Month: January 2019

9. bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness”

hooks yearning

Not everything that’s on my reading list is a 600-page doorstopper. bell hooks’s essay “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness” is only a few pages long. To be honest, I’m not sure how this essay ended up on my reading list. I ran across a reference to it somewhere, I think, and I was impressed. In any case, I had time this afternoon to read something short, and so I chose this essay.

hooks begins by asking questions about “the realities of choice and location”:

Within complex and ever shifting realms of power relations, do we position ourselves on the side of colonizing mentality? Or do we continue to stand in political resistance with the oppressed, ready to offer our ways of seeing and theorizing, of making culture, towards that revolutionary effort which seeks to create space where there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing, where transformation is possible? (145)

That choice is crucial, because it determines “our capacity to envision new alternative, oppositional aesthetic acts” and “informs the way we speak about these issues, the language we choose” (145). Place is both literal and metaphorical for hooks: it is “not just who I am in the present but where I am coming from, the multiple voices within me,” a confrontation with “silence, inarticulateness,” and the words that emerge from suffering (146). Identifying “the location from which I come to voice—the space of my theorizing” is, she continues, a “personal struggle” (146).

For hooks, language is a “place of struggle” (146). “Often when the radical voice speaks about domination we are speaking to those who dominate,” she writes. “Their presence changes the nature and direction of our words” (146). Is it possible to speak in a different way? “Dare I speak to the oppressed and oppressor in the same voice?” she asks. “Dare I speak to you in a language that will move beyond the boundaries of domination—a language that will not bind you, fence you in, or hold you?” (146). One of the questions these words raise—a question that is answered later in the essay—is who “you” is in these questions. She appears to be addressing the oppressor here, although she wants to speak in a language that moves beyond the binaries or boundaries of oppression. One way to do that, she writes, would be to use “black vernacular speech,” something she wants to do in this essay: “Private speech in public discourse, intimate intervention, making another text, a space that enables me to recover all that I am in language,” she writes. But that recourse to the vernacular seems impossible. As a result, she continues, “I find so many gaps, absences in this written text. To cite them at least is to let the reader know something has been missed, or remains there hinted at by words—there in the deep structure” (147). 

hooks’s relationship with her community of origin and her family is ambivalent. Her home community and her family were places of silencing and censorship (147-48), and so she needed to leave them, “to move beyond boundaries,” and “yet I needed also to return there” (148). “Indeed,” she continues,

the very meaning of “home” changes with experience of decolonization, of radicalization. At times, home is nowhere. At times, one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation. Then home is no longer just one place. It is locations. Home is that place which enables and promotes varied and everchanging perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference. (148)

This “dispersal and fragmentation” must be both confronted and accepted in order to construct a new world “that reveals more fully where we are, who we can become” (148). 

Part of the reason that home is so complex for hooks is her experience of privilege—her entry into the university, which she describes as a place of privilege. People without privilege who enter such places “must create spaces within that culture of domination if we are to survive whole, our souls intact. Our very presence there is a disruption” (148). There is constant pressure to silence or undermine the voices of people like her within places of privilege, like universities. “Mostly, of course, we are not there,” she writes—not in those places of privilege:

We never “arrive” or “can’t stay.” Back in those spaces where we come from, we kill ourselves in despair, drowning in nihilism, caught in poverty, in addiction, in every postmodern mode of dying that can be named. Yet when we few remain in that “other” space, we are often too isolated, too alone. We die there, too. Those of us who live, who “make it,” passionately holding on to aspects of that “downhome” life we do not intend to lose while simultaneously seeking new knowledge and experience, invent spaces of radical openness. Without such spaces, we would not survive. (148-49)

Such a space of “radical openness,” hooks continues, “is a margin—a profound edge” (149). But marginality is more than just a site of deprivation; it’s the site of “radical possibility, a space of resistance,” “a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives” (149). Therefore, this marginality isn’t something one would wish to surrender or lose as part of moving into the centre; rather, it’s “a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of a radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds” (150). This is what interests hooks: “what it means to struggle to maintain that marginality even as one works, produces, lives, if you will, at the center” (150). This margin is different from “that concrete space in the margins” she left behind when she entered the centre (150). Nevertheless, she writes, “I kept alive in my heart ways of knowing reality which affirm continuously not only the primacy of resistance but the necessity of a resistnce that is sustained by remembrance of the past, which includes recollections of broken tongues giving us ways to speak that decolonize our minds, our very beings” (150). It’s not necessary to surrender one’s self to learn from places of domination, such as universities; one needs to maintain “that radical perspective shaped and formed by marginality” (150)—both the “concrete” marginality of her home community, I think, and the “profound edge” she finds inside places of privilege.

“Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people,” hooks writes:

If we only view the margin as sign marking the despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being. It is there in that space of collective despair that one’s creativity, one’s imagination is at risk, there that one’s mind is fully colonized, there that the freedom one longs for [is] lost. (150-51)

The margin, she continues, is both a site of repression and a site of resistance, but it is typically only spoken about as repression, as deprivation. “We are more silent when it comes to speaking of the margin as site of resistance,” she argues. “We are more often silenced when it comes to speaking of the margin as site of resistance” (151).

Who silences those who speak of the margin as site of resistance? Scholars within places of privilege, it seems—“especially those who name themselves radical critical thinkers, feminist thinkers,” because they “now fully participate in the construction of a discourse about the ‘Other’” (151). This paragraph is difficult, the words slippery, but it is central to her argument:

I was made “Other” there in that space with them. In that space in the margins, that lived-in segregated world of my past and present. They did not meet me there in that space. They met me at the center. They greeted me as colonizers. I am waiting to learn from them the path of their resistance, of how it came to be that they were able to surrender the power to act as colonizers. I am waiting for them to bear witness, to give testimony. . . . I am waiting for them to stop talking about the “Other,” to stop even describing how important it is to be able to speak about difference. . . . Often this speech about the “Other” is also a mask, an oppressive talk hiding gaps, absences, that space where our words would be if we were speaking, if there were silence, if we were there. This “we” is that “us” in the margins, that “we” who inhabit marginal space that is not the site of domination but a place of resistance. Enter that space. Often this speech about the “Other” annihilates, erases. (151)

What hooks appears to be calling for, here, is twofold. First, these scholars and thinkers need to speak about their own experience—“how it came to be that they were able to surrender the power to act as colonizers”—and by doing that, by ceasing to speak about the “Other” but rather to engage in a dialogue with the “Other,” they will actually be performing the decolonization they pretend to speak about. Second, they need to listen, to create space and silence for the “Other” to speak. The command, “Enter that space”—the space of marginality—is directed at those scholars and thinkers: by decolonizing themselves through silent listening, they will enter that space and stand alongside the “Other” who is waiting for them there. “This is an intervention,” hooks writes:

A message from that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category colonized/colonizer. Marginality as site of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there. Enter that space. We greet you as liberators. (152)

That last statement is ambiguous: who is liberating whom? I think it is those who are already within the space of marginality who are liberating whose who are entering that space for the first time, but hooks’s syntax could have the opposite meaning as well. 

hooks’s concluding paragraph describes her location in the margin, a marginality she has chosen as a site of resistance, as a “location of radical openness and possibility” where “resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination”:

We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that which pleasures, delights, and fulfills desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world. (153)

That space seems to be available not only to those who are oppressed or dominated or colonized, but also to those (presumably white) scholars and thinkers who are willing to speak to, rather than about, the colonized and listen to their responses, who are willing to tell their own stories of decolonization and to meet with the colonized in that marginal space of resistance and transformation.

“Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness” makes me think about how some of my students relate to the university as a place of power and domination. Moreover, it also makes me consider how my research might enable me to enter the margin hooks describes at the end of the essay. Can I follow her command to “Enter that space” by telling the story of my own decolonization? Do I have that kind of story to tell? I don’t know—or rather, I do, but at the same time, I don’t think it’s much of a story. Not yet. Perhaps someday. Perhaps this research will lead to that kind of narrative. That’s a possibility I will hold on to.

Work Cited

hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Between the Lines, 1990, pp. 145-53.

 

8. Bill Waiser, A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan Before 1905

waiser a world we have lost

Why would an otherwise sane person put a 630-page book on his comprehensive examination reading list? Good question. I bought a copy of Bill Waiser’s A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan Before 1905 in hardcover, when it first came out, partly because it won the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language non-fiction, and partly because I’m interested in the history of this place. My comprehensive exams would give me a chance to finally read the book, I reasoned. And so, as a change from reading about Deleuze and the fold, I opened Waiser’s history on New Year’s Day.

A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan Before 1905 is a work of narrative history, rather than, like Sheldon Krasowski’s No Surrender, a book that makes an argument. Waiser sets out to tell the story of Saskatchewan before it became a province. He begins with Henry Kelsey, the first European to see the prairies of Saskatchewan, near what is is today the city of Yorkton. Kelsey worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had a trading monopoly in what was then called Rupert’s Land—all of North America that drained into Hudson’s Bay—and he had been sent by his employers with instructions to invite First Nations living in the interior of Rupert’s Land to trade with the Company. At that time—just 20 years after the Bay had been granted its trading monopoly by King Charles II—the HBC expected that First Nations people who wanted to trade would make their way to its post at York Factory, on Hudson’s Bay. It was a long and difficult journey, however, and few First Nations people wanted to make it. Besides, the Bay was already facing competition from Montreal traders who were making the long trip, by canoe, into the interior of what is now Saskatchewan. Kelsey’s journey was part of the HBC’s first venture into the continent’s interior. So, in June 1690, Kelsey set off with a group of Assiniboine or Nakoda people who were going home after trading at York Factory. Kelsey was hardly the heroic figure he has become in twentieth-century mythology, including his mention in folksinger Stan Roger’s anthem “Northwest Passage.” Instead, as Waiser points out, Kelsey was only there because the Assiniboine accepted him as a guest. “Simply put,” Waiser writes, “the HBC servant was a passenger, not a pathfinder” (10). 

More than half of Waiser’s book is devoted to the history of the fur trade in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, so beginning with Kelsey’s story makes a lot of sense. And the role of Indigenous peoples in the story of the fur trade, as Waiser tells it, is not unlike their role in Kelsey’s journey inland. With a few exceptions—the violence the North West Company perpetrated in the early years of the 19th century on First Nations peoples who decided to trade with the HBC, for example—the fur trade took place according to rules established by First Nations. Trading sessions took place according to Indigenous ceremonial protocols. Fur traders could establish posts inland (or, for that matter, on the shores of Hudson’s Bay) because Indigenous peoples allowed them to be there. Traders provided luxury goods, not necessities, and in the days before inland trading posts, when First Nations peoples were expected to make the difficult trip to York Factory or, later, Prince of Wales Fort (now Churchill, Manitoba), they might set out on a trading mission every four or five years, if that frequently. First Nations on the plains south of the boreal forest who hunted bison on horseback in the 18th century, such as the Blackfoot, could not be convinced to trade with any of the newcomers: the immense herds of countless bison fulfilled all of their material needs. Even in the early days of settlement in the 1870s and 1880s, and even after the Métis Resistance of 1885, when the balance of power was shifting dramatically in favour of Euro-Canadians, Waiser notes, “Indians chose to co-operate with the newcomers . . . and without their acquiescence, the history of the settlement in the North-West might have been written in blood” (598). But once settlers began to arrive, this long history of cooperation, in which Indigenous peoples were the senior partner in the relationship, was forgotten. “It was only the future that mattered,” Waiser writes (623). “For many of the newcomers that took up homestead land or moved to booming communities along an ever-expanding network of rail lines, Saskatchewan’s past had no meaningful place in their memory” (630). Of course, that future is now the past, and while farming and ranching towns celebrate their own history, anything that predates the arrival of settlers near their communities is ignored. 

Although Waiser relies on documentary history sources, rather than oral history, the fact that First Nations were the senior partners in the relationship between Indigenous peoples and newcomers is clear in this book. So too is the ecological impact of trapping, and later the pemmican and bison hide trade, on animal populations and, therefore, on the lives of the peoples who depended on those animals for survival. As areas were trapped out—as populations of beaver in particular fell because of over-trapping—traders pushed farther inland. And the fur trade itself ran on pemmican, made from bison meat: that is what fed the traders and the coureurs de bois who paddled canoes full of furs or trade goods to and from Hudson’s Bay or Montreal. In the 19th century, the demand for hides—used to make conveyor belts for the rapidly industrializing United States—was added to the demand for pemmican, and the bison population began to decline. By 1879, bison had been extirpated from the northern plains. It would have been an unthinkable change for First Nations peoples who had depended on the bison. The dwindling size of the herds was a crucial factor in the demand by First Nations for treaties with the new Dominion of Canada. What struck me from reading Waiser’s book—even though he doesn’t analyze the story of the bison’s disappearance in this way—was how the resources of the northern prairies and boreal forest were ravaged once the region became incorporated into capitalism. Once the animals became raw material, resources rather than entities in relationship with Indigenous peoples—a relationship that had existed since the end of the last Ice Age—they were consumed. Later, the forests went the same way, as the trees became a resource valued as a potential exchange rather than as something of value in themselves. In Heideggerian terms, the animals and the forests lose their essences and become a “standing-reserve” (Heidegger 19) through technology, but also through the extension of capitalism into what was known as the North-West. If we’re looking for someone or something to blame for the extirpation of the bison, we ought to begin there.

At other times, however, connections that ought to be made in Waiser’s account are missed. For example, the success of missionaries in what is now Saskatchewan plays a central role in chapter 11, “We Think It The Best,” but Waiser doesn’t hazard any guesses as to the reason First Nations peoples were ready to abandon their beliefs in favour of Christianity in the 1830s and 1840s. The next chapter, though, “If Something Is Not Done,” describes the disorder and suffering on the plains and in the forests caused by changes in the fur trade, the decline of the bison, and most importantly, epidemics of European diseases—particularly smallpox, measles, and dysentery—that killed as many as 50 to 75 per cent of the Assiniboine and Blackfoot (362-63). I know that correlation is not causation, but surely such apocalyptic epidemics would have had tremendous cultural and spiritual effects on their survivors. 

Waiser’s discussion of the numbered treaties—my particular interest—is short and focuses on Treaty 6, although he does rely on Métis translator Peter Erasmus’s account of the negotiations, Buffalo Days and Nights. He is, however, unsparing in his account of how the Dominion government planned for settlement. The relatively cautious assessments of the agricultural potential of the prairies—those prepared by Captain John Palliser and Henry Youle Hind, who mounted separate expeditions to study the prairies in 1857 and 1858—were ignored in favour of geographer John Macoun’s 1879 and 1880 survey, which produced an exaggerated account of the fertility of the plains. Macoun happened to be travelling during exceptionally wet summers, and as a result he concluded “that the shallow, light soils” of Palliser’s Triangle “would become productive once the ground had been broken and cultivated” (455). Those conclusions “were no substitute for reality,” Waiser writes, and “[t]hey were misleading and potentially harmful in the long run, especially because they suggested that the standard 160-acre homestead was appropriate throughout the region” (456). As a result, land that should have been left as prairie was broken for agriculture, with devastating consequences for farmers during subsequent droughts, and for the prairie ecosystem itself. Today, somewhere between 17 and 21 per cent of native grassland is left in Saskatchewan, with more being lost each year (Sawatzky). But the Dominion of Canada wanted settlement to be uniform, despite the variations in soil quality and aridity across the southern part of the province, with calamitous results for an ecosystem Victorian Canadians, in the main, neither understood nor appreciated.

There is much more to discuss about Waiser’s account of Saskatchewan history, but it is a readable narrative and its footnotes lead in many potentially fruitful directions. I would like to read his earlier book on the events of 1885, Loyal Till Death: Indians and the North-West Rebellion, co-authored with Blair Stonechild, which I am sure informs the discussion of the Resistance in this book. But the need to stay focused on my list compels me to limit my curiosity, to leave Loyal Till Death for another time, and to push ahead with another book on the list.

Works Cited

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, Harper, 1977, pp. 3-35.

Sawatzky, Katie Doke. The State of Native Prairie in Saskatchewan, 1 October 2018, http://www.prairiecommons.ca/?page_id=300.

Waiser, Bill. A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan Before 1905. Fifth House, 2016.

7. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, and Alain Badiou, “Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque”

I’m still trying to understand Gilles Deleuze’s book on Leibniz, and what exactly he means by “the fold.” Back I go to Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre’s essay, “Methodology in the Fold and the Irruption of Transgressive Data,” which started me off on this journey. She does refer to Deleuze’s book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque in that essay, but she also refers to Deleuze’s book on Michel Foucault, and to Alain Badiou’s essay on The Fold. The thing to do is obvious: take a look at both of those texts in my ongoing attempt to comprehend exactly what “the fold” is all about.

deleuze foucault

All of St. Pierre’s references to Deleuze’s book on Foucault come from the last chapter, “Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation.” That chapter is a discussion, in the main, of The Use of Pleasure, the second volume of Foucault’s four-volume The History of Sexuality. I’ve read the first volume, but I haven’t read The Use of Pleasure, so once again I’m reading something Deleuze wrote about another text without having read the original. That’s not a good place to be, but that’s where I am; I’ve strayed beyond the list of 130 books I’m obliged to read, and the further I wander off course, the harder my job is going to be. If I need to read The Use of Pleasure later, I can; but today, I’m working through Deleuze’s interpretation of that book.

According to Deleuze, in The History of Sexuality Foucault is searching for a new axis, separate from power and knowledge, which might explain the failure of 1960s resistance movements in the 1970s (94-96). That’s his purpose in The Use of Pleasure, and the search for that new axis will lead through the fold or the double—the two terms are synonymous for Deleuze and, he argues, central to Foucault’s work. “The inside as an operation of the outside: in all his work Foucault seems haunted by this theme of an inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a folding of the sea,” he writes, something he finds in Foucault’s earlier works (The Order of Things, Madness and Civilization, and The Birth of the Clinic) but which receives its most significant exploration in The Use of Pleasure. “Or, rather, the theme which has always haunted Foucault is that of the double,” he continues, in a paragraph that neatly describes the Fold:

But the double is never a projection of the interior; on the contrary, it is an interiorization of the outside. It is not a doubling of the One, but a redoubling of the Other. It is not a reproduction of the Same, but a repetition of the Different. It is not the emanation of an ‘I,’ but something that places in immanence an always other or a Non-self. It is never the other who is a double in the doubling process, it is a self that lives me as the double of the other: I do not encounter myself on the outside, I find the other in me. . . . It resembles exactly the invagination of a tissue in embryology, or the act of doubling in sewing: twist, fold, stop, and so on. (97-98)

But this focus on folding or doubling, although it “haunts all Foucault’s work,” only surfaces at a late stage, in The Use of Pleasure, because of Foucault’s search for “a new dimension which had to be distinguished both from relations between forces or power-relations and from stratified forms of knowledge” (99).

Foucault returned to ancient Greece to find that new dimension, and in particular to education in that culture, and the way that on the one hand, it produced “a ‘relation to oneself’ that consciously derives from one’s relation with others,” and on the other hand, it also produced “a ‘self-constitution’ that consciously derives from the moral code as a rule for knowledge” (100). “It is as if the relations of the outside folded back to create a doubling, allow a relation to oneself to emerge, and constitute an inside which is hollowed out and develops its own unique dimension: ‘enkrateia,’ the relation to oneself that is self-mastery,” Deleuze writes (100). “Far from ignoring interiority, individuality or subjectivity they invented a subject, but only as a derivative or the product of a ‘subjectivation,’” he continues. “They discovered the ‘aesthetic distance’—the doubling or relation with oneself, the facultative rule of free man” (101). In fact, the relation to oneself produced by the Greeks involves four foldings: the body and its pleasures; the relation of power between forces; knowledge (or “the fold of truth”); and finally “the fold of the outside itself, the ultimate fold,” which constitutes the subject’s hopes for immortality, eternity, salvation, freedom or death or detachment” (104). But the folds that were characteristic of the ancient Greeks were not the same as those that were characteristic of Christian cultures—so the folds Foucault is describing are historicized. “And what can we ultimately say about our own contemporary modes and our modern relation to oneself? What are our four folds?” Deleuze asks:

If it is true that power increasingly informs our daily lives, our interiority and our individuality; if it has become individualizing; if it is true that knowledge itself has become increasingly individuated, forming the hermeneutics and codification of the desiring subject,  what remains for our subjectivity? There never ‘remains’ anything of the subject, since he is to be created on each occasion, like a focal point of resistance, on the basis of the folds which subjectivize knowledge and bend each power. Perhaps modern subjectivity rediscovers the body and its pleasures, as opposed to a desire that has become too subjectivity rediscovers the body and its pleasures, as opposed to a desire that has become too subjugated by law? Yet this is not a return to the Greeks, since there never is a return. The struggle for a modern subjectivity passes through a resistance to the two present forms of subjection, the one consisting of individualizing ourselves on the basis of constraints of power, the other of attracting each individual to a known and recognized identity, fixed once and for all. The struggle for subjectivity presents itself, therefore, as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis. (105-06)

Deleuze’s conclusions here touch not only on the two forms of subjection—of power—that we see everywhere today: incorporating the “constraints of power” into ourselves, and the lure of rigidly fixed identities. I thought about the yellow-vest protestors I saw on the Albert Street bridge before Christmas; the Canadian version of that protest seems to display an affinity for both. And yet, on the other hand, we can also recognize the resistance to these forms of subjection in our contemporary world, in the insistence of many people on the rights to difference and “metamorphosis.” Deleuze wrote this book 30 years ago, and yet it seems quite prescient nonetheless.

Deleuze then sets out to name the new dimension Foucault uncovers in The Use of Pleasure, “this relation to oneself that is neither knowledge nor power” (106). That relation, Deleuze states, is the self. But those three dimensions—knowledge, power, and self—are irreducible, even though they constantly imply one another. They are ontologies, but for Foucault, they are also historical, because “they do not set universal conditions” and “they gain their value from their particular historical status” because what they present is “the way in which the problem appears in a particular historical formation” (114). In the questions Deleuze asks about knowledge, power, and the self—what do I know? what can I do? and what am I?—there is no single solution that “can be transposed from one age to another, but we can penetrate or encroach on certain problematic fields, which means that the ‘givens’ of an old problem are reactivated in another” (115). As a result, Foucault writes a history of thought, rather than a history of events: 

Knowledge, power and the self are the triple root of a problematization of thought. In the field of knowledge as problem thinking is first of all seeing and speaking, but thinking is carried out in the space between the two, in the interstice or disjunction between seeing and speaking. On each occasion it invents the interlocking, firing an arrow from the one towards the target of the other, creating a flash of light in the midst of words, or unleashing a cry in the midst of visible things. Thinking makes both seeing and speaking attain their individual limits, such that the two are the common limit that separates and links them. (116-17)

“To think,” Deleuze writes, “is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside”: this is the general topology of thought (118). 

Does this chapter help me understand what Deleuze means by the Fold, or folding? Yes, I think it does—and it certainly leaves me interested in reading the other volumes of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. One book leads to another, and then to another, and another—that is the nature of this kind of work. Certainly the equation Deleuze makes here between the double and the fold is useful. But I set out to read Alain Badiou’s essay on The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque as well. I had thought that essay would be a kind of bluffer’s guide, an explanation of the references in Deleuze’s book for a non-expert in the field, someone who wasn’t a philosopher—in other words, someone like me. But that’s not what it is: Badiou sets out to think through Deleuze’s book and his own responses to it. “This rare, admirable book offers us a vision and a conception of our world,” Badiou writes. “We must address it as one philosopher to another: for  its intellectual beatitude, the pure pleasure of its style, the interlacing of writing and thought, the fold of the concept and the nonconcept” (51). The central concept of that book, he writes, is the fold itself, and in order to understand Deleuze’s argument, “[i]t is absolutely necessary to unfold the fold, to force it into some immortal unfold” (52). Badiou sets out to unfold “the lasso Deleuze uses to capture us” in three ways. First, the fold is “an antiextensional concept of the multiple, a representation of the multiple as labyrinthine complexity, directly qualitative and irreducible to any elementary composition whatever” (52). Second, the fold is “an antidialectic concept of the event or of singularity,” “an operator that permits thought and individuation to ‘level’ each other” (52). Third, the fold is an anti-Cartesian concept of the subject, “a ‘communicating figure of absolute interiority, equivalent to the world, of which it is a point of view”; it allows us to imagine “an enunciation without ‘enouncement,’ or of knowledge without an object” (52). 

Deleuze’s “ruse,” Badiou writes, “is to leave uncovered no pair of oppositions, to be overtaken or taken over by no dialectic scheme” (53). So when Deleuze distinguishes between three different kinds of point or element—the material or physical, the mathematical, and the metaphysical—he demonstrates that “it is impossible to think of them separately, each supposing the determination of the other two” (53). The “quasi-relations” in the story Deleuze tells are “subsumed under the concept-without-concept of fold,” which means “[t]hey can never be deduced , nor thought within the fidelity of any axiomatic lineage or any primitive decision. Their function is to avoid distinction, opposition, fatal binarity” (54). And that’s what makes Deleuze’s writing so hard to understand. His writing is hostile “to the ideal theme of the clear,” which is, according to Badiou, “the metaphor of a concept of the Multiple that demands that the elements compositing it can be exposed, by right, to thought in full light of the distinctiveness of their belonging” (54). Against clarity, Deleuze employs nuance and shade; they “dissolve the latent opposition” (54) that structures binaries and dialectical logic.

For Badiou, “[t]his vision of the world as an intricate, folded, and inseparable totality,” such that “the multiple cannot even be discerned as multiple, but only ‘activated’ as fold,” is the reason Deleuze finds such an affinity with Leibniz (55). But not only Leibniz: because Deleuze sides with the organicist paradigm of the multiple, he reanimates Aristotle (55). But despite Deleuze’s focus on the multiple, the real question, Badiou asserts, is singularity: “where and how does the singular meet up with the concept? What is the paradigm of such an encounter?” (55). For Badiou, it is the question of the singular that dominates Deleuze’s book. The world is a series of events, a transmission of singularities (56); the word event is a synonym for singularity, and it “designates the origin, always singular, or local, of a truth (a concept)” (56). “Thus,” Badiou continues, “the event is both omnipresent and creative, structural and extraordinary” (56). The multiple exists in the singular: “This is precisely the function of the monad,” Badiou asserts: “to extract the one from the Multiple so that there may be a concept of the multiple” (58). But this configuration submits thought to an extreme tension: “either the Multiple is pure multiple of multiples, and there is no One from which it can be held that ‘everything has a concept,’” or else “the Multiple ‘possesses’ properties, and this cannot be only in the name of its elements, or its subordinate multiples” (58). Leibniz has God to integrate all the multiplicities in one figure, but Deleuze does not (58). Instead, he uses the monad: 

From the point of the situation, and so in ‘monadic’ immanence, it is true that everything has an (encyclopedic) concept, but nothing is event (there are only facts). From the point of the event, there will have been a truth (of the situation) that is locally ‘forcible’ as an encyclopedic concept, but globally indiscernible. (58)

This leads—or seems to lead: to be honest, I am as over my head in Badiou’s essay as I was in Deleuze’s book—to two levels of thought in the world: “the level of actualization (monads), and the level of realization (bodies)” (58). Those two levels are distinct, but at the same time Deleuze folds them together—and why not? Everything seems to fold together in Deleuze’s conception of things.

For Badiou, interiority—the fold—is the key to Deleuze’s book: Deleuze follows Leibniz “in his most paradoxical undertaking,” to “establish the monad as ‘absolute interiority’ and go on to the most rigorous analysis possible of the relations of exteriority (or possession), in particular the relation between mind and body” (61):

Treating the outside as an exact reversion, or ‘membrane,’ of the inside, reading the world as a texture of the intimate, thinking the macroscopic (or the molar) as a torsion of the microscopic (or the molecular): these are undoubtedly the operations that constitute the true effectiveness of the concept of Fold. (61)

The subject is thus an interiority whose own exterior forms a link to the multiple, the world, and this produces three effects. First, “it releases knowledge from any relation to an ‘object.’ Knowledge operates through the summoning up of immanent perceptions, as an interior ‘membrane’ effect, a subsumption or domination, of multiplicities ‘taken as a mass.’ Knowing is unfolding an interior complexity” (62). Second, the subject becomes a series rather than a substance or a point—it is not a limit, but “what provides multiple supports for the relation of several serial limits” (62). Third, the subject becomes the point of view from which there is a truth: “Not the source, or the constituent, or the guarantee of truth, but the point of view from which the truth is. Interiority is above all the occupation of such a point (of view)” (62). 

The fold, Badiou writes, might be the most important of Deleuze’s concepts—“after difference, repetition, desire, flux, the molecular and the molar, the image, movement, etc.” (65). “Deleuze submits it to use through partial descriptions,” he continues, “as that which possibly describes a great description, a general capture of the life of the world, which will never be accomplished” (65). And truth? It’s “neither adequation nor structure”; rather, “[i]t is an infinite process, which has its origin randomly in a point” (65). 

Badiou’s explication of Deleuze’s book is helpful, but at the same time, his prose is almost as slippery and sinuous as the prose he’s writing about. It’s a thinking-through of The Fold, rather than a guide for the perplexed. Like Deleuze’s book about Foucault, Badiou’s essay helps me understand more about the image of the fold and why Deleuze, and St. Pierre, and Badiou, think it is so important. It is an image of irreducible complexity, of interconnecting and intertwining relationships, of opposites in relation. Does that mean my own research finds itself in a fold, or the fold, or a folding? I still don’t know, but it’s something I’m going to continue to think about over the coming weeks. But now, it’s time to return to my reading list and stop getting carried away by tangents.

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. “Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.” Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, Routledge, 1994, pp. 51-69.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault, translated by Seán Hand, U of Minnesota P, 1988.

——-. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, translated by Tom Conley, U of Minnesota P, 1993.

St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. “Methodology in the Fold and the Irruption of Transgressive Data.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997, pp. 175-89.