Essays on Deleuze
Page 58
I cannot escape the ghastly suspicion … that his madness is simulated. This impression can be explained only by the experiences I have had of Nietzsche's self-concealments, of his spiritual masks. But here too I have bowed to facts which overrule all personal thoughts and speculations.43
Although Klossowski does not cite these observations by Gast and Overbeck, he none the less poses the inevitable question: Where does Nietzsche's thought arrive at in this simulation of madness?
Nietzsche's obsessive thought [Klossowski suggests] had always been that events, actions, apparent decisions, and indeed the entire world have a completely different aspect from those they have taken on, since the beginning of time, in the sphere of language. Now he saw the world beyond language: was it the sphere of absolute muteness, or on the contrary the sphere of absolute language? (NVC 251)
Klossowski necessarily leaves the question unanswered. Earlier in the book, he cites a note from the Spring of 1888 in which Nietzsche exhibited a certain guardedness about his own condition that obviously waned at the end of the year. It is entitled “The Most Dangerous Misunderstanding,” and it concerns those who are taken to be sick or mad. Does their intoxication stem from an over-fullness of life, Nietzsche asks, or from a truly pathological degeneration of the brain? How can one discern the rich type from an exhausted type? This was Nietzsche's double fear as expressed in Ecce Homo: the fear of being taken for a prophet, but also the fear of being taken for a “buffoon for all eternity” (NVC 86). In short, how can one tell if the “high tonality” of the Stimmung of the eternal return is an expression of health and over-abundance, or an expression of exhaustion and sickness? This is a question derived from the paradoxical (or “antinomial”) status of the doctrine of the eternal return. As a lived experience, Nietzsche initially experienced the eternal return, not as a thought, but as an impulse, a Stimmung, a “high tonality of the soul.” As a thought, then, Klossowski insists that the eternal return can only ever be the simulacrum of a doctrine; it attempts to communicate a phantasm that is fundamentally incommunicable, and thus is a simulation (and hence a perversion) of that phantasm. Moreover, this paradox finds its concrete manifestation in the direct manipulation of the affects by our modern industrial (or capitalist) organization—for what is marketing or advertising except a willed and conscious manipulation of the affects in the service of gregarious needs and wants? The flows and metamorphoses of capital and commodities, with neither aim nor goal, are a concrete form of the most malicious caricature of Nietzsche's doctrine of the Eternal Return (NVC 171). Klossowski's book Living Currency (La Monnaie vivante) continues his reflection on the destiny of the impulses in industrial societies, and constitutes a kind of parody of political economy (in so far as the modern industrial and capitalistic order can itself be seen as a parody of the eternal return …).44
Each of these concepts—impulses and intensities, phantasms, simulacra and stereotypes—would require a more detailed analysis than we have been able to give them here. Taken together, however, they point to what I take to be the primary significance of Klossowski's work. With this circuit of impulse–phantasm–simulacrum, Klossowski has isolated a baroque and labyrinthine logic, with its complex operations of similitude, simultaneity, simulation, and dissimilation. It is something he uncovers, not only in Nietzsche's madness—which he neither condemns nor romanticizes—but also in the many other writers that have commanded his attention: the Marquis de Sade, and his perversions; Jonathan Swift, and his disproportionate vision of Gulliver, and so on. The Klossowskian economy thus follows a kind of circle: the impulses of the soul engender phantasms, from which are produced simulacra, which harden into stereotypes, but which in turn flow back to the originary vision, the originary pathos of the impulses. In this sense, there is no means to uncover the “truth” of this circuit. As Klossowski says, “if we demystify, it is only to mystify further … ” (NVC 131).
ESSAY 20
Paul Patton
Deleuze and the Liberal Tradition: Normativity, Freedom, and Judgment
P
aul Patton's Deleuze and the Political is without doubt one of the most significant books yet written on the work of Gilles Deleuze.1 It is a short book, but its brevity belies its complexity. It approaches Deleuze's thought from a specific perspective—the question of the “political” (the book is part of Routledge's “Thinking the Political” series)—yet at the same time it provides a succinct and subtle assessment of Deleuze's philosophy as a whole.2 The book contains concise overviews of such “idiosyncratic” (DP 1) Deleuzian concepts as “virtual multiplicities,” “machinic assemblages,” “becomings,” and “deterritorializations,” which will be invaluable to readers new to Deleuze's thought. At the specifically political level, it also contains the most extensive discussion yet of the abstract typology of social formations that constitutes the fundamental innovation of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, including Deleuze and Félix Guattari's important but ill-understood concept of “nomadic war machines.” On both these fronts, Patton's analyses of Deleuze's concepts, though necessarily selective, are exemplary. Readers will find Patton to be a reliable and judicious guide through the labyrinth of Deleuze's novel concepts and political terminology.
Deleuze and the Political is a personal book as well. Patton is not only a well-known scholar of Deleuze but also a political thinker in his own right, having written widely on the history of modern political philosophy.3 In reading the book, and particularly the chapter on power, one gets a clear sense of the figures who have influenced Patton's own political thought, which include Hobbes and Rawls as much as Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze. Patton has also written on Aboriginal land rights in Australia, and published important analyses of the landmark 1992 Mabo case4; the final chapter of the book, which is one of its most original sections, attempts to examine and re-analyze the issues of colonization and native title from a specifically Deleuzian perspective. Deleuze and the Political can therefore be read not only as a commentary on Deleuze but also as a synthetic work of Patton's own, the result of years of research and reflection, bringing together these various interests into a coherent whole.
Of the many riches in Deleuze and the Political, I would like to focus here on a single aspect of the book: namely, Patton's analysis of Deleuze's relation to the “liberal” tradition of political philosophy. In my opinion, this is one of the most important contributions of Patton's study, if only because Deleuze's political thought has usually been read in the context of the Marxist tradition, and not the liberal tradition. While Patton does not ignore this Marxist heritage, Deleuze's relationship to Marxism is already well known and well documented. Deleuze explicitly characterized himself as a Marxist, insisting that “any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed” (N 171). But as Jean-François Lyotard observed long ago, Capitalism and Schizophrenia none the less contains an implicit critique of Marx, since a number of classical Marxist concepts—such as the super- and infrastructure, the workers’ struggle, the proletariat, work-value theory—largely drop out of Deleuze and Guattari's analyses; they are neither analyzed nor criticized, but simply ignored.5 Moreover, traditional Marxism taught that there was a limit beyond which the capitalist machine would break apart and finally collapse, and Marxist politics was built on the search for this limit: that is, for the revolutionary “conditions” that would make possible the appearance of a new type of social formation—first “crude communism” (the abolition of private property), then the positivity of a “fully developed humanism.” Deleuze and Guattari likewise abandon this eschatological conception entirely, defining capitalism in terms of its lines of flight and its minorities rather than its contradictions and classes (capitalist versus proletariat) (N 171–2). This strategy in no way implies a rejection of Marxism, since Marx himself insisted that his own analyses of capitalism would necessarily have to be modified in light of changing conditions. Deleuze and Guattari are therefore able, without in
consistency, to situate themselves squarely in the Marxist tradition, while at the same time rejecting crucial Marxist concepts. The new concepts proposed in their analyses, they insist, are those required by the new problematics posed by the present state of capitalism. The result is a Marxist politics that functions with a new set of political concepts, such as lines of flight, difference, and becomings, all of which Patton analyzes in detail (DP 6–9).
In contrast to this critical affirmation of the Marxist tradition, however, Deleuze's relationship to the liberal tradition of political thought is much more tenuous, and often negative. Patton notes on his opening page that Deleuze's work “shows an almost complete lack of engagement with the central problems and normative commitments of Anglo-American political thought” (DP 1), largely ignoring the issues that most concern the liberal tradition, such as “the nature of justice, freedom, or democracy,” or “normativity,” or “procedural justification” (DP 1). If Deleuze was willing to ignore certain Marxist concepts, one might say that he was more or less willing to ignore the concepts of the liberal tradition in toto. This is where Patton intervenes. Could not the conceptual apparatus of the liberal tradition, he asks, be open to a similar transformation from a Deleuzian perspective, just as Deleuze himself transformed the Marxist tradition? Patton's book in this way injects itself as a forceful intervention in the current reception of Deleuze's thought: it stages a complex confrontation between Deleuze's political thought and the liberal tradition, in the context of which it attempts to demonstrate not only the contemporary relevance of Deleuze's concepts, but also the potential they have to transform both the Marxist and liberal traditions of political philosophy.6 In proposing such a confrontation, Patton is staking out a new and rich territory in the study of Deleuze, and setting out a research agenda that will no doubt be taken up by others. Patton necessarily pursues this agenda somewhat obliquely in Deleuze and the Political, given the several aims of the book, and my aim in what follows is simply to highlight the way in which this particular trajectory unfolds in the course of Patton's analyses.
DELEUZE'S ANALYTIC OF CONCEPTS
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy, famously, as the creation of concepts (WP 5). Patton rightly makes this activity of concept creation the first explicit focus of his book, since it provides not only the viewpoint through which he presents Deleuze's thought, but also the basis upon which he undertakes his own revisionary project. “A guiding principle of this study,” he writes, “is that Deleuze's contribution to political thought must be assessed in relation to his own concept and practice of philosophy” (DP 2). The first chapter (“Concept and Image of Thought: Deleuze's Conception of Philosophy”) thus opens with an examination of the political concept of the “social contract,” which Patton uses to illustrate the various aspects by which Deleuze and Guattari define a concept: its intensive components, which in turn constitute concepts in their own right (the state of nature, the restless desire for power, the artificial person that results from the contract); its internal consistency (the way these elements are linked together internally; the “endo-consistency” of the concept); its plane of immanence (the way the concept of the social contract links up externally with related concepts such as sovereignty, legitimation, justice; the “exo-consistency” of concepts). Surprisingly, Patton does not discuss the crucial Deleuzian notion of conceptual personae, which in the context of political philosophy might include the Leviathan, the Noble Savage, the Prince, and so on (WP 63). The critique of a concept can take place at any of these levels; one can add, subtract, or transform the components, or alter the relations between them. For instance, in Locke's version of the social contract, subjects are no longer determined by the desire for power, as in Hobbes, but rather by their ownership of property—a change in components—which in turn implies obligations toward oneself and others—a change in consistency. This is a good example of the transformative process through which concepts can be rejuvenated and renewed throughout history, and it lies at the basis of Patton's own project to reinterpret liberal concepts from a Deleuzian perspective. Finally, Patton emphasizes the fact that, in all these aspects, concepts always derive their necessity from historically determined problematics (DP 21). Whereas Hobbes's problematic was the constitution and legitimation of civil authority, for instance, John Rawls's problematic in A Theory of Justice concerns the principles of a just society, in the context of which Rawls himself would take up and transform the concept of the social contract yet again (DP 13).
This analysis, though scarcely three pages long, is a tour de force, and provides a far more accessible example of conceptual analysis than the one Deleuze and Guattari themselves provide in What is Philosophy? (via the somewhat obscure Deleuzian concept of the autrui) (WP 16–19). It plays a double role in the context of Patton's study: it allows him to summarize Deleuze and Guattari's conception of concepts, while at the same time providing us with a capsule history of one of the founding concepts of the liberal tradition of political philosophy. It immediately leads us to the second explicit aim of the book—the one that concerns us—which is to show “the points of connection” between Deleuze's work and the Anglo-American tradition of political philosophy (DP 135). This, however, raises a preliminary but necessary question: Why did Deleuze himself largely ignore the political concepts of the liberal tradition such as the social contract? The reason for this evasion, Patton suggests, can be found in a fundamental shift in the status of the subject that is effectuated in Deleuze's philosophy. The general question posed by the theory of the social contract is: How can individuals enter into a mutually beneficial political alliance? In this sense, the social contract presupposes the prior existence of already-constituted individuals as political subjects. In Deleuze, by contrast, the subject itself becomes a secondary phenomenon, the product or the “effect” of more primary sets of flows or processes (what Foucault called “processes of subjectivation”). The political questions Deleuze asks are therefore always posed at the level of pre-subjective processes. For example: How is it that desire, as a process, can come to desire its own repression? How can a subjective (though abstract) process such as labor be “captured” by institutions or State apparatuses? The political philosophy developed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia attempts to analyze social formations primarily as physical systems defined in terms of their processes—or more precisely, in terms of a generalized theory of “flows” (flux): flows of matter, flows of population and commodities, flows of capital and labor, flows of traffic, flows of knowledge, flows of desire, and so on. Simplifying to the extreme, one could say that Deleuze is not a philosopher of the subject but a philosopher of pre-subjective processes or flows. This is the fundamental metaphysical shift in Deleuze's philosophy, and it is these processes that Deleuze's concepts attempt to describe.
The task Patton takes on, then, is to show if and how liberal political concepts can be retained and transformed in light of this metaphysical shift. In turn, the possibility of such a transformation, he suggests, must itself rest on Deleuze's own analytic of concepts, and on the “cognitive function” Deleuze assigns to them (26). On this score, Patton emphasizes the definition, provided in What is Philosophy?, that philosophical concepts “provide knowledge of pure events” (DP 26). But what is a “pure event”? Deleuze distinguishes between the actualization of an event in a state of affairs or in lived experience—that is, in history; and the pure event, which is irreducible to its actualizations, “the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency,” which escapes history and is “utopic,” both now-here and no-where (a play on Samuel Butler's utopian neologism Erewhon), and is expressed in a “self-positing concept” (DP 27). As an example of this distinction, Patton points to Kant's famous reflections on the French Revolution in The Contest of the Faculties, a text that has recently been taken up by thinkers as diverse as Foucault, Habermas, and Lyotard. Kant distinguished between “the concept of a revolution in favor of the universal r
ights of man as this was expressed in the ‘enthusiasm’ of Europeans for those ideals” (this is what marks their “becoming” in relation to the concept); and “the manner in which that concept and those ideals were actualized in the bloody events of 1789” (this is “history”) (DP 27). Patton reformulates this Kantian distinction (between spectator and actor) into a Deleuzian one (between an event and a state of affairs), showing how political concepts such as “revolution” (considered as a kind of “territoriality”) have a double structure. On the one hand, there is the concept in so far as it is actualized in or refers to a particular state of affairs (the actual events of 1789) where it effects movements of relative deterritorialization, movements that can be blocked or reterritorialized (the “betrayal” of the revolution, its inevitable disappointment); on the other hand, there is the concept in so far as it expresses a “pure event” that posits revolution as an absolute deterritorialization, a self-referential movement of pure immanence, a “pure reserve” that is never exhausted by its various actualizations (DP 97, 107, 136). Deleuze uses the term utopia to designate the “critical point” at which these two aspects of the concept are brought together: the point where the absolute deterritorialization expressed by the concept is connected with the present relative milieu.
To say that revolution is itself a utopia of immanence [write Deleuze and Guattari] is to posit revolution as plane of immanence, infinite movement and absolute survey, but to the extent that these features connect up with what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed. (WP 100)