Politics and difference

A meaningful politics of difference requires more than a simplistic formula about the relative priority of difference and identity. As long as the argument remains at the level of an undetermined concept of difference and its supposed priority in relation to identity, there are both political and conceptual limits to the philosophical defence of difference. From a conceptual point of view, since concepts of identity and difference appear inextricably linked to one another, the case for difference readily becomes entrapped in a sterile dialectic which dooms in advance all attempts to argue for the priority of either. The identity of something implies its difference from others. Conversely, since difference is always difference from something, it implies reference to an identity of some kind. Identities presuppose differences and are inhabited by them, just as differences inevitably presuppose and are inhabited by identities.¹⁵ From a political point of view, arguments that appeal to the value of difference over that of identity or equality are subject to what Foucault called the ‘tactical poly valence of discourse’ (Foucault 1978:100). Differentialist arguments may be mobilised in support of racism and sexism as well as against these forms of discrimination. For example, since the 1980s, the French ‘new right’ has argued for the forced repatriation of non-European immigrants on the basis of respect for a cultural ‘right to difference’. In the US, in response to a legal case brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, lawyers for Sears, Roebuck & Company argued that ‘fundamental’ differences between the sexes rather than the firm’s discriminatory practices explained the gender imbalance in its workforce.¹⁶

A politics of difference requires the conceptual determination of difference and the specification of relevant kinds of difference, in an ontological, ethical or political sense. This is how the French philosophers of difference have provided support for a politics of difference: not only by their refusal to treat difference as secondary, derivative or deficient in relation to a presumed identity, but also by providing conceptual grounds for the autonomy of individual differences and rejecting those forms of reductionism which treated particular differences, such as sex and race, as subordinate to one central difference or social contradiction. Deleuze’s philosophy of difference is consistent with both of these themes. The conception of a world of free differences outlined in Difference and Repetition (1994) points to a defence of the particular against all forms of universalisation or representation: every time there is representation, Deleuze suggests, there is always an ‘unrepresented singularity’ which does not recognise itself in the representant (Deleuze 1994:52).¹⁷ In A Thousand Plateaus

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(1987), Deleuze and Guattari explicitly reject the Marxian idea that societies are defined by the contradiction between labour and capital in favour of a ‘micropolitical’ conception of societies as defined by their lines of flight or deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:216). However, as this thesis suggests, the linkages between Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and politics are complex. They are mediated by the theory of assemblages developed in A Thousand Plateaus, and by many of the concepts developed in conjunction with this theory. We shall examine Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming, deterritorialisation and capture in more detail in following chapters, but it is helpful at this point to consider one example which illustrates some connections between a politics of difference and the theory of multiplicities outlined above.

Consider their concept of minority and the corresponding advocacy of a minoritarian politics. This might be regarded as Deleuze and Guattari’s version of a relational understanding of difference, in contrast to the widespread tendency to recognise and evaluate difference only from the standpoint of an implicit standard or prior identity. They define minority in opposition to majority, but insist that the difference between them is not quantitative since social minorities can be more numerous than the socalled majority. Both concepts involve the relationship of a group to the larger collectivity of which it is a part. Suppose there are only two groups and suppose that there is a standard or ideal type of member of the larger collectivity: the majority is defined as the group which most closely approximates the standard, while the minority is defined by the gap which separates its members from that standard. In a social collectivity, majority can take many simultaneous forms:

Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language…It is obvious that ‘man’ holds the majority, even if he is less numerous than mosquitoes, children, women, blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is extracted. Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other way around.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:105, 291)

A politics of difference might simply defend the right of the minorities to figure in the majority. In other words, it would seek to broaden the standard so that it becomes male or female—European or non-European—hetero- or homosexual, etc. Liberal versions of gender neutrality or multiculturalism take this form. Deleuze and Guattari do not deny the importance of such changes to the nature of majority.¹⁸ However, they go further and introduce a third term in addition to the pair majority-

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minority, namely becoming-minor or minoritarian, by which they mean a creative process of becoming-different or divergence from the majority. Becoming-minor involves the subjection of the standard to a process of continuous variation or deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:106).¹⁹ Deleuze and Guattari’s third term suggests that social minorities might be conceived in one of two ways: either as outcasts but potentially included among the majority, or as collectivities of an entirely different kind which threaten the very existence of a majority.

The difference between these two ways of understanding minority corresponds to the difference between qualitative and quantitative multiplicities. Minorities considered as transformational multiplicities threaten the status of the majority in a manner that recalls the threat posed by simulacra to the stable order of representation. In contrast to much of what goes under the name of a politics of difference, Deleuze and Guattari’s political perspective is directed not at the installation of new constants or the attainment of majority status, but rather at the minoritarian-becoming of everyone, including the bearers of minority status. They are advocates of the transformative potential of becoming-minor, or becomingrevolutionary, against the normalising power of the majority. At the end of Plateau 13, ‘7000 B.C.: apparatus of capture’, in the context of their analysis of capitalism as an axiomatic system, Deleuze and Guattari redescribe the difference between majority and minority in terms of the difference between denumerable and non-denumerable sets, suggesting that ‘what distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the relation internal to number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a non-denumerable set, however many elements it may have’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:470). In these terms, the politics of becoming-minor may be recast as a ‘formula’ which asserts the power of the non-denumerable against that of the denumerable:

The power of the minorities is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt within the majority system, nor even to reverse the necessarily tautological criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the non-denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the denumerable sets.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:471)

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POWER

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 821