by Daniel Smith
It is this event-based theory of the concept that Patton puts to work in his revision of liberal political concepts. His method is to extract the “pure event” of a liberal concept in order to—at the same time—reinject it into the current situation, thereby effecting its transformation. “Remarkable or interesting concepts,” Patton writes, “are those that can be taken up again and again in new circumstances, continuing to work their subversive way through history” (DP 133). This might appear to be a curious conception of the political, which is here defined in terms of one's relation to a concept or Idea rather than in terms of one's relation to a concrete state of affairs or a political situation. In Kant, for example, the “enthusiasm” of the Europeans, their becoming-revolutionary, is explicitly linked, not to the historical revolution as it unfolded before them in France, but rather to its concept: that is, to a “pure event,” almost as if the revolution itself were something secondary. But as Hannah Arendt suggests in her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, this is a definition of what political philosophy is:
Robert Cumming recently wrote that “the subject matter of modern political philosophy … is not the polis or politics, but the relation between philosophy and politics.” This remark actually applies to all political philosophy and, most of all, to its beginnings in Athens.7
Such seems to be the case with Deleuze: “The word ‘utopia’ designates that conjunction of philosophy, or of the concept, with the present milieu—political philosophy” (WP 100). Using Deleuze's own methodology, then, Patton's proposal is to treat certain liberal concepts (normativity, freedom, judgment) as “pure events” in this Deleuzian sense—utopian concepts that are irreducible to their various actualizations, whether in a state of affairs or a particular political theory, and hence are themselves capable of transformation in connection with changing historical problematics.
This methodological approach, however, raises a delicate problem that Patton does not discuss directly, although it is implicit in his entire project: the possibility of what one might call exhausted concepts. If certain concepts can be taken up again and transformed within philosophy (such as the social contract in Hobbes, Locke, and Rawls), it is because what the concept expresses (the “pure event”) is irreducible to its actualizations.8 But do some concepts, even as pure events, eventually become “exhausted”? Deleuze suggests that the concept of “truth” is itself so under-(or over-)determined in philosophy that the problematic to which it corresponds must always be carefully delineated (see DR 158–9). Elsewhere he and Guattari write, in a similar vein, that “reason is only a concept, and a very impoverished concept” at that (WP 1994). If Deleuze tended to ignore liberal concepts, or even certain Marxist concepts, was it because he deemed that such concepts had become exhausted, or were no longer relevant to contemporary problematics? Moreover, is this not why Deleuze defines philosophy as the creation of new concepts—new concepts that would constitute a response to changing conditions? Put simply, how does one assess the difference between the need to create a new concept in philosophy and the possibility of reactivating or transforming an already-existing concept?
One can raise this question already knowing, at least in principle, the inevitable response: there can be no pre-existent criteria to determine the direction a philosopher should take, which is why Deleuze constantly insists on the necessity of experimentation. But in practice, this is a difficult and complex question, which has given rise to some well-known and dramatic passages in the history of philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason, for instance, Kant takes care to explain carefully his appropriation of the Platonic concept of the “Idea,” even as he introduces significant changes into the concept.9 Likewise, in A Theory of Justice, Rawls is compelled to justify his own retention of the terminology of the social contract in the context of his theory of “justice as fairness,”10 just as Heidegger takes care to explain his retention of the traditional concept of the “understanding” in Being and Time even as he dramatically reconfigures it as a fundamental existential of Dasein.11 A similar drama is at work in Patton's book. Patton is not simply writing as a commentator, offering a generalized criticism of Deleuze's rejection of liberal political concepts. More subtly, he is writing as a philosopher, suggesting that Deleuze's philosophy can and should be re-evaluated in light of our contemporary historical situation and changing philosophical problematics. What light would the liberal concepts that Deleuze ignores shed on Deleuze's own political philosophy? Conversely, what kind of transformations could Deleuze's concepts introduce into the liberal tradition, given its current situation? In short, what kind of “becoming” would liberal and Deleuzian concepts enter into when they are brought into contact with each other? The fact is that one can never know in advance the course of the becoming of a given concept. As Deleuze writes, “it's not a matter of bringing all sorts of things under a single concept, but rather of relating each concept to the variables that explain its mutations” (N 31).
Deleuze's analytic of concepts, in short, can only be worked out experimentally, and in this case the experimentation is carried out on several “liberal” concepts that Patton, somewhat surreptitiously, imports into his analyses of Deleuze: normativity, freedom, and judgment (as well as a non-liberal concept, the social imaginary). This experimental confrontation is not heralded loudly, but is pursued quietly and patiently throughout the entire book. In the sections that follow, I would simply like to explore, in a provisional manner, how Patton transforms each of these concepts experimentally in the course of his analyses, in a way that points to a new understanding of the liberal tradition of political philosophy.
NORMATIVITY AS THE CONDITION OF THE NEW
The first liberal notion Patton makes use of in his reading of Deleuze is the concept of normativity. Though the term is not listed in the index, it appears frequently in the third section of the chapter on power (DP 9, 20, 49, 59, 87, 106, 135, 136, 144 n11). One of Patton's tasks in these two central chapters—on “Power” and “Desire”—is to argue that Deleuze's theory of desire can be brought together with the theory of power one finds in Foucault and Nietzsche, despite certain conceptual differences. The discussion of normativity that occurs in this context, however, touches a much more difficult question, one that lies at the heart of several recent debates in political philosophy. Critics such as Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Habermas, for instance, have argued that Michel Foucault's well-known theory of power is entirely “non-normative” (DP 59). Normativity is itself a somewhat overdeter-mined philosophical concept, one that corresponds to the question, “What is the source of the authority that moral considerations have over us?” It is usually contrasted with the descriptive, as “ought” is contrasted with “is.” When Habermas and Fraser critique Foucault for failing to provide normative criteria for discriminating between different ways of exercising power, they are therefore accusing Foucault of failing to answer one of the central concerns of liberal political theory and the social contract tradition: namely, “When and in what ways is power, especially State power, justified?” (DP 59).
Patton attempts to respond to such criticisms from a Deleuzian perspective. “Unlike Foucault's analytic of power,” he writes, Deleuze's approach to power is “explicitly normative” (DP 65, 49). This is a somewhat surprising claim, since Deleuze is often condemned along with Foucault for neglecting (or avoiding, or refusing …) questions of normativity. Indeed, one could imagine two possible Deleuzian responses to the criticisms of non-normativity. One might ask if normativity is a good or rigorous concept, and proceed to criticize the concept from a Deleuzian viewpoint. In this case, one could argue that Foucault and Deleuze do not address issues of normativity because their work entails a critique of the very notion of normativity. Patton, however, follows the opposite approach. He takes the problem of normativity seriously, and argues that despite appearances one can find an explicit normative criterion in Deleuze's work, which he identifies by name: “The overriding norm is that of deterrito
rialization” (DP 9). This is the third key thesis of Deleuze and the Political: “A central claim of the present study is that it is the concept of ‘deterritorialization’ which bears the weight of the utopian vocation which Deleuze and Guattari attribute to philosophy” (DP 9). In what sense, then, does Deleuze's notion of deterritorialization play the role of a normative concept?
If Deleuze's political philosophy effects a shift from subjects to processes, then the concept of normativity would have to be altered accordingly. According to Patton, this is exactly what occurs in Deleuze's work: it is the concept of deter-ritorialization that provides “a normative framework within which to describe and evaluate movements or processes” (DP 136). For Deleuze, to analyze a social formation is to unravel the variable lines and singular processes that constitute it as a multiplicity: their connections and disjunctions, their circuits and short-circuits, and above all their possible transformations. To introduce elements of transcendence into the analysis of such fields of immanence, says Deleuze, it is enough to introduce “universals” that would serve as constant coordinates for these processes, and effectively “stop their movement” (WP 47; N 85, 145–6). Deleuze constantly insists that universals are abstractions that explain nothing; they are rather what need to be explained. For instance, there is no such thing as a “pure reason” or a universal rationality, but rather a plurality of heterogeneous “processes of rationalization” of the kind analyzed by Alexandre Koyré, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Canguilhem in the field of epistemology, Max Weber in sociology, and François Châtelet in philosophy. Likewise, there is no universal or transcendental Subject, which could function as the bearer of universal human rights, but only variable and historically diverse “processes of subjectivation,” to use Foucault's term.12 What one finds in any given socio-political assemblage is not a universal “Reason,” but variable processes of rationalization; not universalizable “subjects,” but variable processes of subjectivation; not the “whole,” the “one,” or “objects,” but rather knots of totalization, foci of unification, and processes of objectification. Such processes operate within concrete multiplicities, and are relative to them, and thus need to be analyzed on their own account.
Deleuze would no doubt have followed the same approach in his analysis of normativity had he addressed the issue directly. Foucault himself spoke of the power of what he called the process of normalization, which creates us, as subjects, in terms of existing force relations and existing “norms.” For Foucault, normalization is not merely an abstract principle of adjudication but an already actualized (and always actualized) power relation. Foucault's question then became: Is it possible to escape, or at least resist, this power of normalization? In Deleuze's terminology, the same question would be stated in the following terms: Within a given social assemblage or “territoriality,” where can one find the “line of flight,” or the movement of relative deterritorialization, by means of which one can escape from or transform the existing norm (or territoriality)? From this viewpoint, neither Foucault nor Deleuze avoids the issue of normativity; they simply analyze it in terms of an immanent process. The error of transcendence would be to posit normative criteria as abstract universals, even if these are defined in intersubjective or communicative terms. From the viewpoint of immanence, by contrast, it is the process itself that must account for both the production of the norm and its possible destruction or alteration. In a given assemblage, one will indeed find normative criteria that govern, for instance, the application of the power of the State, but one will also find the means for the critique and modification of those norms, their deterritorialization. A truly “normative” principle must provide not only norms for condemning abuses of power, but also a means for condemning norms that have themselves become abuses of power (for instance, the norms that governed the treatment of women, slaves, minorities, and so on). An immanent process, in other words, must at one and the same time function as a principle of critique as well as a principle of creation (the “genetic” method). “The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are one and the same” (DR 139). The one cannot and “must” not exist without the other.
If deterritorialization functions as a norm for Patton, then, it is a somewhat paradoxical norm. Within any assemblage, what is normative is deterritorialization: that is, the creation of “lines of flight” (Deleuze) or “resistance” (Foucault) that allow one to break free from a given norm, or to transform the norm. What “must” always remain normative is the ability to critique and transform existing norms: that is, to create something new (the category of the new should be understood here in the broad sense, including not only social change, but also artistic creation, conceptual innovation, and so on.) One cannot have pre-existing norms or criteria for the new; otherwise it would not be new, but already foreseen. This is the basis on which Patton argues that Deleuze's conception of power is explicitly normative: “What a given assemblage is capable of doing or becoming,” he writes, “is determined by the lines of flight or deterritorialization which it can sustain” (DP 106).13
Patton is therefore using the concept “normativity” in a quite different manner than Fraser or Habermas. They would say that deterritorialization is not normative, and cannot be, since it eludes any universal criteria and indeed allows for their modification. Patton in effect responds by saying: for that very reason, it is deter-ritorialization that should be seen as a normative concept, even if that entails a new concept of what normativity is. At one point in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that “one can conserve the word essence, if one wishes, but only on the condition of saying that essence is precisely the accident or the event” (DR 191). Patton seems to be saying something similar: one can conserve the word normativity, if one wishes, but only on the condition of saying that the normative is the new or the deterritorialized. Patton's own trajectory is thus beginning to come into focus: rather than simply dropping or ignoring the concept of normativity, he instead proposes to create a new concept of normativity by critiquing components of the old one, and linking it up with a quite different set of related concepts. In this manner, he is effecting a transformation of the liberal concept, while still attempting to situate his own work fully within the liberal tradition.
THE CONCEPT OF “CRITICAL FREEDOM”
A second concept Patton incorporates into his analyses of Deleuze, and links to the concept of normativity, is the concept of freedom, even though Deleuze himself rarely uses this term in his writings (Guattari is said to have remarked that he disliked words that, in French, end with an accent: vérité, liberté, taraté taraté …). Patton none the less entitles his fourth chapter “Desire, Becoming, and Freedom,” and goes so far as to describe Deleuze's thought as an “ethics of freedom” (DP 83). In characterizing Deleuze's philosophy from the viewpoint of a concept that is foreign to Deleuze's own thought, Patton is in fact utilizing a strategy that is itself Deleuzian. In his books on Spinoza, for instance, Deleuze claims that the concept of univocity is “the keystone of Spinoza's entire philosophy” (SPP 63), even though the term “univocity” does not appear even once in Spinoza's texts. The effect of such a technique, however, is to produce what at one point Deleuze calls a “double becoming” (TI 221, 222): the introduction of a foreign concept can often serve as a prism or point of reference by which to evaluate the movement of thought of a given thinker, while at the same time the concept itself is transformed, and enters into its own becoming. (It none the less remains an interesting question to ask why Deleuze might have avoided concepts such as normativity and freedom, while freely adopting other highly charged philosophical concepts such as “idea” or “essence.”)
How is the concept of freedom transformed when it is brought into contact with Deleuze's thought? What Patton finds in Deleuze's work is an activity of what he calls “critical freedom”—a term developed by James Tully in his book Strange Multiplicity—which he distinguishes from the notions of negative and positive freedom.14 Negati
ve freedom, as formulated by Isaiah Berlin in his canonical essay “Two Concepts of Freedom,” is one of the concepts that lies at the heart of the modern liberal tradition.15 It defines freedom negatively as “the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities,” an “area of non-interference” in which agents are allowed to pursue their desires and goals freely without having their choices limited by the intervention of others. By contrast, the concept of positive freedom, as championed by Charles Taylor, implies the stronger notion of “self-mastery” or “strong evaluation”: that is, the idea of actively “exercising control over one's life” (DP 84) by evaluating and defining one's own desires and goals.16 Berlin sees positive freedom as a threat to liberty because it implies that subjects will be constrained to act in prescribed manners; Taylor insists that our freedom of choice is always already partly limited and prescribed by our milieu, and that one evaluates and chooses only within the context of that milieu (culture, community, the state and its laws).
What both these notions of freedom share, however, is a conception of the subject as a determinate structure of interests, goals, and desires: the freedom of the subject lies in its ability to act in pursuit of these interests and goals. What they overlook, or underemphasize, Patton argues, is the fact that individuals often distance themselves from their initial (or inherited) preferences and alter them in fundamental ways (DP 84). This may happen at an individual level (a person altering or leaving a religious heritage) or in a social context where one is exposed to alternate ways of thinking and living (exposure to feminist or racial critiques, contact with other cultures or minorities within one's own culture). Such transformations presume a capacity to alter one's thought and actions, to “question in thought and challenge in practice one's inherited cultural ways” (DP 85), and it is this capacity that Tully terms “critical freedom.” It is the freedom to critique, the freedom to be transformed, to be changed. It entails, as Foucault said, the ability to “think otherwise,” or, as Deleuze might say, the capacity of the self to affect itself.17 Patton's proposal here is to align Deleuze with Tully's contribution to liberal political thought, and to assign to critical freedom a “normative” status.
