Chapter 5: Conclusion: The limits of totality

The Dark Side of the Multitude

With the triumph of the market economy at the end of the 20^th century the tendency to see capital itself as the subject of history increased. This led to a more defensive form of politics where organisation amounted to creating havens of authenticity and enclaves of resistance against an overarching totalisation. Amongst the left this fundamentally negative conception of politics increasingly adopted the existing paradigms of power. In addressing our needs and desires the reaction was: we need more democracy, more rights, more freedoms, more juridical/ legalistic defences against the corporate face of this ‘Subject’ who sticks his nose into an otherwise uncomplicated terrain of liberal freedoms. In this political mindset, capital is responded to by a normative appeal to alternative values: altruism, austerity, responsibility, duty, morality &c. In this process the Left concedes to neo-liberalism its monopoly on the representation of desire and the mode of its satisfaction: it tries to attack power and desire in themselves as things to be ashamed of and that require some kind of exorcism through therapeutic regulation.  In its anti-consumptionist and self- regulative guises the politics of the left manifested itself both as a denial of and a restraint upon the productive power of social subjectivity. The multitude is both theoretically and practically a response to the transition to these internalised modes of self- regulation.

Those that hold to the notion of capital as an immortal Leviathan that can only be limited, call for a politics of the preservation or reconstitution of the public. Within this framework and within the institutions of the public some powerful struggles of re-appropriation do take place. Yet these spaces are no longer the real basis of power; they allow for only a symbolic resistance. Clearly this is what has become of the street (but the same goes for parliament or the mediatic figurehead of a state). The general dissatisfaction with this situation pushes for a re-territorialisation of the ‘public’ from the real to the virtual. Against this logic of limitation emerges a form of subjectivity that neither grounds itself on an alternative future nor judges itself by abstract and external standards of what is possible, but takes itself as its own ground of realisation and in doing so challenges and transforms obstacles that seek to contain and limit it. Rather than construing its projects in terms of the ‘political’ (or indeed as a ‘project’) i.e. through pre-determined avenues of engagement, it challenges this separation because it occupies and operates on the terrain of life. This is not an issue of life-style as Giddens’ theory of modernity would have it,[558] as if there were a blank canvass on which each subject could paint his own idyll, but neither is it simply an issue of subjectivity or subjectification, but rather the everyday struggle in-between them that these poles do not adequately capture. The multitude subverts the fixity of the liberal subject, the individual of classical political economy and the citizen of representative democracy. The multitude is a figure of disobedience and refusal and operates within networks that function to increase different spaces of power, that bypass or displace authority by shifting the locus of politics away from pre-existing mechanisms of mediation, whether the voting booth, the party, the state or Trade Unions. This subjectivity does not distinguish between left and right but is mobile: it can draw results from these forms of mediations but it is not reducible to them and can withdraw from the game at any point.

It is because of rather than in spite of social cooperation that the locus of political power in the sovereign state undergoes subversion. In this context the model of identity politics is exposed as wholly inadequate as a response to the power of individuation, because it coexists with – without undermining- the need of capital to channel unpredictability. In this sense the multitude also sanctions the end of the model of representation and the autonomy of the political which communication and new technologies have rendered obsolete. The multitude differs from the people in so far as the latter is a unity. In the latter case, mechanisms of legitimacy formation and social management could take place within this form of identification of the people with a nation, a state, a class, a religious hierarchy, or a particular fusion of those elements. This refers to the management of unpredictability in that the state is forced to exercise its authority as control over agents that are pre-determined and constituted prior to and outside of the very process of political engagement itself, hence its emphasis on the idea of negotiation of identities and the corresponding need for arbiters and moderators of this process.  The continual crisis of the sovereign state then, its unaccountability and its craving for legitimacy through mechanisms of justification, in short the crisis of Potestas at the level of its belief in its own project, forces it within the control paradigm to turn the object of subjugation into the subject of that same process: it forces the political onto the terrain of life itself which, as was seen in the discussion of Bataille, is inherently discontinuous and unstable. Once self- regulation (always encouraged by more or less immediate threats of a more exacting and physical force) becomes the major mode of control and social management, the site of struggle reappears on the very ground of productive constituent power: a power that does not necessarily mediate itself through the political.

In the emerging social totality defined as control society, public forms of subversion tend to be more difficult and exceptional. The public is made up of citizens with names, a supposedly open and accountable space for visible, autonomous and recognisable subjects, but operative only in a context of legality and liberal rights. For a while the internet represented the opening up of a new domain of access to information and communication by an anonymous user, giving an opportunity for those whom for whatever reason had been excluded from the old forms of public life to develop a new layer of communication with others. It allowed for those who did not have a name to speak for themselves. Whilst this freedom is fast eroding it points to the unrecoverable element that drives the force of recuperation. In the old imagination of the totality, sociology and Marxism were drawn to the visible and representable elements of social struggle, those forces where association could take the institutional form of a class, cult or group that was seen as part of the wider society and by the fact of being there had an unwritten kind of solidarity with it.  However opposed to these visible networks of accountable individuals speaking in the name of others, there are numerous invisible networks that are equally constitutive forces within social life but ones that cannot be represented due to the illegal or immoral content of their association. It is these associations that partly give rise to what is chagrin to both left and right, namely the crisis of politics. The legal space of representation called the political will maintain its apparent separation so long as it is not a space wherein the social behaviour of the multitude can be recognised. It will continue to be seen as a world apart, one that can be entered into, but one that requires a detachment from what one might otherwise do. Rather than an extension of man’s social being and the expression of his amour propre, it involves a set of technologies that react back onto social life and condition the terms of its expression. Thus the crisis of politics lies in that political man is seen now as inauthentic man, separated from the fulfilment of his own needs and turned into a media entrepreneur, fickle in the extreme, whose true private life will eventually be exposed to his ruin. For Negri, ‘when people talk about a "crisis of politics,"’

‘They are effectively saying that the democratic State no longer functions - and that in fact it has become irreversibly corrupt in all its principles and organs; the division of powers; the principles of guarantee; the single individual powers; the rules of representation; the unitarian dynamic of powers; and the functions of legality, efficiency and administrative legitimacy.’[559]

In this sense, and many other cases, the multitude is ahead of the Left and its theorisation. This is arguably because it knows its power but keeps it secret, hidden, and it does not allow its power to be expressed in the form of an institution, whereas for the Left the institution, the accountable, representative and media sensitive body, is the only conceivable form of power. Because of this, models of organisation are uncritically borrowed from existing pseudo democratic structures (institutional and behavioural) and democracy continues to be seen as a technical and procedural issue of decision- making and consensus formation. This often invokes the ideas of inclusion, community building, and citizenship, whereas the practical manufacture of consent is in reality the opposite: modes of programmatic exclusion and formal engineering of sentiment that organise to placate the vocal minorities at the great expense of those whose desires show no inclination towards formalised political representation.

Representation forces a wedge between subjects and those acting to exploit them. It shifts the terrain onto negotiation, agreement and consensus. The constituent power of the minority group of capitalists tries to repudiate or recuperate the ‘many’ in order to give legitimacy to the structures of meioses, mediation and control. Power (authority) craves these mediations and very often they are served up on a plate. And yet the skill of the multitude in withdrawing from these constructions intensifies and accelerates this process where all politics becomes a farcical attempt at capturing a power that is one step ahead and beyond its grasp. It is to the dark side of the multitude that we must turn when reflecting on the relation of politics to totality, because it is there that forms of subversion are expressed not merely as a refusal, but also as a constitution, that is to say as the active generation of new forms of life and collectivities. There is nothing inevitable about this process, but when political strategies are fashioned from outside or above this power they remain vulnerable to it.

In so far as the modern state is concerned with the containment, management and inclusion of subjectivity, it is an attempt to create interiority. However, in the conditions of globalisation where social subjectivity is not necessarily manufactured within the state but has many links with other systems, this interiority is increasingly one reducible to law and command in so far as what conditions the behaviour of individuals is determined by more diffuse factors not reducible to their own activity. In this sense the state attempts to limit the drive to exteriority and combination with others, the positive force inherent to social life that it itself adopts as its ground of legitimacy. If the forces of cooperation and association cannot be recuperated, they must be repressed as has been witnessed by the forcible criminalisation of the European and World Social Forums that staged themselves as alternatives to global summits. Such control society subverts the sovereignty of the individual on which it ostensibly based its legitimate ground. The network model of horizontal association appears where there is consciousness on behalf of social actors of the inadequacy of the sovereign individual. Where the one relates to itself as one, it is really none as its supposed unity allows for no differentiation although it has absolute exterior differentiation as its ground. Indeed because subjectivity is social, based upon multiple becomings of immanent connections in life, the introspective form of self- reflection and identity creation posed by the likes of Giddens adopts as the constitutive principle the reverse of this, and reflects a turn to an inwardness that is only possible on the basis of the schema of the visible and legally sanctioned form of difference. At the same time however, the model of the totality that has its dynamic in separation and negation becomes an equally problematic model for the comprehension of desiring subjectivity. Within post-modern interiority, the totality cannot form an adequate horizon of being because being has an infinitude that intrinsically concerns the over coming of boundaries through combination.

As Foucault describes, the classical representational projects that built the general grammar of wealth, of history and of nature, suffered their crisis in the passage to the modern. That is to say the modern is essentially this crisis within the classical representation.

“The end of Classical thought – and of the episteme that made general grammar, natural history and the science of wealth possible – will coincide with the decline of representation, or rather with the emancipation of the living being, and of need, with regard to representation.”[560]

It is subjectivity that provokes this crisis, living being and practice that shatter resemblances. But it is also a subjectivity that effectively evades capture, and that must constitute itself in antagonism or as a disturbance of the classical representational episteme. When Foucault continues he says,

“Something like a will or a force was to arise in the modern experience – constituting it perhaps, but in any case indicating that the classical ages was now over, and with it the reign of representative discourse, the dynasty of a representation signifying itself and giving voice in the sequence of its words to the order that lay dormant within things.”

There is an emergence of force, but one marked by a fundamental ambivalence about quite what to call it and how to describe it. And yet what is suggestive in Foucault’s words is very much the figure of decline of an empire, the end of a dynastic order, and to be a little indulgent the figure of multitude of living being, polyvalent subjectivity that is at first only manifest to us as, ‘something like… a force’. Clearly, for Foucault this force emerges at the beginnings of the modern, but it is possible to see in the demise of the mature counter crisis systems that evolved in the modern, that such a force would present itself again as an initially indeterminate awareness at the level of being, the like of which was seen in the metaphysics of Hegel and Fichte but lacking in the confidence of the internal drive to completion and consummation of that force within itself. This consciousness is clearly one of practical social activity rather than merely the activity of the awareness of thinking; that which subjectivity is reducible to in idealism. But such a drive also subverts the materialist desire for the totality of being described by Bataille. Rather it reflects an opposite relation that Bataille also identifies: the flight from recuperation in the totality. The advantage of the social ontology of aleatory materialism is that it does not lament the demise of the individual in the manner of the Hegelian and existential Marxism of Debord and Marcuse. It criticises separated being, but not from the position of a future unity, but from its real unity in the cooperation of singularities. Indeed it allows for the possibility of seeing subjectivity not in manageable liberal terms of the antecedent individual, but as a Spinozian combination with those outer elements that agree with its nature and enhances its powers. Whereas it was the mythical and spiritual unity in collective confrontations with death that allowed for Bataille to say, " an individual is complete only in so far as he ceases to distinguish himself from others, from his fellow beings..."[561] today it is the explosion of communicative horizons and the creation of a general capacity to act that allows for the possibility of a true break with the de-habilitating discourse and repressive practice of the formation of the individual. Whilst such a radical drive within modernity was locked within the increasingly problematic discourse of alienation and totality, in current times, these concepts based upon separation have lost their general ability to encompass the force of social life.

There is no politics of the post-modern

Earlier, the claim was made that to interrogate the nature of the post-modern inevitably affirms elements of it. Whether negatively or positively intended, any orientation towards post-modern theory reproduces its presence. However, this discursive constitution typifies the formation of the post-modern as a set of converging, critical and theoretical practices. This practice is critical because it is an intellectual site that is based formatively on the questioning of foundations. It has been shown that two of the conditions of possibility for theories of post-modernity lay in the convergence of two strong and ultimately contradictory forces: the demand for a unitary and synthetic theory and the proliferation of Marxisms in widening and differentiating social struggles. Identifying these two forces is not meant to be exclusive but one small but significant result of this inquiry has been to see that far from being something alien to Marxian systems, postmodern theory is often the natural result of the investigation or application of them. However the questioning of Marxism has broader affects upon other systems of social explanation that share certain of its methodological principles or assumptions.  The result of this generalised deconstruction is that post-modern theory cannot be relegated to the realm of fancy, unless a more synthetic form of social science can sufficiently ground a plausible and working notion of the practical interconnection of subjectivity and totality within a theoretical system. Until then, the procedures used to advance scientific understanding will be principally those that question the nature of contemporary society and the means by which it can be understood. It is not for this author to decide whether this questioning of foundations ought to be described as post-modernism, because as has been attested to in this work, the novelty of the post-modern only lies in that it is now a generalised and emboldened form of what have been many partial orientations towards and deconstructions of totality throughout the history of what is called modernity. This is said to dispel any notion of a sequence of events forming a historical linearity as opposed to a structuralist view of the conjuncture and over-determination of effects. It must be pointed out however, that those advocates of a ‘soft’ post-modern approach, in affirming a historical temporality to the modern, have only postponed the question of what going beyond the modern would entail. Habermas’s position is more sophisticated, but it is important to note that his theory of modernity as an unfinished project would not make quite so much sense to its conservative readers if they were not so desperately looking for an exit route from the aporia and cynicism of the post-modern abyss.

There is no politics of the post-modern because today, the representational functions of the political have lost their connection to their democratic origin. Representative politics is of necessity spectacularised and orientated to the marketing of a position. The radical side of post-modern criticism is that the symbolic ordering of representations takes precedence over their content. The manipulation of the aesthetics of politics employs technologies that are identifiable across the board. Once this occurs what drives public discourse cannot be essentialised as reason or the reasonable, because the latter is only one mode of creating affect. But that the specificity of the political should emerge in the notion that there are set of technologies designed to induce another to act, is at the very same moment the point where one can see its dissolution as a separate and authentic realm of conduct. In the pluralisation of the mode of subjectification through signification, the sign detaches itself from its referent as its other. What was once a source of solidarity with the aesthetic representation becomes a volatile thing, signs call up other significations than those intended. It should not surprise us that the expression of this moment in the philosophy of Derrida is essentially linked to the crisis of the speculative dialectic that through totality effects a closure. The insights gained from looking at what the use of totality in thought implies has in this research helped inform what we can understand by politics and what the limitations of it are. Totalities are thought constructs that describe a process of interiorisation of the outside. Totalities are the creation of a determinate interiority and thus they negatively posit an exteriority. This dynamic of internalisation and externalisation is politics. That there is no universal form of this process, nor meta-historical instantiation of it (except in the form of generalised expression of minor-histories), is why the conception of what is politics can only ever become more specific by the taking up the concrete set of forces as they exist in the present.

The crisis of politics in the post-modern refers to a state where the authority of institutions of mediation has been generally discredited. For a while, the critical appraisal of the post-modern associated it with degeneration at the level of knowledge, culture and anti-systemic world changing subjectivity. It was predominantly seen as the emergence of irrationalist and relativist doctrines, and an exaggerated anti-enlightenment position where truth claims were reduced to contingency. This criticism conjoined both conservative reaction and a defence of reason. There developed an intellectual opposition to post-modernism that sought to defend truth against relativism, progress from decay and reason from the irrational.[562] Despite their polemical appeal, these fundamentally conservative reactions have contributed little in the way of elucidating the different forms of post-modern thought and effect only a recuperative power that performs on the post-modern the very same kind of reduction and negative focus that is said to characterise the post-modern treatment of modernist thought.

The post-modern is not an aberration of the modern, but the outcome of its internal process of questioning of foundations, its spirit to not hold back its self- critique. Whereas it is true that in and of itself this does not posit the beyond to modernity, we would offer that the generalisation of this radical doubt and the impossibility of a generic political solidarity based around state legitimacy, questions the coherence of the idea of modernity. And so even if the defence is to point out that modernity itself was never a singular entity, this plays ultimately into the hands of the broader attack on the meta-narrative of modernity as a form of social management and as a closure around a particular identity posing as universal. This view could comprise an anti-modernity that judges particular developments in their own terms, yet opposes the overall totalisation of one dominant form of individuated activity, the reduction to labour power.

This requires a giving over of its own. It requires giving over to high modernism the principle of difference, because it truly represents the moment of decomposition, decomposition of the ideal, its final collapse; whereas the post-modern is more properly the impasse that succeeds this failure of the modernist project and the beginnings of new types of combination. For this reason tracing the post-modern finds it, though evidently not in name, at many of the significant points where the contradictory mechanisms of modern societies reach crisis. It is not a question of finding the authentic moment or origin of the post-modern whether in the 30s or in the 70s, that is an intellectual endeavour of reaching back and of rediscovery that belongs to culture at large. However the coincidence of the resuscitation of the post-modern theorising and anti-theorising with the immediate post-cold war post triumphalist period should, that is to say in the mid-90s when this thesis was conceived, be a reminder that this its-self has been the object of a process of recuperation and of deliberate misrepresentation that has minimised its truly radical anti-systemic implications.

The horizons of totality

The difficulty then lies in trying to perceive the totality through suturing subjectivity to a form of universality, a minority that becomes majority. The Hegelian Marx demands that a subject with ‘universal chains must be formed.’ He approaches Das Kapital with a mind to ground that universality in social subjectivity itself, but accomplishes it only by reducing social subjectivity to an abstract form of labour-power; a general social capacity to act. From this point of view it is easier to see why the role of workers subjectivity in generating new forms of command was not explicitly theorised. He sought to show that crisis emerged out of the reduction of difference to identity necessary for capital to valorise. The integration of the worker’s actual productive power into a system as already valorised – the idealisation witnessed in the second volume of Das Kapital – is permitted by the totalisation of a tendency existing in a material process of reduction.

This text has drawn on negative dialects of synthesis and positive dialectics of combination. In the first case, totality is a necessary mediation and in idealist negative dialectics it is as essential to the movement as negativity itself. In the case of the latter, that which has been called aleatory materialism, the synthetic moment of thought has a subordinate role in systems that see an expansive and combinatory power at the level of social subjectivity and that do not interiorise the other but combine with it in positive assemblages. If it is the case that in the latter type of materialism, infinity is more primordial that totality, then it is equally the case that refusal is more fundamental than negativity. They are only superficially similar. Negativity ties constitution to a dialectic of interiority, the negative belongs to what it negates. Refusal on the other hand refers to a state of being somewhere else, doing some other thing and saying no to incorporation. Refusal is a form of social activity that always stands in opposition to the realisation of a totality, i.e. the closure of an interiority. Around this issue it is surprising to see how starkly the two camps of humanist Marxism and aleatory materialism are divided over what would appear to be such a slight difference. In recent work by John Holloway, the latter has made much over the claim that the ‘starting point is negativity.’ [563] For Holloway life begins with a scream, despair and nothingness – in short with a desire whose only drive is a sense of loss. In contrast, Deleuze maintained, ‘revolution never proceeds by way of the negative.’  Whilst the struggle that Holloway describes quickly becomes one of a struggle for an authentic personality, one whose appeal can fall entirely within a liberal frame of reference, aleatory materialism on the other hand addresses an outwardness to other beings that is a re-constitution of being in new combinations and without the limiting horizon of effecting a closure upon the drive to the outside. The advantages of the social ontology of aleatory materialism is that on a number of levels it breaks with the notion of individual autonomy and liberation and is open to all manner of assemblages of acting singularities. For Negri too, the realisation of communism is a coming together, a generative act that must refuse the internalisation of limits and project itself in knowledge and politics as collectivity, openness and creation.

For dialectical thought, the concept of totality furnished an important way of bridging the gap between the reflective thought construct and the concrete social world. Whilst Hegel looked for the homeliness of thought in Spirit, in contrast the spirit of Marxism found this homeliness in the idea of Marxism as a proletarian science. Marxism believed it could claim objectivity because, through the party and within the movements of the working class, it could centralise the differential experiences of struggle and develop an authentic class outlook. Here totality could be held onto as a concept because it was transposed into a different type of interiority, both practically and theoretically governed by the horizons of a political movement. It is the experience of this latter that informs the possibility of the post-modern. In the materialist transubstantiation of the category of totality from a purely religious horizon into a political project, played out in many opposing ways, the result has tended less towards a more synthetic view of modern social and political life and more towards a view based on the irreconcilability of antagonisms within the social. 

This is the relation of totality and subjectivity. It is the social relation that we call politics and it is not an incidental matter that totality and total critique slip out of usage in political programmes, just when the constitution and diversification of social identities has matured to the point where the traditional mechanisms of political and religious mediation are exhausted. In the complex crisis of social cohesion called the post-modern, the kind of sense of loss and of absence that provided the context of success of the Hegelian speculative narratives has itself become over-determined and diffused. Technologies of self creation have become plural and have their own relations with one another that forces perspective and self determination to assume such complex dimensions that make a nonsense of the idea that we can start from a simple point of departure in order to cognise them. There is no single and total original separation to be discovered. This remains the same, as has been shown, even if the simple point of departure has the complexity of a determining totality the like of which we can see from positivist conceptions of society wherein, disposed to the unitary model of the totality, cohesion arises out of differentiation. Moreover, the gradual recognition within western societies that preordained orders of social explanation whatever their organisational form, religious, national, racial or otherwise are hierarchical and the re-emergence of localisms, regionalism, and highly developed and plural cultural particularism itself reflects the broader crisis of the specifically political form of the mediation and control.

The disinterest held for total explanations must be understood politically. They are rejected by constitutive power that demands its own space. The atomisation of the individual – his over-determination as point of reference – his radical disinterest in the state of things, posits a state of things like no other. Not only the guarantee of practical survival, the social is the only source of inner explication, it is a mediation that requires, in the head, its own undoing as a mediation, that is to say the dissolution of the imposition of the requirement that the epistemological imposes over the ontological – that is when what exists, is reduced to what can be represented. The mediation of the social, the sub-systems’ reproduction of the system, can only be untangled and registered in its immediacy, by the surrender of the political to the functional imperatives of the organisation of the system. That is to say, the emancipatory discourse of the political is invalidated historically by the actualisation of the political as technique of command, which is another way of describing the sub- systems’ reproduction of the system i.e. the reproduction of social relations in capitalist form.

As a social process that grounds modernity and the theoretical edifice that justifies it, social differentiation has been exhausted. Difference so to speak has become a repetition. Distantiation has become indifference. And yet the ‘pimp between man and his desire’ the ‘social bond’ that man carries in his pocket, continues to be the inhuman nexus of human behaviour, as a continually re-posited externality, an outside that it sought, necessary to the majoritarian experience of becoming through social integration. It is for this very reason that the vast majority of people cannot conceive of a world without money, and yet paradoxically it is at this very point that we cannot imagine a beyond, when its domination appears total, that the origin of its dissolution must be sought.

The Empire of the known

Totality is a horizon that is never reached. However, it regulates and conditions the known all the same. In the form of thought constructs, all totalities are haunted by the unknown: by the elements that could not be seen and thus not even negatively incorporated into the whole. The totality is limited to only those determinations that can be accounted for, and thus it is ultimately, inevitably a one sided orientation. The struggle for the impossible informs the possible. In negative dialectics, totality was a form of belonging that presented itself as a result. But such a result is not the whole movement and as such the affectivity of a whole is always an approximation ready to fall foul of reality.

This does not mean that thought cannot orientate itself to the totality nor attempt to include as many determining elements as possible in order for thought constructs to become more adequate. It is to argue that the aspiration to totality is a more powerful and affirmative drive than any one intellectual result produced through application of its method. Such results are often contingent and can be unsettled by the slightest differentiation. Totality must always be understood as an inadequate adequation to a real that is different in form to the real. Hence it represents by not being a representation but a conceptual distantiation from the visible form of the substance. That is to say, the conceptual order, or the discursive field, must maintain their distinction as a particular and one-sided orientation to what is. There are no inherent positivist reasons why there should be a scientific explanation of exploitation and our experience should not suffice to be sure of it, if it were not the case that science were used to disprove experience.

The struggle for the impossible informs our consciousness of possibility. The possible belongs to the now rather than the future and only the past is properly transcendent. Often when this transcendence is offered to us, we accept it as reason. Because our reason belongs to the surpassed, in it we discover a not now that we imagine must be the future, whereas this future is just a representation of our distantiation from others within the present. The orientation to the future, to the revolution, and the utopian reconciliation are just other forms of this displacement or deferral that disjoints our power as bodies from the knowledge of the power of our bodies. The epoch of the post-modern is a period of a quasi- universal reflection of an epoch onto itself and its impossibility. It is emblematic of the impossibility of positing a universal moral ideology; it is symptomatic of consciousness within complex differentiation. What speaks in the post-modern is the particular. It is epochal in this regard in that history can not be spoken of in universal terms: that is to say, in the real, histories necessarily collide, contaminate one another or fight against one another, they are intrinsically linked to the power of being.

Sovereign totality introduced politics into simple totality. Its yield was exception, surplus and the non-representability of the heterogeneous. It sees the ‘overall’ determination as commandment or will. The deconstruction of sovereign totality is the destruction of the overall-movement as having a dynamic pertaining to itself in summation of its parts. The (historical) refusal of the assimilation of the parts or their withdrawal forces the conceptual moment away from the analysis of the whole, because the concrete unity of the whole as totality is only possible with the a posteriori intervention of the intellect. Like ‘truth’ the totality is a production. It is however a production in a special sense. What totality produces, and must always produce, is the empire of the known. The unknowable by contrast sets itself up against it as its destructive force. The unknowable is what totality conquests, but at each point a totality is posited, it cements the known parts together without any collaboration of the unknown parts. A totality then is intrinsically a closure, but this very interiority is the source of the generation of an awareness of exteriority, of the rediscovery of the infinite and heterogeneous as richer categories of reflection and being.