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!

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.

‘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.

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.