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

Abstract

This essay comments on the so-called ’White March‘ which, in the aftermath of the Dutroux-case (which was about multiple child abuse and child murder), led one out of 30 Belgians to participate in the biggest demonstration, albeit a silent one, Belgium has ever known. It is argued here that this White March can be read, in a Deleuzean way, as a rhizomic flash, or, using metaphors from chaos theory, as a dissipative structure, which was strangely attracted around empty signifiers (e.g. “Whiteness”), to form a Body without Organs. This formation, or build-up of a white (Belgian) Body without Organs is explained by pointing at two complementary processes which post-Fordist, flexible, “hypermodern” Belgium is sliding into: 1) under “hypermodern” conditions of flexibility, of post-Fordist regulation, of de/re/centring subjectivities and of budgetary austerity, the old Belgian regulatory mode of political pacification through pillarization is becoming more and more obsolete, and, at the least, is growing incapable of regulating ever proliferating nomadic subjectivities; 2) de/re/centring, nomadic subjectivities, in Belgium, losing the old comforts of pillarized regulation and pacification, are floating and whirling freely in Belgium's political void, since there is no alternative mode of regulation – such as a public space or culture of civic negotiation – in sight/site. This has brought Belgium's mental and political landscape on the verge of deep instability, or, in the language of chaos theory, in a phase of exploding bifurcations, in which small causes can produce big consequences – a phase, that is, in which tiny particles of social energy can rapidly cluster together (around “strange attractors”) to form dissipative structures, mostly around “empty signifiers”, in a (Deleuzean) Body without Organs. This happened, in Belgium, when, in August 1996, the Dutroux-case broke out. The Dutroux-case gathered – rhizomically – huge portions of “White material” of unregulated discontent from Belgium's multiple locations of multiplicity to form a Body without Organs, which, in turn, materialized in the White March of October 20th 1996, after it had been named by Marc Dutroux's legal counsel, who suddenly spoke a language of universalism, equality, and civic culture. When the counsel spoke words, that is, which did not match with Belgian everyday life experience, still submerged as it was (and is) in the old mental habits of Belgium's politics of pillarization, with its trench mentality, and its war-of-position-like strategics. The essay closes with some considerations on the future of Belgium's emerging White Movement. In a sense, this essay aims at two goals: it tries to read one of the most significant events in Belgian history using rather “unusual” metaphors, and, secondly, while doing so, it aims at showing that metaphors from chaos theory and from Deleuzean post-structuralism can be merged together while describing (or explaining) concrete historical events. This essay, then, tries to contribute to what might be called a historiography of rhizochaotics, or a psycho-geography of rhizomic and chaotic socio-mental energies.