Driftwork

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

The boy-microcomputer assemblage looked more like a metro indian now than he had a few days before. His microcomputer was suspended from a chain hanging from a shoulder belt. He was drinking a glass of carbonated water outside of an Italian cafe. Earlier he’d watched diesel enginned buses begin leaving the garages to resume running along their routes. Looking at the road, and the market stalls that people had made out of the remains of the raided supermarket vegetable and grocery departments, and said conversationally to the cop who was standing quietly next to the waitress he loved.
“I suppose things will will return to normal in a few days, and the idiots will be driving their cars down here in a few days…”
“Well won’t you be playing that thing again won’t you ?” Gesturing at the computer.
He closed his eyes and thought about the plains.

I would not argue that we should treat a virus differently from a human being or another being. At a point in human history where increasing numbers of living creatures exist only because human beings have decided that they should, at such a point the very idea of treating differently needs to be considered with a greater care and consideration than any previous generation of human beings have ever had to consider. The question of whether the smallpox virus should be exterminated forever or maintained for future study in a laboratory has become the kind of question which needs to be carefully considered. It is also important to bear in mind I said ‘equivalent’ and not ‘equal’, the origins of the distinction are in the difficulty of explaining what equality might mean under these circumstances. There are a number of central reasons for the use of the term ‘equivalence’ and I think that by discussing what equality means the reason why the concept of equivalence is so important and different may become clearer. The central presumption of understandings of equality is the ‘equality of types?’ - which means that a central characteristic of all approaches to human social arrangements is that they all want the ‘equality of something’ – a thing that is central to their specific theory. This may be as varied or specific as the equality of opportunity, equality of welfare, equality of income, gender-equality and libertarians may demand equality through an entire definition of rights and liberties. These are all definitions of a type of equality so in addition they are all making demands against specific understandings of ‘egalitarianism’. Which is to say that they are all arguing for a specific type of equality which every human person should have and which is critical to their ideological approach. There is a common feature in all egalitarian approaches in that they relate to having equal concern for all the human beings involved - if this is missing or if it legitimates other inequalities, and they frequently do the proposal is deeply misleading. In practice this means that when a libertarian argues for equal rights over specific classes of entitlements they cannot also argue for equality of incomes. Just as those arguing for the equality of income cannot argue for equality of opportunity and merit. In effect when equality is produced as a core social value and event it always contains a degree of inequality in some other understanding of the term. The result of this is that the argument over inequality and difference is what exists in the core of all arguments for equality.

At the most pragmatic level the importance of the question of types is the consequence of the virtual and actual differences between human beings, this implies that understanding equality in terms of one difference will always generate inequalities in theory and actuality. Human beings are extraordinarily different in our named characteristics: gender, age, sex, abilities, talents, eye colour, genetic differences as well as in socially determined differences: class, social background, environment, financial etc. Note how equality and egalitarianism in one aspect of these differences requires the rejection, or balancing against equality and egalitarianism in another. The importance of the question of types is related to the empirical question (and all empirical questions are constructivisms) of human difference. The egalitarian statement ‘all humans are created equal’ misses the point in that difference is not a secondary factor which may be ignored or addressed later but is foundational because it is central to our interest in equality. The humanist notion of equality, which is after all what is being refused here, is confronted by two types of difference firstly the heterogeneity of humans and secondly the extraordinarily diverse ways in which equality can be evaluated. Given this it makes sense to accept that the heterogeneous range of differences will always lead to difficulties in the understanding of equality. With the brief list of differences already listed it is not surprising that the rhetorical figure of the ‘equality of human beings’ does tend to be used to avoid differences. This figure is normally considered to be central to egalitarian thinking, but as we have learned the effect of ignoring difference, not just the interpersonal variations but also the greater social variations can be extraordinarily inegalitarian, because it suppresses the realization that equal consideration for all depends on additional considerations for the disadvantaged. Historically human difference has been left out of the account not just as a consequence of the inappropriate application of the idea of ‘equality of human beings’ but because of the pragmatic tendency to simplify what this implies. Within humanism the consequence of this is to avoid the consequences of the demand for equality. Which is to say that difference is characterised as inequality(i.e differences such as: income, opportunity, wealth, happiness) which tend to become increasingly separated, not least because of the sheer heterogeneity of people but also because equality of one type may not coincide with equality of another type. Thus equality of opportunity can lead to extremely unequal incomes, equal incomes can be side by side with unequal happiness. The question of the types of equality we want to consider haunts this. The humanist perspective insists that we cannot begin to critique or defend equality without describing and defining what equality we are defining. A type in the list of inequalities (income, wealth, opportunities, freedoms, rights) ? Given the contradictions between the types, a universal humanist conception of equality simply cannot be defined. With the consequence that if a successful argument is made for a particular type of equality then what is achieved is the successful argument for equality of a particular type, with the specific type being used as the comparative type. Equally if the claim for a given equality of type is refused then this is a successful argument against the refused type of equality, which has another type as the standard of comparison. The problem with equality can then be seen to be that there is no ability to discuss a deeper question about what ‘equality’ might be if the sub-question of ‘what type of equality’ is refused in favour of an untyped concept of equality. I would like to emphasize again that in the humanist understanding of equality it is always typed. The typing of equality enables and positively encourages the idea of equality being restricted to something. The specific equality derived from some particular type is particularly important to each theory because they aim to construct a normative theory of social arrangement. Some examples from from recent Anglo-American political philosophy may help to clarify this even if we don’t explore this in any depth – for example John Rawls - liberty and equality in the distribution of goods, Dworkin – treatment of equals – Nagel – economic equality, similarly the libertarian Nozick produces a demand for equality of libertarian rights. This rather dense logic was written to try and explain the why the concept of equality is balanced by the concept of equivalence - this emerges from the anti-humanist logic at the heart of much interesting recent work, most notably the understanding of humanity as a multitude, which is a multiplicity of singularities and all singularities are equivalent. The phrasing of Negri would be “men are singularities, a multitude of singularities” but this does not go far enough because we need to move beyond the restrictions of species.