CONCLUSION

Deleuze’s contribution to political thought is concentrated in the books he co-authored with Guattari, particularly Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. In the course of this brief survey, we have done little more than chart the salient features of this complex body of work and indicate some of the ways in which it offers new resources and new directions for thinking the political. We sought to show that these philosophically experimental and politically engaged books are not an aberration or a detour in relation to Deleuze’s earlier work. Rather, they exemplify a conception of philosophy which grows out of his engagement with the history of philosophy and which displays the same virtues that he discerns in the tradition which runs through Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche, namely a rejection of negativity, a belief in the externality of forces and relations, a hatred of interiority, and a commitment to the cultivation of joy by means of the invention of concepts. In order to demonstrate this continuity, we argued in Chapter 1 that Deleuze’s earlier criticisms of the prevailing ‘image of thought’ in philosophy set the scene for his later attempts in collaboration with Guattari to ‘put concepts in motion’. We also pointed to some of the concepts and themes which connect this collaborative work with Deleuze’s earlier studies in the history of philosophy, especially the theory of qualitative multiplicities derived from Bergson and the structure of immanent evaluation derived from Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality. Finally, we argued that some aspects of Deleuze’s earlier writings exercised considerable influence on political thought in their own right, notably the metaphysics of difference elaborated on the basis of the concept of multiplicity and the theory of differential force outlined in Nietzsche and Philosophy.

Above all, we have sought throughout to present Deleuze’s contribution to political thought as philosophy in the sense that he and Guattari define it in What Is Philosophy? (1994). Deleuze and Guattari share with Marx, Nietzsche and many others the conviction that the task of philosophers is to help make the future different from the past. For this reason, they endow philosophy with an explicitly political vocation, defining it as the

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creation of ‘untimely’ concepts. Philosophy is untimely and ‘worthy of the event’ when it does not simply respond to social events as they appear but rather creates new concepts which enable us to counter-actualise the significant events and processes that define our historical present. Philosophy, as they understand it, has both a cognitive and a critical function. The cognitive function is achieved by the creation of concepts that provide knowledge of pure events. The critical function is achieved not by the creation of glorious images of new earths and new peoples but by the creation of new concepts that afford new means of description of the forces which shape our future and therefore new possibilities for action. Remarkable or interesting concepts are those that can be taken up again and again in new circumstances, continuing to work their subversive way through history. Our discussion of aboriginal rights in Chapter 6 shows how the concepts of equality before the law and the equality of peoples continue to function as means of counter-actualisation of the treatment of indigenous peoples in colonial countries.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze described the act of thought as a dice-throw, by which he meant that thinking is a form of experimentation, the success or failure of which lies outside the control of the thinker. Similarly, in What Is Philosophy? he and Guattari suggest that philosophy is a form of experimentation in the creation of new concepts, by which they mean that it is a form of critical practical reason which aims to produce new means of acting upon the present. Their account of the political vocation of philosophy is therefore linked to a pragmatic conception of the value of philosophical concepts. Obviously, the creation of concepts can neither bring about nor controvert what those concepts express, whether this be political society under a rule of law, justice, equality between the sexes or racial equality. Rather, philosophical activity contributes to making the future different from the past by affording new forms of description, thought and action. As a result, the value of philosophical concepts is not measured by their truth value but by their novelty, remarkability and degree of interest in relation to the present. It follows that the effectiveness of philosophy as they conceive it cannot be decided by philosophy alone. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari present their own concepts as rhizomatic conceptual assemblages, the purpose of which is precisely to ‘function’ in relation to other concepts and practices outside of themselves. The only appropriate test of the concepts they invent lies in the attempt to make them function in new contexts.

Deleuze and Guattari do not offer a concept of the political as such. Rather, they provide a series of concepts in terms of which we can describe significant features of the contemporary social and political landscape. These include concepts of social, linguistic and affective assemblages; concepts of a micropolitics of desire founded on the dynamics of unconscious affect and the different ways in which this interacts with individual and

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collective subjectivities; a concept of capital as a non-territorially based axiomatic of flows of materials, labour and information; a concept of the state as an apparatus of capture which, in the forms of its present actualisation, is increasingly subordinated to the requirements of the capitalist axiomatic; a concept of abstract machines of metamorphosis which are the agents of social and political transformation; and concepts of processes of becoming-minor or becoming-revolutionary which embody a politics of difference defined in opposition to all attempts to capture or reconfigure the position of majority. Our survey of Deleuzian political philosophy retraced the path of this fragmentary approach to the political. We began with an account of their concept of philosophy, focusing on their concept of philosophical concepts, and ended with one of the most heterogeneous and mobile concepts which they invent, namely the concept of nomadic metamorphosis machines. In keeping with the nature of this concept and the imperative of pragmatic evaluation, we sought to re-present it by describing the common-law concept of aboriginal or native title as a metamorphosis machine in relation to certain legal forms of colonial capture.

The purpose of the discussion of colonisation and native title jurisprudence in Chapter 6 was not to suggest a simple application of the concept of capture to the colonial case, but rather to show that capture takes on a specific legal form in the case of constitutional colonial states, and to suggest that in this context the jurisprudence of aboriginal or native title amounts to a smooth legal space with the potential to alter significantly both the rights of indigenous peoples and the constitutional form of those states. It was not the aim of this discussion to invoke the aboriginal peoples of the new world as exemplary Deleuzian nomads. Rather, the aim was to demonstrate the complexity of their concept of nomadism by showing that it has no necessary connection with actual nomads, just as the concept of metamorphosis machines has no necessary connection with war. At the same time, we sought to emphasise the abstract character of the concepts of capture, metamorphosis machine and smooth space by showing how these could be brought to bear on the phenomenon of colonisation. It is precisely the abstract character of these concepts which allows them to be deployed in contexts other than those in which they were first developed.

Our examination of Deleuzian concepts relevant to the political is incomplete in the sense that other concepts could just as well have been the focus of attention. Among the many novel concepts proposed in the course of A Thousand Plateaus which we have not discussed are those of strata, bodies without organs, faciality, the order-word and the refrain. Even the concepts selected for discussion have sometimes been truncated in the interests of simplicity and clarity. However, over and above these contingent limitations of the present survey, there is an important sense in which any discussion of particular concepts will necessarily constitute an incomplete account of Deleuzian political thought. For what Deleuze and

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Guattari created in A Thousand Plateaus is a heterogeneous assemblage which has no built-in end-point or conclusion and a textual machine for the creation of new concepts. That is why A Thousand Plateaus ends with a series of definitions and rules rather than a conclusion. These are, on the one hand, the rules of their own construction of concepts, but also rules which might be adapted to the creation of new concepts. Thus, in guise of a conclusion the authors provide a series of facultative rules under the following headings: strata, stratification; assemblages; rhizome; plane of consistency; body without organs; deterritorialisation; abstract machines (diagram and phylum). Even this list itself is provisional since it relates back to the concepts actually elaborated in particular plateaus. The point of abstracting these rules is to show how the process could be continued and new concepts could be elaborated. In this sense, the body of philosophy created by Deleuze and Guattari is an open-ended conceptual corpus analogous to the common law. While it possesses its own internal consistency in the form of a skeleton of principles which are subject to certain formal constraints, it can be modified, extended or developed so long as these constraints are respected. It is a rhizomatic body of concepts which can allow indefinite proliferation and self-transformation.

We suggested at the outset that the conception of philosophy as the creation of concepts whose function and value cannot be measured simply in terms of their power of representation has particular relevance to the activity of political philosophy. More generally we sought to show that Deleuze and Guattari’s own work is properly regarded as political philosophy, both in its normative and its descriptive dimensions. To that end, we pointed to the distinctive concepts of power and freedom which inform their account of social, linguistic, intellectual and other assemblages. Our aim in doing so was not to suggest that these are better concepts of power and freedom than those that are more common in Anglo-American political theory, but simply to show that there are points of connection as well as similarities and differences between them. To the extent that Deleuze and Guattari describe a world in which the possibility of creative differentiation from the past is ever present, they share with other poststructuralist thinkers a commitment to what Foucault called ‘the undefined work of freedom’. In Chapter 4 we argued that this orientation relies upon a concept of critical freedom which implies more than the absence of restraints or limits to our capacity to realise fundamental goals: it implies the ability to question and revise those goals and desires which determine the present limits of individual and public reason. In Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, this commitment is manifest in the way that their concepts accord systematic preference to certain kinds of movement or process over others: becoming-minor over being majoritarian, metamorphosis over capture, deterritorialisation over reterritorialisation and so on.

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Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the natural and social world provides both an open-ended machinic ontology and a normative framework within which to describe and evaluate movements or processes. As such, it is an ethics in Spinoza’s sense of the term. We showed how this structure of immanent evaluation could be found in Deleuze’s reconstruction of Nietzsche’s will to power, but also how this structure was reiterated in a series of conceptual oppositions throughout Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: schizophrenic and paranoiac assemblages of desire; molar and molecular lines versus lines of flight; processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. In retracing the conceptual contours of this evaluative ontology, we focused on some concepts and pairs of concepts at the expense of others: becoming, lines of flight or deterritorialisation, nomadism and metamorphosis machines rather than destratification, the constitution of a body without organs or the opposition between the plane of consistency and the plane of organisation. While this choice of concepts was necessarily selective in the sense that other concepts developed in A Thousand Plateaus could have been discussed, it was not unmotivated. For we argued that the concept of deterritorialisation lies at the heart of Deleuzian ethics and politics, to the extent that Deleuze and Guattari’s mature political philosophy might be regarded as a politics of deterritorialisation.

For this reason, we endeavoured to retrace some of the internal complexity of the concept of deterritorialisation. We pointed to the distinction between the conjunction or conjugation of deterritorialised flows which occurs when one process of deterritorialisation is blocked or taken over to the benefit of another on which reterritorialisation occurs, and the connection of deterritorialised flows which occurs when these enter into mutually reinforcing interactions which lead to the formation of new territorialities. The difference between these two forms of interaction between deterritorialised flows corresponds to a distinction between the exercise of power where this is reciprocal and mutually beneficial and the exercise of power in relations of domination. We also drew attention to the fundamental distinction between relative and absolute deterritorialisation, which corresponds to the distinction Deleuze draws between the two dimensions of any event, or between events as actualised in bodies and states of affairs and the pure event which is never exhausted by such actualisations. Absolute deterritorialisation is like a reserve of freedom or movement in reality or in the earth which is activated whenever relative deterritorialisation takes place. For Deleuze and Guattari, thought can also be a vector of absolute deterritorialisation: Thinking consists in stretching out a plane of immanence that absorbs the earth (or rather ‘‘adsorbs” it). The deterritorialisation effected on such a plane does not preclude reterritorialization but posits it as the creation of a new earth to come’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:88, trans. modified). Philosophy

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achieves this ambition by the creation of new concepts. In one sense, Deleuze and Guattari’s contribution to political thought must be judged by reference to the concepts that they have created. In another, their legacy to thinking the political lies in this idea of a philosophy which aims at new and creative forms of counter-actualisation of the present.

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NOTES

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 626