness that later collections would pointedly produce. 275 attempted. With the Anti-Oedipus issue, Lotringer continued his quest to bring

French thought and American art together because he believed that they had a lot in common. As Casarino notes, "there where a conversation takes place, there the common expresses itself' (1). If the "Schizo-Culture" conference was a failed attempt at staging conversations (as opposed to the sometimes violent encounters that ensued, suggesting incommensurability), Lotringer used the Semiotext(e) journal as a means to continue to build the bridges necessary for French and American contingencies to converse.

Like the Georges Bataille cover that preceded it, the Anti-Oedipus issue was adorned with a cartoon drawn by Gil Eisner (Figure Six), indicating an attempt to build a bridge between the academy and artists, but also a bridging of temporal and spatial gaps more broadly. While the previous issue's image was of the guillotine at

Place de la Concorde (a dated, relatively distant image: the French Revolution), the

Anti-Oedipus issue is adorned by an image that was much more proximate: a troupe of baton-wielding riot police leading a hurried, ordered march with a paddy-wagon in tow. Secondly, the image bridges a spatial gap: whereas the guillotine of the Bataille issue is nation-bound, the image of the henchmen on the Anti-Oedipus cover is as

American as it is French. The brimmed helmets, slouched posture, and shadowed demeanour of the riot squad might call to mind the graphics of May '68 in France, but the scene was also familiar in the United States, iconic even, broadcast across the nation from the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In this sense, the graphic plays the part of trans-Atlantic bridge, but in a more specific way still: if we 276 are thinking in terms of the project's place in New York, the graphic is also a bridge between Columbia and its outside, the Lower East Side community in particular, where Columbia's SDS and RAT Subterranean News were stationed in

1968, producing the movement that drew the paddy wagons onto campus in April

1968. The Eisner graphic's work does not end with a reading of the cover itself; the

Paris-New York/Columbia-outside bridge is repeated when the cover is flipped open

(Figure Seven). On the inside cover page of the journal is a picture of a lone protestor throwing a cobblestone down a street. Although the photograph was most likely taken in France, there are no discernible markers of place. The image, in fact, captures the very act that I used to bridge New York and Paris in chapter two: it is worth recalling, here, that the action of launching of cobblestones in the environ and immediate aftermath of Columbia quoted the uprisings in France (a continuation of the struggle, a refusal to allow state oppression on campus to distract the movement from continuing to mobilize around the larger-than-campus issues that were at play in the respective revolts in the first place).

Though much closer to New York in 1977 than to the French Revolution, it should be noted that the image still comes quite late - almost a decade after 1968 - especially in the aftermath of a conference dubbed by Foucault to be the last countercultural event of the sixties. In response to this problem, the caption beneath the photograph compells: "Beneath the beach, the paving stones..." The Paris '68 slogan is altered, rendered in reverse, with pave and plage switching places: throwing VOLUME II. NO. I. 1977 S3.S0

TUsemiotexB JOURNAL OP A GROUP ANALYZING THE POWER MECHANISMS WHICHt PRODUC E AND MAINTAIN THE PRESENT DIVISIONS OF KNOWLEDGE, Anti-Oedipus

From Psychoanalysis to Schizopolitics

Figure Six: Semiotext(e) Anti-Oedipus issue. Front cover. 278

semiotexts

ANTI-OEDIPUS

"Beneath the beach, the p»»in* stones., .'*

Figure Seven: Semiotext(e) Anti-Oedipus issue. Inside cover page.

cobblestones, the caption points out, is not the same as it used to be. If the lifting of cobblestones marked an intervention against the march of modernity, a revelation of the smooth sand beneath modernity's rigid roads, the reversed quote suggests that the beach uncovered will always be fleeting, that there are always more cobblestones 279 buried beneath. As Lotringer explains in his introduction to the volume: "the events in France have proven that revolution is possible in even a highly industrialized capitalist society. But they shouldn't be hailed as another ready-made model to be followed blindly. For even May '68 can become Oedipal" ("Libido

Unbound: The Politics of Schizophrenia" 9). The question, then, remains: if the point is not to repeat Paris (or Columbia), then why did the issue stage the provocative launching at the front of the issue?

A closer look at the positioning of the protester provides the answer to this question. Rather than suggesting a repetition of the clash between protestor and police, as per 1968, something different is at play. That the target of the projectile is beyond the horizon of the image might have signified that the target was on the front cover (the cobblestone being launched at the approaching riot police), but the protestor is turned away from the approaching henchmen, launching his cobblestone into the text rather than back at the cover just passed (which it is, in effect, ahead of).

The squad and protestor are moving in the same direction, future-oriented, pointed into the depths of the text, of the issue(s) to come.

This type of movement has everything to do with the direction that the subtitle of the volume signposts: "From Psychoanalysis to Schizopolitics." If the issue is extending the Schizo-Culture conference, it makes sense that Anti-Oedipus is the subject matter: the conference, after all, was the result of Lotringer's friendship with

Guattari, sparked by his fascination with Anti-Oedipe, which had just been published in 1972, and coinciding with his return to Paris to organize seminars. Guattari, who 280 was not an academic, was a regular lecturer amongst a revolving stream of speakers at Reid Hall, and Lotringer spent much of a year of leave in 1973 working with him on Recherches and at La Borde. In this sense, Schizopolitics, a Guattarian invention, was very much a practice that was extra-academic.

In "Libido Unbound: The Politics of Schizophrenia," which serves as an introduction to the volume, Lotringer lays out the terms according to which Anti-

Oedipus marks a move from psychoanalysis: not only a departure from Freud but also from Structuralism and Linguistics, which, on the one hand, had explicitly advocated a return to Freud via Lacan but, more generally and significantly, were the same strain of virus: they boasted similar traits and consequences as Oedipus, castration, and the unconscious. Structuralism and Linguistics were apparati for the location and determination of "incontrovertible scientific truths," which produced "pure knowledge reserved strictly for techno-academics" (5). If Lotringer was attempting to build a bridge between continents, it was not for the continued importation of

Structuralism. Semiotext(e), at this juncture, becomes a project determined to prevent

French thought from becoming entrapped within disciplinary prisons that would inhibit the productive potential of its madness.24

24 The statement of purpose, which up until this point listed the divisions of knowledge within which it was scouring for alternatives in semiotics are bracketed off in an act of pointed cynicism: the project is now the "self-supporting journal of a group analyzing the power mechanisms which produce and maintain the present divisions of knowledge (Psychoanalysis, Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy and Semiotics)" (Lotringer, Anti-Oedipus 2). That Semiotics is included in this list is significant as it was the very signifier that distinguished Semiotext(e) from other ventures into the recent work of French thinkers. This line of inquiry, beginning with the Anti-Oedipus issue, is as suspect as the other domains listed in the project statement. Lotringer believed that French thought was more suited to, and was even ultimately about, the United States and not its native France. After two short paragraphs of general introduction - explaining what Schizopolitics is moving from -

Lotringer offers the following heading as a point of entry: "Project for a Revolution in

New York" (5). Whereas Sartre was "the uneasy bedfellow of bureaucratic socialism," a national presence, Deleuze and Guattari, Lotringer proposes, "[turn] somewhat paradoxically towards the United States for another possible face of revolution" (6). "The gamble of Anti-Oedipus," Lotringer argues: is to reformulate revolutionary perspectives from the strong points, and the weak links, of capitalism.

No longer moving against the grain, but rather pushing the logic of Kapital further than it ever allowed itself to be led - to its breaking point (6).25 In this passage,

Lotringer explains not only why Schizopolitics is particularly suited to America, but also why the police and protestor on the front and inside cover are running in the same direction: it is not about being against the oppressors pictured on the cover.

Instead, there is something to be said about what might be achieved by running with them (or, being just a step ahead, evading apparati of capture). In this we see

Deleuze's Nietzsche and the predilection towards active rather than reactive forces, or, to use an American example - as Deleuze and Guattari often do - George

Jackson's directive to flee but to grab a weapon in the process.

25 On the point of Anti-Oedipe's subversion of Kapital, Jean-Fra^ois Lyotard's "Enurgumen Capitalism," which explains why "what the book subverts most profoundly" - above and beyond psychoanalysis - "is what it doesn't criticize-. Marxism" (11). 282 If Semiotext(e)'s ambition was to build bridges for conversation and not just inroads for a new knowledge, the contents of the journal, like those of the

Bataille issue, ring rather monophonic. Because the journal is devoted to theAnti-

Oedipe, the contents mostly consist of writings by Deleuze and Guattari, written

together and apart, as well as early reviews of, and essays about, their work. While

the essays provide an important - and rather conversational, many of the pieces are

interviews - foundation in the politics of schizophrenia (as argued by Deleuze and

Guattari), the journal is not yet really doing the politics that it is carrying over. If the journal was trying to push beyond ego traps, it was not going to achieve the feat by

publishing issues on Bataille and Deleuze and Guattari (as much as the latter say that

in being two they are many).

What happens between the two: A New York Reel

It was the next issue, Nietzsche's Return, which began to break through the

wall of exclusivity that the conference had so explicitly challenged. Rather than just

including essays by French thinkers along with responses to their work by a select

number of American scholars, the issue includes a conversation between John Cage

and Daniel Charles, a short series of paragraphs that interpret Nietzsche as "The

Dancing Philosopher" by New York dancer-choreographer-writer Kenneth King, and

work by New York artists Selena Whitefeather, Jose Urbach, and Marim Avillez. All

of the pieces engage Nietzsche: King literally makes Nietzsche dance,

choreographing him into a "Dionysian frenzy" where "[djancing is pure becoming" 283 (22, emphasis original); Whitefeather diagrams the becoming of paramecia;

Urbach contributes a drawing of Nietzsche's face, mustache protruding, in the top- right corner of every odd-numbered page so that when the book is flipped,

Nietzsche's head goes spinning; and Avillez contributes a comic strip depicting

Nietzsche's incestuous relationship with his sister, all of the dialogue provided from

Nietzsche's My Sister and /, written while Nietzsche was confined to a nursing home in 1890.

A key aspect of the project was the way that it staged conversations, working against the impulse and tendency to fall into ego traps. The Cage/Charles offering is notable and worth pause. The conversation works by breaking down the ego, not only in terms of the way that Cage talks about his use of chance operations (which he uses to determine his performances and poetry) but because the author of Cage's responses to Charles was not always John Cage. As Cage points out in a short (split-column) introduction to the conversation proper, tapes of his conversations with Charles "had been damaged or lost or inadvertently erased, so it had sometimes been necessary for

Daniel Charles to compose my responses to his questions" (24). Although much of the conversation was unrecognizable to Cage when he read the galleys, Cage decided that the manuscript should be published as it was, a co-production between Cage and

Charles. The distance between Cage and his words is even further compounded in the

Semiotext(e) printing: although the conversations between Cage and Charles were conducted in English, the book from which the conversation is extracted for reprinting in the journal was originally published in French, and because the tapes and 284 transcripts had since vanished, the work had to be translated back into its original

English for publication. Cage's gesture - allowing the text to be published without editorial changes, setting thoughts free - was a very Nietzschean one. Assessing the significance of Nietzsche's contribution to philosophy in the essay that precedes the

Cage/Charles conversation, Deleuze describes Nietzsche as a philosopher who "has claimed for himself and his readers, present and future, a certain right to misinterpretation ("Nomad Thought" 12, emphasis added). As Cage notes at the end of the introduction to the conversation, he felt that ideas should be allowed to "live their own lives. They are certain to change in certain, unpredictable ways whenever someone takes the time to use them" (24). Although Cage and Charles do not mention

Nietzsche explicitly in their conversation, Deleuze's preceding piece, "Nomad

Thought," a paper which Deleuze had delivered at a 1964 conference on the question of "Nietzsche Today," argues that the Nietzschean today is not simply "the scholar preparing a paper on Nietzsche" but anyone who "in the course of an action, of a passion, of an experience, willingly or unwillingly, produces singularly Nietzschean utterances" (13). Hence the title of Deleuze's presentation ("Nomad Thought"): what

Nietzsche celebrates is the movement of thought, and never its framing.

If I am arguing that what is notable about Semiotext(e) is the way that it stages conversations, then reading the way that New York pieces are placed in the journal is as significant as what those pieces, in themselves, have to say. The question that I am ultimately asking of the journal after all is how are Parisian thought and New York art put in relation to one another? How does Lotringer's project bring out those things 285 that Paris and New York have in common? If the journal was "doing theory," how was the journal put to work? Although the Nietzsche's Return issue is predominantly devoted to translations of French essays (by Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault,

Lyotard) and contributions by members of the editorial board (by Hollier, Lotringer,

Rajchman), it is a piece from New York - which also adorns the cover (see Figure

Eight) - that ties the issue together. The piece in question is Urbach's spinning

Nietzsche head, which begins about a third of the way into the book, weaving New

York through the volume. Urbach's heads are like graffitied tags along the volume's seam. When flipped the tags not only make Nietzsche reel in the margins of the text they also become a New York reel, a projection of New York through the "French

Of*

Nietzschean" scene.

The point of the Semiotext(e) project was not for American art to become the fodder of French theory in America but to bring out the elements that French theory and American art had in common. As James Leigh says in his introduction to the volume, "Semiotext(e) demands more than a right to misinterpretation (Deleuze); it asserts sovereign multiplicity" (10, emphasis original). If the sovereign represents the centre of a regime, at centre of the Semiotext(e) project, according to Leigh's introduction, is multiplicity. The right to misinterpret becomes the rule when the sovereign centre is inherently multiple. To strip the sovereign of its singularity is to

26 That the reel, when flipped, sets Nietzsche's exaggerated and untamed moustache spinning is a depiction, perhaps, of the eternal return (the issue, after all, is entitled Nietzsche's Return), or perhaps it is a rabbit hole, pulling French Nietzsche into mad New York. 286

$3.(10

POLYMORPH PRESS VOLUME III. NO. !. 1978

Georges BATAILLE John CAGE Daniel CHARLES Gilles DELEUZE Jacques DERRIDA Michel FOUCAULT Fianp>is FOURQUET Lee HILDRETH Denis HOLLIER Kenneth KING Pierre KLOSSOWSKI James LEIGH Sylvere LOTRINGER Jean-Fran(ois LYOTARD Roger MCKEON Daniel MOSHENBERG John RAJCHMAN

Figure Eight: Semiotext(e) Nietzsche's Return. Front cover. remove the index that determines relations between all points in a regime of signs, allowing them to converse more freely. The index that Semiotext(e) removed was not only that of the philosopher Nietzsche (as the volume's inclusion of the Cage/Charles piece in particular demonstrates, reference to Nietzsche was not required for inclusion, but also the index that would give critic dominion over artist (with his or 287 her expert status and special interpretive powers) or restrict a writing to its nation

(not French theory for France, but for America, and not America as itself, but as that which continually pushes past itself, through its frontiers).

While a leveling out is at play in this process, it is not a leveling of differences. As Casarino points out, conversation is not the same as sublation (or, the assimilation and stifling of the other, of difference). Conversation is "that language that brings us together as different from rather than identical to one another"

("Surplus Common" 2). As opposed to monologue or even dialogue (which, in spite of the polyphonic possibilities opened up by Bakhtin, remains bogged down by its

Platonic connotations and the liberal-democratic discourse that invokes the term to characterize negotiations which proceed by "reconciling differences"), conversation not only acknowledges differences between the sides coming together but also moves according to these unassimilable differences. To include John Cage in a collection of

French theory is not to use French concepts to explain Cage, or vice versa. As

Deleuze and Parnet put it, conversation is "simply the outline of a becoming;" it is what passes between the two, the orchid AND the wasp, an "a-parallel evolution of two beings that have nothing whatsoever to do with each other" (2-3). Semiotext(e) was French theory AND New York: but to stage encounters between American artists and French theorists that would bring out currents that they already had in common.

Rather than outlining the common as an answer to some prefigured question or puzzle, the common is treated as a line of flight, a moment of double-capture, pulling something away from either side in order to move elsewhere. 288

Bounces, signals, jumps, and clicks

While the Nietzsche's Return issue marked a move in this direction - with its inclusion of Cage and American art, weaving New York through French theory -

Semiotext(e)'s Schizo-Culture issue, published later in the year, was a definitive break with the tendency to sublate rather than converse. Shortly after the Schizo-

Culture conference took place the journal's editorial collective - comprised of

Lotringer alongside graduate students who were getting jobs on other campuses - began to disperse. The Schizo-Culture issue marked the recomposition of an editorial collective that would from that point on be fluid, and that was comprised of downtown artists rather than uptown academics.27 Although Lotringer was the

27 Lotringer's first impression of New York came in the form of shows at CBGBs and the Mudd Club where the punk, new wave, and no wave movements were taking shape downtown. Beyond the clubs, an arts movement was thriving: painters, writers, and filmmakers taking advantage of the relatively low-rent in the rundown neighbourhoods of New York's Lower East Side. The collective was comprised of a number of artists that Lotringer met upon moving downtown, and filmmakers to whom Lotringer was teaching Lacan (who were interested in psychoanalysis and film in the wake of Christian Metz's Imaginary Signifier) who had ultimately enrolled in the university to use its equipment. Lotringer thus became involved with a group of downtown artists that was perpetually in flux, and who would ultimately become the journal's editorial collective. It was his relationship with Diego Cortez however, with whom Lotringer shared a studio for four years in the fashion district, that would grant Lotringer access to a wide array of downtown artists. Despised as widely as he was admired, Cortez was referred to as the "king of clubs;" he could get access anywhere, was something of a scout whose association with people and events was a marker of their being significant and of the moment. It was through Cortez that Lotringer met Kathy Acker (Cortez collaborated with Acker for her performances at the Kitchen, a performance space that fostered the downtown literary scene). Lotringer and Acker became very close, and shared an apartment for a time at the end of the seventies. Acker discusses the influence of their conversations about Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in "Devoured by Myths" 10 and Don Quixote 54-55. Consider, as well, the appearance of Deleuze and Guttari, unattributed, in her 1978 novel Blood and Guts in High School: EVERY POSITION OF DESIRE, NO MATTER HOW SMALL, IS CAPABLE OF PUTTING TO QUESTION THE ESTABLISHED ORDER OF A SOCIETY; NOT THAT DESIRE IS ASOCIAL; ON THE CONTRARY. BUT IT IS EXPLOSIVE; THERE IS NO DESIRING MACHINE CAPABLE OF BEING ASSEMBLED WITHOUT DEMOLISHING ENTIRE SOCIAL SECTIONS." (125) 289 Special Editor of the issue, the issue released was the result of collective efforts.

Rather than having the editor assume a central role in the organization of the issue, each member of the collective was responsible for a series of pages. The issue was also the first to forgo the convention of stapling an introduction to the beginning of the issue: the pieces are allowed to converse without overarching directives. If Leigh characterized the preceding issue as being directed by "sovereign multiplicity," the collectivization of editorial processes ensured that the Schizo-Culture issue would be constructed with multiplicity at its centre.

As noted above, the Schizo-Culture issue did not reprint the proceedings of the event whose name it carried, but instead performed the themes and overlaps that the conference had been organized to raise. Although New York artists appeared in the previous issue, they were relegated to the margins, the exception in a journal that was, as a rule, devoted to French thought. The Schizo-Culture issue, on the other hand, was more American than it was French, featuring essays, poetry, and manifestoes by William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Cage, John Giorno, and

Richard Foreman. Nothing distinguished these pieces from those by Deleuze,

Foucault, and Lyotard. Columns divided most of the pages (mimicking the popular characterization of schizophrenia as a simple split in personality), meaning that

French and American pieces were literally run side by side with a typeface so similar

This passage comes towards the end of the novel, as Acker tries to escape with Genet, the thief, in an escapade of plagiarism and improvisation, assembling a desiring machine that calls into question the fundamental structures of capitalism. 290 that it was inevitable that one would read across variously arranged barriers in the process of reading each piece. As Lotringer writes in a letter to Allen Ginsberg, soliciting a contribution for the issue (and calling American writing the equivalent of post-'68 radical French thought): "[b]y Schizo-Culture, we don't mean, of course, the end-product of institutional repression or social controls of all kinds, but the process of becoming, the flow of creative energy unchecked by ego boundaries: body intensity, affirmative, revolutionary disposition" (Lotringer, Letter to Allen

Ginsberg).29 In this sense the bleeding of columns into one another was a crucial gesture in the layout: the intensities represented in each piece could not be contained, and the layout was responsible for either attempting to frame these unframable pieces, or laying them out in the open, allowing them to move more freely amongst one another. In this way both editorial procedure and layout were set to work in the issue as "creative energy" released from the compression of the ego.

The point of the journal was not simply to favour madness over normality, but to point out that everything was madness and that it was a matter of strategically channeling flows as opposed to staging a simple war against institutions. As Foucault points out at the end of an interview about Bentham's panopticon which opens the issue, although it might be desirable for inmates to take over the observation tower in

28 Considering the overlap in concerns and strategies it is worth noting that the Schizo-Culture journal was supposed to be launched - or at least made available - at the same time as Burroughs and Gysin's launch of The Third Mind at the Semiotext(e) co-organized Nova Convention. The collective, however, was a bit behind schedule in its preparation of the journal.

29 Ginsberg did not provide a piece for the journal but would participate in the Nova Convention in late 1978. 291 Bentham's structure, it would only make a difference if this occupation was temporary as things would not really be all that different if inmates and guards simply switched places ("The Eye of Power" 19). French Nietzscheanism puts the dialectic to rest and puts its stakes into active as opposed to reactive forces. As the issue demonstrates with its inclusion of ads for psychiatric drugs and exposes written by psychiatrists, various agents and enclosures are employed to repress those desires which exceed normal functioning, but these institutionally sanctioned procedures are as mad as those impulses that they seek to repress (we get this from the beginning in the form of the graffitied word "Schizo" that runs over top of stock market readout on the cover of the issue). It is not simply a matter of switching social stations, but of understanding relations so as to be able to move strategically through them.

It is precisely this type of strategic movement that characterized Lotringer's project. Because theory often tended to obscure the creative flows about which it spoke, Lotringer employed theory conversationally. As artists became drawn to the project in the aftermath of the Schizo-Culture conference, Lotringer moved downtown and took the opportunity to converse with the artists that he believed shared affinities with the French philosophers whom he had been hired to import. The point was not to assimilate New York, to explain it away with theory, but to locate and feature points of overlap and lines of escape. In the absence of an introduction for the Schizo-Culture issue, an obscure performer called Police Band - who improvised with violin and voice over top of real-time projections from a police scanner - provides the most fitting description of this strategic project. Explaining by way of 292 reference to his performances - and not to Deleuze and Guattari whom he seems to be channeling - why he considers the body to be fascist, Police Band states that the body is:

completely organized, and if you abuse it, it beats you. It's incredibly oppressive and then when you start trying to control it, you start looking for others to control. .. Schizophrenia is a solution, of course, because it allows you to jump back and forth from position to position without any sense of self. Hopefully one position will click. It's like the scanner. I tell you, you should look at this piece of equipment. It just bounces back and forth until it finds something to signal into and it just stops if there's information coming over that wavelength. So, in effect, my act's quite schizophrenic. (65)

The Schizo-Culture issue of Semiotext(e), and the Semiotext(e) project in general, was all about finding such frequencies. Jumping back and forth from position to position in search of moments that clicked. These were its conversations, its expressions of the common, and it is in this sense that "downtown" New York provided a more fitting home for French theory than Columbia - organized to create critic/controllers - ever could at the time. Rather than being some form of trick orchestrated by the layout of the journal, conversation conveys an important pedagogical lesson about French theory. If Semiotext(e) was exiled from Columbia because of its political content (its inclusion of Marxists and Maoists), it took the exclusion in stride, purposively throwing aside academic conventions like introductions and footnotes because theory did not belong in the classroom as such: it was there to use, not to study, and it was everywhere.

Semiotext(e) could not continue to reproduce the Schizo-Culture issue, whose

2,000 copies sold out within three weeks. The rapid sellout, alongside Semiotext(e)'s 293 staging of the Nova Convention in 1978 (which drew in thousands to celebrate

Burroughs's career and, with its readings by Acker, Burroughs, Cage, Ginsberg,

Giorno, Gysin, Sanders, and "post-punk" performances by the B-52s, The Jerks with

Lydia Lunch, Patti Smith, Teenage Jesus, and Frank Zappa made the Village

Voice's list of top events in the year in review), was indication that Semiotext(e) had found its, or become a, public. What good was this constellation, however, if closed?

The point of the project was to remain a step ahead, as illustrated by the protestor on the inside cover of the Anti-Oedipus issue: if the rock was not being launched at the oncoming police, but somewhere beyond, into the depths of the texts yet to come,

Semiotext(e) was directed towards an outside and could not repeat the Schizo-Culture issue by printing its promised sequel. Semiotext(e) would begin the eighties with an issue devoted to the Italian Autonomists (like Schizo-Culture, which was staged months after the end of the sixties, the issue was released just after the Italian movement's "leaders" were rounded up by the Italian government, effectively putting an end to the phenomenon), and would continue in different directions from there as the journal was passed through a series of editors and collectives.

Just as Deleuze and Guattari argue that "May '68 did not take place," the same can be said about Schizo-Culture, or, more generally, the American invention called French Post-structuralism. Deleuze and Guattari argue that "there is always one part of the event that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains," and that this irreducibility "is an opening onto the possible" which can never be

30 Keith Richards was a no-show, nabbed in Canada for possession of marijuana. 294 outdated ("May '68 did not take place" 233). What this particular arrival of

French Post-structuralist theory in America has to offer, in contradistinction to the theorists who, with the exception of Derrida, introduced Structuralism to America at the Johns Hopkins conference in 1966, is an impulse towards perpetual connections and possibilities and a refusal of circumscription. This is what led Deleuze to comment upon "The Superiority of Anglo-American Literature," an anti-tradition within which he recognized a constant revelation of ruptures, impulses towards flight and becoming, and relationships with various outsides (Deleuze and Parnet 36-37). If

Fredric Jameson's Marxist method is to tease out the dialectical impulse towards

Utopia within cultural works, Deleuze's suggestion, one that is not only shared by his

French contemporaries but which also mirrors Burroughs's cut-ups, Acker's plagiarism, Cage's mesostics, and so on, is experimentation and rhizomatics: to forge connections with an outside because "when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work" (Deleuze and Guattari ATP 4). Because Lotringer, with Semiotext(e), opted for a similar approach - juxtaposing texts without metacommentary or editorial notes in order to stage cultural interventions - his project provides us with a unique perspective on the convergence of French theory and American art.

Conclusion: Of Foreign Agents and Time Bombs

Just as Semiotext(e) took flight from the university, it did not restrict itself to an obsessive love affair with French theory, nor did it fixate upon the Schizo-Culture 295 event, publishing and republishing its proceedings. Crucial for the movement of the project was not to remain entrapped within a particular domain, field, or regime.

Rather than aiming for fidelity to a circumscribed set of writings, the project lays itself out as a grounds upon which different kinds of writing can mix, and rather than subjecting one side of the equation to directives from the other (French theory to analyse American writing) Semiotext(e) encourages that which occurs between the two. As opposed to questions and objections, which restrict movement, Deleuze likens conversation to "the wasp AND the orchid," rendering the "AND" in caps because it is the "and" itself (and not the "wasp" or the "orchid") that designates conversation. Conversation is not about something that is in one or the other, Deleuze explains, "even if it ha[s] to be exchanged, be mingled, but something which is between the two, outside the two, and which flows in another direction" (Deleuze and

Parnet 7). It is an "a-parallel evolution" (7), which is to say that it is not an averaging out but a synthesis that drives between the elements connected as an absolute force or speed; it is absolute movement. Semiotext(e) was neither "French theory" as it was in

France (French theory was an American invention) nor was it "downtown" New York

(also an American invention, a retroactive designator for an explosion of cultural production in New York's Lower East Side): Semiotext(e) was what happened between the two.

But this "between the two" should not only be considered spatially - each issue of Semiotext(e) as the manifestation if the conversation between French theory and American writing - because there is an important temporal dimension to 296 conversation. I do not simply mean to redraw attention to the difficulties that arose when trying to translate French presentations into English on the fly at the

Schizo-Culture conference, but also to those things which occurred between

Semiotext(e)'s events and its issues. For this reason, in between my discussion of the

Schizo-Culture conference and the post-conference journal issues I inserted an interlude, recounting Deleuze and Guattari's post-conference road trip with Jean-

Jacques Lebel. Semiotext(e) is an instructive set of constellations, each issue and event bringing intensive points together, but there are also lines of flight. The road trip Westwards from the conference - through Kerouac, Dylan, Ginsberg, Smith,

McLure, Ferlinghetti - is one such line, another constellation (some of the points reappearing in different constellations in Deleuze and Parnet's Dialogues and

Deleuze and Guattari's "Rhizome"). There is a becoming-American writing of French theory and a becoming-French theory of American writing: Burroughs, Cage, Dylan, and Smith help Deleuze and Guattari to articulate their concept of the rhizome, becoming a part of it over the course of the eighties, and "theory" becomes increasingly popular downtown, inflecting downtown writing.31

I do not wish to restrict consideration of the temporal dimension of this conversation to exchanges that occur between Semiotext(e)'s events and issues because that would be to say that past conversations are closed, their final words already spoken. Consider Lotringer's reference to Semiotext(e)'s Foreign Agents

31 See, in particular, Brandon Stosuy's account of the Downtown literary scene in the 1980s in his excellent anthology of downtown writing, Up is Up but so is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 94, 98. See also Robert Siegle, "Writing Downtown"138-139. 297 series - a series of little black books by French theorists that were released over the course of the 80s and 90s - "cumulative time bombs" because it often took as long as a decade for these names to catch (Deleuze and Guattari being a prime example) after he introduced them, in translation, to a North American audience ("My

80's: Better than Life" 197). Lotringer's assessment of the time-lag between the release of agents and their effects on an American audience takes us back to the epigraph from Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" which I used to open this project:

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history - blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. (262-263)

Semiotext(e) is not the messianic answer to the question of French theory in America, but its issues are constellations that might be blasted from an oppressed past (the becoming Post-structuralism of French theory). If the event and issues do not provide an answer, it is a question that prevails: how might we make use, today, of the suggestive relations that Lotringer has forged? This will be an ongoing conversation. 298 Conclusion. Diagrams Over Top of a Tracing

What does it mean to talk about the arrival of French theory in America and, for that matter, what is French theory? Accepting the fact that this term is an

American invention lays bare, at the outset, that what arrives as "French" has already been translated, made to fit a foreign mold. A set of diverse thinkers spanning several disciplines (in different sections and on different floors in French bookstores) have been made to converge in Anglo-American "Post-structuralism." It is inevitable when thought travels from one language and nation to another a process of mediation occurs. As such, my project was not an attempt to retrieve untarnished originals.

What I sought to do instead was to displace arrivals and, in the process, to plug these arrivals into other networks. What I have done in this project can be explained as a procession of diagrams, or, rather, a procession of diagrams over top of a tracing, which I will provide first.

In the first chapter I proposed that when French theory is pursued as a construct of the field we are able to discern the way that French theory's arrival - the

Johns Hopkins conference on "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man"

- is consecrated as Post-structuralism, and how the '68 years are elided in the process

(See Figure Nine). In 1972, in the midst of the publication of a number of edited collections that accumulate the Structuralist paradigm, the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, emblematic of Structuralism's arrival in the United States, reasserted itself in the form of republication. The collection was unaltered except for 299

1966 1968 1972 1980

Johns "The "Post- Hopkins Languages of Structuralism" Conference Criticism and the Sciences • Textual "The of Man" Strategies Languages of republished as: • Untying the Criticism Text and the The Sciences of Structuralist • Structuralism Man" Controversy and Since " 1

Figure Nine: The French Theory tracing a brief new preface and a new title which foregrounded the controversy that resided at the centre of Structuralism. At the turn of the eighties, when another constellation of edited collections appeared, it was the texts of "Post-structuralism" that were being collected, a term which editors of collections devoted to this new mode of French thought could not yet explain except to say that it had something to do with the work of Jacques Derrida (whose rogue presentation at the Johns Hopkins conference was at centre of the controversy). 300 I analyzed this procession of events in order to trace the movement of academic capital at a time when the field of literary studies was in search of a replacement paradigm for the New Criticism and argued that this attunement to the crisis in criticism led critics to consecrate French theory as a formalist paradigm - an apparatus for the close reading of texts - that continued to be out of step with the larger crisis in the university (which involved a turn away from the university itself and towards that which was excluded from its discourses). I argued that the

Nietzschean turn which Macksey and Donato identify in passing in their introduction to the republished Johns Hopkins proceedings marks a substantial departure from the triumphalist line of Structuralism that their proceedings collect. In response to the elision of 1968 in this narrative, I situated both the triumphant and Nietzschean line in relation to the larger crisis in the university and identified their divergences: one is a turning inwards while the other is a strategic turning away.

On the one hand, when 1966 is republished in 1972 as The Structuralist

Controversy, the '68 years are elided and the trajectory of French theory restricted to the interests of the field. On the other, this trajectory is itself a delimited tracing. To emphasize the emergence of Post-structuralism as a response to Structuralism proper

(Derrida's "controversial" Johns Hopkins paper, the rise of the Yale School, and a continuation of the project of close reading) is certainly to focus on a history whose effects are discernible in the field of literary studies, but this narrative is also a conventionalized one, on offer with variations in Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory 301 and The Function of Criticism, Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism and, most recently, Franfois Cusset's French Theory.

In this sense, my dissertation is, in part, a work of historiography: a history of the history of theory that sets out to explain how and why it came to be that certain of theory's Anglo-American events have been privileged over others. In the process of historicization the contents of theory are translated into a narrative form wherein certain events are given symbolic significance that betrays or, at the very least, supplements their actual meaning. Theory, however, was already being translated upon its arrival, not only linguistically - from French to English - but in preparation for Anglo-American usage. As such, part of my task was to look back at this moment in order to examine the granting institutions, university departments, and editor and translator introductions that framed theory's Anglo-American arrival.

The task that I set out to accomplish was to recuperate this context in the form of the '68 years that were elided in the process of consecrating Anglo-American Post- structuralism. I argued that the '68 years constitute a vast diagram comprised of, and traversed by, a number of autonomous yet interconnected issues and groups engaged in trans-Atlantic dialogue. From the launching of cobblestones in tandem - a shared gesture that challenged discourses of modernity (students having begun to recognize the exclusions and interests upon which such discourses are founded [See Figure

Ten]) - to Jean-Jacques Lebel as go-between and groupuscule (with a foot on either side of the Atlantic, carrying French and American groups with him along the way

[See Figure Eleven]), to the prison information assemblage where Foucault and 302

/^ \ 1968 .'N \ / • • New York

\ / • • • X • (Columbia) • \ • « (cpbblestoh^s) J

Figure Ten: Columbia X Nanterre

William Burroughs -.'68 years Gilles Deleuze • • • Allen Ginsberg and \ / Abbie Hoffman Jeafk Jacques Felix Guattari Living Theatre Le?bel UAW/MF • s \{RA T S&bterannectn News) V N J

Figure Eleven: The Lebel groupuscule 303 George Jackson cross in the GIP and the relationship between intellectuals and power is rendered in such a fashion that Foucault's position, instead of being "Post-

structuralist," is occupied by the speech of others who under normal circumstances do

not have access to the information network (see Figure Twelve).

Black Panther Party

George Jackson

Attica

Figure Twelve: Foucault and the (prison) information network

Much of this mixing occurred in the underground press where events,

countercultures, and movements were collected for the purpose of assembling new

ones which, at their most successful, emerged as vast and complex compounds of

important and effective struggles (Women's LibeRATion, intercommunalism). While

the Schizo-Culture conference and the journal issues that followed did not share the

political thrust of these movements, the intensities collected in a project that refused

to define itself made available a set of discourses and crossings that ran astray, that

pulled us onto extra-academic paths, lines of flight from the discourses that have 304 distracted attention away from considering some of these other histories of French theory in America. After having recovered stray crossings dispersed about the '68 years, then, in my final chapter I endeavoured to displace the Johns Hopkins conference itself, excavating the arrival of French theory at the Schizo-Culture conference in November 1975 (See Figure Thirteen). What we find in this

• Gilles Deleuze 1975 Kathy Acker / \ Michel Schfc^CijKure / S. William Foucault Burroughs Semiotext(e) \ John Cage Felix Guattari (Sylvere Lotringer)

Jean-Francois Richard Lyotard Foreman

Figure Thirteen: Displacing Arrivals, Semiotext(e) and Schizo-Culture.

conference is not only the crossing of French theory and the American counterculture, but, in the extra-academic trajectory drawn by the Semiotext(e) project we once again find the cobblestone. As the caption under a Parisian protestor at the beginning of an issue of the Semiotext(e) journal reads, "underneath the beach, paving stones;" this is a reversal of the May '68 slogan which speaks to the necessity of continued movement, a project of perpetual assembly ill-suited to the confines of fields that 305 striate the smooth space of the beach. As the '68 years demonstrated, intensities only remain as such if, once collected, they are projected elsewhere.

The question my dissertation sought to answer was: if the arrival of French theory as narrativized is wanting, where might French Theory make sense in America at the turn of the seventies? The networks provided by the Underground Press

Syndicate and Semiotext(e) in particular display a process of cross-pollination and assemblage-building and not a process whereby energies are assimilated for the work that they can do within a given field. It is according to this process of assemblage- building that I have developed another history for French theory. The point of locating these hidden zones of contact and overlap has not been to affix theory to its proper origins, but to open it up to other possibilities and tasks, identifying points where further inquiry is merited.

I began this project with a quote from Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" because it spoke to the moments that might be blasted out of historicity, or, out of line (66->72->80), rendering different pasts - new constellations - available. Pondering Benjamin's essay, Cesare Casarino writes that, although he is unsure about whether the past awaits each generation's arrival, he is certain that

"[s]ome of us search for, stake a claim on, and elect as our own past that bygone moment when what we desire now was first anticipated and deferred, when what we now want as our future might have taken place but never did" ("Surplus Common"

13). If philosophical families are built of "elective affinities" (13), we do not only have the ability to decide which philosophers will be our kin, but also which histories, 306 arrivals, and interventions, a philosophical DNA that we decode and deploy every time we pick up a book, a genealogy that is more diagram than tracing (See Figure

Fifteen).

1966 1972 1980 Johns Hopkin<. w >The Language^ * >. "Post- Confereno' \ 1968 Criticism/ N. 1975 • ' \ucturalism"

SCien<^ Jchizo-^iilture /

and^^I (cobblestones) ^Hshec Se«rf^t(e) of Man'

Figure Fifteen: Diagrams over top of a tracing. 307 Works Cited

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"Tear down the walls!" RAT Subterranean News. 17 Dec 1970-6 Jan 1971: 9+.

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Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. "Affinity Groups." RAT Subterranean News. 9- 22 Aug 1968: 11.

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Weatherwoman. "Inside the Weather Machine." RAT Subterranean News. 9-23 Feb 1970: 5+.

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Zizek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge: MIT, 2003.