THE FUTURE OF UTOPIA

GREGORY FLAXMAN

There is hope, but not for us.

Franz Kafka

Part I
However we traditionally define the figure of the intellectual, and
god only knows how many ways this has been done, it seems that the
intellectual today is defined primarily by virtue of discouragement.
The reasons for this discouragement are, no doubt, the subject of a
number of the essays collected in this journal, but I want to begin here
by remarking on the condition itselfon what it means not just for
anyone, but for the intellectual, to have lost hope. The quietly
devastating fact, so widespread that it often goes unspoken, is that we
can no longer muster the peculiar optimism with which the intellectual
traditionally laid claim to another, different, or better world. As
Frederic Jameson writes in his recent book on science fiction, the most
crippling aspect of intellectual existence today is that the historic
alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible,
and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone
practically available (xii). Indeed, our cultural affinity for science
fiction narratives in which humanity capitulates to vast extraterrestrial
occupations seems, finally, to have been displaced by the sad revelation
that we dont need any aliens to render our resistance futilethat we
can no longer imagine a future that differs from our present.
Hence, the title of this essay should already suggest the troubles of
the intellectual, no less the troubling paradox we now confront, for the
intellectual today grapples with the loss of that very aptitude on which
hope rests. Traditionally, the power of utopia constitutes one of the
most enduring means of intellectual critique, since the capacity to
imagine another place (topos), however different or because it is different
(utopos), conditioned the means to intervene in the present, in the here

symploke

Vol. 14, Nos. 1-2 (2006) ISSN 1069-0697, 197-215.

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and now. Far from being one narrative among others, then, utopia
historically corresponds to something like our faculty of political
imagination, but what happens when we can no longer invoke that
faculty, when the trope of political hope is no longer available?
Ironically, this is precisely the kind of bleak moment when we would be
inclined to invoke utopia in order to conjure a hope for the future from
the ashes of our despairexcept for the fact that what makes this
moment so depressing in the first place is that we no longer have
recourse to utopianism. Whereas utopia traditionally concerned the
fabulation of another world, we seem to have reached a point where or
when we can no longer imagine the radical transformation of our own
circumstances without a paroxysm of self-loathing, as though we should
all know better by now than to indulge in impossible dreams.
Of course, weve all heard the admonishments against utopiaget
over your far-flung hopes, stop fantasizing about a better world, and
above all give up on all that Marxist blather . . .but rather than
internalize them, we could just as well take them as the inducement for
a reckoning with utopia itself. If we have lost the utopian function of
criticism,1 as Hayden White has recently argued, how can we grasp
this loss, and how can we address it? Is it possible to resuscitate the
figure of the utopian intellectual? These are daunting questions, but I
want to suggest that the constituents of a response have been rehearsed
by a previous generation for whom the problems of the utopian
intellectual already loomed large. We might even go so far as to
suggest that our discouragement represents the recognition of a state of
affairs that has been preparing itself for some time but that we are only
now able or willing to acknowledge. Hence, this essay revolves around
a conversation about the fate of the intellectual which brought
together Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, both specifically and more
generally, in the wake of the events of May 1968. Unlike many of their
contemporaries, for whom these events were the source of profound
promise and finally utter disappointment, Foucault and Deleuze drew
upon this episode to extract a particular understanding, even a lesson,
about the contemporary intellectual. Thus, under the auspices of LArc,
these two thinkers sat down in 1972 to discuss a new relationship
between theory and practice that each found so striking in the others
work. The resulting dialogue was first published in the journal under
the title Intellectuals and Power, but in a sense the conversation never
1 This suggestion was aired in a public lecture given at the University of North
Carolina in 2005. Notably, White intended his diagnosis to reflect the current
apotheosis of the social sciences, which rely for the most part on statistical
mechanisms, and the concomitant diminishment of the human sciences, which
traditionally rely on more narrative means. But this division equally applies to the
intellectual, since this figure, once firmly located in the human sciences and asserting
his or her force in the name of humanism, has been increasingly supplanted by the
expertise of the social scientists or specialist.

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really ended, since both continued to return to the same themesthe

emergence of the intellectual in modernity, the intellectuals subsequent
efflorescence as a Marxist figure, and finally the fate of this
revolutionary lineagein subsequent writings and interviews.
For a long period, the left intellectual spoke, and was
acknowledged the right of speaking, in the capacity of master of truth
and justice, Foucault once remarked, but both he and Deleuze contend
that this promise has been gradually rescinded (2000, 126). It seems to
me that the political involvement of the intellectual was traditionally the
product of two different aspects of his activity, Foucault explains at the
outset of the dialogue: his position as an intellectual in bourgeois
society, in the system of capitalist production and within the ideology it
produces and imposes . . . and his proper discourse to the extent that it
revealed a particular truth, that it disclosed political relationships where
they were unsuspected (1980, 207). Notably, these aspects of the
intellectual serve to locate our sense of the epistemic shift in which this
figure has been caught. In the most recent upheaval, Foucault says,
referring to May 68, the intellectual discovered that the masses no
longer need him to gain knowledge (126). In other words, where once
the intellectual served the mysterious, prophetic, and utopian function
of mediating between political conditions and the desires of the masses,
he or she can claim no such raison dtre today, when these operations
are neither necessary nor possible. What has happened?
In the first place, Foucault suggests that where once the
intellectuals function relied on the conviction that the ignorant or
ideologically blinded masses needed to be informed, the intellectual has
discovered that the masses no longer need him [the intellectual] to
gain knowledge; they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know
far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing
themselves (207). In the second place, and perhaps even more
devastating in this context of our discussion, Deleuze suggests that
where once the intellectuals function also presumed that the masses
needed to be represented as such, as a whole, the intellectual has
discovered that the contrivance of a grand, totalizing imagine (the
people) is ultimately impossible. These twin acknowledgements form
the groundwork for the problem with which we must grapple. In the
broad sweep of their separate oeuvres, it could be said that a kind of
tacit partition characterizes the conversation in which these two
thinkers figuratively participate. While Foucault sought to sketch the
genealogy that brought the intellectual to this problematic impasse,
Deleuze sought to consider the means with which the intellectual could
create a new line of flight outside this impasse. Indeed, the spheres of
Foucaults historical analysis and Deleuzes speculative analysis merge
in the conditions of our current crisis, namely, the foreclosure of utopia
and the desacralization the intellectual. Let us imagine these

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tendencies as if they formed two panels of a diptych that, when brought

together, resonate to form a single trajectory leading from the
emergence of the utopia intellectual to its current demise and, finally, to
revaluation of both utopianism and the intellectual.

Part II
In light of the hopelessness that we have described, we might begin
a consideration of the utopian intellectual by suggesting that what this
figure has lost, and what it formerly possessed, was a well nigh
religious status. In other words, if we are to understand the demise of
the utopian intellectual in terms of a kind of desacralization, then we
should grasp the consecration of the intellectualthe process whereby
this figure was anointed with certain powers and the claim to a
particular privilege. At first glance this analysis is apt to seem
counterintuitive, since we tend to associate the intellectual with the
ascendance of an enlightened modernity, with courageous attacks on
religious suspicions, and finally with the displacement divine authority
onto secular institutions. My point here, however, is that we should
equally understand that even the most secular and leftists instances of
the intellectual, including the Marxist intellectual, were beholden to a
religious lineage from which this figure emerged.2 In The Formation
of the Intellectuals, for instance, Antonio Gramsci insists that the
intellectual was largely indebted to the enduring status of the
ecclesiastics, who for a long time (for a whole phase of history, which is
partly characterized by this very monopoly) held a monopoly on a
number of important services: religious ideology, that is the philosophy
and science of the age, together with schools, education, morality,
justice, charity, good works, etc. (2000, 302). When Gramsci describes
the gradual transposition of the intellectual from religious to secular
organizations, he notes that in romance languages this secular type was
characterized by the word chierco, which denoted both a clerk and a
cleric, both a secular and a religious figure (303).3
Like their predecessors, then, modern intellectuals developed a
noblesse de robe, drawing together around schools and domains of
knowledge that were in themselves utopian but that also projected vast
utopias. Both religious and secular intellectuals were traditionally
identified with an organization set apart from the society at large; the
monastery that had protected the literate and governed the
2 It is not incidental that Sir Thomas More, who effectively invented the term
utopia, was himself posthumously beatified by Pope Leo XIII.
3 As Gramsci explains, Thus we find the formation of the noblesse de robe, with
its many privileges, a stratum of administrators, etc., scholars and scientists, theorists,
non-ecclesiastical philosophers, etc.

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reproduction of texts gave way to modern institutions (libraries,

universities, societies, etc.) which, in their own ways, were no less
cloistered. As Gramsci notes, The whole idealist philosophy can easily
be connected with the position assumed by the social complex of the
intellectual and can be defined as the expression of that social utopia by
which the intellectuals think of themselves as independent,
autonomous, endowed with a character of their own (303). Hence,
while the modern intellectual undoubtedly represents a transformation
of the antecedent, ecclesiastical authority, vestiges of the same
esteemthat of a privileged relationship to knowledge and a pretense
of autonomyendowed the modern intellectual just as it had the priest.
Inasmuch as the intellectual was nurtured (or harbored) in sacred and
utopian communities, his or her modern emergence did not prevent the
continued bestowal of a kind of mystification, as if this figure retained a
particular qualitylet us say, aurathat would become apparent
precisely in a secular context.4
It is in this regard that Foucault, in trying to explain the power of
the traditional intellectual, refers to this figure as the eternal
rhapsodist, for the intellectual was capable of expressing something
and of providing certain signifiers that, like a sacred text, pointed
beyond a given moment of articulation or even subject of enunciation. If
the intellectual par excellence used to be the writer, as Foucault
explains, this is because the act of writing became the modern means of
baptizing new possibilities: the writer was counterposed to those
intellectuals who were merely competent instances in the service of state
or capitaltechnicians, magistrates, teachers (2000, 129). Thus, as we
have already begun to grasp, the intellectual was endowed with a
strange kind of singularity: his or her esteem relied at one and the
same time on the principle of scarcity and uniqueness (not everyone
could be an intellectual, who was special) and the principle of
representation and universality (the genius of the intellectual lay in
becoming the voice of the people). The intellectual saw more clearly,
felt more deeply, but in so doing this figure intuited truths that placed
him or her in a position to become the voice for the people.
As the repository and disseminator of values and significations in
which all can recognize themselves, the secular intellectualthe
writerwas capable of achieving a universal significance, which is to
say, an historically particular relationship to the concept of the universal
(128). It is possible to suppose that the universal intellectual, as he
functioned in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was in fact
derived from a quite specific historical figure, Foucault suggests, since
4 Of course, most will know aura as the term that Walter Benjamin uses to
characterize the quality of art which modernity, and especially the means of
mechanical reproduction, extinguishes. But we might also use the term here to
describe the artist who likewise suffers a kind of descralization.

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the intellectual confronted power, despotism, and the abuses and

arrogance of wealth by appealing to the universality of justice and the
equity of an ideal law (128). Thus, Foucault traces the traditional
intellectual back to the great political struggles of the eighteenth
century, which represented the formative age of modern law and the
particular moment when it became possible to invoke the universal
(All men). In this vein, we can locate the emergence of the leftist
intellectual in the historical personage of the jurist, for the latter was
particularly well positioned to address the problems of lawand, more
generally, of reasonthat historically befell the new age of
constitutions, of legal pacts, and above all, of rights which we identify
with the secular or capitalist nation-state. Indeed, the law forms the
primary point of reference for the category of the universal intellectual,
which will include not only actual jurists and quasi-litigators, such as
scholars and philosophers, but also the growing ranks of writers.
Hence, even as Foucault mentions Voltaire as an early paragon of this
intellectual school drawn from the model of the jurist or notable, the
development of this universal intellectual, which refers to the
political and not the sociological sense of the word, embraces an
increasingly wide range of authors (128).
As we have already seen, his individualization anointed the
intellectual qua author with a particular power, for even as writing
characterized an increasingly dense legal terrain defined by ownership,
by copyright, etc., writing lent itself to a particular kind of sacralization
that permitted the intellectual to transcend his or her own conditions of
legal possibility. Thus, for instance, at the same time that the
intellectuals interventions were made possible by the age of law and
rights, he or she could appeal to values that exceeded any such
codifications. As Foucault explains, the emergence of the author
constitutes a privileged moment of individualization in the history of
ideas, knowledge, and literature, or in the history of philosophy and
science (1984, 115). Surely this is why so many identify the Dreyfus
affair as the signatory event of the European intellectual.5 The
characteristics that we associate with the great intellectual, especially the
acute sense of reason and an imperturbable sense of justice, were
mobilized by the Dreyfus Affair because the latter was essentially
5 The more specific history of the American and the Russian intellectual would
have to be treated separately, since the latter seems almost to skip the legalistic phase
whereas the former seems never to have moved beyond the legalistic phase. Indeed,
the American model of the universal intellectual remains, however romantically,
determined by the figure of the juristnot only in terms of the legacy of a certain
mode of jurisprudence associated with the pragmatism of Oliver Wendell Holmes but,
also, in terms of the hope with which the last century invested the law and the
lawyer. It could well be argued that the great American intellectuals of the last
century were lawyers and, more than that, fictionalized lawyersClarence Darrow
and Addicus Finch.

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structured as a law case that made possible a mode of legal appeal. As

Pierre Bourdieu declared, the arrest and imprisonment of Alfred
Dreyfus, an obscure Jewish officer in the French army who was accused
of treason, galvanized a number of writers, artists, and others to
intervene in political life as intellectuals, meaning with a specific
authority founded on their belonging to the relatively autonomous
world of art, science and literature, and on all the values associated with
that autonomydisinterestedness, expertise, etc. (656).6
Of course, this appeal will be forever associated with the novelist
Emile Zola, who responded to the young lieutenants circumstances by
publishing a denunciation of the army cover-up that led to his
imprisonment. In reaction to the armys charges, Zola wrote an open
letter to the president of the republic, which he published in Le Figaro
under the famous title Jaccuse . . . ! In effect, he responded to legal
circumstances by recoursing to a tradition of right and to an imagination
of truth and justice that had been abused but that was nevertheless the
object of longing in what he called freedom loving France of the rights
of man (43). As he explained,
Dare to tell the truth, as I have pledged to tell it, in full, since the
normal channels of justice have failed to do so. My duty is to
speak out; I do not wish to be an accomplice in this travesty.
My nights would otherwise be haunted by the specter of the
innocent man, far away, suffering the most horrible of tortures
for a crime he did not commit. (123)

Both Zolas actions and their repercussions (he was found guilty of
libeling the army, sentenced to prison, but fled to England until the
sentence was eventually commuted) have defined him as the great
modern intellectual whose public, oppositional stance derives from an
inextinguishable idealism. As Foucault writes, Zola remains the
universal intellectual, bearer of law and militant of equity (2000,
129). In other words, Zola recapitulates the very constituents of the
traditional intellectual that we have endeavored to analyze to this
pointthe representative of the universal, the juridical figure who
appeals to a higher law. The dynamic of this intellectual consisted in
critiquing the very conditions of universalism and jurisprudence that
had made the intellectual as such possiblethough, in most cases, in
the name of a higher law or a more equitable system of judgment.
The universal and utopian position which the intellectual adopted,
6 As Bourdieu explains, Intellectuals are paradoxical beings who cannot be
thought of as such as long as they are apprehended through the obligatory alternative
between autonomy and commitment, between pure culture and politics. This is
because intellectuals are constituted, historically, in and through their overcoming of
this opposition (656).

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drawing upon the force of the people, likewise conditioned his or her
capacity to intervene in the present on behalf of a kind of
unimpeachable justice. Inasmuch as this figure drew strength from the
people, even if the people remained a utopian notion, the intellectual
stood as the representative of transcendent concepts which he posed
against real inequalities in the political, social, and economic domain.
The intellectual was heard, and purported to make himself heard, as
the spokesman of the universal, Foucault writes. To be an intellectual
meant something like being the consciousness/conscience of us all
(126).

Part III
Insofar as we have sought to trace the utopian intellectual from its
ecclesiastical type to its universal one, it remains for us to understand
the logical extension of this trajectory into its revolutionary efflorescence.
Indeed, the apotheosis of the utopian intellectual in this guise is born
out in the history of Marxism, especially if we begin from the point of
considering the dilemma, at once practical and theoretical, that existed
in Marxism itself as a mode of representationthe dilemma of
representing the masses. Because Marxism was always and inevitably
concerned with the capacity for authentic expression of the people, the
discourse always worried about false or crude avatars of the universal
that would draw the people into compromise with the status quo. Marx
reminds us that the bourgeoisie (Burgerlich Gessellchaft) historically
constituted a universal class because it expressed the tendency of capital
and culture, which is to say, because is expressed the dominance of
civil society (Burgerlich Gessellchaft). In other words, the ideal public
envisioned by the bourgeoisie was never truly public, never truly
universal, but only a publicized version of the bourgeoisie. For each
new class which puts itself in place of one ruling before it, Marx writes,
is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its
interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is,
expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality,
and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones (1970,
65).
The bourgeoisie is only the semblance of the authentic universal,
the people, which staked its legitimacy in the proletariat as the
representative of a total and communal class. In place of the old
bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms, Marx and
Engels write in the Communist Manifesto, we shall have an association
in which the free development of every individual is the condition for
the free development of all (76). Whence the tendency, in Marxs own

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analysis and the tradition of early Marxism, to fixate on the

contradiction between wage labor and capital, since this contradiction,
and particularly the growing misery of the proletariat with respect to
the brutal material conditions experienced by this class, should have
proven the mainspring of a socialist foment. Only later, especially in
the wake of the First World War, did Marxists widely address the abyss
between fully developed proletarian misery and stalled revolutionary
consciousness, as many began to assert that such consciousness
demanded intellectual labor to formulate the ideas around which masses
could congregate. For this generation of Marxists, which would include
Gramsci, circumstances necessitated a concept of the organic
intellectualone that would represent not the bourgeoisie but the
proletariat, one that would become the instrument not for hegemony but
for the people. Ideas and opinion are not simultaneously born in each
individual brain, Gramsci explains. Rather, they have a center of
formation, or irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasiona group of
men, or a single individual even, which has developed them and
presented them in the current form of political reality (1972, 192-3).
In the wake of this realization, Gramsci was arguably the first, but
by no means the last, to articulate a theory that sought to revise the
Marxist tradition of class affiliation according to the intervention of
intellectuals. But how could that association, rooted in a class but
ultimately beyond all class differences, take shape?
Far from
precluding any kind of utopianism, the answer to this question
arguably entails the evocation of utopianism as the condition for
intellectual intervention. To understand this contention, we might
briefly reflect on the trajectory we have traced thus far, from the
religious to the universal to the revolutionary intellectual, for these
types effectively correspond to class distinctions. In the first place, as
Gramsci himself notes, the ecclesiastics were essentially functionaries of
the feudal aristocracy. In the second place, as we have just seen, the
universal intellectuals were essentially representatives of the
bourgeoisie. Even as the universal intellectual prefigured a certain
revolutionary potential, this figured is still enlisted in the service of the
law: the universal intellectual was, in Deleuzes words, a reformer. By
contrast with these types, the revolutionary intellectual was (in theory)
produced from among the ranks of the proletariat in order to represent
the proletariat. The revolutionary intellectual is the one who gives
voice to the true universal, to the collective desire of the people.
Just as the proletariat, by the necessity of its historical situation, is
the bearer of the universal (but its immediate, unreflected bearer, barely
conscious of itself as such), Foucault explains, so the intellectual,
through his moral, theoretical, and political choice, aspired to be the
bearer of this universality in its conscious, elaborated form (2000, 126).
What seems, at first glance, to be a mere statement of comparison

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(Just . . . so . . .) linking the proletariat and the intellectual actually

serves as the beginning of a critique, for what Foucault glimpses is that
the common dilemma of representation experienced by each subject
(proletariat and intellectual) ultimately unites these spheres. While the
proletariat is the bearer of the universal, the proletariat appears to
lack the facility or faculty with which to consciously articulate his or her
conditions and, thence, to make those conditions the subject of universal
consideration. The proletariat seems, for this reason, to require a
representative who can translate the universal into its conscious,
elaborated forma form that will speak to the proletariat in order to
raise their collective consciousness and speak about the proletariat in
order to articulate their collective grievances. The intellectual is thus
taken as a clear, individual figure of a universality whose obscure,
collective form is embodied in the proletariat (126).7
My point in all of this is not to draw out the long history of Marxism
and utopia but, rather, to suggest that as an impulse and a narrative,
utopianism was by no means inimical to even the most materialist of
discourses: quite the contrary, it should be clear by this point that we
have sought to consider the formation of intellectual in the context of
Marxism because the latter tends to bring into stark relief the utopian
structure of thought that once sustained the figure of the intellectual but
that no longer does so. Indeed, we can now understand not only how
the utopian lineage of the intellectual characterizes a series of very
different intellectual types but, also, why this utopian lineage, even or
especially under the auspices of its Marxist apotheosis, finally confronts
its own impossibility. This becomes clear enough in the context of our
own familiar regime of intellectual and leftist politics, for the history of
progressivism over the last forty-odd years demonstrates the problems
of the utopian, the universal, and the totalizing gesture. In the wake of
the incandescent promise of the 1960s, perhaps it seemed possible to
imagine that the sequential demands for civil rights, womens
liberation, and then gay rights augured the possibility of a grande
politique, a tectonic (perhaps even global) shift of political organization.
But if these instances collectively symbolize the remarkable hopefulness
of a liberatory politics, we might also begin to glimpse the seed of the
very problems that we encounter, writ large and small, today.
The post 1960s left began to conceive and articulate itself on behalf
of increasingly specific constituencies, such that progressivist politics has
become identified with so many different and divergent infirma species.
The remarkable coincidence of these various socio-political movements,
7 In an interview after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, Guattari explained of
revolutionary systems, We come up against the same old scheme again and again:
they detach a pseudo avant-garde able to bring about syntheses, to form a part as an
embryonic state apparatus; they levy recruits from a well-educated, well-behaved
working class . . . (qtd. in Deleuze 2004, 267).

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these claims to rights, now seems to have been literally coincidental in

the sense that they momentarily intersected, occupying the same space
but also destined to continue on their respective paths, launching into so
many disparate and increasingly disconnected strands. In other words,
we might say that the very leftist logic which had formerly identified
itself with a potentially universal humanism (the rights of man, etc.),
deflected its narrative and critical resources into the formulation of so
many distinct identities which demanded to be heard, to be recognized,
and to be represented. No greater symptom of the fragmentation of
progressivism can be found than the lamentations now heard among
Marxist intellectuals as to the development of identity politics. In his
recent Wars of Position, for instance, Timothy Brennan rails against a
certain tendency of leftist politics which forges particular identity camps
that, in demanding to be represented in themselves, preclude the
syncretized and totalizing promises that Marxism traditionally offered.
The exponential proliferation of what he calls a politics of belief has,
in Brennans view, foreclosed the more traditionally Marxist possibility
of synthesizing sectarian constituencies and thereby formulating any
sense of unity in the face of shared oppression.8
One could have predicted the bitterness of Brennans diatribe in the
previous rehearsals of this Marxist lament, which have, with each
critique of identity politics, testified to the impotence of the very
discourse of Marxism itself. In an earlier and even more renowned
broadside against the American university system, Cultural Capital,
John Guillory sought to underscore how the theoretical lures of identity
politicsnamely, race and genderhad drawn academics away from
any engagement with underlying economic interests.9 In both cases,
the authors argue that, by virtue of demanding to be represented in
their own right, and apart from others, the avatars of identitarianism
not only prevented the consolidation of broader class interest but, in the
same stroke, conditioned the hegemony of a particular class interest.
Inasmuch as the intellectual traditionally fashioned himself or herself as
the conscience of a people, we might say that this figure now confronts
the problem of the people itself, which can no longer be assumed or
posited as such. In part, this explains why both Foucault and Deleuze
agree that a theorizing intellectual, for us, is no longer a subject, a
representing or representative consciousness. 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 (Foucault 1980, 206).
Though we are often told that certain constituencies must be
represented, what we are suggesting here is that the aim of
8 See especially Brennans introduction, where he takes aim at the efflorescence of
identity politics in the academy.
9 See, especially, the first part of the book (Critique).

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representation which traditionally defined the utopian intellectual must

confront not only its limits as a critique of power but its complicity with
power itself.

Part IV
In the tradition of utopianism we have traced to this point, the
tradition that culminates with the revolutionary intellectual, we have
born witness to the prospect of a consciousness whose genius lay in itself
somewhat ahead and to the side of the people in order to express
the stifled truth of the collectivity (207-8). Among Marxists, even
among Maoists, we find the same old scheme again and again: they
detach a pseudo avant-garde [of intellectuals] able to bring about
syntheses, to form a part as an embryonic state apparatus; they levy
recruits from a well-educated, well-behaved working class; and the rest,
lumpen proletariat, is a residue not to be trusted (always the old
condemnation of desire) (Deleuze 2004, 267).10 The problem is that, in
launching the beginnings of a revolutionary organization, in securing
an intellectual avant-garde apart from the people in order to
represent the people, the intellectual secures the very system of power
that he or she had hoped to critique. As Foucault says, the very act of
assuming to speak or write for others makes intellectuals
the agents of this system of powerthe idea of their
responsibility for consciousness and discourse forms part of
the system. The intellectuals role is no longer to place himself
somewhat ahead and to the side in order to express the
stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against
the forms of power that transform him into its object and
instrument in the sphere of knowledge, truth,
consciousness, and discourse. (1980, 207-8)

Needless to say, intellectuals have not ceased to speak in the name

of others, but this speech, this writing, is increasingly marked by
indignity rather than consecrated by identification. The utopianism
with which the intellectual traditionally formulated a notion of the
people and a critique in their name only serves to reify the current
image of power. On the basis of our actual situation, power
emphatically develops a total or global vision, Deleuze says, adding
that the forms of repression we find across societies are easily
totalized from the point of view of power (2004, 211). At best, the
10 This quote comes from an interview that Deleuze and Guattari did on the
occasion of the publication of Anti-Oedipus (indeed, the quote itself should be
attributed to Guattari).

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utopian recourse to a total or global vision displaces one totality in

favor of another (here comes the new boss, the same as the old boss).
In the religious intellectual, the legal intellectual, and even the
revolutionary intellectual, we always find the speculation of a
transcendent reality, a world behind the worldwhether this is a
divine regime (heaven on earth), a constitutional state (human
rights), or a world communism (the true state of the proletariat). One
world is thus replaced by another that, however utopian, still relies
upon the same essential source and totalizing impulse: the intellectual
who sees beyond, who experiences visions of other times and places,
becomes the representative of a reality that inevitably indicts our own.
Whence the problem we have begun to describe here, for the
expectations with which we formerly freighted utopia have so
diminished that the intellectual seems at best nostalgic and at worst
delusional. Perhaps only in this sense can we grasp the desacralization
from which the leftist intellectual suffers, since utopianism is evoked
today like an amputee reaching for a phantom limb: theres no there
there.
For both Foucault and Deleuze, this is surely the lesson of May 68,
the promise of which was kindled not because but in spite of the intervention of an intellectual class. The interesting thing about May 1968 is
that it happened so spontaneously, that allegiances between unions,
between constituencies, between classes were not mediated by intellectuals but resulted from a kind of self-organization. When people ask
where was Foucault during these days? or what did Deleuze do?
they miss the point that what happened, or did not happen, is
distinguished precisely by the absence of presiding intellectuals
because in its most creative moments, the events of May 68 were those
that escaped the determination of a professional intellectual structure
(not only professional philosophers but professional politicians, etc.).
Naturally, certain people tried to transcend these series of amplified
instabilities and fluctuations, to name its organs, to speak for its
totality, but these same people are the ones who, as Deleuze says, fail to
perceive the event of May 68 qua an event (Deleuze and Guattari 233).
There were a lot of agitations, gesticulations, slogans, idiocies, illusions
in 68, Deleuze admits, but this is not what counts. What counts is
what amounted to a visionary phenomenon, as if society suddenly saw
what was intolerable in it and also saw the possibility for something
else (233-4).
Indeed, when Deleuze and Guattari write that May 68 did not
happen, we must immediately understand that this statement marks
the division between an event and the representation or reportage
which surrounded the event and tried explain it. What we call May
68 already determines a particular object within historical conditions of
possibility (it happened because of the workers, because of the students,

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etc.), when an event is precisely that which escapes historical causality,

launching a line of flight from the presenta line that, by its very
nature, cannot be explained from the perspective o f the present.
Historians are not very fond of this aspect of the event, Deleuze and
Guattari write, they restore causality after the fact. Yet the event itself
is a splitting off from, or a breaking with causality; it is a bifurcation, a
deviation with respect to laws, an unstable condition which opens up a
new field of the possible (233). Hence, those who strived to represent
the events of May 68, even and especially those who claimed in the
universal and utopian tradition to be the subject who knows, only
ensured that, when all was said and done, the aftermath of May 68
would be very much the same as what had preceded it. Perhaps, in
this way, the phrase May 68 did not happen takes on a second
meaning. For the historical re-writing of the event, its representation,
ensures that May 68 cannot happen, which is to say, that the residual
and ineffaceable signs of the event, emanating as if from a distant star
we see years in the past, finds no hospitality, no understanding, in the
present. May 68 was not the result of a crisis, nor was it a reaction to a
crisis. It is rather the opposite. It is the current crisis, the impasses of
the current crisis in France that stem directly from the inability of
French society to assimilate May 68 (234). In short, May 68 did not
take place, nor has it ceased not to take place.

Part V
Perhaps it is only in the wake of this event, or non-event, that we
can assume the appropriate nihilism with which to raze our old hopes
and, thence, to begin anew. If the intellectual no longer possesses a
traditional or utopian function, can we speak of a utopian intellectual?
How can we understand the convergence of these terms, especially
insofar as both the revolutionary intellectual and the people seem to
have been evacuated of their significance, their prestige, and their
power? It should be understood here that insofar as the intellectual has
been divested of his traditional role, the utopian vision of the people has
been likewise detached from any kind of pre-defined populous. As
Deleuze has frequently argued, in one of his more poetic refrains, the
people are missing, and we should take this statement to mark the
absence of both a definite referent and the traditional means of
addressing that referent, namely, the intellectual. The people are
missing just as much as the intellectual is missing, for these absences
effectively countenance each other. And yet, when Deleuze analyzes
these absences, he never relegates what is missing to a deficiency, as
if the people and the intellectual had been utterly negated. No degree

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of uneven development can account for the qualitative differences that

challenge even the unity of people or the universalism of the
intellectual, the result of which is that the only possible affirmation, and
the affirmation of possibility itself, would consist of saying precisely that
the people and the intellectual are missingin other words, that they
will have to be created each time anew.
Above all else, it is noteworthy that Deleuze poses the prospects of
this double creation most forcefully in the context of the cinema, the
political inclination of which is based precisely on the intuition that the
people no longer exist, or not yet . . . (1989, 126). As he will go on to
say, This acknowledgement of a people who are missing is not a
renunciation of political cinema, but on the contrary the new basis on
which it is founded, in the third world and for minorties (217). Indeed,
this realization is not only specifically cinematic but, as Deleuze argues,
it draws the problems of both the intellectual and the people into new
contexts where authors and audiences could more easily discover it. If
the West still clings to the twin myths of the intellectual and the people,
myths that are in the last instance always sustained by the mechanisms
of power and the systems of the majority, Deleuze suggests that these
myths have long since been dispatched in other spaces and places. The
conditions necessitating new forms of creations were, ironically,
absolutely clear in the third world, where oppressed and exploited
nations remained in a state of perpetual minorities, in a collective
identity crisis (217). In these milieus, the condition of minority does
not refer to any infinitely particularized attribute nor to any
transcendental condition but to the multiplicity of peoples, who
remained to be united, or should not be united, for the problem to
change, the result of which is that the determination of the people is
evacuated of any strict referent in favor of a virtual plane where a
people may or may not be invented (220).
In this sense, the paradoxical invocation of a people who are
missing should neither be understood as a negation of a people nor as
the totalization of the people but, rather, as the affirmation of the political
possibilities of a people to come. But how do we traverse the
constituents of so many people without determining the people, or how
do we develop a people without recoursing to the intransigence of
political identities? Obviously, we cannot hope to settle these questions
in any single essay, but we might suggest that the answer can be
broadly sketched in terms of three basic principles that Deleuze only
vaguely hints at but that we can elaborate here. These principles,
derived from his reading of Kafka, underwrite these pages on political
cinema, though in some sense they have been ignored, perhaps because
they gesture toward a theory of the intellectual that is potentially risky,

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even dangerous, in the current academic climate.11 In the interests of

time, and for the sake of brevity, let me lay out the principles I have in
mind:
1. Make yourself a collective assemblage of enunciation.
2. Make yourself and your cinema a connection to a political
immediacy.
3. Make yourself a foreign cinema within cinema.

The first exhortation, to make oneself a collective assemblage of

enunciation, is perhaps the easiest to understand, if only because this is
inevitably the condition of cinema as a mass, industrial art. Unlike the
great writer, who could inhabit a kind of solitude, enjoying the comforts
of a room of ones own, the cinema already extends the filmmakers into
a vast, collaborative field that potentially annihilates the last vestiges of
private individualism. In The Movement-Image Deleuze asked how it is
possible that the cinema allows us to forget ourselves, but this process
finds its political significance in what I am calling minor cinema, since it
is in the context of a people that are missing that the filmmaker makes
him or herself an empty, non-referential space. As Deleuze and Parnet
write,
In each of us there is, as it were, an ascesis, in part turned
against ourselves. We are deserts, but populated by tribes, flora
and fauna. We pass our time in ordering these tribes, arranging
them in other ways, getting rid of some and encouranging
others to prosper. And all these clans, all these crowds, do not
undermine the desert, which is our very ascesis. On the
contrary, they inhabit it, they pass through it, over it. (11)

The analysis of literature as a collective phenomenon can be traced back

to the Romantic tradition and its attribution of national, ethnic, and even
racial styles. Likewise the analysis of third cinema, and then of
postcolonial cinema, has often resumed this enthnographic tradition.
But rather than relating literature or philosophy to the propagation of a
nation or race, the invocation of the minor, the race or, better yet, the
tribe, exists only in the name of the oppression its suffers: there is not
race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is not
defined by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred on it by the
system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of
race (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 379).
In this respect, we can already begin to envision the second
principle of minor cinema, to make yourself and your cinema a
connection to a political immediacy, since cinema assumes its most
11

See Deleuze and Guattaris Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1986).

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political and most revolutionary guise only when it becomes the

province of the uncertain or oppressedthose who can claim no
nation or land of their own, those who can claim no autonomous state
nor sovereignty, those on whom language and images are imposed,
those from whom myths are stolen for the purpose of ever new forms of
colonization. But how, we might ask, is minor cinema immanently
political? Kafka provides the beginning of an answer when he writes in
his diaries that [w]hat in great literature goes on down below,
constituting a not indisputable cellar of the structure, here takes place in
the full light of day, what is there a matter of passing interest for a few,
here absorbs everyone no less than as a matter of life or death (qtd. in
Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 17). Does not the same apply to the cinema
we are conjuring here? The juxtaposition between major (great)
cinema and minor cinema suggests not only two distinctive modes of
cinema but that such cinema begets distinctive modes of viewing.
Insofar as state cinema suppresses politics, finally stuffing what really
goes on into a netherworld that will have to be retrieved, endlessly
interpreted, minor cinema would embark on a kind of filmmaking that
requires no interpretation: who can afford private, bourgeois neuroses in
the midst of this collective where everyone already knows everyone
elses business? What need has minor cinema to be hermeneutically
sealed when it already traverses distances and formulates connections
that have carried it beyond any possible interpretation to politics itself?
In light of this politics, the politics of what I have called the minor,
Deleuze has often been criticized for profiteering at the expense of third
world people whose reality, both material and mental, he ostensibly
colonizes. Concepts such as minorization and nomadism thus appear to
demarcate, to use Deleuze and Guattaris own term, the capture of
particular features in the service of an entirely different, intellectual
world: our so-called first world. And yet, we might take note of the
fact that, as Deleuze himself foresaw, the terminology of first and third
world and the ostensible divisions they imply have become increasingly
complicated (literally, folded together and over one another) by the
shuffling of global socio-economic conditions. When high-tech jobs are
being outsourced to comparatively poorer nations and, alternately,
emergency circumstances such as natural disasters reveal an underbelly
of widespread poverty within the body of wealthy nations, the
landscape of power-relations requires a new map, topolological as much
as topographical, to account for the curious proximities and distances of
wealth and class, leisure and suffering. Rather than demonizing the
minor in the name of outworn concepts like minority, which are (after
all!) the provenance of a linguistic and juridical dominance, we might
recognize the minor as a response to these conceptual conditions. The
notion of the minor does not entail a third world context because it no
longer recognizes that category, so much as it develops a concept based

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upon singular traits that may just as well be located in any worldin
our world.
Thus, the construction of this cinema always bears a revolutionary
political significance, devised as it is with respect to dominance which it
seeks, in turn, to deterritorialize. Whence the final proposition of a
minor cinema, namely, to make yourself a foreign cinema within
cinema. In the context of his book on Kafka, Deleuze underscores the
remarkable difficulty of this thesis, since linguistic vernaculars are
susceptible to forms of sedimentation and concrescence that demand
what we can only call a becoming strange beyond any estrangement.
But in the cinema, which is not a language (langue) and which does not
possess a determinate syntax, this sober, revolutionary task is
comparably more available (19). The speech-acts of the cinema, unlike
those of literature, take shape against a visual field that renders them
potentially far more equivocal: the voice that comes from nowhere and
speaks to no one in particular, the discursive invocation of the one who
is missing, the linkage between speech-acts that cross vast spatiotemporal distancesthe audio-visual resources made possible by cinema
avails itself precisely to a people who are missing. Finally, and
especially in the context of the cinema, the minor does not belong to a
minority, to a people who have been ethnically or socio-economically
predetermined, since it emerges from beyond our expectations or even
from beyond the Law itself. Cinema in this sense might be said to be
utopian inasmuch as we understand that it does not refer to a field of
possibilities at all but to a field of forces, above all to the force and flow
of life itself, from which conditions of possibility are created. Cinema is
utopian, in other words, because it moves in the direction of the illformed or incomplete, traipsing into frontiers that are imagined, and
made possible, only in the process of creation itself. This cinema speaks
to no constituency, addresses no market or demographic or niche, but
escapes categorial and statistical determinations by contriving new
forms of life and labor that, perhaps, will invoke a people, a politics,
and an intellectual to come.
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, CHAPEL HILL

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