Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (from Image, Music, Text, 1977)
In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following
sentence: ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive
worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.’ Who is speaking thus? Is
it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it
Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac
the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology?
We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point
of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative
where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.
No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting
directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the
very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters
into his own death, writing begins. The sense of this phenomenon, however, has varied; in
ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a
mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’ — the mastery of the narrative code —may possibly
be admired but never his ‘genius’. The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as,
emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism,
French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the
individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should
be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest
importance to the ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of
writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their
person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary
culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism
still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man,
Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the
man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent
allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.
Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done no more than
consolidate it), it goes without saying that certain writers have long since attempted to loosen it. In
France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to
substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for
us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality
(not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point
where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’. Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in suppressing
the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader).
Valery, encumbered by a psychology of the Ego, considerably diluted Mallarme’s theory but, his taste
for classicism leading him to turn to the lessons of rhetoric, he never stopped calling into question and
deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic and, as it were, ‘hazardous’ nature of his activity, and
throughout his prose works he militated in favour of the essentially verbal condition of literature, in
the face of which all recourse to the writer’s interiority seemed to him pure superstition. Proust
himself, despite the apparently psychological character of what are called his analyses, was visibly
concerned with the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation between the
writer and his characters; by making of the narrator not he who has seen and felt nor even he who is
writing, but he who is going to write (the young man in the novel — but, in fact, how old is he and
who is he? — wants to write but cannot; the novel ends when writing at last becomes possible), Proust
gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so
often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model; so that it is
clear to us that Charlus does not imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou — in his anecdotal,
historical reality — is no more than a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus. Lastly, to go no
further than this prehistory of modernity, Surrealism, though unable to accord language a supreme
place (language being system and the aim of the movement being, romantically, a direct subversion of
codes—itself moreover illusory: a code cannot be destroyed, only ‘played off’), contributed to the
1
desacrilization of the image of the Author by ceaselessly recommending the abrupt disappointment of
expectations of meaning (the famous surrealist ‘jolt’), by entrusting the hand with the task of writing
as quickly as possible what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing), by accepting the
principle and the experience of several people writing together. Leaving aside literature itself (such
distinctions really becoming invalid), linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author
with a valuable analytical tool by show ing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty functioning
perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors.
Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the
instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the
very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’, suffices, that is to say, to
exhaust it.
The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable ‘distancing’, the Author
diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) is not merely an historical fact or an act
of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text (or — which is the same thing —the text is henceforth
made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent). The temporality is different. The
Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand
automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the
book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of
antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born
simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is
not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every
text is eternally written here and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate
an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say); rather, it
designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative a rare verbal
form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no
other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered—something like the I
declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets. Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can
thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow
for his thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this
delay and indefinitely ‘polish’ his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice,
borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which,
at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all
origins.
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the
‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of
them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres
of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and
whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a
gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones
with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he
ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed
dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely; something
experienced in exemplary fashion by the young Thomas de Quincey, he who was so good at Greek
that in order to translate absolutely modern ideas and images into that dead language, he had, so
Baudelaire tells us (in Paradis Artificiels), ‘created for himself an unfailing dictionary, vastly more
extensive and complex than those resulting from the ordinary patience of purely literary themes’.
Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings,
impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt:
life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs imitation that is
lost, infinitely deferred.
Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an
Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a
conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the
Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has
2
been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that,
historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism
(be it new) is today undermined, along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to
be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking)
at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged
over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a
systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would bebetter from now on to
say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as
text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary
since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.
Let us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one, no ‘person’, says it: its source, its voice, is not the
true place of the writing, which is reading. Another—very precise— example will help to make this
clear: recent research (J.-P. Vernant) has demonstrated the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek
tragedy, its texts being woven from words with double meanings that each character understands
unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is exactly the ‘tragic’); there is, however, someone who
understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters
speaking in front of him—this someone being precisely the reader (or here, the listener). Thus is
revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures
and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this
multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is
the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being
lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be
personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds
together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. Which is why it is
derisory to condemn the new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the
reader’s rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only
person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant
antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores,
smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth:
the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
3
Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text"
It is a fact that over the last few years a certain change has taken place (or is taking place) in our
conception of language and, consequently, of the literary work which owes at least its phenomenal
existence to this same language. The change is clearly connected with the current development of
(amongst other disciplines) linguistics, anthropology, Marxism and psychoanalysis (the term
'connection' is used here in a deliberately neutral way: one does not decide a determination, be it
multiple and dialectical). What is new and which affects the idea of the work comes not necessarily
from the internal recasting of each of these disciplines, but rather from their encounter in relation to an
object which traditionally is the province of none of them. It is indeed as though the interdisciplinarity
which is today held up as a prime value in research cannot be accomplished by the simple
confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy
security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity
of the old disciplines breaks down -- perhaps even violently, via the jolts of fashion -- in the interests
of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were
to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it
is possible to diagnose a certain mutation. The mutation in which the idea of the work seems to be
gripped must not, however, be over-estimated: it is more in the nature of an epistemological slide than
of a real break. The break, as is frequently stressed, is seen to have taken place in the last century with
the appearance of Marxism and Freudianism; since then there has been no further break, so that in a
way it can be said that for the last hundred years we have been living in repetition. What History, our
History, allows us today is merely to slide, to vary, to exceed, to repudiate. Just as Einsteinian science
demands that the relativity of the frames of reference be included in the object studied, so the
combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature, the relativization
of the relations of writer, reader and observer (critic). Over against the traditional notion of the work,
for long -- and still -- conceived of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now the requirement of a
new object, obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories. That object is the Text. I know
the word is fashionable (I am myself often led to use it) and therefore regarded by some with
suspicion, but that is exactly why I should like to remind myself of the principal propositions at the
intersection of which I see the Text as standing. The word 'proposition' is to be understood more in a
grammatical than in a logical sense: the following are not argumentations but enunciations, 'touches',
approaches that consent to remain metaphorical. Here then are these propositions; they concern
method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading and pleasure.
1. The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. It would be futile to try to
separate out materially works from texts. In particular, the tendency must be avoided to say that the
work is classic, the text avant-garde; it is not a question of drawing up a crude honours list in the name
of modernity and declaring certain literary productions 'in' and others 'out' by virtue of their
chronological situation: there may be 'text' in a very ancient work, while many products of
contemporary literature are in no way texts. The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance,
occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field.
The opposition may recall (without at all reproducing term for term) Lacan's distinction between
'reality' and 'the real': the one is displayed, the other demonstrated; likewise, the work can be seen (in
bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according
to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language,
only exists in the movement of a discourse (or rather, it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself
as text); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the
Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production. It follows that the Text cannot
stop (for example on a library shelf); its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular,
it can cut across the work, several works).
2. In the same way, the Text does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy,
even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its
subversive force in respect of the old classifications. How do you classify a writer like Georges
Bataille? Novelist, poet, essayist, economist, philosopher, mystic? The answer is so difficult that the
literary manuals generally prefer to forget about Bataille who, in fact, wrote texts, perhaps
continuously one single text. If the Text poses problems of classification (which is furthermore one of
its 'social functions), this is because it always involves a certain experience of limits (to take up an
4
expression from Philippe Sollers). Thibaudet used already to talk -- but in a very restricted sense -- of
limit-works (such as Chateaubriand's Vie de Rancé, which does indeed come through to us today as a
'text'); the Text is that which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, readability, etc.).
Nor is this a rhetorical idea, resorted to for some 'heroic' effect: the Text tries to place itself very
exactly behind the limit of the doxa (is not general opinion -- constitutive of our democratic societies
and powerfully aided by mass communications -- defined by its limits, the energy with which it
excludes, its censorship?). Taking the word literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical.
3. The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign. The work closes on a signified.
There are two modes of signification which can be attributed to this signified: either it is claimed to be
evident and the work is then the object of a literal science, of philology, or else it is considered to be
secret, ultimate, something to be sought out, and the work then falls under the scope of a
hermeneutics, of an interpretation (Marxist, psychoanalytic, thematic, etc.); in short, the work itself
functions as a general sign and it is normal that it should represent an institutional category of the
civilization of the Sign. The Text, on the contrary, practises the infinite deferment of the signified, is
dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived of as 'the first stage of
meaning', its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action. Similarly,
the infinity of the signifier refers not to some idea of the ineffable (the unnameable signified) but to
that of a playing; the generation of the perpetual signifier (after the fashion of a perpetual calendar) in
the field of the text (better, of which the text is the field) is realized not according to an organic
progress of maturation or a hermeneutic course of deepening investigation, but, rather, according to a
serial movement of disconnections, overlappings, variations. The logic regulating the Text is not
comprehensive (define 'what the work means') but metonymic; the activity of associations,
contiguities, carryings-over coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy (lacking it, man would die);
the work in the best of cases -- is moderately symbolic (its symbolic runs out, comes to a halt); the
Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature
is a text. Thus is the Text restored to language; like language, it is structured but off-centred, without
closure (note, in reply to the contemptuous suspicion of the 'fashionable' sometimes directed at
structuralism, that the epistemological privilege currently accorded to language stems precisely from
the discovery there of a paradoxical idea of structure: a system with neither close nor centre).
4. The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it .has several meanings, but that it accomplishes
the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a coexistence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a
liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the
ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of
signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). The reader of the Text may be
compared to someone at a loose end (someone slackened off from any imaginary); this passably empty
subject strolls -- it is what happened to the author of these lines, then it was that he had a vivid idea of
the Text -- on the side of a valley, a oued flowing down below (oued is there to bear witness to a
certain feeling of unfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a
disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat,
air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children's voices from over on the other side,
passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half identifiable:
they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, founds the stroll in a
difference repeatable only as difference. So the Text: it can be it only in its difference (which does not
mean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive (this rendering illusory any inductive-deductive
science of texts -- no 'grammar' of the text) and nevertheless woven entirely with citations, references,
echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it
through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being
the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the
'sources', the 'influences' of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to
make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted
commas. The work has nothing disturbing for any monistic philosophy (we know that there are
opposing examples of these); for such a philosophy, plural is the Evil. Against the work, therefore, the
text could well take as its motto the words of the man possessed by demons (Mark 5: 9): 'My name is
Legion: for we are many.' The plural of demoniacal texture which opposes text to work can bring with
5
it fundamental changes in reading, and precisely in areas where monologism appears to be the Law:
certain of the 'texts' of Holy Scripture traditionally recuperated by theological monism (historical or
anagogical) will perhaps offer themselves to a diffraction of meanings (finally, that is to say, to a
materialist reading), while the Marxist interpretation of works, so far resolutely monistic, will be able
to materialize itself more by pluralizing itself (if, however, the Marxist 'institutions' allow it).
5. The work is caught up in a process of filiation. Are postulated: a determination of the work by the
world (by race, then by History), a consecution of works amongst themselves, and a conformity of the
work to the author. The author is reputed the father and the owner of his work: literary science
therefore teaches respect for the manuscript and the author's declared intentions, while society asserts
the legality of the relation of author to work (the 'droit d'auteur' or 'copyright', in fact of recent date
since it was only really legalized at the time of the French Revolution). As for the Text, it reads
without the inscription of the Father. Here again, the metaphor of the Text separates from that of the
work: the latter refers to the image of an organism which grows by vital expansion, by 'development'
(a word which is significantly ambiguous, at once biological and rhetorical); the metaphor of the Text
is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic (an image,
moreover, close to current biological conceptions of the living being). Hence no vital 'respect' is due to
the Text: it can be broken (which is just what the Middle Ages did with two nevertheless authoritative
texts -- Holy Scripture and Aristotle); it can be read without the guarantee of its father, the restitution
of the inter-text paradoxically abolishing any legacy. It is not that the Author may not 'come back' in
the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a 'guest'. If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like
one of his characters, figured in the carpet; no longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, his
inscription is ludic. He becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his
fictions but a fiction contributing to his work; there is a reversion of the work on to the life (and no
longer the contrary); it is the work of Proust, of Genet which allows their lives to be read as a text. The
word 'bio-graphy' re-acquires a strong, etymological sense, at the same time as the sincerity of the
enunciation -- veritable 'cross" borne by literary morality -- becomes a false problem: the I which
writes the text, it too, is never more than a paper-I.
6. The work is normally the object of a consumption; no demagogy is intended here in referring to the
so-called consumer culture but it has to be recognized that today it is the 'quality' of the work (which
supposes finally an appreciation of 'taste') and not the operation of" reading itself which can
differentiate between books: structurally, there is no difference between 'cultured reading and casual
reading in trains. The Text (if only by its frequent 'unreadability) decants the work (the work
permitting) from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means
that the Text requires that one try to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between
writing and reading, in no way by intensifying the projection of the reader into the work but by joining
them in a single signifying practice. The distance separating reading from writing is historical. In the
times of the greatest social division (before the setting up of democratic cultures), reading and writing
were equally privileges of class. Rhetoric, the great literary code of those times, taught one to write
(even if what was then normally produced were speeches, not texts). Significantly, the coming of
democracy reversed the word of command: what the (secondary) School prides itself on is teaching to
read (well) and no longer to write (consciousness of the deficiency is becoming fashionable again
today: the teacher is called upon to teach pupils to express themselves', which is a little like replacing a
form of repression by a misconception). In fact, reading, in the sense of consuming, is far from playing
with the text. 'Playing' must be understood here in all its polysemy: the text itself plays (like a door,
like a machine with 'play') and the reader plays twice over, playing the Text as one plays a game,
looking for a practice which re-produces it, but, in order that that practice not be reduced to a passive,
inner mimesis (the Text is precisely that which resists such a reduction), also playing the Text in the
musical sense of the term. The history of music (as a practice, not as an 'art') does indeed parallel that
of the Text fairly closely: there was a period when practising amateurs were numerous (at least within
the confines of a certain class) and 'playing' and 'listening' formed a scarcely differentiated activity;
then two roles appeared in succession, first that of the performer, the interpreter to whom the
bourgeois public (though still itself able to play a little -- the whole history of ) the piano) delegated its
playing, then that of the (passive) amateur, who listens to music without being able to play (the
gramophone record takes the place of the piano). We know that today post-serial music has radically
altered the role of the 'interpreter', who is called on to be in some sort the co-author of the score,
6
completing it rather than giving it 'expression'. The Text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks
of the reader a practical collaboration. Which is an important change, for who executes the work?
(Mallarmé posed the question, wanting the audience to produce the book). Nowadays only the critic
executes the work (accepting the play on words). The reduction of reading to a consumption is clearly
responsible for the Boredom' experienced by many in the face of the modern ('unreadable') text, the
avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it
going.
7. This leads us to pose (to propose) a final approach to the Text, that of pleasure. I do not know
whether there has ever been a hedonistic aesthetics (eudaemonist philosophies are themselves rare).
Certainly there exists a pleasure of the work (of certain works); I can delight in reading and re-reading
Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, even -- why not? -- Alexandre Dumas. But this pleasure, no matter how keen
and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part (unless by some exceptional critical effort) a
pleasure of consumption; for if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot re-write them (that it
is impossible today to write 'like that') and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off
from the production of these works, in the very moment their remoteness establishes my modernity (is
not to be modern to know clearly what cannot be started over again?) As for the Text, it is bound to
jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation. Order of the signifier, the Text participates in its
own way in a social utopia; before History (supposing the latter does not opt for barbarism), the Text
achieves, if not the transparence of social relations, that at least of language relations: the Text is that
space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate (keeping the circular
sense of the term).
These few propositions, inevitably, do not constitute the articulations of a Theory of the Text and this
is not simply the result of the failings of the person here presenting them (who in many respects has
anyway done no more than pick up what is being developed round about him). It stems from the fact
that a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied by a metalinguistic exposition: the destruction of metalanguage, or at least (since it may be necessary provisionally to resort to meta-language) its calling
into doubt, is part of the theory itself: the discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text,
research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside,
nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory
of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.
1971
7
Translation Copyright 1977, Stephen Heath
Baudrillard, Jean. "Simulacra and Simulations." Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed Mark
Poster. Stanford University Press, 1998, pp.166-184.
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is
none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes
If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of
the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the
decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the
deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and
rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being
confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing
but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.l
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no
longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real
without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.
Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that
engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds
are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there,
in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is
with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with
their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has
disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the
difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept
and the charm of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed
by the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory,
disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and
discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and
its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of
simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command
models — and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be
rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than
operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a
hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without
atmosphere.
In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of
simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials — worse: by their art)ficial resurrection in
systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all
systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question
of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the
real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a
metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and
short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital
function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves
any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from
any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of
models and the simulated generation of difference.
8
The divine irreference of images
To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't.
One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is
not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill.
Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning
or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked;
whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and
"imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not? The simulator
cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point,
before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can
no longer be accepted as a fact of nature, then every illness may be considered as simulatable and
simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "true" illnesses by their
objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious way on the edge of the illness principle. As for
psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom from the organic to the unconscious order: once again, the
latter is held to be real, more real than the former; but why should simulation stop at the portals of the
unconscious? Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be "produced" in the same way as any other
symptom in classical medicine? Dreams already are.
The alienist, of course, claims that "for each form of the mental alienation there is a particular order in
the succession of symptoms, of which the simulator is unaware and in the absence of which the
alienist is unlikely to be deceived." This (which dates from 1865) in order to save at all cost the truth
principle, and to escape the specter raised by simulation: namely that truth, reference and objective
caues have ceased to exist. What can medicine do with something which floats on either side of
illness, on either side of health, or with the reduplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer true
or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the reduplication of the discourse of the unconscious in a
discourse of simulation that can never be unmasked, since it isn't false either?2
What can the army do with simulators? Traditionally, following a direct principle of identification, it
unmasks and punishes them. Today, it can reform an excellent simulator as though he were equivalent
to a "real" homosexual, heart-case or lunatic. Even military psychology retreats from the Cartesian
clarifies and hesitates to draw the distinction between true and false, between the "produced" symptom
and the authentic symptom. "If he acts crazy so well, then he must be mad." Nor is it mistaken: in the
sense that all lunatics are simulators, and this lack of distinction is the worst form of subversion.
Against it, classical reason armed itself with all its categories. But it is this today which again
outflanks them, submerging the truth principle.
Outside of medicine and the army, favored terrains of simulation, the affair goes back to religion and
the simulacrum of divinity: "l forbade any simulacrum in the temples because the divinity that
breathes life into nature cannot be represented." Indeed it can. But what becomes of the divinity when
it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority,
simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone
deploy their pomp and power of fascination — the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the
pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose
millennial quarrel is still with us today.3 Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they
sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses
of people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never
been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that God himself has only ever been his own
simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of
God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth.
But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in
fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect
simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be
exorcised at all cost.
It can be seen that the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and denying images, were in
fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them only
reflections and were content to venerate God at one remove. But the converse can also be said, namely
9
that the iconolaters possesed the most modern and adventurous minds, since, underneath the idea of
the apparition of God in the mirror of images, they already enacted his death and his disappearance in
the epiphany of his representations (which they perhaps knew no longer represented anything, and that
they were purely a game, but that this was precisely the greatest game — knowing also that it is
dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).
This was the approach of the Jesuits, who based their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and
on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences — the evanescence of God in the
epiphany of power — the end of transcendence, which no longer serves as alibi for a strategy
completely free of influences and signs. Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of
politics.
Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images: murderers of the real;
murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this
murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible
mediation of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation:
that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meamng and that
something could guarantee this exchangeGod, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated,
that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes
weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never
again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an umnterrupted circuit without
reference or circumference
So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the
principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a
fundamental ax~om). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence,
from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every
reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation,
simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.
These would be the successive phases of the image:
1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the
second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance:
it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of
simulation.
The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is
nothing, marks the decisive turning pomt. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which
the notmn of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in
which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from
false, the real from its art)ficial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.
When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a
proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity.
There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the
object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the
referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in
the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a
strategy of deterrence.
Hyperreal and imaginary
10
Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of
illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be
what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the
social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and
drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary
world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that
aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect.
The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot — a veritable concentration camp — is total.
Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is
directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly
belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have
been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his
resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.
The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to
the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comicstrip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland
(L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to
American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals
something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation:
Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is
Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal
omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe
that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real,
but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation
of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the
reality principle.
The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to
rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this
imaginary. It ~s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are
elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly
among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.
Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los
Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose
mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of
fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power
stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a
perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms
for its sympathetic nervous system.
Political incantation
Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists
outside than inside the bounds of the art)ficial perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing
that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by
the CIA and the Washington Post journalists). Same operation, though this time tending towards
scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to
regenerate a reality principle in distress.
The denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law. And Watergate above all succeeded in
imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal — in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of
intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale. It could be said
along with Bourdieu that: "The specific character of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as
such, and to acquire all its force only because it is so dissimulated"; understood as follows: capital,
which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever
regenerates this public mocality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the; order
of capital, as did the Washington Post journalists.
11
But this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu enunciates it, he takes "relation of
force" to mean the truth of capitalist domination, and he denounces this relation of force as itself a
scandal: he therefore occupies the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post
journalists. He does the same job of purging and revivihg moral order, an order of truth wherein the
genuine symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all relations of force, which
are only elements of its indifferent and shifting configuration in the moral and political
consciousnesses of people.
All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to
receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be
read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that
there is none.
Watergate is not a scandal: this is- what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned
to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we approach the
primal (mise-en-)scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty; its incomprehensible ferocity; its
fundamental immorality — these are what are scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral
and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to
communism. Capital doesn't give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it: it is a
monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more. Rather, it is "enlightened" thought which seeks to
control capital by imposing rules on it. And all that recrimination which replaced revolutionary
thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is
unjust; its justice is a class justice; capital exploits us; etc." — as if capital were linked by a contract to
the society it rules. It is the left which holds out the mirror of equivalence, hoping that capital will fall
for this phantasmagoria of the social contract and furfill its obligation towards the whole of society (at
the same time, no need for revolution: it is enough that capital accept the rational formula of
exchange).
Capital in fact has never been linked by a contract to the society it dominates. It is a sorcery of the
social relation, it is a challenge to society and should be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be
denounced according to moral and economic rationality, but — challenge to take up according to
symbolic law.
Moebius: spiralling negativity
Hence Watergate was only a trap set by the system to catch its adversaries — a simulation of scandal
to regenerative ends. This is embodied by the character called "Deep Throat," who was said to be a
Republican grey eminence manipulating the leftist journalists in order to get rid of Nixon — and why
not? All hypotheses are possible, although this one is superfluous: the work of the Right is done very
well, and spontaneously, by the Left on its own. Besides, it would be naive to see an embittered good
conscience at work here. For the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of the Left. All the
hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating
causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another; where there is no
longer any active or passive. It is by putting an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle
of political reality can be saved. It is by the simulation of a conventional, restricted perspective field,
where the premises and consequences of any act or event are calculable, that a political credibility can
be maintained (including, of course, "objective" analysis, struggle, etc.) But if the entire cycle of any
act or event is envisaged in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in
a field unhinged by simulation, then all determination evaporates, every act terminates at the end of
the cycle having benefited everyone and been scattered in all directions.
Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or
staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing
power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this
is equally true, and the search for proof- indeed the objectivity of the fact- does not check this vertigo
of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an
order of reasons. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all models around the
merest fact- the models come first, and their orbital (like the bomb) circulation constitutes the genuine
12
magnetic field of events. Facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection
of the models; a single fact may even be engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this
precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of
meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity or implosion of poles) is what each
time allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory — all are true, in the sense
that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generalized
cycle.
The communists attack the socialist party as though they wanted to shatter the union of the Left. They
sanction the idea that their reticence stems from a more radical political exigency. In fact, it is because
they don't want power. But do they not want it at this conjuncture because it is unfavorable for the Left
in general, or because it is unfavorable for them within the union of the Left — or do they not want it
by definition? When Berlinguer declares, "We mustn't be frightened of seeing the communists seize
power in Italy," this means simultaneously:
1 That there is nothing to fear, since the communists, if they come to power, will change nothing in its
fundamental capitalist mechanism.
2 That there isn't any risk of their ever coming to power (for the reason that they don't want to); and
even if they do take it up, they will only ever wield it by proxy.
3 That in fact power, genuine power, no longer exists, and hence there is no risk of anybody seizing it
or taking it over.
4 But more: 1, Berlinguer, am not frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy — which
might appear evident, but not so evident, since:
5 It can also mean the contrary (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am frightened of seeing the
communists seize power (and with good reason, even for a communist).
All the above is simultaneously true. This is the secret of a discourse that is no longer only ambiguous,
as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determinate position of power,
the impossibility of a determinate position of discourse. And this logic belongs to neither party. It
traverses all discourses without their wanting it.
Who will unravel this imbroglio? The Gordian knot can at least be cut. As for the Moebius strip, if it is
split in two, it results in an additional spiral without there being any possibility of resolving its
surfaces (here the reversible continuity of hypotheses). Hades of simulation, which is no longer one of
torture, but of the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning4 — where even those condemned at
Burgos are still a gik from Franco to Western democracy, which finds m them the occasion to
regenerate its own flagging humamsm, and whose indignant protestation consolidates in return
Franco's regime by uniting the Spanish masses against foreign intervention? Where is the truth in all
that, when such collusions admirably knit together without their authors even knowing it?
The conjunction of the system and its extreme alternative like two ends of a curved mirror, the
"vicious" curvature of a political space henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilized from right
to lek a torsion that is like the evil demon of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital
folded back over its own sur&ce: transfinite? And isn't it the same with desire and libidinal space? The
conjunction of desire and value, of desire and capital. The conjunction of desire and the law; the
ultimate joy and metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is so well received at the moment): only
capital takes pleasure, Lyotard said, before coming to think that we take pleasure in capital.
Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze: an enigmatic reversal which brings this desire that is
"revolutionary by itself, and as if involuntarily, in wanting what it wants," to want its own repression
and to invest paranoid and fascist systems? A malign torsion which reduces this revolution of desire to
the same fundamental ambiguity as the other, historical revolution.
13
All the referentials intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian compulsion. Not so long ago
sex and work were savagely opposed terms: today both are dissolved into the same type of demand.
Formerly the discourse on history took its force from opposing itself to the one on nature, the
discourse on desire to the one on power: today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios.
It would take too long to run through the whole range of operational negativity, of all those scenarios
of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to revive a moribund principle by simulated scandal,
phantasm, murder — a sort of hormonal treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of
proving the real by the imaginary; proving truth by scandal; proving the law by transgression; proving
work by the strike; proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution; and for that matter proving
ethnology by the dispossession of its object (the Tasaday). Without counting: proving theater by antitheater; proving art by anti-art; proving pedagogy by anti-pedagogy; proving psychiatry by antipsychiatry, etc., etc.
Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form
of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of
death, its real agony. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and
legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a
political dimension. Others — Johnson, Nixon, Ford — only had a right to puppet attempts, to
simulated murders. But they nevertheless needed that aura of an art)ficial menace to conceal that they
were nothing other than mannequins of power. In olden days the king (also the god) had to die — that
was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing
of power. But even this is gone.
To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle by the mirror of crisis, negativity and antipower: this is the only alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious circle
of its irresponsibility and its fundamental nonexistence, of its deja-vu and its deja-mort.
Strategy of the real
Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the
impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer
possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation,
which is posed here.
For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more
violently to a simulated hold up than to a real one? For a real hold up only upsets the order of things,
the right of property, whereas a simulated hold up interferes with the very principle of reality.
Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real.
Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law
and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation.
But the difficulty is in proportion to the peril. How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Go and
simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a
simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a
real theft; in fact the signs mclme neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is
concerned, they are always of the order of the real.
Go and organize a fake hold up. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most
trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger (otherwise you risk committing an offence). Demand
ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible. In brief, stay
close to the "truth", so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't
succeed: the web of art)ficial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer
will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the
phoney ransom over to you). In brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one
of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some
reality: that's exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play.
14
In this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation must be seen the whole thrust of an order
that can only see and understand m terms of some reality, because it can function nowhere else. The
simulation of an offence, if it is patent, will either be punished more lightly (because it has no
"consequences") or be punished as an offence to public office (for example, if one triggered off a
police operation "for nothing") — but never as simulation, since it is precisely as such that no
equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is
irreceivable by power. How can you punish the simulation of virtue? Yet as such it is as serious as the
simulation of crime. Parody makes obedience and transgression equivalent, and that is the most
serious crime, since it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based. The established order
can do nothing against it, for the law is a second-order simulacrum whereas simulation is a third-order
simulacrum, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond the rational distmctions upon which
function all power and the entire social stratum. Hence, failing the real, it is here that we must aim at
order.
This is why order always opts for the real. In a state of uncertainty, It always prefers this assumption
(thus in the army they would rather take the simulator as a true madman). But this becomes more and
more difficult, for it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation; through the force of
inertia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is also true (and this very reversibility forms part of
the apparatus of simulation and of power's impotency): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the
process of the real, or to prove the real.
Thus all hold ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense that they are
inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode
of presentation and possible consequences. In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated
exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their "real" goal at all. But this does not make
them inoffensive. On the contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer having any particular contents or
aims, but indefinitely refracted by each other (for that matter like so-called historical events: strikes,
demonstrations, crises, etc.5), that they are precisely unverifiable by an order which can only exert
itself on the real and the rational, on ends and means: a referential order which can only dominate
referentials, a determinate power which can only dominate a determined world, but which can do
nothing about that indefinite recurrence of simulation, about that weightless nebula no longer obeying
the law of gravitation of the real — power itself eventually breaking apart in this space and becomnig
a simulation of power (disconnected from its aims and objectives, and dedicated to power effects and
mass simulation).
The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject realness and
referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the
economy and the finalities of production. For that purpose it prefers the discourse of crisis, but also —
why not? — the discourse of desire. "Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the ultimate
slogan of power, for in a nonreferential world even the confusian of the reality principle with the
desire principle is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality. One remains among principles, and
there power is always right.
Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective; they turn against
power this deterrence which is so well utilized for a long time itself. For, finally, it was capital which
was the first to feed throughout its history on the destruction of every referential, of every human goal,
which shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a
radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power. It was the first to practice
deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization, etc.; and if it was capital which fostered
reality, the reality principle, it was also the first to liquidate it in the extermination of every use value,
of every real equivalence, of production and wealth, in the very sensation we have of the unreality of
the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Now, it is this very logic which is today hardened
even more against it. And when it wants to fight this catastrophic spiral by secreting one last glimmer
of reality, on which to found one last glimmer of power, it only multiplies the signs and accelerates the
play of simulation.
15
As long as it was historically threatened by the real, power risked deterrence and simulation,
disintegrating every contradiction by means of the production of equivalent signs. When it is
threatened today by simulation (the threat of vanishing in the play of signs), power risks the real, risks
crisis, it gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, -political stakes. This is a question of
life or death for it. But it is too late.
Whence the characteristic hysteria of our time: the hysteria of production and reproduction of the real.
The other production, that of goods and commodities, that of la belle epoque of political economy, no
longer makes any sense of its own, and has not for some time. What society seeks through production,
and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary
"material" production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional
production, but it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction (thus the hyperrealists fasten in a
striking resemblance a real from which has fled all meaning and charm, all the profundity and energy
of representation). Thus the hyperrealism of simulation is expressed everywhere by the real's striking
resemblance to itself.
Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance. And at the same time,
another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power — a holy
union which forms around the disappearance of power. Everybody belongs to it more or less in fear of
the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power comes down to nothing more than the
critical obsession with power: an obsession with its death; an obsession with its survival which
becomes greater the more it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, logically we will be under the
total spell of power — a haunting memory already foreshadowed everywhere, manifesting at one and
the same time the satisfaction of having got rid of it (nobody wants it any more, everybody unloads it
on others) and grieving its loss. Melancholy for societies without power: this has already given rise to
fascism, that overdose of a powerful referential in a society which cannot terminate its mourning.
But we are still in the same boat: none of our societies know how to manage their mourning for the
real, for power, for the social itself, which is implicated in this same breakdown. And it is by an
art)ficial revitalization of all this that we try to escape it. Undoubtedly this will even end up in
socialism. By an unforeseen twist of events and an irony which no longer belongs to history, it is
through the death of the social that socialism will emerge — as it is through the death of God that
religions emerge. A twisted coming, a perverse event, an unintelligible reversion to the logic of
reason. As is the fact that power is no longer present except to conceal that there is none. A simulation
which can go on indefinitely, since -unlike "true" power which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a
relation of force, a stake — this is nothing but the object of a social demand, and hence subject to the
law of supply and demand, rather than to violence and death. Completely expunged from the political
dimension, it is dependent, like any other commodity, on production and mass consumption. Its spark
has disappeared; only the fiction of a political universe is saved.
Likewise with work. The spark of production, the violence of its stake no longer exists. Everybody
still produces, and more and more, but work has subtly become something else: a need (as Marx
ideally envisaged it, but not at all in the same sense), the object of a social "demand," like leisure, to
which it is equivalent in the general run of life's options. A demand exactly proportional to the loss of
stake in the work process.6 The same change in fortune as for power: the scenario of work is there to
conceal the fact that the work-real, the production-real, has disappeared. And for that matter so has the
strike-real too, which is no longer a stoppage of work, but its alternative pole in the ritual scansion of
the social calendar. It is as if everyone has "occupied" their work place or work post, after declaring
the strike, and resumed production, as is the custom in a "self-managed" job, in exactly the same terms
as before, by declaring themselves (and virtually being) in a state of permanent strike.
This isn't a science-fiction dream: everywhere it is a question of a doubling of the work process. And
of a double or locum for the strike process — strikes which are incorporated like obsolescence in
objects, like crises in production. Then there are no longer any strikes or work, but both
simultaneously, that is to say something else entirely: a wizardry of work, a trompe l'oeil, a
scenodrama (not to say melodrama) of production, collective dramaturgy upon the empty stage of the
social.
16
It is no longer a question of the ideology of work — of the traditional ethic that obscures the "real"
labour process and the "objective" process of exploitation- but of the scenario of work. Likewise, it is
no longer a question of the ideology of power, but of the scenario of power. Ideology only corresponds
to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its
reduplication by signs. It is always the aim of ideological analysis to restore the objective process; it is
always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.
This is ultimately why power is so in accord with ideological discourses and discourses on ideology,
for these are all discourses of truth — always good, even and especially if they are revolutionary, to
counter the mortal blows of simulation.
Notes
1 Counterfeit and reproduction imply always an anguish, a disquieting foreignness: the uneasiness
before the photograph, considered like a witch's trick — and more generally before any technical
apparatus, which is always an apparatus of reproduction, is related by Benjamin to the uneasiness
before the mirror-image. There is already sorcery at work in the mirror. But how much more so when
this image can be detached from the mirror and be transported, stocked, reproduced at will (cf. The
Student of Prague, where the devil detaches the image of the student from the mirror and harrasses
him to death by the intermediary of this image). All reproduction implies therefore a kind of black
magic, from the fact of being seduced by one's own image in the water, like Narcissus, to being
haunted by the double and, who knows, to the mortal turning back of this vast technical apparatus
secreted today by man as his own image (the narcissistic mirage of technique, McLuhan) and that
returns to him, cancelled and distorted -endless reproduction of himself and his power to the limits of
the world. Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate.
This has hardly changed for us: simulation (that we describe here as the operation of the code) is still
and always the place of a gigantic enterprise of manipulation, of control and of death, just like the
imitative object (primitive statuette, image of photo) always had as objective an operation of black
image.
2 There is furthermore in Monod's book a flagrant contradiction, which reflects the ambiguity of all
current science. His discourse concerns the code, that is the third-order simulacra, but it does so still
according to "scientific" schemes of the second-order — objectiveness, "scientific" ethic of
knowledge, science's principle of truth and transcendence. All things incompatible with the
indeterminable models of the third-order.
3 "It's the feeble 'definition' of TV which condemns its spectator to rearranging the few points retained
into a kind of abstract work. He participates suddenly in the creation of a reality that was only just
presented to him in dots: the television watcher is in the position of an individual who is asked to
project his own fantasies on inkblots that are not supposed to represent anything." TV as perpetual
Rorshach test. And furthermore: "The TV image requires each instant that we 'close' the spaces in the
mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile."
4 "The Medium is the Message" is the very slogan of the political economy of the sign, when it enters
into the third-order simulation — the distinction between the medium and the message characterizes
instead signification of the second-order.
5 The entire current "psychological" situation is characterized by this shortcircuit.
Doesn't emancipation of children and teenagers, once the initial phase of revolt is passed and once
there has been established the principle of the right to emancipation, seem like the real emancipation
of parents. And the young (students, high-schoolers, adolescents) seem to sense it in their always more
insistent demand (though still as paradoxical) for the presence and advice of parents or of teachers.
Alone at last, free and responsible, it seemed to them suddenly that other people possibly have
absconded with their true liberty. Therefore, there is no question of "leaving them be." They're going
to hassle them, not with any emotional or material spontaneous demand, but with an exigency that has
been premeditated and corrected by an implicit oedipal knowledge. Hyperdependence (much greater
than before) distored by irony and refusal, parody of libidinous original mechanisms. Demand without
17
content, without referent, unjust)fied, but for all that all the more severe — naked demand with no
possible answer. The contents of knowledge (teaching) or of affective relations, the pedagogical or
familial referent having been eliminated in the act of emancipation, there remains only a demand
linked to the empty form of the institution- perverse demand, and for that reason all the more
obstinate. "Transferable" desire (that is to say non-referential, un-referential), desire that has been fed
by lack, by the place left vacant, "liberated," desire captured in its own vertiginous image, desire of
desire, as pure form, hyperreal. Deprived of symbolic substance, it doubles back upon itself, draws its
energy from its own reflection and its disappointment with itself. This is literally today the "demand,"
and it is obvious that unlike the "classical" objective or transferable relations this one here is insoluble
and interminable.
Simulated Oedipus.
Francois Richard: "Students asked to be seduced either bodily or verbally. But also they are aware of
this and they play the game, ironically. 'Give us your knowledge, your presence, you have the word,
speak, you are there for that.' Contestation certainly, but not only: the more authority is contested,
vilified, the greater the need for authority as such. They play at Oedipus also, to deny it all the more
vehemently. The 'teach', he's Daddy, they say; it's fun, you play at incest, malaise, the untouchable, at
being a tease — in order to de-sexualize finally." Like one under analysis who asks for Oedipus back
again, who tells the "oedipal" stories, who has the "analytical" dreams to satisfy the supposed request
of the analyst, or to resist him? In the same way the student goes through his oedipal number, his
seduction number, gets chummy, close, approaches, dominates- but this isn't desire, it's simulation.
Oedipal psychodrama of simulation (neither less real nor less dramatic for all that). Very different
from the real libidinal stakes of knowledge and power or even of a real mourning for the absence of
same (as could have happened after 1968 in the universities). Now we've reached the phase of
desperate reproduction, and where the stakes are nil, the simulacrum is maximal — exacerbated and
parodied simulation at one and the same time- as interminable as psychoanalysis and for the same
reasons.
The interminable psychoanalysis.
There is a whole chapter to add to the history of transference and countertransference: that of their
liquidation by simulation, of the impossible psychoanalysis because it is itself, from now on, that
produces and reproduces the unconscious as its institutional substance. Psychoanalysis dies also of the
exchange of the signs of the unconscious. Just as revolution dies of the exchange of the critical signs
of political economy. This short-circuit was well known to Freud in the form of the gift of the analytic
dream, or with the "uninformed" patients, in the form of the gift of their analytic knowledge. But this
was still interpreted as resistance, as detour, and did not put fundamentally into question either the
process of analysis or the principle of transference. It is another thing entirely when the unconscious
itself, the discourse of the unconscious becomes unfindable — according to the same scenario of
simulative anticipation that we have seen at work on all levels with the machines of the third order.
The analysis then can no longer end, it becomes logically and historically interminable, since it
stabilizes on a puppetsubstance of reproduction, an unconscious programmed on demand — an
impossible-to-break-through point around which the whole analysis is rearranged. The messages of the
unconscious have been short-circuited by the psychoanalysis "medium." This is libidinal hyperrealism.
To the famous categories of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, it is going to be necessary to add
the hyperreal, which captures and obstructs the functioning of the three orders.
6 Athenian democracy, much more advanced than our own, had reached the point where the vote was
considered as payment for a service, after all other repressive solutions had been tried and found
wanting in order to insure a quorum.
18
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Introduction: Rhizome', in A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism
and Schizophrenia [Fr. 1980], trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), pp. 3-25.
(92)
The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a
crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as
farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our
own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render
imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like
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everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach,
not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether
one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired,
multiplied.
A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates
and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matter relations. It is to
fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines
of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also deterritorialization and destratification.
Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on
the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an
assemnblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity but we don't know yet what the multiple entails when It is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been
elevated to the status of a substantive. One side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which
doubtless make lt a kind of organism, or signing totality, or determination attributable to a subject; It
also has a side facing a body without organs,' which is continually dismantling the organism, causing
asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulat, and attributing to itself subjects that it
leaves with nothing more in a name as the trace of an intensity. What is the body without organs of a
book? There are several, depending on the nature of the lines considered, their particular grade or
density, and the possibility of their converging on a `plane of consistency" assuring their selection.
Here, as elsewhere, the units of measure are what is essential: quantify writing. There is no difference
between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object. As an
assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other
bodies without organs. We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not
look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other
things it does or does not transmit intensifies, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and
metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists only
through the outside and on ~ outside. A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also
measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, relutionary machine, etc. - and
an abstract machine that sweeps them
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along? We have been criticized for overquoting literary authors. But 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. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordinary bureaucratic machine.. .
. (What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it
not first through the voice that one becomes animal?) Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do
with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been.
All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, lines of flight and intensifies,
machinic assemblages and their various types, bodies without organs and their construction and
selection, the plane of consistency, and in each case the units of measure. Stratometers, deleometers,
Bw0 units of density, Bw0 units of convergence: Not only do these constitute a quantification of
writing, but they define writing as always the measure of something else. Writing has nothing to do
with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.
A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image
of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic inferiority
(the strata of the book). The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it
that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the book is the law of reflection,
the One that becomes two. How could the law of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides
19
over the very division between world and book, nature and art? One becomes two: whenever we
encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in the most `dialectical' way
possible, what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of
thought. Nature doesn't work that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and
circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. Thought lags behind nature. Even the
book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a
spiritual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes
two, then of the two that become four. . . . Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a
discipline as `advanced' as linguistics retains the roottree as its fundamental image, and thus remains
wedded to classical reflection (for example, Chomsky and his grammatical trees, which begin at a
point S and proceed by dichotomy).3 This is as much as to say that this system of thought has never
reached an understanding of multiplicity: in
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order to arrive at two following a spiritual method it must assume a strong principal unity. On the side
of the object, it is no doubt possible, following the natural method, to go directly from One to three,
four, or five, but only if there is a strong principal unity available, that of the pivotal taproot
supporting the secondary roots. That doesn't get us very far. The binary logic of dichotomy has simply
been replaced by biunivocal relationships between successive circles. The pivotal taproot provides no
better understanding of multiplicity than the dichotomous root. One operates in the object, the other in
the subject. Binary logic and biunivocal relationships still dominate psychoanalysis (the tree of
delusion in the Freudian interpretation of Schreber's case), linguistics, structuralism, and en
information science.
The radicle-system, or fascicular root, is the second figure of the book, to which our modernity pays
willing allegiance. This time, the principal root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an
immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing
development. This time, natural reality is what aborts the principal root, but the root's unity subsists, as
past or yet to come, as possible. We must ask if reflexive, spiritual reality does not compensate for this
state of things by demanding an even more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive totality.
Take William Burroughs' cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes
multiple and even adventitious toots (like a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the
texts under consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity continues its spiritual
labor. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can also be presented as the Total Work or
Magnum Opus. st modern methods for making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow are perfectly
valid in one direction, for example, a linear direction, whereas a unity of totalization asserts itself even
more firmly in another, circular or cyclic, dimension. Whenever a multiplicity is taken up in a
structure, its growth is offset by a reduction in its laws of combination. e abortionists of unity are
indeed angel makers, doctores angelici, because they affirm a properly angelic and superior unity.
Joyce's words, accurately described as having `multiple roots', shatter the linear unity of e word, even
of language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Nietzsche's aphorisms
shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic unity of the eternal return, present as
the nonknown in thought. This is as much as to say that the fascicular system not really break with
dualism, with the complementarity between a subject and an object, a natural reality and a spiritual
reality: unity is
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consistently thwarted and obstructed in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject.
The world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity,
of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its object. The
world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than
root-cosmos. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented. At any rate, what
a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world. In truth, it is not enough to say, `Long live the
multiple', difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is
enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but
rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has
available always n - 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the
unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n - 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could
be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles.
Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects
20
altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some
animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter,
supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from
ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over
each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal
and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we
enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.
1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to
anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an
order. The linguistic tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and proceeds by dichotomy.
On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic
chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic,
etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status.
Collective assemblages of enunciation function directly within machinic assemblages; it is not
impossible to make a radical break between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics
claims to confine itself to what is explicit and to make no
97
presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of
assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky's grammaticality, the categorical S symbol that
dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker: you will
construct grammatically correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a
verb phrase (first dichotomy ... ). Our criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too
abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract
machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective
assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field. A rhizome ceaselessly
establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative
to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse
acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in
itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized
languages. There is no ideal speakerlistener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic
community. Language is, in Weinreich's words, `an essentially heterogeneous reality'.4 There is no
mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.
Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean
stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.5 It is always possible
to break a language down into internal structural elements, an undertaking not fundamentally different
from a search for roots. There is always something genealogieal about a tree. It is not a method for the
people. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it
onto other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function
of impotence.
3. Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive,
`multiplicity', that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual
reality, image and world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities
for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is
not even the unity to abort in the object or `return' in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor
object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the
multiplicity changing in nature (the laws f combination therefore increase in number as the
multiplicity grows).
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Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer
but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the
first: `Call the strings or rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that its multiplicity
resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into the text. Granted; but the actor's nerve fibers in
turn form a weave. And they fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated. . . . The
interplay approximates the pure activity of weavers attributed in myth to the Fates or Norns'.6 An
assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in
21
nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found
in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a
piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making
the whole piece proliferate. The number is no longer a universal concept measuring elements
according to their emplacement in a given dimension, but has itself become a multiplicity that varies
according to the dimensions considered (the primacy of the domain over a complex of numbers
attached to that domain). We do not have units (unite) of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of
measurement. The notion of unity (unite) appears only when there is a power takeover in the
multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding: This is the case for a
pivot-unity forming the basis for a set of bi-univocal relationships between objective elements or
points, or for the One that divides following the law of a binary logic of differentiation in the subject.
Unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system considered
(overcoding). The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has
available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the
multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines. All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or
occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of consistency of multiplicities, even
though the dimensions of this `plane' increase with the number of connections that are made on it.
Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization
according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. The plane of
consistency (grid) is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite
number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary
dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and
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necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless
of their number of dimensions. The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of
exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations,
concepts, individuals, groups, social formations. Kleist nented a writing of this type, a broken chain of
affects and variable speeds, with accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with he
outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to he classical or romantic book
constituted by the inferiority of a substance or subject. The war machine-book against the State
apparatusbook. Flat multiplicities of n dimensions are asignifying and asubjective. 'hey are designated
by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives (some couchgrass, some of a rhizome . . . ).
4. Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks eparating structures or cutting
across a single structure. A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again
on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form n animal
rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains
lines of segmentarity according D which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed,
te., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the
rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the
rhizome. These lines Ways tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a
dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. ~u may make a rupture, draw a line
of flight, yet there is still a danger ~at you will re-encounter organizations that re-stratify everything,
formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject - anything you like,
from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just
waiting to crystallize. Yes, couchgrass is also a rhizome. Good and bad are only the products of an
active and temporary selection, which must be renewed. How could movements of deterritorialization
and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The
orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that
image. The wasp is never the deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive
apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp orchid, as heterogeneous
elements, form a rhizome. It could be said the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its Image in a
signifying
100
fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata - a parallelism
between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other.
At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus
value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a
22
becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one
term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a
circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further. There is neither imitation nor
resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a
common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying. Remy
Chauvin expresses it well: `the aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do
with each other'.-' More generally, evolutionary schemas may be forced to abandon the old model of
the tree and descent. Under certain conditions, a virus can connect to germ cells and transmit itself as
the cellular gene of a complex species; moreover, it can take flight, move into the cells of an entirely
different species, but not without bringing with it `genetic information' from the first host (for
example, Benveniste and Todaro's current research on a type C virus, with its double connection to
baboon DNA and the DNA of certain kinds of domestic cats). Evolutionary schemas would no longer
follow models of arborescent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a
rhizome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line
to another.8 Once again, there is aparallel evolution, of the baboon and the cat; it is obvious that they
are not models or copies of each other (a becomingbaboon in the cat does not mean that the cat `plays'
baboon). We form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with
other animals. As Fran~ois Jacob says, transfers of genetic material by viruses or through other
procedures, fusions of cells originating in different species, have results analogous to those of `the
abominable couplings dpar to antiquity and the Middle Ages'.y Transversal communications between
different lines scramble the genealogical trees. Always look for the molecular, or even submolecular,
particle with which we are allied. We evolve and die more from out polymorphous and rhizomatic flus
than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome is an antigenealogy.
The same applies to the book and the world: contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an
image of the world. It forms a rhizome
l01
with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the
deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn
deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can). Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it
relies on binary logie to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature. The crocodile does not
reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings. The
Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is
its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes
its rupture, its own line of flight, follows its `aparallel evolution' through to the end. The wisdom of
the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with
something else - with the wind, an animal, human beings (and there is also an aspect under which
animals themselves form rhizomes, as do people, etc.). `Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the
plant in us.' Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight;
make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and
broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first
line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside
that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits
and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend
the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of
consistency. `Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now
the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them
determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your
plant. All the devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later ... you can extend the
size of your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the way."° Music has always
sent out lines of flight, like so many `transformational multiplicities', even overturning the very codes
that structure or arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and proliferations, is
comparable to a weed, a rhizome."
5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or
generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure. A genetic axis is like an
objective pivotal unity upon which successive stages are organized; a deep structure
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23
is more like a base sequence that can be broken down into immediate constituents, while the unity of
the product passes into another, transformational and subjective, dimension. This does not constitute a
departure from the representative model of the tree, or root-pivotal taproot or fascicles (for example,
Chomsky's `tree' is associated with a base sequence and represents the process of its own generation in
terms of binary logic). A variation on the oldest form of thought. It is our view that genetic axis and
profound structure are above all infinitely reproducible principles of tracing. All of tree logic is a logic
of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as in psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is
itself representative, crystallized into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed
within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in
intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there from the start, lurking in the
dark recesses of memory and language. It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure
or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings;
tracings are like the leaves of a tree.
The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid
does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; It forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What
distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in
contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; It constructs
the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without
organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part
of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible,
susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting,
reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a
work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important
characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an
animal rhizome, and sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of flight as passageway
and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing,
which always comes back `to the same'. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing
always involves an alleged `competence'. Unlike psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic competence (which
confines every desire and statement to a genetic axis or overcoding structure, and makes infinite,
monotonous trac103
ings of the stages on that axis or the constituents of that structure), schizoanalysis rejects any idea of
pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to lt - divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural,
hereditary, or syntagmatic. (lt is obvious that Melanie Klein has no understanding of the cartography
of one of her child patients, Little Richard, and is content to make ready-made tracings - Oedipus, the
good daddy and the bad daddy, the bad mommy and the good mommy - while the child makes a
desperate attempt to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst totally misconstrues.)12 Drives
and part-objects are neither stages on a genetic axis nor positions in a deep structure; they are political
options for problems, they are entryways and exits, impasses the child lives out politically, in other
words, with all the force of his or her desire.
Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps to tracings, as good and bad
sides? Is lt not of the essence of the ; thizome to intersect roots and sometimes merge with them? Does
not a map contain phenomena of redundancy that are already like tracings of its own? Does not a
multiplicity have strata upon which unifications and totalizations, massifications, mimetic
mechanisms, signifying power takeovers, and subjective attributions take root? Do not even lines of
flight, due to their eventual divergence, reproduce the very formations their function it was to
dismantle or outflank? But the opposite is also true. lt is a question of method: the tracing should
always be put back on the map. This operation and the previous one are not at all symmetrical. For it is
inaccurate to say that a tracing reproduces the map. It is instead like a photograph or X-ray that begins
by selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other restrictive procedures, what it
intends I to reproduce. The imitator always creates the model, and attracts it. The tracing has already
translated the map into an image; lt has already trans!: formed the rhizome into roots and radicles. lt
has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of signifiance and
subjectification belanging to it. It has generated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is
reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is so
dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or
rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration. Take a look at
24
psychoanalysis and linguistics: all the former has ever made are tracings or photos of the unconscious,
and the latter of language, with all the betrayals that implies (it's not surpris.ing that psychoanalysis
tied its fate to that of linguistics). Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child
psychoanalysis at
104
its purest: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING HIS MAP, setting it straight
for him, blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had
rooted shame and guilt in him, PHOBIA (they barred him from the rhizome of the building, then from
the rhizome of the street, they rooted him in his parents' bed, they radicled him to his own body, they
fixated him on Professor Freud). Freud explicitly takes Little Hans' cartography into account, but
always and only in order to project it back onto the family photo. And look what Melanie Klein did to
Little Richard's geopolitical maps: she developed photos from them, made tracings of them. Strike the
pose or follow the axis, genetic stage or structural destiny - one way or the other, your rhizome will be
broken. You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after every outlet has been obstructed. Once a
rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that
desire moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls
to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths.
That is why it is so important to try the other, reverse but nonsymmetrical, operation. Plug the tracings
back into the map, connect the roots or trees back up with a rhizome. In the case of Little Hans,
studying the unconscious would be to show how he tries to build a rhizome, with the family house but
also with the line of flight of the building, the street, etc.; how these lines are blocked, how the child is
made to take root in the family, be photographed under the father, be traced onto the mother's bed;
then how Professor Freud's intervention assures a power takeover by the signifier, a subjectification of
affects; how the only escape route left to the child is a becoming-animal perceived as shameful and
guilty (the becoming-horse of Little Hans, a truly political option). But these impasses must always be
resituated on the map, thereby opening them up to possibte lines of flight. The same applies to the
group map: show at what point in the rhizome there form phenomena of massification, bureaucracy,
leadership, fascization, etc., which lines nevertheless survive, if only underground, continuing to make
rhizome in the shadows. Deligny's method: map the gestures and movements of an autistic child,
combine several maps for the same child, for several different children." If it is true that it is of the
essence of the map or rhizome to have multiple entryways, then it is plausible that one could even
enter them through tracings or the root-tree, assuming the necessary precautions are taken (once again,
one must avoid any Manichean dualism). For example, one will often be forced to take dead ends, to
work with signifying powers and subjective affections, to find a foothold in forma105
tions that are Oedipal or paranoid or even worse, rigidified territorialities that open the way for other
transformational operations. It is even possible for psychoanalysis to serve as a foothold, in spite of
itself. In other cases, cm the contrary, one will bolster oneself directly on a tine of flight enabling one
to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections. Thus, there are very diverse map-tracing,
rhizome-root assemblages, with variable coefficients of deterritorialization. There exist tree or root
structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome.
The coordinates are determined not by theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics
composing multiplicities or aggregates of intensifies. A new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree,
the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch. Or else it is a microscopic element of the root-tree, a
radicle, that gets rhizome production going. Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by tracings: they can
begin to burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizome stems, as in a Kafka novel. An intensive trait
starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception, synesthesia, perverse mutation, or play of images
shakes loose challenging the hegemony of the signifier. In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic,
ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate themselves from the `tracing', that
is, from the dominant competence of the teacher's language - a microscopic event upsets the local
balance of power. Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky's syntagmatic model
can open np in all directions, and in turn form a rhizome." To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems
and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put
them to strange new uses. We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles.
They've made us suffer too much. Alt of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to
linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots,
25
adventitious growths and rhizomes. Amsterdam, a city entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its
stem-canals, where utility connects with the greatest folly in relation to a commercial war machine.
Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called
`dendrites' do not assure the connection neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between
cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the
leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of
consistency or neuroglia, whole uncertain, probabilistic system (`the uncertain nervous system'). Many
people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is
106
much more a grass than a tree. `The axon and the dendrite twist around each other like bindweed
around brambles, with synapses at each of the thorns." s The same goes for memory. Neurologists and
psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on the order of a
minute). The difference between them is not simply quantitative: short-term memory is of the rhizome
or diagram type, and long-term memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or
photograph). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its
object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions of
discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity. Furthermore, the difference between the two kinds of memory
is not that of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not grasp the same thing,
memory, or idea. The splendor of the shortterm Idea: one writes using short-term memory, and thus
short-term ideas, even if one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts. Shortterm memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the
nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization)
traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, off beat, in an
`untimely' way, not instantaneously.
The tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a
centered or segmented higher unity. If we consider the set, branches-roots, the trunk plays the role of
opposed segment for one of the subsets running from bottom to top: this kind of segment is a `link
dipole', in contrast to the `unit dipoles' formed by spokes radiating from a single centre.' Even if the
links themselves proliferate, as in the radicle system, one can never get beyond the One-Two, and fake
multiplicities. Regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not get us any further.
Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification, central
automata like organized memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives information
from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along pre-established paths. This is evident
in current problems in information science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes
of thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ. Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean
Petitot, in a fine article denouncing `the imagery of command trees' (centered systems or hierarchical
structures), note that `accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving arborescent
structures privileged status. . . . The arborescent form admits of topological explanation. . . . In a
hierarchical system, an individual has
107
only one active neighbour, his or her hierarchical superior. . . . The channels of transmission are
preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted
place' (signifiance and subjectification). The authors point out that even when one thinks one has
reached a multiplicity, it may be a false one - of what we call the radicle type -because its ostensibly
nonhierarchical presentation or statement in fact only admits of a totally hierarchical solution. An
example is the famous friendship theorem: `If any two given individuals in a society have precisely
one mutual friend, then there exists an individual who is the friend of all the others'. (Rosenstiehl and
Petitot ask who that mutual friend is. Who is `the universal friend in this society of couples: the
master, e confessor, the doctor? These ideas are curiously far removed from the initial axioms.' Who is
this friend of humankind? Is it the philosopher as he appears in classical thought, even if he is an
aborted unity that makes itself only through its absence or subjectivity, saying all the while, I know
nothing, I am nothing?) Thus the authors speak of dictatorship theorems. is indeed the principle of
roots-trees, or their outcome: the radicle solution, the structure of Power. 17
To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems, finite networks of automata in
which communication runs from any neighbor to y other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all
individuals are changeable, defined only by their state at a given moment - such that local operations
are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency. Transduction of
26
intensive states replaces topology, and `the graph regulating the circulation of information is in a the
opposite of the hierarchical graph.... There is no reason for the h to be a tree' (we have been calling this
kind of graph a map). The problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for n
individuals to manage to fire in unison? The solution without a General be found in an acentered
multiplicity possessing a finite number of with signals to indicate corresponding speeds, from a war
rhizome or guerrilla logic point of view, without any tracing, without any copying of a al order. The
authors even demonstrate that this kind of machinic multiplicity, assemblage, or society rejects any
centralizing or unifying automaton as an `asocial intrusion'." Under these conditions, n is in fact
always n - 1. Rosenstiehl and Petitot emphasize that the opposition, centered-acentered, is valid less as
a designation for things than as a mode of calculation applied to things. Trees may correspond to the
rhizome, or may burgeon into a rhizome. It is true that the same thing is generally susceptible to both
modes of calculation or both types of regulation, but
108
not without undergoing a change in state. Take psychoanalysis as an example again: it subjects the
unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchical graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs, the
phallus, the phallustree not only in its theory but also in its practice of calculation and treatment.
Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it bases its own dictatorial power upon a
dictatorial conception of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis's margin of maneuverability is therefore
very limited. In both psychoanalysis and Its object, there is always a general, always a leader (General
Freud). Schizoanalysis, on the otller hand, treats the unconscious as an acentered system, in other
words, as a machinic network of finite automata (a rhizome), and thus arrives at an entirely different
state of the unconscious. These same remarks apply to linguistics; Rosenstiehl and Petitot are right to
bring up the possibility of an `acentered organization of a society of words'. For both statements and
desires, the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to make it signify according to
a tree model. The issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different desires: the
rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious.
It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to
biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy ... : the rootfoundation, Grund, racine, fondement. The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation;
the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed plants produced by cultivation based on
species lineages of the arborescent type; animal raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects lineages
forming an entire animal arborescence. The East presents a different figure: a relation to the steppe
and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather than forest and field; cultivation of
tubers by fragmentation of the individual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is
confined to closed spaces or pushed out onto the steppes of the nomads. The West: agriculture based
on a chosen lineage containing a large number of variable individuals. The East: horticulture based on
a small number of individuals derived from a wide range of `clones'. Does not the East, Oceania in
particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model oppose in every respect to the Western model of
the tree? Andre Haudricout6 even sees this as the basis for the opposition between the moralities o
philosophies of transcendence dear to the West and the immanent ones o the East: the God who sows
and reaps, as opposed to the God wh replants and unearths (replanting of offshoots versus sowing of
seeds). Transcendence: a specifically European disease. Neither is music the same,
Rhizome 109
the music of the earth is different, as is sexuality: seed plants, even those with two sexes in the same
plant, subjugate sexuality to the reproductive model; the rhizome, on the other hand, is a liberation of
sexuality not only from reproduction but also from genetality. Here in the West, the tree has implanted
itself in our bodies, rigidifying and stratifying even the sexes. We have lost the rhizome, or the grass.
Henry Milter: `China is the weed in the human cabbage patch.. . . The weed is the Nemesis of human
endeavor.. . . Of all the imaginary existences we attribute to plant, beast and star the weed leads the
most satisfactory life of all. True, the weed produces no lilies, no battleships, no sermons on the
Mount.. . . Eventually the weed gets the upper hand. Eventually things fall back into a state of China.
This condition is usually referred to by historians as the Dark Age. Grass is the only way out.... The
weed exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. It grows between, among other things.
The lily is beautiful, the cabbage is provender, the poppy is maddening - but the weed is rank growth
... : it points a moral'.Z° Which China is Miller talking about? The old China, the new, an imaginary
one, or yet another located on a shifting map?
27
America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination by trees or the search for roots.
This is evident even in the literature, in the ,uest for a national identity and even for a European
ancestry or genealogy (Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless, 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.
Amerin books are different from European books, even when the American off in pursuit of trees. The
conception of the book is different. Leaves of grass. And directions in America are different: the
search for arborescence d the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic
West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, shifting and displaced frontiers. There
is a whole American `map' in West, where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the
directions: it put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that earth came full circle; its
West is the edge of the East.Z' (India is not the intermediary between the Occident and the Orient, as
Haudricourt believved: America is the pivot point and mechanism of reversal.) The American singer
Patti Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don't go for root, follow the canal. . . .
Are there not also two kinds of bureaucracy, or even three (or still more)? Western bureaucracy: its
agrarian, cadastral origins; roots and
110
fields; trees and their role as frontiers; the great census of William the Conqueror; feudalism; the
policies of the kings of France; making property the basis of the State; negotiating land through
warfare, litigation, and marriages. The kings of France chose the lily because it is a plant with deep
roots that clings to slopes. Is bureaucracy the same in the Orient? Of course it is all too easy to depict
an Orient of rhizomes and immanence; yet it is true that in the Orient the State does not act following a
schema of arborescence corresponding to preestablished, arborified, and rooted classes; its
bureaucracy is one of channels, for example, the much discussed case of hydraulic power with `weak
property', in which the State engenders channeled and channelizing classes (cf. the aspects of
Wittfogel's work that have not been refuted).z= The despot acts as a river, not as a fountainhead,
which is still a point, a tree-point or root; he flows with the current rather than sitting under a tree;
Buddha's tree itself becomes a rhizome; Mao's river and Louis's tree. Has not America acted as an
intermediary here as well? For it proceeds both by internal exterminations and liquidations (not only
the Indians but also the farmers, etc.), and by successive waves of immigration from the outside. The
flow of capital produces an immense channel, a quantification of power with immediate `quanta',
where each person profits from the passage of the money flow in his or her own way (hence the
reality-myth of the poor man who strikes it rich and then falls into poverty again): in America
everything comes together, tree and channel, root and rhizome. There is no universal capitalism, there
is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it is neocapitalism
by nature. It invents its eastern face and western face, and reshapes them both - all for the worst.
At the same time, we are on the wrong track with all these geographical distributions. An impasse. So
much the better. If it is a question of showing that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid,
despotism and hierarchy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism between
here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no blend or American synthesis. There
are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic
formations of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are anarchic
deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots, and subterranean stems. The important
point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first escapes; the second
operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if ir constitutes its
own hierarchies, even
111
if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that 'lace on earth, or of a given
moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is
perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself,
breaking off and starting up again. No, this is not a new or different dualism. The problem of writing:
in order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly unavoidable. Not at all
because it is a necessary step, or because one can only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in
no way an approximation; on the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way. We
invoke one dual ism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dualism of models only in order
pp arrive at a process that challenges all models. Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo
the dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic formula we
28
all seek -PLURALISM = MONISM - via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary
enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging.
Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome
connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same
nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is
reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly
three, four, five, etc. lt is not a multiple krived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is
composed sot of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor
end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear
multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of
consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n - j). When a multiplicity of this kind
changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis. Unlike a
structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points
and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of
segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the
maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature. These
lines, or lineaments, should not be confused with lineages of the arborescent type, which are merely
localizable linkeages between points and positions. Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of
reproduction: neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure.
The rhizome is an anti-genealogy.
112
It is a short-term memory, or anti-memory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest,
capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome
pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable,
reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings
that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with
hierarchical modes of communications and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered,
nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central
automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to
sexuality - but also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial
- that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of `becomings'.
A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus.
Gregory Bateson uses the word `plateau' to designate something very special: a continuous, selfvibrating region of intensifies whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point
or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example: mother-child sexual games, and even
quarrels among men, undergo this bizarre intensive stabilization. `Some sort of continuing plateau of
intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax', war, or a culmination point. It is a regrettable characteristic
of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of
evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value.23 For example, a book
composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed
instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a
`plateau' any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a
way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus.
We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of
us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had
hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of
tiny ants. We made circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be
related to any other plateau. To attain the multiple, one must have a method that effectively constructs
it; no typographical cleverness, no lexical agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical
boldness, can substitute for it. In fact, these are more often than not merely mimetic
113
procedures used to disseminate or disperse a unity that is retained in a different dimension for an
image-book. Technonarcissism. Typographical, lexical, or syntactic creations are necessary only when
they no longer dong to the form of expression of a hidden unity, becoming themselves dimensions of
the multiplicity under consideration; we only know of rare successes in this.24 We ourselves were
unable to do it. We just used words that in turn function for us as plateaus. RHIZOMA'TICS =
IHIZOANALYSIS = STRATOANALYSIS = PRAGMATICS = MICROPOLITICS. These words are
29
concepts, but concepts are lines, which is to say, number systems attached to a particular dimension of
the multiplicities (strata, molecular chains, lines of flight or rupture, circles of convergence, etc.).
Nowhere do we claim for out concepts the title of a science. We are no more familiar with scientificity
than we are with ideology; all we know are assemblages. And the only assemblages are machinicassemblages desire and collective assemblages of enunciation. No signifiance, no subjectification:
writing to the nth power (all individuated enunciation remains trapped within the dominant
significations, all signifying desire is associated with dominated subjects). An assemblage, in its
multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously
(independently of any recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus). There
is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the
book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between
certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its
object nor one or several authors as its subject. In short, we think that one cannot write sufficiently in
the name of an outside. The outside has no Image, no signification, no subjectivity. The book as
assemblage with the outside, against book as Image of the world. A rhizome-book, not a dichotomous,
pivotal, or fascicular book. Never send down roots, or plant them, how difficult it may be to avoid
reverting to the old procedures. `Those things which occur to me, occur to me not from the root up but
rather only from somewhere about their middle. Let someone then attempt to seize y let someone
attempt to seize a blade of grass and hold fast to it when gins to grow only from the middle.'ZS Why is
this so difficult? The question is directly one of perceptual semiotics. It's not easy to see things in the
middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them ,below, or from left to right or
right to left: try it, you'11 see that everything changes. It's not easy to see the grass in things and in
words (similarly, Nietzsche said that an aphorism had to be `ruminated'; never is
114
a plateau separable from the cows that populate it, which are also the clouds in the sky).
History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State
apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology,
the opposite of a history. There are rare successes in this also, for example, on the subject of the
Children's Crusades: Marcel Schwob's book multiplies narratives like so many plateaus with variable
numbers of dimensions. Then there is Andrzejewski's book, Les portes du paradis (The gates of
paradise), composed of a single uninterrupted sentence; a flow of children; a flow of walking with
pauses, straggling, and forward rushes; the semiotic flow of the confessions of all the children who go
up to the old monk at the head of the procession to make their declarations; a flow of desire and
sexuality, each child having left out of love and more or less directly led by the dark posthumous
pederastic desire of the count of Vendöme; all this with circles of convergence. What is important is
not whether the flows are `One or multiple' - we're past that point: there is a collective assemblage of
enunciation, a machinic assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an immense
outside that is a multiplicity in any case. A more recent example is Armand Farrachi's book on the
Fourth Crusade, La dislocation, in which the sentences space themselves out and disperse, or else
jostle together and coexist, and in which the letters, the typography begin to dance as the crusade
grows more delirious.Z6 These are models of nomadic and rhizomatic writing. Writing weds a war
machine and lines of flight, abandoning the strata, segmentarities, sedentarity, the State apparatus. But
why is a model still necessary? Aren't these books still `images' of the Crusades? Don't they still retain
a unity, in Schwob's case a pivotal unity, in Farrachi's an aborted unity, and in the most beautiful
example, Les portes du paradis, the unity of the funereal count? Is there a need for a more profound
nomadism than that of the Crusades, a nomadism of true nomads, or of those who no longer even
move or imitate anything? The nomadism of those who only assemble (agencent). How can the book
find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to reproduce?
The cultural book is necessarily a tracing: already a tracing of itself, a tracing of the previous book by
the same author, a tracing of other books however different they may be, an endless tracing of
established concepts and words, a tracing of the world present, past, and future. Even the anticultural
book may still be burdened by too heavy a cultural load: but it will use it actively, for forgetting
instead of remembering, for underdevelopment instead of progress toward development, in
115
nomadism rather than sedentarily, to make a map instead of a tracing. RHIZOMATICS = POP
ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things ~ do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic
culture or pseudoscientificity in it are still too painful or ponderous. For science would go completely
30
mad if left to its own devices. Look at mathematics: it's not a science, it's a monster slang, it's
nomadic. Even in the realm of theory, especially in the realm of theory, any precarious and pragmatic
framework is better than tracing concepts, with their breaks and progress changing nothing.
Imperceptible rupture, not signifying break. The nomads invented a war machine in opposition to the
State apparatus. History has never comprehended nomadism, the book has never comprehended the
outside. The State as the model for the book and for thought has a long history: logos, the philosopherking, the transcendence of the Idea, the inferiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court of
reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The State's pretension to be a world
order, and to root man. The war machine's relation to an outside is not another `model'; it is an
assemblage that makes thought itself nomadic, and the book a working part in every mobile machine,
a stem for a rhizome (Kleist and Kafka against Goethe).
Write to the nth power, the n - 1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant!
Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point!
Speed turns the point into a line!' Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line
of flight. Don't bring out the General in you! Don't have just ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have
short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like
the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon. As they say but old man river:
He don't plant 'tatos
Don't plant cotton
Them that plants them is soon forgotten
But old man river he just keeps rollin' along
A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.
The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb `to be',
but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, `and ... and ... and . . . '. This conjunction carries
enough force to shake and uproot the verb `to be'. Where are you going? Where are you coming from?
What are you
116
heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again
from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation - all imply a false conception of voyage and
movement (a conception that is methodical, pedagogical, initiatory, symbolic ... ). But Kleist, Lenz,
and Bilchner have another way of traveling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through the
middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing.2s American literature, and already
English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move
between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify
endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics. The middle is by no means an
average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a
localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a
transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that
undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.
Notes
1
Deleuze and Guattari derive the notion of a `body without organs' (Bw0) from Antonin
Artaud, for whom the body `is all by itself/and has no need of organs' (cited in Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R.
Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 9. The Bw0 is always outside any
systematic account of bodies (through legal, philosophical, medical or other discourses) and therefore
outside the disciplining of bodies via such accounts. Whereas the bodv is what always belongs to a
subject (the rational, the political, the psychoanalytic subject and so on), for Deleuze and Guattari the
Bw0 has nothing to do with belonging but onlv with becoming. The body without organs is never the
property of a subject (a person or a discourse); it is always in the process of becoming a body which is
unable to be controlled by totalizing discourses about the body. The Bw0 is the body `all by itself' (not
yours or mine), with its own desires and energies and in its own relationships to and impacts on other
bodies (yours and mine, as well as those of animals, plants and things). (NL)
2
The `plane of consistency' refers to the style by which a Bw0 holds itself together,
dynamically and precariously; it is the `mode of composition' by which elements come to be
assembled (neither purely by chance nor wholly by choice) into and as a body without organs, such as
a book, which is `all by itself' in its connections to exteriorities. In short, a book's plane of consistency
is the style of its connections to other books. A book may be said to be
31
117
`all by itself', then, in terms of such a style, and not in terms of its `interiorities' in the form of themes,
contents and meanings. (NL)
3 See, for example, Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1965). (NL)
4 U. Weinreich, W. Labov, and M. Herzog, `Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language', in W.
Lehmann and Y. Malkeiel, eds, Directions for Historical Linguistics (1968), p. 125; cited by Françoise
Robert, `Aspects sociaux du changement dans une grammaire generative', Langages, 32 (Dec. 1973),
p. 90. (Trans.)
5 Bertil Malmberg, New Trends in Linguistics, trans. Edward Carners (Stockholm: Lund, 1964), pp.
65-7 (the example of the Castilian dialect).
6 Ernst Jünger, Approches; drogues et ivresse (Paris: Table Ronde, 1974), p. 304, § 218.
7 Remy Chauvin in Lntretiens sur la sexualite, eds M. Aron, R. Courrier, and E. Wolff (Paris: Plon,
1969), p. 205.
8 On the work of R. E. Benveniste and G. J. Todaro, see Yves Christen, `Le rôle des virus dans
1'evolution', La Recherche 54 (March 1975): `After integrationextraction in a cell, viruses may, due to
an error in excision, carry oft fragments of their host's DNA and transmit them to new cells: this in fact
is the basis for what we call "genetic engineering". As a result, the genetic information of one
organism may be transferred to another by means of viruses. We could even imagine an extreme case
where this transfer of information would go from a more highly evolved species to one that is less
evolved or was the progenitor of the more evolved species. This mechanism, then, would run in the
opposite direction to evolution in the elassical sense. If it turns out that this kind of transferral of
information has played a major role, we would in certain cases have to substitute reticular scheznas
(with communications between branches after they have become differentiated) for the
schemas currently used to represent evolution' (p. 271).
9 François Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty E. Spillmann Pantheon, 1973), pp. 291-2, 311
(quotation).
10 Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p.
88.
11 Pierre Boulez, Conversations with Celestin Deliege (London: Eulenberg Books, 1976): `a seed
which you plant in compost, and suddenly it begins to proliferate like a weed' (p. 15); and on musical
proliferation: `a music that floats, and in which the writing itself makes it impossible for the performer
to keep in with a pulsed time' (p. 69 [translation modified]).
12 See Melanie Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1961): the role of war
maps in Richard's activities. [Deleuze and Guattari, with Claire Parnet and Andre Scala, analyze
Klein's Richard and Freud's Little Hans in `The Interpretation of Utterances', in Language, Sexuality
and Subversiozzs, trans. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1978), pp. 14157. (Trans.)]
118
13
Fernand Deligny, Cahiers de l'immuable, vol. 1, Voix et voir, Recherch (April 1975).
14
See Dieter Wunderlich, `Pragmatique, situation denunciation et Deixis', Langages, 26 (June
1972), pp. SOff.: MacCawley, Sadock, and Wunderli4 attempts to integrate `pragmatic properties' into
Chomskian trees.
15 Steven Rose, The Conscious Brain (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 76; memory, see pp. 185-219.
16
See Julien Pacotte, Le reseau arborescent, scheme primordial de la pens (Paris: Hermann,
1936). This book analyzes and develops various sche of the arborescent form, which is presented not
as a mere formalism but
the `real foundation of formal thought'. lt follows classical thought throu to the end. lt presents all of
the forms of the `One-Two', the theory of th dipole. The set, trunk-roots-branches, yields the following
schema:
opposed segment
More recently, Michel Serres has analyzed varieties and sequences of trees in the most diverse
scientific domains: how a tree is formed on the basis of a `network'. La traduction (Paris: Minuit,
1974), pp. 27ff.; Feux et signaux de brume (Paris: Grasset, 1975), pp. 35
17
Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, `Automate asocial et systemes acentres', Communications,
22 (1974), pp. 45-62. On the friendship theorem, see H. S. Wilf, The Friendsbip Theorem in
Combinatorial Mathematics (Welsh Academic Press); and on a similar kind of theorem, called the
32
theorem of group indecision, see K. J. Arrow, Cboice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley,
1963).
18
Rosenstiehl and Petitot, `Automate asoeial'. The principal charaeteristic of the acentered
system is that local initiatives are coordinated independently of a central power, with the calculations
made throughout the network (multi plicity). `That is why the only place files on people can be kept is
right in each person's home, since they alone are capable of filling in the description and keeping it up
to date: society itself is the only possible data bank on people. A naturally acentered society rejects the
centralizing automaton as an asocial intrusion' (p. 62). Ort the `Firing Squad Theorem', see pp. 51-7. It
even happens that generals, dreaming of appropriating the formal techniques of guerrilla warfare,
appeal to multiplicities `of synchronous modules ... based on numerous but independent lightweight
cells' having in theory only a minimum of central power and `hierarchical relaying'; see Guy
Brossollet, Essai sur la non-bataille (Paris: Belin, 1975).
119
19 On Western agriculture of grain plants and Eastern horticulture of tubers, the opposition between
sowing of seeds and replanting of offshoots, and the contrast to animal raising, see Andre Haudricourt,
`Domestication des animaux, culture des plantes et traitement d'autrui', L'Homme 2 (1) (Jan.April
1962), pp. 40-50, and `Nature et culture dans ta civilisation de 1'igname: 1'origine des clones et des
clans', L'Homme 4 (1) (Jan.-April 1964), pp. 93104. Maize and rice are no exception: they are cereals
`adopted at a late date by tuber cultivators' and were treated in a similar fashion; it is probable that rice
`first appeared as a weed in taro ditches'.
20 Henry Miller, in Henry Miller and Michael Fraenkel, Hamlet (New York: Carrefour, 1939), pp.
105-6.
21 See Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 1968). This
book contains a fine analysis of geography and its role in American mythology and literature, and of
the reversal of directions. In the East, there was the search for a specifically American code and for a
recoding with Europe (Henry James, Eliot, Pound, etc.); in the South, there was the overcoding of the
slave system, with its ruin and the ruin of the plantations during the Civil War (Faulkner, Caldwell);
from the North came capitalist decoding (Dos Passos, Dreiser); the West, however, played the role of
a line of flight combining travel, hallucination, madness, the Indians, perceptive and mental
experimentation, the shifting of frontiers, the rhizome (Ken Kesey and his `fog machine', the beat
generation, etc.). Every great American author creates a cartography, even in his or her style; in
contrast to what is done in Europe, each makes a map that is directly connected to the real social
movements crossing America. An example is the indexing of geogtaphical directions throughout the
work of Fitzgerald.
22 Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957). (Trans.)
23 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 113. It will
be noted that the word 'Plateau' is used in classical studies of bulbs, tubers, and rhizomes; see the entry
for `Bulb' in M. H. Baillon, Dictionnaire de botanique (Paris: Haehette, 1876-92).
24 For example, Joelle de La Casiniere, Absolument necessaire. The Emergency Book (Paris: Minuit,
1973), a truly nomadic book. In the same vein, see the tesearch in progress at the Montfaucon
Research Center.
25 The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken, 1948), p.
12.
26 Marcel Schwob, The Cbildren's Crusade, trans. Henry Copley (Boston: Small, Maynard,1898);
Jersy Andrzejewski, Les portes du paradis (Paris: Gallimard, 1959); Armand Farrachi, La dislocation
(Paris: Stock, 1974). It was in the context of Schwob's book that Paul Alphandery remarked that
literature, in certain cases, could revitalize history and impose upon it `genuine research ditections'; La
chretiente et !'idee de croisade (Paris: Albin Michel, 1959), vol. 2, p. 116.
120
27
See Paul Virilio, `Vehiculaire', in Nomades et vagabonds, ed. Jacques Bergue (Paris: Union
Generale d'Editions, 1975), p. 43, on the appearance of linearity and the disruption of perception by
speed.
28
See Jean-Cristophe Bailly's description of movement in German Romanticism, in his
introduction to La legende dispersee: Antbologie du romantisme allemand (Paris: Union Generale
d'Editions, 1976), pp. 18ff.
33
Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?"
342
The coming into being of the notion of "author" constitutes the privileged moment of individualization
in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences. Even today, when we
reconstruct the history of a concept, literary genre, or school of philosophy, such categories seem
relatively weak, secondary, and superimposed scansions in comparison with the solid and fundamental
unit of the author and the work.
I shall not offer here a sociohistorical analysis of the author's persona. Certainly it would be worth
examining how the author became individualized in a culture like ours, what status he has been given,
at what moment studies of authenticiry and attribution began, in what kind of system of valorization
the author was involved, at what point we began to
recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes, and how this fundamental category of "the-man-andhis-work criticism" began. For the moment, however, I want to deal solely with the relationship
between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this "figure" that, at least in
appearance, is outside it and antecedes it.
Beckett nicely formulates the theme with which I would like to begin: " `What does it matter who is
speaking,' someone said, what does it matter who is speaking.' " In this indifference appears one of the
fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing (ecriture). I say "ethical" because this
indifference is not really a trait characterizing the manner in which one speaks and writes, but rather a
kind of immanent rule, taken up over and over again, never fully applied, not designating writing as
something completed, but dominating it as a practice. Since it is too familiar to require a lengthy
analysis, this immanent rule can be adequately illustrated here by tracing two of its major themes.
First of all, we can say that today's writing , has freed itself from the dimension of expression.
Referring only to itself, but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is
identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an, interplay of signs arranged less
according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds
like a game (jeu) that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the
point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather
a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
The second theme, writing's relationship with -death, is even more familiar. This link subverts an old
tradition exemplified by the Greek epic, which was intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero:
if he was willing to die young, it was so that his life, consecrated and magnified by death, might pass
into immortaliry; the narrative then redeemed this accepted death. In another way, the motivation, as
well as the theme and the pretext of Arabian narratives-such as The Thousand and One Nights-was
also the eluding of death: one spoke, telling stories into the early morning, in order to forestall death,
to postpone the day of reckoning that would silence the narrator. Scheherazade's narrative is an effort,
renewed each night, to keep death outside the circle of life.
Our culture has metamorphosed this idea of narrative, or writing, as something designed to ward off
death. Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life: it is now a voluntary
effacement which does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer's
very exis343
tence. The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to
be its author's murderer, as in the cases of Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka. That is not all, however: this
relationship between writing and death is also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject's
individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he
writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of
the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of
the dead man in the game of writing.
None of this is recent; criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance-or death-of the author
some time ago. But the consequences of their discovery of it have not been sufficiently examined, nor
has its import been accurately measured. A certain number of notions that are intended to replace the
privileged position of the author actually seem to preserve that privilege and suppress the real meaning
of his disappearance. I shall examine two of these notions, both of great importance today.
The first is the idea of the work. It is a very ' familiar thesis that the task öf criticism is not to bring out
the work's relationships with the author, nor to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience,
but rather, to analyze the work through its sttucture, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of
34
its internal relationships. At this point, however, a problem arises: "What is a work? What is this
curious unity which we designate as a work? Of what elements is it composed? Is it not what an author
has written?" Difficulties appear immediately. If an individual were not an author, could we say that
what he wrote, said, left behind in his papers, or what has been collected of his remarks, could be
called a "work"? When Sade was not considered an author, what was the status of his papers? Were
they simply rolls of paper onto which
344
he ceaselessly uncoiled his fantasies during his imprisonment?
Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he
wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theoretical and technical. When
undertaking the publication of Nietzsche's works, for example, where should one stop? Surely
everything must be published, but what is "everything"? Everything that Nietzsche himself published,
certainly. And what about the rough drafts for his works? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms?
Yes. The deleted passages and the notes at the bottom of the page? Yes. What if, within a workbook
filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry
list: is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum. How can one define a work amid the
millions of traces left by someone after his death? A theory of the work does not exist, and the
empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such
a theory.
We could go even further: does The Thousand and One Nights constitute a work? What about Clement
of Alexandria's Miscellanies or Diogenes Laertius' Lives? A multitude of questions arises with regard
to this notion of the work. Consequently, it is not enough to declare that we should do without the
writer (the author) and study the work in itself. The word "work" and the uniry that it designates are
probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality.
Another notion which has hindered us from taking full measure of the author's disappearance, blurring
and concealing the moment of this eüacement and subtly preserving the author's existence, is the
notion of writing [ecriture]. When rigorously applied, this notion should allow us not only to
circumvent references to the author, but also to situate his recent absence. The notion of writing, as
currently employed, is concerned with neither the act of writing nor the indication-be it symptom or
sign-of a meaning which someone might have wanted to express. We try, with great effort, to imagine
the general condition of each text, the condition of both the space in which it is dispersed and the time
in which it unfolds.
In current usage, however, the notion of writing seems to transpose the empirical characteristics of the
author into a transcendental anonymity. We are content to efface the more visible marks of the author's
empiricity by playing off, one against the other, two ways of characterizing writing, namely, the
critical and the religious approaches. Giving writing a primal status seems to be a way of retranslating,
in transcendental terms, both the theological affirmation of its sacred character and the critical
affirmation of its creative character. To admit that writing is, because of the very history that it made
possible, subject to the test of oblivion and repression, seems to represent, in transcendental terms, the
religious principle of the hidden meaning (which requires interpretation) and the critical principle of
implicit significations, silent determinations, and obscured contents (which gives rise to commentary).
To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both the
religious principle of inalterable and yet never fulfilled tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the
work's survival, its perpetuation beyond the author's death, and its enigmatic excess in relation to him.
This usage of the notion of writing runs the risk of maintaining the author's privileges under the
protection of writing's a priori status: it keeps alive, in the grey light of neutralization, the interplay of
those representations that formed a particular image of the author. The author's disappearance, which,
since Mallarme, has been a constantly recurring event, is subject to a series of transcendental barriers.
There seems to be an important dividing line between those who believe that they can still locate
today's discontinuities (ruptures) in the historicotranscendental tradition of the nineteenth century, and
those who try to free themselves once and for all from that tradition.'
It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. For the
same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating (after Nietzsche) that God and man have died a
common death. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author's disappearance, follow the
distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers.
35
First, we need to clarify briefly the problems arising from the use of the author's name. What is an
author's name? How does it function? Far from offering a solution, I shall only indicate some of the
difficulties that it presents.
The author's name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the problems common to all proper names.
(Here I refer to Searle's analyses, among others. Obviously, one cannot turn a proper name into a pure
and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger
pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description. When one says "Aristotle," one employs a
word that is the equivalent of one, or a series of, definite descriptions, such as "the author of the
Analytics, " "the founder of ontology," and so forth. One cannot stop there, however, because a proper
name does not have just one signification. When we discover that Rimbaud did not write La Chasse
spirituelle, we cannot pretend that the meaning of this proper name, or that of the author, has been
altered. The proper name and the author's name are situated between the two poles of description and
designation: they must have a certain link with what they name, but one that is neither entirely in the
mode of designation nor in that of description; it must be a specific link. How345
ever - and it is here that the particular difficulties of the author's name arise-the links between the
proper name and the individual named and between the author's name and what it names are not
isomorphic and do not function in the same way. There are several differences.
If, for example, Pierre Dupont does not have blue eyes, or was not born in Paris, or is not a doctor, the
name Pierre Dupont will still always refer to the same person; such things do not modify the link of
designation. The problems raised by the author's name are much more complex, however. If I discover
that Shakespeare was not born in the house that we visit today, this is a modification which, obviously,
will not alter the functioning of the author's name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write
those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in
which the author's name functions. If we proved that Shakespeare wrote Bacon's Organon by showing
that the same author wrote both the works of Bacon and those of Shakespeare, that would be a third
type of change which would entirely modify the functioning of the author's name. The author's name is
not, therefore, just a proper name like the rest.
Many other facts point out the paradoxical singularity of the author's name. To say that Pierre Dupont
does not exist is not at all the same as saying that Homer or Hermes Trismegistus did not exist. In the
first case, it means that no one has the name Pierre Dupont; in the second, it means that several people
were mixed together under one name, or that the true author had none of the traits traditionally
ascribed to the personae of Homer or Hermes. To say that X's real name is actually Jacques Durand
instead of Pierre Dupont is not the same as saying that Stendhal's name was Henri Beyle. One could
also question the meaning and functioning of propositions like "Bourbaki is so-and-so, so346
and-so, etc." and "Victor Eremita, Climacus, Anticlimacus, Frater Taciturnus, Constantine
Constantius, all of these are Kierkegaard."
These differences may result from the fact that an author's name is not simply an element in a
discourse (capable of being either subject or object, of being replaced by a pronoun, and the like); it
performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a
name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and
contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts. Hermes Trismegistus
did not exist, nor did Hippocrates-in the sense that Balzac existed-but the fact that several texts have
been placed under the same name indicates that there has been established among them a relationship
of homogeneity, filiation, authentification of some texts by the use of others, reciprocal explication, or
concomitant utilization. The author's name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse:
the fact that the discourse has an author's name, that one can say "this was written by so-and-so" or
"so-and-so is its author," shows that this discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes
and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech that must be
received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status.
It would seem that the author's name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a
discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be
present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The
author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this
discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the
work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive
36
construct and its very particular mode of being. As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our
own there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the "author-function," while others
are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer-it does not have an author; a contract may
well have a guarantor-it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a
writer-but not an author. The author-function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence,
circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.
Let us analyze this "author-function" as we have just described it. In our culture, how does one
characterize a discourse containing the author-function? In what way is this discourse different from
other discourses? If we limit our remarks to the author of a book or a text, we can isolate four different
characteristics.
First of all, discourses are objects of appropriation. The form of ownership from which they spring is
of a rather particular type, one that has been codified for many years. We should note that, historically,
this type of ownership has always been subsequent to what one might call penal appropriation. Texts,
books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, "sacralized" and "sacralizing"
figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses
could be transgressive. In our culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a
product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act-an act placed in the bipolar field of the
sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically; it was a
gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership.
Once a system of ownership for texts came into being, once strict rules concerning author's rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters were enacted-at the
end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century-the possibility of transgression
attached to the act of writing took on, more and more, the form of an imperative peculiar to literature.
It is as if the author, beginning with the moment at which he was placed in the system of property that
characterizes our society, compensated for the status that he thus acquired by rediscovering the old
bipolar field of discourse, systematically practicing transgression and thereby restoring danger to a
writing which was now guaranteed the benefits of ownership.
The author-function does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way, however. This is its
second characteristic. In our civilization, it has not always been the same types of texts which have
required attribution to an author. There was a time when the texts that we today call "literary"
(narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized
without any question about the identity of their author; their anonymity caused no difficulties since
their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status. On
the other hand, those texts that we now would call scientific-those dealing with cosmology and the
heavens, medicine and illnesses, natural sciences and geography-were accepted in the Middle Ages,
and accepted as "true," only when marked with the name of their author. "Hippocrates said," "Pliny
recounts," were not really formulas of an argument based on authority; they were the markers inserted
in discourses that were supposed to be received as statements of demonstrated truth.
A reversal occurred in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Scientific discourses began to be
received for themselves, in the anonymity of an established or always redemonstrable truth; their
membership in a sys347
tematic ensemble, and not the reference to the individual who produced them, stood as their guarantee.
The author-function faded away, and the inventor's name served only to christen a theorem,
proposition, particular effect, property, body, group of elements, or pathological syndrome. By the
same token, literary discourses came to be accepted only when endowed with the author-function. We
now ask of each poetic or fictional text: from where does it come, who wrote it, when, under what
circumstances, or beginning with what design? The meaning ascribed to it and the status or value
accorded it depend upon the manner in which we answer these questions. And if a text should be
discovered in a state of anonymity-whether as a consequence of an accident or the author's explicit
wish-the game becomes one of rediscovering the author. Since literary anonymity is not tolerable, we
can accept it only in the guise of an enigma. As a result, the author-function today plays an important
role in our view of literary works. (These are obviously generalizations that would have to be refined
insofar as recent critical practice is concerned.)
The third characteristic of this author-function is that it does not develop spontaneously as the
attribution of a discourse to an individual. It is, rather, the result of a complex operation which
constructs a certain rational being that we call "author." Critics doubtless try to give this intelligible
37
being a realistic status, by discerning, in the individual, a "deep" motive, a "creative" power, or a
"design," the milieu in which writing originates. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual which we
designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the
operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as
pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice. All these operations
vary according to periods and types of discourse. We do not construct a "philosophical author"
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as we do a "poet," just as, in the eighteenth century, one did not construct a novelist as we do today.
Still, we can find through the ages certain constants in the rules of author construction.
It seems, for example, that the manner in which literary criticism once defined the author-or rather
constructed the figure of the author beginning with existing texts and discourses-is directly derived
from the manner in which Christian tradition authenticated (or rejected) the texts at its disposal. In
order to "rediscover" an author in a work, modern criticism uses methods similar to those that
Christian exegesis employed when trying to prove the value of a text by its author's saintliness. In De
viris illustribus, Saint Jerome explains that homonymy is not sufficient to identify legitimately authors
of more than one work: different individuals could have had the same name, or one man could have,
illegitimately, borrowed another's patronymic. The name as an individual trademark is not enough
when one works within a textual tradition.
How then can one attribute several discourses to one and the same author? How can one use the
author-function to determine if one is dealing with one or several individuals? Saint Jerome proposes
four criteria: (1) if among several books attributed to an author one is inferior to the others, it must be
withdrawn from the list of the author's works (the author is therefore defined as a constant level of
value); (2) the same should be done if certain texts contradict the doctrine expounded in the author's
other works (the author is thus defined as a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence); (3) one must
also exclude works that are written in a different style, containing words and expressions not
ordinarily found in the writer's production (the author is here conceived as a srtlistic unity); (4) finally,
passages quoting statements that were made, or mentioning events that occurred after the author's
death must be
regarded as interpolated texts (the author is here seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a
certain number of events).
Modern literary criticism, even when-as is now customary-it is not concerned with questions of
authentication, still defines the author the same way: the author provides the basis for explaining not
only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse
modifications (through his biography, the determination of his individual perspective, the analysis of
his social position, and the revelation of his basic design). The author is also the principle of a certain
unity of writing-all differences having to be resolved, at least in part, by the principles of evolution,
maturation, or influence. The author also serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a
series of texts: there must be-at a certain level of his thought or desire, of his consciousness or
unconscious-a point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied
together or organized around a fundamental or originating contradiction. Finally, the author is a
particular source of expression that, in more or less completed forms, is manifested equally well, and
with similar validity, in works, sketches, letters, fragments, and so on. Clearly, Saint Jerome's four
criteria of authenticity (criteria which seem totally insufficient for today's exegetes) do define the four
modalities according to which modern criticism brings the author-function into play.
But the author-function is not a pure and simple reconstruction made secondhand from a text given as
passive material. The text always contains a certain number of signs referring to the author. These
signs, well known to grammarians, are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and verb
conjugation. Such elements do not play the same role in discourses provided with the author-function
as in those lacking it. In the latter, such "shifters" refer to the real speaker and to the spatio-temporal
coordinates of his discourse (although certain modifications can occur, as in the operation of relating
discourses in the first person). In the former, however, their role is more complex and variable.
Everyone knows that, in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first person pronoun, nor the
present indicative refer exactly either to the writer or to the moment in which he writes, but rather to
an alter ego whose distance from die author varies, often changing in the course of the work. It would
be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker;
the author-function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance.
38
One might object that this is a characteristic peculiar to novelistic or poetic discourse, a "game" in
which only "quasi-discourses" participate. In fact, however, all discourses endowed with the authorfunction do possess this plurality of self. The self that speaks in the preface to a treatise on
mathematics-and that indicates the circumstances of the treatise's composition-is identical neither in its
position nor in its functioning to the self that speaks in the course of a demonstration, and that appears
in the form of "I conclude" or "I suppose." In the first case, the "I" refers to an individual without an
equivalent who, in a determined place and time, completed a certain task; in the second, the "I"
indicates an instance and a level of demonstration which any individual could perform provided that
he accept the same system of symbols, play of axioms, and set of previous demonstrations. We could
also, in the same treatise, locate a third self, one that speaks to tell the work's meaning, the obstacles
encountered, the results obtained, and the remaining problems; this self is situated in the field of
already existing or yet-to-appear mathematical discourses. The author-function is not assumed by the
first of these selves at the expense of the other two, which would then be nothing more than
349
a fictitious splitting in two of the first one. On the contrary, in these discourses the author function
operates so as to effect the dispersion of these three simultaneous selves.
No doubt analysis could discover still more characteristic traits of the author-function. I will limit
myself to these four, however, because they seem both the most visible and the most important. They
can be summarized as follows: (1) the author-function is linked to the juridical and institutional system
that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses; (2) it does not affect all
discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization; (3) it is not defined by the
spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer, but rather by a series of specific and complex
operations; (4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise
simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects-positions that can be occupied by different classes
of individuals.
Up to this point I have unjustifiably limited my subject. Certainly the author-function in painting,
music, and other arts should have been discussed, but even supposing that we remain within the world
of discourse, as I want to do, I seem to have given the term "author" much too narrow a meaning. I
have discussed the author only in the limited sense of a person to whom the production of a text, a
book, or a work can be legitimately attributed. It is easy to see that in the sphere of discourse one can
be the author of much more than a book-one can be the author of a theory, tradition, or discipline in
which other books and authors will in their turn find a place. These authors are in a position which we
shall call "transdiscursive." This is a recurring phenomenon-certainly as old as our civilization.
Homer, Aristotle, and the Church Fathers, as well as the first mathematicians and the originators of the
Hippocratic tradition, all played this role.
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Furthermore, in the course of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Europe another, more
uncommon, kind of author, whom one should confuse with neither the "great" literary authors, nor the
authors of religious texts, nor the founders of science. In a somewhat arbitrary way we shall call those
who belong in this last group "founders of discursivity." They are unique in that they are not just the
authors of their own works. They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the
formation of other texts. In this sense, they are very different, for example, from a novelist, who is, in
fact, nothing more than the author of his own text. Freud is not just the author of The Interpretation of
Dreams or, jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious; Marx is not just the author of the Communist
Manifesto or Capital.- They both have established an endless possibility of discourse.
Obviously, it is easy to object. One might say that it is not true that the author of a novel is only the
author of his own text; in a sense, he also, provided that he acquires some "importance," governs and
commands more than that. To take a very simple example, one could say that Ann Radcliffe not only
wrote The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and several other novels, but also made possible the
appearance of the Gothic horror novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century; in that respect, her
author-function exceeds her own work. But I think there is an answer to this objection. These founders
of discursivity (I use Marx and Freud as examples, because I believe them to be both the first and the
most important cases) make possible something altogether different from what a novelist makes
possible. Ann Radcliffe's texts opened the way for a certain number of resemblances and analogies
which have their model or principle in her work. The latter contains characteristic signs, figures,
relationships, and structures which could be reused by others. In other words, to say that Ann
Radcliffe founded the Gothic horror novel means that in the nineteenth-century Gothic novel one will
39
find, as in Ann Radcliffe's works, the theme of the heroine caught in the trap of her own innocence, the
hidden castle, the character of the black, cursed hero devoted to making the world expiate the evil
done to him, and all the rest of it.
On the other hand, when I speak of Marx or Freud as founders of discursivity, I mean that they made
possible not only a certain number of analogies, but also (and equally important) a certain number of
differences. They have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something
belonging to what they founded. To say that Freud founded psychoanalysis does not (simply) mean
that we find the concept of the libido or the technique of dream analysis in the works of Karl Abraham
or Melanie Klein; it means that Freud made possible a certain number of divergences-with respect to
his own texts, concepts, and hypotheses-that all arise from the psychoanalytical discourse itself.
This would seem to present a new difficulty, however: is the above not true, after all, of any founder of
a science, or of any author who has introduced some important transformation into a science? After
all, Galileo made possible not only those discourses that repeated the laws that he had formulated, but
also statements very different from what he himself had said. If Cuvier is the founder of biology or
Saussure the founder of linguistics, it is not because they were imitated, nor because people have since
taken up again the concept of organism or sign; it is because Cuvier made possible, to a certain extent,
a theory of evolution diametrically opposed to his own fixism; it is because Saussure made possible a
generative grammar radically different from his structural analyses. Superficially, then, the initiation
of discursive practices appears similar to the founding of any scientific endeavor.
Still, there is a difference, and a notable one. In the case of a science, the act that
founds it is on an equal footing with its future transformations; this act becomes in some respects part
of the set of modifications that it makes possible. Of course, this belonging can take several forms. In
the future development of a science, the founding act may appear as little more than a particular
instance of a more general phenomenon which unveils itself in the process. It can also turn out to be
marred by intuition and empirical bias; one must then reformulate it, making it the object of a certain
number of supplementary theoretical operations which establish it more rigorously, etc. Finally, it can
seem to be a hasty generalization which must be limited, and whose restricted domain of validity must
be retraced. In other words, the founding act of a science can always be reintroduced within the
machinery of those transformations that derive from it.
In contrast, the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogeneous to its subsequent transformations.
To expand a type of discursivity, such as psychoanalysis as founded by Freud, is not to give it a formal
generality that it would not have permitted at the outset, but rather to open it up to a certain number of
possible applications. To limit psychoanalysis as a type of discursivity is, in reality, to try to isolate in
the founding act an eventually restricted number of propositions or statements to which, alone, one
grants a founding value, and in relation to which certain concepts or theories accepted by Freud might
be considered as derived, secondary, and accessory. In addition, one does not declare certain
propositions in the work of these founders to be false: instead, when trying to seize the act of
founding, one sets aside those statements that am not pertinent, either because they are deemed
inessential, or because they are considered "prehistoric" and derived from another type of discursivity.
In other words, in the founding of a science, the initiation of a discursive practice does not participate
in its later transformations.
As a result, one defines a proposition's theo351
retical validity in relation to the work of the founders-while, in the case of Galileo and Newton, it is in
relation to what physics or cosmology is (in its intrinsic structure and "normativity") that one affirms
the validity of any proposition that those men may have put forth. To phrase it very schematically: the
work of initiators of discursivity is not situated in the space that science defines; rather, it is the
science or the discursivity which refers back to their work as primary coordinates.
In this way we can understand the inevitable necessity, within these fields of discursivity, for a "return
to the origin." This return, which is part of the discursive field itself, never stops modifying it. The
return is not a historical supplement which would be added to the discursivity, or merely an ornament;
on the contrary, it constitutes an effective and necessary task of transforming the discursive practiee
itself. Re-examination of Galileo's text may well change our knowledge of the history of mechanics,
but it will never be able to change mechanics itself. On the other hand, re-examining Freud's texts
modifies psychoanalysis itself just as a re-examination of Marx's would modify Marxism.3
What I have just outlined regarding the initiation of discursive practices is, of course, very schematic;
this is true, in particular, of the opposition that I have tried to draw between discursive initiation and
40
scientific founding. It is not always easy to distinguish between the two; moreover, nothing proves that
they are two mutually exclusive procedures. I have attempted the distinction for only one reason: to
show that the author function, which is complex enough when one tries to situate it at the level of a
book or a series of texts that carry a given signature, involves still more determining factors when one
tries to analyze it in larger units, such as groups of works or entire disciplines.
To conclude, I would like to review the reasons why I attach a certain importance to what I have said.
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First, there are theoretical reasons. On the one hand, an analysis in the direction that I have outlined
might provide for an approach to a typology of discourse. It seems to me, at least at first glance, that
such a typology cannot be constructed solely from the grammatical features, formal structures, and
objects of discourse: more likely there exist properties or relationships peculiar to discourse (not
reducible to the rules of grammar and logic), and one must use these to distinguish the major
categories of discourse. The relationship (or nonrelationship) with an author, and the different forms
this relationship takes, constitute-in a quite visible manner-one of these discursive properties.
On the other hand, I believe that one could find here an introduction to the historical analysis of
discourse. Perhaps it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive value or formal
transforrnations, but according to their modes of existence. The modes of circulation, valorization,
attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each. The
manner in which they are articulated according to social relationships can be more readily understood,
I believe, in the activity of the author-function and in its modifications, than in the themes or concepts
that discourses set in motion.
It would seem that one could also, beginning with analyses of this type, re-examine the privileges of
the subject. I realize that in undertaking the internal and architectonic analysis of a work (be it a
literary text, philosophical system, or scientific work), in setting aside biographical and psychological
references, one has already called back into question the absolute character and founding role of the
subject. Still, perhaps one must return to this question, not in order to re-establish the theme of an
originating subject, but to grasp the subject's points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of
dependencies. Doing so means overturning the traditional problem, no longer raising the questions
"How can a free subject penetrate the substance of things and give it meaning? How can it activate the
rules of a language from within and thus give rise to the designs which are properly its own?" Instead,
these questions will be raised: "How, under what conditions and in what forms can something like a
subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what
functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?" In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject (or
its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function
of discourse.
Second, there are reasons dealing with the "ideological" status of the author. The question then
becomes: How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world?
The answer is: One can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and
dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one's
resources and riches, but also with one's discourses and their significations. The author is the principle
of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the
author. We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author is the genial creator of a
work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of
significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so
transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to
proliferate indefinitely.
The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work;
the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one
limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the
353
free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are
accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in
reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an
ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a
historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.)
The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the
proliferation of meaning.
41
In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure
of the author. It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would
operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would
develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure. Although, since
the eighteenth century, the author has played the role of the regulator of the fictive, a role quite
characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property,
still, given the historical modifications that are taking place, it does not seem necessary that the authorfunction remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence. I think that, as out society
changes, at die very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author-function will disap' pear,
and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemic texts will once again function according to another
mode, but still with a system of constraint-one which will no longer be the author, but which will have
to be determined or, perhaps, experienced.
All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be
subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer hear the questions
that have been rehashed for so long: "Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With
what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?"
Instead, there would be other questions, like these: "What are the modes of existence of this discourse?
Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself.+ What are the
places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subjectfunctions?" And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an
indifference: "What difference does it make who is speaking?"
NOTES
1. For a discussion of the notions of discontinuity and historical tradition see Foucault's Les Mots et
tes chares (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), translated as The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1971).Trans.
2. John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
Universiry Press, 1969), pp. 162-174.-Trans.
3. To define these returns more clearly, one must also emphasize that they tend to reinforce the
enigmatic link between an author and his works. A text has an inaugurative value precisely because it
is the work of a particular author, and our returns are conditioned by this knowledge. As in the case of
Galileo, there is no possibility that the rediscovery of an unknown text by Newton or Cantor will
modify classical cosmology or set theory as we know them (at best, such might modify our historical
knowledge of their genesis). On the other hand, the discovery of a text like Freud's "Project tot a
Scientific Psychology"-insofar as it is a text by Freud-always threatens to modify not the historical
knowledge of psychoanalysis, but its theoretical field, even if only by shifting the accentuation or the
center of gravity. Through such returns, which are part of their make-up, these discursive practices
maintain a relationship with regard to their "fundamental" and indirect author unlike that which an
ordinary text entertains with its immediate author..
42
FROM Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History Theory, Fiction (London:
Routledge, 1988)
"Clearly, then, the time has come to theorize the term [postmodernisrnl, if not to define it, before it
fades from awkward neologism to derelict e(iche without ever attaining to the dignity of a cultural
concept."
Ihab Hassan
(301)
Of all the terrns bandied about in both current cultural theory and contemporary writing on the arts,
postmodernism must be the most over- and underdefined. It is usually accompanied by a grand
flourish of negativized rhetoric: we hear of discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentring,
indeterminacy, and antitotalization. What all of these words literally do (precisely by their disavowing
prefixes - dis, de, in, anti) is incorporate that which they aim to contest- as does, I suppose, the term
postmodernism itself. I point to this simple verbal fact in order to begin `theorizing' the cultural
enterprise to which we seem to have given such a provorative label. Given all the confusion and
vagueness associated with the term itself (see Paterson 1986), I would like to begin by arguing that,
for me, postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then
subverts, the very concepts it challenges - be it in architecture, literature, painting, sculpture, film,
video, dance, TV, music, philosophy, aesthetic theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, or historiography.
These are some of the realms from which rny `theorizing' will
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proceed, and my examples will always be specific, because what I want ot avoid are those polemical
generalizations - often by those inimical to postmodernism: Jameson (1984a), Eagleton (1985),
Newman (1985) - that leave us guessing about just what it is that is being called postmodernist, though
never in doubt as to its undesirability. Some assume a generally accepted `tacit definition' (Caramello
1983); others locate the beast by temporal (after 1945? 1968? 1970? 1980?) or economic signposting
(late capitalism). But in as pluralist and fragmented a culture as that of the western world today, such
designations are not terribly useful if they intend to generalize about all the vagaries of our culture.
After all, what does television's `Dallas' have in common with the architecture of Ricardo Bofill?
What does John Cage's music share with a play (or film) like Amadeus?
In other words, postmodernism cannot simply be used as a synonym for the contemporary (cf. Kroker
and Cook 1986). And it does not really describe an international cultural phenomenon, for it is
primarily European and American (North and South). Although the concept of modernism is largely
an Anglo-American one (Suleiman 1986), this should not limit the poetics of postmodernism to that
culture, especially since those who would argue that very stand are usually the ones to find room to
sneak in the French nouveau roman (A. Wilde 1981; Brooke-Rose 1981; Lodge 1977). And almost
everyone (e.g. Barth 1980) wants to be sure to include what Severo Sarduy (1974) 6as labelled - not
postmodern - but `neo-baroque' in a Spanish culture where `modernism' has a rather different meaning.
I offer instead, then, a specific, if polemical, start from which to operate: as a cultural activity that can
be discerned in most art forms and many currents of thought today, what I want to call postmodernism
is fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political. Its contradictions may
well be those of late capitalist society, but whatever the cause, these contradictions are certainly
manifest in the important postmodern concept of `the presence of the past.' This was the title given to
the 1980 Venice Biennale which marked the institutional recognition of postmodernism in
architecture. Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi's (1983) analysis of the twenty facades of the `Strada
Novissima' - whose very newness lay paradoxically in its historical parody - shows how architecture
has been rethinking modernism's purist break with history. This is not a nostalgic return; it is a critical
revisiting, an ironic dialogue with the past of both art and society, a recalling of a critically shared
vocabulary of architectural forms. `The past whose presence we claim is not a golden age to be
recuperated,' argues Portoghesi (1983, 26). Its aesthetic forms and its social formations are
problematized by critical reflection. The same is true of the postmodernist rethinking of figurative
painting in art and historical narrative in fiction and poetry (see Perloff 1985, 155-71): it is always a
critical reworking, never a nostalgic `return.' Herein lies the governing role of irony in postmodernism.
Stanley Tigerman's dialogue with history in his projects for family houses modelled on Raphael's
palatial Villa Madama is an ironic one: his
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43
miniaturization of the monumental forces a rethinking of the social function of architecture - both then
and now [ ... ].
Because it is contradictory and works within the very systems it attempts to subvert, postmodernism
can probably not be considered a new paradigm (even in some extension of the Kuhnian sense of the
term). It has not replaced liberal humanism, even if it has seriously challenged it. It may mark,
however, the site of the struggle of the emergence of something new. The manifestations in art of this
struggle may be those almost undefinable and certainly bizarre works like Terry Gilliam's film, Brazil.
The postmodern ironic rethinking of history is here textualized in the many general parodic references
to other movies: A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Gilliam's own Time Bandits an(-] Monty Python
sketches, and Japanese epics, to name but a few. The more specific parodic recalls range from Star
Wars' Darth Vadar to the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. In Brazil,
however, the famous shot of the baby carriage on the steps is replaced by one of a floor cleaner, and
the result is to reduce epic tragedy to the bathos of the mechanical and debased. Along with this ironic
reworking of the history of film comes a temporal historical warp: the movie is set, we are told, at 8:49
am, sometime in the twentieth century. The decor does not help us identify the time more precisely.
The fashions mix the absurdly futuristic with 1930s styling; an oddly old-fashioned and dingy setting
belies the omnipresence of computers - though even they are not the sleekly designed creatures of
today. Among the other typically postmodern contradictions in this movie is the co-existence of
heterogenous filmic genres: fantasy Utopia and grim dystopia; absurd slapstick comedy and tragedy
(the Tuttle/Buttle mix-up); the romantic adventure tale and the political documentary.
While all forms of contemporary art and thought offer examples of this kind of postmodernist
contradiction, this book (like most others on the subject) will be privileging the novel genre, and one
form in particular, a form that I want to cal) `historiographic metafiction.' By this I mean those wellknown and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim
to historical events and personages: The French Lieutenant's Woman, Midnight's Children, Ragtime,
Legs, G., Famous Last Words. In most of the critical work on postmodernism, it is narrative - be it in
literature, history, or theory - that has usually been the major focus of attention. Historiographic
metafiction incorporates all three of these domains: that is, its theoretical selfawareness of history and
fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and
reworking of the forrns and contents of the past. This kind of fiction has often been noticed by critics,
but its paradigmatic quality has been passed by: it is commonly labelled in terms of something else for example as `midfiction' (Wilde 1981) or `paramodernist' (Malmgren 1985). Such labeling is
another mark of the inherent contradictoriness of historiographic metafiction, for it always works
within conventions in order to subvert them. It is not just metafictional; nor is it just another version of
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the historical novel or the non-fictional novel. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years o f
Solitude has often been discussed in exactly the contradictory terms that I think define postmodernism.
For example Larry McCaffery Sees it as both metafictionally self-reflexive and yet speaking to us
powerfully about real political and historical realities: 'It has thus become a kind of model for the
contemporary writer, being self-conscious about its literary heritage and about the limits of mimesis ...
but yet managing to reconnect its readers to the world outside the page' (1982, 264). What McCaffery
here adds as almost an afterthought at the end of his book, The Metafictional Muse, is in many ways
my starting point.
Most theorists of postmodernism who sec it as a `cultural dominant' (Jameson 1984a, 56) agree that it
is characterized by the results of late capitalist dissolution of bourgeois hegemony and the
development of mass culture (sec Jameson 1984a [via Lefebvre 1968]; Russell 1980; Egbert 1970;
Calinescu 1977). I would agree and, in fact, argue that the increasing uniformization of mass culture is
one of the totalizing forces that postmodernism exists to challenge. Challenge, but not deny. But it
does seek to assert difference, not homogeneous identity. Of course, the very concept of difference
could be said to entail a typically postmodern contradiction: `difference,' unlike `otherness,' has no
exact opposite against which to define itself. Thomas Pynchon allegorizes otherness in Gravity's
Rainhow through the single, if anarchic, `we-system' that exists as the counterforce of the totalizing
`They-system' (though also implicated in it). Postmodern difference or rather differences, in the plural,
are a(ways multiple and provisional.
Postmodern culture, then, has a contradictory relationship to what we usually label our dominant,
liberal humanist culture. It does not deny it, as some have asserted (Newman 1985, 42; Paltner 1977,
364). Instead, it contests it from within its own assumptions. Modernists like Eliot and Joyce have
44
usually been seen as profoundly humanistic (e.g. Stern 1971, 26) in their paradoxical desire for stable
aesthetic and moral values, even in the face of their realization of the inevitable absence of such
universals. Postmodernism differs from this, not in its humanistic contradictions, but in the
provisionality of its response to them. it refuses to posit any structure or, what Lyotard (1984) calls,
master narrative-such as art or myth-which, for such modernists, would have been consolatory. It
argues that such systems are indeed attractive, perhaps even necessary; but this does not make them
any the less illusory. For Lyotard, postmodernism is characterized by exactly this kind of incredulity
toward master or metanarratives: those who lament the `loss of meaning' in the world or in art are
really mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer primarily narrative knowledge of this kind (1984,
26). This does not mean that knowledge somehow disappears. There is no radically new paradigm
here, even if there is change.
(305)
III
"Unfortunately, `postmodern' is a term bon à tout faire. I have the impression that it is applied today to
auything the user happens to like. Further, there seeins to be an attempt to make it increasingly
retroactive: first it was apparently, applied to certain writers or artists active in the last twenty years,
then gradually it reached the beginning of the century, then still further back. And this reverse
procedure - continues; soon the postmodern category will include Homer."
Umberto Eco
When Charles Newman attempts to denigrate the `essence' of the postmodern strategy by
characterizing it as one of assimilating `voraciously (though rarely systematically) while
simultaneously repudiating assimilation' (1985, 28), he has, in fact, put his finger on precisely what
characterizes postmodernism: contradiction and a move toward antitotalization. The same is true when
Charles Russell calls postmodernism `an art of criticism, with no message other than the need for
continuous questioning. It is an art of unrest, with no clearly defined audience other than those
predisposed to doubt and to search' (in Russell 1981, 58). Russell intends this as a criticism of the
postmodern, for (at this early stage in his theorizing) he would prefer to see in it a new romantic
individualism and originality as mediated through modernist transcendence, a move `beyond doubt
and distrust toward inspired vision' (5). But this kind of move is not part of the postmodernist
enterprise, as he saw later. As the very label of `historiographic metafiction' is intended to suggest,
postmodernism remains fundamentally contradictory, offering only questions, never final answers. In
fiction, it combines what Malcolm Bradbury (1973, 15) has called `argument by poetics' (metafiction)
with `argument by historicisrn' (historiographic) in such a way as to inscribe a mutual interrogation
within the texts themselves.
We have seen that the contradictions that characterize postmodernism reject any neat binary
opposition that might conceal a secret hierarchy of values. The elements of these contradictions are
usually multiple; the focus is on differences, not single otherness; and their roots are most likely to be
found in the very modernism from which postmodernism derives its name (or rather, from the `ideal
type notion' of modernism that has resulted from successive canonizations - Huyssen 1986, 53). Many
critics have pointed out the glaring contradictions of modernism: its elitist, classical need for order and
its revolutionary formal innovations (Kermode 1971, 91); its `Janus-faced' anarchistic urge to destroy
existing Systems combined with a reactionary political vision of ideal order (Daiches 1971, 197); its
compulsion to write mixed with a realization of the meaninglessness of writing (in the work of Beckett
or Kafka); its melancholy regret for the loss of presence and its experimental energy and power of
conception (Lyotard 1986, 30-1). In fact, Terry Eagleton sees as a positive characteristic of modernism
the fact that it retains its contradictions:
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`between a still ineluctable bourgeois humanism and the pressures of a quite different rationality,
which, still newly emergent, is not even able to name itself' (1985, 70). Postmodernism challenges
some aspects of modernist dogma: its view of the autonomy of art and its deliberate separation from
life; its expression of individual subjectivity; its adversarial status vis-à-vis mass culture and bourgeois
life (Huyssen 1986, 53). But, on the other hand, the postmodern clearly also developed out of other
modernist strategies: its selfreflexive experimentation, its ironic ambiguities, and its contestations of
classic realist representation.
45
However, I would argue not only that postmodernism, like modernism, also retains its own
contradictions, but also that it foregrounds them to such an extent that they become the very defining
characteristics of the entire cultural phenomenon we label with that name. The postmodern is in no
way absolutist; it does not say that 'lt is both impossible and useless to try and establish some
hierarchical order, some system of priorities in life' (Fokkema 1986, 82). What it does say is that there
are all kinds of orders and systems in our world - and that we create them all. That is their justification
and their limitation. They do not exist `out there', fixed, given, universal, eternal; they are human
constructs in history. This does not make them any the less necessary or desirable. It does, however, as
we have seen, condition their `truth' value. The local, the limited, the temporary, the provisional are
what define postmodern `truth' in novels like John Banville's Kepler or Christa Wolf's Cassandra. The
point is not exactly that the world is meaningless (Wilde 1981, 148), but that any meaning that exists
is of our own creation.
In fiction, it is self-reflexivity that works to make the paradoxes of postmodernism overt and even
defining. Many have argued that all art possesses some of these devices of self-reference and that they
function in much the same wav:
"Even the most `realistic' of works use such conventions because, rather than trying to `take us in'
('that is, to delude us), they prefer to show us how close they have come to doing so, how marvellously
verisimilar their Illusion is: one cannot appreciate the verisimilar without being aware that it is not the
thing itself." (Krieger 1982, 101; see too 1976, 182-3).
No language, in other words, is really `self-effacing'; all is to some degree `selfapparent,' to use
Jerome Klinkowitz's terms (1984, 14). Postmodernism, in this perspective, would just be a more selfconscious and overt manifestation of the basic paradox of aesthetic form.
But there are other postmodern contradictions that are less generalizable. Whi1e much art uses irony
and parody to inscribe and yet critique the discourses of its past, of the `already-said,' postmodernism
is almost alwa,ys double-voiced in its attempts to historicize and contextualize the enunciative
situation of its art. Black American culture has been defined as one of `double consciousness'
(307)
(W. E. B. DuBois 1973, 3) in which black and white, slave and master cultures are never reconciled,
but held in a doubled suspension. Some types of feminism have argued much the same sort of
relationship between female and male culture. The next chapter [in A Poetics of Postmodernism] will
investigate how both of these social forces have had their impact on postmodernism, and how its
contradictory double- or multiple-voicing is one of the manifestations of this impact.
There are many forms that this paradoxical identity of the postmodern can take. One of the most
interesting involves the actual reception of postmodernism. Douwe Fokkema has argued that it is
`sociologically limited to mostly academic readers interested in complicated texts' (1986, 81). (For a
similar argument re modernism, see Todd 1986, 79.) But if that is true, how do we account for the fact
that The Name of the Rose, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ragtime, Midnight's Children, Flaubert's
Parrot, and so many other historiographic metafictions have been prominent on the best-sellers' lists in
both Europe and North America? One of the contradictions of postmodernism, I would argue, is that it
does indeed `close the gap' that Leslie Fiedler (1975) saw between high and low art forms, and it does
so through the ironizing of both. Think of the ironic mixtures of religious history and the detective
story in The Name of the Rose or of war documentary and science fiction in Slaughterhouse-Five.
Woody Allen's films (see D'Haen 1986; 226) also close this gap by paradoxically using both familiar
movie staples (love, anxiety, sex) and also sophisticated parodic and metafictional forms (for example
in Play it Again, Sam or The Purple Rose of Cairo). Postmodernism is both academic and popular,
elitist and accessible.
One of the ways in which it achieves this paradoxical popular-academic identity is through its
technique of installing and then subverting familiar conventions of both kinds of art. E. L. Doctorow
has claimed that he had to give up trying to write The Book of Daniel with the usual realist narrative
concern for transition that is characteristic of the nineteenth-century novel (and popular fiction) (in
Trenner 1983, 40), yet he self-consciously has his narrating character both exploit and undercut that
very structural concern for continuity. In its contradictions, postmodernist fiction tries to offer what
Stanley Fish (1972, xiii) once called a `dialectical' literary presentation, one that disturbs readers,
forcing them to scrutinize their own values and beliefs, rather than pandering to or satisfying them.
But as Umberto Eco has reminded us, postmodern fiction may seem more open in form, but constraint
is always needed in order to feel free (in Rosso 1983, 6). This kind of novel self-consciously uses the
trappings of what Fish calls `rhetorical' literary presentation (omniscient narrators, coherent
46
characterization, plot closure) in order to point to the humanly constructed character of these trappings
- their arbitrariness and conventionality. This is what I mean by the typically contradictory postmodern
exploitation and subversion of the familiar staples of both realist and modernist fiction.
(308)
We have seen that when postmodern architects showed the world their wares at that Venice Biennale
in 1980, they chose as their banner the motto: `the presence of the past.' This obvious paradox offers a
conjoining of performance in the present and recording of the past. In fiction, this contradiction is
played out in terms of parody and metafiction versus the conventions of realism. The metafictionally
present modern narrator of Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman jars with and parodies the
conventions of the nineteenth-century novelistic tale of Charles, Sarah, and Ernestina. The various
Chinese boxes of narrators and fiction-makers (Fowles, the narrator, his persona, Charles, and finally
Sarah) enact the novel's themes of freedom and power, of creation and control. The multiple parodies
of specific Victorian novels (by Thackeray, George Eliot, Dickens, Froude, Hardy) are matched by
more generic ironic play on nineteenth-century authoritative narrating voices, reader address, and
narrative closure.
This complex and extended parody is not, however, just a game for the academic reader. It is overtly
intended to prevent any reader from ignoring both the modern and the specifically Victorian social, as
well as aesthetic, contexts. We are not allowed to say either that this is `only a story' or that it is `only
about the Victorian period.' The past is always placed critically-and not nostalgically - in relation with
the present. The questions of sexuality, of social inequality and responsibility, of science and religion,
and of the relation of art to the world are all raised and directed both at the modern reader and the
social and literary conventions of the last century. The plot structure of The French Lieutenant's
Woman enacts the dialectic of freedom and power that is the modern existentialist and even Marxist
answer to Victorian or Darwinian determinism. But it requires that historical context in order to
interrogate the present (as well as the past) through its critical irony. Parodic self-reflexiveness
paradoxically leads here to the possibility of a literature which, while asserting its modernist autonomy
as art, also manages simultaneously to investigate its intricate and intimate relations with the social
world in which it is written and read.
This kind of contradiction is what characterizes postmodern art, which works to subvert dominant
discourses, but is dependent upon those same discourses for its very physical existence: the `alreadysaid.' Yet, I think it is wrong to sec postmodernism as defined in an,y way by an `either/or' structure.
As we shall sec in more detail in Chapter 12, it is not a case of its being either nostalgically
neoconservative or radically antihumanist in its politics (Foster 1985, 121). It is, actually, both and
neither. Certainly it is marked by a return to history, and it does indeed problematize the entire notion
of historical knowledge. But the reinstalling of memory is not uncritical or reactionary, and the
problematization of humanist certainties does not mean their denial or death. Postmodernism does not
so much erode out `sense of history' and reference (Foster 1985, 132), as erode out old sure sense of
what both history and reference meant. It asks us to rethink and critique out notions of both.
(309)
Both theorists and artists have recognized that paradox can often reek of compromise. Witness video
artist Douglas Davis's view:
If I want to address my art to the world, I must address it through the System, as must everyone else. It
this sounds suspiciously like liberalism and compromise, so be it: liberalism and compromise is the
only way any true revolutionary has ever worked, save through the sword.
(1977, 22)
Certainly The French Lieutenant's Woman would corroborate such a view of contradiction as
compromise, but not compromise in the sense of avoidance of questioning or of creating a new and
alternate unifying interpretative totality. Postmodernism exploits, but also undermines, such staples of
our humanist tradition as the coherent subject and the accessible historical referent, and this may well
be what is so irritating about it for Eagleton and Jameson. The contested concepts of artistic originality
and `authenticity' and of any stable historical entity (such as `the worker') would appear to be central
to their Marxist master narrative. The postmodern blurring of firm distinctions is probably, by
definition, anathema to Marxist dialectical reasoning, as it is to any Habermasian position of
Enlightenment rationality. Both of these influential positions of opposition to postmodernism are
founded on the kind of totalizing meta-narratives (Lyotard 1984) that postmodernism challenges -that
is, at once uses and abuses. I would argue, along with Nannie Doyle and others, that what is positive,
not negative, about postmodernism is that it does not attempt to hide its relationship to consumer
47
society, but rather exploits it to new critical and politicized ends, acknowledging openly the
`indissoluble relation between cultural production and its political and social affiliations' (Doyle 1985,
169).
Postmodern discourses assert both autonomy and worldliness. Likewise, they participate in both
theory and praxis. They offer a collective, historicized context for individual action. In other words,
they do not deny the individual, but they do `situate' her/him. And they do not deny that collectivity
can be perceived as manipulation as well as activism: witness Pynchon's and Rushdie's novels of
paranoia. The postmodern is not quite an avant-garde. It is not as radical or as adversarial. In Charles
Russell's view (1985), the avant-garde is ,elf-consciously modern and subject to socio-cultural change.
The same is true of the postmodern, but this valuing (fetishizing?) of innovation is conditioned by a reevaluation of the past which puts newness and novelty into perspective. The avant-garde is also seen
as critical of the dominant culture and alienated from it in a way that the postmodern is not, largely
because of its acknowledgement of its unavoidable implication in that dominant culture. At the same
time, of course, it both exploits and critically undermines that dominance. In short, the postmodern is
not as negating (of the past) or as Utopic (about the future) as is, at least, the historical or modernist
avant-garde. It incorporates its past within its very name and parodically seeks to inscribe its criticism
of that past.
(310)
These contradictions of postmodernism are not really meant to be resolved, but rather are to be held in
an ironic tension. For example in John Fowles's A Maggot, there are an amazing number of such
unresolved and unresolvable paradoxes. On a formal level, the novel holds in tension the conventions
of history and fiction (specifically, of romance and science fiction). One of its main narrative
structures is that of question and answer (a lawyer's questioning of witnesses), a structure that
foregrounds the conflicts between truth and lies, differing perceptions of truth, facts and beliefs, and
truth and illusion. The transcribing clerk believes there are two truths: `One that a person believes is
truth; and one that is truth incontestable' (1985, 345), but the entire novel works to problematize such
binary certainty. The contradictory tensions recur in the twentieth-century narrator/historian's
emphasizing of his distance from the 1736 action of his plot. The two major antagonists, the male
lawyer Ayscough and the prostitute-turned-Dissenter Rebecca Lee are established as e ach other's
opposite: in gender, class, education, religion. They come to represent reason versus instinct, male
versus female, even left versus right hemispheres of the brain.
In this novel there are still other unresolved thematic contradictions: the absent `hero,' known as His
Lordship, is both a scientist and a believer in theories of the physical world that are `more phantasies
than probable or experimental truths' (188). Christianity and paganism are also played off against each
other constantly in the novel, and the narrator's interest in Dissenters, especially the Shakers, comes
from the fact that they too have been perceived in contradictory ways: `Orthodox theologians have
always despised the sect's doctrinal naivety; orthodox priests, its fanaticism; orthodox capitalists, its
communism; orthodox communists, its superstition; orthodox sensualists, its abhorrence of the carnal;
and orthodox males, its striking feminism' (4SO). The different and the paradoxical fascinate the
postmodern.
So too do the multiple and the provisional. In the course of the novel, the titular `maggot' is defined as
`the larval stage of a winged creature; as is the written text, at least in the writer's hope' (unpaginated
prologue, signed by Fowles). We are also told from the starr that the word signifies a whim or quirk.
Within the plot, maggots are associated with death (260) and with fancy (277). The title's full
contradictory force comes from Rebecca' description of the large white object in the cave as a `great
swollen maggot ... tho' not' (3SS). The challenging of certainty, the asking of questions, the revealing
of fiction-making where we might have once accepted the existence of some absolute `truth' - this is
the project of postmodernism.
Ihab Hassan sees the oppositional paradox of postmodernism as lying in `its fanatic will to unmaking,'
on the one hand, and, on the other, `the need to discover a `unitary' sensibility' (1982, 26S). I see this
paradox as less oppositional than provisional; I see it, instead, as an inscribing and undercutting of
both any unitary sensibility and any disruptive will to unmake, for these are equally absolutist and
totalizing concepts. Postmodernism is characterized by
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energy derived from the rethinking of the value of multiplicity and provisionality; in actual practice, it
does not seem to he defined by any potentially paralyzing opposition between making and unmaking.
This is the energy (if also logical inconsistency) we get from those cohesive challenges to coherence in
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the work of Foucault or Lyotard (sec Roth 1985, 107). Postmodernist discourses - both theoretical and
practical - need the very myths and conventions they, contest and reduce (Watkins 1978, 222); they do
not necessarily come to terms with either order of disorder (cf. Wilde 1981, 10), but question both in
terms of each other. The myths and conventions exist for a reason, and postmodernism investigates
that reason. The postmodern impulse is not to seek any total vision. It merely questions. If it finds such
a vision, it questions how, in fact it made it.
IV
The great modern achievements were wagers which made gestures, invented methods, but laid no
foundations for a future literature. They led in the direction of an immensity frorn which there was
bound to be a turning back because to go further would lead to a new and completer fragmentation,
utter obscurity, formlessness without end.
Stephen Spender
History has proved Spender wrong, for in postmodernism we sec the results of those wagers and they
have not taken the form he imagined. The debate over the definition of both modernism and
postmodernism has now been going on for years (sec Fokkema 1984, 12-36). There is little firm
agreement on their limiting dates, their defining characteristics, even the players in this game. Instead
of trying to delimit either, I would like to look at the configuration of concerns in each that could help
us define a poetics of postmodernism in its relation to modernism. In other words, I do not want to
enter into the arguments of evaluation; nor do 1 want to set the one enterprise against the other. The
entire issue of binary oppositions like this one needs rethinking. What inevitably happens is that one either modernism or postmodernism - gets privileged over the other.
One of the most influential of postmodern theorists, Ihab Hassan, is fond of creating parallel columns
that place characteristics of the one next to their opposite characteristics in the other, usually making
clear his preference for the postmodern. But this `either/or' thinking suggests a resolution of what I sec
as the unresolvable contradictions within postmodernism. For example I would sec it less as a case of
postmodern play versus modernist purpose, as Hassan claims (1982, 267-8), than as a case of play
with purpose. The same is true of all his oppositions: postmodernism is the process of making the
product; it is absence within presence, it is dispersal that needs centering in order to be dispersal; it is
the ideolect that wants to be, but knows it cannot be, the master code; it is immanence denying yet
yearning for transcendence. In other words, the postmodern partakes of a logic of `both/and,' not one
of either/or.' And, not
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surprisingly, those who privilege the modernist over the postmodernist also work in similar
oppositional binary terms (Graff 1979; Eagleton 1985; Newman 1985).
As I have already mentioned, the major danger in setting up this kind of structure is that of creating
`straw men' in order to make one's point more clearly. For instance when we read that modernism's
concept of time is inescapably linear' and `idea(ly controllable' (Calinescu 1983, 284), we wonder
what happened to those experimental works of Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, and others we think of as
modernists. Did modernism really abandon intracultural dialogue' (Calinescu 1983, 275, his italics)?
What about Tbc Waste Land or Finnegans Wake? No matter which `ism' is preferred, both it and its
Antagonist run the risk of this kind of reduction. And no two critics seem to agree on which reductions
to make. Jameson (1984b) sees modernism as oppositional and marginal- what 1 take as important
defining characteristics of the postmodern. He offers no proof why modernism is somehow exempt
from implication in mass culture. (Andreas Huyssen - 1986, viii - suggests that it is because of its
elitism that attempted to transcend that mass culture.) Not does he offer any reason why he sees
postmodernism in particular as the dominant aesthetic of consumer society Jameson 1984b, 197). In
this book, I will be arguing that such reasons must be given and that, in defining postmodernism, it is
necessary to be as specific and explanatory as possible.
lt is all too easy to reject, as does John Barth, all notions of postmodernism based on its being an
extension, intensification, subversion, or repudiation postmodernism (1980, 69). But modernism
literally and physically haunts postmodernism, and their interrelations should not be ignored. Indeed
there appear to he two dominant schools of thought about the nature of the interaction of the two
enterprises: the first sees postmodernism as a total break from modernism and the language of this
school is the radical rhetoric of rupture; the second sees the postmodern as an extension and
intensification of certain characteristics of modernism.
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The radical break theory depends upon firm binary oppositions that operate on the formal,
philosophical, and ideological levels. On the formal level postmodern surface is opposed to modernist
depth (Wilde 1981, 43; Sontag 1967), and the ironic and parodic tone of postmodernism contrasts with
the seriousness of modernism (Graff 1979, 55; Zurbrugg 1986, 78). It is easy to sec which half is
being privileged here, though it usually is not quite as clear when the oppositions are between chaos
and order or contingency and coherence (Bradbury 1983, 160; 185). This last point is often made in
terms of the difference between the modernist use of myth as a structuring device in the work of, for
instance, Mann, Pavese, or Joyce (sec Begnal 1973; Beebe 1972, 175; 1974, 1,076) and the
postmodern ironic contesting of myth as master narrative in the novels of Barth, Reed, or Morrison,
where there is no consolation of form or consensual belief (Lyotard 1986, 32-3). Modernism has been
seen as creating its own form of aesthetic authority in the face of a center that
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was not holding (Hassan 1985, 59; Josipovici 1977, 109), but if that point is made, it usually entails
claiming that postmodernism is to be defined as anarchic, in complicity with chaos, accepting of
uncertainty and confusion (Wilde 1981, 44). Postmodern skepticism is presented as the refutation and
rejection of modernism's heroism (Wilde 1981, 132-3). Instead of this kind of opposition, I would
argue that what postmodernism does is use and abuse these characteristics of modernism in order to
install a questioning of both of the listed extremes.
Related to these formal and tonal distinctions between the two are differences in philosophical intent.
But even here there is little agreement. One group (McHale 1987; Wilde 1981) sees modernism as
epistemological in its focus, while postmodernism is ontological. The other group just reverses the
adjectives (Krysinski 1981; McCaffery 1982; Russell 1974). Again, I would argue that the
contradictions of postmodernism cannot be described in `either/or' terms (especially if they are going
to be reversible!). Historiographic metafiction asks both epistemological and ontological questions.
How do we know the past (or the present)? What is the ontological status of that past? Of its
documents? Of our narratives?
For some critics, this philosophical issue is also an ideological one. The postmodern's epistemological
break from modernism is seen by some as linked to an important new role it is to play in `worldly
practices' (Radhakrishnan 1983, 34). This is precisely what Jameson accuses postmodernism of in a
negative sense: he sees it as too involved in the economic system of late capitalism, too
institutionalized (1984a, 56). It does not share, he says, modernism's repudiation of the Victorian
bourgeoisie. But perhaps it questions any such easy repudiation, and does so in the light of its
acknowledgements of its own inescapable ideological implication in precisely the contemporary
situation of late capitalism.
It is worth recalling that this same modernism has also been accused of cultural elitism and
hermeticism, political conservatism, alienating theories of the autonomy of art, and a search for
transcendent, ahistorical dimensions of human experience (Russell 1981, 8). lt would not be difficult
to figure out what postmodernism challenges and what attempts at change it offers in the stead of such
a list: cultural democratizing of high/low art distinctions and a new didacticism, potentially radical
political questioning, contextualizing theories of the discursive complexity of art, and a contesting of
all ahistorical and totalizing visions. In fact Charles Russell argues precisely this:
postmodern literature recognizes that all perception, cognition, action, and articulation are shaped, if
not determined, by the social domain. There can be no simple opposition to culture, no transcendent
perspective or language, no secure singular self-definition, for all find their meaning only within a
social framework. (1985, 246)
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Clearly it all depends on who is valorizing what in this kind of theory of an epistemic break between
the modern and the postmodern.
The other school of thought argues a relationship of continuity or extension between the two. For
David Lodge, they share a commitment to innovation and to a critique of tradition, even if the
manifestations of these shared values differ (1977, 220-4.5). On a formal level, modernism lud
postmodernism are said to share self-reflexivity (Fokkema 1984, '17), fragmentation (Newman 1985,
113), and a concern for history (literary and social) (Thiher 1984, 216-19). Certainly postmodern
works have turned to modernist texts - often in different media - in their parodic play with convention
and history. Peter Maxwell Davies has used Joyce's Cyclops episode in Ulysses as the model for his
Missa super L'Homme Armé and Gordon Crosse's Second Violin Concerto uses Nabokov's Pale Fire
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for structural inspiration. Saura's flamenco film of Carmen invokes and comments upon both Bizet's
opera and Merimee's story.
On a more theoretical level, some critics sec postmodernism as raising the same kinds of issues as
modernism: investigating the cultural assumptions underlying our models of history (Josipovici 1977,
145) or challenging the entire western humanistic tradition (Spanos 1972, 147). Others argue that thc
ironic distance that modernism sets up between art and audience is, in fact, intensified in
postmodernism's `double-distancing' (Hayman 1978, 34-6). For others, postmodern fiction completes
modernism's break with traditional realism and bourgeois rationalism (Graff 1975), just as postmodern
poetry is seen as continuing the modernist challenge to romantic self-transcendence, though its stress
on the local and topical does contest modernist impersonality (Altieri 1973, 629).
As this last example suggests, the continuity model is not without its necessary alterations and
exceptions. My own response is probably typically postmodernist in its acceptance of both models, for
I sec as one of the many contradictions of postmodernism that it can both self-consciously incorporate
an d equally selfconsciously challenge that modernism from which it derives and to which it owes
even its verbal existence. There has been a certain move in criticism (sec Pütz 1973, 228; Butler 1980,
138; Bertens 1986, 47-8; Todd 1986, 105-6) to distinguish between two types of postmodernism: one
that is non-mimetic, ultra-autonomous, anti-referential, and another that is historically engage,
problematically referential. I would argue that only the latter properly defines postmodernism,
according to the model developed here (based on postmodern architecture). The former presents many
difficulties, not the least of which are logical ones. Can language and literature ever be totally nonmimetic, nonreferential, and still remain understandable as literature? This is a theoretical problem
that the radical rhetoric of antirepresentation usually ignores. Can there ever really be a total `loss of
meaning' in art (Graff 1973, 391)? Would we still call it art? ls there anything to which we cannot
grant meaning?
The attempt to make the label `postmodernist' describe these extremes of modernist aestheticism is, I
believe, a mistaken one. Much contemporary
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metafiction is indeed almost solely concerned with its own artifice, its own aesthetic workings. But
self-reflexivity has a long history in art, and, in fact, the label of `self-begetting novel' has been used to
describe both modernist fiction and the New Novel (Kellman 1980). The postmodernist art I have been
and will be describing in this book is historical and political in a way that much metafiction is not. It
cannot be described as removing representation and replacing it with textual materiality (Klinkowitz
1985, 192). Not does it unquestioningly accept the act of fiction-making as a humanist stay against
chaos (Alter 1975; Hutcheon 1980; Christensen 1981).
It is the French New and also the New New Novel, along with American surfiction, that are most often
cited by critics as examples of postmodernist fiction. But by my model, they would, instead, be
examples of late modernist extremism. Others have taken this stand as well: Spanos (1972, 16S);
Mellard (1980); Wilde (1981, 144); Butler (1980, 132). Modernist hermeticism and autotelic
reflexivity characterize much surfiction and its theorizing. Raymond Federman (as both surfictionist
and theorist) claims that his extreme metafiction represents an effort to reinstate things and the world
in their proper places, but somehow in a purer state. The way he speaks of surfiction betrays his
modernist and almost romantic blas: it is `the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man's
imagination and not in man's distorted vision of reality' (1981, 7). Fiction is `an autonomous art form
in its own right' (9). No contradictory and interrogating postmodernist discourse could speak with such
authority and certainty.
Postmodern fiction challenges both structuralist/modernist formalism and any simple
mimeticist/realist notions of referentiality. It took the modernist novel a long time to win back its
artistic autonomy from the dogma of realist theories of representation; it has taken the postmodernist
novel just as long to win back its historicizing and contextualizing from the dogma of modernist
aestheticisrn (which would include the hermeticism and ultra-formalism of the `textes' of Tel Quet, for
example). What I want to call postmodernism in fiction paradoxically uses and abuses the conventions
of both realism and modernism, and does so in order to challenge their transparency, in order to
prevent glossing over the contradictions that make the postmodern what it is: historical and
metafictional, contextual and self-reflective, ever aware of its status as discourse, as a human
construct.
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