I have
written this as a collection of thoughts which
can overlap. The sections are like blogs -- I
read something then think of the implications
for politics.I cold justify this as a Deleuzian
method of writing in plateaus -- but I won't
Section/blog
1
This was
inspired by reading Rancière on
the dilemmas and difficulties of radical
cultural politics.He has highlighted a central tension
between the need to preserve the autonomy of art
in order to guarantee ist radical opposition to
capitalism, while managing its ‘heteronomy’,
that is its distance from politics and everyday
life.Radicals
have always seen aesthetics as holding out some
hope as a grounded alternative to capitalism and
its reductions, but the danger is both that art
can become too heteronomous, wanting to announce
its freedom from radical politics, and likely to
become incorporated as entertainment. if it is
not autonomous enough.Rancière
offers
various alternatives, all of which end in
‘entropy’ or contradiction.
It struck
me throughout that Deleuzian cultural politics
display many of the same problems.The
radical stuff in AntiOedipus
and Chaosmosis
holds out the possibility of a radical
subjectivity that overcomes various repressive
forces and allows the free play of desire.There
is an awful lot of hesitation and
procrastination about this, however.Nevertheless,
these political options are not just the
personal beliefs of Deleuze and Guattari, but
have a ground in the underlying ontology.The
possibilities are real, since chaos underpins
all actual empirical systems, heterogeneity
underpins all apparently simple empirical forms,
existing notion of the subject, including the
obedient subject of capitalism, is in fact one
product of complex processes of subjectivation
which can be reenergised to generate much more
open relationships with others and with the
world.
All
radical politics need such a ground or else they
look like special pleading for the groups that
will benefit from them (Marx insisted that the
revolution would benefit the working class but
thereby all humanity, since the victory of the
proletariat would end all class struggle). The
same goes for radical educational politics too –
is progressivism merely the cult of the restless
petit bourgeoisis or is it somehow ‘for
everyone’?
Guattari’s
route to liberation involves a constant form of
therapeutic encounter with otherness, other
people and other universes represented by the
arts.Deleuze’s
route is a more classic scholarly one, and we
have to abandon conventional thought, at some
risk, eschew the company of others, and engage
in solitary philosophical inquiry of a profound
and radical kind.Such enquiry is only possible after wide
scholarly reading of developments in arts,
sciences and mathematics, especially the
unconventional and experimental ones.Avant-garde
cinema
in particular is valued as a stimulus for such
philosophical inquiry, for Deleuze personally,
and as an educational route for others.The
same goes for his own lecturing and writing,
especially when pursued as a form of délire.
One
obvious problem emerges soon into reading this
work in the form of Deleuze’s elitism and
esotericism, which clearly contradicts the
allegedly universal claims made for his
philosophy. This problem is apparent in Badiou’s insistence
that the real priority of Deleuze’s work, the
one he has spent most time on and which he
values most is the scholarly philosophical quest
for a grasp of Being. The
‘applied’ work is at best a constant
demonstration of the philosophical inquiry, the
reductive, endless and repetitive discovery of
the univocity of being: the immensely detailed
work in the books on cinema end by confirming
what Deleuze had thought all along – that
Bergson’s concepts are very valuable. Even a
sympathiser can see the temptations Deleuze must
have faced, having spent his life and built his
career on philosophical inquiry to preserve that
as the main aim, with cultural politics as a
kind of optional ‘application’.
I am
reminded of Fraser’s
sad but hilarious account of the failure of
followers of Derrida’s work on deconstruction as
a political device.The
followers set up a centre in Paris to pursue the
project, but they spent far too much time
philosophising, and failed even to organise a
straightforward political struggle to defend
their own organisation against an aggressive
takeover. I don’t suppose activists can rely
very much on philosophers for help in
practice—as the police charge, would you turn to
Deleuze for advice? Would you be comforted by
his revival of Stoic philosophy and any attempts
to see being beaten to death as
‘deactualization’?
In
Guattari’s case, it is different, and we face
the contradictions of the therapeutic total
institution—you have to be incarcerated in his
clinic before you can begin to be treated with a
new regime of openness and creativity, and,
presumably, the therapists continue to police
the explorations of relations with others in
order to steer away from pathological ones.
Creative freedom for the inmates seems to be one
of those always postponed promises.
The same
applies to progressive education, possibly – you
MUST cooperate and not compete, play parachute
games not football etc. You MUST follow
teachers’ background guidance and discover what
she wants you to discover, and probably avoid
the kind of classic scholasticism pursued by
Deleuze until, one day, you might be empowered
enough to make ‘your own’ choices. Chances are,
progressivism will also develop its own mundane
version of practice, leaving behind the
philosophical groundings offered by Dewey (or
Freire! – no ‘theory’ is allowed in Education)
and turn into a way of coping with the day,
especially in conventional schools, managing
challenge conservatively and so on.
In
Rancière’s terms, both Deleuze and Guattari are
arguing for an initial act of radical separation
from everyday life (the empirical world and
conventional thought) in order to preserve the
autonomy of their virtual levels which act as a
necessary ground.But this very separation runs the risk of
too much autonomy, so to speak, an effective
closure of the virtual realm to those who have
not followed Deleuze and Guattari.There
is another problem too with excessive autonomy –
of all the possible forms of subjectivation, of
all the possible complex actualizations, why
should the virtual prefer liberating and
creative ones?Maybe [especially early] Deleuze suspects
the deep indifference of the virtual to the
mundane world in his stoicism, his belief that
all people can do, when faced with the prospect
of death for example, is to deactualize and
celebrate Fate. [It seems to me that chaos
theorists in organizational management face the
same sorts of dilemma. Chaos has to be separate
enough from the actual organization to serve as
a source of critique, but it clearly threatens
all forms of organization not just outdated
forms. What mysterious mechanism will guarantee
that chaos will meekly actualize as a reformed
capitalist organization specifically? I think
this affects the more ‘democratic’ version of
chaos theory – chaos is as external to liberal
professional politics as it is to authoritarian
hierarchy, surely? Chaos theory helps dereify -
-but so do lots of other approaches].
At a more
political level, we can explain the constant
hesitation between the prospect of liberation
and the dreadful developments of the society of
control: in a way, both are products of the
operations of the virtual, both must be equally
well grounded.It requires a non- philosophical
preference for subjective liberation to develop
radical politics, which weakens the claim of
some sort of compulsory and obligatory grounding
in the first place.
There is
also the danger of recuperation. Capitalism will
meet all our conceivable desires, and people
will shape their desires to what the system can
offer. This is the basis of Zizek’s critique of
Deleuze – the rhizome has become the elusive
flows of international capital, the virtual has
become the Web etc. This is the problem with
very abstract/autonomous cultural politics
again, that a mundane, popular version must take
the place of the esoteric demand for
unconstrained desire, and it ties in with the
elitism issue – only proper philosophers can
tell the difference and they are soon ignored.
Philosophy is too difficult and remote for
ordinary life, and there is always a temptation
to develop a soft working alternative based on
common sense – describe your lack of structured
lessons as ‘rhizomatic’ and away you go.
This is
not to take the piss but to recognize the
inevitable ‘entropy’ that haunts cultural
politics, in Rancière’s terms. The mistake made
by Deleuze and Guattari was to put everything
behind a particular 60s version of cultural
politics -- they (or rather their disciples)
can’t see anything in current popular culture,
for example? Educational progressives are too
wedded to the romantic stuff of the past, when
we all did face to face in small groups, before
electronic communication. Rancière doesn’t give
up hope but advocates constant renewal and
reinvigoration, especially with an eye to
anything approaching recuperation. This is how
we should approach the debates about MOOCs, for
example?
Applying
some intensively philosophical analysis like
Deleuzian ones to more concrete political
situations has additional problems.The
most obvious one is that the philosophical work
is excessive so to speak.I
argued this once with gramscian work that
claimed to have been based on a concrete
political struggle over the pretty obviously
vindictive injustice handed out to black
‘muggers’ in Brimingham, and turned in to pages
of discussion of Althusserian theory and
Poulantzas on the media in Policing the Crisis...
We see this excess with attempts to use
Deleuzian concepts in arguments for progressive
education, or non hierarchical organisations.Ignoring
the technical difficulties for a moment,
discussed briefly below, such applications seem
to carry almost too much power and weight.Do we
really need to have waded through Deleuze before
we can offer criticisms of the traditional
curriculum in Britain, and the exam and teaching
system based on it?Do we
need to have read Deleuze before we can identify
such trends and processes in organizations that
threaten organisational stability as well as
preserving it?Do we need to see exactly how this
analysis relates to debates with Bergson or
Nietzsche (which occupies many pages of the
actual work). My own view is that we can get
enough insight into these mechanisms, or into
processes of rationalisation or reification in
general, from reading much more accessible
critical sociology.Activists
encountering Deleuze are likely to quail at the
prospect of having to penetrate his esoteric
analyses: even brief summaries of his main
concepts are baffling to the uninitiated.
Anyone
turning to Deleuze, less so Guattari, for
assistance in performing any applied analyses or
political activities are likely to meet a
technical objection from the master himself.The
normal concepts of application belong to the
conventional image of thought which is to be
rejected.They
imply, for example, some subjective process of
recognizing an analogical link between a
Deleuzian concept and an empirical practice, or
between, say, the concept of ‘rhizome’ and the
practice of organisational deviation from the
official norms.This would not be proper philosophy,
according to Deleuze, since his concepts are
more than generalisations about empirical
practices, but refer to some non empirical
virtual elements as well, beyond the normal
processes of subjective recognition pursued by
the rest of us.Exactly how empirical practices are
incorporated into Deleuzian philosophy is far
from clear.DeLanda shows that he has clearly read
some modern literature and poetry, and some
mathematics and science, as we argued above, and
in my view, he has borrowed of the claim that
these have empirical applications.I
think there are other assumptions based on
empirical practices, especially the practices of
elite universities, that have crept in their
too.However,
there is nothing systematically discussed about
matters such as how empirical social sciences
actually do attempt to understand empirical
practices—instead, we have a constant critic
based on his own conception of the virtual which
must exceed these ‘applied’ efforts.
Guattari
is different, and bases his analysis on his own
practice as a psychotherapist, allegedly at
least.I
raise doubts because those practices again seem
insufficient to generate all the philosophical
concepts of which he is the proud co-author.It is
clear that he has also read philosophical works,
and both Deleuze and Guattari talk about how
their writing emerges from their own creative
collaborations.Guattari does offer some useful
implications—that modern education might be
understood in the same way as his own
therapeutic practice (as a matter of
reconnecting people with various kinds of
otherness)—but these are only speculative.
As usual,
I think the main interest in Deleuzian work as a
source for politics is likely to lie in the
academic world.The student upheavals of the 1960s were
one ‘application’ that Deleuzians acknowledge,
and it is the heirs of those upheavals (which
include me) who are likely to be still
interested.The university is also the ideal
location, perhaps the only location, for a
cultural politics with extensive philosophical
baggage, since it operates with the mythical
notion that rational argument is supposed to be
decisive. It is probably the only location where
an extensive discussion of Nietzsche’s notion of
the eternal return is likely to gain any
political advantages, say in promotion or in
gaining research funding.
For
everyone else, it is tempting to revive the
analysis of Hindess
and Hirst. After a long
critical discussion of various Marxist and
sociological theorists, they concluded that none
of them were very helpful in engaging in actual
politics – not surprisingly, since the object of
theory, they argued, is to produce theoretical
knowledge, not political programmes. What
positive politics needed was some analysis
intended to help people, the working class if
you insist, calculate their best interests in
concrete situations. Sometimes that might be
Trade Unionism, sometimes Marxism, possibly even
sometimes Deleuze, but the point was not to
investigate the relative philosophical merits of
these positions or explore theoretical
implications: if you want to act politically,
put effective politics first.
[Another
eg –P Smith’s counter-tourism. Just fun really
no need for heavy phil?] Situationnism does not
need surrealism. Progressives not interested in
whether Dewey or Rousseau’s conceptions of
creativity the better one – which one opposes
Gove best etc. Politics is calculative, not a
branch of philosophy]
Also
important essay by Alliez (Fuglsang). Sees
Deleuze and Badiou as offering pole positions on
how philosophy informs politics. Badiou stands
for analyzing the structure of Being in order to
uncover possibilities.Only theorists can do this
though and activism is in vain, easily
recuperable etc. Deleuze used to believe this
(as in Lof S
with its eternal neutral being etc) but then
concretised the concept in politics. There
is not just an opportunist response to 68 and
Guattari for Alliez but new work on desire and
flow etc as basis for politics, philosophy as
politics etc. NB DeLanda probably in Badiou
camp?
Support
for Althusserian structuralism in D&R, but that
changes, says Alliez, to support for the wild
Marxism of the Grundrisse, esp Mx on the
‘general intellect’, and there is convergence
with Negri too.
Section/blog
2
I have been reading Deleuze, Guattari, and the
critics like Zizek,
and in between, I have been reading bits of Rancière.
As a result, I have begun to think about the
mechanisms that produce revolutionary politics,
not in a very systematic way, at the
moment. Here are some thoughts:
Revolutionary politics can be produced by
revolutionary thinking, utopias, dreams, art,
and ideas in general. These are important
because they open alternatives to existing
social formations, and can acts, even as
Christianity once did for Marx, as the 'sigh of
the oppressed'. Both Rancière and EP
Thompson, in their different ways, have pointed
to the importance of such ideas, even religious
ones, in the formation of working class
political movements, both reformist and
revolutionary. However the problem is that
these ideas need to be grounded in something
real, in material social conditions which make
them possible, or even explain why they are
impossible at the present. Without this,
idealist revolutionary politics looks like
'cultural chitchat' to quote Rancière's
dismissive phrase. At the analytical
level, it leads to overdiagnosis, where
situations are analyzed as examples of the
essence of revolutionary movements, in a
tautological way: we are not far from those
millenarian enthusiasts who see the end of the
world in every rise in the price of oil.
This is why we need the second option.
Materialist analysis indicates revolutionary and
conservative possibilities by looking at the
tensions and contradictions in current social
formations, either those of the base or the
superstructure, depending on your take. We
have analyses of the revolutionary possibilities
of global capitalism in the construction of a
disaffected multitude in Negri
and Hardt, which drew inspiration from
Deleuze and Guattari esp. Thousand Plateaus,
as well as the practices of Italian Autonomism.
Hardt offers a
thoroughly political reading of Deleuze, denying
it was Guattari who added the politics ( see
Zizxke) We have the much more gloomy
analyses of capitalist reproduction in work like
Bourdieu, or
possibly Althusser,
if we take Rancière's reading of both.
Materialist analysis has taken different forms,
and offers problems of its own.
One option, for example, takes the well-known
form that social potentials and possibilities
have become stultified, one dimensional, or
reified in capitalism. There are
ambiguities, however. One option sees
reification as limited to a capitalist form
specifically, driven forward by commodity
production, market relations and bureaucratic
administration of a mode of production.
Others would see reification as a much more
general category, a constant tendency, whenever
productive forces achieve some sort of stasis or
equilibrium. This is the position produced
by Sartre in his attempt to provide a
philosophical foundation of praxis for Marxism,
according to Rancière. The snag is that it
is difficult to choose between particularly bad
forms of reification, since become dangerously
close to the argument that capitalism is
ultimately simply a natural form of human
society, just human 'business as susual' to cite
Rancière.
Various people have tried to get out of this
difficulty, notably Berger
and Pullberg, in their famous attempt to
distinguish between 'objectification' which does
happen in all human societies, and 'reification'
which is the specific capitalist form.
Politics aimed at dispelling the forces of
reification have to examine the historical
processes through which reified forms have
arisen, and suggest concrete alternatives and
possibilities.
This is one way of reading the massive efforts
by Deleuze and Guattari to generate new
possibilities through various forms of
philosophical analysis—tracing back to
particular singularities to the multiplicities
that produced them in order to point to a number
of alternative and equally possible
singularities. Guattari in Machinic
Unconscious particularly recommends
this 'diagrammatic' form of politics as
genuinely realistic, not starting from some
utopian point, and not ranging off into
impossibilities (and realistic in the sense that
the virtual, where the multiplicities live, is
also real). The particular device that
Guattari recommends lies in his view that
semiotization is also a multiplicity, and that
what we have to do is to think of alternative
ways to semiotize our existing material
positions, in particular, drawing on the wide
ranging forms of semiotization, including
'asignifying' systems like music and art.
In this, he is in the same tradition as those
Marxists who also recommended a form of cultural
politics based on 'immanent critique', like
Adorno.
This sort of analysis also raises an claims to
solve, another problem with conventional
materialist analysis. Again, Rancière
provides an excellent summary, but it is also
taken up by Zizek. The problem is that the
more successful materialist analysis gets, the
more it is capable of analyzing all the social
effects and practices. Everything can be
explained by materialist analysis. This
can lead to 'lazy theorising' in Sartre's
phrase, offering quick short cuts to grasp
everything as merely ideological or
whatever. It also struggles to explain the
new. If everything is adequate to the
material factors that cause it, how does
anything new arrive? This issue is
rendered slightly more philosophically by Zizek
raising the old problems with causal analysis in
general: if causes translate exactly into
effects, then there can be no substantial
difference between cause and effect. This
leads him to suggest that those interested in
revolutionary politics need to operate with a
form of causality that produces a kind of excess
in the effect, some potential that is not
exhausted by the immediate causes, something
which emerges. Again, Deleuze and Guattari
have suggested something exactly like this in
their concept of a singularity, which has an
emergent and unpredictable effects, a contingent
one outside of the play of rigorous
causes.
Zizek discusses those particular approaches that
suggest this excess is also responsible for the
ability of human beings to reflect on effects
and their potential. The same sort of
analysis is offered by Badiou, who suggests that
there is something left outside even of
mathematical set theory, and that what is left
outside can be the basis of revolutionary
politics, if it can be analyzed and specified
correctly as of universal significance: again we
are back to the importance of being able to
semiotize outside of the conventions. It
is this potential which justifies his own view
of revolutionary politics. It can only
take the form of carnivalesque periodic
challenges to the capitalist order, ranging from
Zapatistas to student demonstrators. These
will count as revolutionary if they can be
semiotized as such.
In any event, there is no alternative.
Zizek particularly rejects that form of anarchic
hedonistic cultural politics based on Deleuze
and the idea of a pulsating eternal desire
representing the energy of the universe in
actualizing itself, often in the form of some
dynamic vitalism or human conceptions of a life
to be led. Zizek's objection here is a
philosophical one, turning on a well worn
argument about the difficulties of linking the
two levels of explanation in any overall
system. Sociologists will be aware of the
difficulties, for example in linking the base
with the superstructure: we need to avoid the
twin problems of rigid determinism and the
recourse to strange philosophical mechanisms
like structural determinism in Althusser (which
is borrowed from Spinoza, as is a similar idea
in Deleuze). In a famous early critique,
Hindess and Hirst traced Marx's writings on
precapitalist modes of production to see how the
privileged concepts from his science were
actually applied. They found it was
impossible to apply concepts deriving from a
philosophical analysis of the base without
dogmatism or incoherence.
The same sort of argument might well be made
against Deleuze, to extend the problems
identified by Zizek. We are back to a
similar problem like that identified with the
concept of reification. We have to decide
whether this concept applies to capitalist
politics, all politics, even our own politics,
or to make some sort of choice—and the issue
here is whether this choice can be anything
other than dogmatic and incoherent. The
same sort of issue arises with Deleuze and the
virtual, says Zizek, although again in a rather
philosophical way. There is an incoherence
in linking the virtual and the actual. The
normal understanding is that the actual
represents congealed or reified possibilities of
the virtual. However, there are sections,
especially in Logic
of Sense, where it seems to be the
other way about, that actual processes,
including causal ones, produce the
virtual. Zizek's argument is that Deleuze
never actually made up his mind about this, and
so it was possible to turn with some relief to
Guattari's politics, to choose commitment
rather than stick with ambiguous analysis.
Zizek's
argument then goes on to say that what the
analysis lacks is some mediating operation
between the virtual and the actual: Deleuze
glosses this with notions like 'the dark
precursor', and other mystifications including
'quasi-casues' and the almost ubiquitous
'resonances' [I am trying to read Deleuze on
Leibniz to track down this particular term -- DeLanda uses
more familiar forms of correlation between
signals etc]. All the while, there is a
perfectly understandable mechanism in the work
of Lacan. It is rather similar to
Guattari's notion of semiotization, but it is
described as symbolization. There is an
analysis of how it works, and an account of the
energy that drives it in Lacan's analysis of
Freud. Deleuze notes the analysis of the
phantasm is being particularly significant as a
way of joining bodily and biological drives to
the symbolic order, but then that is only in the
earlier Logic of Sense. For Zizek,
phantasms are not confined to the infantile
state, but represent an adult way of doing
symbolization as well. The process is
driven by desire, but not the vague and general
universal desire of Deleuze, rather the
specifics of human sexual desire, which,
uniquely, are excessive and cannot be confined
to the bodily level, but are channeled instead
into cultural activities.
Section/blog
3
I think that diagrammatic micropolitics is
actually a pretty limited kind. It seems
to be helpful in unblocking people who are
unable to perceive alternatives, even where they
are oppressed by the existing forms. This
obviously covers psychiatric patients who are
blocked by neuroses or psychoses, and in
Chaosmosis, it is clear that there is
possible therapy for them to reconnect with
otherness. In the psychiatric clinic, it
is possible to mobilize enough local power and
resources to put this kind of liberating micro
politics into effect, but whether power and
resources could be mobilised more generally must
be in doubt.
Guattari seems to assume that the power of
writing alone will offer some sort of
breakthrough, a typical academic delusion.
It is also worth pointing out that the audience
is likely to be other academics as well—who else
would be able to deploy different semiotic
registers drawn from arts, literature,
philosophy and politics: has anyone normal ever
read Proust? Academics are also unlikely
to be 'blocked' in a peculiar way too, if their
departments are dominated by charismatic figures
able to set agendas. Bourdieu says, for
example, that sociology was dominated by Levi
Strauss. Foucault complained that if you
wanted to do any research in France it had to be
within the limits set by structuralist
linguistics, Freudian theory, or Marxism—it's no
surprise that the first two are the particular
targets of Deleuze and Guattari, and they are
occasionally spiky about the last one as well.
Who else might be blocked like this?
Victims of really oppressive regimes which are
able to overcode everything—the victims at the
Moscow trials spring to mind, where the poor old
Bolsheviks were so dominated by a Stalinist
philosophy that they even saw that they were
guilty themselves. There are arguably
victims are among those oppressed minorities who
are dominated by majoritarian thinking to such
an extent that they cannot see a way out. Women
might be included here, victims of a dominating
male imaginary of a Lacanian kind. Black
people who are unable to break out of the
options offered by white discourses—noble
savage, clown, sportsman, criminal, stud.
Or, of course, the working classes dominated by
a sophisticated hegemony that effort mostly
manages to cope with all the contradictions
thrown up by their experience. Both
Deleuze and Guattari come close to this later
option, with their foucard in suspicions about
the sequence of controlling agencies from
families to barracks, and with a constant
sinister role played by the media.
But does this paranoid society of control
actually exist? As with the gramscians,
there are always formal possibilities of
resistance, and these are introduced so
frequently that it becomes easy to see why Negri
got fed up with Deleuze's constant undoing of
analyses by thinking of additional theoretical
options. I also think he loses his bottle
when thinking about how people might escape, by
pursuing rhizomes developing bodies without
organs, especially if they used drugs. He
urges us to be so cautious that he reads more
like a concerned social worker.
What about actual possibilities? We have
constant reference to May '68. We have
some dalliance, especially in Guattari, with
Italian autonomism and the French free radio
movement, and Rolnic persuades him to encourage
the Brazilian workers party. But this is
still pretty thin, and there is no commentary
with what might be called conventional politics:
no attempts to persuade the communist party to
do diagrammatic politics, no commentary on
strikes, riots or conventional political
disputes. No doubt this is beneath elegant
philosophers, and Rancière is probably right to
suspect that all radical academics still
preserve the idea of a passive, instrumentalist
working class (perhaps they are right).
There is very little cultural exploration
either. Classical literature, but not
popular literature, little to say about popular
culture, even though youth cultures were
apparent in France at the time. Nothing
much to say about electronic potentials either,
of course, except for the ability of free radio
to give minorities a voice. No
sociological analysis, of course, which might
have been used to check some of the excessively
paranoid analyses. An example here is the
condemnation of the conventional school system
as controlling and limiting creativity and
rhizomatic thinking. This just must be so,
and although there are abstract possibilities,
since it is always possible to find lines of
flight, there's no exploration of any.
Presumably Deleuze and Guattari themselves had a
conventional education but did manage to escape?
Compare this to Gintis
and Bowles on the contradictions
of liberal education.