A Writing of Space: On French Critical Theory in 1973 and its Aftermath

Tom Conley

diacritics, Volume 33, Number 3/4, Fall-Winter 2003, pp. 189-203 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/dia.2006.0005

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v033/33.3conley.html

Access provided by Western Ontario, Univ of (26 Aug 2013 15:20 GMT)

Reno Rachel Harrison

A WRITING OF SPACE

ON FRENCH CRITICAL THEORY IN 1973 AND ITS AFTERMATH

TOM CONLEY
Je rempliz dun beau nom ce grand espace vide (I ll with a handsome name this great empty space) Joachim Du Bellay, Les regrets [. . .] lunique mot ESPACE, indniment rpt, isol, dune ligne lautre; clos sur lui-mme par la recurrence du e (espace), bris pourtant par ladjonction interne du s (espace), qui se rchit en trompe loeil phontique (espace); avec un centre immuableespace, o peut se lire lamorce de la paix ou du tombeaumais susceptible de faire cap de tout ct, comme on fait eau. Lespace est dcouvert , bris ou vcu droite, o poussent les pithtes ; lespace est objet de dcouverte , de promenade ou d odysse , gauche o salignent les substantifs qui commandent les clichs dont lespace serait le complment oblig. Gnitif dun ct, ou pour le moin compltif, gnrateur de lautre, ou en tout cas substance qualits variables. Dans larbre syntagmes ainsi rig, lespace est invent par lcriture qui fait alterner, sans jamais les combiner sur une mme ligne, un espace donn comme objet stable dexploration. [. . .] ([. . .] the unique word ESPACE can be placed, indenitely repeated, isolated, from one line to another ; closed upon itself by the recurrence of the e (espace), yet broken by the inner adjunction of the s (espace) reected in a phonetic trompe-lil (espace) ; with an immutable centerespace, in which can be read the rst letters of peace or of tombbut liable to go everywhere, like water in the sea. Space is discovered, broken, or lived on the right where epithets come forward; space is the object of discovery , of a walk or an odyssey , on the left where are aligned the substantives that order the clichs for

diacritics / fallwinter 2003

diacritics 33.34: 189-203

189

which space would be the required object. Genitive on one side, or at least objective, generative of the other, or in every event a substance with variable traits. In the tree of syntagms erected above space is invented by writing that causes to alternatewithout ever combining them on the same linea given space as a stable object of exploration. [. . .] Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, crire lespace In 1974 Henri Lefebvre published La production de lespace (The Production of Space), a study said to have changed the course of critical reection on the world around us. In his copious work Lefebvre locates the gaps and rifts between spatial practices or representational spaces and representations of space in order to mark the brute nature of social contradiction. Over history, he shows, those individuals who practice and represent space generally own control over those who do not or cannot. The very history of the reception of Lefebvres work has been so rich that it cannot be disentangled from debates concerning the nature of the postmodern condition. It has brought forward an element, something akin to Lacans real, that cannot be contained or discerned by language, the arena of life itself. The impact of La production de lespace cannot be underestimated.1 Yet, at the same time, the work remains a legacy or a point of reference for a concurrent labor born at the same moment and of a different texture than Lefebvres: an activity that I would like to call a writing of space, a labor by which authors of different formation engage and invent alternative or other spaces within the texture of their own reections on space. Like Lefebvre, they respond to a anxiety about the condition of space in which they live, but unlike him, they embody, in the gist of their own writing, spaces alternative to those in which they live. What follows is thus aimed at discerning why and how space emerged in the eld of critical theory when it did and, in turn, at showing how the reections remain crucial for critical practice here and now. The rst of the two epigraphs above is taken from the end of the second quatrain of the 189th sonnet of Joachim Du Bellays Regrets (1558), a line, no doubt, that every student of French literature knows by heart. The second, drawn from Benjamin Perecs crire lespace [21], is a gloss of the paronomastic title that inaugurates an essay seeking to dene what lived space may be and to denominate its attributes. They are set adjacent to each other for the purpose of charting a theory and a history of the fortunes of space in critical theory in France over the past three decades. They might be imagined as plot points for a grid on which some general remarks can be situated. Je rempliz dun beau nom ce grand espace vide is the line that in 1973 Michel Deguy cites in his Tombeau de Du Bellay to locate the beginnings of modern French poetry. With it Deguy sums up what Du Bellay had begun in Lolive (1549), a collection of fty poems that might be construed to be a work of poetic practice, while its celebrated complement of the same year, the manifesto titled La deffence et illustration de la langue franoise, would be a work of theory.2 Du Bellays early son1. Anthony Vidler situates its importance at the outset of Warped Space Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture [1113]. 2. Floyd Gray noted that the elliptical and obscure character of Lolive required explication on the part of the Deffence, while the Deffence needed poetic proof in the labor of Lolive [30]. In Posie et Renaissance, Franois Rigolot cogently remarked, more recently, that the Deffence counted among the privileged preface-spaces of the authors work to the degree that it is a

190

nets of Petrarchan imitation evince in their verbal disjunction and scatter what Deguy calls an exprience potique, an experiment in and an experience of poetry. Each of the pieces, Deguy felt, was in itself a perfection that would rival the name of the beloved (the fruit of an olive branch, a laurier, which almost rhymes with Petrarchs Laura) so that his love might be able to know and cultivate anything [70]. Deguy pictures Du Bellay grasping not only a triangulated distance between himself, his object of affection and the tremors of unrequited love, but also the world as distance and emptiness [vide] (emptiness of the Olive) [70]. Nine years before the publication of Les regrets, Du Bellay begins to construe the poem as one in which the duty of poetry consists in lling with a handsome [beau] name the great empty space [Deguy 70]. The task of the poem is, nominally, one of creating and lling a void, a void of no easy name, an empty space the poet simultaneously creates and into which he willfully falls. Le regret est encore symbole: unissant (en ce lieu: le sonnet) le vertige du tout au vestige du tout (reste drisoire: le rien de cette mue abandonne par le tout en fuyant mtamorphosant le local) [88] (The regret remains a so-called symbol: uniting (in this place: the sonnet) the vertigo of the whole with the vestige of the whole (a derisory remainder: the nothing of this molted skin left from the whole by eeing (and) metamorphosing the local]. After setting Je rempliz dun beau nom ce grand espace vide in epigraph above the nal movement of the chapter titled Les cent quatre-vingt-dix et un regrets (The One Hundred NinetyOne Regrets) in the fashion of the Thousand and One Nights, Deguy notes that the 186th sonnet (not the 189th) sums up the collection. The question of the poets being, his tre, belongs to that of the world. As a result, his relation to both God and the world is less worthy of praise than the ower of the name of Marguerite de Navarre, his protectress, the princess of princesses who had been the Mycaenas to two generations of poets that included Clment Marot, Bonaventure Des Priers, and himselfwhich he states to Pierre Du-Val (former teacher of Henry the Second, and the bishop of Sez and a translator of Plato): Je veulx chanter de Dieu: pour bien le chanter, Il faut dun avant-jeu ses louanges tenter, Louant, non la beault de cette masse ronde, Mais ceste eur, qui tient encorun plus beau lieu: Comme elle est, Du-val, moins parfaite que Dieu, Aussi lest elle plus que le reste du monde. (I wish to sing of God, but to sing of Him well There must, in foreplay, be attempts at praise, Praising not the beauty of this rotund mass, But this ower, that lives in yet a comelier place: As it is, Du-val, far less perfect than He, Thus more than the rest of the world we see.) The poem assigned to praise God effectively refuses to fulll its task and, in its refusal, serves nothing more than its own perfection. In the folds of the sonnet the reader of our age would see the addressee becoming an avatar of le dormeur du val, the cadaver in Rimbauds sonnet of 1870 that displays two red holes on its right side (il a deux trous rouges au ct droit / he has two red holes on his right side) while the kings sister, of a lesser order thanbut comparable toGod, might be the avant-jeu, the site of foreparatext for Lolive as a founding manifesto for the use of French in view of classical idioms [17475)].

diacritics / fallwinter 2003

191

play, that allows the poet to become a topographer who studies the relation of names to the uncertain space of a world whose borders are uncertain. Inferred is that the end of the sonnet anticipates the effect of the I that becomes an indeterminate other, in which, in the great poem addressed to Jacques Peletier, the geometer, poet, and fellow traveler from Le Mans (just north of the authors Anjou), Du Bellay would merely be declined as a beau nom that hardly lls the void of the great empty spaces in his midst. A common name is tantamount to a negation, a nom and a non, and thus the fathomless emptiness all about him becomes supremely visible and almost even tactile. Deguy later remarks that a melancholic perception of space prevails in the Deffence et illustration. Une absence totale, un vide, aspirant avec force tout, la place de la mort; une absence plus forte, et autre, que toutes les absences; rien dire, rien penser, rien faire. Cest le moment du tombeau vide. [. . .] Le vide apparat comme monde, tombe [150] (a total absence, a void, aspiring forcefully to all and everything, in the stead of the dead; a stronger, and other, absence than all absences; nothing to say, nothing to think, nothing to do. Its the moment of the empty tomb. The void appears as world, as a tomb). Deguys reading of Du Bellays poetic space is riddled with recent memories of Maurice Blanchot, notably Lentretien inni (1969), in which two voices debate the utterance parler, ce nest pas voir (to speak is not to see). One of them recalls, in a gloss of se trouver, that the verb does not mean to nd, locate, or pinpoint, but to go about and around, trouver, turning, in the sense of tourner tout autour [3435]. Blanchots dialogic reection arches back, too, upon the verb itself, such that as the eye gazes upon the seven characters tomblike fantasies emerge from the trou in which ou, or, and o, where, are encrypted both at once in the hole of the rst syllable, while the very line of poetry and the trope that drives it to be written, vers, is the verbal complement. When he writes of trouver through two anonymous voices, he might indeed be guring, albeit on a miniature scale, what he had remarked in the epigraph to Lespace littraire (1955), in which he noted that however fragmentary or circumstantial the creation of a book, especially when crafted from previously written articles, an unconscious force leads attention from all sides toward an indiscernible center. It may not be a geometrical axis but perhaps a vanishing point, a point of fugacious identication, a psychic and graphic site, a trope and a trophy, a site on or about which much of the work tends to turn. Deguy, who makes coyly manifest his afliation with Blanchot throughout Tombeau de Du Bellay,3 turns about the haunting line that he paraphrases as Du Bellays travail de remplissement nominal du vide, qui est aussi bien, nous le savons, celui de la page [71] (nominal labor of lling the void, that is also, we know, that of the page). He does not relate it to its quasi-antithesis in the preceding sonnet [198], Je ne veulx deguiser ma simple posie Sous le masque emprunt dune fable moisie, Ny souiller dun beau nom de monstres tant hideux . . . (I wish not to disguise my simple poetry Under the borrowed mask of a mildewed fable Nor sully with a pretty name such hideous monsters . . .),

3. The effects of Le pas au-del are felt in his rewriting of Blanchots maintenant: Vos mains tiennent le maintenant. Dsarm sans attendre lautre [. . .] [145] (Your hands hold you in the here-and-now. Disarmed without waiting for the other) and passim.

192

in which the proper name has a medusa-effect of turning its bearer into stone. Nor does Deguy locate the name of negation at the virtual vanishing point, the nom that stands close to the tomblike center of the alexandrine. Nor does he quite read the inscription espace, near the edge or lisire of the line, as might Perec, who would nd encryption to be of the essence of space. And he fails to execute the pedantic task of looking at the poem in its initial typography. In Federic Morels edition the sonnets are not coiffed with Roman numerals as they are in todays scholarly and critical editions. An architectural faade or orthographe is given in the quadrangular aspect of four poems seen as a unit, on the verso folio (to the left) and recto folio (to the right) of each double page. The sonnets are arranged in a quadrangular conguration that likens them to caissons of wooden ceilings or cartouches set in relief on walls. The rst lines of every quatrain and tercet are placed to the left of the units of three and two lines that follow in lower-case italic. The rst letter is set in upper-case roman and is so detached from the word of which it is a part that the reader is tempted to see other and different words in the interstices and uncanny groupings of letters. The same effect is found in the case of proper names and toponyms set between parentheses within the lines, in which their rst letter in upper-case roman is followed by the rest of the word cast in lower-case italic. The lines seem to bend under the thrust of the west wind that blows from the left, or else they reect the alacrity and urgency of their writing. In every case the poems make visible a stratigraphy, like that of Freuds vision of Rome in Civilization and Its Discontents, where two cultures, one Latin and the other Italian [6971], cohabit a single and same space scripted in French.

Figure 1: Du Bellay, Joachim (1522?1560). Les regrets et autres oeuvres potiques. 1558 [46]. Bibliothque national de France, Gallica Digital Library.

Deguy does not visit the Salle de Rserve on rue de Richelieu of the old Bibliothque nationale (before it moves across the Seine to be the monumental Bibliothque nationale de France) to engage a reading of this sort. Nor does he supply the reader with what a virtual Guide vert of sixteenth-century poetry would furnish in the name of un peu dhistoire: that as a commonplace in the poetry of print culture, writers conceived the space of the book to be a tomb in which they inserted themselves in the process of writing in order, paradoxically, to bury themselves alive, so that, as a result, after their

diacritics / fallwinter 2003

193

own demise their bodies, now congealed in the printed characters, would eternally release their soul through the transformative energies of the reader who almost literally decrypts their verse.4 Deguy implies that Du Bellay sees himself in the presence of his own effacement in a world of far greater void than he or his forebears could ever imagine, and that the future readers who nd the breath and soul of the lines might be those who have learned Mallarm through Blanchots essays in Lespace littraire.5 And by way of anthonomasia, a trope that Derrida had been studying at the same moment in his work on Genet, Deguy suggests that Du Bellay effaces an aristocratic name, rooted in Angevine sweetness along the verdant shores of the River Loire, into a common being and even perhaps a nonplace of both Italy and France. In 1973 Deguys relation with Du Bellay opens a new critical space. In the median chapter, Dfenses, he charts the plight of poetry at the moment of the composition of Tombeau. Le peuple, qui nen attend plus rien, ncoute que les chansons. Indiffrent, peut-tre capable de rserve, il laisse la langue sabmer [115] (The people, indifferent to everything, only listen to songs. Indifferent, perhaps capable of reserve, they let language go to seed). Writing of and with poetry has given way to an indifferent style of prose. [A] coup sr une manire dcrire est tombe en dsutude: ce qui se publie encore trop souvent sous le nom de posie consiste trop simplement en une reprsentation de la pense toute faite [123] (Surely a style of writing has fallenest tombe, hence is also entombedin obsolescence; what is still published too often in the name of poetry consists too simply in a representation of pregiven thinking). The exhumation of Les regrets in 1973if we graft Michel de Certeaus synchronic formulation in The Writing of History, the historiographical operation, onto Tombeau de Du Bellay amounts to a tactically poetic operation: he goes back to Du Bellay, a canonical author whom schoolchildren had had to learn by heart, on the one hand, for the purpose of internalizing the temperate Frenchness of French geography, history, and poetry while, on the other, of oedipalizing subjects forever living at home and suckling the breast of their mother-country. Like other lines, such as Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage, / Ou comme cestuy-l qui conquist la toison, / Et puis est retourn, plein dusage et raison, / Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son age [. . .] (Happy he who, like Ulysses, made a handsome [beau] journey, or like the one who conquered the eece before returning, full of experience and reason, to live with his kin for the remainder of his life) or France, mere des arts, des armes, et des loix, / Tu mas nourry long temps du laict de ta mamelle [. . .] (France, mother of arts, arms, and laws, you have nourished me for a long time with the milk of your breast) celebrated incipits of
4. In his magnicent Eptres de lamant vert (ca 1505 and published in 1512) Jean Lemaire de Belges imagines himself as the pet parrot of Margaret of Austria, on a perch in a cage in her private quarters, and reports of her privy life before his fantasies turn to a tomb in which he sees himself encrypted while a guide, a local maiden, tells curious tourists of his demise and of the sad life (fortune infortune fort une) of his mycaenas, En devisant dessus lherbette fresche / Leur comptera tout le cours de ma vie / Et de ma mort (dont je prens envie) [. . .] [lines 21720] (While conversing upon the fresh grass / She told them of the course of my life / And of my death [that I beckon]). A recent treatment of the self-entombing impulse is David Cowlings Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France, especially in respect to Lemaire: The image of the building allowed [. . .] Lemaire to articulate a message on several levels of the text at once, to honour a patron and, at the same time, to proclaim his own worth as a writer [171]. 5. See Lexprience de Mallarm, in Lespace littraire [3548]. Blanchot writes of Mallarms artisanaland spatiallabors when, citing the poet, en creusant le vers ce point, jai rencontr deux abmes qui me dsesprent. Lun est [. . .] le Nant [33] (in hollowing out the line to this point I have encountered two abysses that cause me despair. One is [. . .] Nothingness). Both carve out a line to reach a point that marks a central site of ambiguity [42].

194

the Regrets rehearse the scenario. Deguy turns the frail but immortal poet of poets, the writer whom manuals had labeled purer and of greater sincerity than his envied friend, the honestly mendacious and egomaniacal Ronsard, into a poet who creates innitely particular and singular spaces that are other, uncanny, and especially problematic wherever their author is named. Du Bellay is exhumed to show that indeed the spaces his own verse openedand which are as such because, as translations of sentiment, they belong to what in the Deffence et illustration (1549) was called an ordered espacement of letter and languageare today, now, in 1973, dead and forgotten. Deguys lament, heard through the words of the sixteenth-century author, syncopates with those of two fellow travelers and specialists of exile. In 1973 Louis Marin published an assemblage of articles on classical France and southern California under the title of Utopiques: Jeux despaces. In the theoretical matter of the introduction, the author notes that his reections were born of May 1968 and of a colloquy that took place two years later, in Montreal, on the university and its relation to utopia. May 1968 had resulted in a sudden return to order. The festival of the streets and multivocal freedom of its speech and of its images gave way to electoral representation, to slogans, and to the formulas of its discourses and of its postersa return that left no structural traces outside of a few social places, for example, the university [1516]. The dilemma that Marin discerns is aimed at prompting the question, more broadly, of how a properly utopian space can be inserted in the very place where a few marks of the events were still palpable. Yet the university, in seeking to be neutral in respect to the events of 1968, he argues, had become anything but neutral because its own presumed neutrality in the ensuing ve years had been, as it had before, saturated with ideology. He proposes a reawakening and a reworking through appeal to the concept of the neuter, to pluralization, and to a conceptual triad of le jeu, lespace, le monogramme (play, space, and monogram). Attention to things neuter calls into question the camouage and bad faith of neutrality. It also helps to open within discourse a space that discourse cannot include [21], a third and supplementary term, a term calling attention to the power of pure theory in a eld where conict can be treated without repression or resolution. Pluralization would allow for work on a particular gurative mode of discourse, that includes ction, fabulations, anthropomorphized stories, and concrete descriptions. Included are the exotic novel and its representative pictures or maps and all the traits and characters pertaining to them. In the plural domain would be found the regions where the imagination is indeed a site protected from reduction to the language of concepts. Things plural would be ambivalent, located on the multiple levels, on different planes [23] or surfaces, in which the imagination becomes the common sensorium of utopia. They would be discerned, expressed, and decomposed in the labors of ction by way of theoretical reveries. Thus space gures at the center of the triad including play and monogram insofar as utopian gures are discursive gures of space, discursive places, topics [23]. All of a sudden a utopian text is seen constructing space by the force of writing: Tout texte opre en verit une equivalence entre lespace et le discours, mais le texte utopique en est une forme remarquable dans la mesure o il amne en coincidence la dnition opratoire du texte en gnral et son projet propre, son signi spcique: le contenu de lutopie, cest lorganisation de lespace comme un texte; le texte utopique, sa structuration formelle et ses procs operrationnels, cest la constitution du discours comme un espace [24] (Every text effectively operates an equivalence between space and discourse, but the utopian text is one of its most remarkable forms insofar as it causes the operative denition of this text in general to coincide with its own project, its specic signied: the content of utopia is the organization of space as a text; the utopian text, its forms structuring and its operational processes being the constitution (or ordering)

diacritics / fallwinter 2003

195

of discourse as a space). Thus a utopian discourse speaks less about itself than about the possibility of doing so. It is a space-world, an organization of space as a text and a discourse constructed as a space [25], but it is revealed and hidden, as in a map, in the form of a play of lines to be deciphered [25], where letters and ciphers are given and dissimulated, and where too the chiasmus between space organized as text and discourse as space is ubiquitously marked. Marin shows that letters, ciphers, and gures are drawn in the utopian idiolect such that they might be instances of an unconscious that surfaces and then plots transverse itineraries across diurnal and nocturnal reason, where switch-points or creases and fault lines become a geography in which are cited spaces amidst and about places. At its end the introduction arches back upon itself by avowing that the book itself is a utopia, a nonplace of neuter valence, for the events at the beginning of this reection on utopia [47] could never lead the author to irenic islands of the Pacic or sites where geographical space and historical time would vanish into a swirling and enthralling confusion in which dream and reality and desire and political struggle are mixed. The practical utopia remains that of the work on those texts and discourses that literally write spaces that otherwise cannot be experienced. Hardly by chance the book ends with a spatial analysis of Disneyland, a degenerate utopia, and what, by ostensive denegation, he titles the concluding notes on The Project of Citizen Cabets emigration: Utopia is not a political project. It is up to the utopian to fashion spaces from places that have always been here and there. Critical theory, infers Marin in a nal coda, would be a consciousness that discovers in gures the spaces where concepts emerge in their production and where the historical forces transforming the world are discerned. Space is perceived in the paradox where surfaces are decrypted in order to be seen in their multiplicities and multilocalities. Where Marin avows that utopia cannot be realized, he designates, too, how its impossibility had been grasped simultaneously in the forty-four days of May in 1968. Space, then precious and precocious, now becomes what needs to be invented through the models of other utopias in different places. The space marked by the impossibility of any realization of utopiaas in More and Rabelaisbecomes the very locus where transformation is begun through critical labor. It stands to reason that Deguys poetic operation is doubled to a strong degree by Marins utopian operation. The latter indicates that critical energies are invested in a textual nonplace, given or embedded in the ideology of past history and canonical literature. It serves as a discourse and geography by which other spaces can be incised into a present in which they would otherwise be unt. The accepted names and authors of traditional utopias turn into points of transformation because they are extracted from the sites where they are remembered to be lodged and, now, are productively estranged when displaced into a current critical sphere. The masked law that requires utopia not to call into question current conditions and modes of production or the motives or discourses determining the signature of the author is obliquely transgressed. More than ever, however, Utopiques: Jeux despace resembles an interpretive toolbox with an introduction and conclusion resembling a sheet of directions or a mode demploi for action with inherited forms and objects. 1973 is also the date of publication of one of Gilles Deleuzes rst essays on nomadic thinking. First delivered as a lecture for a colloquium on Nietzsche at Cerisyla-Salle the year before, Pense nomade begins with a critique of Marxism and psychoanalysis, two fundamental bureaucracies on the horizon of contemporary culture [352]. He adds that the three principal means of control, as demonstrated by as many types of books, are law, contract, and institution. A sacred book dictates modes of conduct and is thus one of law. A contract is at the basis of secular literature in which

196

authors, editors, and readers are part of a commercial enterprise. The traditionally revolutionary book belongs to its relation with current and future institutions. All three types share some of the pertinent traits of the others. On the basis of these codes, adds Deleuze, our bureaucracies ourish [354]. How to mix and confuse these codes becomes an implicit question of space and of spacing. Deleuze invokes, as he will throughout his writing, different styles of thinking and writing to portray creative modes of confusion. Writers worth their salt, like Kafka and Melville, write other languages within the gist of their own, and as a result they form relations with their readers that do not fall under the purview of law, contract, or institution. Nietzsche, he afrms, succeeds likewise through the art of the aphorism, but especially in the way that Blanchot, in Lentretien inni, had recently shown: how an outside, a dehors, inhabits the gnomic form. Deleuze suddenly mixes codes that separate language and image by appealing to the gure of a visual frame. It is what surrounds a verbal aphorism. Discursive and visual formations are mixed: Quest-ce que cest, un trs beau tableau ou trs beau dessin? Il y a un cadre. Un aphorisme aussi est encadr. Mais cela devient beau partir de quel moment, ce quil y a dans le cadre? A partir du moment o lon sent que le mouvement, que la ligne qui est encadr vient dailleurs, quelle ne commence pas dans la limite du cadre. Elle a commenc au-dessus, ou ct du cadre, et la ligne traverse le cadre. Comme dans le lm de Godard, on peint le tableau avec le mur. [356] (Now just what is a handsome picture or a very pretty drawing? Theres a frame. An aphorism is also framed. But that which is in the frame, from what moment does it become pretty? From the moment when we feel that movement, that the line that is framed comes from elsewhere, that it doesnt begin in the connes of the frame. It begins above or beside the frame, and the line crosses the frame. As in Godards lms, the picture is painted with the wall.) In his run-on (and almost untranslatable) sentence, in which one relative, what, pertaining to time (quel moment) blends into another pertaining to space (ce quil y a dans le cadre), codes distinguishing language and space are conated. The text itself becomes a series of weakly linked aphorisms attesting to what Deleuze soon calls states of force that are exterior to themselves for the implicit reason that they have been put into spatial play.6 The aphorism is also intensive or, like proper names, scattered about Nietzsches writings, designations of intensity that give way to an espce de nomadisme, de dplacement perpetuel des intensits designes par des noms propres, et qui pntrent les unes dans les autres en mme temps quelles sont vcues sur un corps plein [35859] (a sort of nomadism, of perpetual displacement of intensities designated by proper names that interpenetrate at the same time they are lived on a full body). They are, in
6. Further: Un aphorisme, cest un jeu de forces, un tat de forces toujours extrieures les unes aux autres. Un aphorisme ne veut rien dire, ne signie rien, et na pas plus de signiant que de signi. Ce seraient des manires de restaurer lintriorit dun texte. Un aphorisme est un tat de forces, dont la dernire, cest--dire la fois la plus rcente, la plus actuelle et la provisoire-ultime est toujours la plus extrieure [357] (An aphorism is a play of forces, a state of forces that are always exterior to one another. An aphorism means nothing, signies nothing, and no more a signier than a signied. These would amount to ways of restoring the interiority of a text. An aphorism is a state of forces whose last, in other words at once the most recent, the most current and ultimately-provisional is always the one of the greatest exteriority).

diacritics / fallwinter 2003

197

the third instance, tied to laughter, for when codes are mixed in an aphorism the interlocutor or spectator cannot fail to laugh. The Nietzschean writer becomes a nomadic and mobile war machine opposed to the despot who commands an administrative machine. Yet the two are so correlative and copenetrated [compntrs] that the latter always seeks to integrate into his arsenal the ways of the former, who wants to invent an administration of the empire he has conquered. Maps of elds of battle gure in the images that are later eshed out in Mille plateaux (1980, cowritten with Flix Guattari). Sufce it to remark that the mobile war machine is one where creative language creates the space it traverses, whether geographic or intensive, as in the instance of nomads who move by their ways of escaping institutions and codes. What Deleuze calls the nomadic power of thinking is driven by a stylehence a politicsof writing, but of a writing whose estranging properties owe to the ways it produces other spaces and exteriorities within itself. The framing of the essay, by which discussions of codes and institutions are drawn around the pluralities of Nietzsches creative style, suggests that the context is the aftermath of 1968. Appeal to space is part and parcel of pense nomade, which is not located or gendered by a denite or indenite article. The line of thought soon becomes, as followers of Deleuze know well, rhizomatic, singular, and forever drawn and driven outside of the institutions in which it may rst be found emerging. It might be said to be a philosophic operation where Deguys had been a poetic operation and Marins a utopian operation. In all events in 1973 the analytical ideals evinced in the readings seem colored by an apprehension of a loss of critical space in the time passed between the idea of the work and its execution. Like the Tombeau de Du Bellay, Utopiques and Pense nomade are built over a gap and written in view of perplexities felt in the overlapping spheres of the university and the world at large. All seek to be operative and not dismissive of utopia. The construction of Marins work allows a place for its author not only to betray his own ambivalence about the work but also to display a discursive map including the history of its invention. Its cartographies, no less than those of the other operations, bear uncanny resemblance to Une politique de la langue, a study of the construction of the space of modern France that Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel were researching and writing in the same year and that they soon published in 1975. The three authors take up an inquiry that in 1790 the Abb Grgoire prepared in view of making French the ofcial language of France. A dossier of forty-three questions was sent from Paris to clerics and magistrates presiding in provincial municipalities. The questionnaire inquires of the place that the thousands of spoken dialects and patois hold in provinces under French jurisdiction. In the guise of consulting local ofcials about the state of French outside of Paris, Grgoire and his associates used the questionnaire not only to establish a language map of the kingdom but also to suggest to their correspondents various ways of instituting French in schools and churches. The questions that sought information were, simultaneously, promoting, even imposing, a politics of language. The close archival reading in which the three historians engage reveals that Grgoire and his central administration discovered in their correspondents responses myriad signs of uncommon and, in their eyes, sensuous ways of living of which they, who had proclaimed themselves enlightened, had little inkling. Out of the provinces, from a space outside of Paris, emerge attractively savage modes of speaking. The picture of the patois remains an altering proximity at once dangerous and fascinating, indeed the feminine other [155]: an unthought world, a void affected with value [156] attesting to a dilemma that Grgoire and his security advisors experienced when it was impossible for them even to think of the countryside within the ofcial revolution-

198

ary discourse. They quickly had to fashion (bricoler) the representation of something absent to which they could refer as if to an immobile and fantastic center about which turn the changing but also recognizable silhouettes of the social theater [156]. In an inaugural anthropological gesture they construct the myth of an inert, timeless place in which the patois spoken by peasants betrays innocence and justice eradicated by the bestiality of isolation, unbridled and protean passions, and the allianceat once fortunate and unfortunateof the labor with the land itself. The savage state that they imagined surrounding them had to be mediated by two modes of writing. One, alphabetic French, had to be imposed. The other, the patois, was threateningly seductive before being recorded and encrypted in an archive. The mode of transmission of the documents relative to the questionnaire bore the signs of an operation set forward to organize a physical space [157] in which it sufced not only to write on paper, in the design of ideology, but also on the ground itself, with an economic and political program mobilized by the construction of new roads and an ordered placement of schoolmasters. A roadmap for internal conquest and colonization took visible shape. A network of post roads striated the countryside in order to form the spokes of a wheel radiating from a Parisian hub. For Grgoires correspondents the arrival of progress and enlightenment was a mixed and even poisonous blessing. What was routine and that almost literally went without saying became controlled. The three authors of Une politique de la langue provide a rich and polyvocal summary in which their voices are mixed with those of their correspondents and even theorists of more recent vintage: Encore faut-il souligner ce qua en propre cette rotique de lespace quand elle veut tracer des routes. Ecrire dans cet espace, cela signie le possder, mais aussi y introduire la distinction et la diffrence, en faire le champ doprations ritrables et contrlables, le muer en un lieu de commerce et de communications, y privilgier lartefact de la forme sociale au prix dune perte de lorigine et des choses donnes dans la transparence du monde naturel. Le mme geste dessine un espace routier et un espace scripturaire. Comme la littrature ethnographique, il noue lhistoire de lcriture et lhistoire de la route, de la rupture, de la via rupta, de la voie rompue, fraye, fracta, de lespace de rversibilit et de rptition trac par louverture, lcart et lespacement violent de la nature, de la fort naturelle, sauvage, salvage.7 (What still must be underlined is what belongs to this erotics of space when it wishes to draw routes. To write in this space means to possess it, but also to introduce distinction and difference, to produce the eld of reiterable and controllable operations, to transform it into a place of commerce and communication, to privilege the artifact of social form at the cost of the origin of things given in the transparency of the natural world. The same gesture draws a space of roads and a space of writing. Like ethnographic literature, it ties the history of writing and the history of the route, of rupture, of the via rupta, of the broken way [voie], frayed, fracta, of the space of reversibility and of repetition traced by the opening, the splitting and the violent spacing of nature, of the natural forest, savage, salvage.) A writing of space is enacted where Certeau and his colleagues give way to Derridas De la grammatologie, in which the road is confused with routine, and routine with a
7. Une politique 158-59. The citation, noted in the text [159n1], is taken from Derrida, De la grammatologie [158].

diacritics / fallwinter 2003

199

broken wayand voice (voie and voix concretizing the difference)en route to the broader conclusion that what was found alongside the new roads, new and enthusing spaces of alterity, had to be turned into scientic objects in the name of anthropology and folklore, the very topic the authors soon take up in La baut du mort.8 The patois and their users become entombed. As effects of what elsewhere Certeau calls the historiographical operation, they are both honored and eliminated.9 But in Grgoires inquiry the anonymous peasants and their space return exactly where their history would otherwise efface them, and they resist what many readers of the history of the French revolution might make of the archival materials. The illiterate locals and many of their alphabetic representatives resist the inquiry by virtue of a routine of everyday life that has neither time nor inclination to respond to the questions. The constructed image of peasant stability upsets the inquirer who is taken to be an inquisitor. The stasis unsettles.10 The urban administrators nd that the countryside is indeed un enclavement culturel nfaste [150] (a pernicious cultural enclave) that needs to be piqued and redressed, the routine of its roture broken, then straightened and aimed toward the ends of progress. The words shared by the historians and Derrida bring forward, like any of Marins ciphers where space and discourse are in play, a confusion of revolution and routine. What perpetually turns on a central axis and aims its writing toward enlightenment is countered by the labor of those who turn over the soil and labor their elds with the cutting edges of their plows drawn by horses and oxen.11 The authors study of Grgoires inquiry emerges from the background of May 1968. It would be tempting to see in the inquest a rewriting of the utopian vision of the events through the lens of their closure and aftermath in the early 1970s. The return to order led to an eradication of the space made when other voices within the nation had begun to speak. In La prise de la parole, a book written soon after the events had subsided, Certeau speculated that the workers and students felt to the quick an inability to
8. In English in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, chap. 8; in French in La Culture au pluriel. 9. Writing, he concludes, speaks of the past only in order to inter it. Writing is a tomb in the double sense of the word in that, in the same text, it both honors and eliminates. [. . .] [Writing of History 101-02] ([W]riting frays a path [chemine] between blasphemy and curiosity; between what it eliminates in establishing it as past, and what it organizes from the present; between the privation or dispossession that it postulates, and the social normativity that it imposes on the unknowing reader). 10. Some of the lines of this argument are taken up in LAbsent de Paris: In the Savage Country [58586]. In that piece I tried to imagine the counterdiscourse of routine in the gure of stagecoach wheels as they spin in classical Western lms. They often seem to be turning in a direction opposite that of their forward motion. 11. At the outset of Des boyteux, an essay pleading for humane recognition and treatment of possessed women and outsiders, Montaignes remarks about the difference between time and space as it is lived and as it is mapped articulate the same point. Following the Gregorian reform of the Julian calendar after 1580, he notes, [c]ombien de changemens devoient suyvre cette reformation! Ce fut prorement remuer le ciel et la terre la fois. Ce neantmoins, il nest rien qui bouge de sa place: mes voisins trouvent lheure de leurs semences, de leur recolte, lopportunit de leurs negoces, les jours nuisibles et propices, au mesme point justement o il les avoyent assignez de tout temps [1150] (how many changes were to follow this reformation! It meant indeed turning the heavens and earth topsy-turvy. Nevertheless, there is nothing that moves from its place: my neighbors nd the hour of their sowing, of their harvest, the opportunity of their negotiations, the nefarious and propitious days at the very point where they had justly assigned them for all time). The play on lheure and leur indicates that a serial time inhabits the writing, and that its spacing is crucial to the scansion of the temporal rhythms that constitute its routine, which lives outside of the order of a ciphered calendar.

200

make known their plight in words other than those of their superiors who were forever coopting them. Their speech, one of initial rapture and rupture, was no sooner captured. In Une politique de la langue the events and their aftermath are rehearsed in the context of the years 179093, which, in turn, are implicitly mapped over the years 196873. Various revolutions and their spaces are put into play. The ideals of 1789 are seen turning into control and colonization of difference such that any association of a so-called founding moment with 1968 is called into question. Historical space of those who do not speak, of savage subalterns avant la lettre, is surveyed and mapped in order to show how routines work within and against revolution. An intermediate space of politics and historiography emerges from the effect of a sort of historical lap-dissolve in which two different spaces and temporal moments, for an instant coextensive, begin to bleed into each other. In a similar fashion, by superimposing upon one another the relations of text, image, and aspect of Deguys Tombeau, Marins Utopiques, Deleuzes Pense nomade, and Certeau, Julia, and Revels Une politique de la langue, we discover that in the time and place of their writing, multiple spaces are invented. Through four intertwined operationspoetic, utopic, philosophic, historiographiccommon areas emerge, and so do also some specic and singular styles and textures. All contend with what is perceived to be a closureboth predictable and ineluctableof a space that had been opened by the simultaneous acting, playing, and writing of the protests and strikes of 1968. All of them ask how other spaces and, in the same tenor of the term, other events can be created in inherited political and critical spheres. All of them arch toward their own writing as graphic and physical evidence of space glimpsed or made manifest. All demonstrate in themselves that space is not out-there but in-here, inhering in what, here and now, we see and hear. In view of some bold and brutal concluding lines we can observe that none of the four operations reduces space to a denition. Doing so, they infer, would turn what resists a name into a stable, immobile, and pigeonholed object. Implied is that psychic and geographic spaces are of the same feather, but also that nonetheless language, praxis, and space are mixed. Their relations with the practical side of utopian politics (where, as children, we have all fantasized how a space can be inserted into nowhere to turn it into now here) are evinced in a move backward that thrusts forward and back and over again. The politics of their spaces inheres in the potentialities they embody in their form or style of writing.12 They thus also imply that where space pertains to critical theory greater consideration is owed to concepts cutting lines of demarcation between language and the world at large. Space becomes space through the discourses that riddle it, such that, as Deleuze once said about Proust, perhaps rewriting Giraudouxs aphorism that Truffaut had used to launch the politics of New Wave cinema, Il ny a plus doeuvres, il ny a que des auteurs: Il ny a pas de logos, il ny a que des hiroglyphes [Lile dserte 193] (there no longer are works, there are only authors: there is no more logos, there are only hieroglyphs). In hieroglyphs can be found other spaces, those of fables of every species, in the productive deciency seen where language conveys inadequately what is felt through sensation and perception. The epigraph from Perecs Espces despaces of 1974, cited by Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumiers at the beginning of the section entitled Non-Places in her crire lespace of 2002, indicates that she too reaches back to the moment in which, all of a sudden, space once had become, as it had for Henri Lefebvre, an object of critical
12. Lespace jouit de potentialitis pour autant quil rend possible la ralisation dvnements (Space bears potentialities inasmuch it makes possible the realization of events), notes Deleuze in Lpuis, in respect to Beckett, for whom the explosive qualities of language produce and abolish the space they create [Quad 76].

diacritics / fallwinter 2003

201

reection. Perec implied in espace, notes Ropars in her brilliant reading of the title of Espces despaces, a manifest hieroglyph that is at once a tomb and a word that invents other spaces out of and through its own form. The word is, literally and graphically, invested with space and translates other spaces through the arrangement of its fragmentary and even mosaic characters. Perec may have been inclined to create other spaces in the beguiling nonplace of its given form and of the constrained time in which he had probably invented it.13 Rescued in 2002, his hieroglyphic reading is used to show that, as Ropars concludes in a jeweled prose of her own, [l]e pouvoir critique de la notion despace est la mesure de laporie qui contraint lcrire sans lui laisser de lieu pour tre crit [178] (the critical power of the notion of space is of the order of the aporia that requires its writing without a place to be written). In other (and more accid) words, a sense of something absent or something missing causes space to be written in the simultaneous act and trace of writing. It belongs to a creative urgency felt, as noted above in three studies born of the apprehension of foreclosed potentiality, in political and social spheres. Eradication of space summons its writing. Now where we see space as that which is entombed, its inscription and decryption bear increasing political necessity. For starters, the decomposition of space witnessed in the trajectories of these works of critical theory brings us back to the mosaic and riddled surfaces where fragments become local spaces or topographies where movement and reection bear on other, larger areas with which we work through our ongoing and crucial labors of writing. To go back to the sense of a loss of critical space felt in 1973 means measuring and engaging what we have further lost in the political and critical arena three decades later. WORKS CITED Blanchot, Maurice. Lentretien inni. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. ________ . Lespace littraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. ________ . Le pas au-del. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Certeau, Michel de. La culture au pluriel. Ed. Luce Giard. 1974. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. ________ . Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. ________ . La prise de la parole. Ed. Luce Giard. Paris: Seuil, 1994. ________ . The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. Certeau, Michel de, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel. Une politique de la langue: La Rvolution franaise et les patois. Coll. Bibliothque des histoires. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Conley, Tom. Labsent de Paris: In the Savage Country. Michel de CerteauIn the Plural. Ed. Ian Buchanan. South Atlantic Quarterly 100.2 (Spring 2001): 57598. Cowling, David. Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Deguy, Michel. Tombeau de Du Bellay. Coll. Cahiers du Chemin. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.
13. Lefebvre deals with the notion of constrained time at the conclusion of La production de lespace: Cependant que la pratique spatiale, celle de lespace rpressif-oppressif, tendait restreindre le temps au temps de travail productif, et de plus rduire les rythmes vcus en les dnissant par les gestes rationaliss et localiss du labeur (du travail divis) [469] (Yet spatial practice, that of repressive-oppressive space, tended to constrain time to the time of productive labor, and even more to reduce lived rhythms in dening them by rationalized and localized gestures of labor [of the division of labor]).The words subscribe to the politics of Montaignes remark on peasant time [n13 supra].

202

Deleuze, Gilles. Lpuis. Quad. Paris: Minuit, 1992. ________ . Lle dserte et autres textes. Paris: Minuit, 2002. ________ . Pense nomade. Nietzsche aujourdhui 1: Intensits. Paris: UGE 10/18, 1973. 15974. Rpt. in Lle dserte et autres textes. Ed. David Lapoujade. Paris: Minuit, 2002. 35164. Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. Mille plateaux. Vol. 2 of Capitalisme et schizophrnie. Paris: Minuit, 1980. Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Du Bellay, Joachim. La deffence et illustration de la langue franoise. Paris: Arnoul Angelier, 1549. ________ . Lolive. Paris: Arnoul Angelier, 1549. ________ . Les regrets. Paris: Frdric Morel, 1558. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 21. London: Hogarth, 1961. Gray, Floyd. La potique de Du Bellay. Paris: Nizet, 1978. Lefebvre, Henri. La production de lespace [The Production of Space]. 1974. 4th ed. Paris: Anthropos, 2000. Lemaire de Belges, Jean. Les ptres de lamant vert. 1512. Ed. Jean Frappier. Lille: Giard, 1948. Marin, Louis. Utopiques: Jeux despaces. Paris: Minuit, 1973. Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. Ed. A. Thibaudet and M. Rat. Paris: Gallimard/Pliade, 1950. Rigolot, Franois. Posie et Renaissance. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire. crire lespace. Paris: Presses de lUniversit de Vincennes--Saint-Denis, 2002. Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.
All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. In its rst form this article was a lecture given in a seminar taught at the School of Critical Theory at Cornell in the summer of 2003 on space and critical theory in France. The author would like to thank both the wonderful participants in the seminar and the peerless colleagesMieke Bal, tienne Balibar, and Dominick La Caprafor their generosity and encouragement.

diacritics / fallwinter 2003

203