Chapter One—
Invisibility and Amodernism

If the following study were to be a purely descriptive account of the cultural matrix of (post)modernism, we would have to begin with modernism, as the temporal precession of prefixes would imply. It will not be simply descriptive, however, but analytical, in that it will be concerned with the relations between the terms rather than their historical succession. Let us begin, then, in medias res, with the postmodernism that surrounds us on every side. We can even claim a precedent for this in Jean-François Lyotard's argument that "A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern" (Postmodern Explained 13). Since this term has a variety of definitions, we should be clear about what is meant here by the word. Postmodernism is everything you ever wanted in modernism, and less. It takes over, almost completely intact, all of the formal markers of modernism: structural fragmentation; all the polyvalent forms of parody or pastiche; the apparently neutral juxtaposition of "high" and "low" culture; and elaborate and self-consciously artificial formal principles. What it leaves out, however, is the aspect that, for many critics, serves as the motor of modernism: its imperative to provide a replacement for the lost orders of the past—through myth, through pure form, or through both. As T. S. Eliot writes of James Joyce (though it applies also to himself) in "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," one of the classic manifestoes of literary modernism, "In using myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. . . . It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to

the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . . Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method" (Eliot, "Ulysses " 483). Indeed, this is the standard reading of Eliot's own practice, especially in early works like "The Waste Land": "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" by affiliating them with the myths of the Fisher King and Tiresias (Eliot, Poems 69). Theodor W. Adorno defines the mythic method of modernism somewhat differently, as the willing of the new that, through the act of will, binds the new more firmly to tradition. "This explains the link between modernism and myth. The new wills non-identity but, by willing, inevitably wills identity" (Aesthetic Theory 33). His defense of modernism, however, rests on a negative version of the same premise as Eliot's: "By cathecting the repressed, art internalizes the repressing principle, i.e. the unredeemed condition of the world, instead of merely airing futile protests against it. Art identifies and expresses that condition, thus anticipating its overcoming" (27–28). In other words, modernism is the mode in which art retains its critical force under the specific repressive conditions of late capitalism.

This force is what postmodernism and the theories that purport to account for it omit. There are, of course, various versions of this omission of imperative. For Lyotard, the postmodern era is marked by the breakdown of the "master narratives" that legitimated aesthetic and political activity through the modern period; these master narratives, whether individual (the free realization of human potential) or social (the emancipation of the oppressed), underlay all ideas of "progress" in human affairs, but modernism revealed their attempts to provide historical closure and teleology to be mythological impositions on the recalcitrant and irreducible singularities of history. Modernism tried therefore to replace the original narratives with self-consciously artificial myth-narratives, as Eliot once wanted, and in so doing retain the imperatives of progress, but postmodernism accepts the breakdown without nostalgia. Lyotard maintains that criteria and methods still exist for aesthetic and teleological judgment, in the form of "paralogism" and "participation in language games."^[1] For Jean Baudrillard, on the other hand, no such criteria exist because the postmodern is not the failure of progressive historical legitimation but the triumph of abstract mediation or signs. Baudrillard posits a structural equivalence between the parts of the sign, signifier and signified, and the parts of the value-form, exchange and use, and from this equivalence he generalizes to build a model of the post-modern based on pure symbolic exchange without production (and thus

without producers or products). Instead of production, Baudrillard posits an immanent force, seduction, which drives exchange through a kind of uncritical aesthetic affirmation of capital. In such a flattened universe, no political or aesthetic space exists beyond the manipulation of simulacra through electronic media, which now define space and time. Mediation is all that exists, and it is by definition the abolition of difference and the triumph of the Same.^[2]

Lyotard and Baudrillard disagree on many issues, but on at least one they agree: the Western tradition as a directed and emancipatory project has played itself out, and now can only present its fragments, either (for Lyotard) in the jagged shards of Adorno's negative aesthetics or (for Baudrillard) in the smooth screens of Marshall McLuhan's global media village, for the morose delectation of the postphilosophical critic. Such ruins remain infinitely generative of novelty, it is true, but it is a sham novelty, deprived of efficacy, of leverage for the transformation of practices. Thought can no longer appeal to progress for its legitimacy, nor can it use its own creativity as a foundation, since it is produced immediately as commodity/sign in circulation. In a situation like this, the fragments of the Western tradition can be permuted interminably—as they are in advertising, popular film, and television—but they can no longer be shored, as Eliot had hoped, against our ruins. Lyotard's pathos, like Baudrillard's narcissistic self-indulgence, is Eliot's mythic faith turned sour, just as postmodernism, in this formulation, is modernism that has turned against its own constitutive premises without being able to find replacements for those premises. If we wish, we can even pinpoint the formal (though perhaps not the historical) moment at which this turn took place.

The singularity of the literary works that we might, somewhat ironically, call "prophetic" lies in their ability to define, prospectively, a field of literary production that was heretofore undefined, to chart or even create an undiscovered country. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is one such work, standing self-consciously at the end of the cultural moment that Henry Adams—standing just as self-consciously at the end of "virginal" nineteenth-century American literary, political, and scientific culture—had foreseen in The Education of Henry Adams: the tremendous surge of "dynamic" productivity that would emerge from the then-embryonic modernist impulse.^[3] Ellison offers a less symbolic and programmatic vision of the terrain ahead—the terrain that would become the landscape

we now call postmodernism—than Adams did for modernism, perhaps because the shift Ellison explicates is harder to objectify in metaphorical images than was Adam's. The shift from the cult of the Virgin to the cult of technology involves a fairly straightforward substitution of objects within a consistent structure of meaning, while the shift from modernism to postmodernism involves a far more thorough investigation of the very logic of substitution and structure.

In opening up the postmodern territory that has provided homesteads for so many writers and critics, Ellison has really opened up two territories, or a single one with two distinct topographies. The first territory we must map, however, is the frontier between modernism and post-modernism. But to speak of modernism as a mass movement, a cultural trend, a coherent critique, or even a brute thing is to risk falling into inconsequential abstraction; any term that can, in principle, embrace the conscious primitivism of Pablo Picasso's early paintings as well as the rococo overdetermination of James Joyce's last novel, or the monumental functionality of Mies van der Rohe's public buildings as well as the attenuated formalism of Anton Webern's string quartets, lacks the specificity that the critic requires in a definition that is to be used as an analytical lever. Thus we must extract a subset from the many conflicting determinations that are grouped under "modernism," a subset that will hopefully grant us the leverage we need to interrogate some of the cultural objects that fall under those determinations.

Recall the trajectory of Ellison's novel: a young African American man, driven away from the segregated college environment through which he sought to "shape the destiny of [his] people" (32), attempts to find other ways to shape that destiny, first through his own private labor, and then through public political activism.^[4] His efforts throughout the novel constitute a virtual compendium of modernist literary and political strategies: the search for individual "authenticity" against the indifference of mass production, figured in his disgust with college president Bledsoe's hypocritically conformist role-playing and then with the enforced alienation of industrial labor at Liberty Paints; faith in the power and historical validity of the progressive vanguard, in this case the socialist Brotherhood, and, through it, in the efficacy of his own oratory; the possibility of identification with the ethnic nationalism of Ras the Exhorter; bohemianism; and so on. These modernist strategies initially seem inevitable or unsurpassable to the narrator, however, because of his uneasy and incomplete acceptance of the central myth of cultural modernism: the assumption that there is necessarily an asymmetry between

modern and "primitive" cultures—that is, between a fragmented, specialist, or "disciplinary" culture like the capitalist U.S. and totalized, mythically integrated cultures like those studied by anthropologists. Bruno Latour describes this constitutive assumption, which he calls the "Great Divide," as follows:

[E]ven the most rationalist ethnographer is perfectly capable of bringing together in a single monograph the myths, ethnosciences, genealogies, political forms, techniques, religions, epics and rites of the people she is studying. . . . In works produced by anthropologists abroad, you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated. . . . [But] it is impossible to do with our own culture . . . what can be done elsewhere, with others. Why? Because we are modern. Our fabric is no longer seamless. Analytic continuity has become impossible. (Latour 7)^[5]

This asymmetry is both between primitive cultures and modern culture and within modern culture itself, between the incommensurable disciplines of science, politics, and language. Unlike primitive cultures, modern disciplinary culture cannot be treated as a totality . The other modernist strategies of Invisible Man, from bourgeois individualism to Leninism, are grounded in this double assumption, this myth of myths.

The cultural asymmetry underpinning the narrator's activism is figured in Jim Trueblood's narrative of incest with his daughter in chapter 2. Incest and its taboos are, of course, the central themes of modern anthropology and psychoanalysis in their analyses of tribal cultures, including the (re)constructed tribal culture that lies at the historical origin—and in the unconscious—of modern culture itself. Trueblood has formerly been tolerated by the African American college administrators as a vocalist who would "sing what the officials called 'their primitive spirituals'" (Ellison 46) for white patrons; he thus serves as an object lesson in the difference between African American culture, which the white officials and patrons view mythically as a whole that embraces both the "primitive" actions and superstitions of the uneducated farmers and the "progressive" aspirations of the college-educated class, and white American culture, which has lost this unity to become historically and technologically fragmentary or "disciplined." To this extent, modernism is white, and the efforts of nonwhites to make themselves modern are doomed to failure (as witness the Liberty Paints episode, 192–225). Trueblood's incest, therefore, does not appall the white patrons, but merely confirms and intensifies their feelings of asymmetrical difference or superiority, while "all of us at the college hated the black-belt people, the 'peasants'. . . . We were trying to lift them up and they,

like Trueblood, did everything it seemed to pull us down" (47). Indeed, it is for revealing Trueblood to the white patron Norton that the narrator is expelled. The narrator tries throughout much of the novel to distance himself from the atavistic "primitivism" that Trueblood represents, just as the narrator's white adversaries try to distance themselves from him; both sides use the same modernist strategies to construct and enforce this asymmetry.

All his avenues of action are ultimately blocked by the shortsighted and implicitly racist power lust—in other words, the constructed cultural asymmetry—of his supposed benefactors. His attempts to change American public life are doomed to failure by virtue of his wavering but still powerful commitment to modernism's myths. Out of this failure—or, more specifically, out of the "successful" public life that is contrasted to the failure of the narrator's modernist strategies in the course of the novel—appears the first, most readily recognizable form of the terrain that will become, in the decades that follow, postmodernism. Chapter 23 of Invisible Man (468–501) invents, for American fiction, the form of the floating signifier that will provide the fundamental structure of the most influential kind of postmodern writing, which I have called reflexive postmodernism to emphasize its focus on linguistic self-reference. Ellison first presents this kind of writing as a topographical form of public life.

This chapter finds the narrator, disgusted with the blindness of his socialist brethren toward their African American comrades, wandering through Harlem at night trying to avoid the hostile attention of African nationalist Ras the Exhorter's thugs by adopting a very simple disguise: dark glasses and a wide-brimmed hat (Ellison 471–72). Because of this cover, he is repeatedly mistaken for a man named Rinehart, who is simultaneously a pimp (472, 482–83), a confidence man (477), a numbers runner (480), a briber of police (481), and, paradoxically, a storefront preacher (485–86). The multiplicity of Rinehart's incarnations—his ability to "be both rind and heart," both surface and at least the illusion of depth—leads the narrator to an epiphany that opens the postmodern frontier by breaking with one half of the double modern asymmetry, the Great Divide within modern culture between bounded specializations and disciplines (while leaving the other half, the asymmetry between modern and primitive cultures, completely intact):

His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity, and Rine the rascal was at home. Perhaps only Rine the rascal was at home in it. . . . I

wanted to know Rinehart and yet, I thought, I'm upset because I know I don't have to know him, that simply becoming aware of his existence, being mistaken for him, is enough to convince me that Rinehart is real. (487)

Note the genitives: "His world" or the "world in which we lived," as opposed to another, less sophisticated or even "primitive" one that has emerged and retreated earlier in the novel. Rinehart's pure, fluid superficiality, his manipulation of signifying systems as disparate as gambling and gospel, reveals to the narrator the existence of a world alien to his own bounded and fragmentary world of clear historical meaning and straightforward humanitarian progress. This other world is not elsewhere, however; it is between, in the spaces that the narrator's modernist thought and politics have not infiltrated: the black market, underground society, the shifting economy of the street, anywhere that flows of money, signs, and desire generate fleeting new structures out of ephemeral values. This partial break with modernity is mediated, coterminous with the circulation of representations, but Rinehart's world of flux requires no referentiality, no use value, no depth of characterization or meaning; indeed, Rinehart does not actually appear as a character in the novel, only as an overdetermined signifier. Nevertheless, he is "real" in that his activity can be represented, surmised on the basis of the irreducibly contradictory determinations of his career.

Ellison's narrator, momentarily stunned by this revelation of an interstitial alternative world (and by the serene indifference of his supposed allies toward his situation and the situation of his people), tries to construct a plan that will take these developments into account. "There were no allies with whom we could join as equals; nor were there time or theorists available to work out an overall program of our own—although I felt that somewhere between Rinehart and invisibility there were great potentialities" (499). The narrator's "feeling" for these "potentialities" helps him to recognize the impasses into which his own modern commitments (to the universal brotherhood of man, to scientific rationality, to the party as vanguard representing the mass of authentic—i.e., laboring—individuals) and strategies have led him. To realize the "potentialities," he begins to act like Rinehart, like the "rascal" or traditional Trickster: he starts "yessing them" (502), manipulating appearances, signs, in order to confirm the Brotherhood's imaginary world in which the political avant-garde dictates the actions of the ignorant masses, a world that he knows bears no relation to the real situation of the inhabitants of Harlem. He works formally, ironically, as the Trickster does, but no one can gauge his irony because it has become coterminous with

his world: "An illusion was creating a counter-illusion" (504). Those illusory potentialities have also been realized, at least partially, in American fiction after Ellison, which has exploited Rinehart's gift for artifice, the self-conscious play of slipping signification that we might call the "Rinehart Effect" (on the model of illusory "special effects" in film rather than that of the material Coriolis effects in meteorology, for example) far beyond anything explicitly presented in Invisible Man .

For example, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, surely one of the high-water marks of literary postmodernism, is a triumph of pure formal artifice in its wholesale importation of literary criticism into the genre of the novel. The world-historical pretensions of its protagonist, Kinbote, are necessarily though minimally constrained by the very different contours of John Shade's autobiographical poem; in a simultaneous reductio ad absurdam and apotheosis of subjective criticism, Kinbote reads Shade's poem as a hermetic allegory of his own, perhaps imaginary, pseudo-Romanov experience. For the apparently incommensurable human experiences of the Russian revolution and middle-class America, Nabokov finds a purely formal common ground in art—specifically, in language—but then seals it off from all referentiality, not only by undermining the protagonist-critic's claim to literary and even psychological competence, but also by folding the book into itself structurally. For example, if one looks up the central mystery of the book, the missing Zemlyan Crown Jewels, in the index, one is sent to the entry on "Hiding Place," and from there one is sent to the entry on "potaynik, " and then on to "taynik": "Russ., secret place; see Crown Jewels" (Nabokov 206, 207, 211, 213). The referents for the words, like the referent for the novel itself, are missing; words refer to other words via the game of "word golf," an exhaustive demonstration of Saussure's linguistic insight. John Barth's texts further clarify and even magnify this tendency in American fiction; if in Nabokov's hands the Rinehart Effect becomes baroque, in Barth's it becomes rococo.^[6]

Along with Rinehart's formal or reflexive postmodernism, another postmodernism emerges from Invisible Man, but in a less obvious way, as a second topography that has been almost completely reduced to the first, self-reflexive terrain mapped by writers like Nabokov and Barth. This is the terrain I propose to call invisible postmodernism, or amodernism, to mark its furtive, almost imperceptible emergence from the same conditions that opened the frontier of postmodernism. As such, amodernism does not succeed postmodernism, but contests it throughout the postwar period. After his encounter with the signifiers that add

up to Rinehart, Ellison's narrator begins to make use of the Rinehart Effect, "yessing them" by telling his superiors (who have become his adversaries as well) what they want to hear. He marries the Brotherhood's emancipatory historical rhetoric to Rinehart's rhetoric of roles, allowing one to complete the other and thus produce a tidy linguistic totality that renounces all extratextual (i.e., material/political) effect. He can opt for this artificial Rinehart role only briefly, however, before the unarticulated and (to the Brotherhood) unintelligible demands of the people he thinks he represents erupt and destroy his symbolic world. The Harlem riot, through its victims, forces the narrator to recognize that "By pretending to agree I had indeed agreed, had made myself responsible for that huddled form lighted by flame and gunfire in the street, and all the others whom now the night was making ripe for death" (541). Rinehart is, after all, a confidence man who works with irony and lies, just as the Rinehart Effect, and the reflexive postmodernism based upon it, relies on this vertiginous, undecidable irony, this pretense of agreement that, in Greil Marcus's words, is "just one more way of not having to mean what you said."^[7] The Rinehart Effect is not revolutionary, but just business as usual under capitalism: caveat emptor, or never give a sucker an even break.

Carried along, without subjective intention, by the crowd of events, Ellison's narrator passes through the crystalline cityscape of Rinehart's reflexive postmodernism—as he has passed through the lofty but inhospitable mountains of mythic modernism—without stopping. He arrives, finally, in the liminal position of internal exile, under the basements of Harlem, where he lives off the status quo without contributing to it directly. This exile does not necessarily signify resignation or defeat, though it has been read that way; the narrator insists that he has not given up his radical desires, but rather has deferred them into a future that will allow them to be actualized:

In going underground, I whipped it all except the mind, the mind . And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals. Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge. . . . Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it. Perhaps that's my greatest social crime, I've overstayed my hibernation, since there's a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play. (Ellison 567–68)

The novel ends with this promise, which Nabokov, Barth, and other reflexive postmodernists can and will simulate interminably, but it is the

task of an as-yet-invisible postmodernism, of an amodernist literature and criticism, to make good on it.

What would it mean to make good on a promise like this one for a "plan of living"? Leaving aside the possibility that the narrator may in this instance be "yessing" the reader the way he "yessed" the Brotherhood—in other words, expanding the Rinehart Effect to encompass the entire book—it seems to me that there are two ways to fulfill this promise. The first I would call regressive, in that it would entail a retreat, not only from the historiolinguistic vertigo of reflexive postmodernism (the Rinehart Effect), but also from the impasse of modernist asymmetry (the Great Divide) that laid down the coordinates of that postmodernism. Among those who pursue this course, I would include Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and others who struggle to "complete" the project of modernity according to a communicative or systemic theory that preserves intact both aspects of the modern asymmetry: they advocate a social order premised on a vast extension of technological sophistication balanced by a vast reduction in subjective sophistication (particularly aesthetic and linguistic sophistication) that will ultimately revive a dangerously "premodern" form of social stratification.^[8] This way of making good would leave us in a situation no better than the status quo. The second way of fulfilling the promise of a "plan of living" I would call progressive, or amodern, in that it would require us to work through the impasses both of modernism and of postmodernism without accepting the finality of (post)modernist definitions.^[9] This means we can accept neither the constitutive asymmetry of modernism nor the partial restoration of symmetry in reflexive postmodernism; we must be willing to restore both of the symmetries, and in order to do that, we must find a point from which to apply force. Ellison's narrator finds such a point, a perspective from which he can restore the primitive/modern symmetry, just as he later uses Rinehart's perspective to restore the internal, disciplinary symmetry that modernism has denied.

The narrator initially shares with his nemesis, Bledsoe, a horror of Trueblood, who threatens "to pull us down" into the morass of primitive, premodern life (Ellison 47). Trueblood threatens to resituate the "modern" African Americans of the college on the "primitive" side of the Great Divide, the modern asymmetry that the narrator accepts, for the most part uncritically. The narrator is only fitfully committed to this asymmetry, however; in at least one scene—the yam interlude on the streets of Harlem—he breaks decisively with modernism and in so doing reveals the affirmative potentiality of amodernism. This scene occurs

just before the eviction scene, in which he discovers his hortatory vocation. In the yam he recognizes his own connection to the South—not to its racist, protomodern inequalities, but to the enduring agrarian culture of freed slaves that he had reductively identified with Trueblood's over-determined incest. He admits that this "primitive" culture contains "something we liked," which could, nevertheless, "cause us the greatest humiliation" (258) if revealed in a modern social setting. He fantasizes about accusing Bledsoe of atavistic "Field-Niggerism " (259), parallel to Trueblood's, in order to destroy Bledsoe's sham-modernist career. Then, reflecting on his own "primitive" taste for such a culturally marked object, he proclaims that "I yam what I am!" (260): he acknowledges the connection, not shamefully but joyfully, and breaks with the other half of the constitutive asymmetry, the asymmetry between his premodern communal culture and the modernism he adopted later.

This break, however, is almost immediately buried under the renewed modernism of the Brotherhood, which the narrator joins shortly after the eviction riot. As a socialist group, the Brotherhood is committed to the elimination of the capitalist division of labor, the internal fragmentation that constitutes one half of the modern myth, but the Brotherhood's commitment is based on the inexorable law of Marxist historical development, the "necessity of the historical situation" (Ellison 285), which reinscribes the other half of the myth: modernism's self-proclaimed break with its past. For the bulk of the book, the Brotherhood's historical theses determine the narrator's actions, reinstalling him in an asymmetrical, white-dominated world. The fact remains, however, that the symmetry between premodern and modern culture was restored, if only for a moment, in the narrator's affirmation.

Such an affirmation of connection, but not identity, with the totalized "primitive," or premodern, world provides us with a subjective precondition for invisible postmodernism, or amodernism, which would not. necessarily be a McLuhanesque "new primitivism." From the point of view of this precondition, the "Great Divide" of modernism's double asymmetry appears as a double bind that reflexive postmodernism cannot escape: either modernism really does represent an asymmetrical "advance" over all other cultural formations, in which case the couple modernism/postmodernism constitutes a totalization defined negatively by this very asymmetry and exclusion, or modernism's claim of asymmetry is a ruse that conceals a fundamental symmetry or continuity with the premodern, in which case that couple (modernism/postmodernism) constitutes a positive totalization, defined by its specific contingent features

just as "primitive" cultures are. I use the term totalization here in something like its Marxist sense; neither the arrogant blindness of the Brotherhood nor the imprecise refutations of postmodern anti-Marxists have exhausted the force of materialist analysis. The first case, (post)modernism as a negative totalization, is, in fact, the object of Fredric Jameson's far-reaching investigations culminating in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism .

In the conclusion to Postmodernism, Jameson distinguishes the categories of "totality" and "totalization" in order to insist on the continuing value of "totalization" as a critical operation: "if the word totality sometimes seems to suggest that some privileged bird's-eye view of the whole is available, which is also the Truth, then the project of totalization implies exactly the opposite and takes as its premise the impossibility for individual and biological human subjects to conceive of such a position, let alone to adopt or achieve it" (Jameson, Postmodernism 332).^[10] Totalization, Jameson continues, is merely an attempt to sum up, "to envelope and find a least common denominator for the twin human activities of perception and action." This definition of "totalization," borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre, provides the rationale for Jameson's critical project. Most theories of postmodernism (Lyotard's, for example) explicitly repudiate the category of totality (which Marx called the mode of production) and implicitly reject totalization as an attempt to derive or construct a totality from fragmentary language games. This rejection is a symptom of the disavowal of the very capitalist totality that drives (post) modernism. Jameson therefore attempts to totalize postmodernism, to forge a tendential totality out of the shards of contemporary culture in order to interrogate late capitalism, which underlies it.

Jameson's central project, the rehistoricization of a resolutely antihistorical moment, is laudable, and his rehabilitation of the prematurely abandoned categories of totality and totalization takes him a long way, but it also leads him (as it leads those antitotalizing theorists whom he interrogates) to reduce the multiplicity of postmodern aesthetic practices and to propose (explicitly and intentionally, where others work implicitly and unintentionally)^[11] exclusive criteria for postmodernism. These criteria are surprisingly similar to the criteria suggested by others, even though the analyses given surpass in complexity and explanatory force almost all of the competing analyses. What are the criteria that define postmodernism in Jameson's work? First, pastiche or satire that lacks the stable ironic perspective necessary to provoke indignation; second, a rigorous refusal to refer to or thematize anything other than the

simultaneous banality and impossibility of referring or thematizing; and third, collapse of the temporal into the spatial, and of the historical into the formal. In this way, Jameson enters the consensual academic discussion of postmodernism, even though he deploys these criteria to analyze the French New Novel, video art, and New Historicist literary criticism—no longer or not yet standard exempla of postmodern aesthetic production. Yet the criteria apply equally well to many more traditional, even canonical objects of literary study, like the writings of Nabokov and Barth. Both meet Jameson's criteria—as they fit the consensual criteria of most theories of postmodernism—rather well.

Despite the many specific disagreements that have marked the development of these theories of aesthetic and cultural postmodernism, their development has generally been contained within a horizon of consensus that has defined valid theories of postmodernism according to their deployment of methodological self-reflexivity, based (sometimes covertly) in the unconditional rejection of categories of totality or totalization—a rejection that acts as a negative totalization itself. A theory of postmodernism is deemed valid (i.e., acceptable into informed academic discussion) if it characterizes its object as a very particular kind of totality or process of totalization that is distinct from older forms—that is, as an antitotality. In positive terms, the dominant theories of postmodernism stress incommensurability and singularity against the notions of totality and totalization, which are equated with each other and with political totalitarianism. Paradoxically, this formal reflexivity requires an implicit totalization of the writing process itself, in that it requires the kind of circular foreclosure of reference we saw in Nabokov. It requires a totalization that admits of no thinkable or representable outside ("il n'y a pas de hors-texte"), and, despite its devotion to singularity and incommensurability, of no real difference inside. Difference is confined to the Saussurean manifold of negative definition, and its productivity is limited to the infinite proliferation of language. The dominant theories of postmodernism are dialectical, not in the transcendent Hegelian sense, nor in Jameson's asymptotic sense, but in the negative sense given the term by Adorno and Herbert Marcuse: postmodernism is a static contradiction (as opposed to Hegel's standing negation), a dialectic that cannot be rationally resolved, between whose antitheses all of society, including the critic of postmodernism, is (apparently) laid out.

Jameson's project is promising enough, however, to deserve broadening into areas of artistic and theoretical dissent. The most significant effect of the critical consensus on postmodernism, outside of particular

close readings of cultural artifacts, has been the exclusion from discussion of artworks and theories which differ from the dominant model. These alternative works and theories take two general forms, the modern and what I have called the amodern. The modern hostility to postmodernism deplores the hypertrophy of modernist techniques that has led to the liquefaction of modernist forms of resistance (critical irony, resistance to commodification); this account denies the assertion that postmodernism corresponds to the real and total commodification of modernist cultural practices—to Marcuse's "one-dimensionality"—in order to preserve a privileged space for political commitment and artistic contestation. This perspective includes not only aesthetic and political reactionaries like Karl Popper, who refuse the project of totalization outright, but also progressives like Habermas, who accept a limited totalization of "communicative rationality,"^[12] but insist that the resultant totality can be fine-tuned so that social justice prevails.

The amodernist alternative to (post)modernism, briefly, shares the modernist and postmodernist suspicion of representational art and politics, but rejects both the constitutive asymmetries of modernist myth-mongering and the postmodern abandonment of critique in the face of the procession of simulacra. Amodernism, I would argue, constitutes the approach to contemporary culture that can most effectively deploy in a positive manner the project of totalization that Jameson employs from a negative perspective. We still need to discover, however, the objective conditions that would be necessary and sufficient to found a critique of this case, in which (post)modernism appears as a positive process of totalization subject to a materialist critique. The critique of (post)modernism as a positive totalization requires two tools: first, a critical perspective from which the totalization can be undertaken, and second, a logic of relation that can "envelop" the manifold of particulars and enact the process of totalization. This is where Antonio Negri's theoretical insights become important. He suggests a strategy that can explicate the material conditions of our totalized (post)modern culture: an analysis of the real subsumption of human labor under capital that productively historicizes (post)modernism, as I will now outline.

In volume one of Capital, Marx distinguishes two moments of capitalist subsumption, the formal and the real. In the formal subsumption of labor, which dates from the Industrial Revolution, "capital subsumes the labor process as it finds it, that is to say, it takes over an existing labor process, developed by different and more archaic modes of production" (Marx, Capital 1: 1021). Labor production is coterminous with

human history and as such provides a point of perspective from which totalization can be undertaken, but capitalist structures of exploitation arise at a very specific point within that history. Existing labor processes, characteristic of "primitive," or premodern, cultures, are allowed to continue within the larger economic horizon of capital; they are merely encysted and rationalized, to the extent that their organization allows, by extending working hours or increasing production quotas to increase absolute surplus-value, the productive power of labor. In this way, a number of traditional processes survive the Industrial Revolution as vestiges of older orders, and with them survive the forms of subjectivity specific to those orders. According to Negri, the Romantics' "negation of the revolution of the Enlightenment and their affirmation of the new cultural identities that were to emerge during the course of the nineteenth century" register their recognition of "a period of crisis and of the subjection of society and work to capitalist domination" (Negri, Politics 201, 207). Anglo-European Romanticism elaborates its critique of formal subsumption through its hostility toward protomodern rationality and rationalization and toward the labor market's logic of the interchangeability of workers, as well as through its celebration of the productive power of the singular creator, the divine artist. From this point of view, modernism is merely the exhaustive elaboration of Romanticism's implicit credo.

Formal subsumption gives way to real subsumption; archaic labor processes are forced to conform to a "specifically capitalist mode of production " which "not only transforms the situations of the various agents of production, it also revolutionizes their actual mode of labor and the real nature of the labor process as a whole" (Marx, Capital 1: 1021). Through the rational division of labor and the application of technology—the practical embodiments of the internal "Great Divide" of modernism—the old labor processes are reconstructed in the image of capital for the extraction of relative surplus-value, the productive power of capital rather than labor. The worker no longer confronts her own alienated labor in the form of the commodity she has produced since she is no longer directly involved in the productive process, but stands to one side of it as an attentive guard. Labor time can no longer be the measure of value since it no longer correlates to value produced; productivity is dispersed instead throughout all the space and time of society. Exchange-value no longer measures use-value. Capital thus "presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth" (Marx, Grundrisse 706), and it is

precisely this contradiction that drives the postmodern crisis. The more labor is devalued, the more ruthless capital's logic of interchangeability becomes, until it reaches the threshold of perfect homogeneity: all workers become identical from the point of view of capital. This is the inevitable corollary of the Rinehart Effect's mediated break with modern disciplinary separation: in postmodernism, all singularity has been rationalized out of production, leaving a blank totality, not of immanence or of potential but of indifference. As a superficially antagonistic accommodation with the exclusionary, de-singularizing tendencies of modernism, reflexive postmodernism resembles Romanticism in that it "registers in real terms . . . what the romantics had documented in formal terms": the crisis of capitalist domination (Negri, Politics 207).

This interminable reflexivity is not the only response open to literary and critical practice in the period of real subsumption, as the final promise of Ellison's narrator perhaps demonstrates. Reflexive postmodernism represents only the most impoverished use of contemporary cultural innovation, just as Rinehart's protean black-marketeering represents only the most opportunistic use of the liminal spaces and hybrid ideas of this century. It clings to the capitalist axiomatic that constantly limits the explosive movement of production to forms that can be exploited for profit (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 244–53). The crisis in the law of value precipitates a crisis in the exchangist model of social valorization; since exchange-value can no longer measure use-value (if it ever could), new values must be found and a new model of production constructed. The segments of contemporary culture incapable of thinking outside the exchangist model react to this breakdown with reflexive postmodernism; they accept the crisis, but deny that a transformational critique can be carried on after it and that other values can (and will) be constructed. Lyotard, for example, repudiates the project of human emancipation, in part because of its relation to the bankrupt category of the social critic, of the intellectual as idealist:

The promise of emancipation was rekindled, championed and expounded by the great intellectual, that category born of the Enlightenment, defender of ideals and the republic. Intellectuals of today who have chosen to perpetuate this task in ways other than a minimal resistance to every totalitarianism, who have been imprudent enough to nominate the just cause in conflicts between ideas or powers—the likes of Chomsky, Negri, Sartre, Foucault—have been tragically deceived. The signs of the ideal are hazy. A war of liberation does not indicate that humanity is continuing to emancipate itself. (Lyotard, Postmodern Explained 96)

Ignoring the profound differences that separate the intellectual ideals of Chomsky and Sartre, on the one hand, from Foucault and Negri, on the other, Lyotard asserts that the only resistance left to us is "a minimal resistance to every totalitarianism," by which he apparently means an atomized, private resistance that is often directed as much against potential allies as it is against any form of aggregate or institutionalized domination.

In any event, the line of critical "imprudence" which he associates with Negri, Sartre, and Foucault will be of more use to us in the analyses that follow. For this line—the amodern heirs of Negri, Sartre, and Foucault—the crisis in the law of value means something else entirely: instead of critical impotence and the interminable procession of mediated simulacra, the crisis brings opportunity in "an epoch-making leap beyond everything that humanity has hitherto experienced" (Negri, Politics 203). It dramatizes the failure of the principles and practices upon which capital has based its domination: instrumental reason, normative subjective interchangeability, and dialectical resolution. To put it bluntly, capital needs labor production, at least in the form of consumers who will keep the process of exploitation running, but production does not necessarily need capital. Amodernism reveals the unresolvable antagonism between subjectivities and capital that capital has turned to its advantage through the dialectic, and this antagonism is capable of generating a new socius that dissolves the abstraction of labor into the singular power of new, amodern collectivities. Beyond the dialectic, which still governs postmodernism as it governed modernism, committed critique is once again possible, from the space-time of these new collectivities and the singularities of which they are composed.

The nonexistence of such collectivities is one of the fundamental assumptions of reflexive postmodernism, epitomized in Baudrillard's celebration of the "implosion of the social in the media" and the concomitant disappearance of the "masses" that political organizations claim to represent.^[13] This assumption ignores a great deal of evidence that confronts us, in a distorted and misrecognized form, in the media every day. The constriction of representational politics into the almost imperceptible space between the ideological positions of reactionary major parties (not only in the United States but throughout the industrialized world), one of the truisms of postmodern cynicism, is contested by new forms of social organization that emerge precisely at the geographical points where this constriction is most severe: the use of Western technology to strengthen anti-Western, fundamentalist revolutions in once

"pro-Western" Islamic states like Iran and Algeria; the rise of drug cartels, organized like multinational corporations, in regions of South America rendered politically unstable through American intelligence activity directed against earlier mass social movements that were hostile to American economic projects; the manipulation of the mass media by the Zapatistas in order to embarrass the Mexican government on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement takes effect; and, closer to home, the constitution of ethnic gangs as defenders against police brutality and purveyors of drugs within the ghettoes and barrios that form an internal Third World within the United States.^[14] If we look back to the seventies, we find the model of the Italian Autonomia movement—in which Negri was a leading participant—which provided a mass alternative to representational politics in the form of a systematic replacement of capitalist economic organization by worker self-management and the auto-reduction of market prices. Further back, we may consider as a shadowy precedent the Makhnovist anarchist movement that held the Ukraine for nearly three years against the bureaucratization of Soviet state capitalism.^[15] Such novel assemblages are often difficult to assess accurately because of their avoidance (or, alternatively, conscious manipulation) of the media, but this difficulty should not blind us to the real potentialities for nonrepresentational social reorganization that these collectivities reveal.

To make good on Ellison's promise of an amodern "plan of living," we must emerge from the internal exile to which the postmodern impasse has consigned us and articulate these collectivities that defy representation, these new Harlems occupying the edges of our social perceptions and the gaps between our political categories, in both senses of the word articulate: analyze them, criticize them, speak them within the space of language; but also extend, enact, and construct them within the social and material spaces that are irreducible to that space. This double project is what Gilles Deleuze and William S. Burroughs, in similar ways, undertake. As Deleuze argues, "Those who act and struggle are no longer represented, either by a group or a union that appropriates the right to stand as their conscience. Who speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity, even within the person who speaks and acts" (Deleuze and Foucault 206). Likewise, Burroughs insists that "despite disparate aims and personnel of its constituent members the underground is agreed on basic objectives. . . . We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems. The family unit and its cancerous expansion into tribes, countries, nations we will eradicate at its vegetable roots. We don't

want to hear any more family talk, mother talk, father talk, cop talk, priest talk, country talk or party talk. To put it country simple we have heard enough bullshit" (WB 139–40).

This emphasis on fragmentation implies a certain rigidity in modernist culture, a rigidity that defines each area as the province of one or another discipline and excludes the practitioners of other disciplines from it. Modernist culture operates by defining spaces, both in geographical and conceptual terms, and as such could be described as an architectonic form of culture. Michel Foucault gave the name "disciplinary society" to what we are calling modernist culture. This, too, would serve to distinguish modernism from premodern cultures, in which, Latour claims, "hybridization" (the invention of new composite objects and methods, whether technological, social, or aesthetic) is slowed because members of premodern cultures carefully think "through the close connections between the social and the natural order so that no dangerous hybrid will be introduced carelessly" (Latour 41). Modernism, on the other hand, conceals a vast proliferation of such hybrids under the cover of specialization and disciplinary fragmentation that obscures these "close connections between the social and the natural order" and abjures general discussion and oversight of the disavowed proliferation. In modernist culture, only specialists are qualified to pass judgment on the hybrids produced within their own particular discipline, which they must do while admitting their ignorance of the larger ramifications of those hybrids within other disciplines and in the culture at large. Hence dangerous hybrids proliferate, such as holes in the ozone layer, the result of unreflective reliance on technological "solutions" to "problems" of hygiene (aerosols used in deodorants and hair-sprays) and climate (Freon-based refrigeration and air conditioning), or the American health-care crisis, the result of high-tech medical progress combined with knee-jerk free-market ideology. The rigidity of disciplinary boundaries and the fragmentation that results have granted modernism an immense productive power that is undermined by an equally vast impotence, the loss of a perspective from which to consider the ramifications of its activities.^[16] It is this lost perspective, this totalizing impulse, that amodernism seeks to replace.

It should follow from this schematic presentation that reflexive post-modernism represents the auto-critique of, though not necessarily an escape from, modernism. This means that postmodernism accepts the fun-

damental premises of modernism, but radicalizes them further, and in so doing undermines the mythological edifice of modernism itself. Post-modernism perpetuates the ideology of the fragmentation of modern culture and its distance from traditional or primitive cultures, but criticizes the myths by which modernism hoped to reconcile itself to its self-imposed lack of unity. Thus it maintains much of the rigidity of architectonic modernism—indeed, in the cases of Nabokov, Barth, and others actually extends that rigidity—while simultaneously abandoning the pursuit of unification or of a perspective that drove modernism to adopt "grand narratives" of progress.

No doubt it is this rigidity of modernism and postmodernism that accounts for Gilles Deleuze's indifference to both terms. For Deleuze, "a society is something that never stops slipping away. . . . Society is something that leaks, financially, ideologically—there are points of leakage everywhere. Indeed, the problem for society is how to stop itself from leaking away" (Deleuze, "Intellectual and Politics" 21). This fluid idea of society and culture, among other aspects of his thought, has frustrated scholars who have tried to find a model of literary criticism in Deleuze's writings similar to the models they have found in the works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Both Derrida and Foucault, I would argue, take as objects of their analyses the rigid regularities of modern society. Derrida's work, if it may be described schematically and in general, is focused on the conceptual binarisms that constitute the tradition of European philosophy and, by extension, social organization; deconstruction as a critical activity operates through close attention to the points at which the rigidity of Western rationality reveals a paradoxical fragility, a susceptibility to reversal that is held in check not by impersonal and objective logic but by the capricious violence of domination. Not surprisingly, this work has given impetus to criticism that is concerned more with the discourses that grant structure and value to a conceptual field than to the material practices that are legitimated within such a field. Foucault, on the other hand, concentrates on the practices of domination that are imposed on material bodies in social spaces, practices which institute new conceptual arrangements that can erupt into discourse, and so the forms of criticism largely inspired by his work—the so-called New Historicism as well as Cultural Studies—have emphasized the collaboration between literary discourse and material practices of power.

Deleuze's work has not yet given rise to such a recognizable form of aesthetic criticism, and despite the influence he wields and the respect he

has inspired in France, he remains a kind of "invisible man" in Anglophone critical circles. Though Deleuze positions himself nearer to Foucault than to Derrida, he maintains his distance nonetheless: "Michel [Foucault] was always amazed by the fact that, despite all the powers, their underhandedness and their hypocrisy, we can still manage to resist. On the contrary, I am amazed by the fact that everything is leaking and the government manages to plug the leaks. In a sense, Michel and I addressed the same problem from opposite ends. . . . [F]or me society is a fluid—or even worse, a gas. For Michel it was an architecture" (Deleuze, "Intellectual and Politics" 21). This emphasis on the fluidity of society and of its (social, scientific, and aesthetic) productions has an important effect: it makes the articulation of a general, repeatable method of analysis not merely problematic (as it is in Derrida's work and, to a lesser extent, in Foucault's) but virtually impossible. Criticism becomes an activity akin to the "Ideal Game" of which Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sense: not only does difference in the form of chance intervene at specific moments defined by the game's rules, but also chance alters those very rules with every turn (Deleuze, Logic of Sense 58–65).

Deleuze rarely addresses himself explicitly to the problematic of modernism and postmodernism, though Negri attributes the most fruitful formulation of that problematic to him and Félix Guattari.^[17] Even so, there are moments scattered throughout Deleuze's body of work that, when brought together, constitute both a critique of modernism and an amodernist alternative to it. Let us begin our explication of this critical alternative by considering the following statement, from Anti-Oedipus:

We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. . . . We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately. (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 42)

At first glance, this would appear to be a critique of the modernist "mythical method," of a piece with Lyotard's postmodern denunciation of "grand narratives of legitimation," a repudiation of the nostalgia for originary unity that led Eliot to cherish the "fragments I have shored against my ruins" in the hope of reassembling them.

This characterization of the quotation would be adequate if the quotation stopped after the second sentence, but it does not. For in the third sentence Deleuze and Guattari insist that they do in fact "believe . . . in totalities" of the sort that Lyotard dismisses, even and especially if those totalities are "peripheral." What does this mean? It means, as the passage indicates, that totalities do exist, but not at a higher hierarchical level than that of the parts they purport to unify; totalities are produced immanently, as parts alongside the heterogeneous parts or fragments that constitute the range of disciplines, objects, and other hybrids invented under modernism. To return to the Sartrean vocabulary adopted earlier, we could say that what appear to be integrated totalities are really necessarily incomplete processes of totalization . Deleuze and Guattari use the term "peripheral" to emphasize both the epiphenomenality and the fragility of the processes of totalization that ripple through contemporary society. Peripheral totalizations are real without being either stable or necessary; they function as strategic or heuristic tools for the constitution of new forms of collectivity, in much the same way that "strategic essentialism" acts as a tool in cultural studies.

For Deleuze and Guattari, who have adamantly "remained Marxists" (Deleuze, Negotiations 171) when so many others (including Lyotard and Baudrillard) have abandoned the philosophy of praxis, there are actually two different forms of this peripheral process of totalization, the paranoid and the schizophrenic, which can be distinguished by their methods and ends. The paranoid model of totalization corresponds roughly to the Marxist concept of the specifically capitalist mode of production: it is a process of totalization that seeks to maintain the exclusionary rigidity of modernist disciplinary culture as a way of extracting surplus value, a totalization of the fetishized capitalist marketplace that is peripheral in the sense that it is not localizable in space and time but determines the distribution of space and time within capitalist society. The market, which, in the form of a circulation of abstract representations, has expanded (according to Baudrillard) to envelope art and even criticism, is perhaps the most tenacious and pernicious myth of modernism, the myth of a permanent yet flexible totality that is everywhere and nowhere. This paranoid totalization operates according to an "axiomatic," or open-ended set of ad hoc rules for exploitation, which is never fundamentally altered or reorganized, but is simply extended by addition when the rigidity of modernist culture threatens to block profit, according to the tendency, identified by Marx, for the rate of profit to fall within saturated markets.^[18] From this point of view, the successes of the

U.S. Civil Rights Movement in the sixties, for example, should be attributed not to a fundamental shift in social ethics, but rather to the need for relatively affluent new groups of consumers to prolong the postwar expansion of the American economy. This would explain why there have been real increases in African American income and educational/career access, which can be managed by the market, but little real decline in exclusionary or racist attitudes, which cannot be so managed.

The schizophrenic model of totalization is just as peripheral as the paranoid version, just as precariously situated, and likely to shift into the paranoid mode. It is a revolutionary mode of totalization, however, because it is conscious of itself as a process without end. It constantly seeks to liquefy the rigid boundaries between disciplines and specializations, to decode completely the overcoded flows of labor and profit that circulate in a restricted fashion throughout the capitalist socius. For example, to the binary, male-female model of human sexuality, which is an axiomatic that is simply extended and reinforced when homosexuality is added as a "lifestyle option," Deleuze and Guattari propose the model of "a thousand tiny sexes" whose very multiplicity and instability would make exploitation prohibitively difficult.^[19] The schizophrenic model seeks, not to maximize profit by minimizing change, but to maximize change, to push the flows that capitalism tries to manage to the point at which they overflow and make the extraction of profit and the exercise of control impossible. In this, schizophrenic totalization shares many features with Georges Bataille's conception of a "general economy" of excess and expenditure, a "primitive" model that evades the profit-driven subsumption of capital.^[20] Deleuzean schizophrenia pursues this process through the construction and dissemination of revolutionary mass fantasy, fantasy that provides points of accretion for novel kinds of social groups.

The theory of groups in Anti-Oedipus is based on Sartre's distinction between two kinds of human ensembles, the series and the group (or fused group ). The series is passive and determined in its internal relations by an outside force; Sartre's example is that of a set of people lining up at a bus stop to buy tickets and board, whose seriality is "produced in advance as the structure of some unknown group by the ticket machine attached to the bus stop" (Sartre 265). This means that an individual member of the series "actualises his being-outside-himself as a reality shared by several people and which already exists, and awaits him, by means of an inert practice, denoted by instrumentality, whose meaning is that it integrates him into an ordered multiplicity by assign

ing him a place in a prefabricated seriality" (Sartre 265). In other words, he enters into an already constituted ensemble marked by simple, mechanical repetition ("inert practice" or "instrumentality") whose place in the social organization is wholly determined by the constraints of that organization's structure and requirements ("a place in a prefabricated seriality"). This "inert gathering," Sartre claims, is "the basic type of sociality" (Sartre 348). Deleuze and Guattari's version of the series is the subjugated group, which is determined by the preexistent structures that the social order provides; it is predisposed to invest with desire "all of an existing social field, including the latter's most repressive forms" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 30). In this sense, a group remains subjugated even when seizing power if "this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production . . .: the subordination to a socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom; the effusion of anti-production and death-carrying elements within the system, which feels and pretends to be all the more immortal; the phenomenon of group 'superegoization,' narcissism, and hierarchy—the mechanisms for the repression of desire" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 348). We could speak here of ideology as one of the complex forms of investment or fantasy produced by the social system, or "socius," for the purposes of its own reproduction (for the socius is itself an aggregate form of desire), but we could speak equally well of modernist myth, inasmuch as it is presented simultaneously as the permanent ("immortal") base of value and as the legislating superego for the subjugated members of the group.

The alternative to this seriality, in Sartre's terminology, is the group in fusion or fused group . Such groups are ensembles that are "constituted by the liquidation of an inert seriality under the pressure of definite material circumstances, in so far as particular practico-inert structures of the environment were synthetically united to designate it, that is to say, in so far as its practice was inscribed in things as an inert idea" (Sartre 361). A fused group forms when a series is dissolved by the force of its collision with threatening material circumstances—the products of other series—that create the group as their object. Like the subject in Being and Nothingness, the fused group is produced through the look of the Other, but as Jameson notes, the Other in this case is no longer simply the category of objective exteriority but is embodied in the other individual members of the group: "the group no longer has to depend on the look of the outsider or enemy; a structure has been evolved such that

the group carries its source of being within itself" (Jameson, Marxism and Form 253). The external determination of the series, its unification around an inert and instrumental appendage of the constituted social order, is displaced inward and then reprojected outward toward some material locus that signifies both the danger the group faces and its opportunity to protect itself, as in the case of the storming of the Bastille by the people of Paris during the French Revolution (Sartre 351–63).

The position of Sartre's fused group is held in Anti-Oedipus by the subject-group, which is distinct from the subjugated group. When confronted by the repressive fantasies provided by the socius or by subjugated groups, the subject-group responds by "launch[ing] a counter-investment whereby revolutionary desire is plugged into the existing social field as a source of energy" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 30).^[21] The existing field is not affirmed, as it is by subjugated groups, but used as a negative base to impel the invention of other structures. "[It] is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without hierarchy or a group superego" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 348–349).^[22] In other words, the subject-group produces investments that are actively hostile to the rigid structures of the socius. These investments depend not on a reflective consciousness, as they do in Sartre's phenomenological formulation, but on the impersonal connections of desire. Some of these investments take the form of fantasies, but unlike modernist myths, subject-group fantasies are "always mortal," in constant flux, and are incapable of instituting a permanent and restrictive Law. Such fantasies embody what Deleuze will later, in Cinema -2, call "the powers of the false."

Deleuze and Guattari emphasize Sartre's key point, which is that the displacement/projection of group determination is not objective but fantasmatic: the Bastille was not simply an objective threat (of military retribution) and promise (of defensive self-armament) to Parisians, and the production of a subject-group through its focus on the Bastille was not a rational and conscious decision made by the heretofore serialized individuals who would make up the group. The Bastille served as a mirror in which the members of the series could see projected their own fears and desires, but it was a mirror that operated at the level of what Jacques Lacan would

call the "imaginary," at the level of fantasy, and it is through fantasy that they were fused. The same thing is true of the bus passengers, but their relation is planned and preestablished, not by themselves, but by the structure of the institution into which they enter. Their seriality, in relation to the transit authority, is permanent and indifferent; they are merely generic "passengers." This is the point that Deleuze and Guattari import into Anti-Oedipus and their other works: the investment of desire through fantasy can remain enmeshed in institutionalized, serialized ideology, but it can also itself produce group formations that are hostile (though not necessarily opposed, in the strict dialectical sense) to the already given relations of production, class, and subjectivity without necessarily presenting themselves as permanent replacements for those relations. In other words, from this perspective we see that Lacan's psychoanalytic imaginary operates through a fundamental process of misrecognition, but this misrecognition is itself normative, ideological, and mediated by the linguistic and objective category of the Other that produces the subject as an aftereffect. Deleuze and Guattari theorize instead an unmediated desire, free of lack and indifferent to the signifier, that flows as much through institutions and social movements as through Oedipal conflict.

These group fantasies are a specific form of what Deleuze called "simulacra" in the early essay "Plato and the Simulacrum" (Deleuze, Logic of Sense 253–66). Deleuze's primary intention in this essay is to distinguish the Platonic doctrine of the well-founded copy from the sophistic simulacrum. According to Deleuze, Plato calls the image of the Idea of Beauty in the soul of the true lover a copy of the Idea, in that it constantly testifies to the primacy of its origin in that Idea: the true lover loves that image in the loved object that resembles the Idea of Beauty. The false lover has no such image in her/his soul, and therefore cannot really love; the false lover simulates love, in that s/he bears an image that appears to manifest the love of Beauty inspired by its Idea, but has no internal relation to it. In the true lover, the copy-image resembles and preserves the Idea, while in the false lover there is no resemblance whatsoever, but merely an aggression toward the Idea. The logic of the simulacrum does not invert the relation between original and copy, thus making the copy primary, as Derrida argues, but rather inverts or suspends the judgment between copy and simulacrum that validates the former and condemns the latter.^[23] The temporary, peripheral totalizations of subject-group fantasy are just such simulacra, which make no appeal to a transcendent Idea but instead function within a plane of immanence. Totalization is an open-ended process rather than a static entity.

The importance of art and literature in such a process of fantasmatic or simulacral invention is decisive: an aesthetic object functions for Deleuze and Guattari not only as an heirloom that bears witness to the historic values of a cultural tradition—that is, as a "document of civilization which is . . . at the same time a document of barbarism" (Benjamin 256)—but also as an intensifier of the decoding process that constitutes schizophrenic totalization. In many cases this intensified decoding participates in the critical revelation of ideological artifice that embraces strategies as diverse as Viktor Shklovsky's analysis of defamiliarization, Bertolt Brecht's "epic theater" of alienation, and Derrida's destructuring of metaphysical oppositions. More powerful artworks, like those on which Deleuze often focuses, can actually provide fantasmatic alternatives to the constituted socius that can inspire revolutionary subject-groups capable of undertaking the transformation of material practices. The relation of artworks and subject-groups is akin to the relation of theory and practice, as Deleuze and Foucault have displaced it. "At one time, practice was considered an application of theory, a consequence," while at others "it was thought to inspire theory, to be indispensable for the creation of future theoretical forms." For Deleuze and Foucault, however, the relation is different:

On one side, a theory is always local and related to a limited field, and it is applied in another sphere, more or less distant from it. The relationship which holds in the application of a theory is never one of resemblance. Moreover, from the moment a theory moves into its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles . . . which require its relay by another type of discourse. . . . Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practical point to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall. (Deleuze and Foucault 205–6)

If the obstacle or wall, from the point of view of postmodernism, is the absence of legitimating narratives (according to Lyotard) or the disappearance of any group that could act as Marx's "subject of history" (according to Baudrillard), then Deleuze's (and Guattari's) solution lies in the potentiality of art, on an equal footing with philosophy and science, to produce new social subject-groups: "Art . . . must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people. The moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims 'There have never been people here', the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily politi-

cal art must contribute" (Deleuze, Cinema -2 217). Art provides flexible, local micronarratives, rather than a master narrative, of the liberation of desire. The proclamation "There have never been people here," which catalyzes the invention of art and consequently of a people, comes not only from the master and colonizer, but also from the postmodern critic: Baudrillard's thesis of the "implosion of the social in the media" abets this consolidation of power even as it claims to analyze it.

Deleuze's theory of forms of art that "contribut[e] to the invention of a people" in cinematic, plastic, and literary terms is fundamentally a theory of fiction or fabulation.^[24] In Cinema -.2: The Time-Image, he elaborates on the "powers of the false" that he locates in the postwar cinema. Classical cinema, like classical literature, depends on organic narration: "Organic narration consists of the development of sensory-motor schemata as a result of which the characters react to situations or act in such a way as to disclose the situation. This is a truthful narration in the sense that it claims to be true, even in fiction. . . . Truthful narration is developed organically, according to legal connections in space and chronological connections in time. . . . [N]arration implies an inquiry or testimonies which connect it to the true . . . [and it] always refers to a system of judgement " (Deleuze, Cinema -2 127, 133). This system of judgment is fundamentally the same as Plato's judgment against simulacra: truthful narration links events deterministically, according to resemblance and exclusion. Time, in this form of narration, is represented indirectly, through the movement of subjects in action; thus it is inferred from the transformation of space.

In the "crystalline narration" of postwar literature and cinema, on the other hand, the sensory-motor schemata—the identifications of subjects with actions on the screen or in the text—collapse into representations of images not linked by subjective action and give way to nonlocal relations that present direct, subjectless images of time, from which the active movements themselves now derive. Narration no longer "claims to be true," but rather "becomes fundamentally falsifying": "Falsifying narration, by contrast, frees itself from this system [of judgment]; it shatters the system of judgements because the power of the false (not error or doubt) affects the investigator and witness as much as the person presumed guilty. . . . Narration is constantly being completely modified, in each of its episodes, not according to subjective variations, but as a consequence of disconnected places and de-chronologized moments" (Deleuze, Cinema -2 133). It is not simply a matter of the narrator's unreliability, which has always depended upon an implied norm of

narrative reliability, but of the problematization of narration itself. Traditional truthful narration, whether fictional or historical, insists on what G. W. Leibniz called "compossibility," the creation of simple and consistent story lines through the exclusion of incompatible alternatives. As the sinologist in Jorge Luis Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths" says, "In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others" (Borges 98). For Deleuze, the "power of the false . . . replaces and supersedes the form of the true, because it poses the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the co-existence of not-necessarily true pasts. Crystalline description was already reaching the indiscernibitity of the real and the imaginary, but the falsifying narration which corresponds to it goes a step further and poses inexplicable differences to the present and alternatives which are undecidable between true and false to the past" (Deleuze, Cinema -2 131). His model of fiction demands a subject who does not exclude alternatives but rather "chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times" (Borges 98). Narration is freed from the despotism of compossibility and multiplied, producing a fertile network of potential trajectories through time.

Fiction is freed from the rigidity of its determinants and becomes something akin to improvisational jazz. The improviser chooses not only the present note to play, but the imaginary structure out of which it would have come and into which it will flow: "If I play a C and have it in my mind as the tonic, that's what it will become. If I want it to be a minor third or a major seventh that had a tendency to resolve upward, then the quality of the note will change."^[25] Neither the structure of the past nor the structure of the future is given in advance; either can be manipulated in the present to produce different states of affairs. This is the role that artworks can play in the present, the role of fantasmatic structures that alter the direction and speed of the present moment by altering the past trajectory on which the present would have to travel. This multiplication of narrative lines and suspension of the unifying horizons of subjective consciousness and formal closure cannot be reduced to the superficial fragmentation of modernist style. Even collage, whether visual or literary, constitutes a higher-order project of unity that Deleuze, like Adorno, recognizes in modernist techniques: "the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity

continues its spiritual labor. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus" (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 6). The goal, then, is not permanent escape from unity or from closure, but the construction of strategic false unity, fantasmatic totalization, that can provide a focus and a material form for investments of desire that, in pursuing their own ends, also transform the socius. The purpose of art, for Deleuze, is to enable us "To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I" (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 3). This is also the purpose of amodernism: to further the production of subject-groups that can extend the differences that already fissure the capitalist socius into irreparable cracks. Such cracks are already the objects of William S. Burroughs's analyses in his first novels, Junky and Queer .