by Daniel Smith
What an ethics of immanence will criticize, then, is not simply modes of thought derived from base modes of existence, but anything that separates a mode of existence from its power of acting. This is the second positive task of an immanent ethics. When Spinoza and Nietzsche criticize transcendence, their interest is not merely theoretical or speculative (to expose its fictional or illusory status), but rather practical and ethical; far from being our salvation, transcendence expresses our slavery and impotence at its lowest point.30 This is why Foucault could interpret Anti-Oedipus as a book of ethics, in so far as it attempted to diagnose the contemporary mechanisms of “micro-fascism”—in psychoanalysis and elsewhere—that cause us to desire the very things that dominate and exploit us, and that cause us to fight for our servitude as stubbornly as though it were our salvation. At the same time, the book attempted to set forth the concrete historical conditions under which a mode of existence can come into possession of its power: in other words, how it can become active. This leads us to a third question.
3. What are the conditions for the creation of new modes of existence? How are modes of existence capable of being created actively rather than merely being determined passively? This question follows directly from the second, in so far as the active creation of new modes of existence can only occur on the condition that modes are capable of affecting themselves. This is the thread that unites the minor tradition of ethical thought that Deleuze draws upon: the Stoics, as Pierre Hadot has shown, thought of ethics as an askesis, an affect of the self upon itself, whose end was a self-transformation;31 Spinoza, after defining a mode by its capacity for being affected, sought to define the means by which to render possible the attainment of active affections and adequate ideas; and Nietzsche discovered the artistic operation of the will to power as the invention of new “possibilities of life,” a transvaluation of the value-positing element. This question of auto-affection is the object of some of Deleuze's most difficult and penetrating passages, such as those describing the need for common notions in creating active affections and attaining blessedness in Spinoza, or the final chapter of Nietzsche and Philosophy, where Deleuze charts out the transvaluation of negation into affirmation, reactive into active.32
The study of variations in these creative or productive processes of subjectivation is the third positive task posed by Deleuze's conception of ethics. Foucault, for his part, suggested in The Use of Pleasure that the relation of a mode to itself could be analyzed, historically, from the point of view of four aspects or rubrics:
1. ethical substance (ontology), which designates the material element of ourselves that is deemed to be relevant to our ethical conduct and open to transformation (feelings, intentions, desires);
2. mode of subjection (deontology), which designates the means by which one is incited to recognize what one considers to be one's “ethical” obligations (in relation to a divine law, a cosmological order, a rational rule, an aesthetic form;
3. ethical work (ascetics), which designates the “self-forming activity” that one exerts upon oneself (self-examination, meditation, confession, exercise, diet, the following of exemplary role models); and
4. telos (teleology), which designates the goal or mode of being toward which this ethical activity of auto-affection is directed.33
Here again, such a history of modes of auto-affection, which Foucault attempted to inaugurate, must be sharply distinguished from a history of moral codes, since it would map out the complex terrain and conditions in which new modes of existence appeared that were fundamentally irreducible to these codes.
Finally, for both Deleuze and Foucault, the aim of these typological and historical investigations is always borne upon the present: What is our present situation? What are our own modes of existence, our possibilities of life or processes of subjectivation (which are irreducible to our moral codes)? How and in what places are new modes of existence produced? It may be that the creators of new modes of existence are the “noble” (Nietzsche), or the “rational” (Spinoza), or the aestheticized existence of the “free man” (Foucault), or “minorities” (in the Deleuzian sense of this term).34 One cannot know in advance, and these foci of creation change with different social assemblages. Deleuze has offered one such analysis of our present formation in an essay entitled, “Post-Script on Control Societies.”35 If Foucault spoke of societies of discipline, and their principal technique of enclosure (prisons, hospitals, schools, factories, barracks, families), Deleuze suggests that we are now entering into societies of control, which no longer operate by enclosure (hence the crisis facing each of these institutions) but, as Paul Virilio has shown, by processes of continuous control and instantaneous communication. Forms of resistance and delinquency have thereby changed accordingly: the strikes and “sabotage” of the nineteenth century have given way to piratings and the introduction of viruses of the late twentieth century. What may become increasingly important in the future, Deleuze suggests, are modes of existence that are able “to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control” (N 175). But as Deleuze likes to insist, one can never predict in advance where these loci of experimentation will occur; one can only be attentive to the unknown that is knocking at the door.
The primary consequence of an immanent conception of ethics perhaps lies in its change of orientation away from the universal and toward the singular, and away from the historical toward the actual. One does not seek universals in order to judge, but singularities that are able of creating, of producing the new.
When Foucault admires Kant for having posed the problem of philosophy, not in relation to the eternal but in relation to the Now, he means that the object of philosophy is not to contemplate the eternal, nor to reflect on history, but to diagnose our actual becomings. (WP 112)
History thinks in terms of the past, present, and future; but if history in this way surrounds and delimits us, it none the less does not tell us who we are, but from what we are in the process of differing ourselves. When Foucault wrote on disciplinary societies, or on Greek and Christian modes of subjectivation, for instance, he did so in order to find out in what ways we are no longer disciplinary, are no longer Greeks or Christians, and are becoming other. This difference between the present and the actual, for Deleuze, is much more important than the difference between the present and the past. The present is what we are, and for that reason, what we are already ceasing to be; the actual is not what we are, but rather what we are becoming, what we are in the process of becoming. History, in this sense of the term, is what separates us from ourselves, and what we have to traverse in order to think ourselves, whereas the actual is the formation of the new, the emergence of what Foucault called our “actuality.”36 To diagnose the becomings in each present that passes is the task that Nietzsche assigned to the philosopher as a physician, “the physician of civilization,” or the inventor of new immanent modes of existence. To act against the past, and therefore on the present, in favor (one hopes) of a time to come: such, for Deleuze, is the task of the philosopher. This time to come is not the future of history, but the Now that is distinguished from every present; it is not an instant but a becoming, the “actual” or the “untimely,” the conditions for the production of the new.
This is perhaps the secret [concludes Deleuze], to make something exist, and not to judge. If it is so distasteful to judge, this is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because everything that is of value can only create and distinguish itself by defying judgment. (ECC 135)
These three questions concerning the determination, evaluation, and creation of modes of existence serve to demarcate the problematics and tasks of a purely immanent ethics. In rejecting the idea of a transcendental subject, it seeks to define the immanent processes of subjectivation that determine variable modes of existence. In refusing all forms of transcendence, it evaluates the differences between these modes of existence on the basis of purely immanent criteria of power. Fi
nally, in rejecting universals, it analyses the present in terms of the conditions it presents for the production of the singular: that is, for the creation of new modes of existence.
ESSAY 10
Politics
Flow, Code, and Stock: A Note on Deleuze's Political Philosophy
I
n Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, Deleuze and Guattari write that “the general theory of society is a generalized theory of flows” (AO 262).1 The basic thesis of the book is that it is the business of every society to code these flows, and the “terrifying nightmare,” of any society would be a flow that eludes its codes, that is, a decoded or uncoded flow (AO 139–40). While this terminology has become familiar to readers of Deleuze and Guattari, it is hardly a straightforward claim. To my knowledge, no other thinker has insisted that the notion of flow is the fundamental concept of political philosophy. In making this claim, Deleuze is clearly distancing himself from other approaches to social theory, which have instead been based, for instance, on a theory of the State (Plato) or the social contract (Hobbes) or the spirit of the laws (Montesquieu), or on the problems of “perpetual peace” (Kant) or legitimation (Durkheim, Habermas), and so on. The question I would like to address would thus serve as a necessary prolegomena to any consideration of Deleuze's political thought: Why did Deleuze insist that it was necessary to base his socio-political philosophy on a theory of flows?2
As a first approach to this question, Deleuze and Guattari explained, in an interview, that the concept of the flow was “a notion that we needed as an unqualified and undetermined notion [notion quelconque]”: that is, as a purely nominal concept.3 At this level, one can indeed conceive of extraordinarily varied types of concrete flows, and the ways they need to be controlled or coded. Most obviously, there is the flow of water, and the building of dams and dikes to control and channel the water (in the Western U.S. today, the question of the rights to a limited water supply is becoming increasingly acute). There are economic flows such as money and capital, along with the control of markets. There are material flows of raw matter and utilities such as oil and electricity, along with the control of the grid and the oil supply. There is the flow of commodities, along with their marketing and transport. There is the flow of traffic, along with the regulation of the highways and circulation (avoiding traffic jams), as well the mastery and control of speed.4 There are social flows such as flows of populations, the flow of immigrants and foreigners over borders, along with the ability to control and monitor those borders (issuing passports, customs, and so on). There are flows of sewage and refuse, and the question of what to do with them. There are somatic flows such as urine, blood, sperm, sweat, faeces, milk, menstrual blood, and so on, with their various codings. (This is the example with which Anti-Oedipus opens: a breast emits a flow of milk, which is cut into by a baby's mouth, which becomes a flow of feces, cut off by the anus, and so on. Such is the lived experience of the infant, which has no sense of its organic body, but only of intensities such as hunger, or the need to defecate, and the flows and cutting of flows that satiate those needs.) One can even think of flows of thought, and the attempt to code and control the flow of thought via marketing, advertising, and the media (such as the flow of scientific knowledge, as well as a flow of stupidity and opinion).5
Now while all these examples indeed give us a sense of the problem Deleuze has isolated and placed at the center of his political philosophy—the problem of flows and their coding and control—it does not tell us where Deleuze got the concept from, nor why it lies at the basis of his social philosophy, nor how it functions philosophically in his work. For that, we need to turn to the domain of economics and Deleuze's analysis of capitalism, because it is here that Deleuze derives his real definition of what a flow is, and then extends it to domains outside of economics. Robert Heilbroner once wrote a popular survey of the great economic thinkers called The Worldly Philosophers, and it is a fitting title, since the great economists—the three greatest are Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes—deal philosophically with the most practical of matters: money, and everything that goes with it.6 While Deleuze only occasionally refers to Adam Smith, it is Deleuze's use of Marx and Keynes that I would like to focus on here.
DELEUZE, MARX, AND KEYNES
In a 1990 interview, Deleuze remarked: “I believe that Félix Guattari and myself have remained Marxists. This is because we do not believe in a political philosophy that would not be centered on the analysis of capitalism and its developments.”7 It is none the less true that, as Lyotard noted in a review he wrote of Anti-Oedipus immediately after its publication, Capitalism and Schizophrenia contains a critique of Marx that is implicit rather than explicit, since a surprisingly large number of classical Marxist concepts (alienation, ideology, the class struggle, work-value theory, the dialectic of contradiction) drop out of Deleuze and Guattari's analyses completely; they are neither analyzed nor criticized, but simply ignored.8 Yet what Deleuze and Guattari retain of Marx's analyses is the definition of capitalism that lies at the heart of Das Capital, and it is in this sense that Capitalism and Schizophrenia can be said to present a Marxist theory of capitalism, but one that has been transformed and adapted to new conditions. The definition of capitalism that Marx gives in the first book of Capital is organized around the encounter of two elements of abstraction, or what Deleuze will call two decoded flows: the flow of subjective labor and the flow of objective capital. One the one hand, the flow of labor must no longer be determined or codified as slavery or serfdom, but must become naked and free labor, in the form of the worker having to sell his labor capacity; and on the other hand, wealth must no longer be determined as landed wealth or the money dealing of merchants, but must become pure, homogeneous, and independent capital, which is capable of buying this labor. Capitalism appears only when these two purely quantitative flows of unqualified capital and unqualified labor encounter each other and conjugate. I will leave to the side the complex historical analyses of how the conjugation of these two decoded flows of labor and capital took place, and why they first took place in Europe rather than elsewhere—this is, in part, the aim of Althusser and Balibar's influential book Reading Capital.9 I would simply like to make two brief observations about how Deleuze interprets and uses this Marxist definition of capitalism.
1. Political Economy and Libidinal Economy. First, for Deleuze, the philosophical importance of the conjunction of labor and capital lies in their common movement away from representation to what Deleuze calls in several places “the activity of production in general” (AO 270, 302). Marx said that Luther's merit was to have determined the essence of religion, not on the side of the object (Does God exist or not?), but rather on the side of the subject, or what Kierkegaard called “interiority”: faith as the source of religion. According to Marx, Adam Smith and Ricardo wound up doing something similar in political economy: they located the essence of wealth, not in its object (land or money), but rather in an abstract subjective essence, which is my labor capacity, or my capacity to produce. What faith is to religion, labor is to political economy: humans produce gods in the same way they produce automobiles. The same, moreover, was true of Freud: “His greatness lies in having determined the essence or nature of desire, no longer in relation to objects, aims, or even sources, but as an abstract subjective essence—libido or sexuality” (AO 270). This is why Deleuze can say that the discovery of labor (by Smith and Ricardo) and the discovery of the libido (by Freud) were really one and the same thing: political economy and libidinal economy are one and the same economy. “The discovery of an activity of production in general and without distinction, as it appears in capitalism, is the identical discovery of both political economy and psychoanalysis, beyond the determinate systems of representation” (AO 270, 302). Put differently, “desire is part of the infrastructure” (AO 104; cf. 63): our impulses and affects, and even our unconscious drives, what seems to be the most individual and
personal part of ourselves (libidinal economy), are themselves immediately part of what Marx called the economic infrastructure: that is, the material base of every social formation (political economy). In other words, it is impossible to posit a mental reality to desire that is different from the material reality of social production (“there is no particular form of existence that can be labeled ‘psychic reality,’” AO 27); nor can one claim, as Freud does, that the libido has to be “sublimated” (or desexualized or resolved) in order to invest the social field (AO 352); nor can one say that the relations between social production and desire are relations of “projection” and “introjection” (AO 28). This is one of the essential theses of Anti-Oedipus: libidinal economy and political economy are one and the same thing; they have an identical nature.
But Deleuze and Guattari immediately add a complementary thesis: although there is no difference in nature between the two economies, it is true that there is none the less a distinction in regime between them (AO 31). Technical machines, for instance, obviously work only if they are not out of order, which is what allowed Marx to posit a strict distinction, within political economy, between the means of production and the product: “Let us remember once again one of Marx's caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and the relations of production” (AO 24). In libidinal economy, by contrast, the product is always implanting itself back into its production, such that “desiring-machines” function only on the condition that they are constantly breaking down (AO 31–2, 37, 151, 230)—whence the phenomena of manic depressions or bipolarity, psychoses, and, at the limit, schizophrenia. Much of the argument of Anti-Oedipus revolves around an assessment of the relations between these two economies, given their identical nature but differing regimes. The first two chapters develop a theory of the nature of the syntheses of the unconscious: desiring-machines produce by means of immanent syntheses (local and non-specific and connections, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic and polyvocal conjunctions), whereas social machines represent the former by means of transcendent syntheses (global and specific connections, exclusive disjunctions, segregative and biunivocal conjunctions). In both cases, “the same syntheses are at issue” (AO 116)—they have the same nature—but they are put to different uses. Desiring production and social production “are therefore the same machines, but not at all the same regime … or the same uses of syntheses” (AO 288). Social production represents, at a molar level, what is produced, by desiring production, at a molecular level. As a result, desiring production comes to be crushed by the requirements of representation, and comes to desire its own repression.