RE: AUT: Statist Thinking

["Chris Hurl" <munkah@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks again Lowe for laying out the groundwork on this.

I guess my first question would be, how do you think D&G's thought have been translated into representative systems by people like Negri?  Because it seems that Negri borrows a lot of ideas from D&G but then integrates them into a more conventional historical material analysis.  It seems as though bits and pieces of D&G's thinking, those aspects that tend towards the representative, such as Deleuze's discussion of the Society of Control, are incorporated, but the movement in their thinking is lost.

What do you make of statements like the one below?

"What Foucault constructed implicitly (and Deleuze and Guattari made explicit) is therefore the paradox of power that, while it unifies and envelops within every element of social life (thus losing its capacity effectively to mediate different social forces), at that very moment reveals a new context, a new mileau of maximum plurality and uncontainable singularization--a milieu of the event." (H&N, Empire, 25)

Upon first glance, this appears to be a very Hegelian viewpoint, not much different than CLR James' statement that it is precisely when the State (or Party) comes to envelop everything that it ceases to exist.  But does this really reflect D&G's perspective?  It seems on the contrary that for D&G the process of "unification" has always been a diffuse affair.  From this perspective, it is not the process of unification that negates itself.  On the contrary, the constitution of a new context demands the constitution of positive machines, war machines that refuse to implode into the black holes of Statist thinking.  Perhaps, this is a problem with Negri, that the multitude is often reduced to the negative image of Empire.

Now the concept of Negativity in Hegelian thinking, I have always found deeply problematic.  While I try to reconcile my empathy with a critical Hegelian analysis (a la Marx and Debord) with D&G's analysis, I always find that Negativity is the sticking point.  But to what extent is a critical Hegelian standpoint grounded in the Negative?

I am critical of Debord, to the extent that his analysis of the spectacle does not seem to pay any attention to positive struggles and consequently risks imploding in the myopic viewpoint of the spectacle.  Likewise, it seems at times that Marx falls into the myopic viewpoint of Capital.

And yet I think one of the virtues of Marx's stuff is that he moves towards a more positive position (contra Hegel).  Class struggle becomes a positive force, pushing Capital to expel the working class in the production process to the greatest extent possible through the introduction of machinery, etc.  Likewise, the situationist's stuff cannot be restricted to simply the spectacle, but rather they push through all sorts of positive measures (workers council's, etc).  It seems clear that capital will not simply generate irs own opposition.  This is fundamentally a backwards analysis.  Rather, capital itself seems to be a sort of black hole generated by the positive activity of workers.

So then by beginning in struggle can the critical Hegelian perspective be reconciled with D&G?  I have doubts.  Yet it seems like both projects are opening onto a similar sense of praxis.

--chris



>From Lowe Laclau <lowe.laclau@xxxxxxxxx>

>Reply-To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

>To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

>Subject: AUT: Statist Thinking

>Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 21:22:22 +0100

>

>OK. I said I was going to distinguish the difference between the

>anti-Statism of the *critical* Hegelian threads (Marx, Debord) from

>the non-Hegelian anti-Statism of Deleuze. Unfortunately this will have

>to be a somewhat loose and inadequate summary because I have to rely

>upon memory for a bit of it as I had many of my books stolen on a

>train a few months ago so I can't refer to the actual texts. This will

>be cumbersome philosophical talk so if you're impatient with it, move

>along.

>

>I said last time that Deleuze couldn't be subsumed within the types of

>projects initiated by the Marx's and Debord's. The reason for this at

>base lies in what he does in Difference & Repetition with respect to

>developing the concept of difference outside of dialecticism and

>Platonism in general. There is thus no necessity in thought or in

>practice for him for the Negative. The reason for this, and for the

>perceived necessity for D to step outside that box is because for him

>difference is not and cannot be thought for itself as long as it is

>subject to the requirements of representation. The solution for him is

>thus not to extend representation to its infinite (a la the Germanics

>Leibniz, Kant, Hegel...) but to have done with the tools of

>representation themselves. That means exorcising the concept,

>predication, judgment and perception (all those things that Foucault

>in The Order of Things analyzes as the backbone of the classical world

>of representation). Exocising them of what exactly? Of the means of

>mediating for reality. I can't express adequately the significance of

>this concern, insofar as one metaphysics affects every aspect of ones

>thought (and thus ones relationship with life (or Being). Deleuze sees

>a long line emerging from Plato (who again inherits this binarism

>between the Being and Nothingness from Parmenides) throughout western

>history that resulted for us in the thinking that there exists this

>false alternative between Being and Non-Being. Deleuze said in

>response that no, there is only one, and that is Being. What was

>incessantly characterized as non-Being acted a means of erecting

>transcendences and obscuring Being's "passive" heterogeneses. One can

>perhaps foresee what Deleuze may have enacted in his incomplete book

>on Marx

>then... One would have to do away with reinserting the categorical

>into the ontological division altogether. But not only the metaphysics

>would be critiqued, an entire ethics (or ethology) would be

>revaluated. In his own modest little way Derrida's Spectres of Marx I

>think was a way of suggesting certain things about this "inheritance"

>of Marx and of all those things that we've in turn "inherited" from

>him. After thinking about it some more I now see understand the bases

>from which Negri was speaking in his critique of this book, and

>equally understand where Derrida was working from. The major

>difference *I* would say comes from Derrida's relationship to Hegel

>(via Heidegger). Derrida methodologically is stuck in the Negativity

>of "differance" (sic: his concept). This is good for whatever it

>produces, I guess...

>

>(Minor comment: Just to reiterate a point I hinted at before, D was in

>no way anti-Hegel in and of himself, any more than he would have been

>anti-Leibniz or anti-Kant. Diff & Rep is full of appreciative/critical

>analyses of what Hegel does at this most general of thought. Where he

>becomes impatient however is with the "insipid monocentricity of the

>circles in the Hegelian dialectic" as he says in D&R. He's thinking of

>all the would-be Hegel's of his milieu that drained the life out of

>any project, and perspective and any analysis by reducing the

>multiplicity to the essence. He also suggests though that between

>Hegel and Leibniz, Leibniz was the more accute in dealing with the

>"divergence", with "singularities", and with the "finite" in general).

>"We are not sure [..] that [Leibniz] is not the least theological [of

>the two]" (p.265).

>

>Anyhow, after establishing a non-Platonic (for what Hegel inherits

>from Kant is what can't inherits from Plato... as Hans Georg Gadamer

>makes pretty clear as well) basis from which to situate the concept

>(i.e. thinking) which D&G will not explain completely until _What is

>Philosophy?_ Deleuze later returns to a minor theme in Nietzsche that

>he wanted to develop in changed form: that of the thought of the

>outside (or nomad thought).

>

>The thought of the outside (nomad) thought is always opposed to the

>thought of the State (or Statist) thinking. Whats the difference? The

>state for D&G is not defined or definable by any form or ahistorical

>formalizations. Or rather, what the institutions of the State

>presuppose is not some State essence or some interiority, but rather

>determinant practices of the reproduction of power-relations already

>in presupposition. As D says in his comentary of Foucault, "there is

>no state only state control". This type of functionalist definition

>offers all types of opportunity for seeing The State beyond the

>simplistic physicalist definitions: from the perspective of the

>extended or diffused range of state economic regulation, labor

>regulation, learning/thought regulation. The socialization of Capital

>and capitalism everywhere relies upon the this regulatory capacity of

>reproduction of particular power-relations. But here we can see as

>well that if The State is defined by these relations then there is an

>outside to the State, just as there is an outside to The Church or to

>the Family or the Marketplace. (I'm eliding some of the complexity of

>this argument because the State will presuppose certain dispositifs

>that it will in turn institutionalize).

>From the perspective of thought and the molding of our bodies though

>the important thing is that the state is everywhere and immediately

>the reproduction of ways of seeing and articulating. Such that when we

>see and speak we are always reproducing a particular set of

>power-relations. The state not only invests itself in the

>particularities of thought (such as one finds whenever there is

>directed ideological commentary coming from its reproductive agents)

>but far more importantly in forms of logic (the *how * of thinking)...

>in most cases you don't have one without the implicit reification of

>the other. Outside thought is neither the exteriority of any of the

>forms of "the thought" (which relates to the forms in which one sees

>and speaks (i.e. relates to and knows) in the world), nor is it the

>exteriority of forms of thinking. It has rather to do with being in a

>difference of relations of force than those presupposed by the

>Interiority of the State. Or put another way, opening up oneself to

>that nonformalized (not seen and not articulable). There is thus no

>interiority to rejoin oneself up to or reconcile ones universe with.

>One of the major significances to be based in this project of nomad

>thought was (to return to the theme of representation) that it allows

>for the reproduction of the State and the dispositifs upon which it

>itself concretizes into norms to be dissipated and deconstructed

>without any dialectical Negatives. Representation is not reproduced.

>But as well, it should be bared in mind that thinking in this sense

>(in the sense that presupposes no return to the represented or to the

>interior) is an act of rarity. It has nothing to do with the

>daydreaming or ruminating that one does most of ones waking life.

>

>All of this is rewriten very creatively and more complexly (there is

>not just Statist and Nomad thinking.. there are presignifying

>semiotics, coutnersignifying, postsignifying etc) in Mille Plateau in

>the section "On Several Regimes of Signs" which is pretty dense the

>first time or so through.

>

>Well, this is still incomplete but I'm tired of writing about this now.

>

>Lowe

>

>

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