expression of Being's continual creation of new voices out of itself.3 It cannot consist in ..... to a homogeneous existence as commodities (contra heterogeneity) and reducing workers .... two alien ways of regrading ourselves, Deleuze sometimes suggests .... becoming or adopting (both are true at once) a voice against a war.
Deleuze’s Political Ethics: A Fascism of the New?
Fred Evans
Duquesne University
Abstract The cosmology of Deleuze and Guattari emphasises the new. I raise the question of whether this emphasis cancels out two other political virtues, solidarity and heterogeneity, and thereby amounts to a fascism of the new. I reply that what Deleuze and Guattari say about cosmological unity and difference suggests that they can avoid this negative designation. I support this conclusion by considering their statements on ethics and politics and by translating their cosmological philosophy into the more immediate ethico-political context of the alloplastic stratum. The latter effort is abetted by elaborating the two thinkers’ use of the term ‘voice’, for example, in Deleuze’s statement that Being is the ‘single and same voice for the whole thousandvoiced multiple . . . a single clamour of Being for all beings’ or in the two authors’ notion of a ‘constellation of voices’ that makes up the ‘molecular’ or ‘unconscious’ collective assemblage of enunciation. This elaboration is pertinent because political ethics is essentially which voices are heard, and which not, or at least their relative levels of audibility in the alloplastic regime. I further clarify this treatment of Deleuze and Guattari’s political ethics by linking it to the idea of parrhesia, courageous speech and hearing. Keywords: Deleuze, voice, political ethics, fascism, Being, solidarity Political ethics concerns the ‘dramatization’ of voices: which are heard, which not, and how they are expressed and received.1 The scope of this ethics is infinite for Deleuze because everything for him is a voice: ‘[Being Deleuze Studies 10.1 (2016): 85–99 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2016.0213 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/journal/dls
86 Fred Evans is the] single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple . . . a single clamour of Being for all beings’ (Deleuze 1994: 304, 36; see also Deleuze 1990: 179–80, 267). Indeed, Being’s ‘univocal meaning’ is nothing more than Being’s continual division of itself into this clamorous progeny, an activity apart from which Being could not exist (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 254). Being is a pure becoming, ‘always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 382).2 This characterisation of Being implies an ethics of amor fati or ‘love of one’s fate’. Such an ethics for Deleuze can only be an immanent expression of Being’s continual creation of new voices out of itself.3 It cannot consist in obedience to an imperative force that transcends Being. Indeed, Deleuze says that the adherence of Being’s many voices to any moral principle transcending them would separate them from what they can do and thereby make them less than they are. In other words, such compliance would amount to the antithesis of ethics. It would reduce ethics to what Deleuze calls the ‘morality’ of constraining rules (Deleuze 1995: 100; Smith 2012: 146–7).
I. Political Ethics and Chaosmos We can be more precise about this ethics by clarifying the reality to which we and all beings are ‘fated’ and how our ‘love’ of this domain is expressed and often suppressed. To gain this clarity, we must first note Deleuze’s characterisation of reality as ‘chaosmos’. He holds that the cosmos is neither of two opposing tendencies: neither disparate series converging on one another (never a teleological or mechanistic order, never the result of any sort of sameness) nor series diverging from each other without any possible ‘communication’ among them (never pure chaos); rather, chaosmos consists in series of elements that diverge from each other but nevertheless communicate with one another. This communication, however, does not make actual a predetermined order. Instead, it produces what would undermine any such regime, a new difference or singularity,4 and does so over and over again. It is therefore a ‘composed chaos’ or a cosmos that is simultaneously an anti-cosmos, an order that is at the same time an anti-order (Deleuze 1990: 174–6, 1994: 123–4, 128; Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9, 313, 323, 328–9, 1994: 118, 208, 156).5 These comments on chaosmos indicate that the constellation of voices in Deleuze’s avowal of amor fati embodies what we can call three ethicopolitical virtues: solidarity (the interconnectedness of these singular
Deleuze’s Political Ethics 87 voices), heterogeneity (the singularity or alterity of each of them), and fecundity (the production of new voices from the interaction among the others). Because the first of these three virtues, solidarity, is often understated by commentators in relation to Deleuze’s ethics, we should note the sort of interconnections Deleuze has in mind: ‘What we are talking about is not the unity of substance but the infinity of the modifications that are part of one another on this unique plane of life’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 254; my emphasis; see also 255, 256, 514, 1990: 56, 60, 64). The words I have italicised suggest that each of these modifications or voices is part of the identity of the rest and at the same time their ‘other’. Deleuze and Guattari more typically refer to these modifications or voices of Being as ‘assemblages’ (agencements). Because these assemblages are always ‘becomings’, always becoming other than what they are through their interaction with one another, the unity or solidarity among them is never homogeneous and their group identity is never univocal except for their production of novelty. Deleuze’s political ethics, then, implies a tri-parte affirmation or ‘crowned anarchy’ (Deleuze 1994: 36–7, 41) of the three ethico-political virtues: the solidarity of the interrelated ‘parts’ or assemblages, their heterogeneity as singularities, and the fecundity or production of new becomings through the creative interplay among the others. Moreover, these three political virtues are completely immanent to the realm of the interconnected voices, an expression of them and their interrelatedness. If this love of chaosmos is to qualify as the broadest meaning of Deleuze’s idea of ethics, it must be congruent with the more particular descriptions he gives of ethical activity in his works and those he did jointly with Guattari. Deleuze sometimes refers to his ethics as ‘ethology’ because it concerns the ‘latitude’ of the ‘haecceities’ (‘intensities’) on ‘the plane of consistency’, that is, the ‘virtual’ and productive dimension of any assemblage. More specifically, the notion of latitude refers to the ‘affects of which [a haecceity] is capable’, that is, its capacity to affect or be affected by other haecceities and thus to form the new individuals and, by way of ‘reterritorialisation’, the highly ordered form they take on ‘the plane of organisation’, the other dynamic but reactive dimension of the same assemblage. The affects of these haecceities constitute the ‘power’ of any being. If one being separates another from its affects, the power of the passively affected being, its abilities, is reduced and thereby now constitutes what is ethically bad and ‘saddening’ for it. If the contrary takes place, if a being actively links up with another being in a dramatization that increases its power, this is ethically good, indeed, ‘joyful’.6
88 Fred Evans
II. Political Ethics and the Three Cosmic Strata Deleuze recognizes three cosmic strata: the inorganic, organic, and allorplastic or human. If we are speaking of ethical goodness with respect to all of nature and not just the ‘alloplastic’ or human stratum, then the power relations must be such that the assemblages on the plane of consistency affirm each other (solidarity), their status as differences or singularities (heterogeneity), and the interaction among them that produces new voices (fecundity). We can jump directly to the human stratum to show how this triple affirmation or political ethics might be dramatized. This stratum is similar to the other two cosmic strata, the ‘inorganic’ and ‘organic’, because the assemblages or becomings on all three strata express their affects. The becomings of the human stratum, like those of the other two strata, also involve a dynamic interaction between the ‘form of expression’ and the ‘form of content’ of each assemblage. These forms originate in the plane of consistency where they are referred to as, respectively, ‘function’ and ‘matter’. But they gain their specificity as forms on the plane of organisation as they cooperate in the assemblage’s becoming actual. These two forms, expression and content, are close to equal as determining forces in the inorganic and organic strata. But in the alloplastic or human stratum, expression has priority over content because of its greater ‘spontaneity’7 and the added capacity of being able to use language for speaking scientifically, poetically or in other linguistic genres about all three of the strata.8 Even then, the forms of content are not completely subordinate to the forms of expression: physical matter is always interrupting our most careful numerical formulas about nature, the things around us provoke our most evocative and novel lines of poetry, and our behaviour and thoughts transgress our deepest psychological speculations about ourselves and each other. Whichever of the two forms – expression or content – has the upper hand over the other at any given moment, the interaction or ‘reciprocal presupposition’ between them is just an expression of the more encompassing becoming of the assemblage that connects and bears both these forms. We who take part in the expression of the alloplastic stratum do so only as enunciators of what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘constellation of voices’. This constellation makes up the ‘molecular’ or ‘unconscious’ ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’. This assemblage and another one that the authors refer to as the ‘machinic assemblage of bodies’ are subordinate to the assemblage that includes them both as part of its functioning.9 Although we will say much more about this later, the
Deleuze’s Political Ethics 89 entire alloplastic stratum or ‘society’ is an assemblage, one that, like Being, is always dividing itself into new assemblages. We can think of its constellation of voices as providing part of the basis for the becoming of new assemblages. For example, those of us who are professors and students actualise the assemblage known as the university by enunciating its voice and discourse. This voice and its discourse precedes us and we conform to it – draw it from the constellation of voices – when we carry out our respective roles in that scholarly situation. We do so on pain of not being recognised as part of the university. The constellation and other aspects of an assemblage are ‘piloted’ by the ‘diagram’ of what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘abstract machine’.10 We can say that the abstract machine is the lead voice of any particular assemblage. The other voices in society or the alloplastic stratum resound within the voice guiding the university or any other assemblage in its becoming. In other words, all the abstract machines in the alloplastic stratum are interrelated or ‘shot through’ with each other.11 We can therefore recall Deleuze’s idea of the mutually enveloping ‘parts’ or ‘modifications’ of the ‘plane of life’ and say again that each of these abstract machines or voices is part of the identity of the rest and at the same time their other. This claim, in turn, allows us to postulate that the valorisation of any one of these voices is the immediate affirmation of all of them and at the same time of their alterity as well, that is, of the singularity each possesses on the ‘line of infinite variation’ they share (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 94–5, 109). Moreover, this affirmation also applies to their fecundity, that is, to the production of new voices through the dynamic interrelationship of the others (or, as we noted above, the ‘inter-communication’ among the series or voices that make up the chaosmotic chaosmos). How do these voices express their power, their active affects? Given what we have said about reality’s status as chaosmos and its ethics of amor fati, the term ‘power’ in this context can only mean the linking up of these voices to other beings-as-haecceities in a way that increases the power of all, that is, at one and the same time augments their togetherness or solidarity, the singularity or difference of each, and the fecundity of their interaction with each other. Although these voices are interrelated, singular and productive, Deleuze indicates that the symbiotic relation between the plane of consistency and the plane of organisation can lead to fascism or other lines of self-abolition just as readily as to a line of infinite variation or metamorphosis; can lead to negative modes of relative deterritorialisation or ‘conjugations’ just as readily as to positive absolute deterritorialisations or ‘connections’.12
90 Fred Evans In light of this overview of chaosmos, we can assert that Deleuze’s political ethics has both a resisting and an affirmative side. The resisting side consists in warding off the nihilistic tendencies we noted and, more generally, guarding us against the ‘organism, signifiance and interpretation, subjectification and subjection’ that ‘together’ are ‘what separates us from the plane of consistency and the abstract machine’, that is, from our affects, our power (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 134). The affirmative side complements this resistance by valorising and expressing the three political virtues we have stated. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue in a manner suggesting that the valorisation of the three political virtues involves becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible and ultimately, becoming-everybody/everything (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 279–80, 470; see also 200, 249–52). In other words, the full thrust of this affirmation takes place when everyone is at once resisting nihilistic ‘majoritarianism’ and valorising the ‘minoritarian’ interconnectedness of everything, the difference or singularity of each thing, and the creation of new things through becoming other.13 We can use Deleuze and Guattari’s example from Melville’s famous novel to illustrate this minoritarianism: for Ahab, the term means becoming Moby Dick, and for the white whale he pursues, it means the leviathan’s simultaneous becoming a ‘pure whiteness’, a thought in Ahab’s head or, perhaps more precisely, Herman Melville’s book. It ultimately is difficult to say whether the ‘fishing line’ or ‘silver thread’ attached to the whale is nihilistically dragging Ahab into the Void or is instead a means of Ahab and Moby Dick becomingeverybody/everything (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 247, 249–50, 270, 292–3, 306–7).14 In our age, minoritarianism means, on the one hand, overcoming the conjugations of the molar and supple lines and lines of flight that make up the capitalist axiomatic and, on the other, contributing to the connecting of these same lines in revolutions that will allow the emergence of ‘a new Land’ (472–3, 509–10), ‘a new earth and people that do not yet exist’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 108).
III. Deleuze’s Political Ethics: A Fascism of the New? This tale, as wild as Professor Challenger’s ‘geology of morals’ in A Thousand Plateaus, raises the problem of the fascism of the new. A number of scholars have approvingly identified Deleuzian ethics with the creation of novelty. For example, Dan Smith indicates that Deleuze,
Deleuze’s Political Ethics 91 along with Nietzsche and Foucault, saw his ethics as implying that we should analyse ‘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’ (Smith 2012: 159). In another essay, Smith extends this valorisation to Being: ‘Being itself . . . is constituted, in its actuality, by constantly diverging series: that is, by the production of the new’ (254; original emphasis). He adds that Deleuze’s philosophy: represents a Copernican revolution of its own in philosophy, in so far as it makes the problem of the new (difference) not simply a question to be addressed in a remote region of metaphysics, but rather the primary determination of Being itself. (Smith 2012: 255)
In a review essay, Smith further accents the new. He equates Paul Patton’s Deleuzian idea of ‘critical freedom’ with ‘the exercise of a judgment, outside of pre-existing rules, which would be productive of the new’ (the creation of rights, the creation and transformation of social imaginaries, the production of new space-times, etc.) (Smith 2012: 359–60; see also 350). Indeed, Patton approvingly quotes Deleuze and Guattari’s statement that ‘before being there is politics’ and affirms that their political ontology is also an ethics. More specifically, Patton claims that, ‘in all cases’, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus ‘present a world understood as a complex of interconnected assemblages (earth, territory, forms of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation), where the overriding norm is that of deterritorialisation’ and thus the production of the new (Patton 2000: 9). Smith’s and Patton’s emphasis on the new is certainly appropriate.15 But Patton also mentions the interconnectedness of assemblages in the statement just presented; and, at least by extrapolation from his many texts on Deleuze, Smith also would acknowledge its importance for Deleuze’s philosophy. But all three of us and many others inspired by Deleuze might be in danger of overemphasising the new at the expense of the two other political virtues. If heterogeneity and solidarity are valorised only in the name of supporting the production of the new and not as ends or virtues in themselves, would we not have introduced a teleology that sacrifices them on the altar of the new, a fascism of the new? In Deleuze’s terms, have we made the production of the new into his specific idea of fascism, a line that ‘abolishes’ itself and everything, the sort also whimsically championed by ‘The Futurist’ artists as part of Mussolini’s ethics and political philosophy? Or, equally unsavoury, are we endorsing a pure capitalist line of variation that might avoid complete axiomatisation without annihilating itself in the process of
92 Fred Evans endlessly creating new sources of profits while reducing us and things to a homogeneous existence as commodities (contra heterogeneity) and reducing workers to a life-and-death competition for scarce jobs (contra solidarity)? Or can we claim that the proper political ethics celebrates augmenting the power of interconnection (solidarity) and heterogeneity as well as that of creating the new, that is, without sacrificing one for the other? A mutual valorisation of all three political virtues at once? What sort of dramatization or conditions – which ‘who? how much? how? where? when?’ – would constitute this triple affirmation at once (Deleuze 2004: 94)?16 On the inorganic and organic strata it is possible to say that all three of these political-ethical virtues are automatically affirmed at once. On the one hand, the production of the new is brought about by the creative interplay among the interconnected and heterogeneous assemblages of nature; and on the other, the new simultaneously contributes to the heterogeneity and enriched interplay or solidarity among the enhanced number and the variety of assemblages involved. We therefore can think of each of the three political virtues as an end in itself as well as a means for enhancing the ‘power’ of each assemblage and the group of them as the dynamic whole that Deleuze and Guattari describe as chaosmos. At least this is a fair possibility although we have seen that Deleuze does not appear to rule out that a nihilistic and cosmos-destroying line of flight could also occur. Because the alloplastic stratum too is part of nature, it would appear that the assemblages in which we participate also perform an automatic and anonymous affirmation of these three political virtues. These assemblages too, therefore, would always be part of the minoritarian interconnectedness of ‘becoming-everybody/everything’ and always resisting, not always successfully, the effects of nihilistic ‘majoritarianism’. These thoughts suggest that Deleuzian political ethics escapes the charge of being a fascism of the new. But thus far this tri-parte affirmation has appeared only as automatic and anonymous. It therefore leaves open three questions. The first concerns whether this political ethics becomes a fascism of the new when we are speaking of human subjects that play the role of active agents rather than just passive vehicles in the becoming of the assemblage of which they are a part. The second asks if Deleuze’s cosmology allows for an active human subject to begin with. And the third seeks to find out the concrete meaning of political ethics and our three political virtues for subjects that can be conceived of as playing an active role in the assemblages of which they are a part. In its broadest sense, the alloplastic or anthropomorphic
Deleuze’s Political Ethics 93 stratum is the assemblage that emerges from (is an ‘effectuation’ of) the organic stratum (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 60–5). We can forage through Deleuze’s descriptions of the aspects of this stratum that are most pertinent for finding clues for how he might respond to our question about the fascism of the new. In particular, we can discuss what he says about the alloplastic subject and language. His comments on language will be most important because he feels that is what most strongly characterises the alloplastic stratum.
IV. Political Ethics and the ‘Constellation of Voices’ Deleuze’s descriptions of our status within the assemblages on the alloplastic stratum suggest that we are merely the vehicles rather than the agents of their metamorphoses, of their continually becoming other, and their affirmation of the three political virtues and thus his political ethics. The details of this claim are quite involved, but we can state their fundamental points clearly and briefly. To begin, Deleuze’s depictions of us on the plane of organisation make clear that there we are no more than ‘egos’ or ‘the self and the I’ determined by the axiomatics of capitalism and a ‘control society’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 70–3, 1987: 492; Deleuze 1994: 258, 1995: 169–82). But when we turn to where the solution to the problem of agency will then have to be, the plane of immanence, he describes us as consisting ‘exclusively of inhumanities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 190). These inhumanities are the non-totalised ‘parts’ of what Deleuze calls the ‘body without organs’: the anonymous intensities, speeds and cutting edges of deterritorialisation, and all else that marks our momentary escape from being the rigid ‘organisms’ of the plane of organisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 40–1, 1987: 260). He adds that we should ‘reduce ourselves to the abstract line . . . and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 280; see also Deleuze 2001: 25). These two ways of considering ourselves, then, identify us only as either the socially congealed ego on the plane of organisation or the anonymous inhumanities, the body without organs, on the plane of consistency. The first presents us as solely the product of forces external to us, and the second as anonymous and unconscious forces with which we cannot immediately identity ourselves.17 Despite these two alien ways of regrading ourselves, Deleuze sometimes suggests that he thinks of each person as something more than two separate and incommensurable subjects. This is evident in the passage we just
94 Fred Evans quoted: he refers to us as ‘reducing ourselves’ to an ‘abstract line’ (a ‘line of flight’) and thus to the haecceities on the plane of consistency and the ‘unnatural participations’ in a ‘zone of indiscernibility’ that will constitute our becoming-everybody/everything, our becoming-other (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 272–5). But who or what is this ‘who’ that ‘reduces itself’ to an abstract line by taking itself from the actual to the virtual, from the plane of organisation to the plane of consistency, and back again always to a new but shared circuit of becoming-other? Deleuze’s comments on language provide us with a second area of exploration that might help us discover the identity of the ‘who’ we are seeking and how this agent of dramatization might express our political ethics and avoid a fascism of the new. He says that we humans enjoy plasticity of our language, that is, of our form of expression. This suggests that language might provide us a greater leeway for playing a role in the becomings of the assemblages in which we participate, a liberty that is more than that permitted by the multiplicities that make up the inorganic and organic strata. We saw earlier that Deleuze confers priority to expression over content despite their otherwise ‘reciprocal presupposition’ with one another. We also saw that he said we draw from, and are the enunciators for, one or another of the voices in the ‘constellation of voices’ that make up the collective assemblage of enunciation. To use our earlier example, university faculty and students always enunciate a particular voice, the inherited university discourse, when they enter the classroom. Moreover, each of the voices in this constellation is part of the identity and the other of the rest. Thus Deleuze can say that ‘all manner of voices [are present] in a [single] voice’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 77, 84; see also 80). Deleuze’s constellation of voices is ‘molecular’ in the sense that it ‘is not given in my conscious mind’ and thus ‘my direct discourse is still the free indirect discourse running through me, coming from other worlds or other planets’: the university’s voice, for example, precedes and interpellates me and my students when we find ourselves enunciating it in our pedagogical encounters (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 84). This indirect discourse, then, is logically prior to direct discourse and dialogic exchanges; in that sense it has ‘nothing to do’ with the ‘intersubjective communication’ that takes place on the conscious level (78, 85). Because of this priority and the determinative role of indirect discourse in conscious communication, Deleuze says that language consists of ‘orderwords’. These words ‘interpellate’ us, ‘incorporeally transform’ us, and we only ‘transmit’ the discourses of the voices that make our enunciation of them possible: ‘language’, therefore, ‘is not life; it gives life orders’ (76, 77, 79).
Deleuze’s Political Ethics 95 If this free indirect discourse consisted only of order-words, our three political virtues would be just a mechanistic system of interactions, spouting always the same orders that come from elsewhere. Deleuze and Guattari therefore say that a ‘statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and determines it to be so. . . . It is the assemblage . . . that explains all the voices present within a single voice’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 80). But they add significantly that on the plane of consistency this language of orders is always being shaken up, transformed, by ‘passwords’ that are its ‘other face’ and a line of flight or continuous variation included ‘within [the order-words]’ (107, 108). This other face also gives rise to incorporeal transformations. But unlike the ‘death sentence’ of the order-words, this face ‘is now a passage to the limit’ and reduces death to only one ‘variation’ of this passage: language can take on the forms given it by a poet like e. e. cummings or by some other vehicle of linguistic variation; as for the bodies in reciprocal presupposition with this language, they are ‘simultaneously caught up in a movement of metamorphosis of their contents . . . causing them to reach or overstep the limits of their figures’, for example, feudalism transformed into primitive capitalism (108; see also 99). At the level of the password, the distinction between forms of expression and forms of content is deterritorialised and reproduced in a novel matter as part of the process of the assemblage’s becoming (109). The passwords are therefore ‘life’ that lurk ‘beneath’ the order-words that are ‘death’; they take flight from the order-words in order to ‘create’; they ‘are components of passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions’ (110). We moved from the level of the ego and body without organs, from the general distinction between the plane of organisation and the plane of consistency, to the more specific level of language or order-words and passwords. The idea was to find a subject that was more than a congealed organism or anonymous haecceities (inhumanities), one that possessed an agency which we could recognise as ourselves. But orderwords and passwords seem just to repeat this division once more, the former as death sentences or commands, and the latter as anonymous life, an instance of the absolute deterritorialisation of the plane of consistency. Both this death and this life just happen to us; we play no role in them except perhaps as their empty vessel. But Deleuze’s last word on the matter suggests that he still sees it differently: ‘A single thing or word undoubtedly has this twofold nature: it is necessary to extract one from the other – to transform the compositions of order into components of passage’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 110). This implies
96 Fred Evans that we do the ‘extracting’. But we are still left with the dramatization question: ‘who’, exactly what sort of being, does the extracting?
V. Political Ethics and Parrhesia In what sense can we be both the enunciators of the voices of assemblages, their vehicles, and at the same time agents who play a role in our ‘fate’? How can we be both passive and active at once? We are constituted by these voices that provide us with our identities and that throw us into their line of infinite variation and dialogic interplay; we are ‘of them’ yet a force ‘within’ them as well.18 The active-voice, passivevoice grammatical structure of our language – ‘I did it’, ‘it was done to me’ – limits our ability to imagine how this ‘elliptical’ rather than strict identity with the constellation of voices is possible. But we can capture the obliqueness of this identity better if we invent a vocabulary or poetics suitable to it. We can, for example, speak of ourselves as ‘letting ourselves be more’ the voice we find ourselves enunciating, becoming it more; but because the other voices of the constellation are part of that voice as well as simultaneously its other, we also can ‘give over’ to one of these other expressive spectres, increasing its audibility relative to the rest, becoming it, if circumstances make this propitious. For example, we grow up in a politically conservative family and then find ourselves becoming or adopting (both are true at once) a voice against a war our country has been propagating. We are the enunciators of the voices that make up the constellation of our assemblage, but also a force for change within it; we are almost the congealed egos on the plane of organisation, almost the inhumanities or body without organs on the plane of consistency; but the ‘almost’ qualifies us because as both at once we are in excess of either description, capable of becoming more the one we currently are enunciating or, alternatively, becoming one of the others. Either way, we continue elliptically identical with the creative interplay of the voices that make up the alloplastic stratum at any given time. We exist anonymously and personally at once. If we accept this idea of our being elliptically identical with the constellation of the assemblage of enunciation, we can now say that our political ethics consists in the minoritarian role we play in affirming the three political virtues and in resisting the majoritarian force that would undermine it. This role and political ethics can be captured on the alloplastic plane by extending Deleuze’s insightful treatment of Michel Foucault’s work to include the latter’s reflection on the ancient Greek notion of parrhesia: courageously speaking truth to the other voices of
Deleuze’s Political Ethics 97 the social body and courageously hearing them in turn, that is, with the fortitude to possibly change our discourse in light of what they say. This way of speaking to and listening to one another, this dialogic form of existence, constitutes the solidarity of the constellation of voices. More specifically, it is the conversion of the anonymous solidarity of the constellation of voices (that each is part of the identity and the other of the rest) into a solidarity that is also personal. As personal, it makes sense, an expression of amor fati, to speak of all the enunciators of these intertwined voices sharing a desire and a responsibility to continue the parrhesiastic form of their dialogic existence. It is also possible for us to take the mutual affirmation involved in the parrhesiastic solidarity of the enunciators of the constellation of voices as a simultaneous affirmation of the other two political virtues, heterogeneity and fecundity, of them as ends as well as means for sustaining this solidarity. The enunciators’ courageous form of hearing each other is at the same time the valorisation of their heterogeneity. And the fortuitous production of new voices through the enunciators’ courageous speech and hearing of each other is also at the same time the affirmation of their fecundity. Perhaps even this paper, if it is a new idea, would be such a product and hence an affirmation of all three political virtues. If the considerations advanced by this paper have merit, then we can conclude that Deleuzian political ethics need not plead guilty to the charge of being a fascism of the new. The parrhesiastic performance of the constellation of voices and the amor fati it reflects affirm at once all three of the political virtues as ends as well as means for creating novelty. And that affirmation is equally the resistance to any tendency to become a fascism of the new or any other form of self-abolition.
Notes 1. See Deleuze 2004: 94–5. Elsewhere Deleuze says that dramatization consists in the ‘dynamic processes’ that ‘determine the actualisation of Ideas’. More specifically, dramatization combines Ideal determinations (relations and singularities) with spatio-temporal determination, the latter (the dynamic processes) incarnating or embodying, that is, dramatizing, the former (Deleuze 1994: 216; see also 217). Said equivalently, dramatization plays the hinge role (virtual to actual) in a more complex four-part production: ‘differentiation-individuation-dramatization-differenciation’ (Deleuze 1994: 251; see also 219–20). 2. Deleuze and Guattari are speaking here of ‘desiring production’; but this is the key idea in Anti-Oedipus (1983) and, like Being, the production of difference. 3. See Deleuze 1990: 149. Deleuze links amor fati with willing the new here. 4. ‘Singularities’ are the points where a line of infinite variation gives rise to new lines of infinite variation – like the points on a curve where the latter changes
98 Fred Evans
5. 6.
7.
8. 9.
10. 11. 12.
13. 14. 15.
16. 17. 18.
direction and gives rise to new types of curve (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 100). I have elaborated on this notion of Being and related aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy in Evans 2008a: 30–56, 229–32. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 256–65 (‘Memories of a Spinozist’ and ‘Memories of a Haecceity’). See also Deleuze 1992: 261–2; Smith 2012: 147–8, 153–5, 156–7. For the ‘desubjectivized’ type of ‘love’ that Deleuze has in mind, see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 134. See Deleuze 1988: 67–8 for the priority that the ‘spontaneity’ or conditioning power of language and ‘statements’ (expression) give language over the determinable ‘visible’ realm (content) despite the relation of ‘reciprocal presupposition’ between the two. This spontaneity, even if to a lesser degree, is also characteristic for genetic and other languages or ‘refrains’ on the organic stratum and very possibly for the form of expression on the inorganic stratum as well. But the form of expression does not have priority there. See Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 62, for the ‘superlinearity’ of language. See Deleuze and Guattari 1987 for speaking of ‘all manner of voices in a voice’ (77; see also 3, 80), for the idea of drawing our own voice from the ‘constellation of voices’ (84), and for the general relation of the collective assemblage of enunciation to the machinic assemblage of bodies and the assemblage as a whole, including its abstract machine and diagram (90, 140–3). These two ‘assemblages’ are almost synonymous with the form of expression and form of content, respectively. See Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 91, 142 for the piloting role of the abstract machine and its diagram for the assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 514) use the term ‘mechanosphere’ to indicate that all abstract machines in the cosmos are ‘intertwined’ with one another. See also 251, 252, 254, 255, 256. See Deleuze and Guattari 1987 for the symbiotic but oppositional relation between the plane of consistency and the plane of organisation (269–70), the priority of absolute over relative deterritorialisation (56, 508–10), the opposition between ‘connection’ and ‘conjugation’ (220, 473, 508–10; for conjugaison [conjugation], sometimes mistranslated as ‘conjunction’, see 510), and for fascism, disgust, drug abuse and other lines of self-abolition or nihilism (230–1, 215, 227, 285–6, 508–10). ‘Continuous variation constitutes the becoming-minoritarian of everybody, as opposed to the majoritarian Fact of Nobody’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 105–6). For a more complete analysis of the Moby Dick example, see Evans 2010: 146–7. As we have seen, Deleuze lauds the creation of new singularities throughout his and his and Guattari’s texts, Also, in The Logic of Sense (1990: 149), Deleuze equates ethics with not being ‘unworthy of what happens to us’. He then equates such worthiness with willing something yet to come – something new – ‘in that which occurs’. He does not explicitly say ‘new’ here but the context suggests that the new is part of what he has in mind. For a fuller discussion of this political issue, see Evans 2008b: 178–200. See Hallward 2006: 162–4 for a version of the argument that Deleuze’s subject lacks agency. Deleuze suggests this ‘within them’ when he says that we ‘become worthy of what happens to us’ and ‘thus will to release the event’ from within ‘that which occurs’ (1990: 149). Of course, this still begs the question of who this willing one is in Deleuze’s philosophy.
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