The White March as a Belgian Body without Organs: On dissipative structures, strange attractions and empty signifiers

Crime, Law and Social Change

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 49-65

  Lippens, Ronnie ^a  

^a GHENT UNIVERSITY   (Belgium)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 22444453792     PISSN: 09254994     EISSN: 15730751     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1008200218895     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. At the time when conflicts between catholics, liberals (and emerging socialists) gained momentum, culminating in a bitter struggle over educational politics.
2. One Belgian commentator on Belgium's tradition of pillarized politics (or, using our metaphors: Belgian politics of regulation through trench war pacification) once described this tradition as a history of "armed peace" - in Dutch: Luc Huyse, De Gewapende Vrede. Politick in België tussen 1945 and 1980, Leuven: Kritak, 1980 - translated: "Armed Peace. Belgian Politics between 1945 and 1980". Political regulation, in Belgium, as we will explain further on, has been realized through State-funded pacification by pillarization, thus neutralizing ("buying off") outbursts of severe conflict between socio-economic factions, between ethnic groups and between religious/ethical positions.
3. On this metaphor, "strange attractor", from chaos theory, see, amongst various (by now well-known) classics on chaos theory, also: Harriett Hawkins, Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos Theory, New York: Prentice Hall, 1995.
4. Texts, such as cultural practices, novels, subjectivities, and, indeed, demonstrations, can be read as clusters of heterogenuous energies, strangely attracted into unstable dissipative structures, ready for unlimited de(con)structions. On the tangent planes between chaos theory and poststructuralism (and deconstructionism), see the collection in: N. Katherine Hayles (ed.), Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
5. From Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's "rhizome". We will use this Deleuzean metaphor at various places in this essay. "Rhizomic" refers to the highly complex ways through which various socio-mental energies - multiplicities hiding in contingent, multi-layered psycho-geographical locations - mobilise, converge, and diverge. Flowing in and out of marginal s/p/l/aces - Foucault's heteroptia, one could say - linking together into gathering mental s/p/l/aces (psycho-geographical s/p/l/aces), only to fragment and to escape via an unlimited stream of lines of flight into the open. And again. "Rhizomic", then, as a metaphor, is to be understood together with metaphors such as "ambivalence", "multiplicities", "hybridities", "contingency", "chaotic instability", "fluidity", etc. In short, it refers to a reading of the world not as much as a collection of radical unicities (or "roots") but rather as (that which is being re/produced in) an enigmatic maze of interconnected and interdependent nodes of multipled socio-mental or psycho-geographical energies (think of the Internet as a stream of rhizomic flashes, produced in and out of an unlimited network of unretraceable pulses of energy). See the original text, in French, by Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari, Rhizome: Introduction. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1976.
6. This text, slightly modified, has reappeared as the first chapter in Deleuze's and Guattari's "Mille Plateaux", which appeared, in English, as A Thousand Plateaus. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
7. In various contributions to Belgian journals - see also the extended passages on "hypermodernity" in: Ronnie Lippens, "Alternatives to what Kind of Suffering? Towards a Border-Crossing Criminology", Theoretical Criminology, 1988 (3) (forthcoming).
8. See also: Ronnie Lippens, "Hypermodernity, Nomadic Subjectivities and Radical Democracy. Roads through Ambivalent Clews", Social Justice 1998 (2) (forthcoming).
9. A "juge d'instruction", or, in Dutch, "onderzoeksrechter", in Belgium, supervises and controls operations of criminal investigation in specific cases.
10. In fact, he just did his job, while, under extreme White pressures, he even tried to prevent full-blown catastrophy during Dutroux's future trial.