Paper for PSA Conference 2014

Chris Henry
11 February 2014

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The Radical Possibility Of Contemporary Thought.

What To Do With Deleuze And Guattari?

It is doubtless that post-structural political thought provides a strong platform of
critique against representational politics, such as those found within the state and textbooks of
liberal philosophy. Whilst attempting to provide a direction through the unstructured milleu
of immanent multiplicity, the Nietzschean branch of philosophy (stretching back from Dun
Scotus and Spinoza to the work of Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari) resists the categorisation
of life according to transcendental forms and the myopic power restraints with which this
categorisation constrains the political. On the part of philosophy, this is beneficial to the
extent that an understanding of the world becomes built on, rather than a selection of limited
perceived effects with an implied causal process, a foundation of intensive affects which
engender the significant events that create the world around us. In terms of the political, poststructuralism offers at the very least an alternate and critical ontology of the subject to the
identity politics upon which capito-parliamentary forms of social structuring and repression
are reliant on. Despite these benefits and whilst post-structural philosophy is often part of the
conceptual toolkit that academics have at their disposal, it is often denigrated as impotent in
its ability to provide an alternative framework for a politics of resistance. Indeed, of those of
us not subscribing to the communist programme, Savoj iek tells us to not be afraid, join
us, come back!, that youve had your anti-communist fun, and that, fortunately for us,
you are pardoned for it - time to get serious once again! (Douzinas and iek 2010: back
cover). iek here is representative of a large number of thinkers for whom anti-dialectical
post-structuralism simply cannot engender an effective and egalitarian political resistance that
can resist the trappings of dogmatic capitalist logic. With the revocation of the dialectic
contained within post-structural metaphysics, it is seen by some that there is no ground on
which to base emancipatory claims and a resistive subjectivity. A conference at Birkbeck
Institute for the Humanities in 2009 saw philosophical heavyweights such as Badiou, Bosteels,
Douzinas, Hallward, Hardt, Negri, Rancire, Toscano and iek all rally round the idea of
communism, which Badiou goes so far as to call a political truth (Badiou in Douzinas and
iek 2010: 1). These authors claim that it is only through emancipatory subjectivity,
conditioned by an axiom of communism, that the injustices of capitalism can ever be
properly countered (see Badiou 2011: 141-52). It is the development of a politics based upon
a truthful and egalitarian engagement with the real world that determines the legitimacy of
political action. On the other hand, in a recent book discussing the political implications of

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Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy, Peter Hallward argues that their work, inhibits any
consequential engagement with the constraints of our actual world (Hallward 2006: 161).
Hallward argues that the Deleuzian foundations for the substantiation of the real are
grounded in a mysticism out of this world, denying him the ability to determine any
meaningful politics. Simply put, programmatic change and the acquisition of goals are
impossible for Deleuze because he cannot conceptualise the subjects real interaction with the
world. For their part, Deleuze and Guattari, when framing their model of political resistance
within their own post-structural philosophy as that of the war machine, were well aware of
the criticism that their conceptualisation had left themselves open for. In removing the
groundwork conditioning the replacement of one political system for another (this being one
political conclusion of their anti-dialectical ontology of difference), they also removed the
biunivocal relationships conditioning what could truly be good or bad politics. The writers
acknowledge this in A Thousand Plateaus, showing that, the problem of the war machine is
that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model or the
monument. For them, politics is more about an ambulant people of relayers, rather than a
model society (Deleuze and Guattari 2011: 416).

As a result of this dichotomy, the question to be asked of Deleuzian philosophy is:
given the wholesale rejection of good/evil morality, the deconstruction of dialectic
conceptualisations of history and the revocation of action based on truth, to what extent
can it be used in praxis with the real world?. Furthermore, can anything be attained from
activity according to the rhizomatic image of thought? The literature on rhizomatic and
assemblage theory predominantly concentrates on its ability, or lack thereof, to adequately
provide a platform for the critique of dominant forms of power. However, the disappearance
of resistance groups (for example Occupy and Anonymous) from the media and the reemergent popularity of dogmatic communism calls for the conceptualisation of goal
attainment according to a non-dogmatic philosophy. Is it possible to set targets, and
understand their accomplishment, when ontology is always/already rooted in its immanent
potential and not a transcendental or idealist authority? In the rest of this paper, I will
highlight the elements of Badious communist hypothesis which constitute its effective
appeal, yet also constitute its inherent universalising danger. Against this backdrop, I will
argue that Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy provides a better possibility for understanding
the creation of the new, yet work still needs to be done in developing an ethical framework for
its conceptualisation and attainment.

Whilst there are of course a plethora of conceptual frameworks with which to
structure resistance activity, (examples being found in pre-figurative, anarcho-, anarchosyndicalist, agonistic and deliberative authorship,) I am going to employ a somewhat
belaboured opposition between Badiouian and Deleuzian philosophies to highlight some of
the issues at stake within the radical positions in the debate. This contrivance is not
completely without merit, given that Badiou himself, in his book on Deleuze (Badiou 2000),
argues that they both sit in competing and irreconcilable ontological encampments. However,
I set it up only to show how Deleuzian philosophy guards against axiomatic dogmatism, using
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Badious philosophy as only one particular guilty example of employing this dogmatism.
Badiou argues that politics is a condition of thought that exists as an egalitarian axiom. To
this end, politics is engaged in rendering explicit the subjective infinity of situations (Badiou
2011: 143) to those who pay fidelity to this procedure. Those who do pay fidelity are thereby
militants of the communist idea, using terminology that shows Badious Maoist leanings. In
other words, politics is only legitimate if it is seen as that which affirms the equality of a given
statement based upon an egalitarian event, or one which counts for all. Two of Badious
examples, those which count for all are the French Revolution and the Chinese Cultural
Revolution. Politics is not legitimate if, as is the case in the liberal tradition, members of a
group have to either acquiesce to an agreed position (such as in the cases of Rawls or Taylor) or
come to a deliberative conclusion which binds those involved in a situation ( la Mouffe).
Supporting his determination of politics, Badiou makes the claim that politics can only be
that which expresses the infinity of a situation upon the foundation of maths and, specifically,
Cantors set theory. In Being and Event (2010), Badiou rigorously develops what he claims is the
mathematical constitution of ontology, which itself constitutes the basis for politics. He argues
that it is no longer a question of asking how is pure mathematics possible? and responding:
thanks to a transcendental subject. Rather: pure mathematics being the science of being, how
is a subject possible? (Badiou 2010: 6). Accordingly, maths is no longer an activity that
subjects use as a particular way of understanding certain fields, such as physics or
thermodynamics, but instead mathematics is the language of being qua being, that which
provides the foundations for our very interaction with the sensible. Badiou clarifies the
coexistent nature of the the two domains, mathematics and ontology, arguing that the thesis
ontology = mathematics is meta-ontological: this excludes it being mathematical, or
ontological (Badiou 2010: 13).

The power, and therefore the attraction, of Badious political truth procedure is
precisely that it is grounded on a basis of mathematical truth. It is because Badiou seems to
articulate the language of being qua being to constitute his politics, that he can sidestep the
liberal and epi-phenomenological discourses of morality and ethics. Instead, the
mathematical truth of his general principle of equality, i.e. the radical possibility that being is
potentially infinite when unconstrained by the States power, negates what he calls the capitoparliamentary primacy of opinions. So, in good Platonic style, doxa is subordinated to episteme
and, for Badiou, what is true is that - mathematically - everyone is equal. So the appeal of
Badious politics lies in the egalitarian potential of the militant - you can be anything you
want, if only you could throw off the chains oppressing you!. The way to do this, of course,
is to sign up to the revolutionary political vanguard. However, Cantorian set theory (the
mathematical theory underpinning Badious ontology) is a subtractive theory. This is to say
that that which is possible is highlighted only in the remnant of what has been counted by
the state and, furthermore, only in retrospect, ad hoc, of an event. That which is possible is
merely a category of not what has been dictated by the State. Hence, Badiou is unable to
either, a) give an account of the real unless there has been a counting operation to militantly
negate or, b) give an account of the new. This is because the conditions from which the

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revolutionary subject emerges are only explainable in the void - the not - of the states
determination of being. Badiou thus presents a categorical understanding of both ontology
and the subject as that which is indeterminable, preventing him from conceptualising the
singularly new.

Deleuze knew very well that what was important was not whether or not a particular
philosophy was right or wrong - it is not that his philosophy is any more right than Badious.
Instead, what is important is what you can or cant do with a philosophy; Badiou can rally
conferences and groups of activists around a manifesto of Communism, but he cant
conceptualise the real or the new. In light of this, the radical possibility of Deleuzian
philosophy faces two challenges. The first challenge is that it has to defend itself against the
claims that it starts as an a priori condition somehow out of this world. In other words, it has
to talk about the real. The second is that it must be able to give an account of the new; it must
be able to describe the process by which the individual attains their targets. Several authors,
for example Shaviro (2007) and Seigworth (2007), have addressed the first issue - that Deleuze
can not access the real - and so I wont re-iterate their arguments too much here. They
amount saying that attempts to remove the virtual conditions of the actual - in other words
the transcendental from the empirical - miss the point; the potential conditions of the real is
as much a part of the world as the real itself (and this will be developed below). Stemming
from Spinoza, Deleuzes univocular world entails the embeddedness of the empirical world as
always/already within its virtual, transcendental conditions. This is what Deleuze and
Guattari mean when they say clearly in A Thousand Plateaus that any point of a rhizome can
be connected to anything other, and must be (2011: 7). In other words, it is not the case for
Deleuze that either one of the virtual/actual constitute the real more than the other - they are
both modes of one, univocal real. Deleuze was in fact aware, even at the beginning of his
career, of the temptations of mysticism and abstraction, noting that, the more gifted a
philosopher is, I believe, the more he or she tends to leave the concrete behind, at least in the
beginning. He warns us to, resist this tendency, at least from time to time, just long enough
to come back to perceptions, to affects, which will redouble your concepts (Deleuze 2006:
363).

If we can accept then that Deleuze can conceptualise the real, then can he
conceptualise the really new? Deleuze is a philosopher of difference, becoming and becoming
different, but does this difference consist of modification or the genuinely original? At the
beginning of The Logic of Sense, Deleuze says that, when I say Alice becomes larger, I mean
that she becomes larger than she was. By the same token, however, she becomes smaller than
she is now. [...] But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and
smaller than one becomes (2004: 3). Deleuze describes here what he calls the first paradox
of sense, i.e. the recognition that Alice is becoming both larger and smaller at the same time.
On the one hand, we could think of Alices change as one that occurs in accordance with a
strict continuum of time; we would start by saying that Alice is one size at the beginning of a
series, a smaller size in the middle and then a larger size at the end than she was at the
beginning. Thus, Alice would have become smaller, then significantly larger in succession. We
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could further say that, in one sense, i.e. that on average (when her end size is compared to her
beginning size), she is constantly getting larger over the course of the event. This would seem
to address the paradox of sense, allowing us to say that she is getting both smaller and larger
at the same time - it would depend on what scale of time we used. If the scale is that of
seconds, she becomes smaller and then larger over a number of many seconds yet, if the scale
is that of minutes, the whole getting smaller then larger process is replaced by an
observation that she has just become larger. The problems with this conceptualisation are that
it relies on the assumption that time is a constancy upon which to judge the progress of an
event, and that there is nothing new about any of the Alice's. Time is taken as an essential
object which consists of fixed units of comparison (minutes, seconds etc.) and Alice is
compared over this linear series. Where however is the new under this conception? The
Alice at the end of our series is, in this sense, the same Alice, but larger. But this doesn't make
sense! Is it the case that small-Alice can get through the tiny door at the bottom of the well
better than large-Alice? No, though she should be able to if small-Alice were a quantifiable
modification of normal-Alice. It seems rather that small-Alice is a completely different Alice, with
different faculties: she is capable of getting through much smaller doors, yet now faces the
previously unfeasible peril of playing cards. She remembers a time, stored in her memory,
when she was an Alice that, at most, faced the danger of a paper cut from a playing card - but
she is no longer that Alice and they face a much greater challenge.

We have assumed that what Alice has become was the result of her stable existence
affected by her drinking the medicine on the table and eating the biscuit. We have drawn a
causal relationship based upon the elements we perceive as significant; in this case, we view
Alice as an essentialised subject upon which action takes effect, and we note that Alice has
picked up a bottle of medicine and taken a drink from it. Deleuze, drawing on Humes work
on cause and effect in A Treatise on Human Nature (1896), and Bergsons work in Time and Free
Will (1919), Matter and Memory (1911) and Creative Evolution (1944), develops this mechanic of
sense in both Difference and Repetition (2004a) and The Logic of Sense (2004b). In Difference and
Repetition (2004a), Deleuze shows that it is because we piece together contractions of the past
in memory that we construct an understanding of what we perceive as causal relationships.
He shows that, in order to form a causal relationship, the past-present (an understanding of a
particular situation in the past), must resemble our now-present (that which is now), and our
mind then creates artificial signs that we connect together, linking action to object (2004: 102).
It is when this memory is projected into the future that we can start to understand and then
predict the new.

Imagine, for instance, swimming front crawl. In order to move forward, your teacher
instructs you to lift one arm out of the water, brush it forward past your ear, push it into the
water and then sweep it back to your side. You do this, creating a movement through the
water, but you attempt to improve your technique to be closer to the ideal technique you have
been instructed. You set yourself the goal of being faster and try to match the perfect
technique as instructed. We do this because our instructor has told us that doing so will make
us faster and so, remembering this statement whilst we try, we are not surprised when we do
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in fact become faster. You have become faster because you remember that your PE teacher
always told you to be faster! in the 100m races. Yet you are slower at the same time, in the
sense that you are less slow after half an hour practicing in the pool. No one told you at school
that improving at the races would make you less slow, so you dont remember this becoming
less slow; but your ever-cynical, onlooking father might just think you are. So you become
both faster and less slow - two completely different and irreducible qualities - but you have
remembered what conditions your understanding of faster. Alice becomes both larger and
smaller.

Deleuze has shown us that the new is not the simple effect of x upon y which gives rise
to z. Rather, every passing present is new and is connected to its past as its resemblance. His
work drew heavily from Bergson who said that, the possible is only the real with the addition
of an act of mind that throws its image back into the past once it has been enacted (Deleuze
1991: 17). The acknowledgement of what has become new is therefore a retroactive
connection with noveltys past - it is the construction of genealogy. Another way of saying this
is that the bringing about (or actualising) of the new is both a technical and aesthetic
operation on its virtual conditions. One more way: anything new is possible, but we are
limited by our past understanding of the world in how we can bring this novelty about. If the
new then is the result of our past understanding of the world and our interaction with the
world around us, then goals become this understanding pushed into the future, in connection
to a problematic. We expect that a problem can be solved based upon what we know of our
past experiences, but that there is also range for experimentation and the creation of the
radically new. The question of Deleuzian politics thus becomes, how are we to judge/
adjudicate/legislate the emergence of the new from its conditions?. This amounts to asking
the questions, what are Deleuzian ethics? or, are there any normative standards to which we
should hold the new to account?.

It is tempting at this stage to recourse to a liberal discourse of ethics in order to
ground becoming within concepts of justice and liberty. To this extent, Deleuzian ontology
would function as the underpinning of a democratic order in which it is accepted that there
will never be a perfect end of history, but that an avowedly historicist good life can be brought
about through collective work on societys makeup. This is similar to the procedural republic
that Michel Sandel calls for in response to the unencumbered self (Sandel 1984). I will use
the work of Sandel here as a provocation and a potential in-road for the development of
Deleuzian ethics, with the caveat that this is definitely work in progress. Sandel paves the way
for our potential Deleuzian ethics by removing the a priori conditions of the self, albeit within
liberal (not post structuralist) discourse. It is in this sense that it makes sense to think of him as
potentially compatible with how I have tried to position Deleuze. Sandel argues that, only if
my identity is never tied to the aims and interests I may have at any moment can I think of
myself as a free and independent agent, capable of choice (Sandel 1984: 86). Any a priori
determinations of the subject, whether they be ontological (i.e. Kant) or moral (i.e. Rawls)
would foreclose the agency of the individual in the determination of their life. Sandel
therefore places the affective capability of choice before any moral stipulation on the political
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behaviour of the individual. This would seem compatible with the Deleuzian revocation of a
priori categories (discussed above) and would leave the subject a blank category within which
he or she could constantly become new. Accordingly, the Deleuzo-Sandelian primary ethical
statement would be that which is good affirms the subjective ability to be affective. Deleuzes
emphasis on the conditions of the new could be brought to bear by this maxim on societys
education and political institutions; an education system that encourages self-confidence and
the individual pursuit of their own interests would further engender the individuals creation
of the good new. We must be careful however, because one consequence of Sandels
unencumbered self is to put the self itself beyond the reach of its experience, to secure its
identity once and for all. Or to put it another way, it rules out the possibility of what we might
call constitutive ends (ibid.). Whereas Deleuzian ontology of becoming different underpins
everything, regardless of whether it is human or not, Sandel roots his ethical statements firmly
within anthropocentric discourse. It doesnt matter what the person is like for Sandel, just as
long as they are a person and not the result of a process of constitution. The focus on the
individual allows Sandel to position his work within liberal discourse and (particularly) as a
critique of John Rawls, however this conception of the subject reduces the potential for
thinking the individual away from traditional concepts of the self. John Protevi (2010) has
argued that rigid conceptions of subjectivity have significantly limited the scope of
possibilities that cognitive and biomedical sciences have with respect to the body.
Contemporary medical techniques still return bodies to previous Oedipalised notions of what
the body should be as a human body, rather than exploring the possibility of extending its
potential with emerging biotechnologies, within an affective social sphere. The danger of
constructing a Deleuzian ethics of becoming through a return to the liberal individual is that
it forecloses the possibility of thinking the subjects immanent place as constructed within the
world. Therefore, in order to discover the radical possibility of Deleuzian philosophy, we must
develop a desubjectified, affective ethics for the emergence of the new.

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Bibliography

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