Deleuze, Marx and Politics

Nicholas Thoburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134457830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

A critical and provocative exploration of the political, conceptual and cultural points of resonance between Deleuze's minor politics and Marx's critique of capitalist dynamics, engaging with Deleuze's missing work, The Grandeur of Marx.
This book explores the core categories of communism and capital in conjunction with a wealth of contemporary and historical political concepts and movements - from the lumpenproletariat and anarchism, to Italian autonomia and Antonio Negri, immaterial labour and the refusal of work. This book will serve as an introduction to Deleuze's politics and the contemporary vitality of Marx for students and will challenge scholars in the fields of social and political theory, sociology and cultural studies.

1 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, Éric 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 capitalism² 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 square³ allowing us to move around the Deleuzian corpus on fresh legs. (Alliez 1997: 81)

As even a cursory reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s two-volume work Capitalism and Schizophrenia (AŒ, 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:

Félix 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 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)

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). 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 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 (AŒ: 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.; Dauvé 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 dr...