Deleuzian Politics? A Roundtable Discussion

Abstract

Nick and Jeremy circulated some general questions to think about before the discussion, which particularly focused on the surprising fact that many casual commentators, and indeed, some self-styled 'Deleuzians', seemed to regard Deleuzian philosophy as wholly compatible with an embrace of market capitalism and its tendency to celebrate the ephemeral, the individual, the hyper-mobile, the infantile; while others seemed to think of Deleuze as a wholly apolitical or even anti-political thinker, mired in Nietzschean aristocratic elitism, ineffectual mysticism, or old-fashioned individualism. As such, the first question touched on the relationship of Deleuze and Guattari to Marx. VIRTUAL MARXISM? Jeremy: So--our first question. One of the big questions we want to discuss is 'what do we make of Manuel DeLanda's assessment that Marxism is Deleuze's and Guattari's little Oedipus?' Nick--you don't agree with that, I think. Nick: There are interesting questions about why Deleuze and Guattari declare themselves to be Marxists: it's not straightforward, and I think this declaration has a number of functions in their work. Some of these would seem to amount to a deliberate provocation in the face of neoliberal consensus, 'Marx' being a contentious name to invoke at what was a time of general unpopularity for Marxism. But it is very clear to me that the relationship to Marxism is a point of creative tension, an opening, a disruption in their work rather than a limiting, 'Oedipal' factor (which is DeLanda's claim). So I see their Marxism as dynamic--a kind of 'virtual Marx', as Eric has put it--which propels rather than constrains their system. And certainly whilst they declared themselves to be Marxists they also problematise Marxism quite regularly, as a narrative of development and as a potentially constraining identity-form. Nonetheless, what seems to me really clear is that Anti-Oedipus, at least, is completely traversed by Marx and Marxism. The conjunction of free labour and undetermined wealth; the engineering of social relations through money; the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; the Asiatic mode of production: these are all fundamentally important concepts to their work. So it would be very difficult to just extract Marxism from Deleuze and Guattari, as DeLanda suggests one can do. It appears that the problem with capitalism for DeLanda is simply one of monopoly: so 'small is beautiful', and all one needs to do is to abstract labour relations from monopoly formations, and that solves the problem that Deleuze and Guattari call 'capital'. Jeremy: DeLanda's formulation is based on Braudel's distinction between 'markets' and 'anti-markets', and the consequent claim that capitalism is only defined by 'anti-market' monopoly institutions, rather than by the market as such. Nick: Yes, so the whole analysis of abstract labour or the commodity form just vanishes. Peter: The way you've put it--describing the reference to Marxism as a kind of disruptive, liberating, opening-up kind of dynamic in their work--is already for me an indication of the problem. That there are Marxist elements in Anti-Oedipus, or in fact in much of Deleuze's work and Deleuze's and Guattari's work, is clear. But if you think about the usual, conventional way of using Marx, in someone like Sartre for instance--one of the last philosophers who was able to talk meaningfully about politics in a way that exceeded the limits of academic philosophy--he talks about Marxism in the 1950s as a way to 'get a grip on history', and it informed the work that he was doing on Algeria, and a few other places, at the time. A text like Sartre's 'Colonialism is a System' is designed precisely to get a grip on the issue, to analyse it strategically. Such analysis can enable something like a collective determination to take shape in a such a way that it can have a strategic impact and change that situation. It's all about unifying, solidifying, strengthening, focusing--themes opposed to the general logic of Anti-Oedipus. …