Endnotes

1. The term is Rey Chow’s. back

2. Taken separately, these theorists engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari may not constitute a vanguard, but their combined efforts contribute to a surge in interest in the area of nomadism studies, marked by the increase in references to Deleuze and Guattari in books, journals, and conferences. See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Frederic Jameson “Culture and Finance Capital,” from Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 246-265; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). back

3. Caren Kaplan argues that even though Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of territory and nomadic deterritorialization “mark significant departures in poststructuralist paradigms” of many Western postmodernists who unavoidably reproduce the very modernist aesthetic they seek to deconstruct, they still end up being “imperial” because their nomadism “blurs” specific historical situations and cultural differences: “[T]he utility of their methodology...is always generalized....[It] perpetuates a kind of colonial discourse in the name of progressive politics. In their emphasis upon linguistic “escape” and “lines of flight,” Deleuze and Guattari roam into realms of nostalgia....Deleuze and Guattari can be read as ‘high modernists,’ then, privileging language and experimentation over all other strategies....The movement of deterritorialization colonizes, appropriates, even raids other spaces....Deterritorialization is always reterritorialization, an increase in territory, an imperialization”—Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 86-90. Christopher Norris, coming from a different angle, argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s “endlessly wandering” nomad should be discarded—and in fact was discarded proleptically by Kant—on the grounds that it does not attend to the need to develop principles: “Kant both anticipates [Deleuze and Guattari’s] favoured metaphor [of the nomad] and treats it as a symptom of the various pathological disorders that result when unworkable (‘foundationalist’) conceptions of knowledge and truth give way to a wholesale scepticism with regard to any kind of rational, principled or truth-seeking argument. Such an attitude must condemn us...to [as Kant says] ‘a “nomadic” existence that does not meet our deepest needs, including the needs of reason.’ For it ignores what Kant goes on to demonstrate: that those needs can only be met through a process of enlightened reciprocal exchange which abjures the presumptive (authoritarian) appeal to self-evident grounds, but which maintains the possibility of arriving at adequate criteria or validity-conditions for arguments offered in the public sphere of accountable reasons and principles”—The Truth About Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 231. The reference to the work of Deleuze and Guattari as being mechanical comes, of course, from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”: “The failure of Deleuze and Guattari to consider the relations between desire, power and subjectivity renders them incapable of articulating a theory of interests....Because these philosophers seem obliged to reject all arguments naming the concept of ideology as only schematic rather than textual, they are equally obliged to produce a mechanically schematic opposition between interest and desire. Thus they align themselves with bourgeois sociologists”—from C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 273. back

4. Although they do in fact refer heavily to the work of scholars from these fields, such as Pierre Clastres, Jacques Meunier, V. Gordon Childe, James Mellaart, and the urbanist Jane Jacobs. back

5. I have in mind specifically Todd May’s important article “Difference and Unity in Gilles Deleuze” from Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy ed. by Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York: Routledge: 1994), 33-50. Although May has mostly Deleuze in mind in this article, the same can be said of Deleuze’s collaborations with Guattari, especially A Thousand Plateaus. back

6. Jean-Francois Lyotard discusses this movement of capital in his Libidinal Economies trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). He refers to the movement of desire in capital as being “libidinal”: “There is as much libidinal intensity in capitalist exchange as in the alleged ‘symbolic’ exchange....There are libidinal positions, tenable or not, there are positions invested which are immediately disinvested, the energies passing onto other pieces of the great puzzle, inventing new fragments and new modalities of jouissance, that is to say of intensification” (109, 113). In this sense the “body of capital” is not a finished, or “organic” totality: “the ‘body of capital’, which is not an organic body....[Its] ‘mediatory’ unity is not totalizing-immanent, but transcending-detotalizing. The money of capital groups incompossibles together” (137). Lyotard is also in agreement with Deleuze and Guattari on the point that capitalism has always been with us: “capitalism is also a primitive society, or : the primitive society is also a capitalism” (107). back

7. Jacques Lacan The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1981). Levinas makes a similar distinction between the structure of desire and what he calls need: “Need opens upon a world that is for-me; it returns to the self....It is an assimilation of the world in view of coincidence with oneself....In desire the ego is borne unto another in such a way as to compromise the sovereign identification of the I with itself....The relationship with another puts me into question, empties me of myself....The desirable does not fill up my desire but hollows it out, nourishing me as it were with new hungers....[Desire] is beyond all saturation.” Emmanuel Levinas “The Trace of the Other” from Deconstruction in Context, edited by Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 350-351. back

8. Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” from Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 247, 251. Hereafter cited as “CFC.” back

9. This has been Jameson’s consistent critique since his article “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July-August): 59-92. See also his book Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). back

10. J.M. Coetzee, Foe (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 141-142, emphasis mine. back

11. My debt to Heidegger here should be apparent: “The truth that discloses itself in the work can never be proved or derived from what went before. What went before is refuted in its exclusive reality by the work. What art founds can therefore never be compensated and made up for by what is already present and available”—”The Origin of the Work of Art” from Poetry, Language, Thought trans. by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 75. back

12. Derrida has termed this non-symbolizable “presence” of singularities “hauntology”: “Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost. What is a ghost?...Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Altogether other. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it hauntology”—Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10. back

13. Salman Rushdie, East, West (New York: Random House, 1994), 211. back