What is Style as a Political Problem?
François Laruelle
From Le déclin de l’écriture (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1977), p.142-152.
1. With one text, being given or mundane, the productive interpretation of it consists in finding the active drives capable of verifying it by transforming it, by destroying the primacy of the signified, the signifier or linguistic codes that make the text an interiority. Not any such drives that would give it a sense of fiction and dominant sense, or a fascistic value – but the forces susceptible to leading the text, its components, to their twilight [déclin], leading writing to its death or putting it in relation with an unstoppable exteriority. The linguistic-semiological treatment of a text subordinates it to the abstract forces in the sense of reactive, incomplete forces deprived of meaning by themselves and all the more interested in signification. Therefore, it contributes towards triumphing with the abstract thought of the signifier over the affects produced by the impulsive correlations. From this point of view, “language” as a process of production is no longer a former contract with meaning, a former convention with the signifier. It does not have to produce from the exterior a reactive-signifying cancellation of the nebula of the signifier: a positive cancelling is already included in the functioning of the partial drives related to the a-textual Body, that it suffices to activate and re-affirm. Therefore, there are several ways to cancel vouloir-dire and they themselves express different drives.
Why style as a problem? On condition of investing it with an intensifying apparatus – the Libidinal Break. Everyone knows that the question of style has to do with the unconscious. But this is just as much for language: the thesis included in this Break is that we must subordinate the question of style to the question of the unconscious as questioning. Rather than the inverse. Nietzsche attempted an interpretation and evaluation of style in accordance with varying drives that can compose it: but style is above a question of the quality, and therefore the syntax, of drives: for example, an active technique to check emotion on its way and not let it run its course to the very end.[1] In short, some procedures of breaking, suspension and intensification that are always opposed to techniques of extension, demonstration, and histrionism. That style would be a problem of breaks,[2] but above all the quality or syntax of breaks (not within the text, but as the text – that is, in the flows) is what Nietzsche analyzes by attributing style to active, resistant drives that cry halt [s’entravent], break and revive themselves as more sovereign.[3]
Writing and Desire for Victory – Writing should always indicate a victory, indeed a conquest of oneself which must be communicated to others for their behoof. There are, however, dyspeptic authors who only write when they cannot digest something, or when something has remained stuck in their teeth. Through their anger they try unconsciously to disgust the reader too, and to exercise violence upon him – that is, they desire victory, but victory over others.[4]
Breaks rather than transitions, stops and suspensions rather than developments: because the first come to us from the exterior, and the second from ourselves.[5] The formed thought and its effects rather than the labour of thought: the text as the totality of effects drawn by an active drive. Concerning Sterne, Nietzsche demonstrates the importance of breaks overdetermining themselves to form a style:
In his case we should not speak of the clear and rounded but of “the endless melody” – if by this phrase we arrive at a name for an artistic style in which the definite form is continually broken, thrust aside and transferred to the realm of the indefinite, so that it signifies one and the other at the same time. Sterne is the great master of the double entendre [equivoque], this phrase being naturally used in a far wider sense than is commonly done when one applies it to sexual relations. […] He can be and even wishes to be right and wrong at the same moment, to interweave profundity and farce. His digressions are at once continuations and further developments of the story, his maxims contain a satire on all that is sententious, his dislike of seriousness is bound up with a disposition to take no matter merely externally and on the surface. So in the proper reader he arouses a feeling of uncertainty whether he be walking, lying, or standing, a feeling most closely akin to that of floating in the air.[6]
This “invention” of drives is the operation of style: the better the drive, the better writing as a drive capable of not only communicating but producing all affects and above all the most active ones.[7] For it is the “techniques” of suspension, break, and hindering that must be obviously comprised as the means of a revival – beyond the signified-signifying totalities – of the intrinsically diversified and never totalized textual energy. Style is the however active transcendence of the libido, the reiteration that takes on the form of stereotypy, but also uses stereotype to intensify and open it up to the Other. It is this system of stylistic breaks within the libido-of-writing that we must oppose to the “labour” of the text. The laborious conception of the text is ambiguous: like the labour of the negative of the moderns, it is even more foreign to desire than the laborious but active conception of the classics. And literature perhaps has only gained the appearances of a liberation by passing from classical stereotypes to the codes of the signifier, to literature called “textual” literature of the moderns. Style has become very well productive and literature has become problematic by essence – but was there not a formidable double entendre [equivoque] in this idea of a productivity of the text when it is coded by “signifying practices” for example?[8]
This double entendre finds its complex dimension when the question is extended from the text to the writer and the reader. It is not only the writer but the reader who must be a stylist and make the book better by drawing new threads and assuring it brilliance and force.[9]
Nietzsche expressively assigns as the origin to the rules of style of functioning as the selection of readers, constituting trials and problems, and arousing misunderstandings. Style also emerges from the Pathos der Distanz, the différance in the production of meaning.[10] The text is a feint, and cuts between the drives that assemble each other in its reading. It elevates and manifests drives of different qualities: it makes the difference between the active and the reactive and contributes towards determining the quality of the libido of one reading. It is an enacted symptomatology. One will never say enough that reading or “writing” Nietzsche – any text whatsoever considered experimentally as an aphorism (successful or not) – comes back by entering into an analysis where it is the text that analysis the reader and speaks in a stumbling way. Even though there was no former contract between Nietzsche and his reader, there is no entry into an institution. The aphorism functions like a problem for the desire of the subject and their powers. The “better” interpretation is not one that would demonstrate the conformity of meaning detected with the presupposed meaning of the text – in the fashion of the traditional hermeneutic which also recodes the drives in the institutional and contractual space of the rules of production and consumption. But it is one that will make the type of break and revival function capable of bringing about the most violent, the most unstoppable effects, releasing long-distance trauma, and consumed by a “finite” subject:
[The problem] takes the shape of finding, assessing, and assembling the exterior forces that give a sense of liberation, a sense of exteriority to each various phase. The revolutionary character of Nietzsche’s thought becomes apparent at the level of method: it is his method that makes Nietzsche’s text into something not to be characterized in itself as “fascist,” “bourgeois,” or “revolutionary,” but to be regarded as an exterior field where fascist, bourgeois, and revolutionary forces meet head on. If we pose the problem this way, the response conforming to Nietzsche’s method would be: find the revolutionary force. The problem is always to detect the new forces that come from without, that traverse and cut across the Nietzschean text within the framework of the aphorism. The legitimate misunderstanding here, then, would be to treat the aphorism as a phenomenon, one that waits for new forces to come and “subdue” it, or to make it work, or even to make it explode.[11]
2. Style in reading or writing is, if you will, a question of “method” even though it cannot have a simple relation of method with Nietzsche.
Truly speaking, style is less in method than in Seinsverhalten, the behavior-of-being or intervention at a distance within the text where the “subject” only intervenes because they are interested in powers where they can cancel themselves. As always, style is a style of intervention and is grafted onto a strictly machinic relation of projection, of dis-jection from the minoritarian subject towards the text: it goes from the drives of the desiring subject and the drives that expropriate it in language. And, from this perspective, the capacity for style to be measured by the resolution of this problem: how does one cancel the signification of the text without however cancelling it in a reactive mode? How does one cancel the signifier?
The thus arranged text does not produce any sign but a new interpretation of the old signs of culture – and consequently every text can be treated like an aphorism. This is the whole operation of style: it is without common measure with a problem of form. Style is a problem of surfaces, of rising effects, descending effects, sprawling effects, drifting effects, folding effects – bordering effects having become unavoidable. The stylistic problem would be clarified if we abandoned the old problematic of figure for the problematic of the split edge suspended over itself and generalized: every border is an opening, a positivity of a supplement of partial objects that incessantly revive “interpretation” under the form of new arrangements of textual fragments. As a small language-machine that is transformed with the interpretive drives that intervene within it, the text as an aphorism is split [se refend] by other aphorisms, other textual fragments that are grafted or adhered to it to revive the subject further on and compose a monstrous and multiple corpus that includes, for example, the signatures that are definitively partial parts of the corpus, peripheral material parts of the textual process.
Style resides in the capacity to render a text problematic – that is, multiple or minoritarian – not, however, indefinitely or interminably, for the text successful as an aphorism initiates a process of the detextualization of its own drives in terms of its Intense Body, and it exceeds the cancellation of signification. We cannot confuse the always re-activated militant opening of semantic or formal interiorities (towards exterior drives by definition or towards the Body-of-the-Other) with an indefinite journey of interpretation or deconstruction. We will be careful not to flatten the textual surface onto the extension, reducing the political and material duplicity of signs as drives with uniform textual values. This would be to prohibit the breakthrough – the tendential breakthrough – outside of the indefinite circle of general textuality towards the limit to-come of the consumption of textual processes themselves. We will just as much refrain from saying nothing further that there is nothing to interpret within an aphorism because the interpreted and its interpreter are the same: the libido. Everything is not equivalent in the libido-of-writing by virtue of the quadruplicity of syntactic functions.[12] And if there is no in itself of the text, a transcendent signified or signifier in front of which interpretation would be stopped, there is by contrast a transcendental (and not transcendent) function of the “Transfinite” Body wherein one of the two specific effects is to cancel interpretation in terms of textual objects at the zero point of desiring materiality.
This is so that the style of interpretation is split. It is the dominant style that makes the text as an aphorism an indefinite process of writing and reading, an interminable intertextuality of fictions and fantasies both indefinite and recentered around a dominating and organizing signifier. And it is the active style that can by definition lead the signifying assemblages to their twilight – to occupy and destroy the positions of fiction and fantasy. The reactive style is semiological: it poses the irreducibility of signs to their functioning and interpretation. The active style would be rather “hermeneutic” in a new sense and would reabsorb the signs in their functioning. Is this not its weakness, as, for example, deconstruction will object which makes the marks labour “beyond” this opposition between semiology and hermeneutics? However, it is clear enough that this hermeneutic is not one of signification or the signified, but one of meaning distinct from signification – rigorously – either from meaning comprised as material functioning or the assemblage of drives, or as functioning comprised as transcendental: the being of the sign is inseparable from the effects that it produces; the being of the text, general textuality, is not distinguished from the partial objects of language. It is an absolute functionalism because the transcendental avoids the active style as the political intervention within the text, falling once more under the statuses of the logos as signified and signifier.
3. However, to invent metric, stylistic, lexical constraints, to change the dimensions of the subject and the attack angles, to create conventions just as much as traps destined to break the textual flows to better revive them, is not necessarily to recognize the despotism of the classical style, for the break of the flows of writing by the above obstacles forms the condition of their fluency, their lightness, and their intensification. Provided, however, that active drives would be capable of appropriating these traps, using them and dominating them: grace as the objective appearance or apparent movement of the text.[13] The mark of the superior style is in the effacement of the arabesque or the point within the united textual surface (equality, however, of irreducible textual différances), everything that distinguishes it from a certain “theatricality” of expression – and the histrionics of the signifier. For example, the sobriety of the aphorism is the trace that abandons the point of writing as the Intense or Split [refente] Body – the desert of the signifier. There is in the great style the possibility of a “finitude,” a mortal sobriety of writing. This thesis directly results from the subordination of the question of style to the question of the unconscious.
Without this subordination, what Nietzsche will note here and there would remain unintelligible: that style was acquired as a work of culture, that it was confounded with aristocratic culture and was laboriously imposed by a certain popular and Asiatic monstrosity. This is still an affair of the flow and break, which marks the political origin of style.
Simplicity, flexibility, and sobriety were wrestled for and not given by nature to this people. The danger of a relapse into Asianism constantly hovered over the Greeks, and really overtook them from time to time like a murky, overflowing tide of mystical impulses, primitive savagery and darkness. We see them plunge in; we see Europe, as it were, flooded, washed away––for Europe was very small then; but they always emerge once more to the light, good swimmers and divers that they are, those fellow-countrymen of Odysseus.[14]
Style contributes no new value but produces the libidinal value of textual values. It does not even produce any new code but makes the old codes function more intensely. This is a political phenomenon – a political history of style. Nietzsche always opposes the semantic wealth of a style with a reactive, popular or base origin and the “noble poverty,” but the “liberty of the master” of a style who conquers their sovereignty within the sobriety (minority) of the means of expression. Literary language is born from the superposition of these two strains, wherein the second implies that “this game that they want to better possess.” The problem of a higher style: struggle against usury by means that would not be means of accumulation but means of intensification – therefore by active means. “The light and delicate manner in handling the commonplace and apparently long outworn elements in word and phrase.”[15] Style resides in a differential relation with the existing strains of language. It arrives from the exterior to a given language as an ensemble of powers with a new quality, one that does not claim to add anything to the semantic and syntactic givens but is helped by them as instruments for new effects. Every efflorescence of style, every epoch of style assumes a duplicity of powers.
We sense that this abruptness, this exteriority, cannot be the doing of the signifier. However, we do not conclude from this that style is solely Greek, only the “grand style,” and that the modern decline [déclin] of the grand style is the death of every style: there are a plurality of styles, at least a di-style according to the syntactic quality of drives. The grand style, the “finitude” or sovereignty of writing marks the irruption of the libido, otherwise always already there, but repressed, within its active forces. These are the freest, most dominant and artistic drives, that make a return beyond repression. The operation of style is therefore each time a problem or an experimentation with partial textual objects that only writing as a political process can resolve, in varying directions [sens] according to the sought and produced drives. The birth of the signifier and its twilight are inscribed within this political history of the powers of style.
4. This duplicity within the political genesis of style implies the following thesis that gives its meaning to the problematization of the text: style is not a superior strain of the text, an exterior and supplementary organization of elements independent by themselves. Nor is it even – why not? – a superstructure overdetermining the principal difference, the difference between the signifier and the signified. In the “generalized” text as a singular aphorism, style reflects itself, and reflects its impulsive materiality, through the traversal of all elements, “linguistic” or not. Every text must be interpreted as an aphorism more or less subjugated and repressed. But we must then interpret all the elements of the text as stylistic and translinguistic productions. We will not reactively subordinate the most singular of the text – style – to the general laws of linguistics and annex disciplines. We will proceed towards a reversal and a displacement: we will make any such text function as a restrained effectuation of the grand style. Here “machinic” designates a generalized functionalism within the problems of textuality. Not only is it a practice of style as the use of varying symbolisms but a generalization of “use” (qualitatively différantiated into a partial power) extended towards the very production of symbolisms and for example the symbolism of the signifier. This is why the Libidinal Break grounds a generalized stylistic, making style the political problem of the investments of textual unities, and tearing it from the concept of textual practices. It is the libido alone that is in question within the possibility of individuating the immanent Corpus of the text. Style is confounded with the transcendental happening of the Minoritarian Body that is opposed to a still exterior conception of the transcendental as the condition of possibility and formal condition. Our problem is entirely other, and our conception of the transcendental is entirely other: it “grounds” style as the internal quasi-cause of language.
However, it also subordinates style to the unconscious, linguistic values (signifying, semantic, syntactic, and rhetorical values) are subordinated to libidinal values. This subordination allows us to resolve the antinomy between literature and philosophy, fiction and truth: for the authenticity of inscription within the Foll [plain] Body[16] allows us to get out of this alternative between truth and fiction, where we do not escape through the suited subordination of one by the other, in the way that the signifier’s subordination operates. Literature, analysis and philosophy – all three – are displaced by style: displaced on the non-terrain of Machinic Materialism [MM]. Instead of dialectical relations between language and the unconscious (the signifier), the first functions as the ratio essendi of the second, the second functions as the ratio cognoscendi of the first. They are relations of materialist and machinic subordination that this generalized stylistic records in its own way. To be the synthesis of the question of literature and the question of the unconscious, style can no longer be the correlate of the primacy of the signifier but the correlate of the foreclosure of the signifier itself in relation to a bar of repression specific to a translinguistic and transtextual unconscious. Subordinating style by the signifier does not really tear it from its vicious or dominant literary determinations. It is as subordinated to a trans-signifying unconscious that style becomes a problem and a production, that the superseding of literature into literality (Lacan) abandons its appearance of Aufhebung. We “oppose” the resistance of the a-literal Minoritarian Body against the insistency of the letter and the foundation of the style of the signifier.
5. However, generalized stylistics is itself subordinated to generalized writing. And it is not only for descriptive reasons but for functional reasons that style is an included condition of writing and that writing, in turn, subordinates style or functions, in the history of literature, as the opening of style to the Other. Style opens language and its phonetic or graphic machines to Being or the Intense Body, to the coded re-production of language. But the above style is already the penetration of writing in the Intense Body, the dissemination and opening of the Desiring Body and its codes to the Other and the historicity of the to-come. The specific function of the Other is fulfilled by writing even more than by the text (a mixed notion), when we want, however, to distinguish it from language and style which are also universal syntactic functions of the cycle of the process rather than literary facts that can be juxtaposed within linguistic space. Language is re-produced as style, but style has to become writing, and the Political Body has to decline as style: the “grand style” is nothing but this overflow of corporeity with its “figures” by writing insofar as it is foreign to the signifier and determines the subject as minority and jouissance. Relating style to the body and the past of the writer (Barthes) is not enough and can ground (my body, my past) a reactionary and reactive concept of the function of style. It is only in the synthesis of writing as the synthesis of the libidinal break to-come that the phases of language and style can be torn from representation. With this way of considering the process of the production of the text, we will say that style relates machinic syntheses and their linguistic version to materiality, and that writing (which alone renders the process concrete) relates language and style, the “syntax” and materiality of the text to politics. This latter point of view assumes, but includes, the first two, and allows us to pose the question: what body is in question in the relation to style?
[1] The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 136.
[2] Clang can be read in terms of this problematic – among others.
[3] The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 108.
[4] Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions, aphorism 152.
[5] The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 106.
[6] Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions, aphorism 113.
[7] The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 140.
[8] On the ambivalence of the signifier, see below §23 [L’ambivalence politique du signifiant, p.235-241 – Trans.]
[9] Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions, aphorism 153.
[10] The Gay Science, aphorism 381.
[11] Deleuze, in Nietzsche aujourd’hui vol.1, p.168. [“Nomad Thought” in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison, New York: Delta Books, 1977, p.146 – Trans.]
[12] Active/Reactive, Affirmative/Negative, what we have called the “différantials” of power and the libido.
[13] The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 140.
[14] Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions, aphorism 219.
[15] The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 127.
[16] Here, Laruelle is making a portmanteau of the a of différance with the Full Body [Corps plein] of Deleuze and Guattari. Without a proper equivalent of full with différance’s a, I have chosen to go with Foll Body. – Trans.
en-demic 