18 Mar Confessional: Deleuze, Guattari, Badiou, Braun

This week has brought me around to constantly referencing Foucault in my mind. It all began with two discussions about whether or not Foucault is a structuralist, post-structuralist, or post-post structuralist (I was pretty sure I made that up till I found an article written in 1986 that tried to define what that is). It’s not merely the labeling (which I’ll get to later), but that even as Foucault sought to tease out power relations as they related to the mechanisms of discipline (even as Guattari points to the move of society away from technologies of discipline toward technologies of control), he was always conscious of the actors, if not explicitly tied to any single actor in particular. Is the invisible and ever-acting actor the same as the “subject” that was such a hot point of pivot for the French philosophers?

I suppose what makes this week drag me back around to Foucault is that each of the theories presented offer something of an insight to his work without being able to capture and categorize his work. Part of that, obviously, is from my own ignorance of categories / theoretical framings and their actual names, but also, there is a sensibility of relationality built into each of these outlines that always seems to point back to Foucault. Or maybe I’m just intellectually in love with him (at the moment – or always). At the same time, that relationality doesn’t have a concrete point of attachment to any one of these that we read about this week. So what, then, is the function of naming of the French philosophies? What purpose are they serving? To read Foucault – it’s a bit confessional – it’s discovering and naming existence even as the utterance of its existence draws it back into question (is that a stretch?).  What I’ve always appreciated about naming one’s self things like “Marxist”, “Foucauldian”, “Derridadian”, etc., is that the attachment is to a particular train of thought, in all of its evolutions of a single human being who both defines and names that train. It’s not the theory that is attached to idea, but the person and his/her stream of theoretical understandings. That being said, however, being given theoretical frameworks (read: named theories) from which to explore has been useful in trying to grasp how it is that the naming process happens and its importance (even as I end up going back to Foucault).

Deleuze and Guattari: With the rhizome – the entering and exiting points are given more permission to be unknown and unbounded – somehow, it seems not quite so strange an idea as that of the actor-network theory. But is it? I get the metaphor, particularly in light of its antecedent, the arborescent conception, but to what end? Is the power of the term only in its ability to problematize the dichotomous, the basis of metaphysical conception – the right from wrong – the this and that? I found difficulty in it in that it has the same kind of nebulous opening to be the Explanation of All Things – although, through the “lines of flight”, according to Deleuze [conversation with Negri], is bounded by time. But if it is bounded by time [“it’s very interesting to try and follow the lines of flight taking shape at some particular moment or other”] – again, we come to the question of the bounds of that particular time, just as we do with actor-network theory in looking for the terminuses of people and things.  Who defines the “particular moment”? And why? Mitch Rose and Terry Eagleton grapple with this time-space conundrum.  The truth event, though the moment in time that marks a particular node (for lack of a better word) of the rhizome exists only in-so-far as it is part of the infinite, to “insert the eternal into time” (T.E., 158). This moment in time, says Rose, cannot exist without the eternal – it’s existence is dependent upon it’s place in time, not outside of it. Thus, the capacity to synthesize time (recognizing that the past and the future are in the present, existing within “moving lives”) is “a fundamental condition of human subjectivity” (M.R., 3). So the subject comes in!

On a completely different note: Deleuze points out that there is “no longer an image of proletarians around of which it’s just a matter of becoming conscious” – but then goes on to discuss the “minority” as those who are in the process of becoming – that there is no majority. It seems that nested in this, then, there could lay the new definition of the proletarian: the not-majority. And in that recognition, the recognition of all that they are not of the mythical majority they all seek to be, there can be found the common ground toward the revolution. It is here that Eagleton refers to Badiou as he points to the “the political problem [as being] one of struggling against the current of dominant, differentiating, unequal, particularist interests in the name of the revolutionary universal” [157]. In some ways, it sounds very much like an accidental cosmopolitanism – the kind that Harvey was both excited about and disturbed by – the kind that is searching for the sameness (to the exclusion of ideas of the “other” by Badiou, according to Eagleton) while recognizing its own multiculturalism (“cherished differences”, Eagleton, 157). How then are these to be reconciled? And is Eagleton criticizing Badiou for this? How does this tie back to Deleuze’s idea that no one belongs to the majority? And how do we then reconnect this with Badiou’s assertion that Nazism is a politics – is this the kind of multi-culturalism we’re hoping to achieve? One that embraces the politics of differences — that cherished difference? If not, then who gets to decide? I realize I’m conflating two strands of thought that are barely connected, but it seems that even as Badiou unwinds Arendt’s argument that politics is opinion, he points to the issues of parliamentarianism in the consensus that is “common sense”…?  So what does he mean by, “Real plurality is characteristic of instances of politics; the plurality of opinions is only the referant of a particular politics (parliamentarianism)” [24]?

On neoliberalism: Braun points out that “presupposing neoliberalism as a coherent and logical category…everything risks getting reduced to the ‘same’ and emergent social, economic and political forms in global assemblages may go unrecognized” [650]. Even as neoliberalism defies some kind of definition, it is applicable to all situations (political, social, economic) and risks losing its worth as a term at all. And yet, using Badiou, neoliberalism, like philosophy, “is thus both a universal aim of reason and, simultaneously, one that manifests itself in completely specific moments” [67]. That being said, however, brings us back to Foucault in that there is nowhere a single person or entity enacting the power of this frame of thought – so even as neoliberalism exists everywhere and at all times (to exaggerate just a smidge) it is not traceable to any discernible point of power (though occasional particularities are traceable). It seems to me to be one of the big messy holes of capitalism as it exits in the corporate level of this country (to draw it into the particular!): the corporation as an entity is afforded protections but cannot be held responsibility even as the individual is held responsible while being afforded fewer and fewer protections (an inverse correlation between capital and responsibility).

My big question for today – how does Foucault fit into these ideas of assemblage and rhizome?

Big Question #2: What is meant by: “The ‘global biological’ is thus the effect of the extension of techno-scientific networks, by which a ‘local epistemology’ becomes ubiquitous” (Braun, 650)?

And why, oh why…does this fit so well?