"Translator's Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy" by Brian Massumi
Excerpts from his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand
Plateaus (1980, trans. 1987)
"State Philosophy" is another word for the representational thinking that
has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered an
at least momentary setback during the last quarter century at the hands
of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and poststructuralist theory generally....The
modus operandi is negation: x=x=not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice,
and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order,
of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the state.
The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted
in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the
University of Berlin, which was to become the model for higher learning
throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by
Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher)
was the "spiritual and moral training of the nation," to be achieved by
"deriving everything from an organic principle" (truth), by "relating everything
to an ideal" (justice), and "by unifying this principle and this ideal
in a single Idea" (the State). The end product would be "a fully legitimized
subject of knowledge and society" [1] -- each mind
an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of
the State. Prussian mind-meld.[2] More insidious
than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government
(the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role
in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that
"properly spiritual absolute State" endlessly reproduced and disseminated
at every level of the social fabric. Deconstruction-influenced feminists
such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray have attacked it under the name
"phallogocentrism" (what the most privileged model of rocklike identity
is goes without saying). In the introduction to A thousand Plateaus,
Deleuze and Guattari describe it as the "Arborescent model" of thought
(the proudly erect tree under whose spreading boughs latter-day Platos
conduct their class).
[1] Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 32-33. [2] Jurgen Habermas's notion of "consensus" is the updated, late-modern version. |
These excerpts are part of the History of English Studies Page (Rita Raley).