Deleuze and the political

Paul Patton

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Introduction

Gilles Deleuze does not conform to the standard image of a political philosopher. He has not written about Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau and when he has written on philosophers who rate as political thinkers, such as Spinoza or Kant, he has not engaged with their political writings. He does not address issues such as the nature of justice, freedom or democracy, much less the principles of procedural justification. His work shows an almost complete lack of engagement with the central problems and normative commitments of Anglo-American political thought. Explicitly political concerns are not the largest part of his oeuvre and they emerged relatively late in his career. He co-authored with Félix Guattari only two overtly political books: Anti-Oedipus (1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987). In addition, he published a chapter of the Dialogues jointly composed with Claire Parnet entitled ‘Many polities’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987:124–47), a book on Foucault (Deleuze 1988b), an essay on Foucauldian themes entitled ‘Postscript on control societies’ (1995b:177–82), and several interviews which address political issues. Despite his lack of engagement with issues of normative political theory, Deleuze is a profoundly political philosopher. His collaborative work with Guattari offers new concepts and a new approach to thinking philosophically about the political.

The profusion of idiosyncratic terminology makes it difficult for many to read this work as political philosophy.¹ Deleuze and Guattari discuss society and politics in terms of machinic assemblages, becomings, nomadism, forms of capture and processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Thus, A Thousand Plateaus opens with the blunt declaration that ‘All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, lines of flight and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various types’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:4). The difficulty in reading their work is further compounded when many readers assume that Deleuze and Guattari employ much of this terminology as metaphor, while the authors insist that their use of language is not metaphoric but conceptual.² So, for example, in Anti-Oedipus they follow Lewis Mumford in arguing that a society may be regarded as a machine ‘in the strict sense, without metaphor’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:251). In support of their claim that Mumford described certain ancient forms of empire as megamachines in a literal rather than a metaphoric sense of the term, they point out that he justified this term by reference to Reuleaux’s classic definition of a machine as ‘a combination of resistant parts, each specialised in function, operating under human control to transmit motion and perform work’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:141). Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic concept of society is discussed in Chapter 5, while their concept of ‘concepts’ is discussed in Chapter 1 and compared with Derrida’s specifically philosophical and deconstructive concepts.

A guiding principle of this study is that Deleuze’s contribution to political thought must be assessed in relation to his own conception and practice of philosophy. We start from the premise that Deleuze must be taken at his word when he describes his work with Guattari as ‘philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word’ (Deleuze 1980:99). Accordingly, our approach is framed by the conception of philosophy as the creation of concepts which is set out in What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). Chapter 1 points to connections between this distinctive conception of philosophy and Deleuze’s discussions of the nature of thought in his earlier work. The aim is to show that both the distinctive practice of philosophy in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus and the concept of philosophy outlined in What Is Philosophy? are consistent developments from Deleuze’s earlier treatments of the nature and task of philosophy. The chapters that follow seek to draw out the conceptual structure that underlies Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘nomadic’ style of thought and writing, and to elucidate some of the key concepts specific to their social and political philosophy.

As the discussion of concepts of power and freedom in Chapters 3 and 4 shows, it is possible to translate some of Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology into the language of Anglophone political theory. However, there is always a remainder that does not translate and a series of points at which the normative dimensions of their work do not correspond to those of Anglo-American political theory. For example, their conception of power is closer to the idea of capacity to act than to the normative notion of action which adversely affects the capacity of others to act. Their conception of freedom is closer to Nietzsche’s ideal of ‘self-overcoming’ than it is to ideas of negative or positive freedom. This points to a further difficulty in reading their work as political philosophy, namely that they propose concepts that do not readily map on to even the most enduring fictions of Western political thought. In their social theory as well as in their account of individual subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari privilege the processes of creative transformation and the lines of flight along which individuals or groups are transformed into something different to what they were before. They do not refer to individual subjects of freedom or autonomy, much less to notions of contract or consent. Their work is couched entirely in non-subjectivist terms and refers only to abstract lines, movements and processes of various kinds. They appear to be more interested in ways in which society is differentiated or divided than in ways in which it is held together. They are concerned neither with the legitimation of government, nor its delegitimation, but rather with the processes through which existing forms of government of self and others are transformed.

Although not a political philosopher in the sense that he belongs to the disciplinary genre, Deleuze has long held the view that philosophy is a political activity. This becomes explicit in the final product of his partnership with Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1994), where the authors endow philosophy with a political vocation. They define philosophy as the creation of ‘untimely’ concepts in Nietzsche’s sense of this term, namely ‘acting counter to our time, and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come’ (Nietzsche 1983: essay 2, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, foreword). They argue that philosophy should be ‘utopian’ in the sense of contributing to the emergence of new forms of individual and collective identity, or as they put it, summoning forth ‘a new earth and a people that does not yet exist’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:108). Their use of the term ‘utopia’ must be treated with caution since they reject authoritarian or transcendent utopias in favour of those that are immanent, revolutionary and libertarian. It is with this relation to utopia, they argue, ‘that philosophy becomes political and takes the criticism of its own time to its highest point’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:99).

The desire for a philosophy that would be both critical and creative may be found throughout Deleuze’s work. His first book was a study of Hume’s conception of human nature (Deleuze 1991) first published in 1953. In answer to a question from Antonio Negri about the relation of his earlier work to the political, Deleuze replies that what interested him in Hume was not the forms of representation of political life but the forms of collective creation: ‘in Hume I found a very creative conception of the institution and right’ (Deleuze 1995b:169, trans. modified).³ He comments further in response to Negri that a constant theme of his work has been the conditions under which new institutions can arise. In this regard, it is not the law which is interesting but jurisprudence in so far as it is ‘truly creative of rights’ (Deleuze 1995b:169, trans. modified). For this reason, he suggests that this should not be left to judges but should also involve those most directly affected in the elaboration of new principles of right. Chapter 6 takes up the question of jurisprudence with reference to the elaboration of common law aboriginal land rights in Australia and Canada.

Aspects of Deleuze’s earlier work have exercised considerable influence on political thought in France. For example, his efforts during the late 1950s and early 1960s to reformulate and revalue the concept of difference (Deleuze 1956, 1983, 1994) were an important contribution to the subsequent development of unorthodox ‘philosophies of difference’ by a number of French philosophers. His account of Nietzsche as a systematic thinker who privileged difference over identity is credited with having launched the enthusiasm for Nietzsche among left-wing French thinkers during the late 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 2 looks at the concept of multiplicity that is specific to Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference and at the manner in which this concept informed his work with Guattari. This chapter also discusses the anti-Platonism and the resistance to Hegel which are manifest in Deleuze’s critique of the philosophy of representation. The final section of this chapter takes up the relationship of Deleuze’s concept of difference to what has become known as the ‘politics of difference’. Chapter 3 examines his reconstruction of the Nietzschean concept of ‘will to power’ and shows how this was an important methodological resource for Foucault’s critical historical analyses during the 1970s. After outlining his reconstruction of Nietzsche’s concept in terms of active and reactive force, affirmative and negative expressions of will to power, we argue that this provides the prototype for the evaluative structure of concepts developed in Anti-Oedipus (1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987).

Deleuze belonged to a generation of French intellectuals whose political consciousness was formed, as Guattari once said, ‘in the enthusiasm and naïveté of the Liberation’.⁴ Whereas Guattari had a long career of activism in radical psychotherapy and left-wing organisations, Deleuze first came into contact with political movements and activists after 1968. From this period onwards, he became involved with a variety of groups and causes, including the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIF) begun by Foucault and others in 1972, protests against the treatment of immigrant workers, and support for homosexual rights. Later he took public positions on issues such as the deportation by French authorities of a lawyer for the Baader-Meinhof group, Klaus Croissant, and the imprisonment of Antonio Negri and other Italian intellectuals on charges of complicity with terrorism. He also wrote several pieces in support of the Palestinian people, declared his opposition to the French nuclear strike force, and signed letters critical of French involvement in the Gulf War.⁵

This public intellectual activity did not distinguish Deleuze from a variety of other neo-Marxist, existentialist, anarchist or left-wing liberal intellectuals who signed the same petitions and took part in the same demonstrations. By contrast, his conception of the political role of intellectuals and the relationship between his own political activity and his philosophy set him apart from many of his contemporaries. In a 1972 interview with Deleuze, Foucault tells the story of a Maoist who once said to him:

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I can easily understand Sartre’s purpose in siding with us; I can understand his goals and his involvement in politics; I can partially understand your position, since you’ve always been concerned with the problem of confinement. But Deleuze is an enigma.

(Foucault 1977b:205)

In reply, Deleuze points to the emergence of a new conception of the relationships between theory and practice in his own work with Guattari as well as in Foucault’s writings: a conception that understands these relationships in a partial and fragmentary manner, not as determinate relationships between ‘theory’ understood as a totality and ‘practice’ understood as an equally unified process of the application or implementation of theory, but as ‘a system of relays within…a multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical and practical’ (Foucault 1977b:206). The conception of theory as a relay of practice stands in marked contrast to the idea that the intellectual represents the vanguard of a proletarian movement which embodies the forces of social change.⁶ It is closer to the ideal expressed by Nietzsche in ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ when he draws a distinction between academic philosophers in the service of the State and true philosophers who must remain ‘private thinkers’(Nietzsche 1983: essay 3, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, sections 7 and 8). Sartre, whom Deleuze admired during his youth and regarded as an important influence, was a modern paradigm of the private thinker who spoke and acted on his own behalf rather than as the representative of a political party or social class. Such thinkers, Deleuze wrote, seek to align themselves with the unrepresentable forces that introduce disorder and a dose of permanent revolution into political and social life (Deleuze 1985:83–4)⁷ ‘Private’ is perhaps not the best term to describe such thinkers, since it suggests isolation from social forces and social movements when, for Deleuze, these are essential conditions of the activity of thinking.

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish provides an example of this ‘private’ use of reason, to the extent that this book might be regarded as a theoretical relay of the political activity undertaken by the GIP. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus might be understood as a theoretical relay of practical resistance to the role of psychoanalysis in the repression of potentially revolutionary expressions of desire. The aim of their ‘schizoanalysis’ is practical rather than theoretical: the analysis of the forms of unconscious desire and their political investments is conceived as a means to the ‘liberation’ or unblocking of the creative or ‘schizo’ processes present in a given social field. At the same time, with regard to the other side of the relation between theory and practice described above, Deleuze does not hesitate to describe Anti-Oedipus as ‘from beginning to end a book of political philosophy’ (Deleuze 1995b:170). This book exemplifies his view, which we discuss in Chapter 1, that philosophy is and should be a

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response to problems that are posed outside of the academy. For Deleuze, such problems are a crucial enabling condition of creativity in thought. The idea that philosophy creates concepts that are inseparable from a form of life and mode of activity points to a constant dimension of Deleuze’s conception of thought and philosophy. It implies that the test of these concepts is ultimately pragmatic: in the end, their value is determined by the uses to which they can be put, outside as well as within philosophy.

Anti-Oedipus brought notoriety to the authors as founders of the current of post-1968 leftist thought known as ‘the philosophy of desire’. It was widely read in the belief that such periods of revolutionary ferment saw the emergence of unadulterated desire and a will to change which was as quickly suppressed by the established organisations of political opposition (such as the communist party and trade unions) as it was by the forces of order. Deleuze and Guattari shared many of the political and theoretical orientations common to the post-1968 libertarian left. These included a concern for the political effectivity of desire and the unconscious investments which play a part in macropolitical movements, a concern for the micropolitics of social life, and a concern for the politics of language and signification. While they were neither semioticians nor theorists of ‘discourse’ in Foucault’s sense of the term, they did acknowledge the importance of language and its pragmatic dimension for modern political life. Finally, while they were not Marxists in any traditional doctrinal sense, an anti-capitalist thematic pervades all their writings, up to and including What Is Philosophy? (1994). In the interview with Negri cited earlier, Deleuze reaffirms his sympathy with Marx and describes capitalism as a fantastic system for the fabrication of great wealth and great suffering. He asserts that any philosophy worthy of being called political must take account of the nature and evolution of capitalism (Deleuze 1995b:171). In return, Negri finds in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) ‘the fundamental elements of the renewal of historical materialism, in function of the new dimensions of capitalistic development’ (Negri 1995:104).

Despite their adoption of aspects of Marx’s social and economic theory, there are significant points at which Deleuze and Guattari abandon traditional Marxist views. They reject the Marxist philosophy of history in favour of a differential typology of the macro- and micro-assemblages which determine the character of social life. They reject the idea that contradiction is the motor of historical progress and argue that a society is defined less by its contradictions than by its lines of flight or deterritorialisation. They reject any internal or evolutionist account of the origins of the State in favour of a neo-Nietzschean view according to which the form of the State has always existed even if only as a virtual tendency resisted by other processes within a given social field. Actual States are as often as not imposed from without. They reject economic determinism in favour of a ‘machinic determinism’ according to which collective

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assemblages of enunciation determine the social usage of language and even the tools employed in a given society ‘presuppose a social machine that selects them and takes them into its ‘‘phylum”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:90).

In Anti-Oedipus (1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari develop their own account of capitalism as a unique mode of economic and political coordination and regulation which is immanent to the social field, in contrast to earlier forms of empire which operated by the transcendent ‘overcoding’ or capture of existing social and economic processes. Whereas earlier forms of empire extracted rent or other forms of obligatory payment, Deleuze and Guattari argue that capital functions in the manner of an ‘axiomatic’ system which is indifferent to the content of the propositions it connects. It produces a surplus by means of the axiomatic conjugation of decoded flows of labour, money, commodities and, increasingly, information. Deleuze comments in the interview with Negri that what they found most useful in Marx was ‘his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that’s constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in broader form, because its fundamental limit is Capital itself (Deleuze 1995b:171). The lesson he and Guattari draw from this is that, at the macrosocial level of economic and political institutions, there is a permanent possibility of piecemeal social change. While the capitalist economy may constitute an axiomatic system inseparable from the fabric of modern social life, this does not mean that particular axioms cannot be removed or replaced by others.

In common with Foucault and other poststructuralist political thinkers, Deleuze and Guattari do not envisage global revolutionary change but rather a process of ‘active experimentation’⁸ which is played out in between economic and political institutions and the sub-institutional movements of desire and affect. Hence their sympathy for minority groups, where ‘minority’ should be understood in a qualitative rather than a quantitative sense. The minor is that which deviates from the majority or standard which is the bearer of the dominant social code. The importance of minority does not reside in the fact of its relative exclusion from the majority but in the political potential of its divergence from the norm. Minority provides an element capable of deterritorialising the dominant social codes. Conversely, it is the process of deterritorialisation which constitutes the essence of revolutionary politics for Deleuze and Guattari: not the incorporation of minority demands by adjustment to the axioms of the social machine, nor the reconstitution of a code, but the process of becoming-minor, of widening the gap between oneself and the norm. What is important, in their view, is a ‘revolutionary-becoming’ which is in principle open to anyone (Deleuze and Parnet 1987:147). What they mean by this is not simply resistance to the mechanisms of capture and reterritorialisation, but the invention of new forms of subjectivity and new Page 8

forms of connection between deterritorialised elements of the social field. Deleuze and Guattari provide a conceptual language in which to describe the impact of social movements that impose new political demands upon the qualitative or cultural dimensions of social life. More generally, they contrast the dynamism of such forms of social nomadism with the essentially parasitic and reactive character of forms of capture. They point to examples from logic and computational theory as well as the natural world to show that centralised control mechanisms are not essential to the functioning of complex systems (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:15–18). It is not the control of State power which interests them but rather the forms of social change which take place alongside or beneath any given form of State, and the manner in which these changes impact upon political institutions themselves.

The anti-statist and minoritarian tenor of Deleuze and Guattari’s politics leads some commentators to represent them as a new species of anarchist. Yet while they share the anarchist suspicion of political representation, they are no less suspicious of attempts to turn the principles of non-coercive and non-hierarchical organisation into a blueprint for society as a whole. Todd May has suggested that the political perspective which they share with some other poststructuralists such as Foucault and Lyotard may be considered an offshoot of the anarchist tradition. He argues that this new anarchism ‘retains the ideas of intersecting and irreducible local struggles, of a wariness about representation, of the political as investing the entire field of social relationships, and of the social as a network rather than a closed holism, a concentric field, or a hierarchy’ (May 1994:85). However, May also notes that, in common with other poststructuralist thinkers, Deleuze and Guattari abandon several key assumptions of classical anarchist thought, such as the repressive conception of power and a belief in the essentially benign and cooperative character of human nature. As he points out, their version of poststructuralist politics remains a tactical rather than a strategic style of political thought, directed at particular or local forms of revolutionary-becoming rather than wholesale social change. Such a political philosophy offers no guarantees: it is not a narrative of inevitable progress, nor does it offer the security of commitment to a single set of values against which progress may be judged. Does this entail a pessimism or nihilism about the human condition, a certain tragic note as Negri suggests (Deleuze 1995b:173)? Deleuze replies that it does not and that, on the contrary, the fact that movements can always become bogged down in history or that revolutionary processes can turn out badly implies the need for a permanent ‘concern’ or vigilance with regard to the fate of the lines of flight along which movement is possible (Deleuze 1995b:173).

In the interview with Foucault referred to above, Deleuze describes the political function of intellectual work in terms of relays between the

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theoretical and practical components of a ‘multiplicity of parts’. This is an allusion to the concept of machinic assemblage which he and Guattari first employed in their theory of desire in Anti-Oedipus but subsequently broadened to include social, linguistic and conceptual as well as ‘practical’ assemblages. Their theory of assemblages provides the conceptual framework for A Thousand Plateaus which, like Anti-Oedipus, is entirely a work of political philosophy. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 discuss several of the key concepts of the political philosophy presented in this mature work, including ‘becoming’, ‘minority’, ‘nomadism’, ‘war-machine’, ‘capture’ and ‘deterritorialisation’. A central claim of the present study is that it is the concept of ‘deterritorialisation’ which bears the weight of the Utopian vocation which Deleuze and Guattari attribute to philosophy. This concept is one that they invent in Anti-Oedipus (1977), then refine and extend in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) before applying it to the nature of thought in What Is Philosophy? (1994). The concept of deterritorialisation implies a contrast between ‘earth’ and ‘territory’ (terre and territoire) understood as the two fundamental dimensions of nature. Territory is in the first instance territorialised earth, but it produces its own movements of deterritorialisation, while conversely the earth gives rise to processes of reterritorialisation and the constitution of new territories. Stable identities or territories are therefore secondary formations upon the mobile earth. Deleuze and Guattari describe a world in which the overriding tendency is deterritorialisation.

A Thousand Plateaus is not political philosophy in the sense that it provides tools for the justification or critique of political institutions and processes. Rather, it is a political ontology that provides tools to describe transformative, creative or deterritorialising forces and movements. At one point the authors suggest that politics alone provides the horizon towards which all their efforts are directed: ‘before being there is polities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:249). This ontology is an ethics in the sense that, as for Spinoza, normative commitments are immanent to their philosophy of nature as well as their social ontology.⁹ In all cases, it presents a world understood as a complex of interconnected assemblages (earth, territory, forms of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation), where the overriding norm is that of deterritorialisation. It is because they conceive of philosophy as an inherently political activity that What Is Philosophy? does not have a separate section devoted to the political. When they describe philosophy as Utopian in the sense that it summons forth new earths and new peoples, Deleuze and Guattari align it with the creative aspect of this complex process of reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation. By their account, philosophy is utopian in the sense that it opens up the possibility of new forms of individual and collective identity, thereby effecting the absolute deterritorialisation of the present in thought.¹⁰

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The theory of assemblages developed in A Thousand Plateaus incorporates elements of the concept of multiplicity which was a constant concern of Deleuze’s earlier studies in the history of philosophy. Chapter 2 argues that this concept of multiplicity provides the basis for his distinctive contribution to the philosophy of difference, namely a concept of individuality which does not conform to the logic of identity. One of the ways in which Deleuze often sought to present the case for his philosophy of multiplicity was to argue for the priority of the conjunction ‘and’ over the verb ‘to be’. By this means, he sought to carry out a partial overturning of the philosophical tradition and to free the connective power of relationality from its subordination to attribution: ‘Thinking with AND instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987:57). As the indeterminate conjunction which subtends all relations, ‘and’ comes to stand for that which is in-between any two things brought into relation with each other. It becomes an axiom of Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy that new ‘becomings’, events or beings always emerge from this ‘in-between’. In their view, ‘and’ is always a border between two elements and, as such, a potential line of flight along which things happen and changes take place. In this perspective, it is entirely appropriate that this book should be called Deleuze and the political. It does not aim to present a definitive characterisation of Deleuze’s political philosophy, supposing that such a thing were possible. Nor does it seek to recount in detail Deleuze’s political activities, although I have made some reference to these in order to help situate his practice of conceptual creation. Rather, the aim of this book is to present some of the ways in which Deleuze’s philosophy has already shown itself to be productive for political thought, and to suggest other ways in which it might become so. Deleuze and the political can only refer to an open-ended series of relations between philosophy and politics, a series of encounters between philosophical concepts and political events.

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