SOURCE: "Postmodern Theory/Postmodern Fiction," in Clio, Vol. 16, No. 2, Winter, 1987, pp. 139-58.

In recent years the term "postmodernism" has acquired considerable currency, but without there being much consensus as to its meaning or even its legitimacy. For the sake of convenience, I would like to propose three categories for dealing with different versions of postmodernism: literary/aesthetic postmodernism, historical (or cultural) postmodernism, and theoretical postmodernism. In my critical remarks, however, I shall be less concerned with the periodization or the modern/postmodern break per se than with the extent to which these different approaches remain conceptually bound within a modernist domain which some contemporary works of fiction seem to have exceeded.

Probably the most familiar version of postmodernism is the literary or aesthetic one, of which I'll single out only two strands. The first is advanced by people like Patricia Waugh and Brian McHale in England, and Jerome Klinowitz and Ihab Hassan in the United States. What is important for them—what signals the presence of the postmodern—is the foregrounding of literary artifice, the presentation of the work as metafiction or fabulation, and above all the writer's self-conscious awareness of the fictionality of literature and its status as a construction of language. The writers working according to these assumptions who are most often cited are Borges and Nabokov (especially the latter's Pale Fire), Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Calvino, Cortázar, Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, Fowles, and Handke. While the advocates of this strand tend to focus on fiction, those of the second, who are associated with the periodical Boundary 2 and would include such critics as William Spanos, Paul Bové and Joseph Riddel, concentrate their attention on poetry. Since this second group will not be of direct concern here, let me characterize them very briefly. First of all, drawing particularly on the work of Heidegger and Derrida, they oppose T. S. Eliot's modernism with the postmodernism of Pound's Cantos, W. C. Williams' Paterson, and Charles Olson's Projective verse. Joseph Riddel, the most Derridean of this group, argues for example that these poets must be understood in terms of a "double deconstruction," both of their immediate predecessors and themselves, undertaken in order to problematize a poetry of the Word (as logos) and such notions as "tradition," "origin," and "citation."¹ Following the Derrida of "Structure, Sign, and Play," Riddel argues that the Moderns are haunted by a "nostalgia for origins," whereas the Postmoderns make what Derrida describes as "the Nietzschean affirmation—the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation."² The problem with this approach, as J. Hillis Miller points out in a review of Riddel's book on Williams, is that it is too easily reversible, and fails to account for the heterogeneity within a text or body of texts. Both Williams' poems "Asphodel" and "Patterson Five," Miller asserts, are "modernist and Post-Modernist at once, and can be shown to be so."³ The problem is to show, Miller continues, that "periods differ from one another because there are different forms of heterogeneity, not because each period held a single coherent 'view of the world'" (31). And something similar could be said, mutatis mutandis, about Spanos' claim that modernist poetics privileges spatialization whereas postmodern poetics privileges temporalization.⁴

Because it does not appear to involve the problems of periodization, the current practice of what is called "metafiction" may provide a more convenient example of aesthetic postmodernism. In a recent book, Patricia Waugh argues that metafiction, broadly defined as "fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality," exhibits a literary self-consciousness different in kind from that of typically modernist work.⁵ The latter valorize consciousness by asserting a purely aesthetic order (like "spatial form" or the "epiphanies" of Joyce and Woolf) which compensates for the breakdown of traditional values and order in the "objective" historical world. The postmodernists, in contrast, are apt to regard such orderings of an aesthetic consciousness with satirical skepticism (as in Beckett's Watt), or to take them to an extreme by openly flaunting and manipulating the work's artifice and conventionality (the double ending of Fowles' fake "Victorian" novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, Calvino's dramatization of the reader in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, or Nabokov's use of chess, mirrors, and acrostics throughout his fiction).

In the aesthetic version of postmodernism, consciousness is no longer a privileged source of order or an aestheticizing instrument, and has been pre-empted by a more direct concern with language as a field of endless re-articulations. Hence the conventions, assumptions and strategies of writing as such are much more important for the postmodernist, for whom language is no longer the idealistic and expressive medium of a pre-existing consciousness or ego, but a material part of the world, "always already" there. In various ways, therefore, postmodernist writers treat language "semiotically," restoring its opacity and immanent objecthood, sometimes even employing its arbitrary orderings and rules to generate new structures. This shift in ground or conceptual basis (from consciousness to language) also explains why modernist symbolism gives way to postmodernist allegory (which stresses the gap between signifier and signified), and the unified subject of modernism to the dispersion of the subject in the multiple signifying systems of postmodernism. In short, for the postmodernist, structure replaces interiority (or the subject's consciousness and intentionality) as the locus of meaning.

Within this general problematic, Waugh focuses mainly on how metafiction avoids the charge of self-indulgent aestheticism. In laying bare the conventions of realism and then playing with them, she argues, metafiction illustrates how imaginary worlds are created, and thereby helps us "to understand how the reality we live day by day is similarly constructed, similarly 'written'" (18). Yet this asserted analogy remains too undeveloped in Waugh's argument to have much analytic value, and is symptomatic of a problem to which we'll return. Of more pressing concern to her is the difference between metafiction and another kind of postmodern fiction that breaks down or dissolves this "meta" dimension. Citing a surrealistic story by Leonard Michaels called "Mildred" which deliberately confuses literal and metaphorical assertion (one character starts to eat another after the phrase "eating one's heart out" is uttered), Waugh notes its proximity to a "schizophrenic construction of reality" (38). Unlike metafiction, where the "real" and the "fantasy" world are held apart in a state of tension, in Michaels' story there is no "metalingual" means to distinguish between them.

The distinction Waugh draws here recalls the one Brian McHale makes between the epistemological uncertainties of modernism (how can we know a reality whose existence is not in doubt but which is rendered only through the limited perspectives of the characters—Henry James' The Turn of the Screw being a kind of locus classicus) and what he sees as postmodernism's refusal to distinguish between ontologically different realities.⁶ In this view, if a work of fiction deliberately confuses oncological levels by incorporating visions, dreams, hallucinations, and pictorial representations in a way that makes them indistinguishable from what is depicted as apparently "real," then it is postmodern. Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, where it is often difficult to tell whether a scene is actually happening or is only a character's dream, hallucination, or fantasy, provides one clear example; Alain Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth, where a description of a painting or photograph on the wall will suddenly become a scene we have entered, another. Similar blurrings of ontologically distinct levels of representation, we may see, occur in Robert Coover's story "The Babysitter," Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, and most of the novels of William Burroughs. About the latter novels, Waugh remarks that "contexts shift so continuously and unsystematically that the metalingual commentary is not adequate to 'place' or to interpret such shifts" (37). And of course, as she observes, other kinds of postmodern fiction also refuse to provide "explanatory metalingual commentary" on their disorienting fictional strategies. Like Gravity's Rainbow, Joseph McElroy's Lookout Cartridge and A Smuggler's Bible threaten intelligibility through the sheer proliferation of codes and patterns of meaning which produce an overdetermination of meaning sometimes difficult to distinguish from meaninglessness, a situation allegorized in Barthelme's cryptic story "The Explanation" in City Life.

But in drawing a distinction between "schizophrenic" and "meta-" fiction, what is really at stake? Is it only a classification scheme for difficult kinds of postmodern fiction? To explain the function of metafiction, Waugh has recourse to theories of culture-as-play such as we find in the work of J. Huizinga and Roger Caillois. In contrast to the examples cited above, "metafiction functions through the problematization rather than the destruction of the concept of 'reality.' It depends on the regular construction and subversion of rules and systems. Such novels usually set up an internally consistent 'play' world which ensures the reader's absorption, and then lays bare its rules in order to investigate the relation of 'fiction' to 'reality' . . ." (40-41). In Waugh's examples the relationship usually turns out to be simple analogy, as in Muriel Spark's novel Not to Disturb (1971), where the machinations of a group of enterprising servants to film the imminent deaths of their aristocratic employers—in order to capitalize on the sensationalism of the event—mirror the novelist's efforts to construct a fictional world. Yet one only has to compare this novel with something like J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) to sense a strong critique of such self-reflexive fiction. Ballard's text is presented as a series of tableaux in which gestures, geometric landscapes, and various public images—of movie stars, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, astronauts—are obsessively rearranged. Although no coherent narrative emerges, allusions to the mental breakdown of the central figure, whose name changes slightly from chapter to chapter, and to the fatal car crash of his wife, provide the reader with some orientation. But what at first seems to be a deliberate assault on fictional coherence gradually achieves an intense (although abstract) consistency as we come to realize that the novel does not so much represent the breakdown of the individual's interior world as demonstrate that these images of contemporary culture—patricularly images of atrocity—can be charged with meaning only in relation to the detached (even de-cathected) intentionality of a pathological subject. That is, pathology becomes a condition of the novel's formalism, as we see in its repeated assertion of the car crash as a "conceptual event" linking together its various geometries of violence and sexual perversion.

Faced with such an example, and others could be cited as well, "metafiction" begins to look like a containment strategy or a stabilizing function serving a modernist critical perspective. Nor is it clear that the mechanisms in Waugh's examples of metafiction are essentially different from the self-reflexive strategies of modernist works, where the process of their creation or self-begetting becomes their overt subject. I would further suggest that what metafiction preserves and what this other kind of postmodernist fiction threatens is the status of the author as the subject of a unified and coherent intentionality. One can play games only with such a subject, even if that subject is but a formal fiction. The analogy Waugh asserts between fiction as an authorial construction and reality as a social construction fails to hold, since the latter can in no way be said to have a "unified" author or subject. More generally, in Waugh's concern to separate overtly "schizophrenic" fiction from "metafiction"—and thus retain a unified and controlling authorial subject, we can see the limitations and difficulties that befall a formalist attempt to define postmodernism. For it is not only in "schizophrenic" fiction that the subject and representation become problematic, since metafiction itself also raises the problem of representation. As already indicated, the analogy between the construction of the social fabric in its various aspects and that of an artistic illusion in fiction is far too general to explain the specifically late modern or postmodern concern with autorepresentation, and its tendency to represent the processes of the fictional work's construction or even self-generation. Formalism can describe how this concern is manifest in a given fictional text, but seems unable to provide a convincing account of why it takes place.

Fredric Jameson confronts the problem of representation and the schizophrenic subject more directly.⁷ Taking a clearly historical approach, Jameson proposes to understand postmodernism as the mode of cultural production that typifies a third evolutionary stage in the development of capitalism. In this scheme, which is based on Ernst Mandel's analysis of late capitalism, the first moment of emergent modernism corresponds to the first stage of market capitalism, and is represented directly in the ninteenth-century realist novel. The second or monopoly stage, the stage of imperialism, corresponds to the era of High Modernism, and finds its fullest "expression" in the "totalizing"aesthetic structures of Schoenberg and Joyce, and in the proliferation of numerous personal writing styles as so many "strategies of inwardness" elaborated in recoil against the ever more reified surfaces and impersonal forces of modern life. In this essay Jameson argues that we have arrived at a third moment in this scheme, "postmodernism," which is dominant or hegemonic in current cultural production in a way that modernism proper never was, and that it corresponds to the new de-centered networks and operations—to what Jameson calls the new world space or "hyperspace"—of multinational and global capitalism.

While admitting that many of postmodernism's various features can be read back into key works of modernism, Jameson insists that in postmodernism they are not only dominant (in Roman Jakobson's sense of stylistically foregrounded) but also assume a different social and even structural function in contemporary society. For whereas the great works of modernism articulated a critical distance from or positioned themselves in opposition to the social status quo (whether from the political Left or Right), and thus maintained a dialectical or critically negative relationship to bourgeois culture (empirically, modernist works were perceived as ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive and anti-social), postmodernist works have not only been absorbed and to some extent institutionalized without resistance, but have become an important source of novelty—as fresh images and stylistic devices—for the fashion changes of current commodity production. For Jameson this means that high culture no longer constitutes, as it did for modernism, a Utopian realm of freedom which can stand above the brutal determinisms and degradations of everyday life. And yet, unlike his predecessor Georg Lukács, who denounced modernism as the pathological product of a disintegrating bourgeois individualism and exhorted socially responsible artists to return to critical realism, Jameson does not condemn postmodernism for merging with its culture in a collapse of critical distance. Instead, he urges, we must eschew a moral or aesthetic response for a more dialectical understanding that can think this latest cultural development positively and negatively all at once, that can see it as both progress and catastrophe. We must, like the Marx of the Manifesto, look at the latest workings of capitalism as both the best and the worst that has befallen humanity.

Jameson is most compelling, however, when he summarizes the stylistic features, surface attributes, and affects of postmodern works. First and foremost, he sees a flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality and an attendant waning of affect, which suggest that the "depth model"—as in phenomenology, existential hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and historical thinking in general—has been displaced by a new textuality of the surface or intertextuality of multiple surfaces. Moreover, the anxiety and alienation typically expressive of the modernist sense of crisis have now been superseded by the emergence of new "intensities"—free-floating and impersonal feelings that are at once, in Jameson's words, "euphoric" and "hysterically sublime" (76)—a shift that he illustrates in passing from Edvard Munch's "The Scream" to Andy Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes." These general features—the new textual surface and the feeling-tone most often associated with it—are correlated in turn with the fragmentation and dissolution of the subject, with, in other words, the "death" of the autonomous bourgeois individual. The loss of the individual subject (as author and character, representing and represented subject, or, in philosophical terms, of Husserl's transcendental ego) marks a dramatic distance from modernism, and for Jameson nowhere is this more evident that in the eclipse of style by pastiche.

If one of the most significant traits of modernism was the emergence of a number of distinctively recognizable personal or individual styles (Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, Hemingway, Faulkner, etc.) which, more than just being a different wording of the world, constituted a different "phenomenology," then modernism in effect plunged us into a radical Nietzschean perspectivism: each modernist masterpiece represents not a different view of the same world, as would be true for say Dickens, George Eliot, and Thackeray, but an entirely different world, for which the author's style alone holds the key to its deciphering. For Jameson this situation can only be comprehended in turn by means of a larger, more encompassing narrative, for he sees modernism's host of distinct personal styles and mannerisms as so many attempts to "recode" the recognizable norms, beliefs, and practices widely held in Victorian society. In other words, the various styles or "recodings" of modernism become historically intelligible only when seen against the background of Victorian norms. Thus Jameson refers elsewhere to modernist work as "cancelled realism."⁸ Now it is precisely these background norms which no longer exist in contemporary society. Even the older national language has been reduced to neutral and reified media speech, which itself becomes one more idiolect among many. The proliferation of "social codes, professional and disciplinary jargons, as well as the badges of ethnic, gender, race, religious, and class affiliation or identification," Jameson finds, only reveal the extent to which we now live in a "field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm," and mask the fact that "faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existence, but no longer need to impose their speech [on us] (or are henceforth unable to)" ("Postmodernism" 65).

In this situation, parody and satire are unable to operate; instead, such impulses give rise to pastiche, now understood as a kind of blank parody or imitation without ulterior motive and a particular object of derision. And here we might observe that others have made a similar argument for "black humor" and "unstable irony," devices which also arise in the absence of ostensible social norms, or where the "norm" only indicates a statistical generality and may even indicate a symptomatic failure to register the overwhelming newness of the historical situation. In any case, what disturbs Jameson is the way pastiche now tends to eclipse more "genuine representations of history," and the way various "historicisms" randomly cannibalize the styles of the past, which thereby becomes merely a vast storehouse of images. For Jameson this is the real meaning of contemporary nostalgia films and various "remakes" like Body Heat, in which glossy images "connote" the past while emptying it of its real historic substance, as well as the context in which to consider the novels of E. L. Doctorow ("Postmodernism" 67-68). Ragtime (1975), for example, is a

historical novel [that] can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only "represent" our ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes "pop history"). Cultural production is thereby driven back inside a mental space which is no longer that of the old monadic subject, but rather that of some degraded collective "objective spirit": it can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history which was once itself a present; rather, as in Plato's cave, it must trace our mental images of that past upon its confining walls. If there is any realism left here, therefore, it is a "realism" which is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement, and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach. ("Postmodernism" 71).

The representation of the past in pastiche and simulacra thus entails a loss of historical perspective, which indeed may be indicative of the culture's loss of the narrative function.⁹ In The Political Unconscious Jameson argues for the necessary resurrection of narrative as the last horizon of meaning, but in the essay "Postmodernism" he attempts to characterize the postmodern breakdown of temporal organizations of experience by invoking Jacques Lacan's account of schizophrenia as a structural malfunction of language caused by the failure of the subject to enter fully into the symbolic order and thus to acknowledge "the Other." In Lacan's terms, this "forclusion of the Other" disrupts the subject's capacity to link signifiers together in a temporally coherent fashion. In the resulting breakdown of the signifying chain, signifiers are freed from their conceptual signifieds, thus allowing them to "float" in a present free of intentionality and praxis, where they are then experienced with a heightened intensity and even hallucinatory charge. Such, at any rate, is how Jameson would have us consider contemporary valorizations of "difference," for him emblematized in the disjunctive experiences of Nam June Paik's stacked television screens, John Cage's music, the discontinuities of collage, textuality, and the "schizophrenic" writing of Beckett, Philip Sollers, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, John Ashbery, and others.

Yet for Jameson it is the new worldspace of contemporary global, multinational capitalism that finally poses the greatest problem to representation. What characterizes capital in this third stage is its prodigious expansion and penetration into areas—nature, the Third World, the Unconscious—never so totally commodified. And while we can know how it works, as Mandel's book attests, it cannot be directly represented in the totality of its disorienting effects. Hence what most distinguishes and makes possible our consumer society, our society of the spectacle and the mass-media image, is a new unrepresentable space that Jameson calls "postmodern hyperspace." This new space, embodied in the dizzying confusions of John Portman's Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, goes beyond the "capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world" ("Postmodernism" 83). In conclusion, therefore, Jameson calls for a new aesthetic of cognitive mapping, but one that will have to be "representational" and "dialectical" so as to enable the individual subject to locate himself meaningfully in this new cultural space.

While Jameson's idea that late capitalism has shaped a new "hyperspace" holds out the possibility (or promise) of a coherent and unifying perspective on a wide range of contemporary works and practices, his call for a representational and dialectical map suggests to me a collapse or fall back into a modernist space. In fact, the very model he proposes—Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City, with its notions of "urban totality" and traditional markers (monuments, natural boundaries, built perspectives)—has been seriously questioned recently by urbanists like Paul Virilio, who has shown that the speed of advanced technology has dissolved the spatial coordinates of the city into a complex regime of different temporalities exceeding conventional representation and which demand to be analyzed in terms of interface, flow, and dissolving or unstable frame images.¹⁰ In these terms, it is difficult to see how a form of "cognitive mapping" that remains primarily representational could resolve the theoretical problems posed by what we might call, adopting Freud's terminology, late capitalism's representability. The difficulties of such a project are well attested to by Jameson's essay as a whole. On the one hand, postmodernist works, in yielding to a new sense of schizophrenic temporality, fail to provide adequate (i.e., historically perspectived) representations of postmodern experience; on the other hand, the period itself is characterized, following Mandel's scheme, by the unrepresentability of the new "space" produced by the latest technology—nuclear power, the computer, mass media—which is geared toward reproduction rather than production, and only intensifies the tendency of modern culture toward autoreferentiality. Yet it is from within this aporia that Jameson will assert that "our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely the whole world system of presentday multinational capitalism" ("Postmodernism" 79).

But suppose this overriding need for representational schemes and depth model hermeneutics is itself what produces the "distorted figurations" of which it speaks. Such indeed would be the assumption of what I am calling theoretical postmodernism, which abandons this representational framework and seeks to formulate the relationships between literature (and art) and the social context on a new conceptual basis, one that uses the fundamental concepts of modernism but at the same time attempts to go beyond them. It is in this sense that the immense theoretical work undertaken by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their two-volume study of "Capitalism et Schizophrénia" may be called "postmodern," even though they themselves never employ the term.¹¹ Such a shift in perspective does not entail that we consider a new body of work as "postmodern," but rather that we "read" what is already all around us—including those hallowed modernist classics—in a new and completely different way.

Thus in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari explode the symbolist (and inevitably psychoanalytic) view, according to which Kafka's works are to be seen as so many different stagings and sublimations of Oedipal conflicts with his father, and argue to the contrary that

[t]he question posed by the father is not how to become free in relation to him (the Oedipal question), but how to find a path where he did not find one . . . [T]he father appears as the man who had to renounce his own desire and faith (if only to get out of the rural ghetto where he was born) and who calls upon his son to submit—but only because the father himself has submitted to a dominant order in a situation which appears to have no escape .. . In short it is not Oedipus that produces neurosis; it is neurosis, the desire that submits and tries to communicate its submission, that produces Oedipus.¹²

In this reversal of Freud, Oedipus is made into a political issue, one that allows us, as they indicate, "to see over [the] father's shoulder what was in question all along: a whole micropolitics of desire, of impasses and exits, of submissions and rectifications" (19). In Kafka's fiction, therefore, the judges, commissioners and bureaucrats are not to be seen as father substitutes; the father, rather, is their representative, "a condensation of all the forces to which he submits and invites his son to submit" (22). Rather than reducing the drama of Kafka's works to the dynamics of the familial or Oedipal triangle, Deleuze and Guattari show that this triangle is not only connected to but defined by commercial, economic, bureaucratic, and judiciary triangles which indicate force-relationships in the social field.

By specifying these forces, moreover, the possibility of evading them along a "line of flight" also emerges. In Kafka's fiction this first occurs in the stories concerned with some kind of "becoming-animal." If the father—especially the Jewish father—having been uprooted from the country, is immediately caught up in a process of "deterritorialization," he never ceases to re-orient or "reterritorialize" himself in relation to his family, business, and spiritual authorities. But acts of becoming-animal involve the exact opposite process: they constitute attempts to follow a line or movement across thresholds of intensity toward "absolute deterritorializations" where forms and signifier-signified relationships dissolve into the unformed matter of uncoded fluxes and non-signifying signs. Thus for Deleuze and Guattari

Kafka's animals never refer to mythology or to archetypes but correspond only to new gradients, zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as well as from their expressions, and from the signifier that formalized them. There is nothing any longer but movements, vibrations, thresholds in a deserted matter: animals, mice, dogs, apes, cockroaches are distinguished only by this or that threshold, this or that vibration, by a specific underground passage in the rhizome or burrow. For these passages are underground intensities. In the becoming-mouse, it is a whistling that pulls the music and the meaning from the words. In the becoming-ape, it is a coughing that "seems disturbing but that has no meaning" (becoming a tuberculoid ape). In the becominginsect, it is a mournful whining that carries the voice and blurs the resonance of the words. Gregor becomes a cockroach not just to flee from his father, but rather to find an escape where his father couldn't find one, to flee from the director, the businessman and the bureaucrats, to reach that realm where the voice no longer does anything but hum: "Did you hear him speak? It was an animal's voice," said the director. (24-25)

It is important to understand that a "becoming-animal" is in no way a "becoming-like-an-animal"; it is not a copying or imitation but rather a metamorphosis brought about through the conjunction of two deterritorializations: the becoming-human of the animal and the becoming-animal of the human. Nor is it to be seen as a kind of metaphor, as symbolic or allegorical figuration. In the various examples cited by Deleuze and Guattari—the becoming-whale of Melville's Ahab, Lawrence's becoming-turtle, the various becomings of dog, bear or woman in Kleist's plays, the becoming-horse of Little Hans in Freud's case study, the becoming-rat in the Hollywood film Willard, the becoming-Jewish in Joseph Losey's film Mr. Klein, the various metamorphoses like those of the were-wolf or sorcerer in mythology and folklore, as well as the more general instances of becoming-woman or becoming-child—it is always a question of a process that must be understood in non-signifying terms, as sketching a movement of escape from dominant significations and regimes of control.¹³

All too often in Kafka's stories, however, this movement of deterritorialization through a "becoming-animal" fails. In "The Metamorphosis" Gregor's "becoming-cockroach" is finally blocked, and the story depicts his sad re-Oedipalization. The problem, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, may be that animals are too formed, too territorialized, too significative to go all the way along a line of flight. In the novels, consequently, Kafka tries another solution, involving the proliferation of characters and a new fictional topography, in what Deleuze and Guattari call a "socio-political investigation" of the new machinic arrangements" (88-89) that fascism, Stalinism, capitalism, and twentieth-century bureaucracy will usher in.

The key concept in their analysis is the notion of agencement (somewhat feebly translated into English as "arrangement"), by which they mean a multiplicity of heterogeneous parts that somehow function together in a kind of symbiosis. More specifically, an agencement always comprises two sides or faces, one involving states of things (bodies that mix or join in various ways and pass on effects), the other involving statements, or different regimes of signs (new formulations, styles and gestures). In the novels (Amerika, The Trial, The Castle) Kafka presents these two complementary sides of the agencement by creating situations where an extreme juridical formalization of statements (questions and answers, objections, pleas, reasons for a judgment, presentation of conclusions, verdicts, etc.) operates conjointly with things and bodies as so many machines (the boatmachine, the hotel-machine, the circus-machine, the trialmachine, the castle-machine). In asserting that the novels take "machinic arrangements" as their objects, Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the fact that in Kafka's works human beings exist only as parts of or along side various kinds of social machines. (They use the term "machinic"—in opposition to the term "mechanical"—to indicate a functioning of parts which are independent of one other yet somehow function together.) And the terminology of their critical apparatus also allows them to avoid two misinterpretations which have plagued Kafka criticism, to wit, that the desire animating the major characters of the novels is accountable either in terms of a lack (the psychoanalytic reading) or an ungraspable, transcendent law (the negative theological reading).

Instead, they read the novels as the "dismantling of all transcendental justifications" (93). In The Trial the operations of justice and the law are relocated in a field of immanence defined by desire: "where one believed there was the law, there is in fact desire and desire alone. Justice is desire and not law" (90). Because justice is only a form for the working out of desire, it operates along a continuum, but a continuum made up of contiguities, since in Kafka "the contiguity of offices, the segmentalization of power, replaces the hierarchy of instances and the eminence of the sovereign" (92). Because of the immanence of desire, everyone in the novel, including the priest and the little girls, is caught up in the process of justice—if only as "auxiliaries" (91). Thus K finally realizes, despite his Uncle's advice, that he needs no legal representative, that no one should come between himself and his own desire, that he will find justice only by moving from room to room, following his desire, a process that is virtually interminable.¹⁴

Yet desire always proves to be a mixture or blend of what are really two co-existent movements of desire, each caught up in the other, and corresponding to two different kinds of "law": "One captures desire with great diabolical arrangements, sweeping along servants and victims, chiefs and subalterns in almost the same movement, and only bringing about a massive deterritorialization of man by also reterritorializing him, whether in an office, a prison, a cemetery (the paranoic law). The other movement makes desire take flight through all the arrangements, brushing up against all the segments without being caught in any of them, and always carries further along the innocence of a power of deterritorialization indistinguishable from escape (the schizo-law)."¹⁵ Not surprisingly, then, in Kafka we also find two corresponding kinds of architecture and bureaucracy, actually opposed but often blending with and penetrating into each other: an archaic or mythic form with contemporary functions, and a "neo-formation" that is today becoming our own. Such mixtures explain Kafka's strange fictional topographies, especially evident in The Trial and The Castle, where we constantly encounter offices behind offices, long passages and corridors with separate entrances at one end and contiguous entrances at another. By analyzing this topography, together with the proliferating series of doubles and connectors, blocks of "becoming" and thresholds of intensity, Deleuze and Guattari show how Kafka's fiction maps the flows, encodings and decodings of desire as an immanent process in the social field.

Finally, every machinic arrangement of desire is, in their words, also a "collective arrangement of enunciation" (33) in the sense that the former always gives rise to certain kinds of statements. The first chapter of Amerika is filled with protestations by the stoker against his superior officer (a Rumanian) and complaints about the oppression which Germans aboard ship must undergo; and of course The Trial constitutes a complete anatomy of juridical statements, the rules of which adumbrate "the real instructions for the machine." As author of the novels, Kafka accedes to the various "collective arrangements of enunciation" through the invention of what Deleuze and Guattari call "the K-function" (157), the letter suggesting that "K" is not so much a character as a collective subject through which the individual in his solitude responds to the "diabolic powers knocking at the door," as Kafka himself described the new powers looming on the historical horizon.¹⁶ It is through this invention that Kafka makes one arrangement—the one that invented him—pass into another, his own highly political "writing machine."

Deleuze and Guattari trace the evolution of Kafka's "writing machine" from the letters he wrote to Felice (which constituted a kind of "diabolical pact") to the animal stories and finally to the novels. Its condition of possibility stems ultimately from Kafka's employment in the office of an insurance company, with its secretaries and bosses, its social, political and administrative distributions, and the various technical devices and machines both utilized there and that Kafka had to deal with in accident claims. This set-up promoted an entire "erotic distribution . . . not because desire is desire of the machine but because desire never stops making a machine in the machine and creates a new gear alongside the preceding gear indefinitely" (146). Kafka's "writing machine" operates in a similar fashion," as the off-shoot of a vast bureaucratic machine located within a field of external relationships. As a German-speaking Jew in Prague and therefore a minority figure in a double sense, he made of his own peculiarly inflected and somewhat impoverished German a new kind of expressive medium. Rather than choosing to be an author in the classical sense, like Goethe, whom he so admired, Kafka deliberately invented a form of what Deleuze and Guattari call a deterritorializing "minor literature" (29ff). That is, as a writer living in a cultural and linguistic ghetto, Kafka refused to inflate his language artificially by using symbolism, oneirism, or the Kabbala, as did Gustav Meyrink, Max Brod, and others of the Prague school. Instead, he went the other way—toward a new spareness and sobriety. Pushing further along points of deterritorialization already within his language, he created a strange form of "stuttering," a "minority" language, as Deleuze and Guattari say (41-42), within a major language that exerts a subversive pull toward regions beyond representation and signification, and that vibrates with new intensities. And contrary to a major literature of "masters," which always transforms social questions into individual problems, a "minor" literature functions outside of or exterior to hegemonic cultural formations, and always opens out onto socio-political networks. Thus Kafka's writing machine produces not only a different kind of language, but also announces a different function for literature: as Deleuze and Guattari show, in a "minor literature" there is no "subject," but a tracing of desire in the social field, a diagramming of how different machinic arrangements operate in conjunction with different "arrangements of enunciation."

At this point let us pause and take note of an emerging contrast of some consequence. First, as different as they are, both Jameson's and Waugh's versions of postmodernism derive from and maintain a transcendent perspective: in Jameson, through Marxism and the assumption of history as a dialectic process; in Waugh, through a formalism that privileges the authorial function or author as intentional subject. Secondly—and this is a major point—what troubles both critics, albeit in different ways, is precisely the fact that postmodernist works seem to throw into question this transcendent perspective, whether we call it the critical stance or the meta-dimensionality of the work, as if to suggest that there is no longer any Archimedean point "above" from which contemporary cultural production can be surveyed in a nonreductive way. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, bring us to the very threshold of the postmodern, not by lamenting the loss of a transcendent or privileged point of view, but by theorizing its basis in particular social and cultural arrangements. Through their eyes, perhaps, we can envisage postmodernism as an attempt to think through as a specific positivity what modernism could only think negatively (through terms like alienation, cultural crisis, loss of God and tradition, chaos and disorder). In this perspective, at least in the theoretical formulations provided by Deleuze and Guattari, postmodernism constitutes a renewed attempt to link the philosophical problem of radical immanence or multiplicity to a theory of culture conceived as the conjoining of different "semiotic regimes" with various material arrangements, but without recourse to any transcendent unity or expressive function that would stand outside the historical field or domain as their cause or ground. A similar perspective emerges in the work of Michel Foucault, as the many parallels and exchanges between Deleuze and Foucault might suggest. In Les Mots et Les Choses Foucault tried to move beyond the modernist conceptual domain by thinking through the conditions of possibility of the sciences humaines, but it was only with his theory of power, linked with his theory of the production of statements, which thus joins non-discursive and discursive practices, with both conceived as immanent to the field of their distribution and not emanating from some transcendent instance like the subject or the State, that he advanced into a postmodern domain. In his recent book on Foucault, Deleuze demonstrates that Foucault was always centrally concerned with the historically changing forms of le visible and l'énoncable, and with how their different combinations are in turn "stratified"—given historical coherence and stability—through different arrangements of pouvoir and savoir. On the one hand the resulting "strata" (55 ff) are historical formations determinant of what can be seen and said at a given time; but on the other they are always and at the same time enveloped by a multiplicity or "becoming of forces that double history" (91) and are seen as arriving from an indeterminant "outside."¹⁷

It may seem evident that what I am calling theoretical postmodernism overlaps in many ways with the theoretical enterprise generally subsumed under the rubric of "poststructuralism." But here we must proceed case by case, and not treat "poststructuralism" as monolithic. The questioning of the unity and formation of the subject, of the expressionist and representational functions of language are, it seems to me, clearly postmodernist concerns, whereas the theorization of writing as a privileged form of textuality such as one finds in much of Roland Barthes and Paul de Man still operates within the conceptual domain of late modernism, as an often valuable refinement of modernist formalism and aestheticism. In these terms, Jacques Derrida could be seen as a kind of hinge or transitional figure, as a detailed comparison of Derrida's notion of the "scene of writing" with Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the "writing machine" (which cannot be undertaken here) would, I think, substantiate. But whatever the case, there can be no doubt that Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualization represents a theoretical advance beyond Jameson's, for the "mapping" that it makes possible is no longer tied to the modernist (or industrialist era) model of cultural production, nor constrained by the conceptual limits of dialectical and representational thinking.¹⁸

Finally, something like Deleuze and Guattari's version of theoretical postmodernism also seems urged upon us by the most ambitious recent American fiction as well. In Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and William Gaddis's JR, everything is connected to everything, yet also proliferating madly into divergent series of items, events and structures—as in what James Joyce perhaps meant by a "chaosmos." The only meta-dimension available is provided by what Pynchon calls the "metacartel"—an interlocking conglomerate of industries, technologies and institutions which seek to render every subject and substance (human and otherwise) controllable, serviceable, and exchangeable, whether as labor, raw material, or links in a communication chain: "How alphabetic is the nature of molecules . . . These are our letters, our words: they too can be modulated, broken, recoupled, redefined, co-polymerized one to the other in world wide chains that will surface now and then over long molecular silences, like the seen part of a tapestry."¹⁹ Pynchon thus describes what Deleuze and Guattari call a binary coding machine or abstract machine, which operates even at a molecular level. In the novel, this machine (generally referred to as the "They-system") is opposed by a "Counterforce," which must rely on hardly legitimized semiotic systems: "Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity" (582). And by the end of the novel, the German V-2 rocket has become a "text," Slothrop can read mandalas, trout guts, graffiti, paper scraps; Eddie Pensiero reads shivers, Saure Bummer reads reefers, Thanatz reads whip scars, and the narrator reads Tarot cards. Has the world become a text, or is it rather that all rational signifying systems can only deliver us into the hands of power? Perhaps they amount to the same thing. Gravity's Rainbow makes it clear how World War II was primarily the "site" of an immense technological transformation of the world. Everything that impeded the installation of a kind of cybernetic instrumentality—old territories, languages and social forms, ancient filiations and habits of mind—had to be dissolved so that this new form of rationality could be implemented. Cybernetics and feedback systems, Pynchon's narrator says (238-39), must be seen first as new means of control, and thus the necessary prelude to the commodification of all information by the giant "meta-cartel."²⁰

According to Deleuze and Guattari, we have passed from a semiotics of the signifier to a semiotics of flow. Gaddis's portrayal of Wall Street and the machinations of corporate finance in JR renders the fluxes and flows of contemporary life in the medium of recorded speech, without narrative summary or connection. In this vast "acoustic collage" transcribed out of the discourses of advertising, big business, politics, and public relations, the slang of school kids and street people, the delirious ruminations of drunken intellectuals and failed artists, the bitter dialogues of breakdown and lovers' turmoils—intelligible "sounds" threaten to become barely distinguishable from the general background noise of our multi-media environment. All is flow—money, finance capital, video images, water, conversation, a radio playing, one scene or character impinging on another. As we are whirled from one epicenter of connection to another—from an old family home in Long Island to the local school, the local bank, then to a Wall Street investment firm, and finally to an impossibly crowded upper East Side apartment—it becomes clear that no overriding, stabilizing speech will be heard, indeed could be heard, no identifiable consciousness could be in control, even take it all in. Yet we cannot fail to notice that in this ceaseless break-up and movement which threaten not only production but intelligibility at least two machines appear to be functioning: the corporate finance institutions that generate gigantic "paper empires" and the novel we are reading that is their off-shoot.

If Gaddis's novel is thus a writing machine which operates by recording the breakdowns in the signifying chains of the characters' speech and in the lifelines of their movements, Deleuze and Guattari allow us to see how these breakdowns are part of the larger "deterritorializations" of contemporary capitalism, which requires new modes of individuation and yet at the same time must continue to assign and reinforce older kinds of identities and social investments. In the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari, Gaddis' novel may be said to articulate "a line of flight" along the borders of these two opposing movements, thereby tracing the break-up of the dominant systems of signification and meaning that will result in the characters being swept up in a "molecular becoming." Similarly, Gravity's Rainbow charts the breakdown of the main character Slothrop in relation to a vast reconfiguring of contemporary technology, politics, and big business, but in his gradual disappearance and final anonymity we can also see a molecular "devenir-imperceptible." In both cases the theoretical postmodernism of Deleuze and Guattari allows us to see how these novels push beyond the conceptual limits of modernism and make the new informational arrangements that perhaps define our present visible as part of the same movement in which the older ones are being dissolved.

NOTES

¹ Joseph Riddel, The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counter Poetics of William Carlos Williams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1974), esecially 257 ff, where he argues that Williams "wants to strike through the Modernist deconstruction of the classical with another effort at deconstruction."

² Derrida's often cited essay first appeared in English in The Structuralist Controversy, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972); Derrida's words, translated by the editors (264). Riddel discusses Derrida's statement (250-53 and passim).

³ J. Hillis Miller, "Deconstructing the Deconstructors," Diacritics 5 (Summer 1975):31. But see Riddel's response, "A Miller's Tale," Diacritics 5 (Fall 1975):56-65.

⁴ William V. Spanos, "The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination," Boundary 2 1 (Fall 1972): 147-68. In a later essay, "Repetition in The Waste Land: A Phenomenological Destruction," Boundary 2 7 (Spring 1979):225-85, Spanos argues against the spatialized reading of Eliot's poem and asserts that the poem "points toward .. . the demystifying 'anti-literature' of the postmodern period" by retrieving the "historical sense" (265).

⁵ Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), 2.

⁶ Brian McHale, "Modernist Reading, Post-Modern Text: The Case of Gravity's Rainbow," Poetics Today 1 (Autumn, 1979):85-109.

⁷ Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (July-August, 1985):53-92.

⁸ Fredric Jameson, "The Ideology of the Text," Salmagundi 31-32 (Fall 1975/Winter 1976):243.

⁹ Jameson also takes up the problem of narrative in relation to postmodernism in his "Foreword" to Jean Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Lyotard, who sees a dispersion of the narrative function into its different linguistic elements now taking place, defines "postmodernism" as a loss of belief in the great meta-narratives that sustain and legitimate our culture. But Jameson notes, correctly I think, that for Lytoard postmodernism is not a radically new historical stage but only heralds a new turn or cycle in the perpetual "revolution" of modernism.

¹⁰ Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1960), and Paul Virilio, L'espace critique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984).

¹¹ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's L'anti-oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972) and Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980) constitute the two-volume study "Capitalism et Schizophrénie." Only Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking Press, 1977), trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, is currently available in English. A translation of Mille Plateaux is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

¹² Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), 19 (my translation).

¹³ See Mille Plateaux, chapter 10, entitled "1730-Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, devenir-imperceptible ..." for Deleuze and Guattari's most extended treatment of "becoming."

¹⁴ Deleuze and Guattari in fact argue that the novel is interminable, and contest the legitimacy of the final chapter depicting K's execution on both textual and interpretive grounds. See Kafka (80-81).

¹⁵Kafka, 110. These two kinds of "law" are explored in detail in Anti-Oedipus; see especially 273-83.

¹⁶ In a letter to Max Brod, quoted by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka (22); no date for letter given.

¹⁷ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986). See especially "Les Strates ou Formations Historiques: Le Visible et L'énoncable (Savoir)," 55-76, and "Les strategies ou le non-stratifié: La Pensée du dehors (Pouvoir)," 77-99.

¹⁸ Jean Baudrillard's theory of "simulation" also moves beyond "dialectics" and "representation," and thus would appear to offer another version of theoretical postmodernism. Baudrillard deserves extended treatment, but here it must suffice to point out that his theory, although worked out in semiotic and poststructural terms, is actually historicist (like Jameson's) and proposes a succession of neo-Hegelian self-contained semiotic stages or orders. See "La fin de la production" and "Les trois orders de simulacres" in L'échange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1976), 17-77.

¹⁹ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 355.

²⁰ For a more extended treatment of this theme in relation to the new technologies of communication, see Jonathan Crary's "Eclipse of the Spectacle," in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 283-94.