My Comments to Paul’s Commonwealth Part 2 Notes
There are some interesting parallels in this section of Commonwealth to points raised by Zizek in his recent book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce particularly concerning the Haitian revolution. I don’t have the Zizek book in front of me at the moment but if memory serves, he also observes that the Haitian revolution revealed the centrality of resistance in the formation of European modernity. For Zizek, the Haitian uprising marks all the ambivalences and paradoxes of modernity, both its legacy of domination and hierarchy as well as it’s liberatory tradition. The Haitian revolutionaries rooted their project within the emancipatory register of the enlightenment and the French revolution and through their revolt embodied the principles of freedom and equality more purely than the French themselves who sought to deny the Haitian slaves their humanity. Zizek claims that the lesson here is that postcolonial resistance to global capitalism should continue to take a critical de-colonizing stance toward the specters of domination handed down from modernity, while recognizing that this stance is firmly within the modern tradition of human emancipation. According to Zizek, the truly revolutionary event, as demonstrated by the Haitian revolution, is not only to appropriate the democratic tradition in political struggle but to radically realign and alter that tradition in the process.
In some ways this is what the concept of altermodernity is getting at in Commonwealth. For Hardt and Nergi it is not enough to recognize the contradiction within the power relation between modernity and antimodernity. It is not enough to resist. The goal, rather, is to generate new relations and social democratic forms (parallel and intersectional class based, gender, ethnic/indigenous struggles) that cut diagonally across the modern-antimodern threshold. Ultimately, in their chapter on altermodernity and throughout Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri offer a far more dynamic analysis than Zizek, who, whenever confronted with a tight spot often just simply reverts to some sort of grand negative reversal. This brings up a crucial point for me in terms of the broader importance of Commonwealth and the Empire series in general. As Zizek has stated on numerous occasions, himself borrowing from Fredrick Jameson, it is far easier today to imagine the end of human life do to environmental holocaust than even basic transformation of the global capitalist system. This is usually offered within the context of a more general lamentation about how the neoliberal moment exerts tremendous downward pressure on our ability to imagine collective paradigms of social transformation. The precise aim of Commonwealth is to offer a creative design for a new ontology of democratic possibility (a performance of imaginative possibility). This does not mean, of course, that Hardt and Negri should not be subject to critique. In fact as we will see in further posts, critiques of their project were incredibly productive in the formation of this project. It is, however, necessary to consider the dynamic in which critique is offered.
Recently, I have found myself defending Deleuze against people that I think fundamentally misunderstand the nature or point of his project. In my view, Hardt and Negri’s project embodies Deleuze’s insistence that the value of criticism lies in its ability to transform and affect. In each of his books on Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, Deleuze offers plenty of criticism, particularly of Kant, however, these projects are all undertaken in the spirit of pushing the philosophical systems of these thinkers into new territory and in the process simultaneously transforming their projects into something new and dynamic (isn’t this Zizek’s point regarding the Haitian revolution?). Everywhere one peers within Commonwealth, one can locate the stamp of this Deleuzian legacy from their treatment of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, to their deployment of the concepts of love, poverty, and altermodernity. The emphasis is not only to unravel faulty assumptions and open up blockages, but to pave the way for new possibilities for thought and being. My comments here are not in any way to suggest that these concepts along with Hardt and Nergi’s theoretical treatment of the multitude are not without their limitations. It is essential that these limitations be made visible and struggled over. However, if we are to adopt Hardt and Negri’s ethico-political co-ordinates, this process would orient itself toward making these limitations useful in the sense of expanding and sharpening our analytical, ethical, and political attunements. Such an approach seems to me to point toward a way out of the de-politicizing neoliberal deadlock. However, this is precisely what Zizek and others have disingenuously failed to do in their efforts to expel Deleuze from contemporary social and political thought (check out this brilliant analysis by Steven Shaviro of Peter Hallward’s recent assassination attempt)
With all this being said, what are the limitations and possibilities of altermodernity as a conceptual figure of revolutionary praxis? In a sense, it is not possible to fully answer this question from this chapter alone. Many of the points raised in Part 2 are developed in much more theoretical detail in later chapters, and not before running the ideas through their critique of political economy in Part 3. Here, as a preliminary matter, I would like to address three interrelated critiques. First, critics allege that Hardt and Negri inadvertently reproduce a kind of Marxian developmentalist teleology through their claim that global capitalism produces both the “objective” and “subjective” conditions of its own demise. Submerged within this critique is a second one that refers to Hardt and Negri’s apparent messianic tendencies, connected to their supposed “faith” in the affirmative power of the multitude to govern itself in horizontal co-operative networks. Third, there is also a great deal of contempt for the notion of affirmation itself as a critical basis of praxis. Doesn’t such emphasis on creativity and affirmation reproduce neoliberal desiring subjects of capital? How can we effectively combat capital without directly negating it? And on and on….Hardt and Negri directly address the first criticism in Part 2 by engaging historical determinism as a misguided vestige of Marxism’s relationship to modernity (which does not in any way negate validity of Marxism as analysis or basis for political struggle!). In relation, they obliquely address both the first and second criticisms by insisting that the move into altermodernity does not share any determined relationship to the present, however, in those moments where it has emerged (Bolivia, Chiapas, etc) it has already embodied many of the characteristics of the multitude that they describe: horizontal organizational forms and intersectional alliances coupled with various dynamics of social production (i.e. new strategies of collective action, imagination, and political creation). Rather than emerging as historical necessity or existing simply as a utopian revolutionary fantasy, these movements embody concrete manifestations of the multitude as it engages in transforming the political relations in which it is immersed and in the process transforms itself through the generation of new forms of social life. As for the last point, Hardt and Negri take great pains to insist (particularly through their mobilization of singularity and multiplicity which we will take up later in further posts) that political articulations contain potential for furthering either reactionary or liberatory aims. The point of altermodernity is to recognize that the existence of the former need not negate the possibility of the latter as it strives to inaugurate potentials for as yet unimagined ways of thinking and acting with others.
What I would like to say in closing out these scattered remarks is that I am interested in continuing to think about criticism in a way that is generative, that opens up rather than closes down productive possibilities for thinking through new intellectual and ethico-political connections. In further posts this will have to mean bringing our notes of Commonwealth into more of a direct conversation with our own interests and projects.
January 30th, 2010 at 11:37 am
Alex, I am sympathetic to your finding yourself defending Deleuze and emphasising the productive and affective character of his thought and project. I have been in this predicament more than a few times and always end feeling frustrated that i’ve not chosen the correct seam to work - there are so many points of departure and of course, true to D&G’s logic, no points of conclusion to ‘explaining’ things - or have just plainly not said enough, cogently enough. The obvious examples are having to deal with those who parrot the usual mythology: Deleuze isn’t interested in history; the theory is ‘postmodern’ and therefore it plunges us into a miasma of political relativism; it’s too dangerous due to conservative and individualist tendencies; it’s too abstract and not subject to practice; and so on. My latest encounter ended in my interlocutor insisting that Deleuze must be trying to communicate something to his readers, to which i tried but could not persuade her of Deleuze’s position that language is not about communication (his digressive writing following this logic) and that philosophy and writing, among other things, are about altering extant orientations within the world. Essentially, the debate was stalled–a capture or blockage of the sort one doesn’t want. So my ‘conclusion’ - although the complaints i’ve just listed are perhaps not sufficiently dealt with by what i’m about to say - is that the conversation/argument almost always pits a materialist perspective against an idealist one. And i’m sympathetic to how neo-Kantians would find Deleuze frustrating and problematic. So failing to account for and table the fact that you’re discussing Deleuze in materialist terms can create a situation where one category mistake after another arises.
I suppose it’s at the heart of Shaviro’s diagnosis of Hallward’s engagement with Deleuze, which you link to in your blog entry. A great fledgeling precis, i thought, of the problematic of whether or not Deleuze’s work is political. I’ve spoken to Hallward on this and he is impassive. At any rate, materialism vs. idealism… but even these terms do not make a binary and seem to me open to conjunctive synthesis. At the Deleuze conference in Koln this summer a bloke giving a presentation insisted - to the dismay of the entire room - that Deleuze is an idealist because he makes value judgements. I guess one could argue that he is and isn’t an idealist, depending on the specific moment in his writing, as assembled with any given reader. i’ve gone on enough. As i say, i sympathise with your encounters… but aren’t they are instrumental in thinking Deleuze.
February 8th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Thank you for your generous comments Basil. I honestly need to go back and re-read quite a bit of Deleuze as my chops are a bit rusty. But my general feeling is that one could perhaps render either a “materialist” or an “idealist” version of Deleuze depending on the particular problems one is interested in engaging (or in the case of your interlocutors the particular manner in which one might want to neuter the productive potentiality of Deleuze’s thought). This gets to the heart of the question: is Deleuze’s thought political? What I came away with from my reading (and I think this shows up particularly in Deleuze’s text on Hume and in his notion of transcendental empiricism) is that Deleuze is keenly interested in thinking about immanence as both an ontological condition and strategic resource for conceiving political possibility. But in terms of politics, is Deleuze’s thought political? It all depends on what you do with it. The point is to generate concepts (as in the case of philosophy) or strategic interventions (in the case of political action) that enter into a given distribution of forces in order to transform and alter those relations against power. The efficacy of these actions, I think, depends on tactical intentionality (i.e. the alignment of purpose and effect). In the end, there is no Deleuzian formula or blueprint for the revolutionary event as this is always necessarily contingent. However, I do think Deleuze offers a dynamic set of intellectual resources for considering political intervention.
February 17th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Is Deleuze political? For me, indeed. However, isn’t it true that to begin this discussion is to potentially write/speak endlessly? But since when is writing or speaking ‘finished’ or complete anyway. At any rate, I think the obvious is important, which to explore what we’re willing and able to call political. I think those who feel that fields of action and structures such as economics, the state, parliamentary/formal politics, ideological/party lines, the public sphere and so on are discrete from others will certainly have trouble digesting Deleuze’s micropolitics as a ‘legitimate’ politics. Brian Massumi gave a really nice talk on affect in Koln last summer, and i did find a few folks saying ‘that’s really great, but what can i do with that in relation to girls being forced into prostitution on the streets in Sri Lanka, for example’? A good question, but i’m not convinced that affect is unrelated to changing the conditions of said women. In fact, the more my partner reports back to me on her discoveries about how British politics are shaped and performed behind the lines of the official policy making, the more i feel like i apprehend Deleuze’s desire to always get to a point prior to what we see as concretely happening, looking at the forces at work there–very Marxian actually. Alas, i’ve explored the question of ‘is Deleuze political?’ with an anecdote. It’s the best i’ve got tonight. But relatedly, check out these passages from Claire Colebrook’s book Understanding Deleuze, which i just re-stumbled upon today, for they’re perhaps useful for considering the politics of Deleuze as opposed to the politics of those who think he’s not political, ‘out of this world’ as Hallward puts it:
‘Deleuze and others opened the politics of the virtual: it was no longer accepted [after May 68] that actual material reality, such as the economy, produced ideas. Many insisted that the virtual (images, desires, concepts) was directly productive of social reality. This overturned the simple idea of ideology, the idea that images and beliefs were produced by the governing classes to deceive us about our social conditions. We have to do away with the idea that there is some ultimate political reality or actuality which lies behind all our images. Images are not just surface effects of some underlying economic cause; images and the virtual have their own autonomous power. This is where structuralism and post-1968 politics intersected. We need to see our languages and systems of representation not just as masks or signs of the actual, but as fully real powers in their own right. The way we think, speak, desire and see the world is itself political; it produces relations, effects, and organises our bodies’ (xxxviii).
[...] Can there be an inhuman politics that interrogates the ways in which the image of man as a political subject is produced from the very forces of life and desire? This would mean—and this was the general project of the post-1968 philosophy in France—that we need to recognise the positive force of non-economic events. Art, culture, images and “affects” produce, and do not just represent, the distinct forces and terms of cultural and political life. This means that politics is not about the relations between and among humans. For Deleuze, politics begins with the production of distinct human agents from forces and flows of life. And this raises the problem […] can thinking grasp the forces or differences that precede and produce it? […] can there be a micropolitics?’ This would consider the ways in which our “image” of the human is formed from events that lie outside human decision. Ian Buchanan has referred to this as “metacommentary”, and in doing so has placed Deleuze within the tradition of a far more radical Marxism. The task of thought is to perceive the forces that produce the political and cultural terrain, and not just to accept the already given terms of that terrain (Buchanan 2000 [Deleuzism: A Matacommentary])’ (xxxix).
Two things and i’ll stop: notice the emphasis on recognising the power of ‘non-economic events’, a position which is bound to solicit the claim that this is not legitimately a politics. Also, relevant here is D&G’s assertions (made elsewhere) that politics begins before language; another position which will likely invite the same criticism of political inarticulacy or illegitimacy, whatever it be called. Are we dealing here with the kind of reconception of politics which many see as plunging us into a miasma of political relativism, or is it simply widening the definition to account for what cannot be readily apprehend? Nonetheless, the links between the fields of action Deleuze-Guattari and their ‘disciples’ refer to and the fields of action which are commonly thought of as ‘properly’ political fields are, i think, there and can be made. Like most other phenomena Deleuze takes on, he tries to ’steal’ the political from its common usage and reinvest it with meaning for his own conceptual purposes.
February 26th, 2010 at 3:44 pm
Basil, I think the quotations from Colebrook more or less signal the politicality of Deleuze’s methodology: an attentiveness to immanent multicausality (assemblage theory), which, while locating the production of social reality in such “non-economic” fields as language and affect never denies the often overwhelming salience of the capital-labor machine in the construction of social possibility, including its role in the generation of language and affect. Can a more radical and properly materialist Marxism be derived from Deleuze? Perhaps, and I think this is the wager of Hardt and Negri in their rendering of a Spinozoist-Deleuzian materialism. With this being said, I am still trying to articulate exactly what it is that distinguishes the politics of Deleuze’s project from other projects. I think for me it mainly comes down to what might be called a methodological ethic concerned both with the analytical mapping of forces and the deployment of intellectual and political energies toward the disruption and reconfiguration of anti-human and authoritarian structures of power and domination.
March 5th, 2010 at 4:15 am
Alex, I heard a presentation last summer in Koln on Deleuze’s conceptualisation, and promotion, of jurisprudence. Haven’t yet run it down though. Just had a look online and found the following, and i’m wondering if it might relate, at least in part, to your interest in articulating Deleuze’s politics from others:
Habermas and Deleuze on Law and Adjudication
Journal Law and Critique
Publisher Springer Netherlands
ISSN 0957-8536 (Print) 1572-8617 (Online)
Issue Volume 17, Number 3 / November, 2006
DOI 10.1007/s10978-006-9003-1
ABSTRACT This article stages an encounter between Habermas and Deleuze on law, rights, and adjudication. Most of the article is spent developing Habermas’s concept of adjudication as the application of communicatively generated norms. This application, I argue, involves a complex temporality that is at once retrospective and non-creative. Deleuze is used to critique this concept of adjudication in favor of one based on concrete situations and the creation of new problems. In so doing, I will develop Deleuze’s notorious, and notoriously hostile, remarks on human rights and philosophies of communication by relating them to discourse ethics and to the positive conception of law and judgment that can be drawn from his work.
I read once (i think it was Todd May) that Deleuze’s is a tactical rather than a strategic politics, which i think applies also to much of, say, Foucault’s thought. This seems to me to resonate with your use of the phrase ‘methodological ethic’. I wonder if we could begin to call this politics a practice? perhaps in manner of the Badiou insofar as the latter promotes action whose direction (and outcomes?) can only be ascertained/sighted once in the process of effectuation. But even this might be to formulated for the likes of Deleuze? As for distinguishing D’s from other projects, i’m not well read enough to make a good job of it. I would say that Deleuze seems unique in his tabling of aesthetics as a politics. While i know Ranciere is there as well, and i can’t yet speak coherently to the difference or what the latter is doing specifically (something i’m sure you’re well able to do on that point) i get the sense there’s a significant drift. The matter of Deleuze’s Diff and Rep seems to me important in setting his politics apart. If he resists dialectics as much as possible, and conceives of difference as he does - in itself etc. - then things will be destined to undo themselves continually–no replacement of capitalism with socialism, no more democracy in place of ‘democracy’, no more ‘lock-step politics’, to use that great phrase of yours. Anyway, i only go this route to suggest that perhaps the resistance to dialectics makes Deleuze’s politics unique as well, but again i’m not well read enough to know how this compares to others in the broadest sense. Can we exist without dialectics? Dialectics btw makes me think of the reverse, of the matter of dovetailing or overlapping projects. on this, i do see more and more Deleuze’s roots in Marx, as i do Foucault’s the more i read both. But i’ll not go on about that after having already gone on about all this.
March 5th, 2010 at 9:10 am
Basil, I am not sure if I understand the difference between tactical and strategic concerns. In the article I have comming out on Ranciere and Deleuze I argue that Deleuze’s thought is useful for considering pragmatic strategic ethical decisions beyond prescriptive foundations. Not a rejection of ethical norms but a capacious mapping of forces leading toward strategic political decisions. One such decision might be, for instance, to take up a language of dialectics and materialism if it suits the occasion, if it creates an efficacious opening, or if it suits a pedagogical purpose of dislodging and opening thought and practice to new more humane possibilities.
And you are right to suggest that D’s insistence on difference and becomming are key. These are material claims very much rooted in an oft derided use of scientific metaphors and so on. A useful essay which you have probably read is titled something like “Capitalism and Desire”. Its a collaboration with Guattari. Here they give a very Foucauldian reading of capitalism that also draws heavily on Marxist ideas particularly capital’s self-generating capacities, its ability to rationalize its irrationality etc. In this essay they describe capital as a “system of power” and they highlight I believe (its been almost two years since I read it) how past tactics of working class movements are no longer adequate to thinking revolution particularly as these movements failed to take the notion of desire into consideration. Also, interesting is their use of desire in this essay is very very close to the meaning of power in Foucault’s work: its productive, it circulates, it invests knowledge and bodies etc.
Last point, on the “methodological ethic”. The spirit of the Deleuzian enterprise is to create and affect. In this sense, looking to his texts for revolutionary formulas or answers miss the point. It is very difficult to know what kind of ideas Deleuze would be experimenting with today in this time of accelerated capitalist subsumption. As for myself, I think that Hardt and Negri have given us by far the most stirring and imaginative account of a utopian political project: something that all leftist theorists have bemoaned as being conspicuously absent from contemporary discourse. However, I see very real limitations to a politics based on the multitude (perhaps not on the common) but on a completely horizontally organized political structure. Moreover, given the poverty of contemporary politics and the “decline of symbolic efficiency” as Zizek and Jodi Dean have described our post-fact post-reality media environment, I am becoming more certain that Zizek’s emphasis on the negative and raising the particular to the universal is a necessary challenge. However, I think what we really need is both: a) clear headed determined critique and denuciation b) imaginative politics of affirmation and the constitution of a constituent power!