Driftwork

Noology: Deleuze criticized Husserl for restricting the noema to being an object of human consciousness and said that noematic predicates, for example sound between sound waves and ear, hearing is a relation divorced from a specific observer. Noology is not a study of appearances or ideas but noology, to the extent that noema are thinkables, then we are dealing with a (machinic) history of images of thought, rather than consciousness. Ideology is traditionally thought of as an image of a mind that can think only through an imposed and external structure, Noology is opposed to Ideology by Deleuze.

(Of course I differ from Deleuze in that I do not think that in thinking of Ideology we are presuming subjects and false ideas that can be demystified and the truth will emerge, indeed in the sense I use the concept Ideology it is beyond true and false, even I suspect beyond the human.)

Deleuze makes a good case that it is the idea of a proper subject, if you like a ‘we’ which prevents us from actualising our potential. Noology is not only the study of images of thought but in addition makes a claim for an historical understanding of the images of thought. This broadly speaking is the critical function of noology, which is always a constructivism, beyond this noology considers that when images of thought are created they can always be recreated, with the ideal of liberation from some images of thought being the aim. In a good noological fashion then Deleuze argues that we have failed to think truly (’well’ in my terms) because we presume an image of thought, of a thought. Thought fails to question and interrogate just what it is they think, and what it is they are thinking about. Consequently then we can see that the concept of mind, and the concept of being has been unargued, uninterrogated and an implicit restriction on our thinking. Noology then studies not only what it means for human beings, subjects to think it also requires us to imagine what thought might be beyond the human, and critically in this context what it might be if the thinker is non-human.

It is this final thought which points to why noology is an intervention into the thought that a machinic or non-human citizenship and equality is a necessary thought, it is intrinsic, almost explicit within Deleuzian thought to consider that thought is noological, beyond the human and non-human. What better starting point to avoid the anthropomorphising of being and sentience ?

From Logic of Sense via Difference and Repetition to ATP…

True my metapolitics has always caused difficulties in this long term exchange, I agree that it marks perhaps the primary difference in our cultural, social and philosophical unsdertandings, at least if we ignore the related but more ontological issues of difference/equivalence. It’s not just the underlying belief that to understand, act and live within capitalism we must maintain our connection with Marxism, but also the lesson from Deleuze and 68 is that everything is political or in the softer version ‘maybe’. But still your right the core difference remains the marxism.

What the ‘different uses’ suggests to me is the opposite, that in the de-authored world of texts that I live in where Heidegger as a person is a facist madman but where the texts may be raided and used in the toolbox sense that Deleuze proposes and which I’m advocating with the idea of ‘use’, the texts may be useful. That ‘different uses’ is always political is I think independent of either the strong sense or the weak sense, though clearly I advocate the strong sense of the understanding where the political is not to be considered as being solely the domain of the human and where the restricted subset of the political which is generally advocated as a reflection of the world we live in is rejected.

The point of disagreement over the last paragraph is not in relation to the construction of a global socialist order, whatever we think this might be. But rather the difference is that you’ve had 30 years to have that discussion, to move things forward to allow and use the experimentation and compromise that Lyotard describes and argues for. To present and even construct philosophy as a place where this discussion can take place to arrive a suitable postmodern compromise… But it hasn’t happened. Instead there has been a continuing retreat so that what was once reactionary has become acceptable, has become the new norm, new fascisms sit on the horizon unquestioned, just waiting for their moment… So no - I think its time that we did something different; extend the space which is political into something broader and more all-encompassing, including not just the entirity of the everyday but beyond this into the longer term dreams of autonomy.

We might consider the conflict between the state and the nomad as being nearly timeless, an ahistorical given, perhaps more gently as being metahistorical. Deleuze and Guattari certainly do, before changing the meaning of the conflict by moving the concept from philosophy and theology - in which there is a clearly identifiable line of state thought which stretches from before the Ancient Greece, the Roman empire through Descartes and Hobbes to Kant, Hegel, Bentham, Mill and Heidegger and beyond to the present day, and nomadic thought – to science and scientific thought. Deleuze and Guattari propose state science as being hylemorphic, by which they mean that is works with form and content, privileging formed and fixed bodies. This places state science as being one of the two heads of political sovereignty the jurist-scientist rather than the magician-king (ATP 351), though equally in the present I might be tempted to substitute scientist for magician in the latter term. Nomadic Science they suggest works rather differently with movements, flows and singularities: events though which qualitative transformations take place. (ATP 372). The difference between these two forms of science is not necessarily permanent, because state science requires nomadic science. Needing the discoveries of nomadic science and conversely nomadic science requires state science. The flows and changes of nomadic science are reterritorialised onto the fixed coordinates, the juridical procedures, the stratifications and the categorizations of state science. Many things could be said about this understanding of science, for it obviously repeats a theme that is core to Anti-Oedipus (and Difference and Repetition for that matter) in which knowledge and information is considered as a deterritorialising force and it can also be seen to be generally equivalent to labour which is endlessly deterritorialised and then reterritorialised back onto property and capital. We can say then that the deterritorialisations of nomadic science are a subset of state science because they are endlessly reterritorialised back into state science, subordinated to the categories that are so alien to them.

Deleuze and Guattari want to establish a point which they could not make in relation to philosophy, though the logic is clear in the ATP, in part of course because as already said above, they correctly argue that religion and philosophy have been supplanted by state science as the primary ideology of our times. That state thought is dependent on nomadic thought, identity is after, dependent on difference, deterritorialisation is prior to reterritorialisation. What is being proposed is that knowledge and labour, thought and action, science and thought are all subject to the same apparatus of capture, processes of homogenisation that are intended to produce quantifiable and exchangeable units from what begins as difference, as differential relations of desire. In this state thought, state philosophy, state theology is no different than state science. At times Deleuze and Guattari discuss state thought as a relation of the identity between capitalist and worker, ruler and ruled, constructing a common rationality between subjects. ‘The state must realize the distinction between legislator and the subject under formal conditions permitting thought…’ (ATP 376). This is sometimes raised as collapsing the distinction between the state and capital but this is mistaken for as we’ve seen they are making an opposition within the present.

Of course my deliberate (mis)reading of Deleuze and Guattari assumes that a number of questions are considered as having been answered both within their work but also within related texts – sample questions might be for example - at what point in the history of western capitalism did state science supplant state philosophy and state theology as the central ideological apparatus ? The trajectory can be traced back to Galileo and Newton but which completes in the 19th Century during the 2nd industrial revolution. In this later period state philosophy and state science establish a social and political paradigm which is maintained up to the present. How did state philosophy respond to this replacement of philosophy and theology by science? The answer to this is simple, Heidegger … Sociology of Science (and its descendants), recent post-secularism and the delusion that science and monotheism are related.

This is a note and consequently I am not going to explain what is wrong with the unnecessary localism of relating state thought to the indo-european concept of political sovereignty, perhaps you noticed I didn’t mention Confucius and Lao Tsu in the opening paragraph ? Which is also why I didn’t reference Adam Smith an exemplary state thinker who referenced the east in the later books of the wealth of nations. But then state thought is not being considered as something western, but as something that extends beyond the locality of the indo-european. Perhaps this is where I should have taken this logic here but consider this a marker… rough notes anyway.

I wondered how to answer my own occasional question, about what might replace, succeed what appears to be the pre-industrial and industrial era understanding ‘freedom starts from negation’ from refusal and negation. Which when we touched on this earlier you suggested that an afirmative response was required in a post-industrial period, a period which is slowly but surely changing into a post-information society before our eyes. (How to conceptualize what a post-information society may finally look like is a different question however).

In Gilles Deleuze text Difference and Repetition the references to the Agrarian Question (p36 ) delineates the central issues of a nomadic politics, which appear to be the differences between transcendent and immanent categories and criteria. Where difference is subjected to a logical distribution then the principle can be seen to determine life, in the same way that land is distributed according to external law. Hence sedentary space, a space which is divided and distributed, “fixed and proportional determinations which may be assimilated to ‘properties or limited territories within representation.” A logic can be identified here which extends to the gods, each with its own domain, a category, with attributes and defined limits, they are in effect as sedentary as the politics requires. (And of course such things are always political). The other distribution is nomadic, one which is “no longer a division of that which is distributed but rather a division among those who distribute themselves in an open space – a space which is unlimited, or at least without precise limits”. A nomadic space is not one which has intrinsic properties that determine relations, as with feudal or other despotic\pre-capitalist relations, but rather as a space with extrinsic properties. It is produced from the movements and flows that give the space its specific qualities. (Rather quaintly and bizarrely this difference is conceived as a comparison between the different board games of Chess and Go, but for those of us who are non-game players this difference may appear less relevant than they imagine given that the hierarchies of Go appear to be quite as rigid as the game of chess, just different.) Nomadic space is smooth not because it is undifferentiated but because the differences are not segmentary, the differences create positions and lines through movement. In this sense then a group may cross a space and whilst doing so may occupy the space from within, the space might then be measured and quantified by the various State structures which themselves are different from the virtual nomadic space(s). For as other group(s) move on the original spaces have been transformed with new desires, relations and movements, each group that moves across the space does so creating different mappings. With a nomadic distribution there is not a single law that determines the mapping of space, rather law is produced during the traversal of the space. It’s in A Thousand Plateaus that Deleuze with Guattari begin to write a fuller thesis on nomadology, where they relate this to the concept of the war machine. Both concepts, but especially the war machine, are related to Deleuze’s rejection of the logos. There are no proper beings here, with identities distributed according to essences and external definitions that then enter into relations. We are not referencing masters and slaves understandable through the dialectic. Rather what is understood is that the master becomes a master through force, and consequently the master and slave relation is effected, a distribution occurs through and in the act. Everything begins with forces, power and the war machine(s)….

Usually when describing this people rather tediously emphasize the relations with the State, with a phrase such as “States do not have an existence or power outside their…” but in the here and now we need to be more careful and considered about this matter and rather than thinking about the State instead we should consider this in terms of the control societies we actually exist within, in terms of the continuous control and the instant communications of the network society. Being a European I am instantly attracted to considering these issues in relation to ‘prisons, schools, hospitals, institutions are breaking down’. However we must accept that in Deleuze could not know the extent to which the control society would be engaged in privatising these institutions and reconstruct them into ‘for profit’ institutions, so that what were once issues of State would become as marketized as a network corporation, an engineering firm, a software company, an international logistics corporation or a university. These corporations are as central\essential to the management of the control society as the normal organs of State as prisons, eduction and medicine.

The master-slave relation and thus negation and refusal do not go away, instead what we see is a new distribution of forces that is effected through the act of refusal. So that just as everything begins with forces and the war machine; states and the institutions of the control society do not have any existence outside of their implementation of power, a warring power, which at the everyday and micro-political level is always that of the master-servant, master and slave. For we should understand how the distribution of territory and it’s use in our society produces and reproduces hierarchies and identity. Refusal and negation becomes the only sane response to institutions which are destroying the commons, at the micro-political level this becoming is affirmation.

But we must not forget that the the nomadic distribution tells us that the war machine is not something simply created or managed by the control society, and that the issues of sovereignty and law, the power to distribute territory, has to be forcibly and theoretically separated from the exteriority of war, domination and control, which may be considered as relating to the state, the the control-society but as should be clear this need not be the case.

A recent comment by you was I think a little dismissive of Negri’s recent work from Empire onwards. This became a little more urgent when it was related to a twitter reference on democracy. I have been hesitant about the concept of democracy, preferring a total critique but given the increasingly undemocratic nature of the present version of the spectacle perhaps we should reclaim it.

There is within what we might think of as the Deleuzeian line of thought to related concepts of becoming, becoming-revolutionary and becoming-democratic. The critical one when considering Negri and Hardt’s area of work is I think becoming-democratic.

Becoming-Democratic develops from the conflict that has existed since before the foundations of modern-democratic government, related to the differences between the formal rights of human subjects and the wealth and material conditions of others. In some ways modern history has been the failed struggle to reduce the levels of material inequality and to ensure that all subjects have equal rights. Both aspects of the struggle have been well described and documented in an exemplary fashion by amongst others Zygmunt Bauman.

In the Control and Becoming interview with Toni Negri, Gilles Deleuze discusses this problem when he contrasts the universality of the market system as an exchange of commodities and capital with the way in which it generates wealth and misery. In the present case it is the inevitable unequal distribution that is of direct concern. The benefits of capitalist markets, and there are no other forms of market available, cannot be universally shared and the inequalities of distribution are handed down across the generations as through there were no principles of equality. The principle of equality is something that frames and encodes the Control and Becoming interview, it also sets the agenda of the video discussion with Claire Parnet when she asks ‘what it is to be on the left ?’ Deleuze responds and proposes that it is a matter of perception. And that those who live in the most wealthy areas of a privileged region, primarily in the west but not only, and those who are on the political right understand inequality and injustice from their own place of privilege. Deleuze argues in familiar terms that ‘they know it cannot last, it might go on for a hundred years, who knows, but there is no point pretending about this absolute injustice’. Contrary to this though is that people on left know that such injustices must be dealt with, that the problem is not to maintain the privileges, not to maintain the generalized inequalities between the wealthy and the poor but rather of ‘finding arrangements, world-wide assemblages which address these problems’. Deleuze is assuming a globalized, internationalist and fundamentally egalitarian understanding, paying strict attention to the unjust distribution of wealth and poverty that results from the current capitalist assemblages of production and distribution and arguing that the present and developing future is intolerable. It is from this position that he argues for a becoming-democratic of the social. There is a second aspect of Deleuze’s definition which is the related assumption that to be on the Left is to become minoritarian rather than being majoritarian, which in simple terms is to recognize that the majority is an empty representation of an ideal identity that is linked to the specific systems of power and control, that the minoritarian becomings in which people can become engaged do have the ability to transform and disrupt the systems of power and control, capital in our specific case. The danger with this second aspect is that it can be confused with the particularity of communities and specific politicized groups, a politics of the local. but this would be to neglect the first aspect which recognizes the explicit nature of left politics and additionally recognizes that the minor is precisely the multitude. With the multitude the internationalism, globalized nature of contemporary capitalism (call it empire or the liquid modern if you need a shorter gentler term) becomes explicit. Deleuze’s work has been interpreted as the basis for a philosophy of the multitude, for a radical democratic politics, a becoming-democratic.

The difference between this and Badiou and Zizek’s politics becomes clear at this point, for Badiou calls for an avantist approach based around a ‘few rare political militants’, an approach directly descended from Leninist and Maoist political dogma, and I am not against ‘dogma’ merely this unworkable approach… Based on a false analysis that the political reality to be resisted is the consensus-driven, popular-opinion dominated ideology ‘of contemporary parliamentary states’. But this is sadly mistaken, founded on two errors the notion that the local has more meaning than it does and that a few political militants can effect a planet wide capitalist system which cares nothing for a few parliamentary states. (I am being harsh on Zizek, but since he willingly aligns himself with a version of Badiou’s positions I think its fair.)

Anyway that is the beginnings of why I think that you were being overly harsh towards Negri and by default Deleuze. There is a longer term reason which I think we forget in these days of the spectacle and fashion, the true meaning of a philosophical and political concept takes time to emerge and become active. Ten years is simply nothing, I think it takes much longer than you think in your dismissal of the concepts framed in empire and multitude.

regards

steve