Book Title: Deleuze, Marx and Politics. Contributors: Nicholas Thoburn - author. Publisher: Routledge. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 2003.
Publication Information:
Title Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1: Introduction
2: Minor Politics
3: The Lumpenproletariat and the Proletarian Unnamable
4: The Social Factory
5: The Refusal of Work
6: Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Introduction
The grandeur of Marx
For the race summoned forth by art or philosophy is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994:109)
one does not belong to communism, and communism does not let itself be designated by what it names.
(Blanchot 1997:295)
Gilles Deleuze’s (1995a: 51) comment that his last book, uncompleted before his death, was to be called The Grandeur of Marx leaves a fitting openness to his corpus and an intriguing question. How was this philosopher of difference and complexity - for whom resonance rather than explication was the basis of philosophical engagement - to compose the ‘greatness’ of Marx? 1 What kind of relations would Deleuze construct between himself and Marx, and what new lines of force would emerge? Engaging with this question and showing its importance, E'ric Alliez (1997:81) suggests that ‘all of Deleuze’s philosophy … comes under the heading “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”’. Since the proper name of such a concern with the ‘demented’ configuration of capitalism 2 is of course Marx, Alliez continues: ‘It can be realized therefore just how regrettable it is that Deleuze was not able to write the work he planned as his last, which he wanted to entitle Grandeur de Marx.’ But this is not an unproductive regret. For, as Alliez proposes, the missing book can mobilize new relations with Deleuze’s work. Its very absence can induce an engagement with the ‘virtual Marx’ which traverses Deleuze’s texts:
we can take comfort from the possibility of thinking that this virtual Marx, this philosophically clean-shaven Marx that Deleuze alludes to in the opening pages of Difference and Repetition … can be mobilized in the form of an empty square 3 allowing us to move around the Deleuzian corpus on fresh legs.
(Alliez 1997:81)
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As even a cursory reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s two-volume work Capitalism and Schizophrenia (AOE, ATP) shows, a Deleuze - Marx resonance would, indeed, not have been wholly new. 4 The importance of Marx in Deleuze’s thought has been noted, certainly since Anti-Oedipus (cf. Donzelot 1977; Lyotard 1977), and Deleuze himself more than once proposed that he and Guattari were Marxists (N: 171; Deleuze 1995a: 51). Yet Deleuze’s relation with Marx has remained a relatively unexplored dynamic. A recent essay on Deleuze’s ‘many materialisms’, for example, only mentions Marxism once, and then rather disparagingly to suggest that the use of the term ‘production’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is ‘no doubt … a lingering influence of orthodox Marxian thought’ (Mullarkey 1997:451). An interest in Deleuze’s relation to Marx has, however, been developing in recent years (cf. Hardt 1995; Holland 1997, 1998, 1999; Massumi 1992; Surin 1994, 1997). In these works the focus has tended to be placed on the centrality of an analysis of capitalist dynamics in Deleuze’s system. This is rightly so, for Deleuze places the question of capital - the ways that the capitalist social machine, or ‘socius’, engineers the flows of life - at the centre of his project, and declares himself a Marxist in these terms:
Fe'lix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. What we find most interesting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that’s constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is capital itself. 5
(N: 171)
For Deleuze, following Marx, the capitalist socius is premised not on identity - like previous social formations - but on a continuous process of production - ‘production for production’s sake’ - which entails a kind of permanent reconfiguration and intensification of relations in a process of setting, and overcoming, limits. In this sense, difference and becoming - or a certain form of becoming - is primary. Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that the ‘line of flight’ is primary in, and functional to, capitalist assemblages echoes Marx’s famous description of capital as a state of being where ‘All that is solid melts into air’ and where relations ‘become antiquated before they can ossify’ (Marx and Engels 1973:37). But there is another aspect to Marx that has been less often taken up in critical work on Deleuze’s relations with Marx: politics. If we are interested in maximizing the potential of a productive resonance between Deleuze and Marx, the question of politics must be central, for one can only do justice to Marx’s thought if his analysis of capital is considered through this lens.
One gets the sense that the foregrounding of Marxian concerns through an emphasis on capitalism has emerged to suit a time of political impasse. It is as
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if after the deterritorializing joys of ’68 (a time when Guattari (1998:213) said he ‘had the impression sometimes of walking on the ceiling’) and the early English-language reception of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, our more sombre times require a recognition of the increasing isomorphism of processes of complexity and difference to capitalist productivity (cf. Holland 1998). 6 Impasse is not an alien condition for Deleuze and Guattari, and one should not assume that their ‘joyful’ 7 project, like the worst forms of leftism, should circulate around a continual optimism. Indeed, as we will see, Beckett’s (1979:382) proposition that it is the very impossibility of life that compels life - ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ - expresses a more appropriate tenor for the Deleuzian political than the popular image of unlicensed desire. Nevertheless, it would not do justice to the potential of a Deleuze - Marx resonance if Alliez’s call for a ‘fresh legs’ movement around Deleuze’s virtual Marx focused exclusively on aspects which show a closing-down of political possibility, as if Marx returned to sober up Deleuze.
With this in mind, I want to suggest that it is in our apparent impasse that Marx becomes even more important in exploring Deleuze’s politics. This is not because of the centrality of an analysis of capitalism per se (though the contemporary re-emergence of interest in capitalist dynamics is certainly timely), but because Marx remains the pre-eminent thinker of the impossibility of any easy or given political escape from the infernal capitalist machine, whilst simultaneously positing such possibility and potential on relations formed within and particular to capitalism itself. This condition is what Marx calls ‘communism’. To foreground Marx’s communism is not to turn to a different set of Marx’s texts (for example, the early works, as against Capital). For Marx, communism is the immanent potential that haunts, and emerges in and through, capitalism. It is thus a perspective for interpreting capitalism and developing politics, and is hence found throughout Marx’s works. 8 Marx does present some general aspects of what a post-capitalist mode of life might involve - as a milieu of becoming which overcomes the strictures of identity, abolishes work, forms a non-fetishized relation with Nature or the world, and, if we are to follow Deleuze and Guattari’s reading, sets the desiring machines loose from their anthropomorphic sexuality. 9 Generally, however, the communist perspective is not an elaboration of a different ‘communist society’, and it is certainly not, to use Nietzschean terms, a reactive denial of current life in a postponement for the beautiful tomorrow. It is, rather, a process of continual engagement with the flows and constraints of the capitalist socius toward its overcoming, as is evident in Marx and Engels’ necessarily ambiguous definition:
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
(Marx and Engels 1974:56-7)
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The riddle of politics
This book seeks to contribute to a Deleuze - Marx resonance through a foregrounding of the question of politics immanent to capitalist relations. It is, in a sense, a Deleuzian engagement with Marx’s communism. It explores a series of milieux and conceptual territories - from the question of the proletariat, to the problem of value, control, and the critique of work - to see how Deleuze’s engagement with Marx and with Marxian concerns can develop useful and innovative political figures. At the centre of the book is the question of Deleuze’s politics, and it is to an initial presentation of this, and its possible problems, that I now turn. 10
At one level, an initial presentation of Deleuze’s politics is a relatively simple task. Deleuze and Guattari are self-proclaimed ‘political’ thinkers. Indeed, politics is central enough to their understanding of the formation of life that they can write that ‘politics precedes being’ (ATP: 203). Deleuze’s politics, like indeed all his and Guattari’s concepts and categories, is closely related to his Spinozist and Nietzschean materialism, with its conception of the world as an ever-changing and intricately related monstrous collection of forces and arrangements that is always constituting modes of existence at the same time as it destroys them. Such a materialism conceives the world as not only without finitude, but also without delineated subjects or objects; let us call them ‘things’. 11 Of course, this is not a refutation of the existence of things, but it is a refusal to present them in any ontological or epistemological primacy. There are things, but only as they are constituted in particular, varied, and mutable relations of force. 12
If the world is at base a primary flux of matter without form or constant, then things are always a temporary product of a channelling of this flux in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘assemblages’ or ‘arrangements’ (cf. ATP: 503-5). 13 Nietzsche calls this channelling a process of ‘interpretation’: the process whereby matter is cut and assembled by a particular series of forces that, as Foucault’s work has emphasized, respect no ‘ideal’/‘material’ dichotomy. Any interpretation of a thing or an event does not come after the fact, but is part of its composition, as one of many forces immanent to it. As Deleuze (n.d.a: n.p.) puts it: ‘Nietzsche’s idea is that things and actions are already interpretations. So, to interpret is to interpret interpretations and, in this way, already to change things, “to change life”.’ The coherence of things is not, then, a function of their position in the centre of a series of concentric circles of channelling or interpretation. Things are far more unstable than this. Without a primary form before interpretation, the thing is situated at a meeting point of a perpetually changing series of interpretations/forces and is thus never ‘finished’. 14 A thing thus embodies difference within itself as a ‘virtuality’ or ‘potential’ to be actualized in different interpretations and configurations. 15
This ‘virtuality’ is not in opposition to the ‘real’; rather it is the reality of a creative matter as it exists in ever-new configurations as the base of the real (it is in opposition only to the fixed determination of relations) (cf. ATP: 99).
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Nancy (1996:110) puts this well: Deleuze’s ‘thought does not have “the real” for an “object” - it has no “object”. It is another effectuation of the real, admitting that the real “in itself” is chaos, a sort of effectivity without effectuation’. 16 Thus, it is not only that ‘facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations’ derived from our historically formed values (Nietzsche 1968: §481), but that we are called to an active creation of new and different interpretations, or ‘lives’. If all is contested interpretation as the production of being, then politics is immanent to life, politics precedes being: ‘Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines’ (ATP: 203, 208). Interpretation, or politics, is both a process of intricate attention to what makes a thing cohere, what makes an assemblage work, and, as far as possible (it is not a product of a simple will to change, but is a complex and difficult engagement), an affirmation of new senses, new lives, or new possibilities.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s monist thought, then, ‘life’ has no primary forms or identities but is a perpetual process of configuration and variation, where politics is an art of composition, an art that affirms the variation and creation of life - ‘molecular’ or ‘minor’ processes, against striation and identity - ‘major’ or ‘molar’ processes (though, as I will show, there is no simple minor/ major dichotomy). 17 The ramifications of this generalization of politics across the plane of life are great, and this manoeuvre plays a not insignificant part in the positive reception and use of Deleuze and Guattari’s works in recent years, where a frequent theme is an explication of this politicized life in a ‘politics of becoming’. However, at another level, this generalization of politics poses problems for an account, and indeed a development, of Deleuze’s politics. For, if politics is immanent to the creations of life such that politics is everywhere, one is left wondering what the specificity of politics might be. This question is explicitly taken up by Alain Badiou (1998:16-17; 2001). Badiou argues that, in generalizing politics everywhere, Deleuze’s system lacks a specifically political register of thought. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari isolate the fields of Art, Science, and Philosophy, paying intimate attention to the mode of creation specific to each, but they do not do the same for politics, leaving it as the essence or process of creation immanent to these spheres rather than anything specific in itself. For Badiou, the marker of a specifically political register is the engagement with capital; politics must be adequate to capital. Badiou of course knows that an engagement with specifically capitalist dynamics is a central feature of Deleuze’s work. He argues, however, that when it comes to a politics of capital, Deleuze drops the politics of creation and falls back on a rather politically empty model of ‘critique’.
Badiou’s point is important, and he is right to draw attention to the possible problems of generalizing politics across the terrain of life. His critique at this level is not, however, adequate to the depth and complexity of Deleuze’s politics. For, in Deleuze’s works, there is at once a rich conception of what a politics of life might be, as it is explored through a range of specific sites and problems, and considerable discussion of a political engagement with
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specifically capitalist configurations. Indeed, contrary to a distinction between creation and critique, I would argue that Deleuze’s project is precisely concerned to develop a politics of invention that is adequate to capital. And it is the very difficulty of, and commitment to, this project that necessitates that Deleuze does not delineate the specifically political register of thought that Badiou discerns as lacking. Politics for Deleuze is neither a specific field of human activity nor merely a generalized process of invention; there is an imperative to a grander project which bears striking similarity with that of Marx’s communism, a project which Deleuze and Guattari (AOE: 382) describe as the calling forth of a ‘new earth’. This project is not reducible to a political solution, but is rather a process of engagement with the social totality. It is for similar reasons that Engels (in Marx and Engels 1973:12) describes Marx as a thinker of social, rather than ‘mere political’, revolution, why Negri (1999:266) argues that the separation of the social and political is ‘unthinkable in Marx’, and why those related to left communist milieux often present their politics as ‘anti-political’ (cf. Bordiga n.d.; Dauve' and Martin 1997). In this politics, the project of the new earth, as Ansell Pearson (1999:211) aptly puts it, is a kind of ‘riddle’. 18 That is, it is not something which can be laid out, mapped, and determined - it can have no set structure or narrative, and is not available, to use Marx’s (1976:99) words, like a recipe that can be drawn up for the cook-shops of the future. It is, rather, to be developed and drawn forth through a continual and inventive engagement with the forces of the world. Politics for Deleuze, then, is at once a process of the invention of life and an engagement with specifically capitalist relations. And in this it is the practice of a riddle, an undetermined and continually open, but no less practical, project.
This dual emphasis - of a politics of life that is adequate to capital - is especially evident in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘minor’. It is explicitly emphasized when, in no uncertain terms, they align their privileged political category of the minor with the proletariat - Marx’s figure of the overcoming of capital: ‘The power of minority, of particularity, finds its figure or its universal consciousness in the proletariat’ (ATP: 472) This conjunction of the proletariat and the minor is central to the Deleuzian engagement with Marxian problematics that is the topic of this book, and I do not want to pre-empt the argument here. It is more useful to introduce the core political figure of the book - ‘minor politics’ 19 - and show its relation with Marx’s communism.
Minor politics
As I noted above, the minor is in opposition to the molar or major. Minor and major are expressions that characterize not entities, but processes and treatments of life. Essentially, major processes are premised on the formation and defence of a constant or a standard that acts as a norm and a basis of judgement. As such, major relations are relations that are fixed and denumerable. They are relations of identity. Deleuze and Guattari explain the situation thus:
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îòðûâêè ãëàâîê
Conclusion
The strange joy of politics
a kind of broadly pervasive democratic consensus seems to make us forget that ‘democracy’, more and more frequently, serves only to assure a play of economic and technical forces that no politics today subjects to any end other than its own expansion.
(Nancy 1991: xxxvii)
It is no disproof of one’s presentiment of an ultimate liberation if the next day one’s imprisonment continues on unchanged, or is even made straighter, or if it is even expressly stated that it will never end.
(Kafka 1999:391)
Paolo Virno (1996d: 189) expresses a common sentiment about the state of current political thought and practice when he writes, ‘If nobody asks me what political action is, I seem to know; but if I have to explain it to somebody who asks, this presumed knowledge evaporates into incoherence.’ This is a problem, but it is not a wholly new one. Indeed, inasmuch as it is in the nature of politics to have an openness to virtuality, to potential, and to undetermined worlds, a certain amount of uncertainty, if not ‘incoherence’, is one of its central features. Nevertheless, politics is necessarily subject to a form of ordering - a stratification of forms and potential around the question ‘what is to be done?’ - since it is an attempt to call forth other worlds through concrete engagement with the intricacies of the present. At the other pole to that of ‘incoherence’, the problem is that such ordering and engagement has so often occurred through regimes of truth and certainty that it has been characterized as much by dogma and ressentiment as by experimentation and creation. It would be wrong to say that Marxism was the only vehicle of this form of stratification; the effacement of political virtuality in social democratic consensus is at least as effective, and certainly more pervasive. Nevertheless, orthodox Marxism and the Leninist model did such a good job of curtailing the innovation of politics that most serious attempts, certainly within the academy, to conceptualize politics and open its potential have, since the 1970s, worked at a degree of remove from Marxism, and even ventured a
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4
The social factory
Machines, work, control
Capitalism is a system of relationships, which go from inside to out, from outside to in, from above to below, and from below to above. Everything is relative, everything is in chains. Capitalism is a condition both of the world and of the soul.
(Kafka, in Janouch 1971:151-2)
If in its beginning the factory came out of the social body and tended to separate itself from it in order to elaborate its own rules of operation, it must now reincorporate this social body in order more than ever to dominate it.
(de Gaudemar 1985:285)
The injunction of Marx’s proletarian unnamable is an ever renewed engagement with the social plane of capitalized life - a plane that is at once manifold and mutating, cramped and constraining. In Chapter 3 this plane of capital was presented in general terms. This chapter now turns to consider the specificity of the contemporary capitalist socius. It does this not through a general mapping of Deleuze’s and Marx’s position, but, following the methodological logic of the minor and the proletarian unnamable, by exploring one manifestation of a political critique of capital. It follows a thread through a particular current in Italian Marxist research and politics - a current known in the 1960s as operaismo (‘workerism’) 1 and in the ’70s as autonomia (‘autonomy’). This current can be seen as performing Kafka’s ‘double flux’ (K: 41) inasmuch as it analysed capital as an open system which configures around lines of flight, and sought to take these lines elsewhere, whilst - as I explore in Chapter 5 - situating this politics in a cramped space without a delineated people. A central figure in the development of this current is Antonio Negri, and this chapter considers his work in some detail.
Negri’s recent Empire, co-written with Michael Hardt, has been the subject of much intellectual and political interest, being described by Frederic Jameson as ‘The first great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium’, and by Zizek as ‘ring[ing] the death-bell not only for the complacent liberal advocates of the “end of history”, but also for pseudo-radical Cultural Studies which avoid the full confrontation with today’s capitalism’ (Hardt and Negri
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2
Minor politics
The styles of cramped creation
we are not interested in characteristics; what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling.
(ATP: 239)
hold to the Particular as an innovative form.
(ATP: 471; emphasis changed)
Deleuze’s task is to develop a politics adequate to the complexity of life, a politics that can make the human worthy of the material universe of infinite interaction. This is not the same thing as a simple affirmation of chaos. Deleuze is misrepresented as a theorist of abstract and general becoming, or pure deterritorialization. Politics is primarily a process of (minor) difference against (molar) identity, but one does not easily leave identity behind, and the composition of territory is a necessity for life. As I showed in Chapter 1, the minor and the molar exist in continuous interrelation as two tendencies in matter. Politics exists, in its most general sense, to amplify minor processes. But it only does this through a continual engagement with molar stratifications and specific socio-historical relations, and in the intricate composition of ways of life. In this engagement and composition politics is, to say the least, a complicated process. This chapter seeks to explore the techniques and styles of this process - the modes of composition of minor politics.
The chapter starts by marking the socio-historical emergence of the possibility for minor politics on the condition that ‘the people are missing’ (Deleuze 1989:216). It shows that politics begins with the experience of small peoples or minorities who exist in ‘cramped spaces’ fully traversed by social forces, such that the first principle of the minor is not identity but creation. After exploring this general situation the chapter considers the problematic of ‘deterritorialization’ to show how the minor is a continual process of engagement with molar regimes, rather than an autonomous political space. The way that the ‘particular’ and the ‘social’ are treated in minor composition is then considered in detail. In this section the concepts of ‘inclusive disjunction’ (to show how a milieu emerges of continual experimentation and reconfiguration within and against each ‘particular’ situation or identity) and the primacy of social ‘lines of flight’ (such that the minor has affinities with
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The lumpenproletariat and the proletarian unnamable
When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the existing world order, it is only declaring the secret of its own existence, for it is the actual dissolution of that order.
(Marx 1975a: 256)
Let us accept once and for all that classes are not social super-individualities, neither as objects nor as subjects.
(Balibar 1991:179)
When Marx writes of the proletariat in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he presents less a neat dialectical trajectory of an authentic historical subject than a process of complication, interrogation, and iteration. ‘Proletarian revolutions’, he writes, ‘such as those of the nineteenth century, constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course. They return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again.’ To mark that this return is not a repetition of the same, but an always situated process which seeks to draw in the new, he tells us that the proletarian social revolution ‘can only create its poetry from the future’ (Marx 1973b: 150, 149). This chapter takes up something of Marx’s injunction and returns to the question of the proletariat. It returns not to reproduce that way of thinking Donzelot (1979:73) describes as a compulsory reverence for a certain set of revered political figures, but from a contemporary concern to elucidate the function and place of ‘difference’ in Marx’s proletarian standpoint. It seeks to show that at the core of Marx’s formulation of the proletariat - and despite the work of orthodox Marxism and those who would draw too neat a historical break between modernist and postmodernist political thought - lies a politics which at once highlights the problems of identity and compels a minor practice of invention and becoming. This is an important move if Marx is to maintain contemporary pertinence not just as an analyst of the dynamics of capital - as the bad-conscience-fuelled praise of 1990s business journals would have it (cf. Wheen 1999:5) - but also as a thinker of its overcoming.
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5
The refusal of work
More than any other single watchword of the communist movement, the refusal of work has been continually and violently outlawed, suppressed and mystified by the traditions and the ideology of socialism. If you want to provoke a socialist to rage, or deflate his flights of demagogy, provoke him on the question of the refusal of work!
(Negri 1979a: 124)
To struggle against capital, the working class must fight against itself insofar as it is capital.
(Tronti, cited in ATP: 571)
In Chapter 4 I identified a point of contrast between Negri’s and Deleuze’s understandings of minor politics and its relations with capitalist dynamics. When Negri proposed that Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ raised the possibility of a communism of the ‘transversal organization of free individuals built on a technology that makes it possible’ (in N: 174), Deleuze responded with a ‘shudder’, suggesting that the new mechanisms, technologies, and arrangements of production were less concomitant with communism than with advanced regimes of control. For Deleuze, that is, there was no tendency in productive processes towards an emerging communist autonomy - politics was to continue to reside in cramped minority positions in the midst of capitalist social relations. In Chapter 4 I showed how operaismo developed a framework for the analysis of contemporary production which resonated with Deleuze’s understanding of capital and control. Now I want to return to operaismo and autonomia to see how they developed a politics adequate to this cramped space of the social factory. In a general sense, this chapter is a discussion of the socialized worker that draws back from Hardt and Negri’s (2000) emerging autonomous multitude to see how it can be seen as a minor political figure.
Following the framework of minor composition laid out in Chapter 2, this chapter takes off from the cramped condition identified by Tronti and Panzieri that the social factory operates as a generalized plane of production,
