Marcia Rosefelt
State University of New York at Buffalo

The interstice as intervention : An epistemology of virtual justice

This paper discusses l’écriture and the project of deconstruction as they have influenced cultural criticism, postcolonial theory, socially or politically oriented design theory, and recent critical theory. In particular, the paper investigates how the influential concepts of the interstice and the interval, along with other organic metaphors, have been formulated or explored by Blanchot, Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, as well as by Jean-Luc Godard in some of his most political films. It also advances the notion of deconstructive writing as a new organic paradigm within the French philosophical tradition of organic social and political theory.

Social theories have been grounded in paradigms of organicism often taken from science – and so have philosophy, the notion of l’écriture, and the correspondent project of deconstruction. This tradition has greatly informed the political and aesthetic conception of l’écriture and its organic metaphors. In philosophical perspectives of the social organism of the 17th and 18th centuries which used the living organism as reference, it was the perception of the universe as an organized, systemic, and ultimately harmonic organism (in spite of conflicts) that was transposed to idealizations of the social sphere (what has been called "la logique organique"). Organic metaphors, including metaphors of space have mediated an imaginary constitution of society. Since they have been used to shape the space of the political, they are crucial forms of philosophical mediation and representation. The ethics of deconstruction has been discussed. What I will examine is how the notion of political intervention and social change appears in this literary conception of organic writing.

The image of the liquid diamond was used by Sollers and other organic metaphors were used by Bataille, such as the sponge and the labyrinth. These metaphors suggest the process and fluidity of writing itself. I will examine the recent organic paradigm of the liquid image, which now associated with the popular notion of navigating on the Internet, represents democratic ideals. In spite of its anti-paradigmatic bent, the interstice has been an epistemological and political model of fluidity, of the indeterminacy principle, and most importantly, of virtuality. Homi Bhabha, for example, has used the notion of the interstitial space for a fluid formulation of "otherness" – of gender, cultural difference, and identity – by perceiving the possibility of social transformation through the constitution of an oscillating and hybrid self. It is at the intersections of various social spaces that cultural values and communal interests are negotiated.

Guattari also developed influential organic notions, such as the rhizome, molecular revolution, the phylum, and chaosmosis. They have been models for thinking, writing, political action, and aesthetics. The new collective notions of organicism may have also been developed as a reaction against the aggressive, combative, geometric, dialectical, and hard-edged aesthetics of the modern movement that still dominates the physical environment. Initially revolutionary, the modern movement has been appropriated by capitalism. In spite of the fact that the new organicism presents some of the modern principles of radical social change and an association with the Marxist ideal, there is the debatable question that what I present as a current gelatinous state, found in new visual imagery and material production, may constitute a form of seductive depoliticization rather than a step further in the democratic process or in the history of social consciousness and social justice.

Deleuze perceived liquidity as a political project of epistemological transformation : "your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid, geometric." Derrida formulated the interval as an in-between state that never becomes a third term, never constitutes a solution. Neither the inside nor the outside, this other logic resists the binary structure of Western metaphysics, disorganizing an entire order. Derrida suggested a resistance in the interval. What he called "undecidables" are multiples that overturn the solid basis of Western knowledge. Notions of indetermination, flux, and non-conceptuality were part of the general project of critical theory against the positivism of the concept. The interstice has had the transformative task of dismantling Western social, political, and epistemological structures supposedly based on bipolar dialectics. An extension of the organic tradition found in Marx for example, the concept of fluidity appears today as an operational concept in philosophy for a more democratic constituency. Principles of organicism and multiplicity are connected in the new virtual formulations of social utopia and next to the organic metaphors are structures of global cooperation as well as the crisis of Western thought and hegemony.

The paper also examines briefly how these literary notions are linked to new scientific paradigms concerning perceptions of structures of the universe that refute old mechanistic conceptions as well as the organism, exploring some general epistemological assumptions of social theory related to the concept of justice.